Page:The sermons of the Curé of Ars - Vianney, tr. Morrissy - 1960.djvu/24

 once meet with him, for the Curé was in the confessional and would be there for many hours to come, He entrusted them to M. Raymond, who was the assistant to the Curé of Ars between 1845 and 1853.

The Abbé Raymond kept them. Though he was perfectly convinced of the exalted virtue of M. Vianney he privately considered him gifted with only a modest eloquence. He had not, therefore, any idea of making use of someone else’s sermons. Nor had his pastor any need for his old manuscripts: having no time to prepare anything, the holy man was at present delivering his sermons and catechisms ex tempore. M. Raymond shoved the scripts away in a drawer. When in 1853 he was appointed pastor at Jayat, he threw them in among a pile of papers that were of no importance. As a witness at the Beatification Process on February 24, 1863, he admitted to this: “I had twenty sermons of the Servant of God, but I lost them.”

‘With regard to the manuscript sermons of M, Vianney which escaped destruction—about eighty-five in number—they are no longer in Ars.

No doubt because they had begged him for them, he had given a certain number of them to the Brothers of the Holy Family at Belley, founders of the school, or workers at the church in Ars; others he had sold to Mlle. Marie Ricotier. This lady, born in Gleize (Rhone), retired in 1832 to the village of Ars, where she lived on a small private income, M. Vianney was often short of money and Mlle. Ricotier, to come to his help in his charitable works and also—as she admitted—to procure very surreptitiously for herself, during the very lifetime of the saint, some honored relics, bought from him all the souvenirs possible: furniture, worn out vestments, and so on. It is very possible that Mlle. Ricotier suggested to the Abbé Vianney that he had in his room some manuscripts which were of no value and that she quite willingly gave him hard cash in exchange for them. The holy man never had enough of it for the poor. Whatever the explanation, a large number of the sermons disappeared