Marie-Eustelle Harpain (1814-1842) was a humble seamstress and sacristan in Saintes, France. After a conversion experience in her early teens, Eustelle developed an intense, transformative devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist: Jésus seule! (Jesus alone!) was her motto. She would spend entire nights alone in her parish church of Saint-Pallais, kneeling in adoration before the tabernacle. She had numerous visions of Jesus in the Eucharist and a number of remarkable spiritual transports and revelations. Solitary by nature, Eustelle nonetheless carried on a number of correspondences with several priests of the diocese, Clément Villecourt, her bishop, and ordinary folk who were drawn to her mysterious holiness. Two years before she died, Bishop Villecourt ordered Eustelle to write a memoir of her life, an order she grudgingly obeyed. At her death, the bishop ordered her memoir and surviving correspondence to be collected and published.
J. STEPHEN RUSSELL is professor emeritus of English at Hofstra University, where he taught for over thirty years. He is the author of The English Dream Vision (1988), Chaucer and the Trivium (1998) and more than thirty articles on medieval and monastic writers from Langland and Dante to Augustine, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Additionally, he is the author of The Cause (2009) and Some Catholic Words (2026). He has edited or translated works by Richard Challoner, John Gennings, OFM, and Albertanus of Brescia.
