NOBLET, MARIE THÉRÈSE AUGUSTINE (1889-1930), Catholic mystic, was born on 30
September 1889 at Signy-l'Abbaye, Ardennes, France, second of three children of
Charles Constant Noblet, a wealthy textile manufacturer, and his second wife Marie
Angèle, née Panis, whose piety led them to endow a religious orphanage. In 1894,
soon after his business failed, Charles died and the straitened family went to
Rheims to Marie's father, a professor of medicine. Within eighteen months Marie
Thérèse's younger sister, mother and grandmother died, leaving the traumatized
child under the care of her awesome grandfather, who placed her as a boarder with
the Sisters of the Child Jesus. After his death in 1900 she lived with relatives
at Epernay. In 1896 she had received extreme unction for peritonitis which had
permanently weakened her. In 1901 she wrote down her first 'decision for Christ'.
Her irregular convent schooling ceased in 1903 but she was undoubtedly steeped in
dévot eschatological and legitimist traditions. In 1905, encased in plaster and
unable to walk because of dorso-lumbar 'Pott's disease', she was suddenly cured in
the Lourdes grotto, becoming the twelfth cure authenticated by the official
Medical Bureau. Other ailments followed, and pilgrimages, one of which resulted in
an unverified cure.
View the full record at
Australian Dictionary of Biography
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