I WAS in so strange a state of deprivation of all support, whether exterior or interior, that it would be difficult for me to describe it well or to make it fully understood. In order to acquit myself the best I can, I am about to describe successively the troubles through which during seven years I have passed, until it pleased you, O my God, to deliver me suddenly from them: then I will resume the thread of my narrative. I did not suddenly lose all support for the interior, but gradually, for during the lifetime of Mother Granger I had already suffered many interior troubles, but they were only like the forerunners of those I had afterwards to experience.
After you had wounded me in the profound manner I have described, you commenced, O my God, to withdraw from me, and the pain of your absence was so much the harder for me, the sweeter your presence and the more powerful your love had been in me. I complained of it to Mother Granger, and I thought I no longer loved you. One day, when keenly penetrated with this thought and this pain, I said to her that I no longer loved you, sole object of my love. Looking at me she said, “What ! you no longer love God!” This word was more penetrating for me than a burning arrow. I felt so terrible a pain and such utter confusion I could not answer her, because that which was concealed in the central depth made itself at the moment so much the more apparent as I had thought it lost.
What persuaded me, O my God, that I had lost your love was, that in place of having found new strength in this love, so strong and so penetrating, I had become more weak and more powerless. For formerly I defended myself more easily from the leaning towards the creature; and then, though I had experienced how amiable you are, and your love had even banished from my heart all other love, and my soul had been so greatly elevated above the created, she found herself less capable of defending herself from a certain inclination for the creature: I did not then know what it was to lose our own strength to enter into the strength of God. I have learned it only by a terrible and long experience. I was the more afflicted at it, as this defect appeared to me the most difficult to conquer, and that into which I entered with the greatest facility, and of which I yet had the most horror; because it fills the heart, and seems to establish its dwelling in the same place where you, my God, previously made your residence. Although this was not actually so, my pain persuaded me of it. The more dangerous this evil appeared to me the more familiar it became. It was your leading before making me enter into the state of pure abjectness, which I shall call the state of death; since I cannot doubt that you made use of it to cause me to die entirely to myself, as you had caused me to die to all the rest. For if your conducting of me is attentively considered, it will be seen that the exterior deprivations were only the figure of the interior, and that you have employed both the one and the other with equal force, insensibly augmenting them until total death, where it seems you have changed the conduct only to make me enter into a new abyss of crosses and abjection, in which you have observed an order the more admirable as it has almost always been accompanied by a double abjection: wherein you have maintained a course of guidance as wise and extraordinary as to the eyes of men it has appeared more foolish and abject. The more I advance in what I have to write the more difficult the enterprise appears to me.
Your conducting, O my God, before making me enter into the state of death was a conduct of dying life. Sometimes hiding and leaving me to myself in a hundred weaknesses, sometimes showing yourself with more clearness and love. The more the soul approached the state of death, the more long and tedious became her abandonments, and her weaknesses greater, and her enjoyments shorter, but more pure and more inward, until at last she fell into the total privation. It was an overthrow alike of the exterior and the interior. It seemed, my Love, your exterior providence and your interior guidance had challenged each other as to which would the sooner destroy her.
In proportion as sensibility had increased your absence became more continual; the abandonments more utter; weaknesses greater; exterior crosses more bitter; powerlessness to do good more decided; inclination to all evil insurmountable. I had the sentiments of all sins, without, however, committing them; and these sentiments in my mind passed for realities, because I felt my heart occupied with the creature. At last things came to such a point that I lost for ever both every support and every prop, as well interior as exterior. Nothing of you, O my God, any longer remained to me but grief at your loss, which appeared to me real. Then I lost this grief in order to enter into the cold of death. There remained to me only a certainty of my loss, O my God, and of never loving you.
As soon as I saw the happiness of a state, or its beauty, or the necessity of a virtue, it seemed to me I incessantly fell into the contrary vice, as if that view—which, although very short, was always accompanied with love—had been given to me only to make me experience its opposite, in a manner the more terrible as I had preserved more horror of it. It was indeed then, O my God, I did the evil that I hated, and I did not do the good that I loved. There was given me a penetrating view of the purity of God, and I became still more impure as far as the sentiment; for as to the reality, this state is very purifying, but I was then very far from understanding it. It was shown me that uprightness and simplicity of heart were the essential virtue, and I did nothing but lie, without wishing it. I then thought they were lies, but, in truth, it was only pure mistake and hasty words without any reflection. I gave way to hastiness. I had never had anything but scorn for wealth. I felt attachments to it, and I would have liked to have back what I had lost; so it seemed to me. I could not control my words, nor hinder myself from eating what was to my taste. All my appetites awoke again, with an entire impotence to conquer them. Their revival, however, was only in appearance, for, as I have said, as soon as I ate things for which I felt so violent a desire, I lost the taste for them.
M. Bertot, without knowing my state, forbade austerities, which might have only served me for support. He told me I was unworthy of practising them. I then believed, O my God, that you had made known to him my wicked state. I could no longer suffer anything, as it appeared to me—although I was quite surrounded by sufferings—owing to the extreme repugnance I felt to it. I entered into so strange a desolation that it is inexplicable, the weight of the anger of God was continual upon me. I used to lie on a rug, which was upon the landing, and cry with all my strength—when I could not be heard—in the sentiment I had of sin, and the inclination I believed I had to commit it, “Damn me, that I may not sin! You send others to hell through justice, give it to me through mercy.” It seemed to me I would gladly cast myself into it in the apprehension I had of sin.
M. Bertot, on the reports made to him that I practised great austerities—for people imagined it, owing to the extreme trouble I was in, which made me unrecognizable—though he had forbidden them to me, thought that I followed my own course. In this deplorable state, I could not tell him anything of myself, God not permitting it; for although I had such keen pains from sin, when I wished to write or speak of them, I found nothing, and I was quite stupid. Even when I wished to confess, I could not say anything, except that I had a sensibility for the creature. This sensibility was such that, during the whole time it lasted, it never caused me any emotion or temptation in the flesh. M. Bertot gave me up, and sent me word I should take another director. I no longer doubted God had made known to him my wicked state, and that this abandonment was the surest mark of my reprobation.
I continued so afflicted, I thought I should die of grief. I was pregnant of my daughter. I have often been astonished that I was not confined prematurely. My sobs were so violent I was on the point of suffocating. I should have been consoled at M. Bertot’s abandonment if it was not that I regarded it as the visible mark of God’s abandonment. My pain was so keen at the commencement I could hardly eat. People did not understand what I lived on, and I don’t understand it myself. I was so weak that in my confinement I was ill from Monday midday up to Tuesday midnight. The doctors found no strength in me, and said I should die of pure weakness without delivery. Fear lest the child should be unbaptised made me make a vow to the Holy Virgin, after which I was happily delivered, though I had been so miserable and at the point of death. I had no unwillingness to die, because I thought my death would end my interior ills.
It was as much as I could do at this time to drag my body, so prostrated was I with languor, for I suffered then the privation of all blessings, and the accumulation of all evils, without anything whatsoever in heaven or on earth giving me any consolation. All was hostile to me, all crucified me. Besides, I had to be the whole day under a perpetual opposition, bearing within inconceivable torments. If I could have been alone, my pain would have been much relieved, but I had only the night to mourn and weep my grief. As I dwelt alone in an isolated apartment, I gave free course to my tears, and sometimes I said with the prophet, “I wash my bed with my tears, and my groanings are like the sound of great waters.” Nothing whatever was given me to relieve me, for prayer was a torture. I could not read anything. If I could force myself to do it, I knew not what I was reading, and understood nothing whatever. I recommenced, I know not how often, my reading, and I understood less the last time than the first; all I retained was a horrible disgust for it. Sermons and all pious exercises had the same effect on me. My imagination was in a frightful irregularity, and gave me no rest. I could not speak of you, O my God, for I became quite stupid, nor even take in what others said when I heard them speaking.
In place of that peace of paradise in which my soul had been, as it were, confirmed and established, there was only a trouble of hell. I could sleep but a short time continuously; my trouble woke me up, as if from my bed I was bound to enter hell: for that inclination to be damned rather than to sin, which was still a good thing, was taken from me. I fell into a greater weakness. The fear of death and of hell seized me. I sought my first disposition, and I did not find it; on the contrary, it seemed that sin was more familiar to me, that I would have liked to commit it. I found myself hard towards God, insensible to his bounties. There was not shown me any good that I had done in all my life. The good appeared to me evil, and what is frightful is that this state appeared to me bound to endure eternally, while I did not believe it to be a state, but a true fall; for if I could have believed it had been a state, or that it had been necessary, or agreeable to God, I should not have had any pain from it. From that I entered into insensibility, which appeared to me the consummation of my woes; it was also the last dying state. But before speaking of it I must continue my narrative. I will ask you to consider what it means to bear this state seven years, and especially five years without an instant of consolation, and accompanied with all the crosses I have described and those I am about to tell.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MADAME GUYON 