I replied:  ’God is my father; He will take care of me; I have resolved to be faithful to Him.’  He said:  ’I will give you three days to think over it.’  I rose and went to the Holy Sacrament with an anxious mind.  Having returned to my room, and being seated on a chair, it was drawn from under me so that I fell on the floor.  Then the same things happened again.  I heard a man’s voice saying lascivious and pleasant things to seduce me; he pressed me to give him room in my bed; he tried to touch me in an indecent way; I resisted and prevented him, calling the nuns who were near my room; the window had been open, it was closed; I felt strong movements of love for a certain person, and improper desire for dishonorable things.”

She writes again, at a later period:  “These impurities and the fire of concupiscence which the evil spirit caused me to feel, beyond all that I can say, forced me to throw myself on to braziers of hot coal, where I would remain for half an hour at a time, in order to extinguish that other fire, so that half my body was quite burnt.  At other times, in the depth of winter, I have sometimes passed part of the night entirely naked in the snow, or in tubs of icy water.  I have besides often gone among thorns so that I have been torn by them; at other times I have rolled in nettles, and I have passed whole nights defying my enemies to attack me, and assuring them that I was resolved to defend myself with the grace of God.”  With her confessor’s permission, she also had an iron girdle made, with spikes, and wore this day and night for nearly six months until the spikes so entered her flesh that the girdle could only be removed with difficulty.  By means of these austerities she succeeded in almost exorcising the demons of unchastity, and a little later, after a severe illness, of which she believed that she was miraculously cured by St. Joseph, she appeared before the world almost as a saint, herself possessing a miraculous power of healing; she traveled through France, bringing healing wherever she went; the king, the queen, and Cardinal Richelieu were at her feet, and so great became the fame of her holiness that her tomb was a shrine for pilgrims for more than a century after her death.  It was not until late in life, and after her autobiography terminates, that sexual desire in Soeur Jeanne (though its sting seems never to have quite disappeared) became transformed into passionate love of Jesus, and it is only in her later letters that we catch glimpses of the complete transmutation.  Thus, in one of her later letters we read:  “I cried with ardor, ‘Lord! join me to Thyself, transform Thyself into me!’ It seemed to me that that lovable Spouse was reposing in my heart as on His throne.  What makes me almost swoon with love and admiration is a certain pleasure which it seems to me that He takes when all my being flows into His, restoring to Him with respect and love all that He has given to me.  Sometimes I have permission to speak to our Lord with more familiarity, calling Him my Love, interesting Him in all that I ask of Him, as well for myself as for others.”