François Leclerc du Tremblay (1577-1638), religious name Father Joseph, assisted Antoinette d'Orléans-Longueville, then a nun at Fontevraud Abbey, when she founded the order of the Daughters of Calvary. On 26 July 1611, Madame d'Orléans withdrew to the priory at Lencloître to begin the work of reform that had been impossible to achieve at Fontevraud. From 1611 to 1617, Father Joseph assiduously introduced the nuns to the practice of prayer by giving them many lessons on the spiritual life. At the beginning of 1616, he went to Rome to ask Pope Paul V for his opinion on a crusade project with the Christian princes, for the establishment of missions in Poitou and for the erection of a new Congregation: the Benedictines of Our Lady of Calvary. Not without difficulty, in November he obtained the papal brief for the foundation of the first monastery in Poitiers.
On 25 October 1617, Madame d'Orléans left Lencloître with 24 nuns to live by the Rule of Saint Benedict in poverty, at the school of Mary compassionate with the sufferings of her Son.
In 1618, at the time of the death of Madame Antoinette d'Orléans, Father Joseph set off for Madrid where he hoped to launch the crusade. As Provincial of Touraine, he continued to follow the Congregation and put all his zeal into encouraging foundations, with the support of Queen Marie de Médicis, in Angers and then in Paris.
He followed our Congregation closely and gave his teachings to the 2 monasteries in Paris, the one in Le Marais where he brought together all the young professed sisters to give them a more intensive formation: Exhortations on the spiritual exercises, on the liturgical year, on certain biblical books. There are more than 500 of them. For him, our Congregation became the most effective means of liberating the Holy Places through prayer, as he had been unable to obtain the agreement of the Christian princes to raise an army.
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