The publishers say that this life of St. Catherine Laboure by Father Dirvin will be the definitive biography of St. Catherine. Like many other people, I suppose, I have never been quite certain of the meaning of this word as it is applied to a biography. So I asked the publishers what they mean when they say that Father Dirvin's book is definitive. Here is their explanation.

This book is the full and authoritative story on the life and works of St. Catherine, the Daughter of Charity to whom the Miraculous Medal was manifested by the Blessed Virgin in Paris in 1830. It contains much material never published before, since Father Dirvin had access to archives and places never before opened to a biographer or a historian. These were not only in Paris, but also in Rome and in the village of Fain-les-moutiers, where Catherine was born and spent her childhood. Every statement of fact has been fully authenticated; where evidence on any point is not fully conclusive, this is clearly indicated. In this book you will read everything significant that is recorded anywhere about St. Catherine and her life's work.

How Father Dirvin was able to obtain so much previously unpublished material can easily be understood by those who know of the long and close association of the Vincentian Fathers with the Miraculous Medal. For those who may not know, a brief explanation should suffice.

St. Vincent de Paul founded two Communities: 1) the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentian Fathers) and 2) the Daughters of Charity, sometimes called the Sisters of Charity. At the time Mary manifested the design of the Medal of her Immaculate Conception, Catherine Laboure was a novice in the Paris motherhouse of the Daughters of Charity. When the first Medals were cast two years later, it was only natural that they should be distributed by the spiritual sons and daughters of St. Vincent—first in France, and then throughout the world.

The first organized effort to spread devotion to Mary through her Medal was made in the United States, in 1915, by the Vincentian Fathers of Germantown, Philadelphia. Prompted by a desire to show our appreciation for a wonderful favor received through the Medal, the superiors of our Community decided to establish an association to promote devotion to Mary Immaculate. This was the beginning of The Central Association of the Miraculous Medal. For eleven years prior to his transfer to St. John's University, Brooklyn, Father Dirvin was on the office staff of the "Central Association" and was associate editor of our magazine, The Miraculous Medal.

I hope that all this talk about definitive editions and scholarly research will not mislead anyone into thinking that Father Dirvin's book is a dry compilation of facts. Far from it! Here is a narrative that brings Catherine Laboure to vivid life—as a child; as the little housekeeper in a motherless household; as a girl seeking her vocation; as the young novice chosen by Mary to give her Medal of grace to the world; as the humble Sister who insisted on remaining anonymous almost to the end. This is a book you will find very hard to lay aside until you have read the final sentence on the last page.

Rev. Joseph A. Skelly, C.M., Director
The Central Association of the Miraculous Medal
Germantown, Philadelphia, Pa.

Feast of the Assumption, 1958

The Evening Angelus was ringing over Burgundy. The mild May breeze caught the sound from a hundred belfries and blew it across the mellowing fields and ripening vineyards. Workers in the fields stopped turning the ancient earth and straightened to bless themselves and pray. In the villages, housewives paused in their preparation of the evening meal. Even the children stood silent in the cobble-stoned streets where they were at play. Everyone and everything was still, while the sweet bells told once more of the meeting of Gabriel and Mary.

This moment had not changed over the centuries. The lords and ladies of the Ducal court had known it, and the serfs toiling beneath the blue Burgundian skies, and the monks of St. Bernard and the nuns of St. Jane Frances de Chantal. Only the people and the dress and the customs had changed.

Now it was the second of May in the year of Our Lord 1806, and the evening Angelus was ringing.

In one house of the village of Fain-les-moutiers no one paused for the evening prayer. It was the house of the prosperous farmer Pierre Laboure, and within its stout stone walls his wife, Madeleine Louise, was being delivered of a child. The bell of the little church across the lane had not ceased striking when the baby breathed its first breath and wailed. It was a girl, the second daughter of the household.

In the midst of all the to-do and bustle, the washings and exclamations of delight that all was well, the exhausted mother made herself heard. She had a startling request: that her newborn daughter's name be entered on the civil register at once. It was something that could wait: the official day was over; but, no, Madeleine Laboure would have it done now.

Nicolas Laboure, cousin to Pierre and mayor of the village, was summoned from his office. He brought with him his secretary, Baudrey, who carried the book and pen. The child's name was duly entered: "Catherine, daughter of Pierre Laboure and Madeleine Gontard his wife, was born this same day (May 2, 1806) at six o'clock in the evening." The mother raised herself resolutely to sign the record with her own hand. It was a marvel to her family. She had not done this for any other of her children, nor would she do it for those to come. Only for Catherine.

Thus it came about that the name of Catherine Laboure, saint of Burgundy and France, was inscribed in the written history of the world within a quarter of an hour of her birth. The very next day, the feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, Catherine was baptized, and her name entered on the books of the Church. Her existence had now been noticed by both Church and State; both would have occasion to take note of her many times in the years ahead.

Abbe Georges Mamer poured the waters of baptism on the head of the little Catherine. He was the last Benedictine of the famed Fifth-Century Abbey of Moutiers, which lay outside the village. When his abbey had been suppressed and the monks dispersed during the French Revolution, Abbe Mamer had stayed on in the district to serve as pastor to the villages of Moutiers—Saint Jean, Fain and St. Just. He was honored by his people, for he had courageously refused the Constitutional Oath, that shameful pledge by which the taker denied his Master's Vicar in Rome for the bloody silver of the State.

According to legend, the lands of the Abbey of Moutiers had been the gift of Clovis, the first Christian King of the Franks. The first abbot, so the tale went, having found favor with the King, Clovis promised him all the land he could encircle in a day, riding on a donkey. Whether the charming legend is true or not, there is a poetic justice in the linking of Catherine, the maid of a new religious era, with the beginnings of French Catholicism fourteen hundred years before.

A coincidence like this—in fact, everything we call coincidence—is not one with God. It is part of His plan, a signpost He places along the way of a soul. It was not merely coincidence, for example, that Catherine was born at the ringing of the Angelus. It was God's charming touch, this heralding by the bells of Mary of the saint who was to usher in the Marian Age. Nor was it coincidence that, of all the Laboure children, Catherine's name alone received the prompt attention of the world: surely it was a holy mother's intuition that led Madeleine to call attention to her elected child. Even the feast of Catherine's baptism was prophetic, for Catherine was to "find" the Cross at every turning of her life, was to have a deep devotion for it, and was to see it in mysterious vision.

Catherine's baptismal name was rarely used by her family. They called her Zoe after an obscure saint whose feast fell on the day of Catherine's birth. St. Zoe must have enjoyed a certain local prominence, for the leading saint of the day on the calendar of the Church is Athanasius, the great champion of the Mother of God. Although entirely unofficial, the name Zoe was so much a part of Catherine that, when she served as godmother to a neighbor's child in 1826, she signed the baptismal register: Catherine Laboure Zoe.

Zoe Laboure came by her goodness honestly, for her father and mother were pious country folk. The father, Pierre, was born in 1767. He entered the seminary in his teens but, after a few years, gave up the idea of the priesthood and took to farming. His grandchildren, in testimony before the Beatification Tribunal of 1909, blamed the French Revolution for his change of heart. This was evidently a family tradition and must be respected as such; however, the facts indicate that the Revolution discouraged rather than obstructed the vocation of Pierre Laboure. He was already twenty-two when the Revolution broke out, an age when he would have been well along in his theological studies, and even in orders, were he still in the seminary. Furthermore, the Church was not hampered in her functioning, nor the seminaries closed, at once. The Constitutional Oath was not demanded until 1790, and the Days of the Terror, when persecution and martyrdom began in dead earnest, did not strike until 1793, some months after Pierre was married. Probably the shadow of the coming Revolution gave Pierre Laboure pause in his leanings toward the priesthood and, after an honest searching of his soul, he decided that God had other plans for him.

Zoe's mother, Madeleine Louise Gontard, was born in 1773, three years before the American Declaration of Independence. She came of cultured and respected people: the Gontards were looked up to as a sort of local aristocracy. When Pierre Laboure met her, she was living in the family home at Senailly, teaching school to support her widowed mother.

They were married on June 4, 1793. He was twenty-six; she was twenty. They were brave youngsters, to set up housekeeping in the reeling world of that day. The French Revolution had been disrupting normal living for four years. The King had been killed in January, and the Queen was to come to the scaffold in October. The heads of priests and nuns were soon to be falling into the blood-soaked baskets of the guillotine. The Laboures's daughter Catherine would come to revere the hallowed names of some of them: the Vincentian priests Rene Rogue, Louis Francois, and Henri Gruyer; the four martyred Sisters of Charity of Arras—all members of the double religious family Catherine was to join. Devilish cruelty, blasphemy, and lust were on the rampage, and even the far provinces and hidden villages like Senailly and Fain-les-moutiers felt the pangs of the frightful cancers that were eating away at France. But Pierre and Madeleine were young and in love, and young love knows no terrors or fears.

For the first seven years of their married life, the couple lived with Madeleine's mother in Senailly. Here the four oldest children were born: Hubert, in 1794; Marie Louise, in 1795; Jacques, in 1796; and Antoine, in 1797—and perhaps two of the six babies who died at birth or soon after. Madeleine Laboure had seventeen children in all: eleven lived, and one of these, Alexandre, died when a year old.

In 1800 old Mme Gontard died, and the Laboures moved to the farm in Fain-les-moutiers. Soon after their arrival in Fain the fourth son, Charles, was born. Then came Alexandre, in 1801; Joseph, in 1803; and Pierre, in 1805.

And in 1806, Catherine.

Catherine's parents were a study in contrasts. Pierre Laboure was a gruff, silent man, a devout and good Catholic, an able father, but one who ruled his children with a rod of iron. In all things a perfectionist, he saw to it that his farm and his household ran smoothly or he knew the reason why. It was this quality of management that made his land prosper and his children grow in courtesy and character. Madeleine Laboure was of a softer nature. She was truly the heart of her home, educated, genteel, and saintly.

They were a wonderful combination for the making of a saint, this father and mother, and Zoe took the best qualities from each. She had her father's iron will and capable hand, her mother's gentleness and deep piety.

On October 21, 1808, when Zoe was nearly two and a half years old, Marie Antoinette, or Tonine, the sister who was to be the confidante of her childhood and adolescence, was born. And, in November 1809, the baby Auguste; he was born in poor health and was delicate all his life.

The little village of Fain-les-moutiers—there were scarcely 150 inhabitants—had honorable memories to recall, memories that bred in it a just and natural pride. It had once been part of the lands of the Abbey of Moutiers. St. Bernard and his holy brothers had been born and raised not far away and, later on, St. Jane Frances de Chantal. Some miles to the south lay f Paray-le-monial, where the Sacred Heart of Jesus had unburdened Itself to St. Margaret Mary.

Fain was a charming village, perched on a shelf among the rolling hills, commanding a glorious view of the lovely Burgundian countryside stretching away beneath it. Just below, in the plain, lay the ruined abbey and, farther on, the larger village of Moutiers-Saint Jean. It was a good place to grow up in—healthful, quaint, and serene.

The Laboure farm was large, the house spacious. The sight of the prosperous farmstead was enough to tell the stranger to Fain that here lived the first family of the village. A dozen hired hands tilled the soil for Pierre Laboure. His barn was full, his granary bursting. Nearly 800 pigeons flew in and out of the large, stone dovecot which presided over the farmyard like a medieval battle-tower. Raising squabs for the market is a native French industry but, by ancient law, only one or two farmers in a given area may engage in it. Indoors as well, the polished oak and gleaming pewter reflected the comfortable station of the family. And, if further proof were needed, there was the tiny side chapel in the ancient village church, called the Chapel of the Laboures, and reserved for their use. Pierre Laboure was village mayor from 1811 to 1815.

The Laboures were prosperous because they worked hard and managed well. They knew simple comfort but never luxury. From sunup to sundown the father was in the fields, about his business of farming. At home, the mother was about hers, sewing and cooking, cleaning and dusting, managing her household. After Auguste was born, Mme Laboure had a servant to help her with the children and the housework. As the mother moved from room to room, the toddling Zoe tagged at her heels, taking in all the household tasks she would remember and do so well in the years to come. When the boys came home from the village school, they had chores to do to help their mother. As they grew older and stronger, they followed their father into the fields with plow and hoe.

Of course, there was time for play: the rollicking games in the barnyard or in the twisting streets, the leaping and wrestling in the high-piled hay of the barn. For Zoe and Tonine there were the dolls and the bits of bright cloth of little girlhood. When night had fallen and the whole family was gathered within the walls of the house, all was cozy with the sound of rattling dishes, chattering voices, and laughter.

While Zoe was still a tot, Marie Louise went off to live with an uncle and aunt in Langres. This aunt was Madeleine Laboure's sister, and Marie Louise had been named for her. Her husband was the commandant of the military post in the town. The couple was childless, and in their loneliness had asked the Laboures for Marie Louise. It does credit to the compassion and kindliness of Madeleine and Pierre that they gave her up. Her uncle and aunt raised the girl as their daughter, lavishing every care upon her and giving her an excellent education with the Sisters of Charity at Langres.

In 1811, the oldest son, Hubert, enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen. Not long after, Jacques left home for Paris to take a job as clerk in a business firm. The departure of these two fired dreams in the eyes of the younger boys and they yearned for the day when they, too, would set forth to make their fortunes: their father was a hard man, and in the outside world there was freedom and adventure. In the meantime, however, the loving hand of their gentle mother kept them tractable and together.

Zoe was growing up at her mother's knee, almost literally, for the two were drawn to each other in a special way. Naturally enough, this grave little girl and her baby sister must have been a comfort to Madeleine Laboure, surrounded and assailed for years by seven noisy boys. This womanly delight in little girls, however, is not sufficient to explain the unusual relationship between Mme Laboure and Zoe. It would seem, rather, that the native piety of the mother was quick to notice the difference from the others in this chosen child, was quick to detect in her an eager response to her own love of God. There can be no doubt that the future saint learned the beginnings of her sanctity from her mother. How well she learned, we know from the lips of one who was a little girl with her.

The Laboures had relatives in the village of Cormarin, and every year these cousins would invite the whole Laboure family to join them for the patronal feast of the village. The feast-day celebration would begin with the singing of high Mass in the village church. It was a long and trying ceremony for the children, who had thoughts only for the good times to come when it was over. Like children everywhere, they squirmed, they fidgeted, they played with their fingers, they looked this way and that. All except Zoe. She knelt up straight, hands joined, eyes fixed on the altar where Calvary had come again to a tiny hamlet in France. Her behavior was so different from that of the other girls and boys, her attitude so proper and attentive and grown-up, that it could not pass unnoticed. And noticed it was, even by the children, for the old lady of ninety who related it to the tribunal investigating the sanctity of Zoe Laboure in 1895 was one of those children, and she remembered all through the years.

There was another survivor of those feasts in Cormarin who had more to tell. When Mass was over, the people would pour into the village square, the grownups to chat and renew acquaintanceship, the children to romp and play. Zoe was there in the midst of the laughing, skipping, shrieking children. Eighty years after, a playmate remembered her as "not pretty, but pleasant and good, even when they teased her, as children will." Teasing is hard for any child to take, for the teasing of children can be cruel, but Zoe was not a sensitive little girl. With her there was no hurting back or sobbing and running to mama. She only laughed and passed it off.

In a short time, in fact, the competent Zoe had taken over the group. Not that she organized the games and everyone played them her way, or else. Her leadership showed itself only when there was trouble—a quarrel or a downright fight. Then she stepped in quickly and quietly and made peace, and her peace terms were accepted and followed.

A wonderful treat for the children at the festival in Cormarin were the goodies—the candy and other sweets. It is hard for us today, when candy is so plentiful and cheap, to realize just how wonderful a treat it was for these simple country children. There was no such thing as commercial candy in the country provinces of France; it was all made at home. And life was so hard and provisions so few and precious that they could not be wasted on such a luxury as sweets, except on occasions like this.

There is no reason to suppose that Zoe Laboure was unlike the children of all ages in their common weakness for candy. She, too, must have had a sweet tooth. Yet she would give away her share of the feast-day goodies to the first poor child who had been forgotten. This was a really remarkable act of mortification for a little child, but there is sworn testimony that Zoe did it, and not once only.

Another banner expedition of Zoe's childhood was the annual trek to Senailly, where the Laboure family spent their summer vacation at the mother's old home. It was on one of these vacation trips that a tragic accident occurred. The horses bolted, or a wheel dropped into a deep hole in the rutty road, and one of the carriages overturned amid shrieks of fright and horror. When the dust had subsided, frail little Auguste lay oddly twisted, a cripple for life. Until his dying day, some twenty-two years later, he had to be waited on constantly and carried from place to place.

At home in Fain-les-moutiers the family circle kept getting smaller. Hubert and Marie Louise and Jacques were gone from the paternal roof. Antoine was the next to go. As soon as he was old enough, he apprenticed himself to a pharmacist in Paris. Charles was biding his time, waiting his chance to flee. Joseph and Pierre were in school most of the day. There was a village school for the boys of Fain; the girls had to travel to the school of the Sisters of Charity in Moutiers-Saint Jean.

Although Zoe and Tonine were old enough for school, their mother seemed loath to send them. It could not have been the distance that caused her reluctance: Moutiers-Saint Jean was little more than a half-hour's walk from Fain, and little country girls were used to such a walk. More likely, having suffered the separation from her older children, Madeleine Laboure was anxious to keep the youngest near her as long as possible; and perhaps she had a presentiment that she herself would not be with them much longer. It was a strange way for a former schoolteacher to act, and, even more strange, she does not seem to have given her little girls any schooling worthy of the name at home.

These years, were pleasant ones for Zoe. Her pride in her home when she was its mistress and her deep, lifelong love for her family stem from them. She was the darling of her father and the comfort of her mother. Most fathers are helpless before the feminine wiles of their daughters, and Pierre Laboure was no exception. Zoe's only wile, however, was her goodness, which penetrated her father's hard shell and won his heart. Her mother's heart was easier to win, for Zoe carried a great part of it in her bosom: the loving kindness, the gentleness, the piety of Madeleine Laboure, all were copied faithfully in the heart of her little girl. Out of these years, too, sprang the single-souled friendship that always united Zoe and Tonine.

But, like every earthly happiness, it was not to last. On October 9, 1815, Madeleine Laboure died. She was only forty-two; she and her husband had been married twenty-two years.

There are no details of her death; we do not know whether it was sudden or long-drawn-out; we have no hint of the nature of her last illness. It has been suggested that she was worn out by her seventeen pregnancies, but this can only be a guess, and a dangerous and misleading one. After all, many a woman has borne a large family without dying of it. Madeleine Laboure could not have been a delicate woman. In an age when infant mortality was high, nine of her children grew to strong, healthy adulthood. Auguste, the youngest boy, was the only puny one, and he lived to be twenty-eight years old in spite of the crippling accident suffered in his childhood. Only Alexandre died in infancy, and his death need not be blamed on inherited frailty; any children's disease could have carried him off. Catherine lived to be seventy, and Marie Louise survived her, dying in her eighties. There is absolutely no indication that the Laboures were of weak stock, either on their father's side, or their mother's. Besides, Mme Laboure was not called upon to raise her family and keep her house single-handed. She had her mother with her when the older ones were babies, and a competent nurse and servant for the younger ones. To paint Madeleine Laboure as a poor, bedraggled creature, exhausted with babies and housework, is to paint a very false picture indeed.

The praises of this valiant woman could never be fully sung. She accepted fully the Christian duty of motherhood. She instilled in her children piety, honesty, and integrity of character: the children themselves have attested to it. The sanctity of Catherine is the crowning proof, for, as has been said, her mother taught Catherine the elements of holiness.

The greater the person, the greater the loss. Certainly the loss of Madeleine Laboure was a blow of major proportions to the Laboure family. It was like blowing out the light that had illumined the great square rooms, like tearing the heart out of the home. We do not know whether the three oldest boys were home when their mother died. Marie Louise came home from Senailly and stayed on after the funeral to manage the house. She was a young lady of twenty now, and her place was with her father.

He needed her. He needed every help, every consolation, for his way of life had changed suddenly and completely. The old familiar way was no more. It had started to crumble when the older children left home; now it broke up entirely. In the resulting chaos, Charles received his permission to go to Paris to learn the restaurant business. Joseph and Pierre were packed off to boarding school. Of all that large family there were left only the father, Marie Louise, Zoe, Tonine, and Auguste—and the servant. We do not even know the name of this good servant, but the fact that she earned from her little charges the name of Mama, speaks volumes.

Zoe was nine now, Tonine seven, and Auguste six. The poor little things wandered about, disconsolate, bewildered and unhappy. Of the three, Zoe seems to have taken her mother's death the hardest. She was just at that awakening time of childhood when the happenings of life, joyful and sad, are no longer things looked at idly like a play, but flesh-and-blood experiences that touch and change the heart. Zoe had been especially attached to her mother; she had enjoyed the favored dalliance of a mother who knows that she is near the end of her bearing. Most of all, she had depended on her mother for her spiritual food. Now there was an emptiness in her breast. There was no mother to prattle to, to run to with hurts to be kissed away; above all, to trust with her wise and pious childish thoughts.

It was in this crisis that Zoe adopted Mary as her Mother.

It was on a day shortly after her mother's burial that the extraordinary thing happened. A statue of Our Lady stood on a shelf in the bedroom of her father and mother. It was probably a cheap statue, battered and chipped. It might have been of stone or wood or only of plaster, colored or plain—it doesn't matter. What matters is that it was a statue of Our Lady, perhaps the most important statue of Our Lady in modern times. That unknown, long-discarded statue was the instrument that ushered in the Marian Age.

Zoe was alone in the bedroom; she had looked carefully about to make sure of that. She had a duty to perform, and like all the solemn and decisive acts of life, it had to be done alone. Of course even Zoe did not realize that what she was about to do far transcended her personal life. It was vital to countless millions yet unborn; and so she might have spared herself her pains, for all the world was to see her. The Blessed Virgin arranged for the servant to happen quietly on the scene and to observe it all.

Zoe pulled a chair over beneath the shelf, for it was too high for her to reach, even if she stood on tiptoe. Climbing up on the chair, she stretched overhead and took down Our Lady's image. She was too much engrossed in the ecstasy of her devotion to notice anything now. She did not even get down from the chair; it would serve well enough for the altar of her choosing and dedication. Throwing her arms about the statue, she hugged it close to her little body, as a child might fondle her favorite doll or teddy bear.

But this was no doll. In a sense, it was no longer just a statue of Our Lady. It was Mary herself. Zoe's words showed that very clearly.

"Now, dear Blessed Mother," she said aloud with childlike fervor, "now you will be my Mother!"

Only that. She put the statue back in its familiar place and climbed down off the chair.

What Zoe meant to do, what she did, is clear enough. She missed her mother terribly, she felt deeply the need for someone to take her place. Yet how was it that, at the tender age of nine, she made the perfect choice?

It seems obvious that Zoe's instincts were, already, those of the saints. The great St. Teresa of Avila had made the same choice of Mary for Mother while praying before a statue of the Virgin, not long after her own mother's death. Certainly, Zoe's action was not just a cute, childish trick. As children say, this was "for real." Zoe had chosen Mary, the Mother of God, for her own mother—solemnly, surely, with a certain knowledge of what she was doing, of what she meant. Her whole life from this time on bears it out plainly.

From this day forward Zoe Laboure was truly the child of Mary and Mary was truly her mother. The reality of their relationship is evident in Zoe's simple, straightforward acceptance of it. Mary was as real to her as her father and brothers and sisters. This is the literal truth and it is the key to Zoe's life. It explains her intimate, her almost casual communion with the Mother of God. It explains how—whether now or a little later, we do not know—she could foster a desire that seems at first glance presumptuous, preposterous, nearly blasphemous: the desire to see the Blessed Virgin. She clung to that desire, made it the constant petition of her prayers, and, most amazing of all, was serenely confident that it would be realized. This little village girl knew that some day she would see the Mother of God.

It might be justly objected that, since children have marvelous imaginations and are adept at the game of make-believe, this whole business was but a child's fancy. Not so. Zoe Laboure was not an average child and her sister Tonine tells us, significantly, that Zoe disliked the games of childhood. Neither in her young years or later did she ever display the least tendency to daydream. She was singularly practical and unimaginative. If she spoke out loud to an inanimate statue, it was because she believed wholeheartedly in the living, breathing person the statue represented; it was because she felt, perhaps instinctively and without understanding, that this solemn choice must have a visible and sacramental form.

Probably the incident of the statue was almost entirely for the benefit of mankind, a way of serving public notice that the Marian Age had begun. Why else would Heaven have provided an eavesdropper in the person of the Laboure servant? Certainly the devotion of St. Catherine Laboure for the Immaculate Mother of God, with its enormous consequences for the human race, dated from this childhood dedication. It was the first act of homage of a new day, a day which was to dawn in a burst of glory with the Apparitions of the Miraculous Medal, was to grow steadily brighter with the Apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima, and was to reach its zenith in the solemn proclamation of the Assumption of Our Lady and in the intense, worldwide devotion of the Marian Year of 1954.

Having made her choice, Zoe was no longer lonesome. She had regained a mother. Her action did nothing to solve the family problems of the moment, however; indeed, it may have aggravated them, for, when the servant told Pierre Laboure of the touching scene she had witnessed, his heart must have been torn apart at this poignant evidence of the terrible loss his children had suffered in the death of their mother.

At this point Pierre's sister Marguerite came forward with a very generous offer. Marguerite Laboure was married to Antoine Jeanrot, who conducted a profitable vinegar distillery in the village of Saint Remy. The Jeanrots had four daughters who would make perfect companions for the Laboure girls; and so Mme Jeanrot proposed to her brother that she take Zoe and Tonine into her home and family.

Pierre Laboure accepted his sister's offer. Perhaps he felt that it would be better all around. It would be a change for his little girls, and that in itself might help them to forget. Then they would be surrounded by a normal home life, complete with the tender ministrations of a mother. Certainly it would be a help to Marie Louise and the servant, who had all they could do to keep the house, feed the farm laborers, and nurse the invalid Auguste. At least it would be worth trying.

Saint Remy was a village right out of a story book. It lay, pretty and peaceful, along a winding river, on the road from Fain to Montbard. The Jeanrot house was the first one you met after crossing the wooden bridge. The house had a lovely walled garden that ran down to the river and commanded a fine view of the ranging hills beyond. Here, in this country beauty, Zoe spent the years 1816 and 1817.

Zoe and Tonine were happy with their Aunt Marguerite. She was an aunt after a child's heart, tender and kind, with a fond reputation for charity among her neighbors—the sort of woman you turned to immediately when there was sickness or trouble. That her husband was a kindred spirit is evident from the generosity with which he welcomed his wife's two nieces into his home. The Jeanrot girls, who were older than their little cousins, doted upon them.

Life at Saint Remy was, therefore, comfortable, cheerful, and pleasant. The Jeanrots seem to have been a carefree and lighthearted lot, and it was this sunny attitude toward living that drew from Fain certain disapproving hints that "at Saint Remy the children did not receive all the useful attentions." Certainly the Jeanrot home was run very differently from the strict, precise, and efficient household of Fain, but that is probably the worst that can be said of it. It is possible that Antoine and Marguerite Jeanrot seemed slipshod when measured against the unyielding discipline of Pierre Laboure, but who is to say which view lay closer to the rule of the angels? The Jeanrot home was profoundly Christian; nor were Zoe and Tonine shamefully neglected there—a great deal to say.

Life was almost as before. The broken pieces were gathered and put together by the soothing hands of Aunt Marguerite, the emptiness in the hearts of the little girls wholly filled by her love. Of course they must have had a few bouts with homesickness in the beginning, but, no doubt, these soon passed. Fain was but a few miles away, and they saw their father, Marie Louise, Auguste, and the dear substitute Mama often enough. All this, with the healing power of time and the quickness of children to forget, turned the trick. The little Laboures were content.

One thing Zoe never forgot: that she had chosen Mary for her Mother. Nor the catechism of sanctity her earthly mother had taught her. She went right on building upon these foundations, laying prayer on prayer and devotion on devotion like so many bricks. It was of immense help to her that Saint Remy possessed a resident priest. That meant many more church services than she had been used to, a whole new world of divine things. It was like turning a child loose in a huge, wonderful toyshop, for the things of the Lord were truly the toys of this holy child. The simplest object of piety, the crudest holy picture, or the most primitive statue, gave the same delight to her heart that a new ball or rag doll brought to other little girls.

Zoe's cousin Claudine, who was eighteen and so very grown-up that Zoe called her "aunt," never got over Zoe's absorbed attention in church.

"What a pleasure it is to watch Zoe in church," she would say. "How alert she is when she prays!"

It is the testimony of Cormarin all over again. Nor did Claudine stop at admiring her little cousin, but went on to imitate her. Mentally she checked her own behavior in church: whether she knelt up straight, whether she folded her hands devoutly, whether she kept her eyes fixed on the Mass, as she should, as Zoe did. By her own testimony, Claudine's whole spiritual life grew better, all because of the artless piety of a little girl.

Among the "useful attentions" Zoe failed to receive at Saint Remy was schooling. The Jeanrots cannot be blamed overmuch for this; Zoe's own mother and father neglected to see to it when she was at home.

This neglect of proper schooling is the strangest fact of Zoe's childhood. Her father and mother were, after all, persons of a certain education and culture—a point that cannot be made too much of, for it was noteworthy enough in the country provinces of early nineteenth-century France. The mother was a schoolteacher, the father had pursued the graduate studies of the seminary. Like parents the world over, they must surely have wished their children to be as well educated as themselves, or better; and they had the means. What is more, they saw to it as far as the seven oldest were concerned. Marie Louise had a thorough, well-rounded education with the Sisters of Charity at Langres. Hubert's education was such that he was fitted to make a brilliant career for himself as an officer in the French army and to marry the schoolmistress of a fashionable academy. Jacques and Antoine were trained to follow professional careers, the one in commerce and the other in pharmacy. Charles learned the catering trade. Joseph and Pierre were taken out of the village school in Fain and sent to boarding school upon the death of their mother. Only the three youngest of the family had no formal schooling. Of these, Auguste was too delicate in health for it, and Tonine at least learned from her father to read and write. Zoe alone was scarcely able to trace her name or stumble through a simple sentence.

Many excuses can be made for it: the reluctance of the ailing mother to part with her babies, the shunting about of the girls after her death, Zoe's preoccupation with the housework when she returned home. There seems, however, only one reason: that all these human factors were permitted by God to work toward His own ends. Her lack of letters was to play an important part in both the vocation and the Marian mission of Zoe Laboure.

The stay in Saint Remy was intended to be a temporary measure to tide everyone over the crisis caused by Madeleine Laboure's death. Like many temporary measures, however, it began to take on an air of permanency, and two years had gone by before anyone realized it.

Then two circumstances came about that made it both natural and necessary for the children to come home.

The first was the vocation of the oldest girl, Marie Louise. She had been attracted to the Sisters of Charity when they taught her at Langres, and had long ago made up her mind to join them. Her mother's death had called a halt to her plans for a time, but now she was twenty-two and anxious to get on with them again. She could make no move, however, until someone was found to take over the running of the house.

The second circumstance developed at St. Remy. M. Jeanrot's business was flourishing to such a degree that his wife was called in more and more to assist him with it. She found herself forced to be away from Zoe and Tonine for hours at a time. The good woman herself was the first to be dissatisfied with such a state of affairs, and she solved the difficulty by hiring a nurse for the children. Even this substitution, however, could not have satisfied her wholly, and her sense of responsibility must have been uneasy and disturbed. It was probably a great relief to her when her brother proposed taking his children home again.

The pain and upset attendant on this new change were softened for the children by their father's decision to turn the house over to their charge—or, at least, to Zoe. Pierre Laboure had a great aversion to entrusting his home to a hired housekeeper, and he knew the capabilities of his favorite child

Nevertheless, it was a hard task for a little girl—Zoe was scarcely twelve—to manage a household, and such a household! Zoe had a fair-sized family to do for: her father, Tonine, Auguste and, for a time, Joseph and Pierre, home from boarding school. Auguste was a problem all by himself, for he required the thousand extra attentions of the invalid. Then there were the hired men, a baker's dozen of them. They were part of the household, living in, their meals provided by their employer. In the middle of the day their meal had to be carried to them in the fields. A shrewd head was needed to calculate the stores and provisions to be laid in for such a hard-working, huge-eating crowd, a tireless frame to cook for them, a strong back to serve them.

The housework was enormous: beds to make, the house to sweep and dust—and it was large—piles of dishes to wash, glassware and pewter to keep bright and shining, clothes to sew and mend, launder and iron. Zoe had a servant to help her, of course, but she was a servant, and not a member of the family. The household was not hers to order; Pierre Laboure made that plain; the right and the duty belonged to Zoe.

Many a grown woman would have baulked at the formidable task, but not Zoe. It was her father's wish, it would leave Marie Louise free to go to God, and that was enough for Zoe.

The Laboures had a busy round of it, that winter and spring of 1817-18. Besides doing her housework, Marie Louise had to stop to explain the why and the wherefore and the how of it to Zoe. Zoe worked right along with her, eyes and ears alert even while her hands were occupied. It was not all new to her: she had watched her mother at work, had followed at her heels as she now followed Marie Louise, and much of it came back to her. Bringing up the rear was the little Tonine, helping when she could, mentally laying up every duty against the day when she, too, would step into the post of mistress so that Zoe in turn could follow her heart's desire. The father himself presided over all, making sure Marie Louise did not forget any least detail, noting with satisfaction how quickly Zoe caught on.

These few months were the only moments of their lives that the three Laboure sisters truly shared, knowing and sympathizing with one another as only the womenfolk of a family can. The most piteous figure of the three is Tonine, for her years of service under the parental roof were to be long and, toward the end, lonely; and, afterward, no golden religious life for her reward, but a late marriage with more than its share of heartbreaks.

With everything else, Marie Louise was making her preparations to enter the Sisters of Charity, gathering together the clothes and linens she would take with her. Naturally, her going was the household topic of the hour, a topic Zoe found fascinating, for each excited conversation fanned the flame of religious desire that was rising in her own heart.

She, too, had a work of preparation to crowd into these active days, the preparation for her first Holy Communion. She had begun it at Saint Remy and had gotten well along in the lessons of the catechism under the constant tutelage of the village cure. It was perhaps Zoe's greatest regret in leaving her aunt's home, that she could not wait just a little, to make her first Communion. To get on with her lessons at home in Fain was harder, because Abbe Mamer, with his three parishes to care for, was not always available; nor had she any longer the leisure she had enjoyed in Saint Remy. Postponement was a bitter thing, for her soul was ardent and eager; yet delay was only a tool in the Hand of God to sharpen her appetite for the heavenly Bread.

The delay, actually, was longer in her heart than it was in time. It was only a few weeks after her return to her father's house, on January 25, 1818, that Zoe received her Lord for the first time, in the village church of Moutiers-Saint Jean. Doubtless this church was selected because it was the mother church of the three parishes and the seat of residence of the pastor; and the day, the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, because it was the patronal feast of the church. Looked at in the light of Zoe's subsequent greatness, however, an even better reason for the selection is apparent. It was another of those deliberate coincidences of God. The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is celebrated by the Vincentian Fathers as the birthday of their Community.

The first meeting of Jesus and Zoe Laboure seemed to effect a perpetual contract of mutual love and service. Zoe, who was already good and kind and devout even to a degree of heroism, began to display more and more the outward trappings of her love for God. Tonine was quick to notice the change. Ever and again in later years she would tell her children how their Aunt Zoe had become "entirely mystic" from the time of her first Communion.

Tonine meant that, with first Communion, Zoe put aside the things of a child in piety and devotion. From this time on, she went after her spiritual advancement in dead earnest, with order and system. In spite of the mountain of duties piled upon her young shoulders, she set aside certain fixed times for prayer. The most important of these times was the early morning, and her prayer then the greatest of all, the holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Zoe began to attend Mass daily and to receive Holy Communion frequently. Given the circumstances, these were acts of devotion approaching the heroic. There was no daily Mass in Fain; there was not always Sunday Mass. The only priest in the district said his daily Mass in the chapel of the Hopital de Saint Sauveur in Moutiers-Saint Jean. It was not a question, therefore, of Zoe's rolling out of bed and tumbling into church. The hospital was a good, brisk half-hour's walk from Fain, and the Sisters' Mass was at six o'clock. Daily Mass for this young girl just entering her teens meant an early rising—an earlier rising even than farm life called for, because she had chores to do before she left—and a long walk in all kinds of weather and, half the year, in the dark. The youngster was determined to go, however, and she never faltered. In a sense she had to go, for she went to a daily rendezvous with God, who was her whole life. On certain mornings, frequent but not frequent enough to slake her ardor, she enjoyed complete union with her Beloved in Holy Communion. She could not have this happiness every day, for daily Communion would not be permitted the faithful for a hundred years yet.

Here in the Hopital de Saint Sauveur, Zoe was a guest, as it were, of St. Vincent de Paul. The saint himself had founded the hospital in 1654 at the request of his friend Nicolas de Rouchechouart de Chandenier, Abbe de Moutiers-Saint Jean, and the Sisters of Charity still served it. The hospital was, therefore, another signpost placed along her way, but she failed to catch its meaning.

Zoe had decided, even at so early an age, that she was going to enter religion. Tonine says that she talked of it from the day of her first Communion. Strangely enough, however, though the Sisters of Charity were the only religious women she knew, she does not seem to have been drawn to their community in the beginning. As we shall see, it took a direct and supernatural intervention of God, a few years later, to determine her choice of the daughters of Vincent de Paul.

Attendance at daily Mass was but the start of Zoe's day-long devotion. At home she quietly began the practice of slipping away from the others to some out-of-the-way corner of the house, there to keep her numerous appointments with God. Tonine would come upon her, so often that it ceased to be a surprise, absorbed, face shining—"entirely mystic."

Zoe's great love for Our Lady came out into the open now, too. It was as if she no longer had to pretend to recognize and look up to any earthly "mother." Saint Remy and Aunt Marguerite belonged to the past. Marie Louise—if she had ever made any pretensions toward mothering Zoe—was off in Langres, where the Sisters of Charity had received her as a postulant on June 22, 1818. The beloved servant whom Zoe had once called Mama was now subject to the authority of her former child. Zoe could acknowledge freely that she had but one Mother, without regard to the feelings of anyone.

She made the acknowledgment in a singular way.

The centuries-old village church was across the lane from the Laboure house. A few steps and Zoe could be there. How often, in her years at home, she took those few steps! There were times between tasks when she could slip over to the church for a quick prayer and, at the end of the day with her work done, a longer, quieter time.

We have spoken of the Laboure chapel in this church. The family had defrayed the cost of certain repairs in the chapel, which was separated from the nave by a low railing, and in return the villagers had given it the family name and set it aside for the family use. In the chapel was a painting of the Annunciation. This was Zoe's shrine, a fitting one for her who had been born at the ringing of the Angelus. She knew every line of the picture, every tint, every trace, every cracking and peeling of the paint. Her knees became familiar with the tiniestrise and fall of the hard stone floor, as the fingers of the blind become familiar with the feel of the objects around them. Here she knelt, before the picture of the Annunciation, day after day, year after year, in the pleasant days of spring and autumn, in the stifling heat of summer, in the freezing damp of winter. Upright she knelt, quiet and composed as a statue. All her life she feared that her attitude at prayer might not be humble enough for the house of God. Zoe was never to forget this chapel. She bore the sensible remembrance of it until the day she died, in the arthritis of the knees which she contracted from her long hours of kneeling on the stone flags of the floor.

Another favorite pastime of Zoe's was making the Stations of the Cross. According to tradition, the Stations in the village church were the gift either of Marie Louise or of Zoe herself. Zoe's devotion to Our Lord's Passion was a natural outgrowth of her early bent toward mortification.

Now, with the new burgeoning of her soul, Zoe took on a new mortification, a startling one and, in a way, frightening because it was so very adult. In spite of all the labors of her hard day, she began to fast on Fridays and Saturdays. This worried Tonine. The little sister had nothing but admiration for Zoe's intense, quickening holiness; she had even begun to imitate it: yet she felt there was a limit. Tonine knew well how work could whet the hunger of a growing girl, she knew the spells of faintness unrequited hunger could bring, and she decided there should be no more nonsense. Frowning severely on her sister, she threatened to tell their father.

"Well, then, tell him!" was Zoe's short and decided reply.

This is one of the few verbatim sentences we have from the early life of Zoe Laboure; she was not given to much talk. The very isolation of the words give them a unique significance. "Tell him!" It is amazing how much insight these two words give into the character of this remarkable youngster. The iron will, the ramrod determination, the simple directness, all are here as fullblown as they would ever be. Had they been uttered fifty years hence, they would have been no more in character. The steel scaffolding for a supreme sanctity to build upon was already up.

Somewhat taken aback by Zoe's indifference and lack of compromise, Tonine nevertheless decided to see the thing through. She told her father.

The father did not discuss the matter with Tonine. It was his way to keep his own counsel, especially where his children were concerned. He did, however, remonstrate with Zoe, pointing out to her the necessity of keeping up her strength for her arduous tasks. Zoe listened respectfully, but did not change a whit in her resolve. She went right on fasting Fridays and Saturdays. Tonine could only shrug and retire from the field. She had done her duty.

The importance of this incident lies in the fact that, wrongly interpreted, it could impugn the habitual obedience and humility of the saint. St. Catherine's obedience was her most shining virtue, and it must not be even slightly dimmed without positive proof. If we knew nothing else of Zoe Laboure but this one incident, we should put her down as a headstrong and willful child. Her entire relationship with her father, however, was one of habitual filial respect and submission. Regarding the incident in context, therefore, we come to either of two conclusions, both favorable to Zoe: either the father's admonition was of simple counsel—and there is very good evidence for this; or, if it was a command, a higher Authority overruled him. It is certain that Zoe, in disregarding her father's advice in this matter, was following God's Will.

It might be added that the incident caused little concern to the ecclesiastical judges of her sanctity. Moreover, humanly speaking, Zoe knew what she was about. She was strong and well made, and it is a matter of record that she never suffered any but the slightest indispositions in all the years that she was at home. Her frame could take the penance she imposed.

It is a sure mark of the swift progress of Zoe's sanctity, this early addiction to self-denial. Like all the saints, she seemed to recognize the importance of it by instinct. Long before Our Lady told her, she understood the necessity of prayer and penance for salvation and perfection—and this, after all, is the drift of Mary's message in her appearances at Paris, LaSalette, Lourdes and Fatima.

Instinct is a poor word to describe Zoe's way of knowing the truth. She knew it rather by the infused knowledge perseverance in prayer had brought her from God. Nor is this idle conjecture. Zoe Laboure was an untutored, unlettered girl. She could not learn, therefore, from the reading of spiritual books, but only from the sermons she heard in church; and these were the simple spiritual food of the average Christian, not the spiritual diet needed by an advanced soul like her.

There is not the slightest hint that she received any ordered spiritual direction. In her later years, she used to speak lovingly of the good advice her father always gave her, but we do not know that this advice was spiritual, and, for that matter, we know that he tried to thwart her efforts to fast. Abbe Mamer was certainly capable of directing Zoe's soul, and he was still alive at the time of her first Communion, but there is no evidence that he did. He must have been her confessor, but even confession was a haphazard thing in that district. Zoe herself used to say that when she wanted to go to confession, she had first to look for the priest.

If there was a director of Zoe's soul life at this time, we might justly expect mention of it. Tonine would have known whether or not Zoe applied to a director regularly or not, and she would have let posterity know this fact. Tonine is the source of all the information we have concerning this period of her sister's life. Zoe, who later would confide in no one but her director, confided wholly in Tonine during these growing-up years. Taking Zoe's secretive nature into account, this is highly significant. Zoe would hardly have let even Tonine know her most intimate spiritual secrets, had there been a spiritual guide to tell them to.

Tonine fully respected Zoe's confidence: she revealed nothing of what was told her except when silence no longer mattered, when Zoe was the hidden and forgotten Sister Catherine. Even then, she told only her children of their Aunt Zoe's early steps in holiness. Nor can it be doubted that this was at the unsuspected urging of Our Lady herself, who wanted the whole world one day to know the greatness of her servant.

We have, then, fair assurance that, while at home in Fain Zoe had no authorized spiritual director. We can only conclude that God himself was her director, as He is of all the unlettered who are humble and good.

Zoe was fourteen years old now, and Tonine twelve. They had been running the house for two years and had done surprisingly well. It was at this time that the servant who had been part of the family for years announced that she was leaving the household to be married. When M. Laboure offered to replace her, his two girls answered promptly:

"We have no further need of a servant. The two of us will manage by ourselves."

It was a proud boast, but not a vain one. Zoe and Tonine were young ladies now, quite equal to the task they had set themselves. They were perfect teammates, who thought as one and moved as one, without any lost motion. They differed in temperament—Tonine was not so serious as her sister—but they got along excellently for all that. Zoe, of course, was ever the leader, ever the elder sister, and she kept a weather eye open for the least impropriety or defection in Tonine. Tonine has admitted readily enough that she was a "gamin," a mischievous, carefree urchin. Actually, she had no more than her share of the average child's high spirits. It was Zoe who was different; and the early responsibilities thrust upon her had only served to deepen her natural gravity.

When Tonine got out of line, Zoe brought her back again promptly enough, and sometimes with severity. Zoe was too good-natured, however, to hold long with severity, but would endeavor to make it up to Tonine with an extra show of tenderness and affection.

The love was mutual. For her part Tonine showed it by that supreme of all flatteries, the flattery of imitation. She imitated Zoe in everything she did, even in her devotions. This latter imitation was no small act of love in one of Tonine's light-hearted temperament. She had not the fierce spiritual enthusiasm that drove Zoe to her knees. Nevertheless, she tried to follow the beloved older sister wherever she led. She knelt with her daily in the chapel of the village church. She accompanied her to every church office. This gay younger sister even stumbled along in the early morning to Mass in Moutiers-Saint Jean.

"How pious they were, those Laboure girls!" recalled an old lady of Fain many years afterward. "They never joined the other young girls at play. When church was over, they would stop for a little to pass the time of day with the young people, then hurry home to their work."

They led a true community life, Zoe and Tonine. They followed a regular order of day with fixed times for rising, Mass, prayers, meals, work—just like any religious society of the Church. They were the admiration of the village, and many a mother of Fain held them up as models to her less energetic daughters.

Zoe's limpid holiness, welling up from the springs of her soul, was bound to overflow in good deeds for others. Visiting her sick neighbors became a favorite diversion; there was no unfortunate or ailing person in the village who was not her friend. Without realizing it, she was already leading the life of a Sister of Charity, that perfect integration of body and soul, of spiritual devotion and corporeal toil, of prayer and work and outward charity.

It was a life that sat well with her father, for it was a life very like his own. Pierre Laboure was a pious man who could admire the deep piety of his daughter. Her industry and capability he could admire to the full, for they were traits she took from him, traits he taught her, by example and counsel, to marshal and use. It was no doubt his recognition of himself in Zoe that prompted Pierre Laboure to lavish upon her his special love and predilection. The boys of the family all agreed that this father, a strict and demanding taskmaster, could find little to quarrel with in Zoe, or in the way she ran his house.

Tonine has left us a charming picture of her sister caught unawares, in one of her rare, light moments. Zoe kept for herself as a daily personal duty the feeding of the hundreds of pigeons in the Laboure dovecot. It was, indeed, the one recreation of her long, hard day. The pigeons knew her and, as Tonine says, "loved her." The moment she appeared with the pan of feed, they swirled in great clouds from the dovecot windows. Swooping upon her in thick, multi-colored droves, they pecked and pulled at her hair and her clothes, completely dishevelling her. What a picture she made—hair unloosened, tumbling about her shoulders, one arm upflung across her eyes to shield them from the importunities of her beloved birds! Laughing, she would scatter the grain as best she could, wholly lost in delight at the friendly onslaught.

Most remarkable of all, the birds would soar round and about her, weaving a flashing halo about her head with their wings. Surely we can be pardoned for catching here a sudden glimpse of the white wings of a cornette and the immortal aureole of canonized sanctity.

The most convincing proof of the reality of Zoe Laboure s vocation was that she talked about it. It seems a ridiculous piece of evidence at first glance, for teen-age girls talk about everything: their technicolor dreams of the future, the type of man they mean to marry, the kind of home they plan to have. Many of them "get religion" at one time or another and vow fervently that they will go to the convent—not forgetting to let a requisite number of chums in on the exciting secret. All this is natural, normal, healthy girl talk. Zoe Laboure, however, was not given to such harmless chatter. When she said something, you could be sure that she had thought about it for a long time first.

She talked about her vocation, according to Tonine, "from the time of her first Communion." Characteristically, too, Zoe acted to further it, not in a sudden fever of activity, for hers was a long-range plan: she did not intend to leave home tomorrow or the next day; it would be years before she went. In the meantime, nevertheless, her intention one day to embrace the religious life was her chief motive for training Tonine in the role of housekeeper. When Tonine should be old enough to take over the care of the house, then, Zoe decided, she herself would go off to fulfill her vocation. In the years of waiting she would bolster it with prayer and with the intimate conversation and sympathy of her little sister and friend. Nor did she so much as mention it to anyone but her sister. Zoe went every Sunday to the hospital in Moutiers-Saint Jean to visit with the Sister Servant or Superior, Sister Catherine Soucial; but nothing was ever said on either side about vocation.

This Sister Catherine had an interesting history. As a young girl, she had been in a predicament similar to Zoe's: what to do, where to go, to find her vocation. She had the answer while praying before the famous shrine of Our Lady of Buglose, where St. Vincent de Paul had gone barefoot on pilgrimage. When her seminary in Paris was over, Sister Catherine was sent to the community house in Chatillon-sur-Seine, the very house where Zoe was to be given the final sign of her calling and where she was to serve her postulancy. The violence of the Revolution reached Chatillon in 1793, and the Sisters were driven out. Not knowing where to go, Sister Catherine was on the point of returning to her parents' home, when she heard that the Sisters of Charity were still at Moutiers-Saint Jean. She took refuge there and stayed on for sixty years.

Sister Catherine Soucial and Zoe were fast friends. That, and the religious atmosphere of the house, made it natural for Zoe to reveal her vocation; yet she kept her counsel, and Sister Catherine kept hers. The good Sister went no nearer to the heart of the matter than to encourage Zoe in her devotions and in her hard and laborious life. While it is true that the Sisters of Charity had a tradition of not seeking out vocations, yet the tradition was not ironclad; and furthermore, Sister Catherine never mentioned vocation to Zoe at all, to any religious community. It would seem that this wise woman, who had had first-hand experience of the workings of Providence, was content to let God indicate His plans for Zoe in His own good time. Besides, she must have seen that Zoe was already living the life of a Sister of Charity in the world, and that her way of life would certainly influence her choice of vocation.

As for Zoe, it was her nature to pray and to wait and to ponder and to be silent.

One night in 1824, when she was eighteen, Zoe had an extraordinary dream. She dreamed that she was in her favorite oratory, the chapel of the Laboures in the village church, assisting at the Mass of an old and venerable priest she had never seen before. Each time the priest turned from the altar for the "Dominus Vobiscum," he raised his eyes to Zoe's face and held her gaze. Each time she was forced to lower her eyes, blushing, unable to hold the steady and compelling eyes of the priest.

When Mass was over and the old man had started for the sacristy, he turned back and beckoned to Zoe to follow him. She was suddenly very frightened and, jumping to her feet, ran from the church. She glanced back over her shoulder as she ran, and the priest was still there, standing by the sacristy door, looking after her.

Then the thought came to Zoe in her dream to stop to visit a woman of the village who was sick. On entering the sickroom, she came face to face with the same venerable priest. Wild fright seized her again, and she began to back away. For the first time, then, the priest spoke directly to her:

"You do well to visit the sick, my child. You flee from me now, but one day you will be glad to come to me. God has plans for you; do not forget it."

At these words Zoe awoke and lay wondering what it could all mean; and, strangely enough, there was no more fear in her, only peace and comfort and a great happiness. Although she did not understand it then, this dream was sent Zoe by God to point out with certainty the vocation of His choice.

Zoe told no one about her dream, not even Tonine. She recounted it for the first time to her confessor in Chatillon some four years later, when she began to realize what it meant. Out of the confessional, she spoke of it only toward the end of her life nearly fifty years later, when, in a sudden transport of joy, she recounted this vivid and mysterious dream to Marie Louise, whom she had gone to visit in the infirmary of the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity on the rue du Bac.

Dreams and their interpretation are a slippery business, especially in spiritual matters. Everybody dreams; dreaming is a purely mechanical action of the human mind. The imagination is like a moving-picture screen upon which the films or images stored up by the memory are flashed. If the projection machine is left unguarded, as it is when the operator falls asleep, the film tends to rewind itself and get all mixed up in the process. The results are dreams. Because of their lack of intelligent control, dreams are obviously not to be trusted as guides to action. Yet the superstitious often look upon them as such guides. For this reason the Church has seen fit to condemn the interpretation of dreams generally, along with fortune telling, omens, and other occult claptrap.

Nevertheless, God has at times and for His own wise reasons made important use of dreams. There were, for example, the Old Testament dreams of Jacob and Joseph his son, and the New Testament dreams of the Foster Father of Jesus. And there was the dream of Zoe Laboure.

That God could use so perilous a means to communicate with a girl of only eighteen is eloquent testimony to Zoe's hardheaded common sense. Moreover, Zoe's ability to distinguish between this type of communication and her other supernatural illuminations makes her a most trustworthy witness. She was always precise as to whether she "dreamed" or "saw" or "heard" or "understood interiorly" whatever Heaven had to tell her.

Meanwhile, at nineteen, Zoe had her first proposal of marriage.

Zoe Laboure had certain physical, social, and housewifely graces that made her eminently desirable as a wife, especially a country wife. She was not pretty; neither was she homely. Her best physical feature was her eyes—large, solemn, wise, and blue as cornflowers. She was strong and well knit, an excellent thing in a farmer's wife. She dressed well and neatly, but not with foolish ostentation. She was innocent and good. She had already proven her ability to manage a home. With all this, she was of good family, and, since her father was prosperous, her dowry would be substantial.

The name of the young man who first proposed marriage to her has long been forgotten. He and Zoe had probably known each other from childhood, for the district was not thickly populated and everyone knew everyone else. Most likely he was one of the group of young people Zoe and Tonine stopped to chat with after church.

It is impossible to imagine Zoe encouraging this young man's attentions in any way, "dating him" as we would say today, or even going along with the ritual of courtship then in vogue. Not that she was stuffy or prudish: she was just not interested, for she had other plans; and she was too honest to waste a boy's time or ambition for nothing. She would be gentle and kind and polite with him, as she was with everyone.

Evidently this was encouragement enough for the young blade for, in accordance with custom, his father stepped in to play his part, making a call on Pierre Laboure to propose a marriage between Zoe and his son. Pierre was flattered: the boy's family was solid and respectable and ranked high in the village. He promised to speak to Zoe, to further the suit.

Zoe, of course, turned it down. Nor did her father press her to consent. Secretly, he was highly pleased. There was enormous satisfaction in the knowledge that his favorite child was desirable; it reflected favorably both on her and on him, on her good qualities and on his position. At the same time, he was more than content to have Zoe remain with him; her loss would have been a high price to pay for his social pride. The incident ended, therefore, to the satisfaction of the Laboures, father and daughter; only the young suitor was disappointed and had to look for greener pastures.

Tonine, the romantic miss of seventeen, had followed it all breathlessly. She was puzzled, to say the least, at the outcome.

"Will you never marry?" she asked her sister.

"I shall never marry," Zoe answered. "I am promised to Jesus Christ."

"Then, you haven't changed," Tonine persisted.

"I haven't changed." All her life, change would be the last thing to expect of Zoe Laboure.

There were at least two more proposals of marriage for the first lady of Fain, and they came to the same impasse. Her father smiled to himself, secure in the possession of his treasure. He slumbered on, not realizing that he was to lose her anyway. If he suspected Zoe's vocation at all—and her pious way of life certainly gave him reason enough to suspect it—he was, apparently, confident that he could deal with it.

When Zoe had reached the age of twenty-two, she sat down and took stock of her situation. She had done her duty; she had served her father faithfully and well. Tonine, at twenty, was capable of handling the household alone; and Zoe had made sure, in a long and earnest conversation, that she was not only ready but willing to do so. Satisfied, therefore, that her family responsibilities were at an end, Zoe decided to act upon her vocation. Nor would it be rash to state further that God was nudging her to action, for she never undertook anything unless she was convinced that it was the Will of God.

Nothing now stood in the way but to secure her father's consent. It would seem that Zoe had taken this for granted; otherwise she would not have waited so long to join battle with him for her rights. She would have prepared this ground as she prepared all others. As it was, she was taken by surprise.

Pierre Laboure said "No!"

Zoe's reactions to this unexpected refusal are not recorded, but they are easy to reconstruct. There would be amazement, of course; it was totally unlooked-for. There would be hurt; it was a callous display of ingratitude from the father she had loved and served so well. Especially, there would be anger.

Zoe had a will of her own and a temper to match it. She was a quiet, docile, withdrawn person, until she was crossed. Her father's refusal to consent to her vocation was probably the first time she had been crossed since childhood. She had had the ordering of the household; her father had gladly left it in her capable hands. He had given her a certain authority over Tonine and Auguste. He had left her free to follow her pious inclinations; he had not even forced her to relinquish the fasting she began when she was fourteen. It must have been like running full tilt into a stone wall for this favorite child of her father to have him refuse to grant her dearest wish. We do not know whether a sharp exchange between father and daughter followed upon this refusal. Probably not. Zoe was too much mistress of herself to resist her father in words. She withdrew from the encounter, bewildered, hurt, angry, and heartbroken.

Until now life had been good on the Laboure farm. Pierre Laboure had basked in the mellow autumn of his days, well off, well served, respected by his fellows. Zoe had been content. She liked to manage things, and she did it well. The bright sun of her vocation had climbed steadily in the sky, promising a glorious day. Tonine had been happy also, and Auguste; but their happiness was beside the point, in a sense, since it depended greatly upon the harmony between Zoe and her father. Now that harmony had been shattered, and the former placid way of life was no more.

Things were the same on the surface. The floors were scrubbed, the woodwork dusted, the meals prepared, the livestock fed, with the same clockwork regularity; yet the life had gone out of these things. They had become routine, a way of putting in time between daybreak and sundown. Zoe's heart was no longer in them, and her heart was the heart of the home and all its works. Only her prayers kept their vitality, and they grew sad and poignant, filled with pleas and longing.

Into this house divided came a letter from Charles Laboure, Zoe's brother, who was in Paris. Years before, Charles had finished his apprenticeship in the catering trade and had gone to work for an established proprietor. Now, at twenty-eight, he had his own restaurant. Charles mentioned in this letter written to his father, that he was in need of domestic help, due apparently to the recent, untimely death of his wife. A plan took shape in the mind of Pierre Laboure. He would send Zoe to stay with her brother and help him with his business. The change would be good for everyone, because of the tension in the house. Especially—and this was Pierre's true motive—the change would serve to distract Zoe from her religious purpose. She had seen very little of the world she wished to leave, only a few straggly hamlets in fact. Paris was the world, a world the daughter of Pierre Laboure scarcely knew existed, save in rumor and story. Paris would knock this vocation nonsense right out of her young head. So Pierre Laboure argued. So thousands of doting fathers have argued over the centuries. To keep their daughters from the convent, to prevent them from marrying ineligible young men, these fathers have sent them travelling up and down the paths of the earth. Such plans have failed more often than they have succeeded. Certainly Pierre Laboure's plan was to fail, for, in sending Zoe to Paris, he was sending her away from him forever. She was never to return to Fain.

Zoe obeyed her father's wishes, now, as always. This obedience is the hallmark, the strength, of Zoe Laboure. No matter how fiercely the gorge of rebellion rose within her, no matter how useless she knew the command to be, Zoe always obeyed. Even at the adult age of twenty-two, even with the divine wishes crystal-clear in her own mind, Zoe felt constrained to submit to the superior God had placed over her in the person of her father. It is the only explanation for her allowing herself to be put to such torture of mind and soul during the next two years.

Zoe was quite capable of eloping to the convent; she had the courage and intrepidity for such a violent move. There can be little doubt that she would have been received, for she was of age and legally out of her father's reach. The only human motive she might have for hesitating was the lack of a dowry, but it was a lack that could be supplied, as it was eventually, without her father's help.

It is quite true, also, that Zoe loved her father and would not wilfully hurt him. She knew that he doted on her, that he had always dreamed of having her near him in his declining days. She understood, as perhaps no one else did, his self-righteous excuse that, having given one daughter to the religious life, he had given all God had a right to expect of a Christian man. She understood and allowed for it.

With all this, however, her profound obedience, a virtue evident in every phase of her life, cannot be too strongly insisted upon as the mainspring of her submission, for it was ever the mainspring of all her actions.

A sparkling bauble indeed was the Paris of 1828. It shone with the brilliance of a new day. Andre Marie Ampere and Jean Baptiste Lamarck worked in its laboratories. Nicolo Paganini played in its concert halls. Its citizens diverted themselves with the novels of Victor Hugo and the poems of Alphonse Lamartine; they read in translation the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Irving, in fact, had written his Tales of a Traveler in Paris only a few years before, and John Howard Payne, his immortal Home, Sweet Home. When Zoe arrived in the city, Cooper was actually in residence there, hard at work on his writing.

The storm of the revolution was past, the sun was out again, and Paris was back at its gay pastime of entertaining the world.

Not that Zoe could have known the social whirl and smartness of the capital. After all, her brother was only a restaurant keeper of the humblest kind. She could not miss, however, the beauty and enchantment of the lovely place. These were to be found on the boulevards and in the parks. They were the property of all and the poorest found delight in them.

Zoe did not. Pierre Laboure might have saved himself the hours of worry and scheming and the money spent on this experiment. He had miscalculated. The only effect Paris had on Zoe was to increase her misery.

Charles's restaurant was not at all what we mean by the term. It was a plainer establishment by far, more like the modern lunchroom or grille, a hole-in-the-wall on rue de l'Echiquier, where the workmen stopped for a bit of bread and cheese and a tumbler of wine. The quarter of the city was known as Notre Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle—Our Lady of Good News: the title was ironic, to say the least, at this lowest point of Zoe's life. Inside, the restaurant consisted of a single long, narrow room with a bare counter running from front to back on either side and plain benches set against the walls behind them. Here the rough workmen of the quarter took their daily meals, sitting all in a row like so many strange and noisy monks in their refectory, talking loudly, quarreling, laughing, raucous in their calls for service, beating with tin mugs on the scarred table-tops in deafening bids for attention.

The stale, smoke-filled air of the restaurant was a very different atmosphere from the pure country air of Zoe's home. It was an atmosphere that symbolized the completeness of the change for her, an atmosphere that choked, smothered, pressed upon her, hemmed her in with the hopeless misery of prison bars. Her brother's clients were rough, rude men who worked hard with their hands, men without culture or polish. It was not their roughness, however, that sickened Zoe; she was accustomed to roughness in the hired men of her father's farm. A crude sophistication had intruded upon the basic goodness of these city workers. Their simplicity and plainness of manner were of a very different sort from the simplicity of the farmhand. The city had peppered their talk with vulgarisms and curses and occasional obscenities; in their shouting and loud-mouth remarks they had the offensive quality of a gang of bad boys.

For all that, Zoe was not afraid of them. It would be hard to imagine her afraid of anything belonging to this earth. The only fear recorded in her life was the fear of her confessor, and that was a truly spiritual fear. Zoe was far from timid. Any insulting remarks or fresh advances—and we might surely expect them in such a place from such men—Zoe would deal with promptly and firmly. They would not happen again. And, little by little, a deep respect for this different kind of waitress, the respect of every man for a good woman, would show in the faces and the manners of the clients of Charles Laboure.

Charles himself was unhappy over his sister's lot. Knowing Zoe, he probably knew from the outset that his father's plan to distract her from her religious vocation would never work; knowing his father, Charles dared not say what he thought. He made life as tolerable for her as he could, shielding her as much as possible from the unpleasantness bound up in her work. As time went on and he saw daily the acuteness of her pain, however, he knew that something had to be done.

Zoe had accepted her fate with good grace and all the stamina of her stout spirituality, but every human being has a limit of patience and endurance. Zoe had almost reached hers. It was not only the horror of the dank, stale tavern air in her country lungs, not only the rising panic at being trapped in a tiny, hopeless cage. It was especially a spiritual desolation, for she saw the minutes and weeks and months frittering away and dissolving into nothingness like snowflakes on a wet sidewalk.

Zoe would have seen her brothers in Paris frequently enough. Besides Charles, Antoine, Joseph, and Pierre were living there. Hubert, whose home and family were in Chatillon-sur-Seine, must have come often to the capital on military affairs. He was already, at thirty-five, a member of the personal bodyguard of Charles X and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Each of Zoe's brothers had known and felt the iron will of his father, and therefore could understand and sympathize with Zoe in her hour of trial. Some kind of a family conspiracy was hatched to rescue her, for letters went off in the mail. The plan was for Zoe to escape to Hubert and his wife in Chatillon. Even Marie Louise, away in the convent, was taken into their confidence.

Although Marie Louise was only six years out of the novitiate, she was already superior of the house of the Sisters of Charity at Castelsarrasin. Zoe wrote to her, probably through Charles, confiding her religious desires and asking what she thought of the proposed stay in Chatillon. Marie Louise's reply is extant. It is a letter which Zoe kept and put to good use in saving her older sister from a terrible mistake years later.

"Castelsarrasin 1829

My dear Zoe,

The grace of Our Lord be with us forever.

I cannot tell you what pleasure your dear letter gave me. I love you far too much not to congratulate you on the attraction with which God has inspired you for a community which is so dear to me. You say you wish you already possessed that happiness. Oh, if you could only realize it! If God begins to speak to your heart, no one has the right to prevent you from entering the service of so good a Master, which is the grace I beg Him to bestow on you."

We find here the first evidence that Zoe was considering the Sisters of Charity as the religious community of her choice. That she had not definitely decided, however, is apparent from a further paragraph:

"It is not our custom to ask anyone to enter the community; I hope God will pardon my weakness in this regard for you. He knows that the salvation of your soul is as dear to me as that of my own, and how ardently I desire that you should be of the number of those to whom He will say one day: 'Come, ye blessed of My Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you; for I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' That is the life of a true Daughter of Charity."

The letter is long and commonplace, filled with pious cliches the Sister Superior had heard in conferences or read in books, and needless urgings toward perfection for a soul already completely one with God. Yet it served its purpose, for it brought the sympathy and encouragement Zoe needed so badly. It reached its climax in a short, splendid sentence that must have clashed like Christmas bells in Zoe's soul: "Therefore, if God calls you, follow Him." Marie Louise, though she was to falter in serving God, will be forever blessed for that letter and that ringing sentence. In fact, as bread cast upon the waters always does, it returned its blessing to her in her lifetime. The letter concluded with complete approval of the family plans to circumvent their father.

"I wish that you would pass some time with our dear sister-in-law, as she proposes, so that you can get the education which is so necessary in any state of life. You would learn there to speak French a little better than they do in our village; you could also improve yourself in your writing and arithmetic, but above everything else in piety, fervor, and love of the poor."

Everyone was in agreement. In a Catholic family, the brother or sister in religion is an oracle to be consulted in matters of moment. Marie Louise was especially an oracle to Zoe, for she had already attained the religious goal Zoe so ardently desired, and had even been chosen to direct others. Small wonder that Zoe was seized with a holy relief that this respected older sister should set her seal upon what Zoe wished to do.

The next step was to obtain Pierre Laboure's permission for the venture. It was a formidable task, and the choice for carrying it out fell unanimously upon Hubert's wife, Jeanne. Jeanne could twist her father-in-law around her little finger.

Jeanne Gontard Laboure was a cousin of Zoe's mother. Perhaps that was the basic reason why she was a favorite of Pierre's, for she seems to have been cut from the same cloth as his dead wife. She was educated, cultured, witty, and brilliant; she was also good, kind, and pious. She ran a boarding school for fashionable young ladies, and it tickled the vanity of Pierre Laboure that the noble families of the province of Barrois sent their daughters to be educated there.

This clever woman won the day. She managed to persuade her father-in-law that Zoe would profit by an extended visit with her. The old man was not altogether displeased that Zoe would mix with "young ladies of good family and receive a little education." Little did he know that he was being hoodwinked, that he was lending himself to a plan that would bring about his own ultimate defeat.

Zoe's flight to Chatillon was not exactly jumping from the frying pan into the fire, but neither was it a release into untrammelled freedom. The trials she met there were not the coarse trials of the Parisian bistro, but they were real trials for all that. She had traded her chains for silken strands, but silken strands, too, can bind and hurt.

The boarding school conducted by Jeanne Laboure has its modern counterparts in the ladies' seminaries of England and the finishing schools of the United States. The school was a place of elegance, done in the plush decor of the period with thick-piled carpets, velvet drapes, and full-length mirrors. It was exquisitely furnished with ornately carved tables and the tiny gilded and silk-upholstered chairs of the Age of Mozart. It was a useful and proper school for ladies of rank. They made an acquaintance with the classics; they read and composed poetry; they studied the history of France; they dabbled in astronomy; they learned to dance—in a word, they were powdered and primped for their future appearances in the flossy salons of society.

Zoe lumbered into this gilded cage like one of her own beloved pigeons among a flock of nightingales. She had never been to school before, any school. Her proper place was the first grade, not this exquisite lecture hall of refinement. She was twenty-three years old, much older than the sophisticated misses around her.

The situation was perfect material for a comic opera. Imagine a grown woman stuttering over her ABC's! Imagine the tittering and suppressed giggles of her giddy schoolmates! Imagine the blush of shame on her stricken face, the hurt in her heart, and, knowing Zoe, the quick anger rising within her and being suppressed only with heroic difficulty. Yet it was suppressed. Zoe Laboure was indeed a valiant woman. This brutal humiliation before her own sex was a far more painful trial than any broad-humored sallies of rough men.

Humanly speaking, Zoe's chief balm at Chatillon was her sister-in-law, for Jeanne Laboure proved herself a good and faithful friend. She shielded Zoe as much as possible from the ridicule of the other girls by giving her private instruction in the rudimentary knowledge she lacked. This very protection, however, was a trial in itself. It seemed that lately Zoe was always being protected from someone or something: from the vulgarity of her brother's customers, from her father, from the snobbery of the pupils of Chatillon. It is a miserable thing, to be always protected. It was especially miserable for Zoe, who had always stood on her own two feet. Had she been a weaker character, had she been less certain of what she wanted to do, she could have developed an inferiority complex of appalling magnitude. As it was, she suffered keenly beneath the indignity of it all.

Jeanne Laboure performed an even deeper service of friendship for Zoe than that of shielding and instructing her. In the Providence of God, it was Jeanne, through her piety and love of the poor, who lead Zoe to the ultimate attainment of her religious vocation. How like God and His careful, well-knit plans, to give to this second gentle Gontard the task of finishing what the first, Zoe's mother, had begun.

Jeanne set out from her lovely home on many a mission of charity. The poor of the town knew and cherished her. Her favorite charity was an institution conducted by the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, the Hospice de la Charite, located on the right bank of the Seine in the rue de la Haute-Juiverie. There she came and went like a member of the household, and there, naturally, she introduced Zoe with her kindred heart for the poor. It was in this house of charity at Chatillon that Zoe's vocation was determined once for all.

Some weeks after her arrival in Chatillon, Zoe stopped one day at the Hospice to speak with the Sister Superior. She had scarcely seated herself in the parlor to wait, when her eyes were caught by a portrait on the wall. It was a portrait of a venerable priest, plain-featured, even homely, but with shrewd and smiling eyes that held Zoe's gaze, even as they had done four years before. It was indeed the old priest of Zoe's youthful dream. When the first shock of recognition had subsided, Zoe was in a fever of excitement, eager to ask the question that trembled on her lips. The Sister Servant finally came. The perfunctory greetings were an agony. Then, finally, Zoe spoke the few words that were the climax to all her years of seeking.

"Sister, who is that priest?"

"Why, my child, that is our holy founder, St. Vincent de Paul."

So.

Zoe knew, and it was enough. The self-control she had long since mastered took over, and Zoe went on to speak casually of the business at hand, saying nothing of why she had asked, giving no hint of the turmoil within her.

She lost no time in seeking out her confessor, M. Vincent Prost, to tell him of her mysterious dream and its sudden unraveling. When she had finished, he said without hesitation:

"St. Vincent de Paul calls you He wishes you to be a Sister of Charity."

The ways of God are often slow. It takes the patient temperament of the saint to wait Him out. Zoe's patience had been sorely strained: it was almost four years since the night of her dream, but its culmination was well worth waiting for. There is no greater blessing on earth than to know what God expects of you.

The extraordinary dream of Zoe Laboure and its long-delayed interpretation is surely the answer to those who claim that she meant to be a Sister of Charity from the time her thoughts turned to religion. Had she definitely decided so soon, the incident of the dream is wholly inexplicable. God is not a wastrel, lavishing the miraculous without reason. The whole tenor of the dream was to indicate to Zoe the wishes of Heaven. Had Zoe intended from the start to join the community of St. Vincent, the elaborate device of the dream as a directive loses its point.

Two stones yet lay in Zoe's path, though they worried her little, for not long ago there had not even been a path. The first of these was to obtain the consent of her father. Zoe wanted her obedience to be complete and, like any fond daughter, dreaded leaving home under the cloud of her father's displeasure. Her faithful sister-in-law again came to the rescue, counting still on Pierre Laboure's predilection for her to carry the day. We do not know whether Jeanne wrote to him or went to see him at Fain; we do not know what arguments she used, but she gained her point. The harassed old man threw down his arms. He was sick of fighting odds too great for him. Besides, during the past year he had grown used to Zoe's absence from home and had come to recognize Tonine's competence in running the house. Reluctantly, he gave his consent.

He fired one parting, ineffectual shot: he refused Zoe a dowry. It was a mean thing to do, especially to the daughter who had served him so faithfully. It could serve no point but to embarrass and hurt her, for he certainly knew that she would get the dowry somewhere. This final action of Pierre Laboure toward his daughter had the effect of casting her off without a cent. It was a despicable action, branding as entirely false the sentimental notion that he resisted Zoe's vocation because of his paternal feelings. Such feelings, naturally, were there, but even his grandchildren recognized that he had fought to hold on to Zoe "because she was of use to him." To the end he was selfish, brutal and callous.

Jeanne was ready for him. The refusal of the dowry would make no difference, she assured him, for she and Hubert would supply it. Zoe was free.

Zoe felt no glow of triumph in besting the tired old man. There was only love and compassion in her heart. She knew what he suffered, even though he had brought much of it upon himself, and she suffered too. It was her bitter price for serving God. To her eternal credit, though she must have felt keenly the shabby way he had treated her, she never spoke of her father except in the most glowing terms.

Zoe wasted no time in idle tears, but set about removing the second stone in her path, the persuading of the Superior of the Hospice at Chatillon to receive her as a postulant. This was a harder task. Zoe had profited little, if at all, from her schooling at her sister-in-law's, despite the private tutoring she had received. A girl of twenty-three has neither the aptitude nor the enthusiasm to learn what she should have mastered at seven. The Sister Superior, Sister Josephine Cany was new; she had been in the post scarcely a year, and was timid about receiving so unprepossessing a prospect as Zoe. There would be much clucking disapproval among the mistresses of the seminary in Paris, were they to discover that Sister Josephine had received a postulant who could neither read nor write.

Fortunately, Zoe found a champion in the Assistant of the house, Sister Francoise Victoire Sejole. It is comforting to recognize the true friends God gave Zoe when she needed them most. Sister Sejole was to be the closest friend of Zoe's religious life. This good sister was a remarkable soul, and she had the supernatural gift of discerning the souls of others.

Sister Sejole had ample opportunity to study Zoe thoroughly, for Zoe quickly fell into the habit of accompanying her on her round of visits to the sick poor. Still, it was only Sister Sejole's blessed gift of discernment that gave her deep insight into Zoe's heart, for outwardly Zoe Laboure was shy and silent, even cold, of a personality that, all her life, was to cause her to be misunderstood, slighted, and overlooked. When Sister Sejole saw that Sister Cany was hesitant about receiving Zoe, she took a hand.

"Receive her," she urged the Superior. "There is a great purity and great piety in this girl. She is out of place among all the silk dresses of Mme. Laboure's school. She is a good village girl, the kind St. Vincent loved. I will teach her her prayers and everything else she will need to enter the seminary at Paris."

Sister Cany deferred to her Assistant, and the last obstacle to Zoe's vocation was removed. After so many years of prayer and waiting and struggle against vicious odds the news, for Zoe, was easily the gladdest tidings ever brought to her.

The Sister of Charity is one of the sights of Paris, the city of her birth. She is more omnipresent than the gendarme. In her billowing blue gown and white headdress she walks the boulevards, the back streets, the alleys. She descends into the depths of the metro and climbs to the heights of the garret. She is never without the huge market basket slung over one arm, and packed with the foods and medicines of her trade. nor the black cotton umbrella to protect her starched white linen from the sudden rain. She moves ceaselessly, silently, seemingly unaware of the bustle and roar about her, seeking her quarry; and her quarry is always the same: the poor—the hungry poor, the sick poor, the evil poor—but always the poor.

Her convent is the house of the sick, her cell the chamber of suffering, her chapel the parish church, her cloister the streets of the city or the wards of the hospital; obedience is her enclosure, the fear of God her grate, and modesty her veil. So St. Vincent had ordained in founding the Community.

They were a startling innovation in the Church, these Sisters. Until 1633, the year of their founding, a nun was a withdrawn, secluded woman, cut off entirely from the brawling world, a cloistered maid dedicated to contemplative prayer. St. Vincent changed all that. Many a kindred soul had tried before him, men with a keen awareness of the need for a woman's touch in the active ministry of saving souls. St. Francis de Sales had tried, in founding the Visitation nuns, but his plan missed fire and the grille clanged shut on his Sisters. Where Francis failed, Vincent won out. It was to be; it was in the plan of God.

The world, the very people to be nursed and cared for, did not take kindly to the new order. They jeered, they joked, they slung Parisian mud at the Sisters who had come out to them. The Sisters did not mind. They had been splattered with cleaner, richer earth than the droppings from the streets of Paris, mud from the fertile fields of their farms at home. For they were country girls, healthy, strapping, and docile, the first Sisters of Charity.

Zoe Laboure, therefore, was to the manner born. Sister Sejole had been true to the mark when she said that Zoe was "a good village girl, the kind St. Vincent loved." Vincent de Paul's keen and fatherly eye could not have missed the marked resemblance to himself in this latest daughter of his. Of the same peasant stock—which is a very different thing from belonging to the lower classes—she had her spiritual father's determined vigor and strength of character, his simplicity and candor of soul, his lowliness of spirit, his penchant for obscurity. Humanly speaking, the resemblance of Vincent and Zoe might be laid to the similarity of their origins.

Born in opposite corners of France—he was a Gascon, she a Burgundian—both, nevertheless, sprang from the earth Both were children of farmers who owned their own farms. Both had spent the years of childhood in fields and country lanes. Both were conscious of the soil and sky, the mountains and the plains, the lordly cedar and the common daisy. From this intimacy with the placid development of growing things, the unhurried pace of the changing seasons, both learned the common peasant lesson of patience. It was a lesson to stand them in good stead in waiting out the workings of God, in acquiring a surefootedness in His ways. Ultimately, it was this surefootedness that enabled them to affect so many souls for good.

The few Sisters of Charity first gathered together by Vincent de Paul have, under the divine command, increased and multiplied and filled the earth, to the number of 43,000. There is a story bruited abroad that, when Pope Pius XII recommended modifications in the outmoded dress of religious women, he excepted the white headdress, the cornette, of the Sisters of Charity—fantastic as this seventeenth-century French peasant headgear looks to modern eyes—because "it has become the universal symbol of charity." The Sisters of Charity have indeed become, universally, a veritable legend of charity, and have earned the symbolic titles of folklore. The soldiers of the Crimean War called them "Angels of the Battlefield," a title they earned again in the American War between the States. The Mohammedans, with an Oriental eye upon their white wings, named them "Swallows of Allah." Anyone who has seen one of these Sisters with four or five tiny orphans clinging to her broad blue skirts and an infant cradled in her arms, will accord them the proudest title of all: "Mothers of the Poor." These, then, were the valiant women among whom Zoe Laboure wished to be numbered.

Humanly speaking, Zoe could have had no misgivings about the physical demands of the life. The Sisters rose at four o'clock; so had she, all her life. They cooked and scrubbed and labored hard; she had known no other way of life. They observed long silences; she was quiet and reserved by nature. The outward trappings of the rule could cause her no alarm.

Nor need she fear the long hours of required prayer. In this regard, she had served her postulancy already, in the Lady Chapel at Fain, in the hospital at Moutiers-Saint Jean, in the night watches and day-long devotions of her choosing.

It was on January 22, 1830 that Zoe Laboure quietly left the world and entered upon her religious life at the Hospice de la Charite in Chatillon-sur-Seine. True to their word, Hubert and Jeanne Laboure supplied her dowry and all the clothing of her trousseau. The dowry of 672 francs, roughly equivalent to $125 in modern money, was a notable burden of expense, especially since it was payable in gold, and this generous couple cannot be sufficiently praised for their kindness to their sister. The trousseau, which Zoe brought with her to the Hospice in a goat-skinned trunk, consisted of the following items: "four pairs of sheets; twelve worked table-napkins; linen for chemises, eleven of these to be already made up; five dresses, four of them to be of cotton and one of violet silk; four petticoats, one to be of cotton; four shawls; one white foundation of wool and three of black wool; thirteen fichus of violet silk; one bolt of cotton; thirty coifs, twenty of them to be lined; eleven pocket handkerchiefs; three pairs of pockets; five pairs of stockings; one corset; and one black robe." Zoe and her sister-in-law must have had a grand time shopping for this formidable list of things, and a busy time of fittings and sewing before she was ready to depart.

As a postulant, Zoe was not yet, of course, a Sister, not even a novice. She was an observer, come to examine the life of the Sisters at close range. She was a candidate, come to be examined in turn and passed upon. She rose with the Sisters, prayed with them, took her meals and her recreation with them. She helped in the kitchen and laundry, she sewed, she washed and dressed and supervised the foundlings of the house, she went out into the homes of the poor. And all the while she watched, and was watched.

In the short time of her postulancy, a scant three months, Zoe made a remarkable impression at Chatillon. It was not so much that she did everything she was supposed to do. Most postulants do that, both because the novelty of the life carries them along and because they are anxious to make good and be admitted to the community. It was rather the way she did things. She added an indescribable, intangible something to the commonest action that arrested the attention of the discerning. Whether she made beds or scrubbed floors or washed windows, she performed the duty with such care, such complete absorption, that she seemed wholly dedicated. All her life it was to be the same: she did the most ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Years later, an old woman named Mariette, who had been a servant in the Hospice of Chatillon while Zoe was living there, still remembered vividly how Zoe performed a daily act of devotion in honor of Our Lord's Passion. According to their rule, the Sisters of Charity pause in their work every afternoon at three o'clock and repair to the chapel, there to adore the dying Christ and beg Him to apply the merits of His Death to the agonizing, to poor sinners, and to the souls in purgatory. Mariette was struck by the way Zoe performed this action, more than by the veteran Sisters.

Even more illuminating was Sister Sejole's continuing discovery of new depths to the spirituality of Zoe Laboure. Although she lived with Zoe only three months, she was ready to pronounce her a soul "of surpassing candor and purity." A few months later, when the community was rife with rumors, Sister Sejole had no hesitation in saying that, "if the Blessed Virgin had appeared to a Sister of the seminary, it must be Sister Laboure. That child is destined to receive great favors from Heaven."

The days at Chatillon sped away, because they were full and busy. Here, at last, Zoe learned to write. Sister Sejole gave her the daily half hour of instruction allowed by the rule, and Zoe made notable progress in these extremely short class periods, although at her sister-in-law's fancy school she had learned nothing. Zoe's extant letters, preserved in the archives at rue du Bac, are written in a firm, plain, and legible hand, and the record book she kept at Enghien, also extant, is a model of order and neatness.

Marie Louise had written to Zoe on the day of her entrance into the religious life. This letter, which might seem tiresome to us, must have been deeply appreciated by Zoe. Certainly her family did everything possible to make up for their father's sullen behavior and to surround her departure from the world with warmth.

Zoe Laboure had come to the end of an era in her life. Her sojourn in the world, which had never held her, was over. Her campaign to fly from it, a struggle begun a dozen years before at the time of her first Communion, was successfully concluded. In the chill dawn of an April morning, she set out for Paris and the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity, in the company of Sister Hinaut, an old and weary servant of the poor who was going home to die.

Zoe's arrival at the Motherhouse raised no stir. Apparently she was just another in the endless line of "good country girls" who had come to the Community since the days of St. Vincent. Few turned to give her a second glance as she entered the great wooden gate and walked for the first time down the long cobblestoned alley that led to the seminary or novitiate. A few Sisters hailed Sister Hinaut, hobbling along beside her, and Zoe stood back, silent and unnoticed, while the old friends greeted one another.

The Mistress of Novices welcomed her warmly, showed her a bed and a place at table, instructed her briefly in the rules of the house, and informed her that from now on she would be known as Sister Laboure.

Amid all this newness of scene and faces, Zoe was far from feeling strange. She was spared the lot of most newcomers to the religious life, the unreasoning panic, the sudden longing for home and familiar faces, the agonizing doubt as to whether she had made a mistake in coming. She tells us herself that, at this crucial moment, she was so happy that she felt she was "no longer on the earth." It is what we should expect of Zoe Laboure, who had carefully planned this day for years, waiting, praying, removing obstacles. Now that it was here, it brought her the same quiet sense of achievement as when she had put the last dish on the shelf after a long, hard day in her father's home at Fain.

Exteriorly she was calm, and it was this characteristic outward calm that caused everyone, even those who knew her best, to put her down as cold and apathetic. Interiorly she was a riot of ecstasy. A melting love for God, gratitude, relief, beat and surged through her heart, tingled through her body.

The French Revolution, and in particular the Reign of Terror of 1793, had scattered the two families of St. Vincent de Paul, the Vincentian Fathers and the Sisters of Charity, up and down the length and breadth of France. This, however, had not meant the end of everything. St. Vincent had not founded his Communities upon external trappings, such as seminaries, churches, hospitals, and orphan asylums. He had founded them upon a solid love for the poor. Therefore, like all divine patriots in time of persecution, his sons and daughters had gone underground, contacting souls on street corners and in doorways, healing bodies in cellar and garret. Apparently citizens and citizenesses in secular dress, they were priests and Sisters of the Lord, going about His work in spite of everything.

In 1800, Napoleon, shrewd enough to recognize that the Sisters of Charity were the nursing corps of France, allowed them to regroup and gave them a Motherhouse on the rue du Vieux-Colombier. The Sisters in turn, knowing the bargaining point they had in their services to the nation, pressed this advantage upon Napoleon until he also allowed their religious brothers to return, four years later, and take up residence on the rue de Sevres. In 1815, the Sisters moved to their present quarters on the rue du Bac, the former town house of the Comtes de La Valliere.

Recovery from the paralyzing blows of the Revolution was slow, and when Zoe came to the Motherhouse on April 21, 1830, there were scarcely a hundred and fifty women in the house, including the old Sisters, novices, patients, and servants.

The Sisters themselves were a raggle-taggle sight. Even thirty years after the Revolution, they were still unable to obtain the standard blue cloth of their habits. As a result, some wore black and some few wore blue. Zoe herself, now Sister Laboure, dressed in the peculiar and complicated black-and-white costume of the seminary Sisters. In cut, the costume is very much like the "Dutch Cleanser girl" familiar to Americans. It wasn't until 1833 that the ingenious Mother-General Boulet managed to restore the familiar blue habit to her Sisters. The good Mother happened upon a weaver who was on the verge of bankruptcy. She offered to advance him sufficient funds to tide him over the crisis, provided he would contract, in return, to weave the blue material the Sisters needed.

The upset in the Community caused by the times was, of course, of a semi-permanent character, but Sister Laboure came to the novitiate in the midst of a passing upset that had the Motherhouse in a frenzy of excitement and joy. Three days hence, the relics of St. Vincent de Paul were to be solemnly restored to the Vincentian Fathers and enthroned above the high altar of their church, around the corner from the Sisters in the rue de Sevres.

During the horrors of the Revolution the precious body of the Founder had been hidden away, safe from the hands of desecrators. It had been a prudent step. Many incredibly foul sacrileges had been perpetrated in the name of Freedom. A woman of the streets had danced impurely upon the very altar of Notre Dame. The sacrosanct body of the great St. Genevieve, who had saved her beloved Paris from so many evils throughout the centuries, had been rifled from its tomb in the church built for her by Louis XV and burned ignominiously in the Place de Greve. What terrible things to come unhappy France had pulled down upon her head in that one unbelievable act! It seems hardly too much to state that she still bears the curse of it. It was most fortunate for France that it was the English strangers who burned her other noble Patroness, Jeanne d'Arc.

The third patron and hero of France alone escaped. The body of M. Vincent had happily been well hidden, and survived to honor posterity. Throughout the years of revolution the sacred relics had been moved from one hiding place to another in the Montaigne-Ste. Genevieve quarter. At length it found a resting place in the house of the lawyer of the Double Family of St. Vincent in the rue de Bourdonnais, where it stayed until the Sisters welcomed it home in 1806. On the feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1815, the Sisters brought the beloved body with them to the rue du Bac.

The body of St. Vincent has been spirited away for safekeeping, shunted about from place to place, during every war and uprising that has ripped the fabric of France. Throughout the occupation of Paris by the Nazis during World War II, it lay buried in an old packing box beneath a cellar floor. Always, however, the danger past, it has had a new resurrection, a triumphal return. Zoe Laboure, newly come to Paris, witnessed its greatest, its most triumphal return.

The Vincentian Fathers had completed the building of their mother-church of St. Vincent in 1827, but the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur de Quelen, long hesitated to allow them to expose the body of their Founder for public veneration. It was not that public devotion to the saint had died in France, but anti-religious sentiment was still so rife that the Archbishop feared incidents harmful to the Church. In 1830, however, when the French Army was preparing to move against Algiers, Monseigneur de Quelen decided to brave the wrath of the godless, and publicly invoke St. Vincent de Paul, who had himself been a slave in Algeria, to bless the arms of France. To this end, with the approbation of the Holy See, he authorized the solemn Translation of the saint's relics to take place on Sunday, April 25, 1830.

In March, the body was removed from the Sisters' Motherhouse to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where it was clothed in magnificent vestments and enshrined in an exquisite chasse of solid silver, the gift of the Archbishop. Pontifical vespers were sung at two o'clock in the afternoon, followed by the recitation of novena prayers in honor of the saint. King Charles X and the royal family attended. Then a huge procession set out from the cathedral to escort the Apostle of Charity to his own church.

It was a brilliant cortege: the elite of the army with uniforms glittering and sabres flashing in the afternoon sun; princes and nobles in velvet and lace; purple-clad bishops and ermined canons, the highest prelates in the land; a multitude of the secular clergy, dressed in the simple black soutane Vincent himself wore; the religious orders in their habits of black and white and brown; the civic officials in their robes of office; a sea of Sisters of Charity, more than a thousand, bobbing blue and black-and-white; then the sons of the saint, bearing his body joyfully in their midst; and presiding over all, His Excellency, Hyacinthe de Quelen, Archbishop of Paris.

As the splendid parade wended its way across the Petit Pont, down the rue de la Hachette, the rue de Saint-Andredes-Arts, and the rue du Four, it met with mixed reactions from the mob. By far the greater number of the common people entered wholeheartedly into the fervor of the day and packed the streets, windows, and balconies and even the roofs. Others were indifferent; some actively hostile, but these were in the minority and small attention was paid them.

Unknown and unnoted in this gorgeous equipage of a saint walked another saint named Catherine Laboure. Not entirely unknown, for Vincent de Paul knew she was there, and he found more honor to his holy remains in this one jewel than in all the proud pomp and sparkling display. He was soon to show his pleasure. He was soon to reach out and embrace this favorite daughter, to open up to her the secrets, sad and gay, of his paternal heart.

That memorable Sunday afternoon in April was but the brilliant prelude to a solemn novena of joy in honor of St. Vincent. Day after day, the Vincentian Fathers held open house for the thousands of Parisians and people from the provinces who thronged the church on rue de Sevres to honor the Hero of France. The common people, with their unerring instinct for the right, seemed to realize that the sacred body laid out in the choir was the last holy relic of their nation left to them, and they lavished their devotion upon it. Pontifical Mass was sung every morning and a novena service held every afternoon. On the fifth day, the King himself returned. The ceremonial was an official act of reparation for the excesses of other days. The times of excess were far from over, however. The volatile temperament of her Eldest Daughter would be ever the delight and the despair of the Church of Christ.

The Sisters and the novices were present at the festivities each day. Sister Laboure was there, packed in among her companions, devout and ecstatic. She fed eagerly at the groaning table of spiritual consolation spread before her. She needed every last ounce of nourishment and strength, for each night on her return from St. Lazare, she went through a grueling experience.

Celebrations like this can be a distraction rather than a help to individual piety. There was so much to dazzle the eyes and to fascinate one: the stately and intricate movement of the pontifical Mass; the rich, glittering vestments; the gorgeous backdrop of flowers and lights; such harmony to fill the ears: the thundering of the organ; the soaring melodies of the choir; so many great personages to stimulate human curiosity. The little country girl from Fain had never seen such display. It was a far cry from the simple Mass droned in the half-dark of a winter's morning, the tentative voices of a few sleepy Sisters, the handful of worshippers in homespun. Yet, literally, it meant nothing to her, human-wise; it served only, as it was meant to serve, as a hint of Heaven. She felt, again, that she was "no longer on the earth." Earnestly, she addressed herself to prayer, and with spiritual insight, she prayed well.

She prayed, first of all, for herself, for all the graces she needed. Then, with true Christian breadth, she prayed for the "two families," the Sisters of Charity and their brothers, the Vincentian Fathers, "and the whole of France." For Charles X, the last of the Bourbons, and for the lowliest peasant in his kingdom. For Paris, the teeming mother of the land, pious and sinful, learned and flippant, beautiful and dowdy, all in turn. For Paris, sprung legendary centuries ago from the Ile de la Cite; for Paris, whose great bid for ultimate salvation is that the lovely Cathedral of Our Lady still marks the spot of the city's birth. For Paris, and Dijon, Orleans, and Marseilles; and for the tiny villages like Fain, that the brawling epochs have swept around and left unchanged. For Brittany and Burgundy and the Valley of the Loire. For all that sunny land, with its woods and hedgerows and vistas of landscape, cut out of some medieval tapestry. And for its puzzling people, prototypes of a puzzling race, angels of God and devils of Satan, the glory and the shame of the Most High.

Catherine was French, and we who are not cannot hope to understand. She tells us that she prayed "for the whole of France," and in that simple telling she joins hands with Genevieve and Jeanne d'Arc, with Bernard and Vincent de Paul, and with a host of others, all forming a protective cordon about their beloved country, all presenting a defiant and unbroken front to the world. Fail to understand as we may, who is to say that Catherine Laboure, and all these others, were not right in their passionate devotion to their country? Catherine was to see Our Lady herself weep over the unhappy days ahead for France, and even Christ Himself come to earth to foretell the end of the Bourbon dynasty. Catherine was French, and that meant that France was a passion with her, a thread of her life and her sanctity, weaving itself through her thoughts, her prayers, her good deeds, her visions.

Finally, with truest Christian prudence, she prayed St. Vincent to teach her what she should pray for.

Until now, Catherine's devotion to St. Vincent had been a casual thing, compared with the all-consuming thing it was henceforward to be. Not so many years ago, in her dream, she had fled from him. "You flee from me now," he had said, "but one day you will be glad to come to me." That day was here. And Catherine, with that characteristic generosity that gave everything when it was sure of the direction of its giving, came to him wholly. In these few days of novena, she told St. Vincent everything about herself, her hopes and fears, her powers and her needs. It was he she asked for the graces she required, it was to him she recommended "the two families, and the whole of France." In a word, she gave him her heart.

Now, Vincent was to give his heart to Catherine.

As the novena service ended each afternoon, the novices emerged into the spring twilight, and marched two by two around the comer to their home in the rue du Bac. There, Catherine tells us in homely fashion, she "found St. Vincent again, or at least his heart." The heart appeared to her above a little shrine containing a bone from the right arm of St. Vincent, in the chapel of the Sisters. It hovered over this precious relic, in front of St. Joseph's altar and slightly higher than the picture of St. Anne that hung on the sanctuary wall. It appeared to her on three successive evenings in three different guises. On the first evening, it was of a flesh-white color. Inwardly, Catherine understood that the color foretold peace, calm, innocence, and union for the two Communities, the priests and the Sisters of St. Vincent.

On the second evening, it was a fiery red, and Catherine again, in the depths of her own heart, understood its symbolism: charity would be enkindled in all hearts, the Community would renew its fervor and extend itself to the uttermost bounds of the earth.

The next evening was a different story. The heart of St. Vincent took on a dark red hue. On seeing it, Catherine was plunged into sadness, a sadness which presaged misfortune for herself and for the King of France. She understood by this strange, spiritual sadness that she would have much to suffer in surmounting the obstacles that would be put in her path; and she understood, without penetrating further, that there would be a change in government. Then, for the first time, Catherine heard a voice speaking to her interiorly:

"The heart of St. Vincent is deeply afflicted at the sorrows that will befall France," it said.

The apparition of St. Vincent's heart, with its various changes of color, was repeated eight or nine times, each evening when Catherine returned from St. Lazare. On the last evening, the final day of the novena, it appeared, bright vermilion, and once more Catherine heard the interior voice "The heart of St. Vincent is somewhat consoled because he has obtained from God, through the intercession of Mary, that his two families should not perish in the midst of these sorrows, and that God would make use of them to reanimate the Faith."

It was indeed a grueling experience for this young girl, only a few days in the novitiate. While it is a great grace to be admitted to the secrets of the saints—and Catherine recognized this grace, for she tells us that she had "consolation" from the visions—at the same time, it is a grace that does not enter easily, but rips and tears the human heart with pain. Witness the pain of the saints who have seen or heard the secrets of Heaven, who have been torn and buffeted and contradicted, from St. John the Apostle and St. Paul, the two greatest of all seers, through St. Margaret Mary, St. Bernadette, to the children of Fatima of our own day. Catherine Laboure was no exception.

"Each time that I returned from St. Lazare," she cries out, "I had such great pain! "

It is a cry of courage, for Catherine understood that, although she suffered pain, nevertheless, this oppression of her heart was a divine favor, and brought her consolation, too. She may have been a novice according to the rules of her order; she was certainly no novice in the ways of the spiritual life.

Catherine's callin