Healing of Jeanne Fretel at Lourdes

The stretcher tilted as we lifted her from the train at Lourdes station. Jeanne Fretel lay under a grey blanket, eyes closed, breath shallow enough that the man beside me kept a hand near her mouth to feel for air. We had taken her in place of another girl who died the week before. The orderlies from Rennes knew her chart by heart: thirteen operations, constant morphine, pus draining from both ends, coma deepening for days.

I stayed with the sick that first evening. The air in the Salle du Sacré-Cœur smelled of damp stone and disinfectant. Jeanne did not move when the priest came to anoint her again. Three times already, they said. Her lips barely parted for the oil.

Next morning the procession to the Grotto moved slowly. We carried her on the same stretcher, wheels rattling over the gravel path. At the esplanade the sun struck hard on the white stone. A doctor I did not know argued with a priest about giving her communion. The priest finally placed a fragment of host on her tongue. She swallowed once. That was all.

An hour later she asked for milk. The nurse who brought it watched her drink without retching. Jeanne finished the glass and asked for bread. She sat up on the edge of the bed and looked at her own hands as if they belonged to someone else.

I walked beside her when they took her to the Grotto again. She wanted to see the place where the water ran. Two men lifted her from the stretcher and set her on the bench. She turned her head, searching behind her. No one stood there. She pressed both palms against her abdomen and said the swelling had gone down while she sat. The men looked at each other but said nothing.

By two o’clock she walked the length of the esplanade without support. Doctor Géguan examined her in the medical bureau. He listened to her abdomen for a long time, then stepped back and asked her to stand again. He found no fluid, no rigidity. The chart from Pontchaillou described daily vomiting and five morphine injections. That afternoon the same woman ate a full meal and kept it down.

Father Blancherie came to the hall after the evening procession. Jeanne told him she felt no pain. He wrote the time in his notebook and asked her to repeat the words. She did. The other patients watched from their beds. One woman began to cry quietly.

The commission met the following day. Three doctors from different cities examined her again. They measured, listened, and asked her to walk the corridor. They noted the date and signed. No one declared anything final. They said the record would go forward.

Jeanne returned to Rennes with the same group. She left the hospice within a month. Bishop Théas spoke with her in his office and suggested the Benedictines. She entered the order the next year and later lived alone as a hermit. She came back to Lourdes every October for the Rosary pilgrimage. She never missed one.