continual state of prayer, and
in the greatest humility. God had done by him many signal miracles.

This good hermit had a great sense of the designs of God on Father La
Combe and me. But God showed him at the same time that strange crosses
were preparing for us both; that we were both destined for the aid of
souls. I did not find, as I expected, any suitable place for my
daughter at Tonon. I thought myself like Abraham, when going to
sacrifice his son. Father La Combe said, "Welcome, daughter of
Abraham!" I found little encouragement to leave her and could not keep
her with myself, because we had no room. The little girls, whom they
took to make Catholics, were all mixed and had contracted habits as
were pernicious. To leave her there I thought not right. The language
of the country, where scarce anyone understood French, and the food,
which she could not take, being far different from ours, were great
hardships. All my tenderness for her was awakened, and I looked on
myself as her destroyer. I experienced what Hagar suffered when she put
away her son Ishmael in the desert that she might not be forced to see
him perish. I thought that even if I had ventured to expose myself, I
ought at least to have spared my daughter. The loss of her education,
even of her life, appeared to me inevitable. Everything looked dark in
regard to her.

With her natural disposition and fine qualities, she might have
attracted admiration, if educated in France, and been likely to have
such offers of marriage, as she could never hope to meet with in this
poor country; in which, if she should recover, she would never be
likely to be fit for anything. Here she could eat nothing of what was
offered her. All her subsistence was a little unpleasant and
disagreeable broth, which I forced her to take against her will. I
seemed like a second Abraham, holding the knife over her to destroy
her. Our Lord would have me make a sacrifice to Him, without any
consolation, and plunged in sorrow, night was the time in which I gave
vent to it. He made me see, on one side the grief of her grandmother,
if she should hear of her death, which she would impute to my taking
the child away from her; the great reproach, it would be accounted
among all the family. The gifts of nature she was endowed with were now
like pointed darts which pierced me. I believe that God so ordered it
to purify me from too human an attachment still in me. After I returned
from the Ursuli