Although not pious, his parents were members of the Reform Judaism movement there and taught their son Hebrew and the basics of the Jewish faith.

Praised by his teacher, who had arranged successful concerts for him at the age of 7 in Altona and Frankfurt, he became the spoiled focus of the family's attention.

At the age of 12, his mother resolved to take him to Paris to advance his musical training, against the wishes of her husband, who was experiencing financial difficulties.

Undeterred, she approached the Grand Dukes George of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Francis I of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in order to obtain their financial support for her son.

As Liszt himself had been nicknamed Putzig (German for "little cute guy") by his own teacher, Carl Czerny, he began to call Cohen Puzzi, a diminutive form of the word.

Liszt accepted Cohen into his social circle, introducing him to his friends, the author George Sand and the Abbé de Lamennais, who both also became charmed by the boy.

Lamennais gave the young Jewish boy an autographed copy of his work, Paroles d'un croyant — for which the priest had just been excommunicated by Pope Gregory XVI — with the inscription: Souvenirs offerts à mon cher petit Puzzi.

Cohen felt a deep religious experience in the course of one trip, when Liszt played an improvisation of the Dies Irae from Mozart's Requiem on the Grand Organ of the Fribourg Cathedral.

[3] In 1837 Liszt and his circle returned to Paris, where the princess had arranged for a famed competition between him and his greatest rival of the period, Sigismond Thalberg.

When his increasing debts threatened to drown him, she arranged for a concert, which was to prove unsuccessful, apparently due to his lack of training from the idle lifestyle of gambling and dissolution he had adopted.

The Countess d'Agoult used an affair he had with a married woman in her campaign in an attempt to discredit him in Liszt's eyes, who nonetheless kept Cohen as his companion for his concert tours around Europe until the end of 1840.

Friedrich Wieck, father of the future Clara Schumann, began to criticize publicly both Liszt and Cohen in the newspapers in Leipzig.

He spent the next five years traveling around Europe with his mother and his sister Henriette, playing concerts and composing works for the piano.

In May 1847, while leading the choir at an Eucharistic exposition and benediction at the Church of Sainte-Valérie, Cohen became overwhelmed by an intense experience of being touched by divine grace.

Under his instruction, Cohen became to know the Catholic faith and was baptized as Marie-Augustin Henri on 28 August, the feast day of his patron saint Augustine of Hippo.

At his baptism, he experienced an apparition of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a multitude of saints, all bathed in a brilliant light, as well as an overwhelming experience of love.

With the support of Jean-Baptiste de Bouillé, the Archbishop of Poitiers, out of his own experience, he immediately began efforts to popularize the practice of the nocturnal adoration of the Blessed Sacrament by the general faithful.

Next he turned to Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, OP, who was in the process of re-establishing the Order of Preachers in France, after its destruction during the French Revolution.

Being a recent convert was a barrier to his admission, however, due to Church law, which required a personal visit to Rome to obtain a dispensation.

[2] Cohen gave a farewell concert which cleared his debts, required before he could be admitted to enter the Carmel, in the days before the Revolution of 1848.

He preached to thousands in Geneva, Bordeaux, Lyon, and in Paris before huge crowds in prominent churches, such as Saint-Sulpice and Sainte-Clotilde.

[3] Cohen's fame as a preacher led to an invitation by Cardinal Wiseman to come to England to re-establish the Carmelite order, after its suppression in the Dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century, for which he received a papal blessing from Pius IX.

[2] He gained further public attention to his ministry in 1864, when he faced a jeering crowd while administering the Last Rites to six Catholic sailors about to be hanged on the gallows of Newgate Prison.

Even though he was exempted by the French government, and his surviving immediate family were living in France, he chose to go into exile in Geneva, Switzerland that following October.

He found a facility crammed with over 5,000 prisoners living in squalid conditions, of whom some ten percent were suffering from serious infectious diseases, including smallpox.