Blessed Camille Costa de Beauregard

Camille Costa de Beauregard was born at Chambéry on 17 February 1841, the fifth of eleven children of the Marquis Pantaléon, a gentleman of King Charles Albert, and of Marthe Saint-George de Vérac. After schooling in religious colleges and a period of drift, he entered the French seminary in Rome in November 1863 and was ordained in the basilica of Saint John Lateran on 26 May 1866. He spent another year in Rome, then refused to enter the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics and a diplomatic career, returning instead to Chambéry, where he became curate of the cathedral in August 1867. A cholera epidemic that year left a number of orphans, whom he first gathered in the cathedral presbytery, giving himself entirely to their education, and he also worked among the poor and among workers of the mutual society of Saint Francis de Sales.

From humble beginnings at Le Bocage the orphanage grew to take up to a hundred and seventy-five children, with workshops and a farm to train young farmers. He twice refused the episcopate and gave away his family's wealth to the work. He died on 25 March 1910.