While most people who had contracted typhus died, Eugene’s near-miraculous recovery is attributed to the prayers of the young people
That is when they displayed those feelings of faith and trust in God that I pray the Lord will keep them in always. They were not content to come several times a day to my door to get news of me that was every day more alarming: they were not slow to grasp that one must seek from God what men no longer trusted themselves to obtain by their art. They turned in effect to the Supreme Moderator of all things, and relying on the powerful intercession of the B.V.M., of great St. Joseph, and other saints to whom they were most devoted, they began those prayers which, joined to the others that people in their charity made for me, snatched me from the jaws of death whose prey I had well-nigh become. And how could the goodness of God have failed to be touched by the fervour, trust, perseverance with which these young people prayed the Lord to give them back their father.
Diary of the Aix Christian Youth Congregation ,
May 1814, O.W. XVI