When she was not confined to her bed she spent long days in an
easy-chair, her only diversion being to recite her rosary or to read some
pious work. Now that she had learnt to read, books interested her,
especially the beautiful stories of conversion, the delightful legends in
which saints of both sexes appear, and the splendid and terrible dramas
in which the devil is baffled and cast back into hell. But her great
favourite, the book at which she continually marvelled, was the Bible,
that wonderful New Testament of whose perpetual miracle she never
wearied. She remembered the Bible at Bartres, that old book which had
been in the family a hundred years, and whose pages had turned yellow;
she could again see her foster-father slip a pin between the leaves to
open the book at random, and then read aloud from the top of the
right-hand page; and even at that time she had already known those
beautiful stories so well that she could have continued repeating the
narrative by heart, whatever might be the passage at which the perusal
had ceased. And now that she read the book herself, she found in it a
constant source of surprise, an ever-increasing delight. The story of the
Passion particularly upset her, as though it were some extraordinary
tragical event that had happened only the day before.
Pages:
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166