On the morning of 11 February 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, her sister and Jeanne Abadie went off in search of wood and bones, the wood to be burned and the bones to be turned into fertiliser and sold to the farmers. They made their way to the rock of Massabielle, which overlooked a spit of land that stuck out into the river. It was illegal to pick up wood in the forests; the poor had to scavenge for driftwood carried down by the river from the mountains. They were going to Massabielle because it was common ground belonging to nobody. The town’s waste was dumped there, and the town’s pigs would graze there. It was a marginal place on the frontier of water and dry land, like that place from which the first disciples were called. Bernadette was to make this journey many times over the coming months. She found herself, like Moses, leading an Exodus pilgrimage of the people of Lourdes and beyond to this deserted and dirty place. Just as the people of Israel had to pass through the wilderness to learn how close their God was to them, so the neighbours of Bernadette made a similar journey in search of that same God.