Labre was born in 1748 in the village of Amettes, near Arras, in the former Province of Artois in the north of France. He was the eldest of fifteen children of a prosperous shopkeeper, Jean-Baptiste Labre, and his wife, Anne Grandsire. Labre had an uncle, a parish priest, living some distance from his family home; this uncle gladly received him, and undertook his early education for the...