I was sorting a rota this week — who's bringing what, and on which evening, for a neighbour who's just out of hospital — and it put me in mind of Vincent de Paul, because that is very nearly his whole biography. The story the sources give, and they broadly agree on this one, is that in 1617 he preached about a sick and destitute family in a village parish and the parish responded magnificently: everybody went, on the same afternoon, with everything they had. Food for a fortnight arriving in one day and then nothing at all. So he organised the women of the parish into a roster, with turns and lists, and that was the first of the Confraternities of Charity.

He founded the Congregation of the Mission in the 1620s and then, with Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity: and the interesting difficulty there was legal rather than spiritual. Women under religious vows were meant to be enclosed, and enclosure is no use if the work is climbing the stairs of a tenement or collecting an abandoned infant from a doorstep. So the sisters were not constituted as nuns. Simple vows, renewed each year, no permanent cloister — laywomen, in the eyes of canon law, which is precisely what let them out into the street. It took decades of careful argument to keep it that way.

He died in Paris in 1660, coming up on eighty; he'd been born in 1581 to a farming family in Gascony. The portrait that's attached is the face you'd expect from all that: an old man in a black skullcap and a broad white collar, very lined, grey moustache and a little pointed beard, with a collection label numbered 863 stuck in the corner.