Soeur Emmanuelle - who became a chat show star late in life but spent much of it helping rubbish sweepers in the slums of Cairo - died on Sunday, less than a month before her 100th birthday. Born Madeleine Cinquin in Brussels in 1908, she appeared in recent years alongside the likes of Zinedine Zidane and far more glamorous women as one of France's best-loved figures.
But she never let her fame get to her head: "They're not going to ask for my popularity ranking at the gates of heaven. No one is going to inscribe my score on my tombstone," she once said.
With Catholicism in free fall, the popularity of the bespectacled, hunched and wizened figure of Emmanuelle, who was often likened to Mother Theresa, has led to suggestions that the French are thirsty for philanthropic values in a consumer-obsessed society.
Renowned for her no-nonsense, maverick approach to religious orthodoxy, Emmanuelle approved contraception and the idea of priests marrying, and always kept her charity work independent of the church.
She raised puritanical eyebrows this summer by admitting to dancing into the night with dapper boys during the interwar years, falling in love with a man for his seductive intellect and lusting after the latest fashions.
"I'm no saint," she declared in a set of memoirs published this summer called I'm 100 Years Old and I'd Like to Tell You ...
Revealing the naughty nun behind her lifelong devotion to charity and Catholicism, she admitted to being torn early on between the desire for "immediate pleasure" and her religious calling. "I loved dancing, preferably with nice-looking boys. My mother used to say to me, 'You want boys to like you, to surround you, to admire you. And if you become a nun ... ' And I would tell her, 'For God, I will leave the boys alone'."
She had the habit of dubbing frequent comparisons with Mother Teresa "ridiculous". "It's like comparing a mouse and a mountain," she once said.
Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister and human rights champion, described her as "the youngest, the most beautiful, the most obstinate of activists."
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(Source: TTC)