Saint Jeanne-Elisabeth Bichier des Ages

The sources disagree on when she was born. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives July 3, 1772, near Le Blanc, in the Indre. ³ A lecture published by the Diocese of Bayonne, drawing on her congregation's records, says she was born at the Château des Ages, on the border of Berry and Poitou, and baptized the same day, July 5, 1773, in the church of Saint-Génitour at Le Blanc; ACI Africa also gives July 1773. ⁵⁷

Pius XII, canonizing her, placed her in the country nobility of the provinces, a class he called the providence of its district. ² He remembered, in his French address, her charm at family gatherings, which she livened, though she always found a graceful way to avoid dancing; her solid education; and her ease in moving from the kitchen, where she delighted the servants, to the drawing room, where she delighted the guests. ² He smiled at the picture of her following, "more resigned than enthusiastic", the accounting lessons of her uncle, the canon de Moussac. ² All of it, he said, would serve her one day, and the day of trial was close. ²

According to the Bayonne lecture, her elder brother Laurent emigrated, and her father died on January 17, 1792. ⁵ At nineteen she was left to defend the family's property against the revolutionary laws, and Pius XII describes her arguing interests and claiming rights in the "maquis of revolutionary procedure" with the skill of a man of business. ²⁵ In the parish she kept her distance from the clergy who had taken the oath and held the Catholics firm. ²

She and her mother left the château for Le Blanc. ⁵ The lecture says the revolutionary committee invited her to take the part of the Goddess of Reason, and that after she refused, the searches of the house multiplied; when military equipment used by the guards her father had commanded was found in the attic, mother and daughter were imprisoned at Châteauroux. ⁵ Pius XII recalled that in prison she resoled the shoes and mended the clothes of her mother and the other detainees "with the skill of a professional". ² One of her brothers soon obtained their release. ⁵

In 1796 the two women settled at La Guimetière, their property at Béthines. ⁵⁷ She had not been able to receive communion for years. ⁵

In 1797 an old servant told them, in a low voice, that a real Catholic priest, Father Fournet, was saying Mass in secret for the Christians of the district, at the risk of his life. ⁵ The lecture describes her riding a small donkey across the plateau by night, wrapped in the dark cloak of the local women, for more than three hours, to the farm at Les Marsyllis. ⁵ Inside the barn, peasants and tenant farmers stood around a kitchen table covered with a white cloth, where the priest said Mass. ⁵

When she came forward for confession, the crowd made way for her. The priest asked whether she imagined he would leave mothers and poor farmers who had come from miles away in order to hear her first. ⁵⁶ She said she would wait, and she was the last to confess, close to dawn. ⁵ She went back often. ⁵⁶ Fournet became her spiritual guide, and the Roman Martyrology records that she helped him carry on his hidden ministry. ⁴⁶ Years later she said that great things had been done at Les Marsyllis, and that the Daughters of the Cross could venerate that dark corner as the cave of Bethlehem of their institute. ⁵⁶

With her mother's consent she opened the house at La Guimetière for catechism. ⁵ Pius XII asked what to call the life she led there with her mother and a few companions: "Is it a house and family life? Is it a convent and religious life? Is it a hospital, a school, a dispensary, a center of works of piety? It is all of that at once." ²

Her mother died on the night of July 20, 1804. ⁵ The Bayonne lecture says she then spent a year with the Sisters of Providence at Poitiers to learn religious life, and visited other congregations to which her small group might attach itself; ACI Africa says she first entered a Carmelite convent and later the Society of Providence. ⁵⁷ Pius XII says she found good things everywhere and not what she was looking for, and so, "with her good Father André Fournet, she prepared constitutions", bound herself with her companions by vows, and "without having noticed it" became a foundress. ²

The Bayonne lecture dates the first vows of five sisters to February 1807, at Molante, a small manor in Fournet's parish; the Catholic Encyclopedia dates the establishment of the congregation to 1806, at La Guimetière. ³⁵ The lecture tells of a morning when, coming back from Mass, she heard moans in the undergrowth and found an old woman covered in sores in a cave under an oak; the community took her in and nursed her until she died in Elisabeth's arms. ⁵ The congregation set itself the instruction of poor country girls and the care of the sick, and the Catholic Encyclopedia adds refuges for the young exposed to temptation and the care of churches. ¹³

In 1815 she underwent a long surgical operation in Paris, at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. ⁵ Pius XII described the surgeons going off to tell the court and the city of their patient's heroism, and the foundations in the Paris region that followed. ² He told of a visit to an aristocratic house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where great ladies hurried to wipe from her dress the spittle their own footmen had thrown at her as she arrived; and of the Tuileries, where the king, annoyed that she had been kept waiting, came out of his rooms to meet her himself. ² The Catholic Encyclopedia notes a house at Issy, near Paris, founded in 1817 under the protection of the royal family. ³

She prayed, Pius XII said, for God to "rain down Sisters", and postulants came in such numbers that she had nowhere to put them. ² In 1820 she bought the old abbey of La Puye, which became the mother-house. ³ Pius XII pictured her rebuilding its ruins as a contractor and site manager, and then crossing France in the coaches of the day from Poitou to Burgundy and from the Île-de-France to the Pyrenees, like Teresa of Avila on her foundations. ² By 1830, according to the Bayonne lecture, there were some sixty-three houses. ⁵

In the Pyrenees she met the young priest Michael Garicoïts, in 1825. ²⁵ Pius XII quoted him: "It is to her, after God, that I owe the little I am; yes, I tell you, it was she who converted me." ² The two were canonized together. ¹

She wished to be called only "the Good Sister". ² The Bayonne lecture, quoting her nineteenth-century biographer, says she took the humblest work for herself in every house, cooking, washing dishes and teaching the youngest girls to read, and told her daughters, "You will never call me anything but your sister." ⁵ She died at La Puye on August 26, 1838. ³⁵

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹²³⁵ Pius XII praised her and Michael Garicoïts together as examples of every virtue, and invoked their intercession for the two congregations and those they served. ¹²

Saint Jeanne-Elisabeth Bichier des Ages's feast is August 26, the day of her death. ³⁴⁵ Pius XII fixed it in the decree of canonization on July 6, 1947, which directs that her memory be kept each year on August 26 and Garicoïts's on May 14. ¹ The Roman Martyrology, in the Italian text the Italian bishops publish, places her entry at "Puy-en-Vélay near Poitiers"; the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Bayonne lecture give La Puye. ³⁴⁵ Saint Andrew Hubert Fournet, with whom she founded the Daughters of the Cross, is kept on May 13. ⁶

Pius XII made a point of how ordinary her training was. The cooking, the household, even the accounting she sat through with her uncle, all served her later in the prison, the courts and the houses she founded. ² Nothing in her girlhood looks like preparation for sanctity, and all of it turned out to be.

The first night at Les Marsyllis says a good deal about her. She had ridden for hours to make a confession after years without the sacraments, and when the priest told her to wait behind the farm women, she waited until dawn. ⁵ The congregation she later founded was for exactly those people, the poor of the countryside. ³⁵

She did not choose to be a foundress, by the accounts here: she looked for a congregation to join and did not find one. ²⁵ She kept the name of sister to the end, and the work she took for herself was the work nobody else wanted. ²⁵