Bride of New France (19 page)

The ship’s men fire a cannon into the air as the
Saint-Jean-Baptiste
approaches the settlement on the hill. Their ship has been badly used by the months at sea. The sails are ragged and worn by the weather they encountered on their journey. The torn bits wave like fragments of flags. The wood of the hull is soaked through and rotting in places.

The passengers look even worse than the ship. The men are dark skinned, their hair and beards long and knotted. Their arms are thin and taut with sinewy muscles. Even the girls who spent the calm days at the start of the trip combing their hair and wondering about the men they would marry in Canada are now pale faced and greasy. According to Madame Bourdon’s orders, none of the women have washed more than their faces and hands and have not changed even their undergarments since boarding the ship; their open quarters in the Sainte-Barbe would not enable them to do so with decency. As a result, even the girls who started out young and pretty two months ago now look and smell worse than any vagrant madwoman of the Salpêtrière. Laure knows she must appear the same way, although the journey has done nothing to make Madeleine look as vile as these women. Her illness has simply shrunken her a little and made her seem more like a child than ever. Her eyes rarely open, but there is a small smile on her lips.

The sound of the cannon travels across the water, a lonely reverberation. The fort is surrounded by a stone wall, although there doesn’t seem to be any sign of the war it signifies. Soldiers in military jackets patrol the edges of the settlement. The whole
town isn’t much bigger than the grounds of the Salpêtrière. Laure had expected a city the size of Paris in the New World, not a military outpost. When the ship anchors, there is a mad scramble from the shore to row out to unload the ship’s cargo. Several soldiers with guns guard the proceedings. First, men from the shore come onboard with rustic wooden stretchers to carry off the passengers who are too sick to walk to the Hôtel-Dieu. Madeleine is among those they carry away, along with a young nun recruited to work at the Hôtel-Dieu. Afterwards the passengers disembark.

Then a swarm of bedraggled soldiers wearing brown
justaucorps
and blue stockings barrage the captain and the crew with questions about the date of the ship’s return to France. The winds on the way back to France are favourable. It would take half the time for the return journey. Laure can see, even though Madame Bourdon and the priests try to push the girls past them, that these men are desperate to leave the colony. The men are held back from boarding by the ship’s guards, and some fighting ensues.

Madame Bourdon orders the girls to stay together on the shore. There is no objection to her command, as many of the girls collapse to the ground and cannot stand back up from where they have fallen. Laure’s legs tremble as she tries to remain standing. She sits in the dirt as the river and the town spin around her. The sailors tell the girls they will soon get their land legs.

Once they are able to stand, Madame Bourdon leads the girls away from the port. They pass a group of cheering men, who
seem to find it amusing that these thin women have crossed the sea. Behind them, two indentured servants pull a cart with the women’s coffers over the rough and steep path. A few men from the ship, looking as sick and pathetic as the women, followed by some land reinforcements, protect them from behind.

Madame Bourdon takes the girls up to the Ursulines congregation, the greatest construction in Québec. It is made of grey stone and reminds Laure of the Salpêtrière, only the girls of the Ursulines must pay a dowry to enter and wear black habits. It is a cloistered order, and so they don’t see anyone in the courtyard as they approach. When they reach the entrance to the convent, Madame Bourdon makes the girls wait outside.

A small Savage girl answers Madame Bourdon’s knock and comes outside to keep the French girls company. She looks to be about six or seven years old. When they ask her, she tells them in a small, careful voice that her name is Marie des Neiges. Her dark hair is neatly braided on either side of her head. She is dressed in a clean white dress and clasps her hands in front of her, as if she is preparing to receive her first Communion. She sneaks glances at the stinking mess of women arrived from France, but remains quiet.

Madame Bourdon is inside for a long time, and when she emerges, she gestures for the girls to follow her, away from the congregation building. The little Savage, Marie des Neiges, bows slightly as they turn to go and says, “
Que Dieu vous bénisse
” before closing the door behind her.

“Won’t we be staying here?” one of the girls asks Madame Bourdon.

“Of course not. This is where the Mère Marie lives. I just had to report to her that we had arrived. I also had to tell her how badly some of you behaved during the journey.”

Judging by her haughtiness, Laure wonders if Madame Bourdon hadn’t also expected that the girls would be staying at the congregation. The whole journey, Madame Bourdon had spoken of Marie de l’Incarnation, a living saint. This woman, the Superior of the Ursulines congregation, had left behind her young son in France and now devoted herself to saving the souls of Savages in Canada.

“Mère Marie has more important things to do than spend her time with a group of
filles à marier
. She has come here to bring God to people who want to receive Him.”

People like that Savage girl, Laure thinks. She wonders if behind that stone building that looks so much like the Salpêtrière there are hundreds of Savage girls in dormitories dressed as neatly and speaking as gently as the little girl they just saw.

“You have had every opportunity in France through the holy teachings of so many to become decent women. And you do nothing but give me a hard time, dancing, drinking brandy with sailors, exposing your undergarments to men on the ship!” She looks at Laure when she speaks.

Laure wishes Madeleine were with them so she could meet these holy Savages, who are more pious than French girls.

Instead of staying at the Congrégation des Ursulines, the
filles à marier
are brought to an auberge. Madame Bourdon tells them it is run by a
femme sage
, Madame Rouillard. She has been in the colony for twenty years, back when it had been run by a company that cared only about furs and not one bit about settlement and women. Madame Rouillard will travel
with the girls being sent farther up the river to the place called Ville-Marie. Her brother has an inn there, and her services as a midwife will be needed in the new settlement over the next few years when the
filles à marier
begin having children.

The auberge is a large wooden building in the Lower Town. The inside is made of the same wood as the exterior, including the hard seats and tables the girls are invited to sit at. The smell of brandy and roasting meat makes Laure’s stomach grumble. The men turn to stare as they enter. Madame Rouillard tells them to leave to make way for the girls. She says, “This is no monastery, but for tonight we’ll do our best to bring decency to the place.”

The men bow and chuckle, taking their leave of the women. Madame Bourdon remains tight lipped the whole time Madame Rouillard speaks.

Madame Rouillard wears a stained apron over a thick country dress. She is a tough-looking woman with a deep voice, but her throat is full of words about the colony that Laure is eager to hear. She prepares the first meal the girls will eat in New France and talks the whole time that she works.

“The people here are the refuse of the old country for sure, but each with very different ambitions. Most don’t want to be here at all, like those men who try to fight their way back onto any ship they can once their three-year contracts are over,” she says. “Now they’ve come up with the idea—and it’s about time—that in order to build a new country, you need women as well as soldiers and fur traders. So they’ve gathered you girls out of every poorhouse in Paris, you’ll forgive me for saying
so, to be married to whatever men they can drag out of these forests.”

Madame Bourdon sighs and shakes her head, but there is no stopping Madame Rouillard from expressing her opinion. “Even the officials don’t want to be here. They fulfill their contracts and dream of growing old with a big garden in Paris far from this rough country. Get me some more butter!” she yells out to a slow-moving man of nineteen or twenty. Laure figures that this is Madame Rouillard’s son. “The craziest of all, though, are the priests and nuns who come here to convert the Savages.” She laughs, her bosom shaking, as she stirs the butter into the pot.

The innkeeper laughs even harder when Laure asks her if there are hundreds of Savage girls in Marie de l’Incarnation’s congregation.

“Now that is the biggest farce of this whole colony. Thinking that a few French priests and nuns are going to change the minds of these people. All the Savages want from the French is access to goods and will do any praying and singing required to ensure this. But after they get what they want in trade? They’re running around in the forest just like they’ve always done.”

One of the girls asks what Madame Rouillard is cooking.

“Corn mush and squirrel stew. Don’t think you’ll be eating a thing here that you recognize. Bloody mosquitoes”—she smacks the ample flesh of her arm—“which, by the way, if the food doesn’t get you, these things will make sure that you go out of your mind. Oh, it’s not all bad, though.” She sets down the pot of stew and hands out the bowls. “That’s all I have. We’ve never had this many of you arrive all at once, so you’ll have to share. I expect you’re used to doing that anyway.”

Some of the girls, the younger ones, have tears welling in their eyes.

“If you can forget about that place you came from, which I expect you’ll want to if the things I’ve heard about that hospital are true—”

“But we aren’t all from there—”

“Even worse if you’re from some starved-out farming town. If any of you are moving on to Ville-Marie with me, you will be fortunate. It’s the garden of the New World. In the winter there is so much snow on the ground that nothing beneath freezes.” She laughs. “Imagine that. Of course, the Savages are worse there than they are here.”

Laure has already been told that she is being moved on to Ville-Marie along with any other girls that don’t get chosen to marry men at Québec.

Madame Rouillard shakes her head when the girls start grumbling against her insults to their home countries.

“It’s better to start thinking this way as soon as you can. Remembering Old France as if it had been providing you with a king’s banquet every night will just make you miserable here. You remember where you came from, what might have happened to you if you’d stayed, and then maybe this forest and these mosquitoes and winters that will shock the heart out of your chest won’t seem quite so bad.”

Laure wants to tell this old innkeeper with the strange accent that back in Old France she would first have been a seamstress in Paris and then the wife of a duke. But she wonders for the first time how true that is. Why would her lot end up so much better than that of all the other poor girls of the city? She might very well have been the mistress of a nobleman, staying by his money for a while in a small apartment so he could visit her
in secret when he pleased, but what about when she became older? If she were lucky, some consumptive disease would have claimed her before she turned thirty. Otherwise she might have re-entered the Salpêtrière in some poorer dormitory, after first doing her time in the brothels she had once thought so romantic, where the masters were numerous and the pay just enough to stay alive. But there is no point thinking of these possibilities since her fate will now be played out in this crude new country where much, including social conventions, seems to have been abandoned at sea.