On October 20th, 1946, Marie Thérèse de Soubiran was declared Blessed fifty-seven years after she had died a failure in the eyes of the world and of her rellow Christians. She was another Jeanne d'Arc in whom holiness looked like madness or stupidity and very unlike wholesomeness. Yet she had promised to be the most conventional of saints with breviary lessons written according to the book: she came of a comfortably placed French family with long traditions of piety and priests and nuns in the ancestral role; she was precocious in holiness and at the age of ten was put to direct the retreat of a young woman of twenty. Of the two the ten-year-old found it the greater humiliation. Her new foundation developed unobtrusively out of the sodality organised by her uncle, Canon de Soudan, and at the age of twenty-one she was the first Superior of the first regular community. Yet though the congregation grew steadily and Marie Thérèse duly became Superior .General, by the age of forty she was expelled, never to be Vindicated and to die in disgrace.