Brother Maur was a monk at a Trappist monastery near Paris. When Napoleon expelled the monks from their monastery in 1811, Brother Maur needed to earn a living and so was engaged by Eugene as a domestic first in Paris then in Aix. Brother Maur was more than a domestic, he lived and prayed with Eugene and would have given the young diocesan priest a valuable understanding of the meaning of religious life. After the fall of Napoleon, Brother Maur was able to return to his Order and left Aix on September 18, 1815. The day before he left, he took leave of the members of the Youth Congregation, whose activities he had participated in with Eugene from the beginning:
… in the talk that the Rev. Director gave, he did not forget to point out to the congregants, who had become his [Brother Maur’s] confreres, all the advantages they were going to derive from the communion of prayers and merits which was henceforth established between them and this holy religious, who from the depth of his solitude, and in the very silence of the night, would watch in a way over them, and will obtain for them the grace of perseverance, an inestimable gift that one may not merit, and for which one could not have too many intercessors in heaven and on earth.
Diary of the Aix Christian Youth Congregation, 17 September 1815, O.W. XVI