‘SOEUR Marie Bernard est morte : quelles souf-frances depuis vingt ans!’ Sister Mary

Bernard is dead : how she must have suffered all these twenty years.’ Nearly fifty years have come and gone since the day in Easter week when these words fell on my ears from the holy and revered priest, the friend and guardian of my childhood. He had known and loved the little peasant-girl of the Pyrenees and had often spoken about her to the child, still unfamiliar with death, who listened to his words. To the latter the name of Sr. Marie Bernard had hitherto called up only wonder and admiration. She had seen more than once the Mother of fair Love, the Cause of our Joy! Had not the Beloved Mother promised, too, to make her happy in the kingdom of her Son?

But there was no mistaking the accents of compassion in the mouth of the good priest. He knew so well what poor Bernadette had had to endure for those twenty-one years she still dwelt in this vale of tears, after having beheld, fleetingly no doubt, perhaps ‘through a glass, darkly,’ the Vision of incomparable Loveliness.

The shy, retiring child had had to submit to the harsh interrogatories of officialdom, to be followed by the scarcely less intolerable and more persistent, crossquestionings of numberless enquirers, doubtless wellmeaning, often tactless, sometimes even baldly curious. In a later period her Superiors sought to shield her as much as might be from the inquisitive,