Childhood Marie-Thérèse Chappuis was born in Soyhières, at that time in the
Département du Mont-Terrible in
France, on 16 June 1793, to innkeepers, Pierre-Joseph Chappuis (1752–1822) and Marie-Catherine Fleury (died 1837). Her father served in the
Cent-Suisses, corps d'infanterie Suisse, attached to the personal guard of the king of France. Her mother was the daughter of François Fleury, Mayor of Soyhières and innkeeper of the village. She was also the niece of Joseph Fleury (1723–1812), the
curate of Soyhières. Out of eleven children born of this union, seven entered religion life. As Marie-Thérèse appeared frail at birth, her mother wished her baptized, but due to the
French Revolution there was no priest in Soyhières. An uncle carried the newborn in a market basket two miles over the mountain to the village of Petit-Lucelle, outside the jurisdiction of Revolutionary forces. Marie-Thérèse received her sacrament of First Communion in 1802. At the age of fourteen, she entered the Visitation Convent at
Fribourg as an boarding student. She remained two years. Although the Visitandines were a cloistered order, the nuns provided an excellent education for girls at the schools attached to their monasteries.
Religious vows In June 1811, she returned to the convent as a
postulant, but left it again in three months after a severe bout of home sickness. Three years later she came back and received the religious habit on 3 June 1815. Marie-Thérèse took the religious name of Marie-Françoise de Sales at her profession on 9 June 1816. She steeped herself in the writings of
Francis de Sales and later exclaimed that she found everything she needed and wanted in his writings. From reading De Sales, Marie-Thérèse Chappuis came to see no necessary contradiction between the active and contemplative life. A year after taking her vows she was sent to
Metz, but reasons of health compelled her to return to Fribourg. In 1833, she spent six months in the second monastery in Paris, where she was superior (1838–44). Here, a priest by the name of Beaussier wished to establish clubs or meeting places for young men entering the work force, in order to provide a healthy Christian environment. Chappuis assisted with material and financial resources. She set up similar places for young women in Troyes. "What you are doing is, of course, very good, but what you are going to do will have much greater results." Chappuis became ill in September 1875 and died at the monastery of the Visitation of Holy Mary in Troyes on 7 October 1875. The English edition of her life (London, 1900), in translating this sentence, overlooks the word
actuelle (actual): "What did the good Mother mean by this Word, 'The Way'? She meant a state of soul which consists in an entire dependence on the Will of God, by an interior consent to all that is according to His good pleasure, and an exterior imitation of our Saviour." ==Veneration==