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brief · PARIS, 1623 AD

A nephew in poor clothes asks for St. Vincent de Paul in Paris

Edition of

Saint Vincent de Paul
In a bare, low entry passage, a spare priest in a black cassock and skullcap comes down a wooden stair with his hand held out to a thin country boy in patched brown wool who stands in the light of the open street door, holding his felt hat, while a younger priest watches from the stair and two men in black wait at the right.
St. Vincent de Paul comes down to his nephew at the door of the Collège des Bons-Enfants, Paris, 1623 AD.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French oil painting of the middle of the seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Vincent de Paul ramène des galériens à la foi (Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1876, Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris) View source artwork.

PARIS, 1623 AD — Saint Vincent de Paul is a priest, a farmer’s son from Pouy near Dax, and chaplain to the house of Gondi in Paris. Maynard, the only source for what follows, places him already at the Collège des Bons-Enfants.

This year a young peasant in poor clothes came to the door and told the porter he was St. Vincent de Paul’s nephew.

St. Vincent de Paul turned red and sent one of his priests down to receive the boy. Then he came down, went out to the street and brought his nephew in.

He called his priests together. “Gentlemen, this young man is the most creditable of my family,” he said. “Nephew, salute these gentlemen.” The boy stayed at his side in his country clothes all that day, before the visitors of rank who called.

St. Vincent de Paul told a poor woman who called him “my lord”: “Oh, my poor good woman, you know me very little, for I am only the son of a poor villager.”

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. AI-generated image, in the manner of French oil painting of the middle of the seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Vincent de Paul ramène des galériens à la foi (Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1876, Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris) — see the original.

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More on this saint

A painted interior: a woman in a black gown stands at a tall leaded window with her back to the room, an opened letter and a second sheet with a broken red seal lie on a carpet-covered table, and a servant waits by the door with a cup on a tray.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French oil painting of the middle of the seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Vincent de Paul ramene des galeriens a la foi (Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy, 1876, Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, eglise de la Sainte-Trinite, Paris) View source artwork.

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A plain, balding priest in a worn black cassock and skullcap stands beside a cloth-covered table in a bare lime-washed hall, speaking without gesture to some twenty young men in black cassocks seated in rows before him.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French oil painting of the middle of the seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Vicent de Paul prechant la charite aux dames de la cour de Louis XIII (Charles Meynier, 1824 AD, Centre national des arts plastiques, FNAC PFH-5608) View source artwork.

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