The House on the Rue de Lourmel

The concrete embodiment of Mother Maria’s monasticism in the world was a series of rented houses in Paris — above all 77 rue de Lourmel in the 15th arrondissement, which she ran as a hostel, canteen, and refuge for the destitute of the Russian emigration. There she fed the hungry, took in the homeless, made a chapel of the garage, and kept an open door that would, under the occupation, become a shelter for the hunted. This file describes the house and the life lived in it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Open House

From the moment of her tonsure Mother Maria set about creating what she called houses of hospitality — establishments where the destitute could find a bed, a meal, and human welcome without means test or condition (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). She began in more modest premises and, as the work grew, moved to the house with which her name is permanently linked: 77 rue de Lourmel, in the working-class 15th arrondissement of Paris, taken in the mid-1930s (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6). [Disputed: the exact chronology and addresses of Mother Maria’s successive houses (an earlier house on the villa de Saxe, then rue de Lourmel, plus a country property at Noisy-le-Grand) are given with minor variations of date across the popular accounts; Hackel’s biography establishes the sequence and the centrality of 77 rue de Lourmel while individual dates are reported without archival precision.]

The rue de Lourmel house was large and dilapidated, and Mother Maria filled it with the human overflow of the emigration. She ran a canteen that fed dozens and then hundreds — the destitute, the unemployed, the sick, the released mental patients, the down-and-out — often on food she herself begged, bought cheaply at Les Halles in the small hours, or scrounged (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). She took the meanest room for herself, or slept on a cot, giving the better quarters to those she sheltered. The house had beds for the homeless, and its doors were, by design, never really closed.

The Chapel in the Garage

Characteristically, the house’s chapel was improvised from a former garage or outbuilding on the property, which Mother Maria and her helpers fitted out for the Liturgy (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6). She embroidered its vestments and hangings herself — she was a skilled needlewoman and iconographer, and some of her ecclesiastical embroidery survives — so that the poorest of chapels was clothed in beauty made by her own hands (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). The juxtaposition was deliberate and characteristic: the Liturgy at the center, the poor at the table, the two held together under one roof. For Mother Maria this was not two activities but one — the “liturgy after the Liturgy,” the worship of God continued in the service of God’s images (see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

A Community of Helpers

The rue de Lourmel was not a one-woman enterprise. Around it gathered a working community: a few like-minded nuns and laypeople, and the theologians and activists of the Paris school who supported the venture. Her son Yuri (George) lived and worked there; the philosopher and publicist Fedor Pianov managed much of the practical administration; and from 1939 the house had a resident chaplain, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, whose quiet steadiness complemented Mother Maria’s restless energy (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–8; see The Four Glorified Together). The venture was formally undergirded by the philanthropic organization Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe Delo), founded in 1935 with Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and others (see Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle).

The Texture of the Life

Contemporary accounts, gathered by Hackel, paint a vivid and unromantic picture. Mother Maria was perpetually short of money, perpetually improvising, often exhausted. She was no respecter of monastic decorum as usually understood: she smoked, she went out at all hours to buy or beg provisions, she sat in cafés in her habit debating with émigré intellectuals, she was as at home among the drunk and the broken as among the theologians (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–7). Some found this scandalous; others found in it exactly the Gospel’s own scandalous nearness to the outcast (see The Contested Saint — Methodology). She herself was unrepentant: the point of the house was not to be a model of tidy piety but to be a place where the abandoned were received as Christ (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003).

The house also had a rural annex — a property at Noisy-le-Grand, on the outskirts of Paris, used to shelter and rehabilitate the sick and the destitute, including former psychiatric patients whom no one else would take (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6). The whole constituted a small archipelago of mercy on the margins of a great city.

The House Under the Shadow

When war came in 1939 and the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, the character of the open house changed without changing its principle. The same doors that had stood open to the destitute stood open now to the hunted — to Jews and others fleeing arrest and deportation (see Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis). Rue de Lourmel became a station of rescue, a place where refugees were fed, hidden, and helped toward escape, and where Fr. Dimitri Klépinin issued the baptismal certificates that could mean the difference between life and deportation (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8–9). The logic was continuous: a house built on the principle that the stranger is Christ was, when the strangers became the persecuted, already prepared to shelter them at the cost of everything.

See Also

References

  • Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Ch. 6–9 for the houses of hospitality, 77 rue de Lourmel, the canteen and beds, the garage-chapel and her embroidery, Noisy-le-Grand, the community of helpers, and the transition to rescue under the occupation.)
  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Her essays on hospitality and the service of the poor; Forest’s introduction for the life at rue de Lourmel.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the houses of hospitality and the texture of the work.)