Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot was the daughter of the president of the Burgundian Parlement at Dijon. She married Baron Christophe de Rabutin-Chantal in 1592 at twenty, and bore him six children over eight years. The marriage was happy. In 1601 her husband was killed in a hunting accident by a friend who mistook him for game; Jane, twenty-nine, was left a widow with four surviving children (the youngest under one).
She managed the Chantal estates for seven years as a widow under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by her father-in-law, who insisted she remain at his château with the children. In 1604, on a journey to Dijon, she heard the Lenten sermons of Francis de Sales, the Bishop of Geneva (then in exile at Annecy because of the Calvinist control of Geneva). From their first meeting, both immediately recognized in the other the providential complement of their spiritual lives. Their correspondence — and Jane's spiritual direction by Francis — runs through twelve thousand surviving letters across the next twenty years.
In June 1610, after providing for her children's continued education, Jane founded with Francis de Sales the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary at Annecy. The Visitandines were specifically designed for widows and women whose health or circumstances would not permit the rigours of conventional monastic life — gentle, contemplative, focused on the love of God and the imitation of the Visitation episode of the Virgin Mary visiting Elizabeth. The order grew across France: by Jane's death at Moulins in December 1641 there were eighty-six houses of the Visitation. Canonized 1767. The Sacred Heart visions of Margaret Mary Alacoque would be received at the Visitation convent of Paray-le-Monial three decades later, founded on Jane's spirituality.