Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac

She was born in Bordeaux on December 27, 1556. ³ Her father, Richard de Lestonnac, was a magistrate who stayed deeply attached to the Catholic faith; her mother, Jeanne Eyquem de Montaigne, was a convinced Calvinist and the sister of the essayist Michel de Montaigne. ²³ Her mother tried to bring the girl up in the same beliefs and gave her a Calvinist tutor. ²³

Pius XII, speaking to the pilgrims at her canonization, said it was Montaigne who warned his brother-in-law of the danger, and who led him to take the child's education out of her mother's hands. ² The pope described the home that followed, in words translated here from the French: the family lived under one roof and ate at one table, "but a barrier divides the family into two camps." ² He said the mother's love turned by degrees into hatred, which neither the daughter's tenderness nor her obedience could overcome. ² Clairval says that Jeanne never held it against her and stayed grateful to her. ³

At about twelve, after a long stay with Protestant friends where her mother had sent her, she came back gladly to the Church, her doubts settled, and made her First Communion. ³ The Company of Mary records a voice she heard in her youth, words that held her for the rest of her life: "Take care not to let the flame that I have lit in your heart be extinguished." ¹ Montaigne admired her. Clairval quotes him calling her "most pious, cheerful, intelligent, and beautiful." ³

At seventeen she married Gaston de Montferrand-Landiras, of an old noble family, on November 29, 1573. ¹³ The Company of Mary and Clairval both say they had seven children; Clairval adds that the first two died in infancy, and the Martyrology speaks of her providing wisely for the education of five. ¹³⁴ She was mother, educator and the manager of the household and its property. ¹ Clairval says she looked after her servants and their farm work and was known as the "good lady", and that when plague struck Bordeaux in 1585 she left her castle to nurse the sick. ³

Pius XII saw these years as her training. To obey her father she had married, which looked like the end of her hopes, and the pope said the time she spent in the world, in his words translated from the French, "forged her soul, broadened and ripened her experience." ²

In 1597 her husband died after a short illness, and a few weeks later her eldest son. ¹³ She was forty-one. ¹³ Two daughters soon entered the Annonciades, and her other son married. ²³

In 1603 she entered the Cistercian monastery of the Feuillantines at Toulouse. ¹²³ Clairval tells how she kept the decision from her older children until the eve of her departure, and how her youngest daughter, Jeannette, ran to her at the foot of the boat's gangway on the Garonne. ³ At the convent she took the name of Sister Jeanne of Saint-Bernard. ³

The Company of Mary says that it was there that she had her deepest experience of God, and that the austerity was too much for her strength. ¹ Pius XII put her choice starkly: it was a question of life or death, and she preferred the cloister and death. ² Her superiors decided otherwise. According to Clairval, the mother superior showed her the crucifix and told her, "You must resign yourself; God does not want you here." ³

She spent her last night there in prayer, which the Company of Mary calls "the Cistercian Night." ¹ Clairval gives her prayer: "And should I leave this house, may it be without ever leaving You!" ³ The Company of Mary says she came out of it with a strong inspiration that it was she who had to extend a hand to young women. ¹ Clairval describes it as a vision of a multitude of souls in danger, and the idea of an order of women devoted to the education of girls under the protection of the Virgin. ³

She went back to the world and was blamed for it. ³ After a time of discernment at La Mothe she returned to Bordeaux. ¹ When plague came again in 1604 and 1605 she stayed to nurse the sick and bury the dead, and a small group of young women gathered around her. ³ In 1605 two Jesuits, Fathers de Bordes and Raimond, brought her the plan for a school for girls. ³ Clairval says she answered that she would help, "but not as the founder of the school!"; Pius XII spoke of her horror of the title of foundress. ²³

Under Father de Bordes she and nine companions made the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. ³ Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, approved their constitutions in March 1606, and Pope Paul V gave final approval on April 7, 1607, as the Order of the Company of Mary Our Lady. ¹³ Pius XII said she drew on the principles of Saint Ignatius, wanting to do for girls what he had done for boys, and the Martyrology calls the order modeled on the Society of Jesus. ²⁴ Its life was to be both active and contemplative, given to the education of women, with Mary as its model. ¹

Clairval says the schools were free, so that they would not be only for the rich, and that the girls learned reading, writing, arithmetic and sewing, with religion given first place. ³ In 1610 the cardinal changed his mind and wanted to merge the community with the Ursulines; he then changed it back, and received the first vows of ten novices that December 8. ³ Houses followed at Béziers in 1616, Poitiers in 1618 and Agen, with failures along the way. ³

The hardest years came from within. ²³ In 1622 one of the first sisters, Blanche Hervé, was elected superior in her place, and Clairval says the new superior humiliated the foundress, forbade her to write to anyone, and had a list of her alleged faults read in the refectory while she knelt. ³ Once, Clairval says, the new superior told her she would be sent back to Landiras "to tend the pigs." ³ Pius XII put it in one sentence: within the family of which she was the mother, her part was to be nailed, suffering and humiliated, to the cross. ²

It lasted almost three years. On December 26, 1624, Mother Hervé asked her forgiveness and was received with open arms. ³ At seventy she was sent to found a house at Pau. ³ She died in Bordeaux on February 2, 1640, the day the sisters were renewing their vows, leaving about thirty houses in France. ¹³

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac, so none is given here. ¹²³⁴ Pius XII, presenting her to the pilgrims, spoke of her as a woman who brought to light the importance of the intellectual education of women, natural and supernatural, for their part in society. ²

Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac is entered in the Roman Martyrology on February 2, the day of her death in Bordeaux. ³⁴ She was canonized by Pius XII on May 15, 1949, according to the Company of Mary; the Clairval letter gives May 17, the date of the pope's address to the pilgrims. ¹²³

She was raised in the middle of the quarrel of her century, and Pius XII did not pretend it was painless: her mother, he said, died obstinate in her error. ² Clairval says the daughter would not hold it against her. ³ Much of her later work was teaching girls the faith in Bordeaux, where the Calvinists had opened schools of their own, and in Pau, a Protestant stronghold. ³

Her religious life began when most of her life was over. She had been a wife for twenty-four years and a widow whose children were nearly grown, and she tried a cloister whose austerity Pius XII called very rare in its day, and her health gave way. ¹²³ The order she founded instead was meant, Clairval says, for women who could not bear the austerities of the old orders. ³

She was then pushed aside by the community she had founded, and spent nearly three years under a superior who humiliated her. ³ What Clairval remembers is that she calmed the sisters who wanted to protest. ³ It is not a comfortable story, and it does not need to be made one.