Saint Marie of the Incarnation (Marie Guyart)

Marie Guyart was baptized at Tours on October 29, 1599, in the former church of Saint-Saturnin. She was the daughter of Florent Guyart, a master baker, and Jeanne Michelet. In 1617 she married Claude Martin, a master silk worker. Their son Claude was born on April 2, 1619, and her husband died in the last months of that year. On March 24, 1620, she had the mystical experience that she counted as her conversion.

She went to live with her sister, whose husband, Paul Buisson, ran a carrying business, and in 1625 he gave her the whole management of it. On January 25, 1631, she entered the Ursulines of Tours, leaving her son, then eleven, and she made her vows in 1633 as Marie of the Incarnation. She is a different person from Blessed Marie of the Incarnation, Madame Acarie (1566–1618), the Parisian widow who brought the Carmel of Saint Teresa to France and died a Carmelite at Pontoise.

By her own account, a dream showed her a vast country that she later understood to be Canada. With a benefactor, Madeleine de La Peltrie, and other companions, she sailed from Dieppe on May 4, 1639, aboard the Saint-Joseph and reached Quebec on August 1, 1639. The Ursulines first lived in a house in the Lower Town, which she called her “Louvre,” and in 1642 moved into a stone convent at the top of the cape, where they kept a school for girls. The convent burned at the end of December 1650, and she had it rebuilt.

After the age of forty she learned Indigenous languages well enough to write dictionaries of French and Algonquin and of Iroquois, and a catechism in Iroquois; some of these were lost in a fire in 1686. In 1646 she drew up constitutions for the Ursulines of New France with the Jesuit Jérôme Lalemant. At the request of her son, who had become a Benedictine monk, she wrote an account of her inner life in 1654, and he later published 221 of her letters. She died at Quebec on April 30, 1672.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on June 22, 1980, together with François de Laval. On April 3, 2014, Pope Francis declared them both saints by equipollent canonization, which requires no miracle, and on October 12, 2014, he celebrated a Mass of thanksgiving for the two new saints in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Her tomb is in the oratory beside the historic chapel of the Ursulines in Quebec City, and her feast is kept in Canada on April 30, the day of her death.

In Tours, the Ursulines bought the fifteenth-century house of the Petite Bourdaisière in 1625, and Marie Guyart entered their convent there in 1631. The community left Tours in 1792. In 1983 the association Marie Guyart bought the house and opened the Centre Marie de l’Incarnation, and the neighboring chapel of Saint-Michel, owned by the city of Tours and kept by the association Touraine-Canada, is a memorial to her.

She is shown in the habit of the Ursulines. The chapel of Saint-Michel in Tours was restored in 1964, and the association Touraine-Canada gave it a new chapel decoration, with three stained-glass windows by the Tours master glassmaker Van Guy and four restored paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The museum of the Petite Bourdaisière presents mementos of each stage of her life, as wife and mother, widow, businesswoman, teacher and missionary, and of her crossing to Quebec.

• Tours, chapel of Saint-MichelAt the corner of the rue des Ursulines and the rue du Petit-Pré, a memorial chapel to her, kept by the association Touraine-Canada; visits by appointment, and open on summer afternoons.
• Tours, Petite BourdaisièreAt 2 rue du Petit-Pré, the house where she entered the Ursulines in 1631, now the Centre Marie de l’Incarnation, a small museum; free, visits by appointment.

On our ways: Tours.