“I saw the trees were calm and not moving...I raised my head and looked at the grotto. I saw a lady dressed in white; she wore a white dress, a white veil, a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot - the colour of the chain of her rosary; the beads of her rosary were white...The Lady took the rosary she held in her hands and made the sign of the Cross. I tried a second time to make the sign of the Cross; the great shock I felt disappeared, I knelt down and said the rosary in the Lady’s presence.” On 11th February 1858, an unknown girl in a remote French village claimed to have seen a “beautiful lady” while collecting firewood from a grotto in the village refuse area. Amidst increasing interest in the girl, Bernadette Soubirous continued to receive apparitions from the lady who revealed herself as the “Immaculate Conception”, with a message of prayer and penance for the world, asking to have a chapel built there and calling the faithful to come in procession and to wash and drink at the spring. Today some 5 million people from 130 countries around the world respond to this call. Every pilgrim who returns from Lourdes does so renewed and refreshed, and changed in some way.