Saint Germaine Cousin

Germaine was born in the year 1579 in a tiny French town called Pibrac. From her birth she seemed marked for suffering, having come into the world with a deformed hand and the disease of scrofula. While yet an infant, Germaine lost her mother; but her father soon remarried. Under the pretense of saving the other children from the contagion of scrofula, his second wife persuaded the father to keep Germaine away from the homestead; and thus the child was employed as a shepherdess, making her home in the stable with the animals.

Germaine learned to practice humility and patience and was gifted with a marvelous sense of the presence of God and of spiritual things. To poverty, bodily infirmity, the rigors of the seasons, and the lack of affection from those in her own home, she added voluntary mortifications and austerities, making bread and water her daily food. Because of her great love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, she assisted daily at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; and Germaine’s flocks, left to the care of Providence while she was away, suffered no harm from the wolves in the forest nearby.

The Rosary was her only book, and her devotion to the Blessed Virgin was so great that Germaine would fall on her knees at the first sound of the Angelus bell. On several occasions when Germaine crossed the river to attend Mass at the village church, the swollen waters opened and afforded her passage without wetting her garments. Her father, at last coming to a sense of duty, forbade his wife to treat Germaine harshly and offered the young shepherdess a place in their home with the other children—an offer Germaine humbly refused. Early one morning in the summer of 1601, her father found that she had not risen at the usual hour. When he went to call her, he discovered her dead body lying on her pallet of vine-twigs; Germaine was dead at the age of twenty-two. She was buried in front of the pulpit in the parish church of Pibrac.