Saint Vincent de Paul

God, who seemed to lead him by the hand along the paths of humility, detached his heart from ecclesiastical dignities by a providential accident; the vicars-general of Dax, the see being vacant, had no sooner learned that he was a priest than they provided him with the parish of Tilh, an important post: but it was contested by a competitor who had obtained it from the court of Rome; our Saint did not wish to enter into a lawsuit on this subject. We see, by this fact, by the time he devoted to his studies, and by a document where he was permitted to explain and teach publicly the second book of the Sentences at the University of Toulouse, with the rank of bachelor; we see, we say, that he was not ignorant as he was pleased, later on, to make people believe: very different from those who let themselves be puffed up by a little science they think they possess, he hid that which he had acquired; he would have willingly taken for himself the motto of the Apostle, and could have said in his imitation: "For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." In 1605, Vincent went to Marseille to collect an important legacy. Having consented, on his return, to take the sea route from Marseille to Narbonne, he was taken with the entire crew by Barbary pirates, and sold i n Tun Tunis Place of death of Saint Louis during the Eighth Crusade. is: he changed masters several times, God willing that he should experience himself all that Christian slaves had to suffer, so that he might work later with more ardor for their deliverance.

Finally, a renegade from Nice, in Savoy, having bought him, took him to his timar (this is the name of the property one holds from the Grand Seigneur). It was in an extremely hot and desert country. One of his master's wives served as an instrument in the hands of God to withdraw the renegade from apostasy and deliver Saint Vincent: "Curious as she was to know our way of life," he said in a letter, "she came to see me every day in the field where I was digging: and one day she commanded me to sing the praises of my God. The memory of the *Quomodo cantabimus in terra aliena* of the children of Israel captive in Babylon made me begin, with tears in my eyes, the psalm *Super flumina Babylonis*, and then the *Salve, Regina* and several other things, in which she took such pleasure that it was a wonder. She did not fail to tell her husband, in the evening, that he had been wrong to leave his religion, which she considered extremely good because of a story I had told her about our God and some praises I had sung in her presence: in which she said she had felt such pleasure that she did not believe that the paradise of her fathers and the one she hoped for was as glorious or accompanied by as much joy as the contentment she had felt while I was praising my God." Concluding that there were some wonders in this, this woman did so much through her speeches that, with the grace of God helping, her husband formed the plan to escape to France with our Saint: this is what they did ten months later. The renegade was received publicly in Avignon by the vice-legate Montorio, who wanted to take them both to Rome. Saint Vincent was so consoled to see himself in this city, mistress of Christendom, where the head of the Church militant is, where the bodies of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and so many other martyrs and holy personages who once shed their blood and employed their lives for Jesus Christ are, that he considered himself happy to walk on the earth where so many great Saints had walked: this consideration had softened him to tears.

During his stay in Rome, Vincent gave himself entirely to his studies and to prayer. In this capital of the ancient world and at the center of faith and Christian civilization, he did not give the slightest satisfaction to the most legitimate curiosity. Of all the monuments of ancient Rome, he visited only the Colosseum and the Catacombs, to venerate there the blood and ashes of the martyrs; and in Christian Rome, he only wanted to know the churches and the places consecrated by the piety of the faithful. His passion for study, long compressed in slavery, resumed its flight in Rome; he began his theological works again and further extended his knowledge. He was all the more free to devote himself to study, as he no longer had the worry of material life; for the vice-legate Montorio provided for his maintenance. Vincent amply repaid his debt of hospitality by his edification and the pious charm of his company. As he became better known, he excited more and more the admiration of his protector. The latter could not tire of spreading his praises, especially before the French negotiators who were then in Rome, not suspecting that he was going to have his treasure taken from him. Struck by the praises he gave of his virtue and wisdom, they wanted to see him, to examine if they would not find in him the messenger they were looking for. Vincent appeared before them. They interviewed him several times, and finally believed they could open up to him. As it was a matter of an important affair that required prudence, fidelity, and great discretion, they instructed Vincent and sent him to Paris to confer about it with Henry IV (1609).

Upon arriving in Paris, Vincent hastened to fulfill his mission; but he did not take advantage of this opportunity to advance further at court, fearing that the favor of an earthly king might serve as an obstacle to the graces of the King of Heaven. As he was occupying a room in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the vicinity of the Hôpital de la Charité, with one of his compatriots—a judge from Sore, a village located in the Landes and under the jurisdiction of Bordeaux—he was falsely accused of having stolen four hundred crowns from him. Here is how he himself recounts this trial that God sent him to strengthen his virtue: "I knew a person who, accused by his companion of having taken some money from him, told him gently that he had not taken it; but, seeing that the other persisted in accusing him, he turned away, lifted his heart to God, and said to Him: What shall I do, my God? You know the truth. And then, trusting in Him, he resolved to make no further response to these accusations, which went very far, even to the point of obtaining a monitory against the theft and having it served upon him. Now, it happened, and God permitted it, that at the end of six years, the one who had lost the money, being more than one hundred and twenty leagues from here (the judge being in Bordeaux and Saint Vincent in Paris), found the thief who had actually taken it. Behold the care of Providence for those who abandon themselves to it; then, this man, recognizing the wrong he had done in attacking his innocent friend with such heat and calumny, wrote him a letter to ask his pardon, telling him that he felt such great displeasure that he was ready, to expiate his fault, to come to the place where he was to receive absolution on his knees."

To lead a truly ecclesiastical life, he retired to the Reverend Fathers of the Oratory, not to be aggregated into their holy Company, but to live sheltered from the dangers of the world; and, knowing that we are blind in our own conduct, he renounced his own will and allowed himself to be led in the ways of God, like a child, by a "visible angel," by which we mean a wise directo M. de Bérulle Cardinal and founder of the Oratory of France. r.

His choice having fallen upon M. de Bérulle, he opened his heart to this great servant of God, one of the most skillful masters of the spiritual life who ever existed: he recognized at once that our Saint was called by God to great things, and, no doubt enlightened by supernatural lights, he saw and declared to him that God wished to use him to render a signal service to His Church and to assemble, for this purpose, a new community of good priests who would work there with fruit and blessing. After two years spent in this retreat, he was provided with the parish of Clichy. It is said that he had already refused a bishopric; it is certain that he was offered rich abbeys, and Queen Marguerite, upon hearing of his virtues, had taken him as her ordinary chaplain. But God spoke through the mouth of M. de Bérulle. The humble Vincent would be a village priest: "he prefers," like the Prophet,

"to be abject in the house of the Lord," that is to say, where ecclesiastical obedience calls him, "than to dwell in the tabernacles of sinners," that is to say, among the vain honors where ambition takes root.

At the voice of M. de Bérulle, he left this post of humility and accepted the positi on of tutor to the children of Mes messire Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi General of the Galleys of France and protector of Vincent de Paul. sire Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, Count of Joigny, then General of the Galleys of France, and of Dame Françoise-Marguerite de Silly, his wife, a woman of excellent virtue, a rare thing among people of the court. We cannot better make known in what spirit he acted, and how he behaved in this illustrious family, than by citing what he himself said of it: "That he knew a person who had profited much for himself and for others in the house of a nobleman, having always looked upon and honored Jesus Christ in the person of that nobleman, and the Blessed Virgin in the person of the lady; that this consideration, having always kept him in modesty and circumspection in all his actions and words, had acquired for him the affection of that nobleman, of that lady, and of all the servants, and given him the means to produce notable fruit in that family."

Mme de Gondi felt an ineffable joy to have in her house a guardian angel who drew new graces upon her family every day; she chose him as her director, and they both devoted themselves to all kinds of good works, such as giving alms, visiting the sick whom they served with their own hands, protecting the widow and the orphan, and consoling and catechizing the country folk, and this in all the domains of the General, which numbered no fewer than eight thousand subjects. Now, it happened, in the year 1616, that while in Picardy, at the Château de Folleville, Saint Vincent was asked to hear the confession of a peasant in danger of death: God inspired him with the idea of having this man, who had apparently led an irreproachable life, make a general confession, and the dying man confessed, with the deepest contrition, several mortal sins that shame had prevented him from confessing to his parish priest until the age of sixty. Our Saint took this as an occasion to exhort the inhabitants of Folleville to make a general confession: he showed them its importance, the means to make it well, and God so blessed his words that these good people came in crowds to set their consciences in order. This first "mission" took place on the day of the Conversion of Saint Paul, by a design of God, and it was like the seed of the others he has conducted since then until his death. The General's wife made a will, which she renewed every year, by which she gave sixteen thousand livres to found a mission, every five years, throughout all her lands, in the place and in the manner that Saint Vincent would judge appropriate and, to use the terms that our Saint ordinarily employed, "at the disposal of this wretch."

However, the humility of the servant of God had too much to suffer. Regarded by all who knew him as a saint, surrounded by attentions, seeing that the General of the Galleys and his wife had an esteem for him that they could not hide, he fled secretly, like Moses from the court of King Pharaoh, for fear that the good treatment he received might soil his soul. Madame de Gondi was desolate; she believed she could not do without such a director, that no one else had the light and graces like him to keep her conscience in peace; this attachment was an imperfection in that virtuous soul; and, as God destined her to work for the good of the Church with our Saint, He first wanted to detach her from everything, to deliver her heart from all affection, even the most holy. She did not cease to weep, and could neither eat nor sleep; she wrote, and had others write to the fugitive to recall him; she tried everything: he was deaf to all prayers. But, like Saint Paul at the voice of Ananias, he yielded to the advice of the Rev. Fr. de Bérulle and returned to the General of the Galleys, where he was received like an angel from heaven.

This is how, during his stay in Châtillon, he began the Confraternity of Charity for the poor sick. It happened one feast day, as he was ascending the pulpit to give an exhortation to the people, that Madame de la Chassaigne, who had come to hear him, stopped him to ask him to recommend to the charity of the parish a family, most of whose children and servants had fallen ill on a farm half a league from Châtillon, where they were in great need of assistance. This compelled him to speak in his sermon about the assistance and relief that should be given to the poor, and particularly to those who were sick.

It pleased God to give such efficacy to his words that, after the sermon, a great number of people went out to visit these poor sick people, bringing them bread, wine, meat, and several other similar forms of relief. And he himself, having set out there after Vespers with some of the local inhabitants, and not knowing that so many others had already gone, was very astonished to meet them on the road, returning in groups, and even to see several of them resting under trees because of the great heat. Then these words of the Gospel came to his mind: "These good people were like sheep that had no shepherd. This," he said, "is a great charity they are exercising, but it is not well regulated: these poor sick people will have too many provisions all at once, part of which will be spoiled and wasted, and then afterwards they will fall back into their initial need."

That is why, in the following days, he conferred with some of the most zealous and prominent women of the parish on the means of bringing order to the assistance being rendered to these poor sick people and to others who, in the future, might find themselves in a similar need, so that they could be helped throughout the entire duration of their illnesses. Having thus disposed them to this charitable enterprise, and having agreed with them on the manner in which it should be carried out, he drew up a draft of some Regulations that they would try to observe, in order to then have them approved and established by the authority of the superiors, and he invited these virtuous women to give themselves to God to put them into practice. And thus he began the Confraternity of Charity for the spiritual and bodily assistance of the poor sick, and, having chosen some officers among them, they would meet every month before him and report on everything that had happened.

This Confraternity of Charity was the first and, as it were, the mother that gave birth to a very great number of others. During this same stay, he happily brought some heretics back to the Church, and the love of God and neighbor that he kindled in their hearts produced the greatest fruits. This is the character of Saint Vincent's conversions: they were lasting, and those who had undergone this marvelous change, far from losing their initial fervor, climbed, under the guidance of such a wise director, the paths of the most difficult perfection. We shall cite a very remarkable example: The Count of Rougemont, after some conversations with Saint Vincent on the affairs of his conscience and his salvation, took the resolution to let himself be completely guided by such a holy Priest. This nobleman, having been raised all his life at court, had retained all its sentiments and maxims; he passed for one of the greatest duelists of his time. Nevertheless, O marvelous efficacy of grace! God, having used the words of our Saint to make him know the miserable and damnable state in which he was living, he was so touched by it that not only did he renounce this furious practice and all the other disorders of his life forever, but, beyond that, to make reparation for the past evil, he devoted himself to all the most heroic exercises of a perfectly Christian life.

And, first, having sold his land of Bougemont for more than thirty thousand crowns, he employed a large part of this sum in foundations for monasteries and distributed all the rest to the poor. After having applied himself to the meditation of the mysteries of the Passion of Jesus Christ, his piety having led him to want to know how many blows the Son of God had received in the scourging, he gave as many crowns to the Oratory house of Lyon. And, in a short time, one saw in him such a change, and he made such great progress in virtue, under the guidance of his wise director, that he became a perfect example. Prayer was his most ordinary occupation, and one saw him every day spend three or four hours in meditation, on his knees, without leaning, and always bareheaded. The Château des Chandes, where he made his home, was like a common hospice for religious and a hospital for all the poor, healthy and sick, where they were assisted with incredible charity, both for the needs of their bodies and for those of their souls.

One day when this pious gentleman was traveling, he was thinking of God while walking, according to his custom, and he was examining whether he had renounced everything for His love: "He was going over," recounts Saint Vincent de Paul, "the affairs, the alliances, the reputation, the great and small amusements of the human heart; he turns, he turns it over; finally he casts his eyes on his sword: Why do you carry it? he says to himself. What! leave this dear sword, which has served you on so many occasions, and which, after God, has pulled you from a thousand and one dangers? If you were attacked again, you would be lost without it; but also, some brawl might happen where you will not have the strength, carrying a sword, not to use it, and you will offend God again. What shall I do then? my God! what shall I do? is such an instrument of my shame and my sin still capable of holding my heart? I find only this sword alone that encumbers me. Oh! I will no longer be so cowardly as to carry it! And, at that moment, finding himself in front of a rock, he gets off his horse, takes this sword, breaks it into pieces against the stone, and then gets back on his horse and goes away. He told me that this act of detachment, breaking this iron chain that held him captive, gave him such great freedom that, although it was against the inclination of his heart that he loved this sword, he never again had any affection for any perishable thing and held only to God alone."

One can see by this what a heroic act of virtue and a victory won by force over oneself can do to make great progress in holiness in a short time, and how important it is to renounce attachment to the smallest things of the earth in order to be perfectly united to God.

The General of the galleys, seeing with what blessing and fruit our Saint worked to procure the salvation of souls on all his lands, wished to provide him with an opportunity to extend his charity further: he had him appointed Chaplain General of the galleys. Vincent, having come to Marseille, saw there the most pitiful spectacle one could imagine: criminals, doubly miserable, more burdened by the unbearable weight of their sins than by the heaviness of their chains; overwhelmed by miseries and pains, which took from them the care and thought of their salvation, and led them incessantly to blasphemy and despair. It was a true image of hell, where one heard of God only to deny and dishonor Him: the poor disposition of these galley slaves rendered all their sufferings useless and fruitless.

Being thus touched by a feeling of compassion toward these poor convicts, he set about to console and assist them as best he could: and above all, he employed everything his charity could suggest to soften their spirits, and by this means make them susceptible to the good he wished to procure for their souls. To this end, he listened to their complaints with great patience, sympathized with their pains, embraced them, kissed their chains, and obtained from the administration that they be treated more humanely, thus insinuating himself into their hearts to win them more easily to God.

The unfortunate galley slaves of Paris were in a state even more deplorable than those of Marseille, entirely neglected in body and soul. Saint Vincent rented a house expressly in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the vicinity of the church of Saint-Roch, to take in these poor convicts. There, he rendered them all sorts of good offices: he visited them very often, instructed them, consoled them, disposed them to make good general confessions, administered the Sacraments to them, and, not content with the care he took of their souls, he also provided for the relief of their bodies, and sometimes he would withdraw with them and stay there to render them more services and give them more consolation; which he did even in times suspected of contagious diseases: the love he bore for these poor afflicted ones making him forget himself and his own preservation, to give himself entirely to them. When he was obliged to be absent for other business, he left the care of them to two good and virtuous ecclesiastics.

Providence seemed to lead our Saint by the hand wherever there were wounds of humanity to heal, and everywhere he left for each evil a sure and lasting remedy. Passing through the city of Mâcon, he found it filled with a great number of poor who did nothing but run through the streets and churches to beg for alms, without setting themselves to observe any of the commandments of God and the Church; they even plunged themselves into the most shameful vices. Saint Vincent, an imitator of the Good Samaritan, could not pass by, regarding these poor as so many travelers who had been stripped and mistreated by the enemies of their salvation; he resolved to remain a few days in Mâcon to try to bind their wounds and give or procure them some assistance; and, indeed, he established a very good order there, having associated men to assist the poor, and women to take care of the sick.

At the beginning, when he undertook to establish charity in this way in Mâcon, everyone mocked him, he was pointed at in the streets, believing that he would never be able to succeed; and, when the thing was done, everyone melted into tears of joy, and the aldermen of the city prepared so many honors for his departure that, unable to bear them, he was forced to leave in secret to avoid these demonstrations.

It had already been some years since God had brought forth the holy Order of the Visitation nuns: this new flower had begun from that time to spread a scent of sweetness in the garden of the Church. It was Saint Franci s de Sales, Bishop of G saint François de Sales Bishop of Geneva who prophesied the vocation of Olier. eneva, whom God had used to give life and the first cultivation to this mystical plant; he had applied himself to it with all the care that his incomparable charity could have suggested to him. Mother de Chantal had been sent to Paris by her blessed Father to found a monastery of this holy Order there; and she worked at it with such zeal and prudence that, despite all the oppositions, contradictions, and persecutions that were brought against her, the walls of this little Jerusalem and this dwelling of peace rose with favorable success.

When it was a question of finding a spiritual father and a superior for this religious community, that is to say, a visible angel who would be its guardian to preserve there the first spirit that Jesus Christ had given it, Saint Francis de Sales, who had a most singular gift for discerning spirits, and Saint Frances de Chantal, who had a greatly enlightened spirit, chose our Saint to entrust to him what was most dear and precious to them in this world. God blessed this choice and the government of Saint Vincent, which lasted until his death, despite all the efforts he made to unburden himself of such a heavy load.

But it is time to recount the beginnings of the great work of our Saint, that is to say, the Congregation of the Mission. Madame the Gener al of the Galleys, having congrégation de la mission Society of apostolic life founded by Vincent de Paul for the evangelization of the poor. recognized the necessity and the fruits of the missions, had conceived, as we have already said, for several years the pious design of giving to some community a fund of 16,000 livres to conduct them, every five years, in all her lands. Saint Vincent, whom she charged with the employment of this sum, addressed himself to the superiors of different religious houses, who all refused, not without secret dispositions of Providence. Madame de Gondi reflected that, as there were almost every year several doctors and other virtuous ecclesiastics who joined her holy director to work on the missions, one could form a kind of perpetual Community from them, provided that one procured for them a house where they could gather and live in common. The Count, her husband, shared this with the Archbishop of Paris, his brother, who approved, without hesitation, such a useful establishment. Our Saint could not resist the desire of this holy prelate; he was placed first, with the title of principal, in the old college of the Bons-Enfants. There was for all assets an extremely poor chapel, some apartments in bad condition, and in the neighborhood a certain number of houses that were falling into ruin. Such was the cradle where God wished to bring forth a Congregation that was to spread and bear fruit throughout the whole Church. Saint Vincent consented to receive there the direction of the priests who would retire with him, and of the missions to which they would apply themselves: these missions were especially for the poor people of the countryside and for the galley slaves. After the death of the General of the Galleys, whose name will pass to posterity with that of Vincent de Paul, he retired to the college of the Bons-Enfants with two other priests. All three went from village to village to catechize, exhort, confess, and perform the other functions and exercises of the mission with simplicity, humility, and charity, at their own expense, without asking for or even receiving anything from anyone. When they left, having no servant to guard the college in their absence, they left the keys with one of the neighbors: "We went," the holy Founder later said, "quite simply and plainly, sent by our Lords the bishops, to evangelize the poor, just as Our Lord had done: that is what we were doing; and God was doing on His side what He had foreseen from all eternity. He gave some blessing to our labors: seeing this, other good ecclesiastics joined us and asked to be with us, not all at once, but at various times. O Savior! who would have ever thought that this would have come to the state it is in now? Who had told me that, at the time, I would have thought he was mocking me. And nevertheless, it was through that that God wished to give a beginning to the Company. Well! will you call human that which no man had ever thought of? For neither I, nor poor M. Portail were thinking of it. Alas! we were very far from it."

By Bull of Pope Urban VIII, of January 12, 1632, this holy Company was erected as the Congregation of the Mission, under the guidance of the Servant of God to whom His Holiness gave the power to make and draw up regulations. It would be too long to develop the maxims that were like the spirit of these rules. There are, however, two that we cannot pass over in silence. He wanted one to always look at Our Lord Jesus Christ in others to more effectively excite his heart to render them all the duties of charity. He looked at this divine Savior as Pontiff and Head of the Church in our Holy Father the Pope, as bishop and prince of pastors in the bishops, doctor in the doctors, priest in the priests, religious in the religious, sovereign and powerful in kings, noble in gentlemen, judge and very wise politician in magistrates, governors, and other officers. And the kingdom of God being compared in the Gospel to a merchant, he considered Him as such in men of trade, as a worker in artisans, poor in the poor, infirm and agonizing in the sick and the dying; and, considering Jesus Christ in this way in all these states, and in each state seeing an image of this Sovereign Lord, which shone in the person of his neighbor, he excited himself by this view to honor, respect, love, and serve each one in Our Lord, and Our Lord in each one; he invited his own, and those to whom he spoke of it, to enter into this maxim and to use it to make their charity more constant and more perfect toward their neighbor.

He did not study less to inspire in his own a spirit of lowering, of humiliation, of self-abasement, and of contempt for oneself; he always urged them to consider themselves as the least of all those who work in the Church, and to place in their esteem all others above themselves. We could not better make this known than by the very words he spoke one day, from the abundance of his heart, regarding the fact that a priest, newly received into his Congregation, qualified it as a holy Congregation. This humble servant of God stopped him short and said to him: "Monsieur, when we speak of the Company, we must not use this term: Holy Company, holy Congregation, or other equivalent and elevated terms, but use these: The poor Company, the little Company, and the like. And in that we will imitate the Son of God, who called the Company of his Apostles and his Disciples a little Flock, a little Company. Oh! how I would wish that it might please God to grant this wretched Congregation the grace to be well established in humility, to make a foundation and build on this virtue, and that it might remain there as in its post and in its frame! Gentlemen, let us not deceive ourselves: if we do not have humility, we have nothing. I do not speak only of exterior humility, but I speak mainly of the humility of heart and of that which leads us to believe truly that there is no person on earth more miserable than you and me; that the Company of the Mission is the most wretched of all Companies, and the poorest for the number and condition of its subjects; and to be very glad that the world speaks of it thus. Alas! to want to be esteemed, what is that, if not to want to be treated otherwise than the Son of God? It is an unbearable pride. The Son of God being on earth, what was said of him? And for whom did he wish to pass in the mind of the people? For a madman, for a seditious person, for a sinner, although he was not. Even to the point that he wished to suffer being likened to a Barabbas, to a brigand, to a murderer, to a very wicked man. O Savior! O my Savior! how your holy humility will confound sinners, like me, miserable, on the day of your judgment! Let us take care of that; take care of it, you who go on mission, you others who speak in public; sometimes and quite often, one sees a people so touched by what has been said, one sees that everyone is weeping; and there are even some who, going further, go as far as to utter these words: Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you. We have heard similar words sometimes. Hearing that, nature is satisfied, vanity is engendered and fed, unless one represses these vain complacencies, and one seeks purely only the glory of God, for which alone we must work; yes! purely for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. For, to do otherwise is to preach oneself and not Jesus Christ, and, a person who preaches to be applauded, praised, esteemed, to have people talk about him, what is this person doing, this preacher? what is he doing? A sacrilege; yes, a sacrilege! What! to use the word of God and divine things to acquire honor and reputation! yes, it is a sacrilege. O my God! O my God! grant the grace to this poor little Company, that not one of its members falls into this misfortune! Believe me, Gentlemen, we will never be fit to do the work of God, until we have a profound humility and an entire contempt for ourselves. No, if the Congregation of the Mission is not humble, and if it is not persuaded that it can do nothing worthwhile, that it is more fit to spoil everything than to succeed well, it will never do much; but when it will be and will live in the spirit that I have just said, then, Gentlemen, it will be fit for the designs of God, because it is such subjects that God uses to operate great and true goods."

While these humble servants of Jesus Christ were living thus in the most obscure retreat, the divine Master was disposing the means to establish them in the house of Saint-Lazare, situated on the road from Paris to Saint-Denis, today the faubourg Saint-Denis, an ecclesiastical lordship where there was high, middle, and low justice, vast lodgings, and enclosures no less considerable. The prior of this house, Adrien Le Bon, no longer being able to live in good understanding with his religious, and having heard of some good priests who were dedicated to doing missions, and that there was a man of God in their company, resolved to come to find him and to offer him his priory. Such an advantageous offer g reatly astonished the maison de Saint-Lazare Former priory that became the motherhouse of the Congregation of the Mission in Paris. humble Vincent; it produced on him the same effect as an unexpected clap of thunder: "Eh what! Monsieur," the good prior said to him, "you are trembling." — "It is true, Monsieur," he replied to him, "that your proposal terrifies me, and it seems to me so far above us, that I dare not raise my thought to it. We are poor priests who live in simplicity, without any other design than to serve the poor people of the fields. We are greatly obliged to you for your good will, and we thank you for it very humbly; but allow us not to accept your offer." In the space of six months, they returned more than twenty times to the charge. They ended by telling him that in refusing this house he was resisting the Holy Spirit, that he would answer for it before God. He only yielded out of obedience. He was ready, as he said on another occasion, to suffer everything, to remain in the greatest poverty, rather than to hinder the designs of God for him. Now, all the circumstances seemed to unite by themselves for the execution of His eternal designs.

A holy woman, who, in the judgment of five great bishops, was given to her century to convince it that neither the delicacy of temperament nor the engagements of the world are invincible obstacles to the highest perfection, took a house near that of Saint Vincent, without knowing him. This was Madame Le gras, destine Madame Legras Foundress of the Daughters of Charity who welcomed Catherine to Paris. d to become the mother of the poor just as our Saint was their father. She was already visiting them without regard for their illnesses, offering them food herself as if to tender children, making their beds, consoling them, preparing them for death, and burying them after they passed. Jean-Pierre Camus, Bishop of Belley and an illustrious friend of Saint Francis de Sales, being unable to direct her any longer because he had to move away from Paris, placed her under the guidance of our Saint. God had arranged this whole affair, because He wished to use these two great hearts to give His Church a new company of virgins solely consecrated to works of mercy. After a trial of four years spent in retreat, she received the order from Saint Vincent, in 1629, to visit a portion of the places where charity assemblies had been established, to honor the journeys that the charity of the Son of God caused Him to undertake, and to participate in the pains, the weariness, and the contradictions that this divine Savior endured there. She traveled through several dioceses with the greatest fruits, teaching the charity associations how to properly fulfill their holy functions, establishing them where they did not exist, and procuring abundant alms for them: these confraternities were soon established in the capital of the kingdom.

At the head of this valiant army of charity, one always saw Madame Legras who, like a valiant general, did not recoil before any danger. It happened one day that she approached a girl who had the plague; Saint Vincent, having learned of this, wrote to her in these terms: "I have just learned, only an hour ago, of the accident that happened to the girl whom your guards of the poor were removing, and since you visited her; I confess to you, Madame, that at first this so deeply touched my heart that, had it not been night, I would have left at that very hour to go and see you. But the goodness of God toward those who give themselves to Him for the service of the poor, in the Confraternity of Charity, in which, until now, no one has been struck by the plague, makes me have a very perfect confidence in Him that you will have no harm from it. Would you believe, Madame, that not only did I visit the late sub-prior of Saint-Lazare who died of the plague, but I even smelled his breath; and yet neither I nor our people who assisted him until the end have had any harm from it. No, Madame, do not fear; Our Lord wishes to use you for something that concerns His glory, and I believe that He will preserve you for that. I will celebrate Holy Mass for your intention."

However, several ladies enrolled in the charity associations could not, whether due to the opposition of their husbands or for other reasons, provide the necessary assistance to the poor and the sick, and, when they employed their servants to provide these services, it most often happened that they had neither the skill nor the affection to perform them well. They therefore sought as servants of the sick poor some good girls who had no disposition for marriage, nor the means to be nuns, and who wished, for the love of God, to consecrate themselves entirely to the care of the poor. Saint Vincent placed those whom Providence sent him into the hands of Madame Legras, to learn not only how to care for the sick, but above all the exercise of prayer and the spiritual life; because it is impossible to persevere for long in such a painful vocation and to overcome the repugnance of nature without a great fund of virtue and above all without a continual union with God. This was done in the year 1633, only by way of trial, and Madame Legras, as well as our Saint, was far from thinking that this was, in the designs of God, a nursery from which these Daughters of Charity would spread throughout the whole earth. Nothing is more beautiful than the regulatio n he gave them; this filles de la charité Company of women consecrated to the service of the sick and the poor. single passage will give an idea of it: "They shall consider that although they are not in a Congregation, this state not being suitable for the employments of their vocation, nevertheless, because they are much more exposed than cloistered and grilled nuns, having for their monastery only the houses of the sick, for their cell some poor room and very often a rented one, for their chapel the parish church, for their cloister the streets of the city, for their enclosure obedience, for their grille the fear of God, and for their veil holy modesty; for all these considerations, they must have as much or more virtue than if they were professed in a religious Order. That is why they shall try to behave, in all those places at least, with as much restraint, recollection, and edification as true nuns do in their monasteries. And, to obtain this grace from God, they must study the acquisition of all the virtues that are recommended to them by their Rules, and particularly a profound humility, a perfect obedience, and a great detachment from creatures; and above all they shall use all possible precautions to perfectly preserve the chastity of body and heart."

Later, young girls of standing offered themselves to share in such holy employments: they vied as an honor to serve abandoned poor who would not have been admitted to serve them in the world; the mustard seed soon became a great tree under the dew of heaven and its branches served as shelter for the abandoned orphan, the desolate widow, the soldier covered in wounds, for all miseries, for all misfortunes.

The Holy Spirit, if we may dare to speak thus, used our Saint to renew the face of the earth: he made him, above all, an instrument in the reform of the clergy. The ministers of the Church lived in such disorder that it was very difficult to convert the elders; it was necessary to strive to prepare better ones for the future. In the month of July 1628, the Bishop of Beauvais, having Saint Vincent with him in his carriage, remained pensive for some time; and when asked what was the matter, he said that he had just thought that the shortest and most certain way to prepare aspirants to Holy Orders was to gather them at his house a few days beforehand, to inform them there of the things they needed to know and practice: "Ah! My Lord," cried our Saint, "that is a thought that comes from God; that is an excellent way to gradually restore the entire clergy of your diocese to good order." The following September, fifteen or twenty days before the Ordination, he went to Beauvais to preach this retreat, "being more assured," he said, "that God asked this service of him, having learned it from the mouth of a bishop, than if it had been revealed to him by an angel." Soon this holy practice was established in Paris, where the archbishop obliged the ordinands to retreat for ten days with the priests of the Mission, and from there it spread throughout France and as far as Italy; the city of Rome, among others, reaped the most wonderful fruits from it. But it is not only ecclesiastics who must reform themselves in retreat by entering into themselves and giving their souls the nourishment that suits them in these spiritual exercises; every faithful person needs it: "The earth is in desolation," said a Prophet, "because there is no one who recollects himself and applies himself to thinking and meditating in his heart: one pours oneself out on external objects and forgets the internal ones, which are our soul, God, and eternal life." Our Saint, seeing the necessity of these spiritual exercises, opened the door of his house, and even more so that of his heart, to all persons who might have this devotion; he seemed to say, in imitation of his divine Master: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened with the weight of your sins and vices, and I will refresh you." His invitation was not neglected. One often saw, in the house of Saint-Lazare, lords wearing the blue ribbon, people from the palace, artisans, and lackeys, mingled with a crowd of ecclesiastics, eating in the same refectory, praying together; in a word, following the same exercises. Thus, our Saint, because of this mixture, compared Saint-Lazare to Noah's Ark. Women obtained the same care from the Daughters of Charity.

Some virtuous ecclesiastics having passed through the exercises of Ordination and received, by this means, great graces, desired to preserve and even increase this spiritual treasure. Our Saint, to whom they addressed themselves for this purpose, proposed to them a spiritual conference per week, where they could enlighten, help, and encourage one another in their work and perfect themselves in their duties. This assembly, small at the beginning, multiplied with a special blessing. From it came holy and learned personages, such as archbishops, bishops, vicars general, canons, and parish priests, who, in different dioceses of the kingdom, did great good by the example of their lives, their knowledge, and their zeal. Cardinal Richelieu, having one day sent for Saint Vincent, asked him who were particularly those he dee med worthy of the epi cardinal de Richelieu French prelate who received a relic of the saint. scopate; and, taking the pen, he himself drew up the list in his own hand, under the dictation of our Saint. The latter, far from letting the ecclesiastics of the conference guess the great charges that awaited them, exhorted them incessantly to flee from splendor and greatness, to embrace their own abjection, to catechize, and to care for the poor and the prisoners.

Saint Vincent's charity for the galley slaves, whose miseries he knew, did not allow him to forget them: thanks to him, they had a hospital in Marseille and in Paris, where they received all the care of soul and body when they were sick.

What clearly showed that, in all his enterprises, he was moved by the Holy Spirit and served as an instrument of Providence, was that he never acted with precipitation, always believed himself incapable of undertaking anything, and did nothing except through obedience. A pious lady having proposed to him to establish an assembly of ladies who would take some particular care of the sick at the Hôtel-Dieu, he did not work on this beautiful work until he had received the will of God through the organ of his bishop. These ladies were soon associated and animated by the spirit of our Saint. Although their main goal was to give spiritual consolation to two thousand sick people, to teach them the catechism, and to prepare them to die well, they always began with the relief of the bodies in order to better reach the soul. Besides the food they had distributed in the morning, they brought themselves, after dinner, around three o'clock, the collation for all: white bread, biscuits, jams, grapes, and cherries in season, and other sweets, which they went to distribute four or five together each day, in their turn, girded with aprons: separating through the wards, they went from one bed to another to render all kinds of services to the sick, or rather to Our Lord, in their person; for their holy director had well recommended that they invoke Him upon entering His altar, as the Father of the poor, and to obey in all things humbly the nuns as if they were visible angels. These pious ladies were from then on associated with all the good works of Saint Vincent. Here is one where their charity, as well as that of our Saint, would deserve to be represented, as painters ordinarily do who depict Charity with breasts and a large number of small children whom she holds in her arms and on her bosom.

Three or four hundred newborn children were abandoned each year in the streets of Paris by unnatural mothers, who did not even take care to procure for them the life of the soul through baptism. They were gathered in a house where they found only death, or something worse, and most without having been washed in the water that opens heaven. Saint Vincent became their provider: his heart and that of the ladies of charity felt for these innocent creatures a love that their stepmother-mothers had not wanted to receive from nature. They were gathered in a hospital, where care was taken for their food and education. But, as expenses increased each year, the ladies of charity found themselves very troubled to support such a great burden. They held a general assembly on this subject, in the year 1648, where Saint Vincent put to deliberation whether the Company should cease or continue to take care of the food of these children, it being in its liberty to discharge itself of it, since it had no other obligation to this good work than that of a simple charity. He proposed to them the reasons that could dissuade or persuade them; he showed them that until then, through their charitable care, they had kept alive up to five or six hundred, who would have died without their assistance, many of whom were learning a trade and others were in a state to learn one; that, through their means, all these poor children, in learning to speak, had learned to know and serve God; that from these beginnings they could infer what would be in the future the fruit of their charity. And then, raising his voice a little, he concluded with these words: "Come now, Ladies, compassion and charity have made you adopt these little creatures as your children; you have been their mothers according to grace, since their mothers according to nature abandoned them. See now if you also want to abandon them. Cease to be their mothers to become now their judges: their life and their death are in your hands; I am going to take the votes and suffrages; it is time to pronounce their sentence and to know if you no longer want to have mercy on them. They will live if you continue to take charitable care of them; and, on the contrary, they will die and perish infallibly if you abandon them: experience does not allow you to doubt it." Saint Vincent having pronounced these words with a tone of voice that made it clear enough what his sentiment was, these ladies were so strongly touched by it, that all, unanimously, concluded that it was necessary to support, at any cost, this enterprise of charity, and for that they deliberated among themselves on the means to make it subsist.

Cardinal Richelieu testified to our Saint that he was very pleased to see him from time to time, and even to consult him sometimes on the means of procuring the glory of God in the clergy. The servant of God told him that, to revive the first ecclesiastical spirit, the exercises of the ordinands, the conferences, and the retreats were not enough, but that it was necessary to carry the remedy to the very first source of the priesthood, that is to say, to prepare and dispose from long ago the children who showed some inclination and vocation for this state, according to the intention of the holy Council of Trent. The cardinal greatly liked this proposal, and provided our Saint with the means to establish a minor and a major seminary, where one should above all exercise oneself in virtue and prayer. The prelates of the kingdom, seeing the happy fruits of these establishments, wanted to have similar ones in their dioceses, and several of them entrusted their conduct to the priests of the Mission; thus the clergy of France regained its former splendor. All the works of our Saint embraced, not only a kingdom, but the whole earth. It was the same with his charities, and, a thing of which history offers no example, one saw a single man, with simple alms that God undoubtedly multiplied in his hands, feed entire peoples, like those of Lorraine, Champagne, and Picardy, devastated by war, famine, and plague. Lorraine especially experienced extremities to which one can only compare the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem. The poor died there of hunger by the thousands. One saw mothers eating their children. The heart of Vincent de Paul was torn at this news, as if he had been the father of all the suffering families. While France sent its armies to ravage Lorraine, he sent his priests, his nuns, to the aid of this unfortunate country, with alms, wheat, clothing, and medicines for the sick. The queen mother, the ladies of charity, and, above all, Providence, supported this work of mercy, which one can hardly explain without miracles. A single brother of the Mission made fifty-three trips to Lorraine during nine or ten years, to carry there enormous sums; by a manifest protection of God, although he made these trips through the armies, he was never robbed, nor searched, and always arrived happily in the places where he was to distribute his alms. Saint Vincent gathered in Paris the priests, the nuns, and the gentlemen of Lorraine, whom misery drove from their country, and those of Ireland, persecuted by Cromwell: "It is just," he said, "to assist and relieve this poor nobility, to honor our Lord who was very noble and very poor all at once." He did more; he went one day to find Cardinal Richelieu, and after having exposed to him with all sorts of respect the extreme suffering of the poor people and all the other disorders and sins caused by the war, he threw himself at his feet saying to him: "My Lord, give us peace; have pity on us; give peace to France." Which he repeated with so much feeling, that this great cardinal was touched by it; and, having taken his remonstrance in good part, he told him that he was working on it, and that this peace did not depend on him alone, but also on several other persons, both from the kingdom and from outside.

King Louis XIII, Le roi Louis XIII King of France who ordered the construction of the church. having heard of the virtue and holiness of life of the humble servant of God, sent for him to come to Saint-Germain-en-Laye at the beginning of his final illness, to be assisted in that state by his good and salutary advice. The first compliment that Saint Vincent paid to His Majesty upon arriving was to say to him these words of the Sage: "Sire," Timenti Deum, bene erit in extremis; "he who fears the Lord will be happy at the end of his life..." to which His Majesty, filled with the sentiments of his customary piety, which had led him to read and meditate often on these beautiful sentences of Scripture, replied by finishing the verse: Et in die defunctionis suæ benedicetur; "and he will be blessed (by the Lord) on the day of his death."

And another day, as this holy man was speaking to the King about the good use of the graces of God, the prince, reflecting on all the gifts he had received from God and considering the eminence of the royal dignity to which Providence had raised him, the great rights annexed to it, and particularly that of nominating to the bishoprics and prelacies of his kingdom, said to him: "Oh, Monsieur Vincent! If I were to return to health, the bishops would be at your house for three years."

When this most Christian prince saw that God wished to take him from this world, he again sent for Saint Vincent to assist him in this final passage. He returned therefore to Saint-Germain and went to His Majesty three days before his passing: he remained almost always in his presence, to help him raise his mind and heart to God, and to form interiorly acts of religion and other virtues proper to dispose himself well for this final moment, upon which eternity depends.

After the death of the King, the regent, Anne of Austria, judg ed it expedient Anne d'Autriche Queen of France who attended the missions of Jean Eudes. to establish a special council for ecclesi astical affairs. Our Saint was part of it. From then conseil particulier pour les affaires ecclésiastiques Governing body for Church affairs during the regency of Anne of Austria. on, he did not cease to address himself to God, praying every day that it might please Him to deliver him from this burden; and he told a person of confidence that since that time he had never celebrated the Holy Mass without asking for this grace. Having retired outside of Paris for a few days, the rumor spread that he was in disgrace and that he had been ordered to withdraw from the court; as, after his return, an ecclesiastic friend of his was rejoicing with him that this rumor had not proven true, he said to him, raising his eyes to heaven and striking his breast: "Ah! miserable that I am, I am not worthy of this grace!"

God willed that he remain for at least ten years in this employment, which was very painful for him, because it was to him that most of the affairs that were to be treated in this council were referred; he received the petitions that were presented to His Majesty and took note of the reasons and qualities of the persons who were asking, or for whom one was asking for benefices, in order to then make his report to the council: the Queen had particularly charged him to warn her of the capacity of the persons, so that His Majesty would not be taken by surprise. But it was a subject of admiration to see this great servant of God maintain a holy equality of spirit in the midst of a flux and reflux of persons and affairs by which he was continually assailed, and to possess his soul in peace under an overwhelming burden of distraction and importunities. He always received those who came to find him with the same serenity of countenance, and without departing from himself, he made himself all things to all men to win them to Jesus Christ.

Our Saint had much to suffer during the troubles of the Fronde; but he forgot his own sufferings and those of his Congregation to procure the spiritual and bodily good of the poor people in Paris and in several other places. His missionaries went every day from village to village with beasts loaded with food and clothing, to distribute them according to the needs of each; they also distributed soups that saved the lives of an almost innumerable number of starving poor: but they often lost their own, dying as victims of their charity, falling so to speak with arms in hand on the battlefield, and Saint Vincent blessed the Lord who granted such a beautiful crown to his children.

One cannot say with what ardor and tenderness of heart he recommended to pious persons to join to works of mercy vows, prayers, fasts, mortifications, and other exercises of penance; devotions, pilgrimages to Our Lady, to Saint Genevieve, and other tutelary saints of Paris and France; frequent confessions and communions, masses and sacrifices to try to bend the mercy of God and appease His anger: one cannot say what many good souls have done for this by his advice over several years; how many very delicate ladies have inflicted harsh austerities upon their bodies, and have not spared hairshirts, disciplines, and other macerations to join them to his own and those of his Company. Who could express his sorrow over the disorders of the armies? How sensibly and vividly he was touched by the violence committed everywhere and against all sorts of persons; by the sacrileges and profanations of the Most Holy Sacrament and of churches, and by all the other disorders caused by men of war! How many times has he said, speaking to ecclesiastics: "Ah! Gentlemen, if our Master is about to receive fifty blows of the stick, let us try to diminish the number and spare Him some; let us do something to repair His outrages: let there be at least someone who consoles Him in His persecutions and His sufferings!" He established for this purpose, in the house of Saint-Lazare, that every day three missionaries would fast for this intention: a priest, a cleric, and a brother; that the priest would celebrate Mass and that the other two would receive communion there. Once, being extraordinarily touched by the miseries that the scourge of war was causing throughout the earth, upon coming out of mental prayer, the subject of which was the utility of sufferings, he spoke to his entire community in these terms:

"I renew the recommendation that I have so many times made, and that one cannot make enough, to pray to God for peace, so that it may please Him to reunite the hearts of Christian princes. Alas! we see war on all sides and in all places: war in France, war in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, in Sweden, in Poland, attacked from three sides: in Ireland, whose poor inhabitants are transported from their country to sterile places, on mountains and rocks almost inaccessible and unusual: Scotland is hardly better; as for England, one knows the deplorable state in which it is; war finally in all the kingdoms, and misery everywhere. In France, so many people are in suffering! O Savior! O Savior! how many are there? If for four months that we have had war here, we have seen so many miseries in the heart of France where food abounds on all sides, what can these poor people of the frontiers do, who are exposed to all these miseries and have felt these scourges for twenty years?" Then, speaking of the country people, of the common people, he recommends them thus: "They are every day in fatigue, exposed sometimes to the heat of the sun and sometimes to the other injuries of the air; these poor laborers and vine-growers, who live only by the sweat of their brow, give us their labors, and they also expect that at least we will pray to God for them. Alas! my brothers, while they tire themselves thus to feed us, we seek the shade and we take rest! In the missions themselves where we work, we are at least sheltered from the injuries of the air in the churches, and not exposed to the winds, the rains, and the rigors of the seasons. Certainly, living thus on the sweat of these poor people and on the patrimony of Jesus Christ, we should always think, when we go to the refectory, if we have well earned the food that we are about to take. For me, I often have this thought which gives me much confusion, and I say to myself: Miserable one, have you earned the bread that you are going to eat, the bread that comes to you from the poor? At least, my brothers, if we do not earn it as they do, let us pray to God for them, and let no day pass that we do not offer them to Our Lord, so that it may please Him to give them the grace to make good use of their sufferings. We were saying, these past days, that God counts particularly on priests to stop the course of His indignation; He counts that they will do as Aaron did, and that they will put the censer in hand between Him and these poor people, or else that they will make themselves intercessors like Moses, to obtain the cessation of the evils that they suffer for their ignorance and for their sins, and that perhaps they would not suffer if they had been instructed, and if one had worked for their conversion. It is therefore to these poor that we must render these offices of charity, as much to satisfy the duty of our character as to render them some sort of gratitude for the goods that we receive from their labors. While they suffer and fight against necessity and against all the miseries that attack them, we must do as Moses did, and that at his example we raise our hands continually to heaven for them; and if they suffer for their sins and for their ignorance, we must be their intercessors toward divine mercy, and charity obliges us to extend our hands to them to withdraw them from it; and if we do not employ ourselves, even at the expense of our lives, to instruct them and to help them to convert perfectly to God, we are in some way the causes of all the evils that they endure."

But we cannot remain any longer admiring the virtues of the great servant of God; it is time to see him go to heaven, to receive his reward. For a long time, crosses of all kinds, the most acute illnesses, by which God purifies and rids of the last rust of the body the souls He wishes to call to His celestial embraces, warned our Saint that the most beautiful moment of his mortal life was approaching. Italy, which learned of his sufferings, was as alarmed as France; Pope Alexander VII, to maintain as long as he could the oil in a lamp so useful to the Church, dispensed our Saint, by an Apostolic Brief, from the recitation of the Breviary, without his knowing anything about it: Cardinals Durazzo, Archbishop of Genoa; Ludovizio, Grand Penitentiary of Rome, and Bagni, formerly Nuncio in France, wrote to him separately, to conjure him to moderate his labors. These various letters arrived only after his death. There had been, as was learned by chance, eighteen years that he had been preparing for it every day, as if he were to appear before his Judge in the night. To prepare for it more immediately in his last illness, every day, after Mass, he recited the prayers for the dying. Holy History teaches us that God, having called Moses to the summit of Mount Nebo, ordered him to die in that place, and this holy patriarch, submitting to the will of God, died at the same hour, not by the effort of any illness, but by the pure effect of obedience; "and he died," as the Holy Scripture says, "on the mouth of the Lord," that is to say, by receiving death like a kiss of peace from the mouth of his Lord. We can say that, by a very special mercy, He did something similar in favor of his faithful servant Vincent de Paul, who, having always lived in an entire and perfect dependence on His will, died at last, not so much by the effort of any fever or other violent illness, as by a kind of obedience and submission to that divine will: and his death was so peaceful and so tranquil that one would have taken it for a sweet sleep rather than a death. So that, to better express what the passing of this holy man was, it must be said that he fell asleep in the peace of his Lord, who wished to forestall him in this last passage with the most desirable blessings of His divine sweetness, and to place upon his head a crown of inestimable price. It was a particular reward that God wished to render to his fidelity and his zeal. He had consumed his life in cares, in labors, and in fatigues for His service; and he ended it happily in peace and tranquility. He had voluntarily deprived himself of all rest and all personal satisfaction during his life, to procure the advancement of the kingdom of Jesus Christ and the increase of His glory; and in dying he found true rest and began to enter into the joy of his Lord. Here is more particularly how everything happened:

On September 25, around noon, he fell asleep in his chair; which had been happening to him for some days more than usual, and which stemmed from his sleeplessness at night and his extreme weakness; this weakness always kept him drowsy. He considered this drowsiness as the image and harbinger of his approaching death.

On Sunday, September 26, he had himself carried to the chapel, where he heard Holy Mass, and received communion, as he did every day; having returned to his room, he fell into a deeper drowsiness than usual; so that the brother who was assisting him, seeing that this continued too long, woke him, and, after having made him speak, seeing that he fell back immediately into the same drowsiness, he warned the one who had charge of the house, by whose order they went to fetch the doctor. The latter, having come in the afternoon, found the Saint so weak that he did not judge him in a state to receive any remedy, and said that he must be given Extreme Unction; nevertheless, before withdrawing, having awakened him and excited him to speak, this virtuous sick man, according to his custom, answered him with a smiling and affable face; but after a few words he remained short, not having the strength to finish what he wanted to say.

One of the principal priests of his Congregation having come to see him afterward, and having asked for his blessing for all those of the said Congregation, both present and absent, he made an effort to lift his head and to welcome him with his ordinary affability, and, having begun the words of the blessing, he pronounced more than half of them out loud, and the others in a whisper. Toward evening, as it was seen that he was weakening more and more and that he seemed to be tending toward the agony, he was given the sacrament of Extreme Unction. He spent the night in a sweet, tranquil, and almost continuous application to God: and when he became drowsy one only had to speak to him to wake him, which any other word would have difficulty obtaining. Now, among the devout aspirations that were suggested to him from time to time, he showed he had a particular devotion to these words of the Psalmist: *Deus in adjutorium meum intende*: "O my God, come to my aid." And for this reason they were often repeated to him, and he answered immediately: *Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina*: "Lord, make haste to help me." Which he continued to do until his last breath.

A very virtuous ecclesiastic of the Saint-Lazare conference was at that time on retreat in the same house: he honored and cherished our Saint greatly, and reciprocally our Saint had much tenderness for him. Having therefore learned of the extremity to which this dear sick man was reduced, he came into his room a little before he expired, and, in asking for his blessing for all the members of the conference he had associated, he begged him to leave them his spirit and to obtain from God that their company might never degenerate from the virtue he had inspired and communicated to it; to which he replied with his ordinary humility: *Qui cœpit opus bonum, ipse perficiet*: "He who has begun a good work, will bring it to completion." And, soon after, he passed gently from this life to a better one, without effort or any convulsion.

It was on Monday, September 27, 1660, around four-thirty in the morning, that God drew him to Himself, when his spiritual children, assembled in the church, were beginning their mental prayer to draw God into themselves. It was at the same hour and at the same moment that he had been accustomed, for forty years, to invoke the Holy Spirit upon himself and his own, that this adorable Spirit took his soul from earth to heaven, to crown the holiness of his life, his zeal for the glory of God, his charity for his neighbor, his humility, his patience, and all his other virtues, in the practice of which he persevered until death.

Having breathed his last, his face did not change: he remained in his ordinary sweetness and serenity, being in his chair in the same posture as if he had been sleeping. He expired fully seated and fully dressed, having remained in this way for the last twenty-four hours of his life; for those who were assisting him had judged that in this state it was difficult to touch him without causing him more harm and without danger of shortening his life. He died without fever and without any extraordinary accident, having ceased to live by a pure failure of nature, like a lamp that goes out insensibly when the oil begins to fail it. His body did not stiffen, but remained as supple and manageable as it was before.

He remained exposed the following day, September 28, until noon, both in the hall and in the church of Saint-Lazare, where the divine service was performed solemnly, and then his funeral. The Prince of Conti was there with M. Piccolomini, the Pope's Nuncio, Archbishop of Caesarea, and several other prelates; as well as some of the parish priests of Paris, a large number of ecclesiastics, and a quantity of religious of various Orders. The Duchess of Aiguillon and several other lords and ladies likewise wished to honor his memory by their presence, as well as the people who were there in a great crowd. His heart was set aside in a silver reliquary that the Duchess of Aiguillon gave for this purpose; and his body, placed in a lead coffin, itself enclosed in a wooden coffin, was buried in the church of Saint-Lazare, below the corner. The entrails were deposited in the nave, under the middle of the balustrade partition. On the lead coffin was placed a copper plate with this inscription:

*Hic jacet venerabilis vir Vincentius a Paulo, Presbyter, Fundator, seu Institutor et primus Superior Generalis Congregationis Missionis, necnon Puellarum Charitatis. Obiit die 27 septembris anni 1660, ætatis vero suæ LXXXV. Præfuit annis XXXV.*

The reputation for holiness that Vincent enjoyed in almost the entire universe increased by the miracles that were obtained through his intercession. Soon kings and princes joined their subjects to ask for his beatification from Clement VI. Cardinals and foreign prelates made the same requests as those of France, who explained to the Holy See that the life of this holy Priest had been a prodigy; that one had all the trouble in the world to prevent the people from rendering him a too-precipitate cult, and that, finally, the glory of this servant of God would be that of religion.

He seems to have left us his spirit in the holy Congregations of men and women who make his name blessed throughout the universe; he continues, in the person of his priests of Saint-Lazare, to evangelize the peoples, to form pious Levites; he cares for the sick by the hands of those holy daughters whose hearts seem to have inherited his charity.

In recent times, the Company of the Daughters of Charity has taken on admirable developments and has extended its benefits to all regions of the world. It counted, in 1855, nearly nine hundred establishments, including four hundred and eighty-five hospitals. Multiplied vocations have brought the number of these heroines of religion to nearly ten thousand. There are few cities in France where these worthy daughters of Saint Vincent de Paul have not been called. They have formed houses of charity and serve hospitals in Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, in the various States of Italy and Germany; they make the Christian name and the French name blessed in Africa, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, China, as well as in Egypt, Greece, Syria, in Turkey in Europe and Asia. The Eastern War has brought into new relief the devotion and zeal of this holy phalanx. Twenty to twenty-five military ambulances, established in Crimea or Constantinople, were served by about one hundred Daughters of Charity. Nothing was more touching or more admirable than the examples of faith, piety, abnegation, resignation, and strength, which were given on these distant shores, as much by the French soldiers as by these Christian virgins, whom Sultan Abdul-Medjid himself called earthly angels.

It is also in his name that fervent laypeople, animating themselves with his sentiments in pious conferences, honor Our Lord Jesus Christ in the poor, whose body and soul they surround with the most fraternal aid. Here is how this beautiful institution was formed: In 1832, some young men, brought to Paris to complete their studies, had the thought of associating themselves for a goal of perseverance and charity. To meet on certain fixed days, to edify one another through good readings and pious conversations, to bring to the poor at home some aid taken from their modest resources, such were the first attempts of this association, which took the name of Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul. God blessed the nascent work and gave it in a few years a great increase. In December 1835, rules were established and applied to the various conferences that were formed in France and abroad. In January and August 1845, the Sovereign Pontiff Gregory XVI approved the Society and enriched it with indulgences. Pope Pius IX, by two briefs, one of March 18, 1853, the other of March 18, 1854, increased the treasure of spiritual riches granted to the members of the association. A considerable number of bishops from various points of Christendom testified to their benevolence for the work, and granted it their encouragement and their blessing.

This work, one of the most beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful of our era, born in France, one of the glories, one of the influences of France, for it had propagated itself throughout the universe, was, by the order of the government of Napoleon III, deprived of its general council of Paris.

The reasons given for acting in this way are curious: at a time when everything is being centralized, when it is believed that the citizen thinks badly, speaks badly, votes badly without the government, when one would stamp alms if one dared, at this same time, by a glaring contradiction, it was declared that the various conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul in the provinces could very well have the spirit of the work and function without taking counsel from a center. This reflection is from our sixth edition. Today we can say that the fall of the empire has returned to us the freedom of alms, the most innocent of all.

Saint Vincent de Paul is sometimes represented preaching to the convicts on the royal galleys of which he was the chaplain. — A small child is often placed in his arms, because of his work for foundlings. — In a very old engraving, one sees Vincent offering the holy sacrifice in a humble chapel surrounded by woods. A statue of the Virgin dominates the poor and bare altar; at the foot is an assisting priest, with a single server. At the bottom of the engraving one reads: "Saint Vincent de Paul said his first Mass in a chapel of the Blessed Virgin, which is on the other side of the Tarn, on the top of a mountain and in the woods; he chose this solitary place to perform the divine sacrifice with less disturbance and in the deepest recollection, being assisted, according to custom, only by a priest and a clerk to serve him.

## CULT AND RELICS.

The Cardinal de Noailles, on the orders of Rome, proceeded to the opening of the tomb of Saint Vincent de Paul, on February 19, 1712. The doctors, after a most exact examination, attested that they had found a body entirely whole and without any bad odor. The prodigies performed by the intercession of the Saint were examined by the Church with as much severity as his enemies could do. He was placed among the Blessed, on August 13, 1729. The great of the earth therefore had the consolation of bending their knees with their subjects before the image of this humble priest who, so many times, had bent his own before the little ones and the poor. Heaven, by new prodigies, confirmed these honors. Our Saint was canonized on June 16, 1737.

His cult spread in Savoy and Piedmont, in Genoa and Tuscany, in Naples and in the States of the Church, in Austria and Poland, in Spain and Portugal. It crossed the seas. He was celebrated as far as China, everywhere the missionaries had some establishment.

His body, enclosed in a silver reliquary, was kept in the church of Saint-Lazare. On August 30, 1792, this church was stripped of its silverware and everything precious it had by a commissioner of the revolutionary government, who handed over to the Lazarist Fathers the mortal remains of their holy Founder; they collected them with great respect, drew up a report to verify their authenticity, and hid them with care during the frightful reign of Terror. The times having become more tranquil, this precious deposit was entrusted to the Daughters of Charity, who kept it in their chapel until the month of March 1830, the time at which it was carried to the archbishopric of Paris. The archbishop, filled with veneration for the holy priest who, by his virtues, has so honored the Church of France, and has left in the capital so many monuments still subsisting of his charity, had a silver reliquary of beautiful workmanship executed, and wished to transfer solemnly the body of Saint Vincent into the new chapel built by the Fathers of Saint-Lazare, on land belonging to the house they inhabit. This translation, forever memorable in the annals of the Church of Paris, effectively took place, with the greatest pomp, on April 25, 1830, which was that year the second Sunday after Easter; and now, every year, on the same Sunday, its memory is renewed at the office and at Mass. The events of July 1830 forced this holy relic to be hidden; but, on April 13, 1834, it was again exposed to the veneration of the faithful, in the chapel of the Fathers of Saint-Lazare.

The heart of Saint Vincent de Paul, transported to Turin during the French Revolution, has since been claimed by Cardinal Fesch: it is now in Lyon. The cathedral of Coutances possesses some of his relics. The diocese of Rouen has celebrated his feast since 1823.

An autograph of Saint Vincent de Paul is kept at Brie-Comte-Robert (Seine-et-Marne). This autograph relates to various annotations he made in the regulation of the Confraternity of Charity founded by him in this city, in 1631.

Small relics of Saint Vincent are kept at Saint-Jacques d'Amiens (1773), at the Ursulines, at the major seminary and at Saint-Acheul; at the Hôtels-Dieu of Amiens, Bray-sur-Somme, Péronne, and Roye; at the churches of Folleville (1770), Liancourt-Fosse, and Saint-Riquier. The inventory of Corbie, drawn up in 1820, mentions a fragment of the habit of Saint Vincent de Paul. One sees at the Saint-Charles hospice in Amiens, in a reliquary, a small image of the Saint, whose heart, visible, is said to have been painted with the blood of the founder of the priests of the Mission.

We have used, to compose this biography, the Life of Saint Vincent de Paul, by Abelly, the work of the Abbé Maynard: Saint Vincent de Paul, his life, his time, his works, his influence, 4 vol. in-8°; Paris, 1860; and the Hagiography of the diocese of Amiens, by the Abbé Corblet.