Saint Marie of the Incarnation (1599-1672)

A Birth at Tours (1599)

Marie Guyart was born at Tours on October 28, 1599 — baptized the next day, October 29, in the church of Saint-Saturnin.^[7] She was the daughter of Florent Guyart, a master baker of the city, and Jeanne Michelet, whom biographical tradition links, through one branch, to the noble Babou de La Bourdaisière family — an ancestry reported by the biographers, with no established primary source.^[8] The fourth of several children — the sources speak of seven or eight siblings — Marie grew up in a pious artisan family in the Touraine of the Grand Siècle.^[9][10]

The Dream of the Seven-Year-Old Child

All her life, Marie dated her vocation to a dream received at about the age of seven. In the Relation of 1654 she tells how she saw Christ coming toward her; her heart pounding, she cried out inwardly, and then, at the Lord's question, gave the first "yes" of her life.^[11][12][13]

"Will you be mine?" — Words Marie attributes to Christ in her childhood dream; she answered at once: "Yes."^[14][15]

She held this brief exchange to be the founding act of her whole existence: a covenant sealed in childhood, which sixty-five eventful years would only unfold.

Marriage, Motherhood and Early Widowhood

Against her attraction to the cloister, her parents married her off. In about 1617, at roughly seventeen, she married Claude Martin, a master silk worker at Tours.^[16][17] From this union was born a son, Claude, in April 1619 (the sources waver between April 1 and April 2).^[18][19]

Happiness was brief. A few months after this birth, in late 1619, Claude Martin died, leaving Marie a widow before twenty, with a nursling and a struggling business.^[20][21] She refused every offer of remarriage: the young widow had already, in her heart, chosen God.

The Businesswoman: Paul Buisson's Carrier Company

Far from withdrawing, Marie took charge of her brother-in-law Paul Buisson's transport business at Tours. For several years she managed the warehouses, contracts, workmen, horses and wagon trains that moved goods along the Loire and the roads of Touraine.^[22][23] According to this hagiographical account alone, some sixty horses and a large staff are said to have been placed under her responsibility — a figure not confirmed by the critical notices.^[24]

This period was decisive: it forged in the future nun a practical competence — negotiating, bookkeeping, directing men — which would later make her a foundress able to build, feed and administer a monastery at the end of the world. Marie of the Incarnation's mysticism would never be a flight from reality: it was born, precisely, in the midst of business.

March 24, 1620: "In a Moment"

On March 24, 1620, in a street in Tours, Marie received the grace that cut her life in two. She would tell how "in a moment, the eyes of [her] mind were opened": she saw all her faults at a single glance, and felt herself plunged into the blood of Christ washing her clean.^[25][26][27] Overwhelmed, she ran to throw herself at a confessor's feet, at the convent of the Feuillants.

This experience was no passing feeling but a definitive entrance into the mystical life. Marie dated her true conversion to that day: the discovery, not of a moral code, but of a love that seized her and would never let her go.

Private Vows and Direction by the Feuillants

From then on, while still running the carrier business, Marie led a double life: outwardly the businesswoman, inwardly the spouse of Christ. She secretly pronounced private vows of chastity, poverty and obedience.^[28] She placed herself under the direction of the Feuillant Dom Raymond de Saint-Bernard, to whom she opened her soul in letters of conscience that rank among the earliest witnesses to her journey.^[29]

The Trinitarian Graces (1625-1627)

It was in those years — the sources place the great moments in about 1625 and 1627 — that Marie received her highest visions, centered on the mystery of the Holy Trinity.^[30][31] She describes a successive communication of the three divine Persons, then a union with the Word in which, she would say, the Son took her as His spouse.^[32][33] These graces are the summit of her mysticism and the key to her religious name.

The collections of her sayings attribute to her this oft-quoted maxim: God would never abandon those who treat Him as a friend and prefer Him to all things, even to themselves.^[34]

Marie of the Incarnation: A Name, A Mystery

The name she would choose in religion — "of the Incarnation" — is not decorative. It expresses the heart of her spirituality: union with the Word made flesh, the eternal Son who, in becoming incarnate, gives Himself to the soul. Her whole apostolic life — crossing the ocean to bring Christ to peoples who did not know Him — flows from this contemplation of God made near. Her mysticism is Christocentric and Trinitarian, in the great line of the seventeenth-century French School of spirituality.

"Give Me Back My Mother"

When her son Claude was eleven, Marie judged the moment had come to follow the call of the cloister. On January 25, 1631, she entrusted the child to her sister, left her aged father and entered the Ursuline convent of Tours.^[35][36] The separation was a martyrdom. Sensing her departure, little Claude had run away; he was found several days later on the quays of Blois.^[37] After his mother entered, he came with a band of schoolboys to lay siege to the monastery, loudly demanding his mother back.

"Give me back my mother, give me back my mother!" — Little Claude Martin's cry before the parlor of the Tours Ursulines, as reported by the biographers; his mother confessed she felt herself dying "quite alive."^[38]

This tearing apart — leaving a child to follow God — is one of the most discussed and most poignant features of her life. Marie saw in it neither hardness nor indifference, but the costliest obedience to a vocation she believed certain. History would give her a sign: this abandoned son would become a Benedictine, then his mother's faithful correspondent and biographer.

Novice, Sub-Mistress, Professed

Among the Ursulines, Marie took the name of Marie of the Incarnation and gave herself wholly to religious life. Her novitiate ended in 1633 with her profession.^[39][40] Responsibilities came very quickly: she was made sub-mistress of novices and taught Christian doctrine — for the Ursulines are, above all, a teaching order, devoted to the instruction of girls.^[41] She then wrote a first Relation (1633) and a catechism, L'École sainte (The Holy School), which the Jesuit Charlevoix would later judge "one of the best in French."^[42]

The Dream of the "Great Country" (1633-1635)

In about 1633-1634, Marie received a mysterious dream: she was walking with a lady through a vast, misty, wild country, in which stood a small church of white marble.^[43][44] At first she did not understand what God was showing her. Light came in about 1635: this country was Canada.

"It is Canada that I showed you; you must go there to build a house for Jesus and Mary." — Interior word Marie reports as the origin of her missionary vocation.^[45][46]

At that time, the Jesuit Relations — the yearly accounts of the New France missionaries such as Saint John de Brébeuf and Saint Isaac Jogues — were setting devout France ablaze. Marie burned with desire for the salvation of souls among those distant peoples. But a cloistered nun cannot leave alone: she needed a door, and means.

Madame de la Peltrie and the Departure (1639)

Providence sent her Marie-Madeleine de Chauvigny de La Peltrie, a young wealthy Norman widow, likewise called to New France and ready to finance the foundation.^[47][48] The alliance of the mystic and the benefactress made the project possible.

Marie left Tours in early 1639, reached Dieppe, and embarked on May 4, 1639 aboard the Saint-Joseph with Madame de la Peltrie, two other Ursulines (Marie de Savonnières de Saint-Joseph and Cécile Richer de Sainte-Croix) and a young laywoman, Charlotte Barré.^[49][50] After a perilous crossing, they arrived at Quebec on August 1, 1639.

The First School for Girls in North America

At Quebec, Marie and her companions first settled in a modest house in the Lower Town — which she smilingly called her "Louvre."^[51] Then, on November 21, 1642, the community moved into a stone monastery in the Upper Town.^[52] There was born the first school for girls in all of North America: a work of teaching, free for the poorest, which would mark the history of education in Canada for centuries.^[53][54]

Educating French and Indigenous Girls

The school took in both the daughters of French settlers and young Indigenous girls — Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, later Iroquois. For lack of currency in the colony, Marie accepted board paid in kind: wood, butter, pork, salted eels.^[55] She fed, nursed, instructed and catechized, with a maternal tenderness of which her letters bear traces everywhere.

She herself acknowledged, with a lucidity that honors her, the limits of "Frenchification": the cultural rootedness of the young Indigenous girls resisted, and she admitted how very hard it was to keep them away from woodland life.^[56] This honesty, far from diminishing her work, shows its realism: Marie did not idealize, she loved real persons. Among the lasting fruits, a former pupil, Marie-Madeleine Chrestienne, would marry Pierre Boucher, the future governor of Trois-Rivières.^[57]

The Woman of Four Languages: Dictionaries and Catechisms

The most astonishing trait is linguistic. Past forty, Marie set herself to study Indigenous languages and mastered them to the point of teaching, praying and composing in those tongues.^[58][59] She left a body of works — often the first of their kind — whose list, as reconstructed by historians, is dizzying.

The following table summarizes the principal linguistic works attributed to her by tradition and historians; the approximate dates below are those retained by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and the biographical notices (following the Oury edition, 1971), for manuscripts now largely lost in the monastery's fires.^[60][61]

Many of these manuscripts perished in the monastery's successive fires; only mentions and fragments survive. But their very existence makes Marie of the Incarnation a pioneer of the encounter between the Gospel and the Indigenous languages of the continent.

The Fire of 1650 and the Rebuilding

In the night of December 30 to 31, 1650, the stone monastery was entirely destroyed by fire.^[62][63] All was lost: buildings, provisions, some of the manuscripts. Sheltered for a time by Madame de la Peltrie, Marie and her sisters, far from giving up, rebuilt. The fifty-year-old superior rediscovered her Tours talents as a builder: she negotiated, borrowed, directed the works, and raised the monastery from its ashes. The episode has remained the symbol of her supernatural tenacity: the foundress relied not on means, but on God.

A Superior in the Colony

Elected and re-elected superior, Marie became a central figure of the little colony. She corresponded with the governors, the intendant Jean Talon, the first vicar apostolic François de Laval — the future saint with whom she would be canonized.^[64] Her letters describe everything: harvests, smallpox epidemics, the Franco-Iroquois wars, the price of bread, the spiritual life of the settlers. She was, in the full sense, the living memory of the beginnings of New France.

The Two Autobiographical Relations (1633, 1654)

Marie of the Incarnation is, with Teresa of Avila, one of the great authors of Catholic mysticism. At the insistence of her son Claude, now a Benedictine, she wrote at Quebec, in 1654, a second autobiographical Relation — developing the one of 1633 — in which she recounts, with striking precision, the journey of her soul, her thirteen states of prayer, her Trinitarian graces and her spiritual marriage.^[65][66] This text is now held to be a masterpiece of French-language spiritual literature.

An Immense Correspondence

Her correspondence is a monument. Historians estimate she wrote several thousand letters — the figure of thirteen thousand is often given — of which only a portion survives: about 278 letters preserved, and 221 published by her son in the 1681 Recueil.^[67][68] The reference critical edition by Dom Guy Oury, a monk of Solesmes, retains 288 of them, with forty appended pieces — the gap with older counts comes from classification criteria (whole letters, fragments, enclosures) rather than any substantive disagreement.^[69] Written offhand, between two tasks, they unite the most concrete information about the colony with the heights of the interior life. It was through them that Europe came to know New France.

"The Teresa of Our Days and of the New World"

After her death, her son published her Life (1677) and her letters (1681). The work struck the greatest minds. Bossuet, in his Instruction on the States of Prayer (Instruction sur les états d'oraison), ranked her among authentic mystics and gave her the title that would define her forever:

"the Teresa of our days and of the New World" — Bossuet, Instruction on the States of Prayer^[70]

The comparison with Saint Teresa of Avila is no flattery: like the reformer of Carmel, Marie united a very high mysticism with a genius for action and government, and knew how to set down in writing, with rare clarity, the most interior states of the soul.

Union with the Incarnate Word

At the center of her interior life stands the Incarnate Word. The name she chose expresses her contemplation: the eternal Son who became flesh and gives Himself to the soul. From this union flows all the rest — the desire to bring Christ to the nations, patience in trials, tenderness for children. Her mysticism is never an escape: it is incarnate, like the God she contemplates.

Trinitarian Mysticism and Spiritual Marriage

Her highest graces are Trinitarian: she describes a communication of the three divine Persons, then a spousal union with the Word.^[71][72] This "spiritual marriage" — a classic theme of the great mystics, from Teresa of Avila to Saint John of the Cross — has nothing sentimental about it: it is the transformation of the soul into God, where the human will melts into the divine Will. Marie speaks of it with a theologian's sobriety, without complacency for the extraordinary.

Abandonment to the Will of God

The thread running through her whole life is abandonment: abandonment in widowhood, in separation from her son, in the crossing, in the fire, in the wars. Marie does not seek her own consolation but God's good pleasure. This conformity to the divine will ranks her among the great mistresses of the school of abandonment — the school Catholic spirituality would find again in Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Jane de Chantal or, later, in the way of the Divine Will — to live in the Divine Will, that is, to receive the Will itself so as to have with God but one single acting will, and not only to do God's will. Her doctrine can be put in few words: to let oneself be possessed, to trust the Father who never abandons His friends.

Apostolic Zeal: "Winning Souls"

Contemplation, in her, overflows into mission. It was not despite her mysticism but because of it that she crossed the ocean: the soul united to the Word wants the Word to be known and loved. She carried in her prayer all the peoples of the "savage land," offered herself for their salvation, and saw in the least little baptized Indigenous girl a victory of God. It is this same flame that would animate the Jesuit martyrs, her contemporaries, and, a generation after her, the young Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.

Mary, Mother and Queen

Her devotion was profoundly Marian. It is "for Jesus and Mary" that she was to build a house in Canada; it is under the Virgin's protection that she placed her daughters and pupils. This tenderness for the Mother of God, common to all the mysticism of her century, completes her spiritual portrait: a mother — in the world, in the cloister, on mission — conformed to the Mother par excellence.

Death at Quebec (April 30, 1672)

After more than thirty years in the service of New France, Marie of the Incarnation died at Quebec on April 30, 1672, aged seventy-two.^[73][74] A few months earlier her faithful companion, Madame de la Peltrie, had died. To the end, her thoughts went to God and to her distant son, to whom she had this last message carried:

"Tell him that I carry him in my heart." — Last message of Marie of the Incarnation for her son Claude, who had remained in France.^[75]

She is buried at the Ursuline monastery, where her relics are still venerated.^[76]

Venerable, Blessed, Saint (1911-1980-2014)

The process of her cause, introduced in the nineteenth century, came slowly to fruition; the Church recognizes her as a "mistress of the spiritual life."^[77] The following table summarizes the great stages of her recognition.

The Equipollent Canonization and Its Meaning

On April 3, 2014, Pope Francis inscribed Marie of the Incarnation in the catalogue of saints by an equipollent (or "equivalent") canonization, together with François de Laval, first bishop of Quebec.^[78][79] This ancient mode of canonization does not require the recognition of a new miracle: the pope confirms and extends to the universal Church an already ancient and constant cult, inscribing the saint's feast in the calendar. Francis used it several times, notably for Peter Faber and Angela of Foligno.

A solemn Mass of thanksgiving was celebrated at Rome on October 12, 2014. The pope presented the two new saints as models of docility to the Spirit and missionary zeal:

"Such were Saint François de Laval and Saint Marie of the Incarnation." — Pope Francis, homily at the Mass of thanksgiving, October 12, 2014^[80]

Saint Marie of the Incarnation united what is usually thought incompatible: the highest mysticism and the roughest action. Wife and mother, widow and businesswoman, nun and foundress, contemplative and missionary, writer and builder — she held everything together in the unity of a single love for the Incarnate Word.

Her paradox sums up her holiness: she left one child to win thousands, and lost her Tours life to find it again, fruitful, at the end of the world. The grain of wheat fallen into the earth bore, on the other side of the ocean, a harvest that endures still.

Her figure recalls that the Catholic Reformation was not only a matter of councils and controversies: it was also the upsurge of creative holinesses who, like Marie, crossed the seas to bring the Gospel. First educator of the girls of America, mother of young Indigenous girls, "Teresa of the New World," she remains the patroness of missionaries, educators and all who, amid the business of the world, seek God.

• On the order she planted in Canada: the Ursulines and the monastery of the Ursulines of Quebec (dedicated articles).
• On the missionaries of New France, her contemporaries: Saint John de Brébeuf and Saint Isaac Jogues, Canadian martyrs.
• On the Indigenous fruits of the mission: Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the "Lily of the Mohawks."
• On the other great foundress of Montreal, of the same generation: Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys.
• On the mystic to whom Bossuet compared her: Saint Teresa of Avila.
• On the spirituality of abandonment and the interior life of her century: Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane de Chantal, Saint John Eudes, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque.