The Last Doorbell Rung. My Memoirs (Gilberte Degeimbre)

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10 The Last Doorbell Rung of religion. In “The life of Melanie, Shepherdess of La Salette,” the references to religious and spiritual life are equally plentiful. “The Message of the Lady of all Peoples” is a daily account of Our Lady’s messages. Joseph Barbedette structured his narration in a similar manner, describing the apparition, and each time retelling it in greater detail, explaining the reactions of each person the night Mary appeared at Pontmain. The Last Doorbell Rung offers us something different altogether. It is a text where the dominating factor between November 29, 1932, to January 3, 1933, is the humanely lived out experience of Gilberte Degeimbre (August 13, 1923 – February 10, 2015) that shook up her life as a young girl. Gilberte puts forward in numerous pages the human context she lived. She does not dwell on the Virgin’s phrases which, for the most part, she did not even cite in the first version of her manuscript, but references to one or the other on half a page of the final text. Her concern is having the reader understand her feelings during the times of the apparitions. The first evenings of the apparitions, for instance, were fearful. The desire to see Mary again replaced the initial emotion of fear, and finally both were followed by distress due to the unbelief of her close ones. She spends much time also relating certain events that took place after the apparitions and hence shows what repercussions these had on her childhood and adolescent world. Gilberte’s Memoirs have a long history. From 1978 to 1981, she handwrote for her sister Andrée’s son, Christian Van den Steen, an account of her life before and after the apparitions. Andrée also saw the Virgin during the same period. The handwritten notes were far from constituting a final text. Frequent ruptures, hesitations, and numerous
introduction 11 put offs accumulated throughout these eighty-seven unstructured sheets of paper. The reader may read them on the Jesuit website which edited this work. The original drafts were left in a drawer at Christian Van den Steen’s for more than twenty years until one day Gilberte’s husband, André Philippe, went to look for them and made photocopies. The couple returned to Beauraing in 2004, after having lived forty-seven years in Italy. It is then that Gilberte had wanted to see once again her notes hoping to leave behind an account of what she lived out during her childhood. Her husband retyped the notes on the computer, and working with his wife, corrected them. They were put in order; the structure was polished off with augmented and rephrased paragraphs. At this stage of the text’s history, André’s influence cannot be ignored. The notes from 1978-81 were rough copies. The final text is more complete, but Gilberte still considered it unfinished. She would have liked the format to be more realistic. The content was what she wanted to truly say, but the format did not correspond to that which she was hoping to leave behind. Despite all these factors she wanted the text published. Here and there, Gilberte annotated the text by hand, especially the page where she tells of the time when she and her friends went ringing doorbells. This is echoed in the title of her manuscript, that she marked in ink, “it was The Last Doorbell Rung.” Three years before her death, Gilberte gave the text to her son Jean-François, asking him to look after its publication. Her son gave the text to Father André Haquin, Theologian and resident of Beauraing, it was then given to Father Claude Bastin, Rector of the Sanctuaries of Beauraing, who finally entrusted it to me for publication.
Page 1: Gilberte Degeimbre The Last Doorbel
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Page 7 and 8: Preface G ilberte Degeimbre, tenaci
Page 9: Preface 7 “The true light, which
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Page 19 and 20: Cumont My birth It was August 1923,
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Page 23 and 24: Table of contents 143 Appendix I: T
Page 26: The Last Doorbell Rung “A Liar.

The Last Doorbell Rung. My Memoirs (Gilberte Degeimbre)

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