An inner voice sends St. Zélie into Alençon's lace trade

ALENÇON, Normandy, early 1850s AD — In these years the Daughters of Charity at Alençon refused a young woman who wanted to join them, and she went into the town’s own trade instead. By the end of 1853 AD Saint Zélie Martin, then still Zélie Guérin, was working as a “manufacturer of Point d’Alençon” in her parents’ house at 36 rue Saint-Blaise, giving out work to women who made the lace in their own homes. People came to regard her as an artist in lacemaking.

St. Zélie, a gendarme’s daughter, came to Alençon with her parents in 1844 AD, at thirteen. For years she wanted to share the work of the Daughters of Charity, who nursed the sick at the town hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. At about nineteen she went there with her mother, Louise-Jeanne Macé, to ask to be admitted. The sister in charge of the community decided at once that St. Zélie’s vocation was not to the religious life. With the convent closed to her, she had to earn a living.

In Alençon many young women earned their living at lace. Point d’Alençon (Alençon stitch), the town’s needle lace, was its main industry. It was made entirely by hand with a fine needle on a parchment pattern, in small pieces. A different specialist worked each part, and the pieces were then joined with seams no one could see. A fine piece could take months.

St. Zélie already knew how to make the lace and put the pieces together. Her mother had decided her daughters would learn needlework and pushed them hard at it. St. Zélie had learned the basics of lacemaking from the Picpus Sisters at their school in the rue de Lancrel. She then went to a trade school, where she learned to assemble the finished pieces, and worked in several lace workshops.

On December 8, 1851 AD, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, St. Zélie finished a novena to Our Lady. By her own account she then heard an inner voice say: “Fais faire du point d’Alençon” (Have some Alençon stitch). The words told her to have the lace made by others, not to make it. St. Zélie told her mother she wanted to open a lace workshop. Her mother agreed on one condition: that St. Zélie’s sister Marie-Louise, two years older, take charge of the business.

The workshop was her parents’ house in the rue Saint-Blaise. On Thursdays St. Zélie was there for her workers, handing out work, taking in what was finished and paying for it. She usually mended the fine mesh that forms the lace’s background, and most often she joined all the pieces together.

Selling was harder. Hardly anyone in a small provincial town could afford lace that expensive, so the buyers had to be found in Paris. The selling side interested St. Zélie less. Marie-Louise and their father made the first contacts with lace shops in the capital. Marie-Louise went to Paris to offer the lace to the trading houses. Years later, in a letter to their younger brother, Marie-Louise wrote that she had set out “with such extraordinary timidity that I could not go to our neighbors without blushing,” and arrived “in a big city, without knowing anything, not even a single address of luxury merchants,” so that “for fear of missing my shot, I wanted to go to all the lace merchants”.

Soon afterwards a large Paris house agreed to deal regularly with the Guérin sisters. The quality of St. Zélie’s work made the workshop well known.

Both sisters later wrote about those first years. In the letter to their brother, Marie-Louise wrote: “It is true that our start for the Alençon point was small and in tears”. St. Zélie wrote in a letter of February 1868 AD: “When I began my Alençon lace business, I ended up sick with all the worries”.

Then Marie-Louise had a first attack of tuberculosis. She left the business and promised God she would become a nun if she recovered. She was soon preparing to enter the Visitation convent at Le Mans, and she entered it on April 7, 1858 AD. With the sister who had found the buyers about to leave, St. Zélie stopped running a business of her own in 1856 AD. She went to work for a Paris lace firm, the Pigache house, and ran its lace-making at Alençon.

The house in the rue Saint-Blaise still stands, kept by Carmelite sisters as the Martin family home and open to visitors. A chapel, open every day, now leads into the bedroom where St. Zélie’s youngest daughter, St. Thérèse, was born on January 2, 1873 AD, and where St. Zélie died.