[3] After her husband's death, Madame Guyon initially lived quietly as a wealthy widow in Montargis, before re-establishing contact with François Lacombe in 1679.

The Bishop of Geneva, Jean d’Arenthon d’Alex, persuaded her to use her money to set up a house for "new Catholics" in Gex, in Savoy, as part of broader plans to convert Protestants in the region.

While her daughter was in an Ursuline convent in Thonon as a pensioner, Madame Guyon continued in Gex, experiencing illness and great difficulties, including opposition from her family.

[9] Because of Guyon's ideas on mysticism, the Bishop of Geneva, who had at first viewed her coming with pleasure, asked her to leave his diocese, and at the same time he expelled Father Lacombe, who then went to Vercelli.

[2] Madame Guyon followed her director to Turin, then returned to France and stayed at Grenoble, where she spread her religious convictions more widely with the publication of "Moyen court et facile de faire oraison" in January 1685.

The Bishop of Grenoble, Cardinal Le Camus, was perturbed by the appeal her ideas aroused and she left the city at his request, rejoining Lacombe at Vercelli.

The arrest of Madame Guyon, delayed by illness, followed on 29 January 1688, brought about, she claimed, by Father de La Motte, her brother and a Barnabite.

Some days later she met, at Beyne, in the Duchess de Béthune-Charrost's country house, her cousin, François Fénelon, who was to be the most famous of her supporters.

Before long, however, Paul Godet des Marais, Bishop of Chartres, in whose diocese Saint-Cyr was located, took alarm at the spiritual ideas which were spreading there.

The king consented that her writings should be submitted to the judgment of Bossuet, Louis-Antoine, Cardinal de Noailles, and of Tronson, superior of the Society of Saint-Sulpice.

At Paris, the police, however, arrested her on 24 December 1695 and imprisoned her, first at Vincennes, then in a convent at Vaugirard,[11] and then in the Bastille, where on 23 August 1699 she again signed a retraction of her theories and promised to refrain from spreading them further.

Madame Guyon remained imprisoned in the Bastille until 21 March 1703, when after more than seven years of her final captivity, she went to live with her son in a village in the Diocese of Blois.

There she passed some fifteen years surrounded by a stream of pilgrims, many from England and Scotland, and spending her time writing volumes of correspondence and poetry.

One of her greatest works, published in 1717 by Pierre Poiret—Ame Amante de son Dieu, representée dans les emblems de Hermannus Hugo sur ses pieux desirs—features her poetry written in response to the striking and popular emblem images of the Jesuit Herman Hugo and the Flemish master Otto von Veen.

In contrast to the self-sufficient, "righteous" egoists, the sinners who have selflessly submitted to God "are carried swiftly by the wings of love and confidence into the arms of their Saviour, who gives them gratuitously what He has infinitely merited for them.

Her published works, the Moyen Court and the Règles des associées à l'Enfance de Jésus, were both placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1688.