At length, through the influence of her enemies, Madame Guyon received from the bishop notice that she must go out of his diocese, and Father la Combe was similarly warned to depart.  All espostulation was in vain, and leaving Savoy, in which her labours had been so much blessed, she set out on a wearisome journey into Piedmont, crossing the perilous Mont Cenis on a mule, and came to Turin.

In spite of many annoyances, she had spent two happy years at Thonon in work for her Divine Master; and she would have been more than human if she had not felt, though in a spirit of sweet resignation, the wrench which these frequent changes of habitation inflicted.  No wonder that she called to mind the pathetic words in Matthew viii. 20:  “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.”  “This,” she writes,[1] “I have since experienced to its full extent, having had no sure abode where I could remain more than a few months, and every day in uncertainty where I should be on the morrow, and besides, finding no refuge, either among my friends, who were ashamed of me and openly renounced me just when there was an outcry against me, or among my relations, most of whom have declared themselves my adversaries and been my greatest persecutors, while the others looked on me with contempt and indignation.”

[Footnote 1:  La Vie, seconde partie, ch. xiv., 1.]

At Turin she found temporary refuge and rest in the house of the Marchioness of Prunai, but appears to have spent only a few months of 1684 in that city.  She longed to return to evangelistic work in France.  Accordingly in the autumn she went to Grenoble, and had great success in her labours, but, through the hatred of her enemies, was obliged to quit the place secretly, leaving her little daughter in charge of her faithful maid La Gautiere.  She had already commenced authorship, at Thonon, by writing, during an interval of much-needed rest, her book entitled Spiritual Torrents.  At Grenoble she began her commentaries on The Holy Bible, and here she published her famous work, A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, which speedily ran through several editions.  So, by word of mouth, and by pen, she taught, and “the new spirit of religious inquiry,” as she calls it, spread and prevailed.  It was indeed the old spirit of inquiry, as old as the days of the apostles, and its basis was the principle which she clearly enunciates, “that man is a sinner, and that he must be saved by repentance and faith in Christ, and that faith in God through Christ subsequently is, and must be, the foundation of the inward life.”  Such a bold proclamation of Gospel truth could not but rouse the anger of the clerical party at Grenoble.  The persuasive missioner was soon the centre of a storm of wrath and indignation, which the friendly Bishop Camus, afterwards a cardinal, was unable to allay.  Early in 1686 she left Grenoble for Marseilles, where she hoped to find refuge for a while.  But her fame had preceded her.  “I did not arrive in Marseilles,” she records, “till ten in the morning, and it was only a few hours after noon when all was in uproar against me.”