Despite her family's poverty, at age 11 Marguerite was able to attend the Ursuline convent in Quebec City for two years before returning home to teach her younger brothers and sisters.

[2] On August 12, 1722, at Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal, Marguerite married François d'Youville, a bootlegger who sold liquor illegally to Indigenous peoples in exchange for furs.

"In all these sufferings Marguerite grew in her belief of God's presence in her life and His tender love for every human person.

As their actions went against the social conventions of the day, d'Youville and her colleagues were mocked by their friends and relatives, and even by the poor they helped.

In 1747, the women were granted a charter to operate the General Hospital of Montreal, which by that time was in ruins and deeply in debt.

However strange they may have found the community that held them and the woman who supervised them, they were probably relieved to find themselves in a situation that offered a strong possibility of survival.

They knew their fellow soldiers to be dying in nearby prisons -- places notorious for their exposure to the heat and cold and unchecked pestilence.

After her spiritual writings were approved by theologians on February 1, 1888, her beatfication process was formally opened on April 28, 1890, and she was granted the title Servant of God.

The woman in the case is the only known long-term survivor of this disease in the world, having lived more than 40 years from a condition that typically kills people in 18 months.

[10] Numerous Roman Catholic churches, schools, women's shelters, charity shops, and other institutions in Canada and worldwide are named after St. Marguerite d'Youville.

[13] In 2010, Marie-Marguerite d'Youville's remains were removed from Grey Nuns Motherhouse and relocated to her birthplace of Varennes.