As she sits one day in her school catechism class the 14-year-old village girl Bernadette Soubirous tells how she saw, emerging from a grotto, the vision of "a golden-coloured cloud, and then a girl in white, no bigger than myself, but so beautiful, the like of whom I have never seen". Is this the made-up story of a not very bright girl trying to make herself appear important, or has she truly witnessed a miracle of cosmic significance? The play, set a century earlier, in the then obscure southern French village of Lourdes in 1858, tells the dramatic story of the effect of Bernadette's pronouncement upon the villagers and of the remarkable fortnight of apparitions that followed.