God was more ambitious for His saint than we are. He wanted to place him, in the eternity of his glory, as near as possible to Himself, one of the stars of the first brilliance. That sort of thing has to be paid for, and even then you get it for nothing. God showed also that there is no limit to self-oblation and that His grace can make up what His chosen ones lack—not only in knowledge, wisdom, strength, and health, but even in sleep or food.

It is worth our while to look at some of the demon’s “tricks.”

According to one biography, they began toward the beginning of the winter of 1824–1825. The curé’s pitiless asceticism had brought him to the point of death. He did, in fact, think he was dying, and he prepared himself in fear and trembling, counting all he had done so far as a mere nothing—as indeed it was by comparison with all that he was yet to do.

The devil set about turning his fears into despair, magnifying his weaknesses into deadly sins. He pictured abysses opening before the curé’s feet, and he murmured in his ear: “Soon you must fall into Hell.”

But a true saint is never guilty of despair. After agonies unknown to us, he put the devil in his place, and on his recovery, he answered as a saint answers, by redoubled courage and zeal.

He had just acquired the house where he was to set up his “Providence.” In a place where already there was too much prayer, such a new reservoir of prayer and charity was an additional menace to the devil’s security, which he could not ignore. He began his attacks at once, his persecutions taking the particular form that the Abbé Saudreau—who has studied much in this field—calls infestation.

The devil was there but unseen; he had at his disposal gusts of wind, crowbars, every sort of musical instrument; he gave the impression of being everywhere and nowhere; of being one and myriad; for his name is Legion. He varied his effects, then repeated one single effect endlessly. The word “infestation” is right. The house was infested with him; he swarmed like a rat. At first, M. Vianney thought it was a rat. He was lying in his curtained bed and suddenly heard what sounded like a light pattering; the animal approached the bed, clawed the curtains, gnawed at them. M. Vianney got up to frighten him. The noise ceased: there was no sign of a rat. No sooner was he back in bed than it all began again. Armed with a pitchfork, he shook the curtains and scraped about the floor. The rat gnawed away all night, and for nights on end, but there was not a tooth mark in the curtains.

This, however, frequently as it happened, was only the beginning. Once, at nine in the evening, M. Vianney, who had not yet gone to bed, was startled by three mighty blows on the door of the yard—“as if,” he said, “someone wanted to smash it in with a club.” And he went on:

I immediately opened my window and asked, “Who is there?” But I saw nothing and went quietly to bed, recommending myself to God. I was not asleep when three more blows, struck this time not on the outer door but on the door on the stairs leading to my bedroom, made me jump. I got up and cried a second time: “Who is there?” No one replied. When the noise began, I took it that it was thieves, with designs on the beautiful ornaments presented [to the Church] by the Vicomte d’Ars, and I thought I had better take precautions. I asked two stout men to sleep at the presbytery to help in case of need.

They came several nights running. They discovered nothing and remained convinced that the noise had another cause than the wickedness of men. I myself became certain of it, for one night in winter, when much snow had fallen, three mighty blows were heard about midnight. I sprang instantly out of bed; I shot downstairs into the yard, thinking that this time I should catch the criminals in flight and intending to summon help. But to my great surprise, I heard nothing, and what is more, I saw no footprint in the snow. Then I no longer doubted that it was the devil who wanted to frighten me. I abandoned myself to God’s will, praying to Him to be my protector and my guardian, to come near me with His angels when my enemy should again decide to torment me.

It is worth noting that the poor curé was in deadly fear when this new sort of trial began. He would have had no fear of martyrdom, but he lay in bed with his teeth chattering because of a few noises that he could not explain. He was not yet at home, so to speak, with the devil and his peculiar ways.

Satan tried new amusements. He set the bed curtains tossing, upset chairs, disarranged the furniture. He hammered nails into the floor, plied saw, plane, and axe as though he would smash the house to fragments. Again he imitated the tread of a gendarme on the stairs; drummed on the table, the chimneypiece, the water pot; pranced, like a fiery steed, in the room downstairs and landed with ringing hoofs on the flagstones in the yard; yelled outside the house like a troop of Cossacks; quarreled, argued, “held his parliament in the yard,” as the curé put it. As a substitute for a cavalry charge in the street, he arranged that a flock of sheep should come pouring out of the barn.

It is interesting to glance through Catherine Lassagne’s notes on this subject. Under one date, M. Vianney told her that “the grappin has begun to make a noise like someone binding a cask with iron hoops”; on August 18, 1825, there was a musical interlude—the devil “up the chimney singing like a nightingale.” Another time, he roared like a lion; again, he sang a song: “The fiend has a very ugly voice,” comments M. Vianney.

On nights of special rage, he shook the saint by the feet; passed “what felt like a hand over his face”; sniffed at him like a dog and vomited gravel and such like; dragged him in his bed around the room, lifted him out of bed, sometimes hurled him down. Occasionally, but very rarely, he tried gentle means instead of savage; tried to soften him, slipped a down cushion under his body, swathed him in it, cradled him, with obscene sighs.

He attacked him also in broad daylight, even away from the presbytery. Once when the curé was preaching a mission at Montmerle, he felt himself shaken and reshaken in the confessional. Another time, on the road to Saint-Trivier, the bushes interlocked as though to prevent him passing. And often he found, on coming home, the picture of the Annunciation—to which he was very much attached—absolutely covered with filth.

It is worth adding that the devils sometimes spoke to their victim. They did not shrink from lowering their masks to spit their hate in his face and admit their plans:

“Vianney! Vianney! Eater of potatoes! We shall have you all right! We’ve got you!”

But if they really had got him, they would have taken fine care not to say so.

Did M. Vianney actually see the devil with his bodily eyes? Once in the form of a cloud of bats that darkened his bedroom. Again at three in the morning, in the cemetery, in the form of a black dog “with blazing eyes and bristling hair, scratching the earth” at a spot where had just been buried a man who had died without confession. But if he did not see him often, he knew his scent afar off and could recognize him under many disguises.