Mgr. Joseph-Thomas Duhamel invited the order of the Filles de la Sagesse (Daughters of Wisdom), founded by Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort in Poitiers, France, to come to Ottawa and care for the city’s children and sick people. The first nuns arrived in Janeville in 1891.

They settled in the Valiquette house, located opposite the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, on September 12 of the same year. In the beginning, the nuns took in six boarders, but this number soon rose to 33. A novitiate was opened in 1903, and in 1909 a new wing was added for the boarders.

In 1913, the boarding school was affiliated to Montreal’s Conservatoire national de musique, and in 1920 to the University of Ottawa. In 1920, the school had 130 students. In 1960, a school was built on Church Street to accommodate as many as 500 students.

In 1970, however, as for the other Catholic high schools in the region, administration was taken over by the public system.

This religious order also ran Monfort Hospital for close to twenty years.