Descended from . . .
Descended from a family of soldiers, and the son of a soldier attached to successive barracks (Avignon, Strasbourg), Louis Martin was born at Bordeaux on August 22, 1823. He was acquainted with the life of army camps and was raised in the atmosphere of the Napoleonic legend, though his father joined the royalist armies during the Hundred Days. Captain under the Restoration, the future grandfather of Thérèse took up residence at Alençon in 1830.
Orderly, methodical, of a solitary and meditative temperament, his son Louis learned the watchmaking trade, which requires much patience and precision. At the age of 22 he dreamed of a much more solitary life and presented himself as a candidate at the monastery of the great St. Bernard. He was refused because he did not have any knowledge of Latin. After a sojourn in Paris, he settled down as a watchmaker at Alenςon and lived with his parents on rue du Pont-Neuf. For the next eight years he led a quasi-monastic life that was filled with travel, prayer, reading, fishing — his favorite pastime — and frequenting the company of his friends in the Catholic Club.
Alenςon, the chief town of Orne, had a population of 13,600 inhabitants at this time. It was a quiet little town, perfectly suitable for this quiet man. It owed its fame solely to the art of its lacemakers, who export the famous “Point d’Alenςon” to all parts of France and especially to Paris.
Zélie Guérin was born into a family of peasant background on December 23, 1831. She, too, was brought up in a military atmosphere as her father was present at Wagram and terminated his career in the gendarmes. He retired in 1844 to Alençon, 36 rue Sanit-Blaise, opposite the Prefecture.
Reared by this overbearing father and by a mother who showed her little affection, Zélie one day wrote her brother: “My childhood and youth were as dismal as a winding sheet; although my mother spoiled you, she was very good, she did not know how to take me, and I suffered very much interiorly” (family correspondence, November 7, 1865). She expressed her love for this brother Isidore, who was studying to be a pharmacist, and for her sis Elise, her confidante, who entered the Visitation convent at Le Mans under the name Sister Marie-Dosithée. She carried on a correspondence with them right up until her death, a correspondence that revealed her restless and often melancholic temperament, but her lively character too, her eagerness for work, her faith under every trial, her good sense, and even her humor.
She dreamed of the religious life just as Louis Martin did, and like him, she was categorically refused when she sought permission to join the Sisters of the Hôtel Dieu at Alençon. Then she took up the manufacture of the “Point d’Alençon,” opening an “office” of her own with her sister’s help. A clever worker, she was to be supremely successful.