Bernadette Soubirous was fourteen, asthmatic, poor to the point of destitution, and could not read or write French. Between February and July 1858 she said a lady appeared to her eighteen times in a hollow in the rock outside Lourdes, and the account she gave never changed.
The grotto
She was gathering firewood by the river Gave on 11 February 1858 when she saw a small figure in a niche in the rock at Massabielle. She returned repeatedly, at first with other children and then in front of crowds. The later appearances drew thousands of onlookers, who saw nothing themselves. The lady spoke to her in the local Occitan of Bigorre rather than in French.
The interrogations
The civil authorities questioned her, the police commissioner tried to frighten her out of the story, and the clergy kept their distance for months. She was consistent under all of it and refused every offer of money. Contemporaries who disbelieved the apparitions generally allowed that she believed them herself.
The name
On 25 March 1858 she reported that the lady had answered her question about who she was with the words Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou, I am the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette said she did not know what the phrase meant. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception had been defined at Rome four years earlier, in 1854, and that coincidence is either the strongest point in the account or its most obvious weakness, depending on what the reader brought to it.
The bishop of Tarbes declared the apparitions worthy of belief in 1862.