On the way back to the Petits-Fosses, Bernadette revealed how at a certain moment the Apparition seemed different from before. Suddenly loud yells, belched from the Gave, had rent the sacred silence of Massabielle. They ‘challenged, crossed, collided with one another, like the clamour of a brawling crowd’. One voice, more furious than the rest, dominated them all and roared out: ‘Get out of here! . . . Get out of here!’ Bernadette guessed rightly that the threatening curse was by no means addressed merely to her humble self, but was an attack directed beyond her to the Vision of Light standing above the eglantine. The Vision merely glanced in the direction of the rushing stream. This single look, one of sovereign authority, reduced the invisible mob to silence: the enemy of all good would not drive her from the grotto where she gave her audiences. At Massabielle, the future was to prove that the Spirit of evil, in this burst of fury, had admitted his defeat; he was not to extinguish the great radiance that would issue from this dark, peaceful nook, where so many sinners would renounce sin!
St. Bernadette Soubirous: 1844-1879
by Abbe’ Francois Trochu