This is the story of a recluse, bedridden in the shadows of her room – a young woman afflicted by a mysterious illness who spent her life in her family's farmhouse in Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, a village in the Drôme region of southeastern France. By the 1930s, Marthe Robin's (1902-1981) reputation had already spread beyond her native region: rumors circulated that this farmer's daughter, in her thirties and paralyzed since 1929, was a mystic.

It was said that she survived on nothing but a single communion wafer each week, and that every Friday she relived the Passion of Christ, whose stigmata she bore. Visitors flocked to her bedside, where she offered spiritual guidance. Her ambition was to establish a network: the Foyers de Charité ("Hearths of Charity"), a spiritual and educational organization where laypeople seeking a deeper spiritual life could retreat. Christ himself, she claimed, had urged her in an ecstatic vision to found these "homes of light, charity and love."

To expand them as she dreamed, Robin insisted that Georges Finet, a dynamic, committed and charismatic priest from Lyon whom she met in 1936, remain with her in Châteauneuf. She was convinced he would be an exceptional preacher. Initially hesitant, he allowed himself to be persuaded to become, in his own words, the "executor of the mission God entrusted to Marthe."

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