The Conversion of Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne

The book is deliberately documentary rather than literary. De Bussières prefaces it with a declaration, in compliance with the decree of Urban VIII, that he presents the events as resting on human testimony alone; the editor notes that constructing an independent narrative would have cost the accounts their freshness, so the original documents are given as they stand.

The narrative covers the days before — the chance meeting, the challenge to wear the Miraculous Medal and recite the Memorare, Ratisbonne’s amused agreement — and then the morning of 20 January 1842, when de Bussières left him alone in Sant’Andrea delle Fratte for a few minutes and returned to find him prostrate and weeping. Ratisbonne’s own letter to the curé of Notre-Dame des Victoires follows.

The case was investigated by the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome within months, which is why the documentation is unusually thick for a conversion of the period. Ratisbonne was baptized eleven days later, became a priest, and with his brother founded a congregation working in Jerusalem.

The 1897 English edition, edited by W. Lockhart, is free at Archive.org; a French edition of 1859 is also freely available. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the English.

This edition follows P. J. Kenedy’s New York printing of 1897 of Baron Théodore de Bussières’s account of the conversion of Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, edited by the Rev. W. Lockhart. De Bussières wrote the narrative at Rome in February 1842, three weeks after the event it describes.

The book is a dossier, not a memoir, and we have kept it in the order its editor gave it: the author’s declaration, the preface, the decree by which the Cardinal-Vicar of Rome pronounced the conversion a miracle, the narrative of the twenty days, a report of the baptism, extracts from the sermon the Abbé Dupanloup preached at it, a letter from another eye-witness, Ratisbonne’s own long letter to the curé of Notre-Dame des Victoires, and two letters on the death of the Comte de Laferronnays. Nothing is abridged. The book ends where de Bussières ends it, on the miracle attested in the midst of the mourners, and that is where the French original of 1859 ends too. What follows in the scan — fifty-seven priced titles of Kenedy’s own book catalogue, bound in behind the text — is not part of the book and is not here.

We checked this printing for cuts before using it. It carries the Cardinal-Vicar’s decree and the two Laferronnays letters that the earlier American printing does not, and it agrees with the French throughout.

TWO OTHER PRINTINGS WERE READ AGAINST IT, word by word, and this is the first of our editions to have two. The first is a second scan of this same Kenedy setting. The second is T. W. Strong’s earlier New York printing of the same Lockhart translation — an independently set book, and the cleanest of the three scans. Eighty readings in this text come from them: “which stood” where our scan had “wdiich 6tood”, “hardly rescue the miracles of the Gospels from the hands of unbelievers” where ours had four words destroyed, and the whole of de Bussières’s declaration, which our copy reduced to “Wxrj I aflBrm that «D the ftcta contained in this narrative art related”. Every one of them is recorded, with its context, in the collation logs kept with the edition.

Where neither printing could settle a reading, the French original of 1859 was consulted. It dates the two letters on the Comte de Laferronnays 19 and 29 January 1842. The English prints the second as 1848, and prints it so in both scans, which means the error is the compositor’s and not the scanner’s; but the letter encloses the one written ten days before it, and we have set it right and say so here.

THE DECREE IS PRINTED IN TWO COLUMNS, Latin on one side and English facing it, and the scanner read each page down one column and then down the other — so the English broke off mid-clause three times and a page of Latin followed. We have sorted the columns back apart and give the English decree entire and continuous, which is how it reads on the page and could not be made to read in the file.

We do not print the Latin column. Every tool we use to repair a scan asks whether a word is English, and no Latin word answers yes; put through them, the decree loses two-thirds of itself, and kept out of them it keeps its damage — “Grego- rii”, “conversioni*”, “7eneratione”, “Concordat cum ot+gman”. We could neither set it right nor check it, and it says in Latin what the English decree beside it says in English, which we do print. It is in the free scan linked from the book’s page, and this is the one thing in the printing that is not in this edition.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author. Running heads, page numbers, catchwords and the digitizer’s watermark have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary or another printing settles the question. Three footnotes that had been scanned into the middle of the sentences they hung from are given as notes. The translator’s spelling and punctuation stand, including the older forms — “to-day”, “fulness”, “Strasburg”.

Quotations that run on over several paragraphs are printed as the book prints them, with an opening mark on each paragraph and a closing mark only at the end. That is deliberate and it is correct; it is not a lost quotation mark.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.