The monks labored in the woods and fields. When they returned to the monastery, they received with thankfulness what was given them to eat - a pound of coarse brown bread and pottage made of beech-leaves. Their beds were straw, their pillow a sack of oat hulls. After some hours rest they rose again at midnight to sing the praises of the Lord.

Such was the pious life of these monks of the Blessed Virgin, Whom they honored with their lives. Many men of royal and noble ancestry flocked to the monasteries. One young lord of very high birth, having taken the habit of Citeaux, was sent to drive a troop of swine every day under the oaks of a neighboring forest. Here the pigs would eat acorns and beech nuts.

One day, when the novice was not engaged in prayer, he heard the voice of satan, the father of pride. The devil whispered his temptation into the novice’s mind, saying that it was a very strange occupation for the son of a powerful baron to be tending to swine. The young nobleman, up until now so pious, bit his lips. The thought struck him hard. He had not recognized it as satan, but only as a thought which occurred to him.

When evening came he returned to the monastery as usual, and withdrew to the chapel. Anyone seeing him kneel before Our Lady’s altar, deep in meditation, would have said: “There is a saint whose thoughts are in Heaven.” Yet, sadly, his thoughts had not taken so lofty a flight, for he was thinking of his father’s castle and contemplating thoughts of running away.

“It is very dark tonight,” the novice said to himself, as he looked out beyond the porch of the chapel, “the wind is blowing a tempest. It is the right time to make my escape. . . . Take care of swine indeed! I shall leave! The son of one of the first lords of the court - it is disgraceful!” . . . He quickly arose and walked with a resolute step to the door - never to return.

As he was heading towards the threshold of the doorway, his determined step stopped abruptly. There was someone standing right before him! At first he thought he was dreaming, but he realized that he wasn’t. There at the end of the chapel stood a woman as beautiful as an angel, and majestic as a queen. With a gracious wave of her hand and a smile of compassionate pity, she beckoned him to follow her. Without a thought, the novice instinctively obeyed.

The unknown lady went toward the cemetery. The moon, half hidden by thick clouds, was tinged with a strange light. The large pines, moving gloomily in the wind, seemed to moan over the dead, and the night birds mingled their mournful cries with the whining gusts of the storm. An icy tremor ran through the young monk’s limbs.

Entering the cemetery, the calm and radiant guide stopped. She stretched out her hand over the ground. Before his eyes, the novice watched the grassy coverings of the tombs slowly open and the dead arose from their graves, cold and pale in their winding sheets. Overcome by such a sight, the novice began to faint from fear. The unknown lady, eyeing him with tender compassion said in a sweet, yet penetrating voice:

“Yet a little while, and you will be as these dead! Where would you wish to go, and what are you thinking of? You desire the fleeting glory of the world, which ends like this?”

He was seeing with his own eyes what awaited for him at his death. How many other great young noblemen, even kings, were now lying in the grave. Where now was all of their greatness and their worldly glory?

As she said these words the Blessed Virgin, for it was She who had come to warn the monk, disappeared and the graves closed again. After this unforgettable lesson, the young novice never again wanted to leave the monastery and he became a model of virtue and humility.