She Who Weeps - Bloy Léon

She Who Weeps (Our Lady of La Salette) by Léon Bloy (Celle qui pleure, in French) was originally published in 1908. This is an English translation of a work that is arguably a keystone of religious thought in Bloyʼs canon, given the authorʼs strong belief in, and promotion of, not only Mariology but also Millenarianism, both which beliefs permeate his work. Originally begun in 1879, before his articles written as a scatalogical demolitionary pamphleteer for the Chat Noir journal, before his ground-breaking first novel, The Desperate Man, which was, by the authorʼs own admission, the beginning of the "conspiration of silence" against him - She Who Weeps was surprisingly abandoned at first. It was only later when Pierre Termier, a lay "ambassador of Mary," and close friend of the author in his later years, approached Bloy about the work, that the latter, encouraged, and with rekindled interest, picked it up again and brought it to completion.

It discusses the story of Mélanie Calvat, and also Maximin Giraud, two children-shepherds in the French Alps, witnesses to the Apparition of the Very Holy Virgin Mary on September 19, 1846, - twelve years before the more famous Marian Apparition at Lourdes - and the consequences that the event had on the lives of the two children - particularly Mélanie, who devoted her life to promoting the message.

"Pass it on to all my My People, the Mother of God had said to the Shepherds, having announced to them the Great News..."