Marie-Louise Trichet was born to a Poitiers magistracy family and at seventeen met Louis de Montfort, then chaplain at the General Hospital of Poitiers (1701). De Montfort recognized in her immediately a future foundress; he sent her at first to live and serve at the Poitiers hospital as a simple laywoman among the patients — a contemplative-ascetical experiment that lasted nine years (1703–12).
When de Montfort gathered her with a second companion (Catherine Brunet) on February 2, 1703, in the small hospital chapel and clothed her as a religious of his projected new women's congregation, the Daughters of Wisdom (Filles de la Sagesse), the order had only the two members. The order grew very slowly through the next decade and was barely surviving when de Montfort died in 1716. Marie-Louise — now thirty-two and the senior member — assumed effective leadership of the small group.
Under her direction over the next forty-three years (1716–59) the Daughters of Wisdom grew into one of the major French Catholic women's congregations, dedicated to the care of the poor sick in hospitals, the education of poor girls, and the catechesis of the deaf-mute (a specialization the Daughters developed in the 18th century, anticipating the great 19th-century French Catholic deaf-mute education movement). She died at Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre on April 28, 1759 — the forty-third anniversary of Louis de Montfort's death. Canonized 1993.