Nativite, Jeanne Le Royer, De La

Nativite, Jeanne Le Royer, De La a French female fanatic, was born at La Chapelle Janson, near Fougeres (Brittany), Jan. 24,1732. Received as lay sister in the convent of the Urbanists de Fougeres, where she had been admitted as a domestic at the age of eighteen, this girl, without education, believed she had divine visions and revelations. Her successive confessors, to whom she related them, sought to calm her troubled imagination; but one of them, less enlightened or more credulous, confirmed the sister in her pious reveries. The abbot Genet wrote at her dictation what she pretended to have seen or heard; and on the death of this ecclesiastic, which occurred in 1817, the manuscripts that he possessed were sold to a bookseller, who published them under the title of Vie et Revelations de la sour de la Nativite (1817, 3 volumes, 12mo). In it are found numerouls and extraordinary revelations, in which she predicts many things concerning the Church and the end of the world; also a Recueil d'autorites in support of these revelations. The abbot Tresvaux placed the name of Jeanne Le Royer in his Galerie des saints et autres personnes pieuses de la Bretagne, making a continuation to the work of don Lobineau on this subject. A new edition of the work of the sister de la Nativite was made in 1819 (4 volumes, 8vo and 12mo). The 4th volume, supplementary, was dictated by the sister to some nuns who enjoyed her confidence; like the others, it contains details which might be severely criticised. The author of L'Ami de la religion et du roi gave an analysis and an extract from this work, warning his readers "that not all the revelations of the sister are to be believed as implicitly true," a precaution which seems superfluous. She died at Fougeres August 15, 1798. See Hoefer, Nouv. Biog. Generale, s.v.