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Friar Herbert Thurston - The Physical Phenomenon of Mysticism

let us turn to another witness, Sister Mamertus (mde Marie Henriette Giraud), aged sixty-eight, who, after confirming, along with several others, the universal conviction among the nuns of the truth of the story just recounted, goes on to describe a personal experience of her own which occurred a year or two later. Sister Bartholomew had been succeeded in her office of looking after the granary by a Sister Mary Magdalen, who was no longer living when these depositions were taken, and Sister Mamertus narrates:

Sister Mary Magdalen came to me one morning and said: "l don't know what to do. There are not more than eight or ten bushels of corn left in the granary at the very most." Our good Mother Elizabeth (the foundress] happened to be away from home at the time; she was, I think, in Paris. Sister Mary Magdalen, accordingly, went off to the Father and told him that the community would soon be without bread.

He replied, “My dear child, how little faith you have! God's Providence watches over our needs. Send the corn you have to be ground."

Shortly afterwards I noticed that the Servant of God was making his way to the granary, and my curiosity having been aroused by what Sister Mary Magdalen had told me, I followed him. He went into the granary and closed the door behind him, but I was able to watch him through the keyhole. He knelt down beside the little heap that was there, and began to pray very fervently. I don't know that he did anything else, because in my fear that he himself might catch me spying and might reprimand me for my curiosity, I withdrew almost at once. But in due course, after the Father had left, Sister Mary Magdalen came along with the men from the mill, and I heard from her on that same day that she measured the corn and found that there were sixty bushels.

There was much other testimony given to the same effect, but it is of a less satisfactory kind, and consists mainly of statements of what the nuns or the neighbouring clergy and laity had heard from the lips of those who had been in intimate relation with St. Andrew.