sin which she had committed in her childhood, of which she often accused herself, and which consisted in having gone through a hedge into a neighbour’s garden, and coveted some 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 as much filled with hope and confidence as if I had never committed a sin.’  Her eyes turned lovingly towards the cross which was placed at the foot of her bed, her breathing became accelerated, she often drank some liquid; and when the little crucifix was held to her, she from humility only kissed the feet.  A friend