me apples which had fallen on the ground. She had only
looked at them; for, thank God, she said, she did not touch them, but
she thought that was a sin against the tenth commandment. The priest
gave her a general absolution; after which she stretched herself out,
and those around her thought that she was dying. A person who had often
given her pain now drew near her bed and asked her pardon. She looked
at him in surprise, and said with the most expressive accent of truth, 'I
have nothing to forgive any living creature.'

During the last days of her life, when her death was momentarily
expected, several of her friends remained constantly in the room
adjoining hers. They were speaking in a low tone, and so that she could
not hear them, of her patience, faith, and other virtues, when all on a
sudden they heard her dying voice saying: 'Ah, for the love of God, do
not praise me--that keeps me here, because I then have to suffer double. O
my God! how many fresh flowers are falling upon me!' She always saw
flowers as the forerunners and figures of sufferings. Then she rejected
all praises, with the most profound conviction of her own unworthiness,
saying: 'God alone is good: everything must be paid, down to the last
farthing. I am poor and loaded with sin, and I can only make up for
having been praised by sufferings united to those of Jesus Christ. Do
not praise me, but let me die in ignominy with Jesus on the cross.'

Boudon, in his life of Father Surin, relates a similar trait of a
dying man, who had been thought to have lost the sense of hearing, but
who energetically rejected a word of praise pronounced by those who
were surrounding his bed.

A few hours before death, for which she was longing, saying, 'O Lord
assist me; come, O Lord Jesus!' a word of praise appeared to detain her,
and she most energetically rejected it by making the following act of
humility: 'I cannot die if so many good persons think well of me through
a mistake; I beg of you to tell them all that I am a wretched sinner!
Would that I could proclaim so as to be heard by all men, how great a
sinner I am! I am far beneath the good thief who was crucified by the
side of Jesus, for he and all his contemporaries had not so terrible an
account as we shall have to render of all the graces which have been
bestowed upon the Church.' After this declaration, she appeared to grow
calm, and she said to the priest who was comforting her: 'I feel now as
peaceful and