Alice’s Paintings

Alice’s Paintings are a group of crude images whose repeated subject first appears to be the Virgin Mary, but whose content sharply complicates that identification. Shown to Monsignor Delgard as evidence of Alice Pagett’s single-minded fascination, they unsettle his assumption that the child’s attachment is straightforward worship. Their importance lies not in artistic accomplishment but in the gap between the sacred figure the adults think they recognize and the consistently disturbing image the papers actually present.

Discovery and Presentation

Father Hagan had shown Monsignor Delgard some of the pictures before his death. Alice’s mother had allowed him to take them from the house, placing the work in the hands of the priest and then within an ecclesiastical investigation. In the conversation about Alice, the pictures are introduced as evidence that her fascination is concentrated on a single subject. That subject had been surmised to be the Virgin Mary, although the identification is initially an interpretation made by the adults rather than a meaning the images themselves confirm.

The paintings are presented again when Mother Marie-Claire opens a folder and holds out its first sheet to Monsignor Delgard. His response falters as he looks at it. She then spreads more sheets across the table, making the collection visible as a series rather than as one isolated drawing. The arrangement matters: each new sheet confirms that the unsettling image is not an accident confined to a single attempt. The folder turns Alice’s private work into material for comparison, and the repetition changes the terms on which Delgard can understand it.

A Repeated Figure, Not a Repeated Devotion

The pictures share crude workmanship, garish colors, and broad, slashing brushstrokes. Their central figure remains the same across the sheets, while particular features vary from one image to another. The account notes differences in the treatment of the figure’s sexualized features and in the distortion of its expression, but emphasizes that the obscene elements recur. The variation is therefore limited: the pictures change in particulars without abandoning their underlying design.

That combination of sameness and difference makes the collection more revealing than a single image would be. The materials do not show a polished devotional practice or a sequence of carefully executed religious scenes. Alice is described as having little artistic skill but considerable enthusiasm for her subject, an enthusiasm that the observer calls obsessive. The roughness of the work does not weaken its evidentiary force within the scene. Instead, its recurring figure and repeated obscenities make the fixation legible even where the drawing itself remains crude.

Devotion Put in Doubt

Before seeing the sheets, Monsignor Delgard treats Alice’s attachment as worship of Mary and begins to understand it as devotion. Mother Marie-Claire interrupts that interpretation by challenging his use of the word. She does not offer a competing explanation in the exchange; she places the paintings before him and lets their repeated contents confront his assumption. His visible reaction marks a reversal in the conversation: what had seemed to be a familiar sign of piety becomes something he cannot readily assimilate to pious feeling.

The paintings consequently function as evidence and as a test of the adults’ judgments. The initial identification of their subject as the Virgin Mary remains significant, but it no longer settles what Alice’s fascination means. A sacred identity is invoked by the figure, while the images’ obscene treatment resists a simple devotional reading. The distinction between subject and manner becomes central: recognizing a holy figure does not explain why Alice represents it this way, and the adults cannot make that question disappear by naming her interest worship.

Narrative Significance and Limits

The paintings give the investigation a material trace of Alice’s inner life without providing direct access to her explanation of it. They are images made by Alice, but in this scene they are handled and interpreted by adults: Father Hagan had removed some from the house with her mother’s permission, and Mother Marie-Claire selects and displays the sheets to Monsignor Delgard. The account therefore presents both the pictures and the process by which others claim meaning from them. Their interpretation is consequential, yet it remains an interpretation rather than a statement from Alice herself.

Their narrative force comes from that unresolved tension. The same figure can be read as the Virgin Mary, while the repeated, obscene treatment makes the language of uncomplicated reverence untenable for Delgard. The paintings do not, in the available account, explain their own origin, establish what Alice intended, or prove a supernatural cause. They instead narrow the distance between an adult explanation of Alice as a devout child and the troubling evidence of her actual images. By ending the exchange’s easy confidence in the word devotion, they make the pictures a disturbing clue—and leave their meaning open.