Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, Religious

Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot was born in Dijon in 1572 and in 1592 married the Baron de Chantal. Widowed in 1601, when her husband was killed in a hunting accident, she was left with four young children. In 1604 she heard Francis de Sales preach in Dijon and took him as her guide; Butler tells that she wrote the name of Jesus on her breast as a sign of giving herself to God. In 1610, at Annecy, the two founded the Order of the Visitation, open also to widows and women too frail for harsh austerities. At her death, at Moulins on 13 December 1641, there were more than eighty houses. Her granddaughter was the letter writer Madame de Sévigné. She was canonized in 1767.