Bride of New France (20 page)

This Madame Rouillard, fat off beer and squirrel meat, has made a life for herself here. Laure looks around at the newly arrived girls and sees some of them laughing at the woman’s stories. Just as the
sage femme
counsels, they are eager to shed their old life for this one. To forget who they were and begin again as innkeepers, wives of forest fur seekers. They shovel the strange greasy food into their plain faces and are content.

“Come on, eat up, you’ll be dead by December if you try to be a fussy cat in this country.” The woman pushes Laure’s bowl closer to her. Laure shakes her head and lets the woman next to her finish it off.

They spend the night in the inn. It is the first time Laure sleeps on solid ground since leaving Paris over two months ago. She dreams of the ship’s rocking and also of Iroquois attacks. In her dreams, the Iroquois all look like the Bonhomme Terre-Neuve. When they open their mouths, fangs appear and they roar like beasts. Their enormous bodies are covered in the hair of the women they have scalped.

By the time they leave Québec for Ville-Marie the following week, a number of the women from France are already married and will be staying in Québec or nearby settlements. Madame Bourdon has chosen Laure to go on to Ville-Marie because, unlike some of the other girls, she doesn’t have any family at Québec, nor does she have any immediate marriage prospects. She is among the youngest of the women, who are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-six. Laure also knows that their guardian is eager to be rid of her. She agrees without a fuss to move on to Ville-Marie on the condition that Madeleine can come with her. Madeleine has regained a little of her strength under the care of the Soeurs hospitalières at Québec, although they feel she isn’t ready to leave. Laure cannot imagine travelling farther up the river into the forest country by herself. Madeleine says she is willing to travel with Laure, and so they release the sick girl from the Hôtel-Dieu.

The remaining women, twenty or thirty from what Laure can see, will be taken in canoes and distributed in the settlements between Québec and Ville-Marie to men seeking wives. The women from France, who have spent the past few months crammed together in the Sainte-Barbe of the ship and before that in dormitories of the Paris General Hospital, are now being dispersed one by one into a land that is much larger than all of Old France and covered in dense forest. The only comfort the girls can hope for in this frightening territory is a gentle husband, although from what Laure has seen so far of the rough men at Québec, there is little chance of that. There are too few women in New France, only one for every ten men, so it seems. At least this means there is some choice in what husband
to marry. Several women travelling with them to settlements farther up the river will be marrying for a second time. Their first marriages were annulled, except for one, who is already a widow, although she doesn’t look much older than Laure.

At Québec, the
filles de bonne naissance
were matched with the officers they’d been destined for to begin lives as the choice couples of the town. But the men who came to the auberge in Québec, seeking wives from among the homely country girls and the pale hospital
citadines
, had not been in the company of French women for a year or two. They had been working at the two principal occupations of the colony: fighting off the Iroquois and hunting animals for their fur. Marrying one of these men meant being taken away from the safety of Québec into the woods, where the men had been allotted their plots of land in payment for their services to the King. Laure hopes that the men are less feral farther up the river at this new settlement, Ville-Marie. Stories abound of the holiness of the town, which was established by members of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, the same secret society to which the director of the General Hospital had belonged.

Their convoy will travel in three canoes, which the men first load with heavy supplies of salt, oil, lard,
eau-de-vie
, guns, and iron tools. Six Savages accompany them, five men and one woman, to help communicate in case they encounter others along the way and to help them navigate the river. There are also two Jesuit priests eager to get back to their missions near Ville-Marie and ten fur-trading men along with the twenty or so women from France. One of the Jesuit priests is the young man who had taken such an interest in Madeleine. He is travelling with an older Jesuit who has been in New France for several decades. The old man will take the young priest to live with
him in a mission near Ville-Marie, where the young priest will help him to care for the souls of the Algonquins and to translate Christian prayers into their language. This man remembers the Huron mission at Sainte-Marie before they had retreated from the Iroquois. Of course the stories the priests had written in those years of conversions and torture are famous throughout all of Old France. The young Jesuit leans in to hear the older priest speak of these times. Laure wonders if this young priest is brave enough to have his heart eaten by Savages, or his body filled with poisonous arrows, or his flesh baptized in boiling water. His face is so young and his words are soft and careful.

For the trip, Madame Rouillard has dressed like a Savage man. She has on leather leggings and a hat, and she carries a rifle. She says this is how she dresses when she travels from cabin to cabin to deliver babies. She knows most of the men and talks easily with them.

The canoes are made by the Savages from the bark of the birch tree and are low in the water. These boats are swift, but they must be carefully loaded to evenly distribute the weight, as they easily tip over. After the supplies have been arranged on the canoes, the French men get onboard, and finally it is the turn of the women. Laure crouches down as she has seen the others do, and sits in the centre of her seat. The slightest movement rocks the little vessel. Madeleine does her best to stay sitting in front of Laure, but ends up slumping forward. The Savages are the last to board and don’t seem to have the same trouble standing in the boat that Laure did.

“Doesn’t look like that sick one will make much of a wife.”

Laure turns back to the man who has spoken these words. He is some sort of fur trader, his skin already wizened by the harsh conditions of his trade, although he looks young enough.

His grin freezes when he sees the anger in Laure’s eyes.

“You need to be tough to make a life in the forest.” He looks at Laure’s hair, carefully combed after her stay in Québec and adorned with the ribbons from Madame du Clos. “I don’t know why they send us girls from Paris. You will be lucky if your new husband has a house for you. What we need are country girls.” He turns back and smacks the thigh of one of the girls from Aunis who is seated behind him. “There aren’t any princes waiting for you in Ville-Marie.”

“That is clear.” Laure turns back and takes Madeleine by the shoulders to steady her weight. Laure has determined that there isn’t much respect for rank here in New France. The forests are too vast to keep track of the fur traders, soldiers, settlers, Jesuits, Récollets, Sulpiciens, Catholic converts, innkeepers, cobblers, carpenters, seigneurs, explorers, officers, Savages working as interpreters, and the Governor and the Intendant who try to watch over the whole venture in the name of the King. Because most of these men only stay a short while in the colony before returning to France, there seems to be less concern for respecting superiors. There also seems to be little protection for women from foul-mouthed men like this fur trader. Even more than at Québec, Laure feels the separation from the hospital and its daily regimen. There is nobody here to tell the girls where to sit, whom to speak to, when to be silent, when it is time to pray, to eat, to comb their hair, to change their clothing, to sleep. There is nobody to follow, only an eclectic cavalcade from Old France travelling toward converts, husbands, and fur riches. Madame Rouillard hums a song as the canoes set off up the river.

There seems to be no end to the river. Each hour brings into view more stones, forests, insects, and birds, but no sign
of civilization. When the sun starts to fade on the first night, the mosquitoes become thick, encircling their canoe, feeding on the exposed faces and hands of the passengers. Some of the girls begin to cry at the infestation. The midwife turns back to face the tearful girls, some of whom are begging to turn the canoes back. “You will soon learn that you are not alone. You’re carrying in you the seeds of the families you will have. Before long, this will be your only home. There is no sense looking back.”

Laure wishes Madame Rouillard’s words could bring her some comfort the way it does to the others who cheer up. But she cannot even imagine any of it: marrying one of these men, having children, living in the forest. Surely she will escape this fate.

When the men see the clearing with two cabins and some tents, they tell the Savages to pull onto the shore. They have reached Trois-Rivières. This is where several of the women, including the Belgian Marie and Jeanne-Léonarde, will be married. It is disconcerting for Laure to see the places where the women are being left: Neuville, Grondines, Batiscan. They are little more than clearings in the woods with a handful of inhabitants. Many tears are shed at each stop and the women’s faces register shock and terror when the canoes set off without them up the river.

Trois-Rivières is a little bigger than some of the other settlements, but it looks more like Tadoussac than Québec, an encampment surrounded by a palisade. They are silent and quick as they disembark from the canoes onto the sandy shore. Two
soldiers and the Savage men will sleep in tents near the canoes to guard the provisions. The others, including the women, are brought into the village. The paths around the wooden shacks are devoid of people. Here too the inhabitants fear Iroquois attacks. The women are ushered into one of the huts.

The family in the first cabin refuses to have any of the women from France stay with them because they have three daughters of marriageable age. They say that these women from Paris with their dowries from the King will ensure that their own daughters remain single.

But the second cabin, occupied by a man, his new wife, and their infant child agrees to accept a small payment in return for having some of the girls stay with them. One of the daughters from the first cabin, who is about twelve years old, comes to see the women from France. She wants to know all about Paris and the fashions of the capital. She sits next to Laure and listens with amazed eyes at the rhythm of Laure’s voice as she tells her about the fine materials and the horses and carriages of the wealthy. When the girl’s father comes to the door to get his daughter, Laure removes one of her hair ribbons and gives it to her. “Keep this for your wedding,” she says, and the child is so pleased about the gift that she runs to show her father.

It is very hot in the one-room cabin that night with ten people lying together on the floor. Still, it is nice to be sheltered and to feel protected by the palisade surrounding Trois-Rivières and by the men standing guard outside. Laure has grown accustomed on their journey to falling asleep despite the chirping of crickets and birds.