Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement

Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement was born Marguerite Parigot on 6 February 1619 in Beaune, in Burgundy, then part of the Kingdom of France. She came from a devout Catholic family of the town. The Discalced Carmelite monastery of Beaune was itself founded in 1619, the year of her birth, as one of the early houses of the Teresian reform in France. From childhood she showed a strong attraction to prayer and to consecrated life. At the age of eleven she entered the Carmel of Beaune. She received the habit and the name Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement, a name that expressed the eucharistic piety characteristic of French Catholicism in the seventeenth century.

Within the enclosure she was noted for regular observance, humility, and a concentrated devotion to the mystery of the Incarnation. According to the chronicles of the Beaune Carmel, she received interior lights concerning the Child Jesus and was led to honor him as the Little King of Grace (le Petit Roi de Grâce). A statue of the Infant Jesus dressed as a small king was made for the community and became the center of this devotion. The image, later called the Petit Roi de Beaune or Infant Jesus of Beaune, was venerated by the nuns and by the faithful of Burgundy. Marguerite’s role was to crystallize and promote a form of incarnational piety that presented the Child Jesus as both humble and royal, a source of grace for souls. This devotion developed independently of the later fame of the Infant Jesus of Prague, though both belong to the same broader current of early modern Catholic devotion to the Holy Childhood of Christ.

Her remaining years were spent in the hidden life of Carmel, marked by physical illness which she accepted in a spirit of union with Christ. She died in the monastery of Beaune on 26 May 1648 at the age of twenty-nine. The community preserved her memory as that of a holy nun and continued to foster the devotion associated with her. The statue of the Little King survived the suppression of the monastery during the French Revolution. In later centuries the Carmel of Beaune, when restored, remained a place of this particular devotion. Copies of the Beaune Infant were distributed, and the figure of Marguerite appeared in Carmelite hagiographical literature.

Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement has never been formally beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church, and she has no official feast in the general Roman calendar. Knowledge of her life depends on the internal records of her monastery and on subsequent Carmelite historians. She remains an obscure figure outside the history of the French Discalced Carmel and of seventeenth-century devotion to the Infant Jesus. What can be stated with confidence is that she was a Discalced Carmelite of Beaune, that she lived from 1619 to 1648, that she was closely associated with the origin of the Beaune devotion to the Child Jesus as Little King of Grace, and that she died in her monastery with a local reputation for holiness.