Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt: ... flesh. Nevertheless, the virgin had at times her moments of loathing. " And then," says Gorres, "she did what perhaps no one had ever done before her--she drank the pus and the filthy discharges which she had sucked from the wound. She subsequently declared to her confessor that she had never drank in all her life a more agreeable beverage." We see, therefore, that four hundred years before Charlotte Laporte began her horrible operations, there was a proto-sucker in the person of one of the most worthy saints of the Calendar. MM. Mauriac and Verdalle give a very interesting account of an ecstatic woman, who daily enacted the passion of Jesus, terminating in the usual manner in the crucifixion. This woman, Berguille, had been of good health till, in 1871, she lost one of her children. A short time afterward she began to have visions of her child every night, and then she was seized with obstinate vomitings, which were only cured by drinking the water of Lourdes, ordinary therapeutics not having been very efficacious. In a short time she began to have paroxysms of ecstasy. In these, there were more or less profound abolition of sensibility, general and special, and hallucinations of various kinds. At first these seizures were at no fixed intervals of time, but after a while they occurred regularly on Friday and in the afternoon. The duration was in the beginning only a few minutes, but latterly they got to lasting several hours. Like many other ecstatics, Berguille was devoted to making predictions both in religion and politics. Unfortunately for her reputation, nothing that she foretold ever came to pass. Thus, on the 26th of july, 1873, she said, "The great king, the most Christian king, promised to France, ...