And her daughters adored her, wept to see her lead a life which now was one long torment.  As a result of the intense cold, she became a victim to acute rheumatism; for the Rule of Saint Theresa, which prohibits the lighting of a fire anywhere but in the kitchens, if it is endurable in Spain, is simply murderous in the frozen climate of Flanders.

“After all,” said Durtal to himself, “this life so far is not very unlike that experienced by many another cloistered nun; but towards the approach of death the amazing beauty of this spirit was revealed in so special a manner, and in wishes so remarkable, that it remains unique in the records of the Monastic Houses.”

Her health grew worse and worse.  Added to the rheumatism, which crippled her, she had pains in the stomach, which nothing could relieve.  Sciatica was presently engrafted on this flourishing stock of torments, and dropsy, a common disease in cloisters of austere rule, supervened.

Her legs swelled and refused to carry her; she lay helpless on her bed.  The Sisters who nursed her now discovered a secret which she had always kept, out of humility; they perceived that her hands were pierced with red holes surrounded by a blue halo, and that her feet, also pierced, lay of their own accord, unless they were held down, one above the other, in the position of Christ’s feet on the cross.  At last she confessed that many years before Jesus had marked her with the stigmata of the Passion, and that the wounds burnt night and day like red hot iron.

Her sufferings constantly increased.  Feeling that this time she was dying, she grieved over the pitiless macerations she had used, and with touching artlessness begged forgiveness of her poor body for having exhausted its strength, and so having perhaps hindered it from living to suffer longer.

And she then put up the most strangely fragrant, the most wildly extravagant prayer that ever a Saint can have addressed to God.

She had so loved the Holy Eucharist, she had so longed to kneel at His feet and atone for the outrages inflicted on Him by the sins of mankind, that she waxed faint at the thought that after her death what would remain of her could no longer worship Him.

The idea that her body would rot in uselessness, that the last handfuls of her miserable flesh would decay without having served to honour the Saviour, broke her heart; and then it was that she besought Him to suffer her to melt away, to liquefy into an oil which might be burnt before the tabernacle in the lamp of the sanctuary.

And Jesus vouchsafed to her this excessive privilege, such as the like is unknown in the history of the Saints; and at the moment when she died she enjoined her daughters to leave her body exposed in the chapel, and unburied for some weeks.

On this point there is abundant authentic evidence.  More or less minute inquiries were made, and the reports of medical experts are so precise that we can follow from day to day the state of the corpse until it had turned to oil and could be preserved in phials, from which, by her desire, a spoonful was poured every morning to feed the wick of a lamp hanging near the altar.