b. To crown these illusions she felt
herself lifted off the ground, several feet into the air. She could
hardly believe it, until Mdlle. Gravier, a respectable person, assured
her of the fact. Everyone came, admired, worshipped. Girard brought
his colleague Grignet, who knelt before her and wept with joy.

Not daring to go to her every day, Girard often made her come to the
Jesuits' Church. There, before the altar, before the cross, he
surrendered himself to a passion all the fiercer for such a sacrilege.
Had she no scruples? did she still deceive herself? It seems as if, in
the midst of an elation still unfeigned and earnest, her conscience
was already dazed and darkened. Under cover of her bleeding wounds,
those cruel favours of her heavenly Spouse, she began to feel some
curious compensations....

In her reveries there are two points especially touching. One is the
pure ideal she had formed of a faithful union, when she fancied that
she saw her name and that of Girard joined together for ever in the
Book of Life. The other is her kindliness of heart, the charmingly
childlike nature which shines out through all her extravagances. On
Palm Sunday, looking at the joyous party around their family table,
she wept three hours together, for thinking that "on that very day no
one had asked Jesus to dinner."

Through all that Lent, she could hardly eat anything: the little she
took was thrown up again. The last fifteen days she fasted altogether,
until she reached the last stage of weakness. Who would have believed
that against this dying girl, to whom nothing remained but the mere
breath, Girard could practise new barbarities? He had kept her sores
from closing. A new one was now formed on her right side. And at last,
on Good Friday, he gave the finishing touch to his cruel comedy, by
making her wear a crown of iron-wire, which pierced her forehead,
until drops of blood rolled down her face. All this was done without
much secresy. He began by cutting off her long hair and carrying it
away. He ordered the crown of one Bitard, a cagemaker in the town. She
did not show herself to her visitors with the crown on: they saw the
result only, the drops of blood and the bleeding visage. Impressions
of the latter, like so many _Veronicas_,[111] were taken off on
napkins, and doubtless given away by Girard to people of great piety.

[111] After the saint of that name, whose handkerchief
received the impress of Christ's counte