After Mass this afternoon, Sister Gertrude Agnes will be wheeled into the dining room of the old folks' home which the Little Sisters of the Poor run in Dunkirk. The walls will be festooned with green paper shamrocks and Irish flags sent by relatives. Champagne will be opened, and there will be a cake with candles forming the figure 100.
To congratulate Sister Gertrude Agnes on her 100th St Patrick's Day birthday, the Irish Embassy in Paris is dispatching Second Secretary Ciara O'Brien with a letter of congratulations from the President, Mrs McAleese. Sister Gertrude received Eamon de Valera's signature in 1942 - on a passport issued by Ireland's legation to France's Vichy regime.
Without possessions or money, as dictated by her vows, and speaking a sadly incomprehensible mix of Irish, English and French, Sister Gertrude has little but her passport as a written record of a life that has spanned our century.
The passport shows that Sister Gertrude was born Bridget McFadden in Co Donegal on March 17th, 1899. The photo of a middle-aged woman in the black cloak of her order tied under her chin makes her look startlingly like Jeanne Jugan, who first took an old woman into her home in 1839, an act which led to the foundation of the Little Sisters 10 years later. Jeanne Jugan was beatified in 1982, and today the order runs homes for old people in 68 countries.
Conversation with Sister Gertrude is like being on the faulty end of a poor telephone line. She is cheerful and alert, and seems to understand everything said to her. But the century-old voice comes back to us confused and garbled - except when she sings Glorious St Patrick, Molly Malone and It's a Long Way to Tipperary.
Sister Gertrude has more than looks in common with Jeanne Jugan. Both were from fishing villages, and both worked as servants in the houses of the rich. Sister Gertrude left her family's thatched cottage in Gortahork to live with her older sister Catherine in the US in 1920. She joined the Little Sisters in Delaware in 1928. Inspired by her example, two of her nieces later became nuns, and a grand-niece she has never met was named Bridget after her.
Bridget McFadden was renamed Sister Gertrude Agnes, and sent to France in 1929.
As the four Irish nuns in Dunkirk grow older they fret about the lost faith of the younger generation in Ireland, and the lack of new vocations. At 60, Mother Superior Therese Angela from Dublin is the youngest. Sister Stanislaus from Wicklow is 71. Sister Mary James from Co Meath, 76 today, shares Sister Gertrude's birthday.
The Dunkirk nuns rely on the French Catholic newspaper La Croix and the Osservatore Romano for news of home. But all show a certain detachment, as if - to paraphrase Boris Pasternak - "the private life is dead". The order has moved them from old folks' home to old folks' home according to its needs, and when they grow too old to serve, they are cared for by their "sisters".
Every night the Irish nuns in Dunkirk pray that the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland will give up their weapons. "When I heard about the bombings," the Mother Superior explains, "it hurt me personally. When they write in the newspaper that it's a religious war, it hurts me. It is not true - it's a civil war, and it's about the end of a part of history."