Life of St John Vianney.pdf - the Catholic Kingdom!

"HIS PENANCES. 109whose lives bear the marks of a more systematic andunflinching crucifixion of the whole man, a more uniformpractice both of exterior and interior mortification, thanwe find in the portrait traced of him by those familiarwith the details of his daily life.Claudine Renard, the pious widow who had the chargeof washing his linen, and rendering him such other littleservices as he could not refuse to receive at her hands,could rarely obtain admittance into the presbytery.the few occasions when she contrived to effect an entrance,after doing her best to put the poor furniture in order, shesometimes proceeded to make the good cure s bed. Shethus discovered that, one by one, he had cast aside all thebedding he had brought with him from Ecully, tillthing remained but the straw palliasse ;and that findingeven this too luxurious, he had put a board on the topof it."Andparticulars,Onbesides," said Catherine, when relating thesenothere is hardly any straw left now in thatpoor bed. He takes it out by degrees,till at last therewill be nothing left but the wood. Then he will be satisfied. We have tried sometimes secretly to put in a fewhandfuls, but it only made him take out more ;for if hefelt his bed a little less hard, he would pull out the straw,and throw it into the fire. We discovered this by findingthe ashes in the fireplace."It was accidentally found out afterwards that, tosatisfy his increasing thirst for suffering, M. Vianney wasin the habit of discarding his bed altogether, and sleepingon the bare floor of the granary with a stone for hispillow.His favourite food consisted of some pieces of thecoarsest black bread bought out of the basket of some