Joigny's leading women sign a rule to nurse the town's sick poor

JOIGNY, France, September 6, 1618 AD — In the chapel of Saint-Antoine at Joigny today, Françoise-Marguerite de Silly — Madame de Gondi, wife of the lord of the town — presented a letter from the Archbishop of Sens and wrote her name at the top of a list. The mayor, the sheriffs and others of the town were in the chapel to see her do it, and the leading women of Joigny signed under her. What they have put their names to is the roll of an association of laywomen who undertake to feed, nurse and bury the sick poor of this town.

The priest who drew up that rule is Saint Vincent de Paul. He is chaplain to the house of Gondi and tutor to the sons of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigny and General of the Galleys of France. He came into the family in 1613 AD. Joigny is the family’s principal seat. They take their title from it and keep a large house here, where they usually spend the autumn. St. Vincent de Paul used this autumn stay to preach a mission in the town, and founded the Charity as the mission closed. He said a few words in the chapel and gave the rule. It is a shortened version of the ones he has already given at Châtillon-les-Dombes and at Villepreux.

The rule sets up a government. The members are to elect a president, and with her an assistant and a treasurer. The rule holds that women should not have charge of the funds alone. So the members are also to elect a bursar. He is to be a priest or a layman of the town, devoted to the poor and not taken up with business of his own, and he votes at the meetings for as long as he holds the office. All four answer to the parish priest. The treasurer keeps the money, the papers and the goods. She presents her accounts once a year, on the Monday of Pentecost, to the parish priest and the other three officers.

The rest of the rule is about the sick. No one is visited until the president, the assistant and the treasurer have looked at the case. The woman who visits collects the food from the treasurer, cooks it, and takes it to the house. She lays a napkin on a tray, with a glass, a spoon and a roll. Then she washes the sick person’s hands and says grace. She pours the soup and puts the meat on the plate. She is to start with the sick who have somebody at home to help them and finish with those who have nobody, so that she can stay longest where there is no one else. In the evening she comes back with supper. Each sick person is to have as much bread as is needed. Dinner is a quarter of a pound of mutton or boiled veal, and supper as much again, roasted. On Sundays and feast days it is chicken. Anyone without a fever is to have a pint of wine a day. If the sick person dies without means, the association buys the shroud and the grave. The members meet once a month. Any Christian woman who is pious and virtuous may join — married, single or widowed — provided her husband or her parents consent.

All of this was worked out a little over a year ago in the diocese of Lyons. St. Vincent de Paul was then parish priest of Châtillon-les-Dombes, having gone there meaning to leave the Gondi for good. On August 20, 1617 AD he appealed from the pulpit for a sick family with no one to help them, and the townspeople carried food to that house all on the same day. “Behold, noble but ill-regulated charity,” St. Vincent de Paul said. “These poor people, provided with too much now, must allow some to perish, and then they shall be in want just as before.” He then put a proposal to them: “I suggested to them to club together to do the needful every day, not only for this poor family, but for others that might turn up in future.”

He let the women of Châtillon work for three months before he wrote anything down. Then he had the rules approved by the Archbishop of Lyons through his vicar-general, M. Faye, and gave them on December 8, 1617 AD. Eleven women came forward and gave their names. Four days later they met in the hospital chapel and elected their officers — Mademoiselle Baschet president, Mademoiselle Charlotte Brie treasurer, Madame Puget assistant, Jean Benier bursar — and the votes were written into the register.

He was back in Paris on December 23, 1617 AD and back in this family on Christmas Day. Since then he has been preaching in the villages on the Gondi estates. Priests have begun to join him, and the Count and Madame de Gondi pay for the work. The first association after Châtillon was set up at Villepreux, another Gondi village, and approved this year by the first Cardinal de Retz, Madame de Gondi’s uncle. Joigny got the more formal founding of the two.

The new members have work waiting. During this mission St. Vincent de Paul went round the town’s small hospital, found sick people in it with no one caring for them, and has turned the Joigny Charity towards them.

In the preamble to the first of these rules, the one he wrote out at Châtillon, St. Vincent de Paul named the trouble he was after. The sick poor, he wrote, “sometimes suffer more for want of order than from want of charitable persons.”