Julie Billiart

Daughter of a small Picardy shopkeeper, she was teaching catechism to the village children by fourteen. Around 1774 a shot fired at her father in front of her caused a shock from which she gradually became paralysed; she remained so for twenty-two years. Under the Terror she hid non-juring priests and had to flee Cuvilly, carried on a straw cart, then move refuge several times. Immobile, she went on teaching and directing consciences. In February 1804, at Amiens, she founded with Françoise Blin de Bourdon the Institute of the Sisters of Notre-Dame, devoted to the free instruction of poor girls; on 1 June of that same year, still paralysed, she recovered the use of her legs. Driven from Amiens by a conflict with her director, she set the mother house at Namur. She died in 1816, having opened fifteen convents and travelled, it is said, more than twenty thousand kilometres.