[1] In 1678, Jean-Baptiste Delaveyne (1653–1719), a Benedictine who had spent seven years being dazzled by the court of Louis XIV of France, returned to Saint-Saulge, the hamlet in the Nièvre department where he was born, in an attempt to regain the spiritual direction of his youth.

Struck by the poverty he found in that rural area, he offered the young ladies of the village of Saint-Saulge a challenge: "Have no other business but that of charity.

In 1710 they moved to Decize to serve in the local hospital, and in 1716 they consecrated a chapel in Saint-Saulge to the Immaculate Conception.

[4] While the Sisters initially ministered to the poor, during the nineteenth century they were more oriented toward the middle classes (and most of the novices were middle-class girls), and by the 1860s operated 260 convents in France.

[11] Her autobiography was published in 1871;[12] in it, she described how she made reparations for a sacrilege that had occurred in the chapel by receiving the stigmata, on 26 April 1702.