As Marie-Thérèse appeared frail at birth, her mother wished her baptized, but due to the French Revolution there was no priest in Soyhières.

In 1826, she was elected superior of the monastery at Troyes, where she initiated the practice of the "Spiritual Directory of St. Francis de Sales", which counseled living in the present moment and doing all that is pleasing to God.

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.

[4] The greater part of Chappuis' life was spent at Troyes, where she was elected superior eleven times, and where she celebrated, in 1866, the golden anniversary of her religious profession.

While superior at Troyes, she encouraged the monastery chaplain, Louis Brisson, to start a religious order of men to follow the spiritual legacy of Francis de Sales.

[3] Marie de Sales is celebrated chiefly for her zeal in spreading a certain kind of spirituality which she called "The Way" (La Voie).

Her principal biographer, Louis Brisson, who had been for thirty years confessor to the Visitandines of Troyes, and was her spiritual director, writes that by this expression – La Voie – "she understood a state of soul which consisted in depending upon the actual will of God, relishing whatever was His good pleasure, and imitating the life of the Saviour externally".

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.