Marguerite d'Youville

Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais married at twenty François d'Youville, who sold brandy to the Indigenous peoples and squandered her dowry; widowed at twenty-eight, she had borne six children of whom two survived, and kept a shop to pay the debts. With three companions she took the infirm and the beggars into her own house, which earned the founders insults in the street as "the grey nuns" — les sœurs grises, grise meaning drunken in French, in allusion to her late husband's trade. They kept the nickname, and eighteen years later took a grey habit. In 1747 they were given the General Hospital of Montreal, ruined and in debt, which they restored; there they received foundlings, wounded English soldiers and prisoners without distinction. John Paul II canonised her in 1990.