2.1 The 7th of July. 1939

From 1930 on, I was each day more occupied by my work in the service of the poor, but I had at the same time an agreeable life, money, a home, vacations. Increasingly I realized that he who gives not all gives nothing. The idea of the petits frères gradually crystallized: to be entirely devoted to the poor. But it was necessary to give up many things. It was not easy.

I went often to pray at Notre Dame, to ask for the grace to accept the petits frères. It was like a game of hide-and-seek. The more I wanted them, the less I felt myself ready to say the final yes. 

Friday, July 7: I was in Notre Dame when suddenly I felt that they were literally founded on me, that they entered me like a hurricane. Everything was transformed. I had said yes to the petits frères. When I left the cathedral, I had the impression that I was soaring. This day was the most beautiful of my life.

2.2 The Poorest

I decided to set up in Lilas, in the midst of my kids, and to begin there my life as a Little Brother at Christmas, 1939. But I was mobilized and consequently unable to create the petits frères.
When the war ended in 1945, I said to myself: "your rendezvous with the petits frères takes place now or never." I went to find my friend the Abbé Audouin - remarkable man - then curé of Saint Ambrose, with whom I had long worked on the Loaf of Bread.
The Abbé Audouin said to me: "My little Marquiset, the great victims of the war are the old. They have for the most part used up their savings during the war; the shortage of everything, the black market has been the cause. They are barely hanging on to their homes. Many are disabled. They are the poor of today, and you should concern yourself with them."
He added: "Your program is a new and wise form of charity. The church adapts itself to all times and is always present. You have my full support."
I answered him: "I agree. I ask only that you put me up, give me a list of poor people, and I will become, soon followed I hope by other petits frères, a free domestic servant."

2.3 Easter, 1946

When I had decided to begin my life as a Little Brother at Easter, 1946, I rented a sleeping room on Boulevard Voltaire. The Abbé Audouin had given me a list of 100 poor old people in the area, and it is there that I made the first 100 Easter packages, which I began to distribute on Good Friday and finished delivering on Easter Sunday.   On the 100 food packages, I had noted 30 addresses of those who seemed the poorest, and soon I began to deliver two meals a week to those thirty initial old friends. As I was alone at the beginning, in order to cook and deliver these meals I would begin my rounds around noon and return home, a bit fatigued, around 6:00 in the evening. Among my first clients there were the concierges of Guillaume-Bertrand Street, Mr. and Mrs. Locatelli, lodgers on the first floor. Mr. Locatelli was aged and, his wife being out, I fed him. On her return, Madame Locatelli said simply to me: "Well, Mr. Marquiset, one can say that it was God who brought you ..." I can only agree with this short and precise account of the founding of petits frères.

2.4 Flower of the Fields

Flower of the Fields - because she gathered flowers in the Vincennes woods or on the fortifications and brought them to the petits frères - was a small and simple woman. She had had seven children and all had died. Her husband was 90 and she was 78.  During the days of Easter, 1946 the petits frères several times a week delivered hot meals to them in their home, because they were very poor. Two years later her husband left this world. Henceforth Flower of the Fields had only one family: the petits frères.

When in 1950 Montguichet, first "Chateau of Happiness," opened its doors, Flower of the Fields was naturally among the first invited. There, she immediately found herself at home. She spent many hours in the fields and when the grass was high you couldn't see her head above it, and she would come back with huge bouquets of wild flowers.

2.5 Who Are You Doing This For?

Madame Bestel was very old, deaf, almost blind, very poor and a bit of a coquette around the edges. It was at the beginning of the Little Brother and she was one of the first people to whom we brought meals three times a week. One day, after having left her, I realized that I had left all the desserts at her place and I thought: "Ah, she will have eaten them then."

When I went back to her two days later she said to me: "Well then, my little one, what happened to you? Nothing? Yes, you forgot the desserts at my house. I had to call the neighbors to eat them. There were too many." That day I left her, again forgetting the desserts, the pastries with little candied cherries*). The next time, Madame Bestel said to me: "Well, my little one, you have again left the desserts with me! Ah, yes! My little one, what happened to you? If I were again twenty years old, I would say to myself: I have charm, I have made him lose his head, but at age eighty-six! Well, then, who are you doing this for?" I pointed at her: "For you." "But no, my little one, tell me the truth. At your age, one has a pretty girlfriend. You will not make me believe that you do this for me." I said to her: "Oh yes," again pointing at her. She persistently refused to understand. One day, I changed my tactic: instead of pointing at her I pointed at the sky. She said to me: "Ah! I understand. You are going to her on the top floor."

2.6 Achy

In 1952 the petits frères, wishing to enlarge the number of people invited on vacations, looked for a chateau. They found a magnificent Louis XIII chateau: the Chateau Achy, built in 1643, the year of the King's death. Sixty-five rooms, twenty-one hectares of park, for 8,500,000 francs. They didn't have the first cent - never mind: it must be bought. "We will find the money." They asked for six months to pay. A generous lady donor gave a check for 1,500,000 francs. In four months, the petits frères had paid in full. It took two years and a Little Brother making 1500 trips - during the night - to bring all that the petits frères had received in furniture.

On the first floor was the Henri II room, the Louis XIV room, the Louis XVI room, the Empire room. On the second floor was a marvelous drawing room where everything was white. On the side was a room of blue velours that they offered to a Russian princess who had fled the Revolution and lived in a sleeping room on the seventh floor. When the petits frères said to her: "You will be on the side of the white drawing room," she answered them: "If you knew how I have forgotten what is said in drawing rooms!"

2.7 La Princesse

The petits frères named a charming old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Gey, Prince and Princess of Achy. They had a small Louis XV apartment, small living room and bedroom, and in 1954 when Achy was completely furnished, we celebrated the diamond wedding anniversary of the Prince and Princess of Achy.

In the evening there were fireworks. The Princess of Achy received 300 gifts and among them the most beautiful was a diamond ring. Since the beginning of petits frères, each time an old couple celebrates their diamond wedding anniversary, the petits frères give the elderly woman a diamond ring.

2.8 La Prée

Some time after this, the Princess of Achy died, and she was buried with her diamond. A week later the petits frères received a letter saying:
"General B. would like to donate an ancient Cistercian monastery to a religious movement. If you are interested, here is his address."

We wrote to him and he answered: "Come." He welcomed us at the station and said: "I know you well and I love you, above all because of the diamond ring." Gabriel Bertrand turned to me and said: "The first gift of the Princess of Achy."

We then left for La Prée and were dazzled by its splendor. This Cistercian monastery was built by Saint Bernard in 1128, and the Cistercians occupied it until the Revolution. La Pr6e became the spiritual jewel of the petits frères, as Achy was the temporal jewel, and what charmed us was La Pr6e issuing from Achy thanks to the diamond ring.

The diamond ring given on the occasion of the diamond wedding anniversary was first of course a gesture of giving joy to one of the dear old friends of the petits frères. But it for the petits frères it is a gesture of love, it is beyond this and above all a gesture of respect. In each of their dear old friends, the petits frères see the Lord and as such they try to serve Him, to cherish Him, clumsily, insufficiently.

2.9 Christmas

At Christmas 1962 there were 102 parties in the Paris area alone. Ah, those Christmas parties. Where the first flowers smile Christmas, the silver wreaths sparkle Christmas, the trembling flames of the red candles give warmth to Christmas, the turkey crackles Christmas and especially, above everything, the kiss of Christmas, the tender, so tender kiss of Christmas in which the heart suddenly fills all space.

There were also the Christmas packages. That year we needed the Grand Palace in order to store the huge quantity of Christmas presents for 1962. And we needed a chain, an immense chain of arms. Thirty thousand Christmas presents were made in Paris and swallowed up by Paris. The petits frères houses in Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, and Lille grew and so did the number of Christmas presents for those invited to parties at their many centers. New towns joined the others, ever more numerous. In America, Chicago enlarged the number of party sites, as did Montreal, the petits frères' new outpost of love, begun in July, 1962.

2.10 Ma Jolie (Mv Pretty)

When the petits frères encountered her for the first time, it was at the grocer's. She was holding a leek and saying: "Seven francs, that's horribly expensive!" Several days later the Little Brother who had seen her with her leek knocked at her door. And since that day the petits frères have gone back often. She told them her life story.

She had been a dressmaker, had had many employees, a large suite, many clients. Then her husband was dead and old age had come; she could not keep her employees, she had to take this little room ...

When the first vacation for our old friends took place in 1950 at Montguichet, naturally the petits frères took Ma Jolie, and she had a large green room with Louis Phillipe furniture that suited her dignity, and four large windows from which she could see the lawns, trees, and flowers. The following year they offered her an even grander room at the chateau d'Achy entering directly onto the grounds, without steps or slopes, because, alas, Ma Jolie would have been unable to move about.

One day, her favorite Little Brother having come to see her, she looked pensively at him and said: "Never have I loved anyone like I love you." He answered her: "May it not be that God has given us one to another for an eternal love?" "Yes," she said slowly, "it is an eternal love." Her condition worsened. The chateau d'Achy closed, but Ma Jolie stayed, surrounded by petits frères. A week later she left Achy. The Little Brother who loved her went, with many others, to accompany her to the little cemetery of Achy, so peaceful.

It was a sunny, it was a sweet autumn day, the light was tender, all was serene.