A Family of Saints: The Martins of Lisieux–Saints Thérèse, Louis, and Zélie by Stephane-Joseph Piat

Author:Stephane-Joseph Piat [Piat, Stephane-Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497075
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-06-14T05:00:00+00:00

11

LIFE IN THE FAMILY CIRCLE

AT LES BUISSONNETS

Settling in at Les Buissonnets—Lisieux—Organization of the household—The children’s education—Family leisure—Spiritual life—M. Martin in the Belvedere

Thérèse has told us how, in the evening of Mme. Martin’s funeral day, while Céline took Marie for “Maman”, she herself made Pauline her “little mother”. Aged respectively seventeen and a half and sixteen years, the two older girls were admirably prepared to play such a part. Responding to the last thought of the dead mother, Mme. Guérin offered to guide them and invited her brother-in-law to transplant his home to Lisieux. The pharmacy, now enjoying great prosperity, would be a second home for the orphans, where Jeanne, already a thoughtful child despite her nine years, and her younger sister, Marie, a charming little monkey with brown hair and black eyes, would welcome them as sisters. The intimacy that united the two families would only increase; on either side, there were the same traditions of simplicity, industry, and uprightness. The Fournet family cherished the memory of one of its members, Father Thomas-Jean Monsaint, former curate of Orbec-en-Auge and subsequently of Saint-Roch in Paris, who had been martyred during the massacres of September 2, 1792. In the old, solid building overlooking the crossroads of the Place Thiers and the Grande-Rue, in the shadow of the lofty towers of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, they would breathe the bracing atmosphere of the faith in all its purity.

For M. Martin, a change of residence amounted to an uprooting. Everything bound him to Alençon; the countryside he loved, its poetic associations, the pleasures of fishing, his many acquaintances, the seclusion of the Pavilion, his aged mother, whom he could not think of taking away with him, and, above all, the proximity of his family graves. His confessor and the many friends he possessed in the neighborhood were strongly opposed to an exodus that would cost him so much. They urged him to place his three younger daughters in a boarding school and to bring out the two older ones into society, where Mme. Tifenne and Mlle. Pauline Romet would exercise a helpful moral guardianship over them. This prospect of a more worldly life scarcely appealed to the stalwart Christian, any more than did the thought of adding still further sadness to their mourning by a new separation. He would prefer for his children the careful and happy training of home. As for the arguments concerning him personally, he refused to consider them. What added to his perplexity was that, out of delicate feeling, his wife had concealed from him to the end her desire that he should settle at Lisieux. When approached by M. Guérin, Marie refused to take the initiative for the same motives as her mother.

In his indecision, M. Martin sounded his two older daughters on the subject of eventually moving. “I am asking your advice, my children, because it will be solely on your account that I make this sacrifice, and I would not wish to impose one upon you also.”

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