"Le belle Acarie" ("the beautiful Acarie"), as she was known in Paris, was born Barbara Avrillot in Paris. Her family belonged to the higher bourgeois society in Paris. Her father, Nicholas Avrillot, was Accountant General in the Chamber of Paris, and chancellor of Marguerite of Navarre, first wife of Henry IV of France; while her mother, Marie Lhuillier was a descendant of Etienne Marcel, the famous prévôt des marchands (chief municipal magistrate). She was placed with the Poor Clares of the Abbey of Longchamp, where she had a maternal aunt, for her education, and acquired there a vocation for the cloister. In 1584, through obedience she married Pierre Acarie, viscount of Villemor, a wealthy young man of high standing, who was a fervent Catholic, to whom she bore seven children. Pierre Acarie disapproved of Barbe's reading romance novels and with clerical advice removed the books and substituted books of a more pious and spiritual bent.