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Junior Report 3 min read
A day in the life · TUNIS, September 1605 AD

The slave who kept fifteen fires from ever going out

Pirates sold him at Tunis to an old alchemist, and his whole job was keeping ten or fifteen furnaces burning day and night.

Edition of · 3 min read

Saint Vincent de Paul
A barefoot young man in a coarse linen shirt and knee-length drawers carries a wicker basket of charcoal on his shoulder down a path between two rows of small lit furnaces in a sunlit walled yard, while an old turbaned man watches from a doorway at the far end.
St. Vincent de Paul carrying charcoal to the alchemist's furnaces at Tunis, 1605 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 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.

TUNIS, September 1605 AD — In a workshop in Tunis there were ten or fifteen small furnaces, and every one of them was alight. None of them was ever allowed to go out. Keeping them all burning was one man’s whole job.

That man was Saint Vincent de Paul, a French priest of twenty-four. He was a slave, and he belonged to the old man who owned the workshop.

Pirates had taken his boat in July and sold him in the market at Tunis. A fisherman bought him first, and got rid of him fast. Every time the boat put out to sea, St. Vincent de Paul was ill. He was no use on the water. Then the old man with the furnaces bought him.

The old man was an alchemist, and he had been one for fifty years. He melted metals together over those fires, hunting for two things. One was the philosopher’s stone, which would turn cheap metal into gold. The other was the elixir of life, which would make a person live for ever. Nobody ever found either one.

St. Vincent de Paul fed the fires for almost a year, from September 1605 AD until the following August. Inside one of them sat a crucible with gold and silver melted together in it and a powder stirred in. It stayed in the fire for a whole day and a night. He watched the old man do it many times over. “My business was to keep up ten or fifteen furnaces, which, thank God, I made even a pleasure,” he wrote afterwards.

The old man liked the young Frenchman who fed his fires, and would talk to him for hours about metals.

Then he started trying to change St. Vincent de Paul’s religion. He offered St. Vincent de Paul great riches. He promised him all his own knowledge of alchemy as well, if the young priest would become a Muslim. St. Vincent de Paul said no. The old man kept asking for the rest of the year. Some days he offered him things and some days he frightened him, and St. Vincent de Paul still said no.

The Sultan sends for the old man

By the next summer the old alchemist’s name had travelled the whole way to Constantinople. Sultan Ahmed I sent for him to come and show what he could do at the Ottoman court. He set out, and he died on the road.

St. Vincent de Paul was not set free. At Tunis a slave was property, like a house or a chair. An owner could sell a slave whenever he liked, or leave him to someone else when he died. So St. Vincent de Paul went to the old man’s nephew, along with the rest of the old man’s goods.

St. Vincent de Paul called the nephew a man who could not stand anyone. The nephew sold him on quickly. The buyer was a man from Nice, in Savoy. He had given up the Christian faith and was living as a Muslim. He sent St. Vincent de Paul up into the mountains to work on his farm.

That man had three wives, and one of them was a Turk. Every day she came out to the field where St. Vincent de Paul was working. She asked him to sing to her about his God. He sang her the song the people of Israel sang when they were captives far from home in Babylon. Then he sang her a hymn to Our Lady. She liked the singing. That evening she told her husband he had been wrong to give up the Christian faith.

The next day the man said they should go home to France. St. Vincent de Paul would come with him. Then he took ten months to do it. They crossed the sea in a small boat. They landed at Aigues-Mortes, in France, on June 28, 1607 AD.

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.

Junior Report. Written for readers ten to twelve, from the same sources and under the same rules as the rest of the paper. The words are shorter, hard terms are explained, and the question at the end is for the reader to think over.

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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 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) — see the original.

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Sources for this story

Listed by paragraph.

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    • attested Mgr Émile Bougaud, trans. Joseph Brady C.M., History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Sisters of Charity, Volume 1, HIS CAPTIVITY IN TUNIS, p. 13 ¶8
    • attested F. A. Forbes, Life of St. Vincent de Paul, Chapter 2
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    • attested Mgr Émile Bougaud, trans. Joseph Brady C.M., History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Sisters of Charity, Volume 1, HIS CAPTIVITY IN TUNIS, p. 13 ¶14
    • attested Mgr Émile Bougaud, trans. Joseph Brady C.M., History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission and of the Sisters of Charity, Volume 1, HIS CAPTIVITY IN TUNIS, p. 13 ¶8
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