Saint Bernadette Soubirous

Bernadette was born in Lourdes in 1844, the eldest child of a miller whose family had fallen into poverty. In 1858, aged fourteen, she saw a Lady in a grotto by the river eighteen times, and at her word dug in the ground and uncovered a spring. The Lady named herself the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette later became a sister at Nevers and died there in 1879.

She never claimed to be special, and bore questioning, fame and long illness with plain honesty. The spring at Lourdes still draws millions of pilgrims, many of them sick. She was canonised in 1933. Painters show her as a young peasant girl in a hooded cape, kneeling with a rosary before the grotto.