A Tertiary of St. Dominic

Extract

Anyone assisting at Mass in the Chapel of the Fathers of the Assumption in Paris on a May morning in the year 1865 might have observed the frail, slightly mis-shapen figure of a woman, bowed in prayer. On enquiry he would have learnt that her name was Antoinette Fage, the directress of an orphanage run by some charitable ladies, a Tertiary of St. Dominic, and a recent penitent of the Assumptionist Père Pernet. He would have required unusual prescience to have discerned in this small delicate woman, already in her forty-second year, the Foundress of a Congregation that would spread to two Continents before the end of the century.

Left a virtual orphan at the age of thirteen by the death of her mother, her spine permanently injured in an accident during her childhood, Antoinette grew tip in an atmosphere of sorrow and suffering. Thus early she learnt her first lessons in resignation to the Divine Will. ‘It was His Holy Will that I should suffer anguish of mind, sadness of heart and extreme bodily pain so that I might the more easily enter into the sufferings of others and minister to them,’ she said in later years.

Antoinette was cared for by kind friends until site was old enough to earn her living with her needle. In 1850 she joined a dressmaking establishment, and it was about that time that she first became acquainted with the Dominican Fathers. Of a naturally religious nature, gifted by God with remarkable qualities of heart and mind, yet with a highly-strung temperament and a want of confidence in her own powers, she needed the direction of a master of the spiritual life. For the next fourteen years she was to find in Père Faucillon, O.P., such a director.