,
Rose Perrier, belonged to a family of wealthy merchants of the same
city. Pierre Francois Duchesne had adopted the false teachings of
Voltaire and his school, but his wife was very pious, and carefully
brought up her children in the love and fear of God. Philippine was the
next to the last in a family of six. From her earliest years she was
noted for her serious turn of mind. One of her chief pleasures was
reading, but even this had to be of a serious kind. Roman history was an
especial favorite, but what she loved most of all was the lives of the
saints, particularly the martyrs. Another of her pleasures was to assist
the poor. All of her pocket money, with everything else that she could
dispose of, went to them, and she loved to distribute her alms with her
own hand.

At the age of twelve she was placed as a pupil at Sainte Marie d'en
Haut, the Visitation Convent of her native city, to be prepared for her
first Holy Communion. The remarkable spirit of prayer, of which she had
given very early evidence, developed itself here, and her happiest
moments were those she was permitted to spend in adoration before the
Blessed Sacrament. A diligent and conscientious student, so ardent was
her piety, that she was allowed by the kind nuns the privilege of making
her morning meditation and reciting the Office in choir with them. The
year after her admission into the school she made her First Communion,
and it was on this happy occasion that she heard the call to a perfect
life. Her parents, suspecting what was in her mind, removed her from the
Convent. She silently acquiesced in this decision, keeping her own
counsel, and continuing her studies with great success, in company with
her cousins, the young Perfiers, who were afterward at the head of a
great banking business in Paris, under the rule of the first Napoleon.

After four years of patient waiting, in the hope of obtaining her
parents' consent, and convinced at last that they never would grant it,
she decided that it was time to act, and entered the novitiate of the
Visitation. Her family became somewhat reconciled to her choice, after
striving in vain to induce her to return home; but when the time for her
profession came, her father absolutely forbade her to make it, on
account of the dangerous political conditions of the time.

Four years later, in 1792, when the revolutionary storm was at its
height, religious communities were being everywhere expelled from their
h