INTRODUCTION
The Curé of Ars knew no vanity whatsoever, not even the vanity of authorship. All he had printed during his lifetime were “four or five prayers dictated to Mlle. Lassagne, the directress of La Providence,” and even these appeared under the veil of anonymity in the Guide for Pious Souls, a work which was sometimes attributed to him, but which was really that of a priest from Lyons, M. 'Abbé Peyronnet, chaplain at Fourviére.
If Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney had wished to give something to the public, undoubtedly he would have chosen to publish his sermons, of which he had completed easily six volumes. The thought never even occurred to him. He kept his manuscripts for a certain number of years, perhaps as long as he hoped that he would be able to use them again. But the time came—around 1832 or so—when, overwhelmed by the work of the confessional, he no longer had even the leisure to reread his manuscripts, and he did not give any further thought to them.
He had a good hundred sermons. He had put them away on a shelf in his bookcase when, towards 1845, Canon Perrodin, the Superior of the seminary at Brou, in the diocese of Belley, who was preparing a spiritual book, borrowed the Curé’s instructions which had dealt either with the life of our Lord or with the Blessed Sacrament. Most unfortunately, irreparable damage was done, for this series of sermons was lost in the following way:
‘When Canon Perrodin wanted to return to M. Vianney the twenty copies of sermons which he had taken he could not at
