Madame Acarie

Extract

After a painful illness of nearly three months there died, at the age of fifty-two, on the Wednesday in Easter week (April 18, 1618), in the Carmelite convent of the reform of St. Teresa at Pontoise, soeur Marie de l’Incarnation, a lay sister, five years professed. Dr. André Duval, who wrote her life, has left some account of the manner of her death. “I arrived at Pontoise,” he says, “at about half-past five in the morning . . . when I got to the courtyard I met the turn sister looking for the chaplain to come and give extreme unction . . . they told the prioress that I had arrived, and she sent me at once a surplice and a stole; I went straightway to the infirmary . . . the doctor told me that it was advisable to anoint her and thereupon I began it; as I was doing so she breathed her last. The doctor having informed me that she was dead I ceased the anointing and began the anthem Subvenite with the prayers which follow . . .”.

This matter of fact account by the grave doctor of the Sorbonne hides the great reverence he had for her at whose deathbed he was present. Indeed we may wonder why he should trouble to journey through the night from Paris to minister to a lay sister in a provincial convent, even though he was one of the ecclesiastical superiors of that and all the other Carmelite convents in France.