Globally, pictures of Sister Genevieve's small frame, standing in serious prayer just feet from Pope Francis's body, shone.
Paying homage to the friend she met in pursuit of justice for a victim of Argentina's cruel dictatorship, the 82-year-old French nun was not supposed to be there.
Cardinals lined up to pay their respects once Francis's body was laid in state in St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.
Although the basilica had not yet admitted the general public, Genevieve broke protocol and slipped in and spent several minutes wiping away tears.
Twenty years ago, Francis and Genevieve met following her trip from Rome to Buenos Aires for the funeral of her aunt, Leonie Duquet.
She first found the then-bishop of Buenos Aires uninteresting, but years later they would become friends and cooperate to assist the underprivileged and disenfranchised.
Duquet, a French nun as well, suffered under Argentina's dictatorship. She had a "piercing stare". Along with 10 activists and another French nun, Alice Domon, she was thrown to her death into the sea on one of the infamous "death flights" on December 14, 1977.
Under the 1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship, up to 30,000 people are said to have been forcibly disappeared; many of them were tortured and dumped into the sea.
Duquet's body washed ashore and was buried in a mass grave; it was discovered and marked in 2005. Approved by Buenos Aires' then-bishop, Francis, her re-burial took place at the Santa Cruz church, where she had been arrested.
"I sobbed practically from the beginning to the mass's end. In a video uploaded on YouTube on her friendship with Francis, Genevieve remarked, "I couldn't accept that a part of the church was on the dictatorship's side."
Genevieve signed a letter pleading with French President Emmanuel Macron not to overlook the French victims of the dictatorship when he visited Argentina on a state trip last November.
Eric Domergue knew Genevieve at the time she was looking for a Catholic burial for her aunt; his brother Yves vanished in 1976 before his body was discovered and identified in 2010.