Businesswoman, Mystic, Founder Of The Ursuline Convent In Quebec

Life in France.

Marie de l'Incarnation exemplifies the mark an energetic woman could make as a missionary nun in New France. She was born Marie Guyart, daughter of a baker who sold his loaves in the French textile center of Tours. Marie enjoyed mystical experiences even in her youth and dreamed of entering a nunnery. Her father, however, disapproved and arranged a marriage for her to a silkmaker named Claude Martin when she was seventeen. She bore a son the next year, and before the child was a year old her husband died. Marie refused to marry again, devoting herself to religious exercises whenever she could free herself from other tasks in her sister's household, where she and her son Claude had taken up residence. She spent the next decade helping with her brother-in-law's carting...