No sooner had Madeleine Sophie been elected to preside over the infant Society than she received two invitations to further expansion. One came from Poitiers, where the three Chobelet sisters and some others who aspired to religious life were operating a small school in an abandoned Cistercian monastery that they had bought. Through priest friends who traveled about giving missions, these women heard of Madeleine Sophie and the nascent Society. Sophie left Grenoble with Henriette Girard on July 10, 1806, and arrived in Poitiers on July 23. Her account of the journey forms the first part of the well-known Journal :  Poitiers 1806-1808.

By that time only one of the Chobelets, Lydia, remained along with Josephine Bigeu. These two indicated their intention of joining Madeleine Sophie. Meanwhile, however, they had sold their house to the bishop for a seminary. So Madeleine Sophie faced the first of the hurdles on the way to this Poitiers foundation: getting the sale cancelled. Their friend Father Lambert succeeded in getting the monastery back. Then Madeleine Sophie presented the rules of the new Society to the church authorities for approval. The vicar general, in the absence of the bishop, came to see Mother Barat to explain certain difficulties; what it came down to was that it was not clear to what bishop Madeleine Sophie was accountable or which house she would live in, since she governed houses in three different dioceses. Jeanne de Charry in her study of the Constitutions tells us that this would be a major problem in the Society: the submission of the superior general to the local bishop, the “ordinary.” This time Madeleine Sophie said, “to calm him,” that she would live in this house, Poitiers, for as long and as often as possible and that it would be the novitiate and “that we were going to see to what bishop I should be accountable.” Not for nothing was she called Sophie (Wisdom). The vicar general went away satisfied; the approval was quickly granted, as the authorities saw great potential for Catholic education. But this problem would recur in one form or another in the future.

Mother Barat looked elsewhere, however, for her first recruits: another invitation had come from Bordeaux. She heard from another priest, Father Enfantin, that he had been directing a group of six young women who wanted to be nuns. They had been living together under a religious rule for three months; Madeleine Sophie received them, and when the news got around, thirty other candidates appeared. She could not take all of them, but she sent the six original ones and two others to Poitiers. She describes it in her journal: “I arranged to send them in separate parties, to avoid remarks that would have been made at the simultaneous departure of so many…four went with Mother Henriette Girard, three followed by themselves, and I kept one, Elizabeth (called in religion Thérèse) Maillucheau, to go with me.” Thus began one of her many close friendships with fellow religious who, like Mother Duchesne, had the same spiritual aspirations as Madeleine Sophie herself.

The Journal tells us how Mother Barat, young mistress of novices though she was, set out to form her charges. She was presenting them with constitutions that, as yet, made no mention of the Sacred Heart, but “On the morning of the feast of the Sacred Heart, I called my sisters together and gave them a conference on the spirit in which we should celebrate this feast, the greatest in our Society…that we had been chosen to renew devotion to the Sacred Heart…that as the heart is the center uniting all the affections of the person, in this sense the Divine Heart of Jesus is worthy of adoration and love…” Uniting themselves to this loving heart of the God-Man would be the source of all their spiritual growth and apostolic effectiveness. There was created a climate of charity in which the novices were given a religious formation that penetrated the whole personality to the depths in order to consecrate them wholly to the Lord. The formation was searching: it demanded detachment, obedience and silence, but no matter how demanding, as J. de Charry observes, “a breath of joy and freedom passes through the pages of the Journal.” The spirituality of the Society, which we are trying so hard to articulate today, was taking form in a noviceship program that would be the model for the future. It was the Society’s Eden.