When only seven she had a vision, in which our Saviour called her in an especial manner to be his alone. Her docile heart responded to the divine vocation, and from the age of nine or ten she sought the most retired places and least-frequented churches, in order to spend a considerable part of the day in communion with our Lord. She watched the devout persons at prayer, and imitated their humble and pious attitude, and, ignorant of meditation or mental prayer, made her spontaneous acts of virtue, repeated the prayers she knew or ejaculations prompted by her own innocent heart.
As she grew and began to study, the influence of her girlish companions could not wean her from her love of spiritual things. In pious books she found her greatest and most unwearied delight, and her piety only grew more solid as her mind was enabled to understand the mysteries of faith and the immensity of God’s love and mercy. Her whole soul tended to the consecration of herself to our Lord in some religious retreat, and she expressed to her mother her desire to enter the Benedictine convent at Tours, then the only one in the city; but as her pious mother, after advising her that she was yet too young to take such a step, heard no further allusion, she supposed it a mere passing thought and not a solid vocation. The child had not the advantage of a wise and prudent director at this moment, and her future was apparently to lie in secular life; yet Providence was but guiding her surely to her real vocation.
At the age of seventeen her parents proposed that she should accept the hand of a young man of good character who solicited her as his wife. She evinced the greatest repugnance to enter a state so incompatible with the recollection and prayer which were her great desire. But as her parents had accepted the offer she durst not resist. “Mother,” she exclaimed, “as the whole thing is determined and my father insists on it, I feel obliged to obey his will and yours; but if God does me the grace to give me a son, I here promise to consecrate my son to his service; and if he restores me the liberty I am now about to lose, I promise to consecrate myself to him.”
The young wife accepted her new life courageously. Her husband, Mr. Martin, was a silk manufacturer, employing many operatives, and she had a certain supervision over a number of them who lived on the place. But these new duties did not cause any relaxation in her pious practices; she heard Mass every day, and gave a considerable time to meditation and pious reading. Affection founded on the purest motives united her and her husband, who soon learned to revere the holy wife whom God had granted him. Yet her life was not free from bitter trials. Even greater were in store. She had passed but two years in the marriage state, and had been but six months a mother, when her husband was almost suddenly taken from her. The widow of nineteen, with her helpless child, saw her property swept away, law-suits encircle her in their deadly meshes, and a lot of almost absolute destitution await her. She soon returned to her father’s house, and in a garret room led the life of a recluse.
God now began to favor her by interior lights, and placed her under the guidance of experienced directors. She consecrated herself to his divine service, but the future was not made clear to her, and a further period of trial was to purify her virtue. A sister, also married, urged her to come and aid her in the business that devolved upon her. Mme. Martin reluctantly yielded, but was ungratefully made the drudge of the house, and then burdened with the superintendence of her brother-in-law’s extensive forwarding business. Amid all this distracting toil, apparently so incompatible with high spirituality, the servant of God maintained an almost uninterrupted union with God. Amid all the din and bustle of business life she was raised to the highest contemplation. In all this she subsequently beheld God’s providence. Writing at a later date from Quebec, she said: “I see now that all the states, all the trials and labors through which I passed, were a preparation to form me for the work of Canada. This was my novitiate, from which I issued far from being perfect, but yet, by the grace of God, in a state to bear the difficulties and hardships of New France.”
Heaven was fitting her alike for the external work in founding a religious community in a scarcely-organized colony, and for conducting its members with the experience of the highest mystical knowledge.
As the ties which bound her to the world fell away her longing for the religious life increased. Her director, however, deemed it her duty to remain in the world in order to superintend the education of her son; but he ultimately allowed her to make vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the last referring to her director, and in temporal affairs to her sister and brother-in-law.
Her austerities at this time were constant and severe. She slept on a bare board, wore hair-cloth, mingled wormwood in her scanty food, and by frequent disciplines—even with nettles—and fastings mortified a body already over-burdened with daily toil. For this privileged soul, raised to the highest contemplation, and prepared by the heavenly Bridegroom for the most sublime union, mortifying the body with austerities that rivalled the anchorets of Thebais, was not even in a religious cloister, but immersed from morning to night in those business cares and details which seem so incompatible with a spirit of prayer and of recollectedness. She not only gave so much of her time to God and made all her labor one prayer, but in her great heart was always solicitous for her neighbor. Over the working-people under her direction she exercised the greatest influence, giving them from time to time clear and persuasive instructions suited to their understanding, and by counsel and mild reproof guarding them from offending God or recalling them from danger. But it was especially in the hour of sickness that they found her a true mother, rendering them all the service and care that the best of mothers could lavish on them.
It was not to be wondered at that she came to be regarded as a saint; but God, to purify her and preserve her from any self-esteem, permitted her suddenly to fall into the greatest aridity. Her fidelity when all sensible consolation was withdrawn was rewarded by extraordinary favors—visions in which the most profound mysteries of faith seemed laid open to her gaze.
The period at last arrived when she could place her son in a suitable institution and follow the inclination which had so long been to her as a vocation. Yet she was far from beholding to what order she was called. Her first inclination had been towards the Ursulines, while the contemplative order of Mount Carmel seemed most in unison with her whole spiritual life. Her director was a father of the order of Feuillants, and the general, desirous of securing for a convent of nuns of his rule a soul so privileged and so highly advanced in the ways of perfection, offered to assume the education of her son. While she remained thus undecided the Ursulines founded their first house at Tours. She felt at once that Providence wished her among them. A knowledge of their rule and of their profession of serving their neighbor confirmed this impression, and she felt convinced that she was not called to a purely contemplative life. A pious bishop, about to found a Visitation monastery at his see, heard on his way through Tours of the pious widow, and called upon her. He pressed her earnestly to join the community he projected, but all confirmed her in believing that the Ursuline was the order into which she must enter.