Marguerite Naseau

Marguerite Naseau was a French peasant woman of the early seventeenth century, born in the village of Suresnes near Paris. Traditional accounts give her year of birth as 1594. She belonged to a poor rural family and in her youth worked as a cowherd. Despite her lack of schooling, she was determined to learn to read. According to the later testimony of Vincent de Paul, she obtained a primer and asked passers-by to help her with the letters until she could read. She then gathered poor girls of the countryside and taught them in turn, an unusual initiative for a woman of her social condition in that period.

Drawn by the missions and charitable works organized by Vincent de Paul, Marguerite left Suresnes and went to Paris to serve the sick poor. She is regarded as the first woman of humble origin to offer herself in a stable way for this service, thereby anticipating the vocation of the Daughters of Charity. She lived in poverty and devoted herself to visiting and nursing the abandoned sick in their homes, in the spirit of the Confraternities of Charity that Vincent had established among laywomen of means and among country parishioners.

In 1633, while attending a person suffering from the plague, Marguerite contracted the disease. She died in Paris in February of that year, commonly dated 24 February 1633. The Company of the Daughters of Charity was formally founded later the same year, on 29 November 1633, under the guidance of Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac. Vincent nevertheless always presented Marguerite Naseau as the first Daughter of Charity and as the living model of the community’s spirit: simplicity, humility, and complete self-gift to God in the person of the poor.

Although she has not been beatified or canonized, Marguerite Naseau remains a central figure in Vincentian memory. Her life illustrated that the service of the most abandoned did not require noble birth or advanced education, but only a willing heart and perseverance. Later Daughters of Charity have looked to her as their proto-sister, whose self-taught charity and death in epidemic service summed up the charism that Louise de Marillac would organize into a lasting religious family.