Our Lady of Pellevoisin: the fifteen apparitions to Estelle Faguette

Pellevoisin, Indre. A village in the archdiocese of Bourges. In the winter of 1876, Estelle Faguette lay dying in her parents' house there. She had been a maid and nursemaid for Countess Arthur de La Rochefoucauld. Dr Bucquoy found peritonitis and phthisis, with a tumour "the size of an orange" on her left side.

In September 1875, feeling abandoned, Estelle wrote a letter to the Virgin. It was left at a small Lourdes grotto that children had built at Poiriers. "I saw no one," she said of that time. On 14 February 1876, Dr Hubert said she had only hours to live.

That night, the devil appeared at the foot of her bed. Then a woman appeared in the corner of the bed, dressed in white and "completely surrounded by light." A white veil with three folds. A tunic fastened by a cord. She rebuked the devil, and he turned his back without daring to speak. He vanished. Then the promise. "On Saturday, you will be dead or healed."

She returned each night. On the fifth, she stood silent in the gap of the bed curtains, in a clear vapour, smiling. At half past midnight Estelle felt a strong pain, then a feeling of life-giving blood irrigating her body. Only her right arm stayed paralysed. On Saturday 19 February she received Communion. She got up, dressed and asked for food.

The visits resumed on 1 July, as Estelle knelt by the fireplace. Soft light covered the figure from head to toe. Graces fell like rain from her hands. On 9 September she lifted the small piece of wool on her chest. Beneath it was a red heart. This became the Scapular of the Sacred Heart. On 15 September, a warning. "France will suffer."

The last visit came on 8 December 1876, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. "You will not see me again... I will be invisibly near you." She rose gently, turned around the room and disappeared. No one else was ever present. Every apparition rests on Estelle's word alone.

A canonical inquiry in 1877 questioned 56 people. All but one spoke favourably. A second inquiry followed in 1878. There was resistance too. In 1886 the Prefect closed the chapel. In 1895 Estelle was forced out of the apparition house. Leo XIII granted indulgences in 1892 and received her in private audiences in 1900.

In 1982 a medical commission set up under Archbishop Paul Vignancour called the cure "inexplicable in the light of current medical science." It was declared miraculous in 1983. In August 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the approval of Pope Francis, granted a nihil obstat. The devotion was recommended.

No source alleges fraud. Yet the apparitions themselves were never formally declared authentic, and the canonical processes were never completed. What the Church approved was the cure, the scapular and the devotion. None of the sources on the case proposes a natural explanation. Estelle died in Pellevoisin in 1929, aged 86. Her bedroom is now the chambre des apparitions of the Sanctuaire Notre-Dame de la Miséricorde. In June 2020 the French bishops voted to open her beatification cause. 2026 marks the 150th anniversary.