COLETTE BOILET, a carpenter's daughter, was born at Corbie, in Picardy,
in 1380. Her parents, out of devotion to St. Nicholas, gave her the name
of Colette, the diminutive of Nicholas. She was brought up in the love
of humiliations and austerities. Her desire to preserve her purity
without the least blemish made her avoid as much as possible all
company, even of persons of her own sex, unless it was sometimes to draw
them from the love of the world by her moving discourses, which were
attended with a singular blessing from almighty God. Humility was her
darling virtue; and her greatest delight seemed to be in seeing herself
contemned. She was so full of confusion at her own miseries and
baseness, and was so contemptible in her own eyes, that she was ashamed
to appear before any one, placed herself far below the greatest sinners,
and studied by all sorts of humiliations to prevent the least motion of
secret pride or self-conceit in her heart. She served the poor and the
sick with an affection that charmed and comforted them. She lived in
strict solitude in a small, poor, abandoned apartment in {521} her
father's house, and spent her time there in manual labor and prayer.
Being very beautiful, she begged of God to change her complexion, and
her face became so pale and thin, that she could scarce be known for the
same person. Yet a certain majesty of virtue, shining in her
countenance, gave her charms conducive to the edification of others by
the sweetness, modesty, and air of piety and divine love discernible in
her looks. Her parents, who, though poor, were virtuous, and exceeding
charitable, according to their abilities, and great peacemakers among
their neighbors, seeing her directed by the Spirit of God, allowed her
full liberty in her devotions. After their death she distributed the
little they left her among the poor, and retired among the Beguines,
devout societies of women, established in several parts of Flanders,
Picardy, and Lorrain, who maintain themselves by the work of their
hands, leading a middle kind of life between the secular and religious,
but make no solemn vows. Not finding this way of life austere enough,
she, by her confessor's advice, took the habit of the third order of St.
Francis, called the Penitents; and, three years after, that of the
mitigated Clares or Urbanists, with the view of reforming that order,
and reducing it to its primitive austerity. Having obtained of the abbot
of Corbie a small hermitage, she spent in it three years in
extraordinary austerity, near that abbey. After this, in order to
execute the project she had long formed of re-establishing the primitive
spirit and practice of her order, she went to the convent at Amiens, and
from thence to several others. To succeed in her undertaking, it was
necessary that she should be vested with proper authority: to procure
which she made a journey to Nice in Provence, to wait on Peter de Luna,
who, in the great schism, was acknowledged pope by the French under the
name of Benedict XIII., and happened then to be in that city. He
constituted her superioress-general of the whole order of St. Clare,
with full power to establish in it whatever regulations she thought
conducive to God's honor and the salvation of others. She attempted to
revive the primitive rule and spirit of St. Francis in the convents of
the diocese of Paris, Beauvais, Noyon, and Amiens; but met with the most
violent opposition, and was treated as a fanatic. She received all
injuries with joy, and was not discouraged by human difficulties. Some
time after she met with a more favorable reception in Savoy, and her
reformation began to take root there, and passed thence into Burgundy,
France, Flanders, and Spain. Many ancient houses received it, that of
Besanzon being the first, and she lived to erect seventeen new ones.
Several houses of Franciscan friars received the same. But Leo X., in
1517, by a special bull, united all the different reformations of the
Franciscans under the name of Observantines: and thus the distinction of
Colettines is extinct. So great was her love for poverty, in imitation
of that of Christ, that she never put on so much as sandals, going
always barefoot, and would have no churches or convents but what were
small and mean. Her habit was not only of most coarse stuff, but made of
above a hundred patches sewed together. She continually inculcated to
her nuns the denial of their own wills in all things, as Christ, from
his first to his last breath, did the will of his heavenly Father:
saying, that all self-will was the broad way to hell. The sacred passion
of Christ was the subject of her constant meditation. On Fridays, from
six in the morning till six at night, she continued in this meditation,
without eating or doing any other thing, but referring all her thoughts
and affections to it with a flood of tears; also during the Holy-Week,
and whenever she assisted at mass: she often fell into ecstasies when
she considered it. She showed a particular respect to the holy cross;
but, above all, to Christ present in the blessed eucharist, when she
appeared in raptures of adoration and love. She often purified her
conscience by sacramental confession before she heard mass, to {522}
assist thereat with the greater purity of soul. Her zeal made her daily
to pour forth many fervent prayers for the conversion of sinners, and
also for the souls in purgatory, often with many tears. Being seized
with her last sickness in her convent at Ghent, she received the
sacraments of the church, foretold her death, and happily expired in her
sixty-seventh year, on the 6th of March, in 1447. Her body is exposed to
veneration in the church of that convent called Bethleem, in Ghent. She
was never canonized, nor is she named in the Roman Martyrology: but
Clement VIII., Paul V., Gregory XIII., and Urban VIII., have approved of
an office in her honor for the whole Franciscan order, and certain
cities. Her body was taken up at Ghent, in 1747, and several miracles
wrought on the occasion were examined by the ordinary of the place, who
sent the process and relation of them to Rome.