MARIA DELL'INCARNAZIONE, Blessed. – Carmelite, born Barbe Avrillot, at Paris on 26 Feb. 1566, died at Pontoise on 18 Apr. 1618. She married (1582) Pierre Acarie, counsellor to the Court of Accounts, and bore him six children; three of the daughters became Carmelites.
Converted to fervour in 1588, she was often rapt in ecstasy, and her confessors—Benedict of Canfield, Cardinal de Bérulle, and Father Coton—attest that she bore the stigmata. Her mystical life is marked by an utter disregard for her own spiritual advantage and by a special gift for the direction of souls.
While attending to her family, Madame Acarie radiated her influence over the high society of her time. “Of the hearths kindled under the reign of Henry IV, none equals in splendour, intensity, or irradiation the hôtel Acarie” (H. Bremond). For thirty years she was one of the most heeded authorities in matters spiritual; “the spiritual mother, she gave extraordinary religious ferment to all around her.” She prepared the way for the charitable works of St Vincent de Paul; she decided her cousin, Madame de Sainte Beuve, to found the Ursulines of France (1608); she aided the reform of Benedictine monasteries; she watched over the nascent Congregations of Father Gallemant at Aumale and Pontoise; she organized the Congregation of Ste Geneviève, from which would emerge the Carmel of France. She welcomed an apparition of St Teresa, and in 1603, with the help of Cardinal de Bérulle (q.v.), she introduced the reformed Carmel into France; she thus directed the efforts of Jean Quintanadone and obtained from the Princess de Longueville the support of the French court; she supplied the nascent Carmel with its first recruits, whom she herself had selected and formed. One of these Carmels, that of Dijon, would become the cradle in which would blossom the sanctity of Jeanne Frémyot de Chantal.
Widowed in 1613, Madame Acarie entered (1614) the Carmel of Amiens as a lay sister; from there she was invited to that of Pontoise. She was beatified on 5 June 1791. Feast, 18 March. Her Lettres were published by Richarda (2 vols., Tournai 1876).