to
the place whither he would have me remove. I had already begun to awake
regularly at midnight, in order to pray. I awoke with these words
suddenly put in my mind, "It is written of me, I will do thy will, O my
God." This was accompanied with the most pure, penetrating, and
powerful communication of grace that I had ever experienced. Though the
state of my soul was already permanent in newness of life; yet this new
life was not in that immutability in which it has been since. It was a
beginning life and a rising day, which goes on increasing unto the full
meridian; a day never followed by night; a life which fears death no
more, not even in death itself; because he who has suffered the first
death, shall no more be hurt of the second. From midnight I continued
on my knees, till four o'clock in the morning, in prayer, in a sweet
intercourse with God, and did the same also the night following.

The next day, after prayers, Father La Combe told me, that he had a
very great certainty, that I was a stone which God designed for the
foundation of some great building. What that building was he knew no
more than I. After whatever manner then it is to be, whether His divine
Majesty will make use of me in this life, for some design known to
himself only, or will make me one of the stones of the new and heavenly
Jerusalem, it seems to me that such stone cannot be polished, but by
the strokes of the hammer. Our Lord has given to this soul of mine the
qualities of the stone, firmness, resignation, insensibility, and power
to endure hardness under the operations of His hand.

I carried my little daughter to the Ursulines at Tonon. That child took
a great fondness for Father La Combe, saying, "He is a good father, one
from God." Here I found a hermit, whom they called Anselm. He was a
person of the most extraordinary sanctity that had appeared for some
time. He was from Geneva; God had miraculously drawn him from thence,
at twelve years of age. He had at nineteen years of age taken the habit
of hermit of St. Augustine. He and another lived alone in a little
hermitage, where they saw nobody but such as came to visit their
chapel. He had lived twelve years in this hut, never eating anything
but pulse with salt, and sometimes oil. Three times a week he lived on
bread and water. He never drank wine, and generally took but one meal
in twenty-four hours. He wore for a shirt a coarse hair cloth, and
lodged on the bare ground. He lived in a