; His bleeding kiss was to be the only one bestowed upon
her womanhood, diverted from nature's course. The nuns took cords, passed
them under her aching back, and fastened the crucifix so roughly to her
bosom that it did indeed penetrate it.

At last death took pity upon her. On Easter Monday she was seized with a
great fit of shivering. Hallucinations perturbed her, she trembled with
fright, she beheld the devil jeering and prowling around her. "Be off, be
off, Satan!" she gasped; "do not touch me, do not carry me away!" And
amidst her delirium she related that the fiend had sought to throw
himself upon her, that she had felt his mouth scorching her with all the
flames of hell. The devil in a life so pure, in a soul without sin! what
for, O Lord! and again I ask it, why this relentless suffering, intense
to the very last, why this nightmare-like ending, this death troubled
with such frightful fancies, after so beautiful a life of candour,
purity, and innocence? Could she not fall asleep serenely in the
peacefulness of her chaste soul? But doubtless so long as breath remained
in her body it was necessary to leave her the hatred and dread of life,
which is the devil. It was life which menaced her, and it was life which
she cast out, in the same way that she denied life when she reserved to
the Celestial Bridegroom her tortured, crucified womanhood. That dogma of
the Immaculate Conception, which her dream had come to strengthen, was a
blow dealt by the Church to woman, both wife and mother. To decree that
woman is only worthy of worship on condition that she be a virgin, to
imagine that virgin to be herself born without sin, is not this an insult
to Nature, the condemnation of life, the denial of womanhood, whose true
greatness consists in perpetuating life? "Be off, be off, Satan! let me
die without fulfilling Nature's law." And she drove the sunshine from the
room and the free air that entered by the window, the air that was sweet
with the scent of flowers, laden with all the floating germs which
transmit love throughout the whole vast world.

On the Wednesday after Easter (April 16th), the death agony commenced. It
is related that on the morning of that day one of Bernadette's
companions, a nun attacked with a mortal illness and lying in the
infirmary in an adjoining bed, was suddenly healed upon drinking a glass
of Lourdes water. But she, the privileged one, had drunk of it in vain.
God at last granted her the signal