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me if I accepted it. I felt so annihilated; I felt such pains
because of the offenses that are given, that I felt my heart

split. I said to Him: “Lord, do with me what You want.” And
so He took it, He drove it onto my head, and He disappeared.
Now, who can say the spasms I felt when I came back into
myself? At each movement of my head I thought I would

breathe my last, so many were the pains and the prickings
I felt in my head, in my eyes, in my ears, behind my neck.

I felt those thorns penetrate even into my mouth, and it
clenched in such a way that I could not open it to take food,
so I would remain sometimes two days, sometimes three,
without being able to take anything. When they somehow

mitigated, I would feel, sensibly, a hand that pressed my
head and renewed the pains; and sometimes the spasms were
such that I would lose consciousness because of the pain. At

the beginning, this would happen on certain days, while on
others it wouldn’t. When they were repeated, it would be
three or four times a day, and they would last sometimes a
quarter of an hour, sometimes half an hour, sometimes one

hour, and then I would remain free, though feeling very weak
and in suffering. I would remain in suffering, more or less,
depending on how much those pains were communicated to

me during that state of dozing.

I also remember that since sometimes, because of the
sufferings in my head, as I said above, I could not open my

mouth in order to take food, and since my family knew that I
didn’t really want to be in the countryside, when they saw that

I was not eating, they would attribute it to a fuss of mine, and
naturally they would become irritated, they would get upset, and
they would mock me. My nature wanted to resent this, because
I saw that what they were saying was not true, but the Lord did

not want this resentment and here is how it happened:
One evening, while we were at table, and I was in this
state of not being able to open my mouth, my family began to

get upset. I was so affected that I started to cry, and in order
not to be seen, I got up and I went somewhere else, continuing
to cry; and I prayed Jesus Christ and the Most Holy Virgin to

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