The White and the Gold (48 page)

Women had to be home by nine o’clock of an evening. This was designed, no doubt, to nip in the bud any tendency to hold evening entertainments and balls, but it was the one restriction which seems to have been disregarded. Visitors to Quebec wrote glowing reports of the social gaiety of the place and the beauty and vivacity of the ladies.

Unmarried girls were permitted to dance with one another only, in their own homes and with their mothers present. Ships from France were not permitted to bring in rouge (but they brought in everything else in the way of new fashions and beauty aids).

A society was formed in Quebec known as the Congregation of the Holy Family to which only women belonged. They met every Thursday at the cathedral, where a room carefully protected from eavesdropping was provided for them. The purpose of the meetings, although this was never openly acknowledged, was for each one present to tell everything she had heard about others, good or bad; a practice borrowed from the convents of earlier centuries. It is probable that the members were more likely to recite the bad deeds than the good ones, and certainly disciplinary measures were followed only when misdemeanors were retailed. The fathers and husbands of the good ladies who belonged to this gossip mart became highly incensed and tried to put a stop to it, even securing the aid of Talon in the matter. They had no success. The ladies enjoyed the tattling and they had the support, or so it was whispered, of Bishop Laval.

One of the hardships which caused the men of the colony to complain
was the number of church holidays and saints’ days when they were not allowed to work. “How can we cultivate our land,” they cried, “or build a thriving business in our stores when we have no more than ninety working days!”

Gossip La Hontan, who found all this highly objectionable, was particularly bitter about a prohibition which had been put on the possession of any books save the
Lives of the Saints
and similar volumes of a devotional nature. He was himself the victim of this regulation which the priests carried out with unrelenting severity. It was in Montreal that he ran afoul of the King’s orders.

Printing being still in an infant stage, certain kinds of books were extremely expensive, particularly those which appealed most to this avid purveyor of spicy detail. There was one book which had to be printed in secrecy and sold from beneath the counter with blinds drawn, being probably the most pornographic and obnoxious in the world at that time. La Hontan possessed a copy, a perfect one, which made it very valuable. One day he returned to his rooms and found the curé there. The good priest had taken the book in hand and was just tearing out the last of the offending pages!

Most of the information with reference to the regimentation of the people of New France is found in the multiplicity of letters and memoranda exchanged between the King and his minister Colbert on one hand and the men who acted as intendant in Canada, most particularly while Jean Talon filled that post. Laval does not seem to have figured to any extent in what was being done, although his influence can be felt in many of the regulations. The King had become increasingly wary of the militant head of the Church. He, Laval, was too sure of what he believed to be right and too willing to battle for it. The King preferred men who nodded their heads promptly. Not that Colbert was obsequious in his attitude. He understood his master and knew how to get his own way without seeming to oppose or press.

When Talon left the colony for the second and last time, Laval had two more years to wait for the honor he had desired so much. He was fifty-one years of age when he finally became Bishop of Quebec. It cannot be said, therefore, that he had attained his vintage years when the King was tinkering with the lives of his New World
subjects like a boy with his toys, but there can be no doubt that he was mellowing. It was possible now to detect a hint of sweetness back of the severity of his eyes and some of the same quality in his smile. Needless to state, the man who had fought with Montmagny over trifles was still willing to fight with the King over issues of importance.

A never-ending dispute was being carried on between the new bishop and the head of the state over the position of the parish priest, the curé. The King wanted the priest to be more the servant of his flock than of his bishop; a fixture who could not be removed except for unusual cause, which was the system prevailing in France. Laval wanted the priests in the field to be subject to change so that a man could always be fitted into the niche where he would be most useful. The King refused to understand why the Canadian priest had to be paid twice as much as the rural curé in France. Laval’s answer was to demand (and finally to obtain) as much as five hundred francs a year for his priests, even though many humble priests in France had to be content with two hundred. Did the French curé minister to a flock living over a hundred-mile stretch of river country? demanded the logical and outspoken bishop. Did he need a body servant strong enough to carry a portable chapel about with him?

Despite his willingness to fight when the need presented itself, Laval was finding that his interests had shifted to some extent at least. He was deeply concerned now over the schools he had established. The seminary at Quebec, which was devoted to the training of young Canadians for the priesthood, was the point to which he invariably turned with quickened footsteps when he had any time to spare. He delighted in conversation with the neophytes, and nothing pleased him more than to welcome the missionaries who came once a year from their distant fields for a week at the seminary, to be spent in retreat and contemplation.

The other educational institutions he had inaugurated were doing well, the school for boys and the manual-training school which had been set up under the shadow of Cape Tourmente down the river. In the latter establishment young men and boys were instructed in the work they desired to undertake in life. A few had come who showed artistic gifts, and they were being given full opportunity to develop them. It was to Laval’s open-mindedness on this point that the credit must be given for the fine artists the colony produced, the men who made the classically simple but beautifully proportioned
silverware of Quebec, the vessels for clerical use, the handsome silver platters, the
écuelle
(a porringer) with its typical points of design, the characteristic papboat.

Although Bishop Laval lived on a sparse minimum, he was becoming a rich man in spite of himself. The grants of land which the Crown had insisted on conferring on him were becoming valuable. When the bishopric of Quebec was finally set up, a quarter of the population lived on his seigneurial lands at Beaupré and on the island of Orleans. Laval had a plan locked away in his mind. He would keep his land, allowing it to increase in value, and at his death he would will it to his much-loved schools. So well managed was this purpose that after his death these institutions continued to grow in scope and influence over the years, free of financial strain because of the acumen of their founder.

If the people of Quebec had heard on the evening of November 19, 1671, that the candles had blown out during the services at the cathedral, they would have said at once that Madame la Fondatrice was dead. There was a superstition, in which they all firmly believed, that this was a sure sign of death; and they knew that Madame de la Peltrie, who had founded the Ursuline Convent, was mortally ill.

When this earnest lady of great refinement and charm had turned over all her wealth to the endowment of the convent in Quebec and had come to Canada to devote the rest of her life to it—accomplishing this revolutionary change in her life by hoodwinking her suitors and going to law with her grasping relatives—she was filled with a great sense of devotion. With the zeal, however, had gone an understandable belief that she would walk always in shining spiritual armor. That she had a desire to assume spectacular roles was made clear by the zest with which she embraced the Montreal adventure and by her desire to go out to almost certain death in the Huron mission field. It took her a time to reach the realization that service is more often a matter of daily attention to monotonous tasks; that, like Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, she must be prepared to labor incessantly, unnoticed and unrewarded. When she was instructed to return to Quebec from Montreal, she began to see the light and from that time forward she was content to share the drudgery of dedication.

For the last eighteen years of her life Madame de la Peltrie lived in her tiny house in a corner of the convent grounds and had charge of the wardrobe, a task which kept her extremely busy. She did the work so well that the little Indian girls always had warm and suitable clothing, although the Fondatrice herself went about in old and patched garb.

“Why don’t you give these things you wear to the poor?” she was often asked.

“I prefer,” was her answer, “to see the poor in new clothes.”

She had become, in fact, very humble and even contrite. Perhaps she believed that pride had played too large a part in her previous attitude. “I am the most sinful creature in the world,” she said once. “Certainly I have been unfaithful to God’s gift of grace.”

She always took a humble place at the long table in the refectory so that she would be one of the last served. Her place in the choir was an inconspicuous one.

On November 12 she had an attack of pleurisy and sank so rapidly that all hope for her recovery was abandoned. Knowing that her end was near, she had everything which might be thought ornamental removed from the room, it being her desire to die in the atmosphere of poverty into which she had directed her life.

The consistency with which she had observed the principles of self-sacrifice became apparent when an inventory of her few personal belongings was made after her death. The list was as follows:

It must have been apparent to Jean Talon, who went to her bedside on November 15 to assist in the drawing of her will (she had almost nothing to leave), that all the regulations he had put into effect on the orders of the King, all the restrictions which aimed at improving the tone of life in the colony, would prove less effectual in the long run than the example of a life such as this.

Two other lives came to an end soon afterward to add to the
weight of the lesson. Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, who had faithfully and tearfully remained at the side of her dying friend, passed away eighteen months later. She had been the active head of the convent; in fact, her determination to do everything needful for the good of the institution had led her to master three Indian languages, Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois. Thus equipped, she had been like a mother to the Indian girls who came under her charge, as well as to the French children who paid their 120 livres a year for instruction in
les ouvrages de goût
, the finer things, such as painting, embroidery, and the making of lace. When Mère Marie came to die it was a misfortune in which the whole colony shared. Everyone came to bid her a last farewell, until it seemed to those in attendance that the chamber of the dying woman was always crowded. This remarkable woman, whose seventy-one years had been years of devotion, did not care; they were her friends, and she was dying, as she had lived, in harness.

All of Quebec, weeping and disconsolate, came out to attend her funeral services, which were conducted by Father Lalemant, and to stand at the grave where she would know the rest that life had always withheld.

“The Angel of the Colony,” Jeanne Mance, passed away on June 18, 1673, thus bringing to an end the epic story of the three great women who had played such useful parts in the founding of New France.

The efforts of the King to evolve by decree the kind of state he desired in the New World have been defended on the ground that strict laws were indispensable. The land was far removed from civilization, and the conditions encountered were in every way extraordinary: a continent of vast extent thinly populated by savages, the climate severe, the means of sustenance small. It was hard to find volunteers for a life so different and so terrifying. Among those who were induced by one means and another to go out, there were few like Louis Hébert, men with a wholehearted desire to take up land and to make a living by their own efforts. The bulk of the colonists were so averse to agricultural pursuits, in the early stages, that they had to be fed from France or so liberally endowed that they were dependents of the Crown. There was very little general employment,
and so the idle hands of the men in rusty coats and patched knee-length stockings who loafed in the streets of Quebec and Montreal could not be kept out of mischief. Nothing but the strictest discipline by regulation, say the apologists, could keep such communities from falling into economic and spiritual chaos.

There is some truth, of course, in these observations. Strangely enough, however, the strongest evidence which can be advanced to excuse the royal policy is that it drove men into the woods, and this form of disobedience proved in the best interests of the colony. The opening up of the North and West had always been among the chief aims of the French in the New World. The Jesuits thought of the whole continent as their field, and the eyes of the statesmen fixed themselves resolutely on the ultimate goal, the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Unwilling to be told what they could and could not do, the
coureurs de bois
set out in ever-increasing numbers, their canoes filled with goods for trading with the Indians, their resentful eyes fixed on the waterways and the woods ahead of them. The exodus was so great that at one time the loss to the towns was estimated at a quarter of the effective male population.

This can be cited, therefore, on the credit side of the ledger for the Martinet of Marly, that as a reverse effect of his incessant interference the frontiers were rolled back and the North and the West were slowly opened up.