e questions which our confessors are in the
habit of putting to their female penitents. I have already been destroyed
by those questions. Before I was seventeen years old, God knows that His
angels are not more pure than I was; but the chaplain of the Nunnery where
my parents had sent me for my education, though approaching old age, put to
me in the confessional a question which, at first, I did not understand;
but, unfortunately, he had put the same questions to one of my young
class-mates, who made fun of them in my presence, and explained them to me;
for she understood them too well. This first unchaste conversation of my
life plunged my thoughts into a sea of iniquity, till then absolutely
unknown to me; temptations of the most humiliating character assailed me
for a week, day and night; after which, sins which I would blot out with my
blood, if it were possible, overwhelmed my soul as with a deluge. But the
joys of the sinner are short. Struck with terror at the thought of the
judgments of God, after a few weeks of the most deplorable life, I
determined to give up my sins and reconcile myself to God. Covered with
shame, and trembling from head to foot, I went to confess to my old
confessor, whom I respected as a saint and cherished as a father. It seems
to me that with sincere tears of repentance I confessed to him the greatest
part of my sins, though I concealed one of them through shame, and respect
for my spiritual guide. But I did not conceal from him that the strange
questions he had put to me at my last confession were, with the natural
corruption of my heart, the principal cause of my destruction.

"He spoke to me very kindly, encouraged me to fight against my bad
inclinations, and, at first, gave me very kind and good advice. But when I
thought he had finished speaking, and as I was preparing to leave the
confessional-box, he put to me two new questions of such a polluting
character that I fear neither the blood of Christ nor all the fires of hell
will ever be able to blot them out from my memory. Those questions have
achieved my ruin; they have stuck to my mind as two deadly arrows; they are
day and night before my imagination; they fill my very arteries and veins
with a deadly poison.

"It is true that, at first, they filled me with horror and disgust; but,
alas! I soon got so accustomed to them that they seemed to be incorporated
with me, and as though becoming a second nature. Those thoughts have become