Béline — Belina in the older Latin and Polish accounts — was born at Landreville, a village in Champagne within the diocese of Troyes. The traditions concerning her are old and not always in agreement: some place her martyrdom in the year 1153, others as late as 8 September 1380. What every account holds in common is the shape of her short life: the daughter of a devout farmer, a shepherdess, a girl of sixteen whose goodness was known to everyone in the village.
Her holiness was not hidden in a cloister but worked out among her neighbors. She visited and cared for the sick, kept vigil beside the dying, and prayed for the dead, so that the peasants of Landreville loved and respected her. Between her flock and the sickbeds of her village she learned that whole discipline of Christian love which asks nothing back: to be near suffering when it is inconvenient, to sit with the dying when others have gone home, to give the poor the little she had.
According to tradition she was betrothed to a young man of the village, and her parents went, as custom required, to ask the consent of the local lord, Jean de Pradines. He refused. He had conceived a desire for the girl himself and declared his own intention regarding her, which Béline refused. Some time afterward, on 8 September — the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary — the lord came upon her as she was pasturing her sheep beside a spring outside the village, and there pressed his shameful proposals upon her. She refused him again and resisted. Enraged by this second refusal, he drew his sword and struck her; the blow to the head killed the sixteen-year-old at once. The older French account says simply that he beheaded her by the fountain.
The murder of the little shepherdess broke the patience of the countryside. The people of Landreville rose in indignation and burned the lord's castle to the ground. Jean de Pradines escaped the fury of the crowd by flight and saved his life, but not his honor: he was struck with excommunication, and his fief was annexed to that of Bar-sur-Seine. The village had lost its shepherdess; it had gained a martyr.
Béline's tomb and memory were guarded with love. Tradition holds that the spring where she died became a place of miracles, and pilgrims came to it as to a holy well. She was honored as a saint some fifty years after her death, and her relics were kept at the abbey of Notre-Dame de Mores until the French Revolution. They are now exposed for the veneration of the faithful in a reliquary in the parish church of the Assumption of the Virgin at Landreville, which contains a chapel dedicated to her, adorned with a retable by the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Bouchardon. A separate chapel of Sainte-Béline was raised on the presumed site of her home, and a monument marks the fountain where she was martyred.
She is honored in France as a martyr of purity — one of those young witnesses who, like Agnes and Maria Goretti, judged that the integrity of the body given to God was worth more than life itself. Her sanctity, however, did not begin at the spring; it had been formed already in the sickrooms and death-watches of Landreville, where she had spent herself for others long before she was asked to give everything.
May Saint Béline obtain for us her clean heart and her fearless charity, and may we imitate her today by spending one hour in service of someone sick, dying, or alone.
