:
Jesus does not fail to appear to a Visitandine, Mademoiselle Marie
Alacoque, and shows her His heart and wound.

She was a strong girl, and of a sanguine temperament, whom they were
obliged to bleed constantly. She had entered the convent in her
twenty-fourth year, with her passions entire; her infancy had not been
miserably nipped in the bud, as it often happens to those who are
immured at an early age. Her devotion was, from the very first, a
violent love, that wished to suffer for the object loved. Having heard
that Madame de Chantal had printed the name of Jesus on her breast with
a hot iron, she did the same. The Lover was not insensible to this,
and ever after visited her. It was with the knowledge, and under the
direction of a skilful superior, that Marie Alacoque made this intimate
connection with the Divine Bridegroom. She celebrated her espousals
with Him; and a regular contract was drawn up by the superior, which
Marie Alacoque signed with her blood. One day, when, according to her
biographer, she had cleaned with her tongue the lips of a sick person,
Jesus was so satisfied with her, that He permitted her to fix her lips
to one of His Divine wounds.

There was nothing in this relating to theology. It was merely a
subject of physiology and medicine. Mademoiselle Alacoque was a girl
of an ardent disposition, which was heightened by celibacy. She was by
no means a mystic in the proper sense of the word. Happier far than
Madame Guyon, who did not see what she loved, she saw and touched the
body of the Divine Lover. The heart He showed her in His unseamed
breast was a bloody intestine. The extremely sanguine plethory from
which she was suffering, and which frequent bleeding could not relieve,
filled her imagination with these visions of blood.

The Jesuits, who were great propagators of the new devotion, took good
care not to explain precisely whether homage was to be paid to the
symbolical heart and celestial love, or whether the heart of flesh was
to be the object of adoration. When pressed to explain themselves,
their answers depended on persons, times, and places. Their Father
Galiffet made, at the same time, two contradictory replies: in Rome he
said it was the symbolical heart; and in Paris he said in print that
there was no metaphor, that they honoured the flesh itself.

This equivocation was a source of wealth. In less than forty years
four hundred and twenty-eight brotherhoods of the