Now it is absolutely certain that the water was there before Bernadette Soubirous scratched till she reached it. The Abbé Richard, a geologist, says that it was there and it was known to be there by many individuals in Lourdes. On 25 March Bernadette made her seventeenth visit to the grotto. The _curé_ Peyramale had been at her repeatedly insisting that she should ask the apparition who and what she was. Accordingly on this occasion she said: “Madam, kindly inform me who you are?” Then the figure crossed its hands over the breast, lowered the eyes, and said: “Je suis l’Immaculée Conception, et je désire une chapelle ici.” It is deserving of notice that the apparition did not state that she was the Blessed Virgin, but that she was an abstraction, the manifestation in visible form of a dogma. Now Bernadette had been subjected for some time to strong suggestion. She had been influenced by the Abbé Ader at Bartrès, who had announced that she was just the sort of person to be chosen by the Blessed Virgin to see her; then she had been under the direction of the _vicaire_ Pomian, and the strong personality of the _curé_ Peyramale, who could mould such a feeble creature as wax. I do not imply that they consciously provoked a fraud; far from it. I think that these clergy had made up their minds that Bernadette was a suitable subject to be favoured by a vision, and had let her understand what their opinion of her was. Indeed, the schoolmaster at Bartrès, in his simplicity, wrote as much in the _Guide du Pèlerin à Lourdes_. The fathers of Garaison, who “ran the show,” to use a vulgar expression, were so alarmed at this revelation, that they brought up and destroyed every copy of the _Pèlerin_ on which they could lay their hands. According to J. de Bonnefon, _Lourdes et ses tenanciers_:-- “Somewhat later, the Abbé Ader, dissatisfied, neglected, forgotten, was filled with scruples, and told everything.” What his authority for this statement is I do not know, but this is certain, that Ader was hurriedly removed from his _curé_, and sent hastily to the Benedictines, and kept in the abbey of Saint Benoît for two years, without occupation, but lodged and fed and entertained, not at his own cost. At the end of that time he was thought to be no longer dangerous, and was appointed _curé_ of Oroix, a little place with not two hundred inhabitants, in a remote corner of the diocese, miles from every highroad. That Bernadette had heard of the apparition at La Salette is certain, even if she had not heard Ader liken her to one of those who saw that apparition, which took place in 1846, and was preached about and talked of everywhere. I spent a summer in a château in the valley of Argelez in 1850, and the _curé’s_ mind was full of it. He lent me a book concerning it, and became hot in defence of the veracity of the children.