These three individuals, being the poorest of the Community, did not leave the convent until the spring of 1812.  She was still very unwell, and could not be moved without great difficulty.  The priest lodged with a poor widow who lived in the neighbourhood, and Anne Catherine had in the same house a wretched little room on the ground-floor, which looked on the street.  There she lived, in poverty and sickness, until the autumn of 1813.  Her ecstasies in prayer, and her spiritual intercourse with the invisible world, became more and more frequent.  She was about to be called to a state with which she was herself but imperfectly acquainted, and in order to enter which she did nothing but submissively abandon herself to the will of God.  Our Lord was pleased about this time to imprint upon her virginal body the stigmas of his cross and of his crucifixion, which were to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles folly, and to many persons who call themselves Christians, both the one and the other.  From her very earliest childhood she had besought our Lord to impress the marks of his cross deeply upon her heart, that so she might never forget his infinite love for men; but she had never thought of receiving any outward marks.  Rejected by the world, she prayed more fervently than ever for this end.  On the 28th of August, the feast of St. Augustine, the patron of her order, as she was making this prayer in bed, ravished in ecstasy and her arms stretched forth, she beheld a young man approach her surrounded with light.  It was under this form that her Divine Spouse usually appeared to her, and he now made upon her body with his right hand the mark of a common cross.  From this time there was a mark like a cross upon her bosom, consisting of two bands crossed, about three inches long and one wide.  Later the skin often rose in blisters on this place, as if from a burn, and when these blisters burst a burning colourless liquid issued from them, sometimes in such quantities as to soak through several sheets.  She was long without perceiving what the case really was, and only thought that she was in a strong perspiration.  The particular meaning of this mark has never been known.

Some weeks later, when making the same prayer, she fell into an ecstasy, and beheld the same apparition, which presented her with a little cross of the shape described in her accounts of the Passion.  She eagerly received and fervently pressed it to her bosom, and then returned it.  She said that this cross was as soft and white as wax, but she was not at first aware that it had made an external mark upon her bosom.  A short time after, having gone with her landlady’s little girl to visit an old hermitage near Dulmen, she all on a sudden fell into an ecstasy, fainted away, and on her recovery was taken home by a poor peasant woman.  The sharp pain which she felt in her chest continued to increase, and she saw that there was what looked like a cross, about three inches