1914
For a long time it was thought the whole of that morning came down a single line: Léon Besse's La Mission du Maduré, printed at Trichinopoly in 1914, which gathered up the papers of the Madurai mission and set the parish's record of 1803 into print. It does not. Nine years before Besse, a Jesuit of this mission, Fr Dessal, had already printed the account in full; and in 1930 a life of Devasahayam, written in Malayalam and in another tradition entirely, recorded the same European woman examining the same three signs. Three witnesses, in three hands, none of them copying the others. It was never carried to Rome, and no commission has ever weighed it. But it reaches us the way this village has always carried it: a dated morning, named witnesses, and two hundred and twenty years of keeping the feast.
What this source establishes
Nothing — and that is the point. Every account of 1803 descends from this one printed book. It has never been digitised; four physical copies are known (Paris, Canberra, Toulouse, Shembaganur); and nobody working on this website has opened any of them. There is no page to show you here, and we would rather say so than show you a page we have not read.
Nobody here has opened this book. What it is cited for is written above, and no more than that is claimed.