Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon

A celebrated French mystic of the seventeenth century; born at 
Montargis, in the Orleanais, 13 April, 1648; died at Blois, 9 
June, 1717. Her father was Claude Bouvier, a procurator of the 
tribunal of Montargis. Of a sensitive and delicate constitution, 
she was sickly in her childhood and her education was much 
neglected. Incessantly going and coming between her home and the 
convent, and passing from one school to another, she changed her 
place of abode nine times in ten years. Her parents, who were very 
religious people, gave her an especially pious training; while she 
received and retained profound impressions from her reading of the 
works of St. Francis de Sales, and her intercourse with certain 
nuns, her teachers. At one period she desired to become a nun, as 
one of her elder sisters had, but this desire did not last long. 
When scarcely sixteen years of age, she accepted the hand of a 
wealthy gentleman of Montargis, Jacques Guyon, twenty-two years 
older than herself. After twelve years of a union in which she 
gave more devotion than it yielded her happiness, Madame Guyon 
lost in succession two of her children and her husband. Thus, at 
twenty-eight she was left a widow with three young children. 

Her Experiences and Theories 

In the meantime Madame Guyon had been initiated into the secrets