Barbe Avrillot was born to a Parisian magistracy family and at sixteen married Pierre Acarie, a wealthy Parisian master of accounts. The marriage produced six children — three of whom would become Carmelite nuns and one a priest. Madame Acarie ran the family financial affairs, the household of servants, the catechetical formation of her children, and from 1588 (the year of the Henrician civil war and the Catholic League's struggle for Paris) a major underground network supporting persecuted Catholic priests of the Ligue.
She was the centre of the most influential salon of the French Catholic Reformation. Pierre de Bérulle, Vincent de Paul (as a young curé), Francis de Sales (during his Parisian visits), and the future Cardinals of Paris all met at her household weekly. She read the recently-circulating Spanish Carmelite writings — Teresa of Ávila had been canonized in 1622 a few years after Marie's death — and from 1601 led the formal effort to bring the Discalced Carmelites from Spain to France. The mother-house was established at Paris in October 1604, with six Spanish nuns including Ana de San Bartolomé and Ana de Jesús; the foundation succeeded and Discalced Carmelite houses spread rapidly across France.
Her husband died in 1613. She entered the Carmel of Amiens that year as a simple lay sister (refusing the choir-nun status her family rank would have allowed) and was transferred to Pontoise in 1614, where she died on April 18, 1618. Beatified by Pius VI in 1791 — three months before the suppression of all French Catholic religious houses by the Revolution.