Maison natale de Catherine Labouré

Fain-lès-Moutiers

Catherine Labouré, whom her family called Zoé, was born here on 2 May 1806, the eighth of the ten children of Pierre Labouré, a farmer, and Madeleine Gontard, who died in 1815 when the child was nine. Placed for a time with an aunt, she came back at twelve to keep house for her father: the housework, the cooking, the milking, the pigs; she did not go to school and learned to read and write only late, at the boarding school of a cousin at Châtillon-sur-Seine. It was at Châtillon, in the house of the Daughters of Charity, that she recognised on a painting Saint Vincent de Paul, the old priest she said she had seen in a dream, and that she resolved to join his congregation despite her father, who first sent her to work in Paris in the canteen of one of her brothers. She left Fain for good in 1830: having entered the rue du Bac on 21 April, she reported there from July onwards the apparitions out of which the miraculous medal would come, then spent forty-six years caring for the old people of a hospice without saying a word to anyone. The place of her youth has remained a village farm; since 1968 a community of Daughters of Charity has lived there and receives visitors to tell the story of those twenty-four years, out of which all the rest came. Here one takes the measure of the distance between a farmyard in the Auxois and the millions of medals struck from 1832 onwards.

Wikipédia — Catherine Labouré ↗

Getting there : Maison Sainte-Catherine, 6 Grande Rue, Fain-lès-Moutiers (Côte-d'Or), by the D 905 from Montbard and then Moutiers-Saint-Jean. Unguided visit of the family property and a welcome from the sisters; it is advisable to telephone beforehand. The village church is next door.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound