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Biography

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Barbe Avrillot, known in the world as Madame Acarie and in religion as Marie of the Incarnation, was born in Paris in 1566, the daughter of Nicolas Avrillot, lord of Champlâtreux and a counsellor in the Chambre des Comptes, and of Marie Lhuillier. She belonged to the Parisian noblesse de robe and received a devout upbringing, including a period of education among the Poor Clares at Longchamp, where she formed a desire for religious life. Family arrangements overrode that inclination. In 1582 she married Pierre Acarie, a wealthy maître des comptes. The marriage produced six children, three daughters and three sons; the daughters later entered Carmel.

During the later French Wars of Religion, Pierre Acarie was a prominent member of the Catholic League in Paris. After Henry IV prevailed, Acarie was banished and the family’s property was confiscated. Barbe remained in the capital, managed a reduced household, raised her children, and became widely known for works of charity among the poor and the sick. Her home was a meeting place for the dévot circle of the early seventeenth-century French Catholic revival. She was associated with Pierre de Bérulle and with other reformers of the period, and she was reputed for mystical experiences as well as for practical holiness in ordinary domestic life.

Deeply marked by the writings of Teresa of Ávila, Madame Acarie became the principal lay promoter of bringing the Discalced Carmelite reform into France. With Bérulle and with support at court she obtained the needed authorizations and arranged for Spanish Carmelite nuns, including Ana de Jesús, to come to Paris. The first French convent of the Teresian reform was established in Paris in 1604. She subsequently helped in the foundation of further Carmels in the kingdom and was regarded as a spiritual mother of the French Carmel, while remaining a married laywoman for most of that work.

After Pierre Acarie’s death in 1613 she was free to follow the vocation she had set aside in youth. In 1614 she entered the Carmel of Amiens as a lay sister, taking the name Marie of the Incarnation, a choice of the lowest rank in the community that contemporaries attributed to humility. She later transferred to the convent at Pontoise, where she died in 1618. Pope Pius VI beatified her in 1791. She is commemorated on 18 April and is remembered as foundress of the Discalced Carmelites in France and as a leading figure of devout lay Catholicism in the Catholic Reformation.

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