St. Zélie Martin is buried at Alençon without her five daughters

ALENÇON, Normandy, 29 August 1877 AD — The doors of the church of Notre-Dame stood open at nine this morning, and relatives and friends went in for the funeral of Saint Zélie Martin, the lace-maker of Rue Saint-Blaise, who died at half past midnight yesterday. She was forty-five.

Her five daughters were not there. By the custom here the daughters of the dead do not come to the funeral, and none of the five came: Marie, seventeen; Pauline, fifteen, and sixteen in nine days; Léonie, fourteen; Céline, eight; and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, four and a half.

It is their parish church. Saint Louis Martin and St. Zélie Martin were married there. The civil ceremony was at ten at night on 12 July 1858 AD; two hours later, at midnight, with almost nobody present, Abbé Hurel, the dean of Saint-Léonard, received their consent. They had met that April on the bridge at Saint-Léonard, where she noticed a young watchmaker. Three months from the bridge to the altar.

Canon Dumaine baptized the youngest of the five girls in the same church on 4 January 1873 AD, two days after she was born. Marie, who was twelve, stood as her godmother, and the child went into the register as Marie-Françoise-Thérèse. The entry carries a great many signatures, and visitors are shown it.

On Sunday evening St. Louis Martin walked to this church to fetch the priest for his wife, and came back through the streets beside the Blessed Sacrament himself. He turned fifty-four a week ago today.

St. Zélie Martin was buried after the funeral in the cemetery of Notre-Dame, in the old part.

She had wanted the religious life first. The superior of the convent she applied to would not take her, so she learned the Point d’Alençon instead, and towards the end of 1853 AD set up as a manufacturer of it at 36 Rue Saint-Blaise, putting work out to home workers. She said her workers were to be loved like members of her own family. The business had her up at four in the morning and still working at eleven at night. She was still running it this month.

Four of her children died before her, and they are buried in the same cemetery. She had nine, and every one of them was given Marie for a first name. The two boys were both called Joseph; their parents had asked St. Joseph for a son who would grow up to be a priest. One died at five months and the other at nine. Mélanie Thérèse died at three months. Hélène died in February 1870 AD, in her mother’s arms in the morning, five minutes after telling her she would soon be well. The doctor had reached the house on the Monday, found a fever and a congested lung, and said the lung was in serious danger. Her father came in, saw her, and broke down. St. Zélie Martin wrote it out afterwards: “When he came back into the room and saw his poor little daughter dead, he began to sob, ‘My little Hélène, my little Hélène!’ Then together we offered her to the Lord.”

She went on keeping that child’s birthday. In October 1875 AD she wrote: “Yesterday was the 11th year since the birth of little Hélène, and I thought so much of her; I will be very happy to see her again in the next life.”

Her own sister, Sister Marie-Dosithée, a Visitandine at Le Mans, died in February this year. Twelve weeks ago, writing to her brother and his wife before she left for Lourdes, St. Zélie Martin put the dead on the list of the people she was counting on: “And then, I have my sister in Heaven who is interested in me, I also have my four little angels who will pray for me; all will be in Lourdes with us.” Her brother had told her to take a corner seat in the carriage. She wrote back to him: “I don’t want a corner; any place will be good.” She went into the baths at Lourdes in June and came home no better.

That brother is Isidore Guérin, a chemist at Lisieux. A letter from Marie brought him and his wife, Céline Guérin, to the sickroom on Monday, the day before the death. St. Zélie Martin smiled at them, then looked a long time at her sister-in-law, which was as much as she could do by then: since the anointing she could neither move nor make herself heard, and her family had to read her words off her lips. She left instructions that her husband and her daughters were to go to Lisieux and live near her brother.

Since yesterday morning St. Louis Martin and the five girls had stayed with the body in the room where it was laid, and kept looking at her face. It looked much younger than forty-five.

The house has been running short-handed. Louise Marais, the maid for twelve years, was dismissed during the illness for beating Léonie and turning the girl against her mother, then asked to be allowed to stay to the end because nobody else could nurse her mistress properly. She did the nursing to the last, and is leaving now. It was Léonie, of the five, that her mother had been asking God for more years for. St. Zélie Martin wrote to Pauline in March: “This is why, now, I have a desire to live that I had not known until this day. I am very necessary to this child.”

A friend of the family, whose name the record does not preserve, has come to the door every morning of the last weeks to collect the two smallest girls and keep them at her own house for the day, out of the sickroom.

In these days the five sisters have been together in one room, looking at one another. Their nurse, whose name the record does not preserve either, came in on them, and the sight was too much for her. She spoke to the two youngest.

“Poor little dears, you no longer have a Mother.”

Céline threw herself into Marie’s arms and said, “Well, you will be my Mother now.” Thérèse, four years old, copied Céline in everything and would have done the same — but she was afraid Pauline would be sad at being left the only elder sister without a little daughter of her own. So she went to Pauline instead, hid her face against her, and said, “And Pauline will be my Mother.”