A Touch of Fire: Marie-André Duplessis the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec and the Writing of New France 9780228002345

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a touch of fire

mcgill-queen’s studies in early canada / avant le canada Series editors / directeurs de la collection : Allan Greer and Carolyn Podruchny This series features studies of the history of the northern half of North America – a vast expanse that would eventually be known as Canada – in the era before extensive European settlement and extending into the nineteenth century. Long neglected, Canada-before-Canada is a fascinating area of study experiencing an intellectual renaissance as researchers in a range of disciplines, including history, geography, archeology, anthropology, literary studies, and law, contribute to a new and enriched understanding of the distant past. The editors welcome manuscripts in English or French on all aspects of the period, including work on Indigenous history, the Atlantic fisheries, the fur trade, exploration, French or British imperial expansion, colonial life, culture, language, law, science, religion, and the environment. Cette série de monographies est consacrée à l’histoire de la partie septentrionale du continent de l’Amérique du nord, autrement dit le grand espace qui deviendra le Canada, dans les siècles qui s’étendent jusqu’au début du 19e. Longtemps négligé par les chercheurs, ce Canada-avant-le-Canada suscite beaucoup d’intérêt de la part de spécialistes dans plusieurs disciplines, entre autres, l’histoire, la géographie, l’archéologie, l’anthropologie, les études littéraires et le droit. Nous assistons à une renaissance intellectuelle dans ce champ d’étude axé sur l’interaction de premières nations, d’empires européens et de colonies. Les directeurs de cette série sollicitent des manuscrits, en français ou en anglais, qui portent sur tout aspect de cette période, y compris l’histoire des autochtones, celle des pêcheries de l’atlantique, de la traite des fourrures, de l’exploration, de l’expansion de l’empire français ou britannique, de la vie coloniale (Nouvelle-France, l’Acadie, Terre-Neuve, les provinces maritimes, etc.), de la culture, la langue, le droit, les sciences, la religion ou l’environnement.

1 A Touch of Fire Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France Thomas M. Carr, Jr

a touch of fire Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France

thomas m. carr, jr

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 isbn 978-0-2280-0094-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0095-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0234-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0235-2 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from the Maude E. Wisherd Fund of the Emeriti and Retirees Association of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: A touch of fire : Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the writing of New France / Thomas M. Carr, Jr. Names: Carr, Thomas M., 1944- author. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in early Canada = Avant le Canada ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200214667 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200214764 | isbn 9780228000952 (softcover) | isbn 9780228000945 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228002345 (pdf) | isbn 9780228002352 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Duplessis, Marie-Andrée, 1687-1760. | lcsh: Duplessis, MarieAndrée, 1687-1760— Correspondence. | lcsh: Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. | lcsh: Nuns—Québec (Province)—Québec—Biography. | lcsh: Hospitalers—Québec (Province)—Québec—Biography. | lcsh: Hospitals—Québec (Province)— Québec— History—18th century. | lcsh: Canada—History—To 1763 (New France) | lcgft: Biographies. Classification: lcc fc351.D87 C37 2020 | ddc 971.4/014092—dc23

contents Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

1

Two Girls’ Friendship on the Rue Saint-Honoré in the Orbit of Independent Women 17

2

The Networks of an Enterprising Father and a Resilient Mother 30

3

Spiritual Mothers and Friends: Seeking the Peace of the Lord in Hospitality 50

4

Friend of a Jansenist, Sister of a Jesuit: The 1718 Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu and Fashioning Epistolary Friendships 7 5

5

A Sister Team Managing the Oldest Hospital North of Mexico: Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Mother Superior (1732–38; 1744–50) 102

6

Writing the Spiritual Life at the Hôtel-Dieu 131

7

Duplessis Takes Women’s History Public: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec 152

8

1750–55 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Aborted Expansion, Burnout, and the Encyclopédie 179

9

1755–58 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Fire, Family Crosses, and War 202

10

A Woman’s Siege and Occupation: Navigating a Year of Male Military Failures 223

11

Epilogue and Conclusion: Bride of an Unworthy Spouse: Femme forte or femme tendre? 254

Notes 273 Bibliography 335 Index 357

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contents

figures 1.1 Lingère, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1784. Special collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, photo by Laura Weakly. 25 1.2 Couturière, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1784. Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, photo by Laura Weakly. 25 2.1 Anonymous, Sainte Hélène impératrice, late seventeenth / early eighteenth century. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2249. 42 2.2 Richard Short, A View of the Jesuits College and Church. McCord Museum M2485. 46 3.1 Adaptation by Robert Nickel of the 1776 Plan of the City of Quebec by T. Bowen. 53 3.2 Anonymous, Mère Juchereau de Saint-Ignace. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2214. 56 3.3 Claude François, known as Frère Luc, Hospitalière soignant le Seigneur dans la personne d’un malade. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2018.51. 65 3.4 Frontispiece of Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Archives du monastère des Augustines, hdq. 70 4.1 François-Xavier Duplessis at cross of Arras, Avis et pratiques pour profiter de la mission, 1742, photo by Laura Weakly. 88 4.2 Pall embroidered by Duplessis with pelican. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2198.2. 98 5.1 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Hotel Dieu, Quebec. McCord Museum, M338. 112

5.2 Statue of Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces, first half of eighteenth century. Collection du Monastère des Augustines. 120 6.1 Title page of manuscript of the Musique spirituelle. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 1. 134 7.1 Title page of manuscript of the Annales, Histoire de l’HôtelDieu de Québec, 1720. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq. 154 7.2 Title page of printed Annales, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1751. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq. 174 8.1 Title page of Hecquet’s 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage, photo by Laura Weakly. 192 8.2 Page in 1761 edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage, photo by Laura Weakly. 194 9.1 Richard Short, A View of the North West Part of the City of Quebec, Taken From St. Charles’s River. McCord Museum, M2482. 209 10.1 Plan of the River St. Lawrence from Sillery to the Fall of Montmorency with the Operations of the Siege of Quebec, 1759 (Compagnie de lithographie Burland-Desbarats, 1881). Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. 232 10.2 Richard Short, A View of the Treasury, and Jesuits College. McCord Museum, M2484. 237 10.3 George Townshend, General James Wolfe, at Quebec 1759. McCord Museum, M1791. 239 10.4 Richard Short, A View of the Inside of the Jesuits Church. McCord Museum, M2486. 251

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figures

acknowledgments My gratitude to the many people who have helped me year after year is heartfelt. Sister Claire Gagnon and François Rousseau welcomed me to the Hôtel-Dieu archives when I only envisaged a very limited project. They directed me to documents that transformed my view of Duplessis and aided me repeatedly as an article project became a biography. I have returned repeatedly to François Rousseau’s books for their authoritative treatment of the Hôtel-Dieu. They are exemplars of the best historical writing. Their successors, Chantal Lacombe and Sara Bélanger, have continued their tradition of hospitality on which the Hôtel-Dieu was founded in 1639. Chantal’s knowledge of the archives has been invaluable during the last stages of my research and the selection of illustrations. In France, the librarians of the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, Valérie Guittienne-Mürger and Fabien Vandermarcq, introduced me to Bernard Homassel whose extensive repository of documents dealing with all branches of the Homassel family has been crucial. The archival work of Nicolas Lyon-Caen on the Homassels has proven an essential resource. Two student assistants were especially helpful: Elizabeth Stacey Khalil with Duplessis’s correspondence and Rebecca Ankenbrand with her Musique spirituelle. Senior editor Kyla Madden and readers at McGillQueen’s University Press gave nuanced suggestions, which resulted in fruitful revisions. Josh Caster and Laura Weakly of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries helped with illustrations. Kay and Bob Nickel also contributed to the illustrations and in innumerable other ways. Sylvie Robert shared her familiarity with Saint-Utin and deciphered a crucial document. Early grants from the Québec Ministère de relations internationales and the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec were

crucial. Further funding came from the University of NebraskaLincoln’s Research Council, its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the Wisherd Fund of the Emeriti and Retirees Association of un-l.

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acknowledgments

a touch of fire

introduction

In August 1719, Marie-André Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, the secretary of the advisory council to the mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, entered into the minutes a solemn personal protest against an action the group had taken: “I will never repent of having refused my consent to it because I followed without passion the insight God gave me and the movement of my conscience.”1 Their bishop, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix-Chevières de Saint-Vallier, had imposed construction of a separate house where ill priests would be cared for within the hospital grounds. The proposal had not been debated properly either by the council or by the community as a whole at a chapter meeting. The failing matriarch of the community, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace, who was assistant mother superior at the time, had only agreed to it after a change in wording; the secretary Duplessis had to sign for her because of her paralysis. Duplessis’s objection was that the priests would expect special attention, strain the community’s limited resources, and detract from its core mission, the care of the poor. Her protest was directed at her sister nuns, whom she accused of bad faith in ignoring future problems: “In the hope that they would no longer be present when that would trouble us, they agreed grudgingly, expecting that they would not be committing themselves personally to anything.”2 Marie-André was the only one of the seven to refuse her signature.

At thirty-two, she was the youngest member of the council, and her written protest is unique in the monastery’s records of that period. While the bishop’s imposition of his will occasioned it, the protest was directed as much at her sisters’ acquiescence to male authority as to that authority itself. It was born of her frustration at not winning the other nuns over to her view. Two things emerge from a reading of subsequent chapter minutes. The priests’ house never was mentioned again as a problem, which suggests that Duplessis had overreacted. Repeatedly in later years, the chapter approved proposals she brought before it when she became mother superior. What did not change was her fiery reaction when she perceived a threat to her hospital, as a supplier with whom she was unhappy learned to his chagrin. He noted in replying to one of her letters, “I had the honour of your letter written with a touch of fire.”3 In 1719, Duplessis was already well into the preparation of her best-known work, the annals of her community and its hospital. Although all her writings have their source in her commitment to those two institutions, the development of New France is omnipresent in all but the most spiritual of them. The foreword of the annals evokes the exploration of New France, beginning not with Jacques Cartier or even Giovanni da Verrazzano, but with John Cabot, whose voyages were authorized by Henry VII of England in the late 1490s. Her texts, in fact, encompass two hundred and fifty years of Canadian history, since her last letters recount the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the beginning of the British occupation of Quebec in 1759. The annals anchor the history of the hospital in the history of the colony. Her surviving writings are extensive, and all are shaped by her experience of directing Canada’s first hospital from her vantage point in the upper town, high above the Saint Lawrence and Saint Charles Rivers.

1718: The Hinge in a Versatile Career Her outspoken protest at the beginning of what would be a long administrative and writing career is a useful hinge for a biography of Duplessis. How was her protest a product of her family background and early experience as a nun? What more productive ways to channel her resolute energy did she find when she moved into a leadership 4

a touch of fire

role? Two early texts, one written in 1712 and the other in 1718, have a more playful aspect than later ones. How did her outlook change as she moved into higher positions of responsibility? A sketch of her life can be divided conveniently into five periods: childhood in Paris (1687–1701); adolescence in Quebec (1701–07); early years as a nun (1707–18); increasing involvement in community affairs (1718–32); full-time administrator (1732–60). She grew up in Paris, where she was born on 28 March 1687, under the tutelage of her maternal grandmother, to whom her parents confided her at age two when they left for Quebec in 1689. Her father had been named to a post in the office of the treasurer of the navy (Trésorier de la Marine) in Quebec. On the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, she met Marie-Catherine Homassel, who was being raised by an aunt. Homassel’s aunt was a business associate of one of Marie-André’s own aunts. Marie-André’s mother retrieved her in 1701, and she spent her years between the ages of fourteen and twenty in her father’s household in Quebec’s upper town. Georges Regnard Duplessis had solidified his position in the treasurer’s office, acquired a seigneurie, and taken advantage of the business opportunities his post afforded. With a father well respected by the colony’s chief military and civilian administrators, Marie-André had access to the elite of Canada’s society. Although her talents attracted suitors, in 1707 she entered the Hôtel-Dieu. She convinced her younger sister Geneviève to join her in 1713; the next year her father died in trying financial straits. Her brother François-Xavier left for France in 1716 to become a Jesuit, and her youngest brother Charles-Denis sailed to study at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in 1719. The year 1718 marked her coming of age both as a key member of the Hôtel-Dieu administrative team and as a writer. She had previously been singled out as the personal secretary of the mother superior, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. In 1718, she was elected novice mistress, which made her automatically a member of the advisory council. She also became the recording secretary of the chapter about this time. 1718 marked as well the beginning of the drafting of her major text, the annals of her house, in collaboration with Juchereau. In the fourteen years between 1718 and 1732, she gradually increased her administrative involvement, serving one year as assistant superior, and then was named bursar of the hospital (économe des pauvres) by introduction

5

the bishop in 1725. This post put her in charge of hospital finances. During the period 1732–60, she was elected superior six times and served sixteen years in the office. When she was not superior herself, she was almost always the vice-superior, known as the assistant, and thus no less involved in the affairs of the community and hospital. As the head of a mature institution, her first challenge was to maintain adequate financing and insure a steady stream of supplies. The colony’s economy had come out of the doldrums of the first two decades of the century, but it was on a war footing after 1744. In fact, the hospital began to take on a military role, making its expansion all the more necessary; but who would pay for it, the nuns or the king? The 1755 fire that destroyed hospital and monastery made this question moot. Rebuilding mobilized Duplessis’s energies during the last years of her life, a period that culminated in the 1759 siege and capture of Quebec. She died in January 1760, while there was still hope that the town could be retaken and that the colony could be saved for France.

A Woman of Canadian Firsts It would be difficult to identify a laywoman in New France during the four decades before the Conquest who had the sustained administrative and financial responsibilities of Duplessis. She was the powerhouse of a central colonial institution. Her position put her in contact with all the major figures in the ecclesiastical, civil, and military establishments. Her reach extended into France, where she corresponded with colonial authorities such as minister of the navy Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas and cultivated patrons such as the third duc de Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis. Her success as an administrator depended on being able to adapt her institution to the evolution of the colony’s fortunes when economic development resumed in the 1720s and when, beginning in the 1740s, military expenses increasingly dominated. The heroic “Amazones du grand Dieu,” the French foundresses of the seventeenth century who had been inspired by the fervour of the Catholic revival, such as Marie Guyart, Jeanne Mance, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, have been amply studied.4 Duplessis represents not this first generation, nor even the Canadian-born second one 6

a touch of fire

that consolidated their work, such as Marie Morin of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal, Marie Barbier of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, or Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté at Duplessis’s own institution. Duplessis figures in the third wave of religious superiors active in the eighteenth century whom historians have only begun to examine. Her terms in office corresponded almost exactly with those of her contemporary, Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat, mother superior of the Ursulines. Although Duplessis was ten years older, she is comparable in some ways to an aristocratic duo of nuns who governed the Hôpital-Général during the same period, Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay and Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay.5 The Ursuline Esther Wheelwright, a New England girl, who joined that order after having been a captive of the Wabanakis for five years, belongs to their generation, but she only became mother superior in 1760 after Duplessis’s death.6 Besides this administrative career, no other eighteenth-century nun in New France – nor any woman of that time and place, for that matter – can equal the range and quality of Duplessis’s writings. The list of firsts that have been claimed for her as a Canadian writer is lengthy: first literary narrative, the Histoire de Ruma;7 first musical treatise, the Musique spirituelle;8 first Canadian to attempt an historical work, the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.9 This book was not the first such convent chronicle in Canada; Marie Morin had begun the annals of her Montreal Hôtel-Dieu in 1697.10 However, Duplessis’s book, when printed in 1751 as the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, was the first book published by a Canadian woman during her lifetime. The historical current runs deep in her writing, even if she is not primarily an historian. She was ever attentive to the impact of New France’s past on current conditions in the colony and her hospital. She would find multiple ways of writing New France, in addition to the Histoire: annual letters, business correspondence, administrative reports. Her earliest known work, the Histoire de Ruma, embodies a playful spirit that is rare in Canadian writing of the period. Duplessis’s letters to her friend Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet stand as one of the major surviving private correspondences of eighteenthcentury Canada. Only Élisabeth Bégon’s rivals hers. An intellectual drive that led her to seek out information from books, gazettes, introduction

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and informants nourished her writing. She had her biases, but her network of correspondents in France kept her always well informed. She merits sustained attention simply as an author.

A Corpus Rediscovered Duplessis was almost unknown in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Little wonder, since the 1751 edition of the annals printed in Montauban had attributed its authorship exclusively to JeanneFrançoise Juchereau, and her correspondence with Hecquet was unpublished. It took over eighty years before a sufficient portion of her writings became accessible so that her accomplishment could be appreciated. The process began after the discovery in 1856–57 of her letters to Hecquet in Paris archives by Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. Her providentialist view of Canadian history appealed to the clerically minded savants who introduced her to nineteenth-century readers. A selection of her letters to Hecquet was serialized in the Revue canadienne in 1875 by H.-A. Verreau, who planned to write her biography. To promote the letters, Verreau presented them as a continuation of those of Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation. He noted that the Ursuline’s correspondence stops in 1671 and covers the first part of the French regime; Duplessis’s takes up its last four decades. Verreau is almost willing to place her as the equal of Marie de l’Incarnation: Duplessis “is perhaps not inferior to her.”11 A fuller picture of Duplessis began to emerge three years later in 1878, when Henri-Raymond Casgrain made her the centrepiece of the eighteenth-century section of his Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu. All three Quebec City historic women’s monasteries published their histories at this time, but while the Ursulines and Hôpital-Général turned to their own members, the Hôtel-Dieu commissioned a professional author who was furnished documents from their archives. In Casgrain they had a priest-writer at the heart of Quebec’s literary ferment and an experienced nationalist historian. His history makes ample use of Duplessis’s annals for the period up to about 1718; for the era of her administration, he extensively quotes or paraphrases her short historical pieces. Since Casgrain was writing an institutional history, he discusses her challenges, successes, and disappointments as an administrator. His point of comparison is not with foundresses such as Marie de 8

a touch of fire

l’Incarnation, but with Duplessis’s mentor Juchereau: “Before her Mother Juchereau de Saint-Ignace had been the model of the strong woman (la femme forte); Mother Sainte-Hélène was the model of the tender, gentle woman (la femme tendre).”12 While Juchereau “reigned by a forceful spirit,” Duplessis “governed with a mild touch.”13 Although regional historian J.-Edmond Roy published no additional writings by Duplessis, his books in the 1890s added substantially to knowledge about her. In 1892, Roy brought out an edition of her Jesuit brother’s letters to her and her sister Geneviève.14 Much information about Marie-André can be surmised from FrançoisXavier’s allusions to shared concerns. Like Casgrain, Roy had access to the monastery’s archives, and he used his expertise as a notary to supplement them with documents from the public record. In the introduction and apparatus to François-Xavier’s letters and again in his 1897 Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, he gives an ample account of her parents’ land dealings and short accounts of the lives of her brothers and sister. Extracts of two devotional texts, one by Geneviève and another by Marie-André, appeared in a pious newsletter in 1902 and 1905.15 A.-L. Leymarie’s publication between 1927 and 1931 in the journal Nova Francia of the entire holdings in the French National Archives of Duplessis’s letters to Hecquet made her candid observations on colonial affairs available to historians, who gradually began to mine them. He also expanded the corpus by locating her letters, mixing business and personal remarks, to an apothecary in Dieppe and to a business agent in Paris.16 Albert Jamet’s 1939 authoritative edition of the annals, commissioned for the third centenary of the hospital, did much more than make the book as Duplessis wrote it widely available for the first time;17 the Benedictine scholar also clarified the role she and Juchereau played in the elaboration of the annals. Jamet established that if Juchereau supplied the material for the early history of the house, she left its organization and redaction to the younger nun. His extensive annotations added context about the personages and events that Duplessis discussed, and confirmed her reliability as an historian. The publication of this critical edition of the annals restored her original text that Bertrand de La Tour had modified in 1751. The first round of discovery of her achievement as a writer was complete. introduction

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Toward Recognition Once Duplessis’s core corpus had been established, scholars turned to its analysis. Sister Mary Loretto Gies’s 1949 Laval University doctoral dissertation on Duplessis as a letter writer and annalist was squarely in the clerical tradition dating from Verreau,18 as was the overview for the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française by Juliette Rémillard, niece and secretary of the nationalist historian Lionel Groulx, who founded that journal.19 Gies was the first critic to confront the militant Jansenism of Duplessis’s friend, and it clearly troubled her. Duplessis did not profit when the secular-minded proponents of a Quebec national literature during the Quiet Revolution looked back for antecedents in their colonial past. Her status as a nun and her Parisian birth worked against her. Even Rémillard, in her 1962 article, which is in many ways a last hurrah for the older clerical tradition, felt the need to reassure on that last score: Duplessis is “a Canadian at heart although French by birth.”20 When Léopold LeBlanc included an extract from Duplessis’s annals in his 1978 anthology of Quebec literature from the New France era, he introduced her as the first example of a Quebec-France collaboration. He did perceive the worldly current that underlies much of her style, noting that she “is closer to the salons and to the polished society of the eighteenth century” than Marie de l’Incarnation.21 Slowly, beginning in the late 1980s, fresh approaches gave new perspectives on Duplessis’s basic corpus established between 1873 and 1939. Erich Schwandt published her Musique spirituelle in 1988, calling it “Canada’s First Music Theory Manual.” Just as importantly, perhaps, Schwandt pointed toward the inventiveness behind the lighter tone that Leblanc had noted but could not explain. François Rousseau gave many examples of the managerial prowess of the Duplessis sisters in his 1989 history of the hospital, La Croix et le scalpel, and drew on their administrative correspondence held in the archives. He was attentive to women’s agency and underscored the Duplessis sisters’ maneuvers to circumvent male ecclesiastical authority.22 François Melançon and Paul-André Dubois recognized the importance of her published correspondence and situated it in terms of exchanges based on friendship and learned curiosity. Their article mapped out the key features of her approach to friendship, 10

a touch of fire

which can be explored now that more of her letters are available and more is known about her correspondents.23 In a more specialized vein, Lorène Simon’s doctoral dissertation on Duplessis’s letters written to the Dieppe apothecary Féret between 1733 and 1752 showed how rich they are in information about eighteenth-century pharmaceutical practices in France and Canada.24 In a series of insightful articles that stem from her doctoral dissertation, Julie Roy began the process of giving Duplessis her due as a woman author without singling her out.25 Roy showed that the field of women writers in New France goes well beyond the “trinity” – consisting of Marie de l’Incarnation, Marie Morin, and Élisabeth Bégon – canonized by literary historians.26 Catherine Fino examined Duplessis for the first time as a spiritual author and situated her among the writers of the French School of Spirituality whom Duplessis mentioned in her own works.27 I expanded her corpus by locating the previously unknown Histoire de Ruma in a library in Montauban. However, Duplessis has not figured prominently in the burgeoning studies focusing on female religious communities during the French regime, and she is largely absent from overviews of women writers of that period.28 The absence of a convenient edition of Duplessis’s correspondence has been a significant impediment to the recognition of her stature. The letters in the French archives were serialized in a long-defunct journal, Nova Francia. However, the Fiducie du patrimoine culturel des Augustines is transforming access to her writings. Established in 2009 by the sisters, the Fiducie holds in trust the archives and collections of eleven Augustine communities with a central depository in the Hôtel-Dieu. It has embarked on an ambitious plan to digitize documents from its holdings and post them online.29 As I write in 2019, Duplessis’s correspondence with Bishop Pontbriand is already accessible.

Shaping a Biography of Duplessis According to Duplessis’s death notice, her contemporaries of “good taste” who read her Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec judged that her “ease of composing and penetration” made her “capable of writing the history of the founding of Canada.”30 Despite my title, The Writing introduction

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of New France, this cannot be exclusively a literary biography of an historian of New France. The biography also analyzes the managerial career of the woman who administered the first hospital built north of Mexico for almost thirty years. Duplessis wrote extensively and well, and more than the duties of her office required. However, like two other major women writers of New France, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon, she never thought of herself as a writer. Except for her letters to Hecquet, all her surviving texts stem from her convent responsibilities. Thus, although New France is omnipresent in her writing, she always viewed Canada from the Hôtel-Dieu. This overarching commitment to the hospital pervades her writings and this biography. Biographies of eighteenth-century women are invariably portraits of their families.31 Their trajectory toward marriage or the convent was set in motion by their parents’ circumstances and desires, and once they were established as a mother or a mother superior, this new family became their preoccupation. Moreover, Marie-André worked in tandem with her sister Geneviève, who took over duties as hospital bursar when Duplessis was elected mother superior. Her Jesuit brother in France, François-Xavier, lobbied relentlessly for it. She worried over the undistinguished military career and failed marriage of her quarrelsome younger brother Charles-Denis. Neither Geneviève nor François-Xavier has received the biographical treatment they merit. J.-Edmond Roy’s account of the Jesuit’s life in his 1892 edition of his letters is hagiographic and slights the hostile reactions to his preaching by Jansenists and philosophes alike.32 Neither party had any more use for the Jesuit than he had for them. Geneviève, who oversaw hospital finances for years, was much more than the junior partner of her older sister. She was more outspoken than Marie-André, and her frank letters have often proved to be more revealing. She was also an active spiritual author who envisaged publishing in France. Room must also be made for Marie-André’s childhood friend, Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet. Duplessis first came to attention in the nineteenth century when her letters to Hecquet were discovered in the French National Archives. Marie-André revealed herself in a more unguarded way in these letters than in any of her other writings. In addition, most of what we know of Duplessis’s childhood 12

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comes by way of Hecquet’s biography of her aunt Michelle Homassel Fontaine. It was first published in 1862 but seems to have remained unknown to scholars in Canada.33 Marie-Catherine became a militant Jansenist, while Duplessis adopted her Jesuit brother’s hostility to what the church considered a heresy. Their forty-year correspondence impacted Marie-Catherine’s life at a crucial juncture in 1736, and it triggered the one book Hecquet published during her lifetime, the 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois. A rigid chronological approach hardly does justice to a figure such as Duplessis, whose impact touched so many domains. Her skill as a writer, her managerial expertise, and her spiritual development all merit attention. Thus, the spine of this biography is her life from her family’s origins, through her childhood and early convent years, to her long period of administrative service, ending with the British seizure of Quebec. However, chapters on her spirituality, spiritual writing, redaction of the annals, and friendship with Hecquet are inserted within this frame. Although this approach entails placing some material out of chronological order and considering it from different angles in successive chapters, it allows for a more focused analysis of her accomplishments. This arrangement disperses a key period in her life: her creative years between 1717 and 1720. These years mark her entry into the community’s leadership. They are years of intense spiritual enthusiasm, as can be seen in her Jesuit brother’s letters to his two sisters. She wrote her major work, the Annales, and one of her most original minor texts, the Musique spirituelle, during them. Chapters 1 and 2 examine Duplessis’s childhood years in Paris and the relatives who shaped her life. Chapter 1 looks at the influence of three independent women in whose households Marie-André was raised in Paris: her grandmother, an aunt, and a friend of her aunt. Their business savvy and religious devotion were central to her upbringing. In the household of her aunt Marie-Anne Leroy she became fast friends with Marie-Catherine Homassel. Leroy recognized her niece’s potential as a manager and groomed her to take over her fashionable dressmaking business. This chapter also begins the analysis of the tensions that surrounded her key friendships, treated in subsequent chapters: her “particular” convent friendship with her sister nun Geneviève and her anti-Jansenist barbs in her introduction

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letters to Marie-Catherine. The second chapter traces the career of her enterprising parents, Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy, who re-entered her life when she arrived in Quebec in 1701. Marie Leroy’s trajectory shows how a wife could second a husband who had to create his own network in the colony and how a widow could maintain a measure of independence. Chapter 3 treats Duplessis’s path into the Hôtel-Dieu and her spirituality. There she encountered remarkable women such as Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau who recognized her gifts. Her Jesuit brother’s letters to her give a glimpse into her early spiritual ambitions. However, the evidence about her spiritual experience in the last decades of her life is much sketchier. Chapter 4 focuses on the threat to Duplessis’s friendship with Hecquet after Marie-Catherine became an intransigent Jansenist, while Duplessis’s brother François-Xavier made his career in France as an anti-Jansenist preacher. Duplessis’s correspondence with MarieCatherine may now be the most engaging and accessible part of her oeuvre, but nothing assured the continuation of their friendship. Their first surviving letter dates from 1718, just when New France underwent a Jansenist scare and when Marie-Catherine in Abbeville experienced a bout of persecution for her refusal to adhere to the papal bull Unigenitus condemning Jansenism. The outing of the Jansenist monk Georges Poulet, who was briefly a patient at the hospital in 1718, illustrates why Jansenism never had the impact in Canada that it had in France. The chapter examines how, despite these tensions, Duplessis refashioned their friendship through letters. It concludes by situating her exchange with Hecquet within her other epistolary networks. Chapter 5 is the first of four that examine how Duplessis met the challenges of administering a hospital and large religious community. Beginning with her appointment as hospital bursar in 1725, it analyzes the achievements of her first two six-year terms as mother superior. The naturalist Pehr Kalm’s account of his visit in 1748 offers a vantage point for assessing the generally favourable state of the hospital at the end of this period of economic expansion for the colony. However, Duplessis’s defensive management style limited her ability to maneuver in the new climate dominated by war. The next two chapters focus on Duplessis as a woman author who stretched the conventions of convent writing. Chapter 6 examines 14

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the short texts that she wrote, first as a newly professed nun, then as novice mistress, and finally as mother superior. Particularly innovative are the early Histoire de Ruma and the Musique spirituelle. Her spirited vignettes often enliven even the more conventional monastic texts that she later produced in her role as mother superior – meditations, short accounts of notable events in the life of the convent, and circular letters commemorating deceased nuns. Chapter 7 presents the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec as a unique example of women publishing their history. Duplessis wrote it around 1720, before she became mother superior. She had it published in 1751 in France by a former ecclesiastical superior of the house, Bertrand de La Tour. Revisions that she had previously made, seemingly to smooth over relations with male church officials, are examined, as are her reactions to changes that La Tour introduced into her text when he adapted an in-house history for a wider public. The eighth and ninth chapters assess how gender impacted her negotiations with colonial officials during her trying last decade in what she termed “a land of crosses and suffering.” They analyze her attempts to fend off demands that she fund the hospital’s expansion to serve royal troops. After the 1755 fire that left the monastery and hospital unusable, Bishop Pontbriand tried to impose his own vision of reconstruction. Her multiple exchanges with Hecquet about Indigenous peoples led to the publication of her friend’s 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage and Duplessis’s own entrance into Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The death of her sister and administrative partner Geneviève in 1756 left her isolated just as the war intensified. The final chapter focuses on 1759, the last year of her life, in terms of women’s experience of the British siege and occupation of Quebec. Eighteenth-century accounts of the campaign largely ignored the role of women, which hardly fared better in the commemorations 250 years later in 2009. The defeat of the Canadians and French was a male failure, and women coped with this failure of their supposed protectors according to their social status. Duplessis did not need to participate in the January 1759 street protests by women to make her need for food supplies known to officials. Likewise, the rules of “civilized” warfare worked to the advantage of her hospital, while poorer townswomen and country wives fared much worse. The chapter uses her extensive and often conflictual correspondence with introduction

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the intendant François Bigot, Bishop Pontbriand, and the British occupiers. It sets her letters alongside the accounts of the campaign by male participants, both French and British, who hardly took into account women’s experience of the events. The conclusion begins with her death in January 1760, four months into the British occupation and two months short of her seventythird birthday. The 1759 defeat is emblematic of a failed patriarchal colonial state with which resourceful women like Duplessis had to contend. Indeed, the conclusion argues that despite H.-R. Casgrain’s characterization of her as a “gentle woman” instead of as a femme forte, her skills as an administrator align better with a model of the femme forte that dates to the last third of the seventeenth century. Finally, no other eighteenth-century woman in New France, and perhaps no man, left a corpus written with such versatility, verve, and range. The conclusion proposes Duplessis as a major figure of colonial Canadian letters. A note on names: I have tried to conform to the spellings of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The chief exception is the subject of this book, which the Dictionary gives as Marie-Andrée Regnard Duplessis. However, she generally signed her name on documents and letters as Marie André Duplessis, without the second ‘e’ that her grandmother Andrée Douin used, and without her father’s name Regnard. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

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chapter

1

Two Girls’ Friendship on the Rue Saint-Honoré in the Orbit of Independent Women In spring 1693, two young “orphaned” girls in Paris began a friendship that would last almost seventy years. Marie-Catherine Homassel described the meeting as love at first sight: “Seeing each other and loving each other was the same thing. The similarity of our ages and perhaps of our temperaments created in us a union that even a separation of fifteen hundred leagues and an absence of more than twenty years have not yet been able to change.”1 Marie-Catherine was seven and Marie-André six. They would share six years of close proximity, often living under the same roof, until their parents reclaimed them. The two girls, of course, were not orphans at all, but, as so often happened in an age when spouses died prematurely or parents had to travel, they had been confided to close relatives. Marie-André had been entrusted to Andrée Douin, her maternal grandmother, when her father Georges Regnard Duplessis was named to a post in the treasury of the marine’s office in Quebec in 1689. Jacques Homassel, owner of a luxury fabric manufactory in Abbeville, had asked his sister Michelle Homassel to care for Marie-Catherine after the death of her mother in childbirth in 1691. The girls’ formative years were spent under the aegis of women who had found the measure of independence from male domination that society offered to lay women of their rank. Andrée Douin was an older widow of some means.

Michelle Homassel was a younger, poorer widow who had not remarried, even though this meant living in much reduced straits. A third woman must be added to the mix, an unmarried but legally emancipated daughter of Andrée Douin, Marie-Anne Leroy. The two girls met when Leroy, an enterprising dressmaker who ran a successful business on the fashionable Rue Saint-Honoré, took her niece to visit her friend Michelle Homassel. Little of Marie-André’s childhood would be known without the biography of her own aunt Michelle Homassel that Marie-Catherine wrote for her children. The friendships that are described in this chapter both belie and confirm the opinion of most male writers on friendship from Antiquity to the Renaissance – from Aristotle to Montaigne. These philosophers and moralists held that if true friendship between two men is difficult to achieve, friendship between a man and a woman is unlikely, and friendship between women is all but impossible. They cited the list of commonplaces that were used to justify the subordination of women and separate them from each other: women’s fickleness, their lack of resolve, their intellectual weakness, etc.2 Despite this misogynistic view, the friendship of the two girls would last a lifetime. However, the tight bond between Marie-André and Marie-Catherine would also be used to undermine the independence of one member of the trio of adult women, Michelle Homassel. Women’s friendship could indeed have its perils.

A Trio of Independent Women Andrée Douin, the most independent of the trio, was about fiftysix when her two-year-old granddaughter was entrusted to her. All her life, Marie-André would remain grateful for the affection and upbringing she received from this grandmother to whom she was closer in many ways than to her mother. As she wrote Hecquet in 1752, “a grandmother’s tenderness is greater than a mother’s; I experienced this, as you know, having been raised by a saintly grandmother. The stronger my reason becomes, the more I recognize the debt I owe her.”3 These emotional bonds were reinforced by the financial security and solid community ties that her grandmother’s family enjoyed. Andrée Douin came from a well-connected administrative family in Limours-en-Hurepois (Essonne), a town thirty-one kilometres 18

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southwest of Paris. Her father, Anne Douin, had been king’s attorney (procureur du roi au baillage) for Limours. A brother, Louis, was the superior of a small local Franciscan monastery there that belonged to the order of Picpus, named for its headquarters in that Parisian suburb.4 Marie-André would eventually inherit his portrait, which is now held by the Hôtel-Dieu. A sister, Anne Douin, was married to Guy Josse, an attorney (procureur) in the local court at Limours. One of their sons, Pierre, became a clerk (greffier) at the Châtelet of Paris and a secretary to Claude Le Peletier, who succeeded Jean-Baptiste Colbert as general controller of finance for Louis XIV in 1683.5 Douin’s husband, Jean Leroy, had been a tanner-merchant in Chevreuse, situated about seven kilometres north of Limours. His was one of the many tanneries along the Yvette that flows through the town. After becoming a widow, Andrée Douin lived at times in Paris and in Chevreuse. Jean Leroy left his twenty-nine-year-old widow in 1662 in a comfortable enough situation that she did not have to remarry while she raised and established four children. The oldest daughter, Marie-Anne Leroy, was received as a mistress in the dressmakers’ guild in January 1675 and set up in business.6 Jean Leroy, originally a priest of the diocese of Paris, was pastor of SaintCéneré (Mayenne), a village seventeen kilometres east of Laval that had 174 households in 1696.7 He is described as having “a benefice with a considerable income” in a 1702 will of Anne-Marie Leroy.8 In spring 1686 Douin saw her remaining son and daughter married. Denis Leroy was an attorney at the Châtelet in Paris. This position would have cost his mother around 8,000 livres,9 and she gave him 6,000 livres at the time of his wedding in April 1686. A month before Denis’s marriage, Andrée Douin had established her other daughter Marie Leroy by marrying her to Georges Regnard Duplessis with a dowry of 7,000 livres.10 In addition, when she died at Chevreuse in December 1701,11 Douin left a farm to her daughter Marie Leroy at Villevert, a kilometre or so west of Limours. The least independent of the trio was Michelle Homassel, whose social and financial position was much less secure than Andrée Douin’s or that of any of the Leroy children. She had made an unpromising marriage at age twenty-one in 1676 to a young man from near Alençon, Guillaume Fontaine. He did not bring financial security, good health, or even a stable character to the altar. Shortly after the wedding, he two girls’ friendship

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had to flee Paris because he had participated in a duel. His refuge was Valenciennes, where he held a modest position collecting excise taxes.12 After her husband’s death around 1677, Michelle returned to Paris, and rather than remarry, she devoted herself to the education of their daughter. When the child died at age two, Michelle turned to the retired life of prayer and asceticism of a devout widow, while supplementing the modest income that her husband had left her by working as a seamstress. She was unconcerned with material acquisition. She was thirty-six when she brought the five-and-a-halfyear-old Marie-Catherine to Paris from Abbeville in October 1691, and immediately turned her attention to raising the girl according to the standards of unostentatious piety by which she had lived during the twelve years since her daughter’s death. This meant sessions of prayer upon arising and before going to bed, daily mass, reading scripture and devotional books. A regimen of fasting and bodily mortification supplemented this regime. She hid her devotional life and mortifications from others, and did not seek or report mystical raptures or visions, or align herself with any party such as that of Port-Royal. Her one spiritual “luxury” was that she had placed herself under the direction of the Oratorian Jean Soanen, who became famous as a court preacher in the 1680s, but she hid her identity from him for many years, preferring the status of an anonymous penitent in his confessional. Funded by her mother’s capital, Marie-Anne Leroy created a growing business in one of the few fields where women could operate independently of men. Her linen-drapers’ (lingères) guild was smaller, more prestigious, and older than the newer seamstresses’ (couturières) guild that had been established in 1675. Both were among the rare exclusively female guilds. Fees to become a mistress were 200 livres for Leroy’s linen-drapers, but only 50 for the seamstresses.13 Although the linen-drapers’ original function had been to sell linen cloth and finished goods such as aprons, shirts, and sheets, its members quickly moved into dressmaking. With a shop situated in the stylish Rue Saint-Honoré neighbourhood near the Louvre, Marie-Anne’s clients included women of quality whom she might visit in their residences. In the early 1690s, she envisaged expansion by taking in young needy women to make her clients’ dresses in her shop, rather than hiring out the work. 20

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Inseparable Friends and the Perils of Devout Friendship Accounts of childhood friendships in this period are rare, which makes situating Marie-André and Marie-Catherine’s bond among typical friendships between girls difficult. However, as Marie-Catherine presents her tie to the young Duplessis, it encompasses a number of the standard commonplaces of friendship. In addition to the conformity of character highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, she stresses its extraordinary nature: true friendship is a privileged relationship that is not often achieved. The classical theorists of friendship also stressed its voluntary nature, unlike most family relationships. When Marie-Anne Leroy took her niece for her first visit to Marie-Catherine in Michelle’s lodgings in 1693, Marie-André was so taken by the other girl that she refused to leave. According to Marie-Catherine, “It was not possible to wrest this little one from my side, and her aunt was forced to leave her there for a time.”14 While Marie-André’s attraction to Michelle’s niece was perhaps too immediate to be a deliberate choice, her willful attachment to the older girl and demand to stay by her side is the first recorded instance of the determination she would show all her life. The girls’ refusal to separate poised a problem for their adult guardians: how to persuade Marie-André to return to her aunt’s shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré? Marie-Anne Leroy had a solution that would satisfy the girls’ desire to be together and make possible the expansion she wanted. Michelle Homassel would leave her own lodgings and move with Marie-Catherine to Leroy’s shop. Andrée Douin would also take quarters there. All three adults and both girls would be housed under the same roof. However, this was also a business proposition. Leroy wanted to staff her shop with young seamstresses, but she could not both supervise them and deal with her client base. Michelle would oversee the seamstresses, leaving Leroy free to handle the front end of the enterprise. Michelle’s sense of duty would ensure order among the seamstresses, upon whom she would impose her own disciplined piety. According to her niece, Michelle had reservations about the arrangement from the start. It put her in a very unequal position in relation to Leroy, who controlled the capital. She would be less a two girls’ friendship

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partner than an employee and would be housed on her employer’s premises. Furthermore, what was uppermost in her mind was the education of Marie-Catherine, and she foresaw that the tight control that she had been able to maintain by secluding her niece would not be possible in the shop, given the intrusions of worldly clients and the proximity of the young seamstresses. Her devout friendship, however, led her to accept Leroy’s offer. The two women had several things in common. They were both single women of about the same age earning their living in the clothing trade. Above all, they shared the same pious outlook that proposed that devout women lead as retired a life as possible, devoted to prayer, church services, and works of mercy. Moreover, they shared the same director, Jean Soanen, and moved in the same Oratorian circuit. Aristotle had posited that the most perfect form of friendship was based on virtue. When his concepts were Christianized, virtue became conflated with the theological virtue of charity. This involved a certain amount of tension since Christian charity was not conceived as reserved for friends, but had a universal character. Had not Christ said, “Love your enemies”?15 Christian charity also claimed a sacrificial orientation, modelled on Jesus’s death on the cross: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”16 This sacrificial ethos no doubt motivated Michelle, but she was also following the directive of their common advisor Soanen, who thought that Michelle’s even temper would moderate the impetuosity and imperious personality of Leroy.17 The fundamental compatibility between the two girls produced an enduring friendship. However, Michelle radically misjudged Leroy and thus entered into a relationship of self-sacrifice that she interpreted as submission to divine Providence. According to her niece, she became the “victim of friendship” of this “false friend.”18 It would be a purgatory in this life for her. Marie-Catherine flatly accused Leroy of being a hypocrite whose ostentatious piety was a masquerade. “Devotion does not always drive out selfish motives,” as she put it.19 Her friend Marie-André echoed this judgment in a softer, ironic register, describing her aunt as being “in a lofty devotion.”20

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Education and Business Apprenticeship Although Andrée Douin continued to alternate with her granddaughter between Chevreuse and Paris, when she was in the capital, the two girls were in close proximity and shared exposure to Parisian life, devotional practices, and an informal apprenticeship in a thriving business. However, there were many differences in their upbringing. Michelle sought total control over her niece’s education, which she handled herself according to a strict daily schedule of prayer, reading of scripture, and recitation of lessons learned. Rather than send her charge to the parish school, she was Marie-Catherine’s primary instructor, and she only brought in a tutor to teach writing. “She decided that no one but she would teach me anything she could teach me herself.”21 Even when Marie-Catherine was prepared for her first communion, her aunt gained permission from the pastor of Saint-Eustache to do the instruction herself, rather than send the girl to the classes organized by the parish. We know less about the specifics of Marie-André’s upbringing under Andrée Douin. Writing in 1753 to Marie-Catherine, whose eldest daughter had just died, leaving an orphan girl, Marie-André consoled her friend by proposing that a grandmother can have more affection than a mother: “Grandmothers commonly raise maternal tenderness to a higher level. I remember with much joy and gratitude the great kindnesses that my grandmother, whom you met, had for me. Everything that she said for my wellbeing is so deeply engraved in my soul that I remember it with pleasure.”22 More than tender affection, her grandmother instilled in her abiding religious principles, as she said the preceding year.23 Douin’s holiness was recognized by those who knew her grandmother in Chevreuse. Marie-André’s Jesuit brother François-Xavier tells how as late as 1738, parishioners still held her in veneration, as he discovered when he visited the parish church of Saint Martin and read his breviary in the pew near the spot where she was buried.24 Marie-André must have shared her gratitude to her grandmother with her community of nuns because her successor Ursule-Marie des Anges featured it as well in her obituary letter: “This virtuous lady spared nothing to raise her in piety and innocence,” and the young girl considered her grandmother’s

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teaching and advice “a divine command.”25 While Marie-Catherine’s religious upbringing was shaped almost entirely by her aunt’s orientation, Marie-André was exposed to multiple influences: for example, parish life in Chevreuse and her Franciscan uncle Louis-François. She could have attended the parish school for girls in Chevreuse that had been founded in 1683.26 The teachers were local single women who banded together in a community under the supervision of the pastor without the formality of vows. The women were well-regarded by the Leroy family. Marie-Anne Leroy bequeathed a thousand livres to them in her 1702 will.27 Claire Hardy had been named mistress in 1687 and might well have been Marie-André’s teacher. Her Jesuit brother reported during his 1738 stay in Chevreuse that Marie-André’s memory was still alive when he visited the community: “I was invited by the pastor who has a special regard for you. I steal away every day for a few minutes to go to the community where I hear them speak of the favours that God has given my dear sister Sainte-Hélène.”28 Instruction in Chevreuse would have been rudimentary: reading, writing, and strong doses of catechism. In theory, the school was destined for poor girls of the parish. At some point, Marie-André’s grandmother boarded with the Filles de la Croix on the Rue SaintAntoine near the Place des Vosges. Besides accepting women boarders, they also ran a school that Marie-André could have attended, but she made no explicit mention of their classes when she alluded to her grandmother’s stay there in a letter to Hecquet in 1747.29 Marie-Catherine was explicit that her friend was not under Michelle Homassel’s direction at the Rue Saint-Honoré, but the two girls did see each other after lunch and supper for periods of about an hour that Marie-Catherine remembers as being devoted more to pleasure than to instruction.30 This might have included song sessions, because Marie-Catherine accused herself of having sung “naughty,” “bad” songs in the company of the young seamstresses. In a later devotional text, Marie-André would similarly, but without giving any specifics, accuse herself of having misused her voice by singing “songs and words that displeased and offended you [i.e. God].”31 Rather than just sell cloth and accessories made off-premises, as many members of her linen-drapers’ guild did, Leroy ran what might be seen as an embryonic fashion house. As Marie-Catherine reported, “Because her trade was extensive, she could not have managed it all, 24

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1.1 and 1.2 Although these plates of the Encyclopédie méthodique (1784) appeared almost hundred years after Duplessis worked in Marie-Anne Leroy’s shop, they evoke the atmosphere of the female guilds. Leroy was a linen-draper (lingère) who sold fabric, but who also employed seamstresses (couturières) to make apparel on-site.

if she had not found a person like my aunt to watch over the interior of her premises while she was doing business outside.”32 Rich clients came to the shop, and they were sometimes so taken by the young Marie-Catherine Homassel that they insisted she accompany them home for a visit. At other times Marie-Anne Leroy might ask the girl to come along when she called on clients in their homes. Her own niece Marie-André certainly participated in these activities, because Leroy eventually aspired to retire to a life of prayer and to leave her business to her niece. Andrée Douin would operate the business in the transition period until Marie-André was old enough to take charge.33 Leroy must have noted the young Duplessis’s potential as a businesswoman. The project collapsed when Marie-Anne Leroy quarrelled with her mother Andrée Douin, who apparently was much less acquiescing than Michelle Homassel. Leroy’s affection for her own niece Marie-André cooled, and in a surprising reversal, she decided to groom Marie-Catherine to take over the business. Michelle realized the inherent impossibility of such a scheme immediately. Jacques Homassel would certainly have other designs for his daughter. Moreover, the plan would not only increase tensions within the Leroy family, but would create problems between them and herself. True to her character, Michelle temporized instead of giving Leroy a flat refusal. Although she did not tell her niece about the plan, the girls might well have noted the shift in Leroy’s attentions, thus causing competition that could have endangered their friendship. Relations between Leroy and her mother became so inflamed that Andrée Douin left Paris for a country house she owned. Her other daughter, Marie Leroy, the mother of Marie-André, who had arrived in 1700 from Quebec, cut short her stay in France and returned with MarieAndré earlier than planned.34

Separation and Return to Parents It was not the quarrel over Leroy’s business that precipitated the girls’ separation, but the desire of their parents to reclaim them. Jacques Homassel had remarried for the third time in early 1697. He had two surviving children from his first marriage, Marie-Catherine herself and a boy who had been born a year after her. Marie-Catherine attributed 26

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her return to Abbeville in late 1699 at age thirteen to her father’s new wife, who wanted Jacques’s children restored to their father’s household.35 The fact that it was almost three years after the marriage that Jacques Homassel reclaimed his daughter suggests another reason. His business had prospered and he was thinking seriously about associating his children in the enterprise. His son was probably sickly, since he died in June 1700. His death left the adolescent Marie-Catherine as Jacques’s sole living child. She could provide a son-in-law. Marie-André would only leave for Canada in 1701.36 Jacques Homassel did not allow his daughter to return to Paris, so the girls probably did not see each other during the year and a half that Marie-André was still in the Paris area, although they may have corresponded. Nor do we know exactly what motivated the decision of Marie-André’s parents to reclaim her. Had they planned all along to bring her over to Canada, or had they concurred in MarieAnne Leroy’s project to pass her business to her niece and only changed their mind after the linen-draper quarrelled with the family? They might have not thought of their stay in Canada as permanent, and might have envisaged rejoining their daughter in France. Leaving their guardians behind was difficult for both girls, but especially traumatic for Marie-Catherine. Marie-Catherine did not return to a welcoming family, and she left a surrogate mother. Since Michelle had kept her isolated from other children, Marie-Catherine likely had an especially strong attachment to Marie-André, the one girl her age with whom she had had prolonged contact. This might have led her to idealize their friendship in retrospect. She records no other female friendships upon her return to Abbeville, nor, for that matter, during the course of her life. In Marie-André’s earliest known writing, the Histoire de Ruma, she described the pain of leaving her grandmother “who had raised her tenderly.” Leaving Paris for Canada also meant leaving behind “her country,” a country to whose “attractive features” she said she had become very much attached. However, she made a determined effort to hide her strong reluctance, aided by gratitude to her mother for the difficult trip that Marie Leroy had undertaken to come for her and the hope of seeing her father of whom she had heard so many good things. two girls’ friendship

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Not only did she regain loving parents, but she discovered a new soul mate. Her mother had brought along on the trip to France MarieAndré’s eight-year-old sister Geneviève, whom she had never seen. Marie-André said she was quickly linked in a “tight friendship” with her sister that she attributed to their sharing “a kind disposition,”37 just as Marie-Catherine had attributed her friendship with Duplessis to a harmony of temperaments. Their bond must have been strengthened by the close quarters they shared on the voyage across the Atlantic. Both sisters would eventually enter the Hôtel-Dieu, where they developed bonds of intimacy and collaboration such as Marie-André and Marie-Catherine might have done, had they not been separated.

Conclusion The years Marie-André and Marie-Catherine shared gave them a common store of memories and experiences that united them the rest of their lives. Each met the other’s family. In 1720, Marie-André specifically mentioned Jacques Homassel, his younger sister Élisabeth who lived for a time in Marie-Anne Leroy’s household, and Philippe Hecquet, a cousin of Marie-Catherine’s mother who was making a name for himself as a doctor in the 1690s.38 Their shared years made them both Parisians, even if MarieAndré spent the rest of her life in Quebec, and Marie-Catherine almost forty years raising a family in Abbeville before establishing herself definitively in Paris. As late as 1749, Marie-André could evoke her intimate knowledge of the city in trying to visualize where her friend had finally settled in the capital. “I seek you out in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in Saint-Germain, and in Saint-Honoré.”39 All her life she assiduously cultivated ties with her home country by maintaining multiple exchanges of letters and by engaging with travellers arrived from France. Her own family connections there, especially her Jesuit brother’s long residence in France, facilitated this access. Both rejected the ostentatious piety of Marie-Anne Leroy for the less showy devotion of their guardians, although Michelle’s brand was certainly more austere that that of Andrée Douin. MarieAndre’s description in 1747 of the comforts her grandmother had known while boarding at the Filles de la Croix would have seemed too soft for Michelle. “There were a number of well off ladies of all 28

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the better classes, even duchesses, who lived there, as if it was a tiny paradise. They visited each other as much as they wished; they prayed as much as their piety inclined them.”40 In neither case do the very divergent future religious affiliations of each girl stand out clearly. The Oratorians who directed Michelle steered clear of the Jansenist Port-Royal, and the connections Marie-Catherine had with Jansenistleaning individuals, such as her cousin Philippe Hecquet, were more familial than doctrinal. Likewise, there is no sign that Andrée Douin had any privileged connections with the Jesuits; her priest son Jean Leroy, in fact, became an outspoken Jansenist. Both girls were tapped in turn to take on the responsibility of Marie-Anne Leroy’s dress business on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Both observed closely how the enterprise was managed, and both had contact with the milieu of its wealthy customers. This supplemented the introduction to the ruling administrative elites that they had through their parents’ business affairs. Both fathers, for example, had dealings with ministers of the powerful Pontchartrain family who had authority over the colonies and internal trade.41 The tenacity, the financial acumen, and the spirituality that Marie-André and MarieCatherine would both display as adults owe much to the example of this trio of independent women.

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chapter

2

The Networks of an Enterprising Father and a Resilient Mother

Friends and Family In late March 1686, a year before Marie-André’s birth, about twenty friends and relatives gathered in the quarters of Andrée Douin on the Rue Saint-Honoré to sign the marriage contract of MarieAndré’s parents, Georges Regnard Duplessis (1657–1714) and Marie Leroy (1662–1732).1 The composition of the assembled guests and the stipulations of the contract reveal much about the networks that Georges and Marie would use to create for their children a comfortable situation among the bourgeois merchants and functionaries in Quebec during twenty-five years of stressful economic times in the colony, before their affairs began to unravel around 1710. None of the witnesses at the signing on the husband’s side was a family member, while all of Marie Leroy’s were. This is not surprising, since Georges Regnard came from Saint-Utin (Marne), a village in the Champagne region about twenty-three kilometres south of Vitry-le-François and two hundred kilometres east of Paris.2 He was a younger son, and his brothers and sisters remained in that region. Coming from Chevreuse, just south of Paris, Marie Leroy already had a sister and brother living in the capital who were present, along with an uncle and cousins.3

All of Georges’s witnesses are listed as “friends,” not intimate ones in the sense used in the last chapter, but in another meaning of the word common in this period. Such friends could include non-related supporters such as patrons and other allies, or working companions. Listed first among Georges’s “friends” was a major royal official, Gédéon Berbier du Metz, steward and general controller of the crown furniture and treasurer of the royal treasury.4 The Berbier du Metz family dominated the area of Champagne where Saint-Utin is located, and a younger brother of Gédéon seems to have held the title of seigneur de Saint-Utin. The wife or mother-inlaw of this younger brother was Georges’s godmother, in fact. The Regnards likely came from the group of prosperous farmers called “laboureurs” who had moved into minor, local administrative offices and were thus clients of the Berbier du Metz clan. Although Georges is not listed as such in the contract, he was probably a clerk in the royal treasury controlled by Gédéon, since the last two “friends” on the list of witnesses are identified as clerks there. Such patron-client networks, often overlapping with baptismal ties, oiled Ancien Régime society. The only witness on Marie Leroy’s side who approached the spheres of royal power was a cousin, Pierre Josse, who was secretary to Claude Le Peletier, the successor to Jean-Baptiste Colbert as controller-general of finances. The bride’s family brought greater financial capital to the union than the groom’s. Georges’s parents were deceased, and whatever his inheritance as a younger son might have been, the contract only specifies that he provided 200 livres of dower. The dower was an annuity promised to a widow if the husband died first. In comparison, his future brother-in-law Denis Leroy would promise 300 livres at his marriage a month later and indicated that the capital behind the annuity could be recuperated.5 As noted in the previous chapter, Andrée Douin also furnished a dowry of 7,000 livres and the promise of the farm near Limours. Moreover, no matter how close to royal power Georges’s witness friends might have been, surviving documents and letters do not indicate that they aided him once he was in Canada, while his wife’s matrilineal networks proved to be a resource for them there. In fact, if indeed Georges held a position in the royal treasury thanks to the Berbier du Metz connection, Pierre Josse likely

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played a role in his posting in 1689 to Canada. The patron of Pierre Josse was the controller-general Claude Le Peletier, who in turn was mentor and patron of Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, who became controller-general himself in 1689 and minister of the navy and colonies the next year.6 This made for a rather modest tie to the three generations of Pontchartrains who would have responsibility for New France between 1690 and 1748. However, in what Peter N. Moogk called “a society built upon networks of kinship and patronage,”7 Georges Duplessis’s family exploited this tie to the maximum.

A Father on the Make Georges Regnard sieur Duplessis arrived in Quebec in 1689 at age thirty-two, apparently as temporary agent of the treasurer general of the marine (the royal navy).8 The department of the marine had responsibility for the general administration of the colony, and its treasurer general for its finances.9 However, the treasurer general and his agents in the colonies were not government officials. The treasurer was a financier who bought his post from the king and served as something of a private banker to the state. The treasurer received funds from the government and disbursed them for authorized expenses, but during the interval, the funds were under his private control.10 At the time of Duplessis’s arrival in Canada, Jacques Petit de Verneuil occupied the position of representative or agent (commis) in Canada of the treasurer general in France, Louis de Lubert,11 and Duplessis likely served as Petit de Verneuil’s associate or deputy. Disbursals had to be authorized by the intendant, who was charged with the civil administration of the colony, and so the treasurer’s representative worked closely with this government official. Jean Bochart de Champigny was intendant during Duplessis’s first decade in the colony. The monies handled by the treasurer’s office in Quebec were substantial. The funds included those destined for the administration of the colony under the heading of the état du roi, for such expenses as building and maintaining fortifications, salaries of workers, soldiers, and government officials, purchase of supplies, and gifts to Indigenous allies. These sums averaged half a million livres a year around 1700.12

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Among the duties that fell to treasurer’s office in Quebec was issuing the so-called “playing-card money.” Specie was in short supply in the colony; very little coin made its way west across the Atlantic. The main source of hard currency was funds sent by the navy department for government expenditures. Not enough specie was available to the residents of Canada for purchasing supplies from France or for internal commerce. A first expedient was to increase arbitrarily the value of the coins in circulation in Canada by a quarter, creating a difference between the currency of France (monnaie de France) and currency of Canada (monnaie du pays).13 In the years just before Duplessis arrived, this shortage was compounded by delays in the arrival of government funds, and by funding that was insufficient to meet expenditures. This was particularly the case during wartime, and Duplessis’s arrival coincided with the beginning of the War of the League of Augsburg, which would last until 1697. Officials resorted to a second expedient: issuing promissory notes written on playing cards, signed by the agent of the treasurer of the marine and countersigned by the intendant and governor. Cards had to be used since there were no printing presses in Canada. The first cards were promptly redeemed when funds arrived from France, but as early as 1690, it became the practice to leave some cards in circulation without redeeming them, thus effectively increasing the money supply.14 In March 1690, a certain Pierre Malidor was sentenced to flogging for forging the signatures of Duplessis and Petit on counterfeit cards.15 Duplessis must have shown the business competence and diplomatic skills needed to please his superiors, because successive governors and intendants protected and promoted him. In 1693, the governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac served as godfather to his son Louis. The following year, the future governor’s wife, LouiseÉlisabeth de Joybert de Vaudreuil, stood as the godmother of his son François-Xavier.16 In 1696, Champigny proposed naming Duplessis superintendant of forests (grand maître des eaux et forêts).17 The same year, Frontenac granted him a seigneurial concession in Acadia, near the mouth of the Cocagne River on the Northumberland Strait, across from Prince Edward Island in present-day New Brunswick. In 1698, Champigny named him receiver of funds owed to the Admiralty in the case of two English vessels that had been captured.18

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Champigny’s successors as intendant, the father-and-son team of Jacques and Antoine-Denis Raudot, took a special liking to Duplessis and the whole family. Geneviève Duplessis reported in 1740, “We were especially close to Monsieur [Antoine-Denis] Raudot while he was in this country … He was intendant at Quebec and in this country with his father who had a great liking for our family and who could not spend a day without his coming to our home or our coming to his.”19 Jacques Raudot described Georges in 1705 as “very skilled and a good accountant” in a report to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, the minister of the marine.20 At the same time, Duplessis cultivated ties in devout circles. Duplessis’s “faithful friend” was Paul Dupuy de Lisloye.21 Because of his reputation for integrity and devotion, Champigny lured this pious military officer, who had come to Canada with the CarignanSalière regiment and married a descendent of the first colonist, from his manor on an island in the Saint Lawrence to become the king’s attorney in the provost’s court in Quebec. Once in Quebec, Dupuy was active in the Jesuits’ Congregation of the Virgin that attracted the colony’s pious elite, and served on the Poor Board (bureau des pauvres) that administered money gathered for beggars and the indigent. Duplessis moved in the same circles. He was chosen vice-prefect of the Jesuits’ Congregation in 1695,22 and in March 1698 he was named treasurer of the Poor Board, which also served as the administrators of the newly founded almshouse, the Hôpital-Général.23 Dupuy was admired for his integrity and impartiality in administering justice. However, Duplessis would not imitate his sacrifice of worldly affairs to piety. Dupuy died impoverished in 1713, having been forced to sell his holding on the Ile-aux-oies to settle his debts, including the 3,000-livre dowry of a daughter, Geneviève de la Croix, at the Hôtel-Dieu. His 500-livre annual salary from the king was simply not sufficient. There was nothing unusual about his situation. No official in the colonial service of the king could live on his government salary, and Dupuy seems to have been one of the few such officers who did not take advantage of their post to supplement their salary with private trading of some sort. Duplessis faced this challenge because his salary in 1711 only amounted to 1,200 livres.24 However, enterprise was directly embedded in his post, since he was not a government functionary but 34

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the representative of a private banker. Despite his piety, he did not remain aloof from the colony’s commercial networks. It was normal, in fact, for agents of the treasurers general in Quebec to be part-time merchants.25 Duplessis had a gift for seizing opportunities and for self-promotion that led him to take advantage of a number of business opportunities. Hence Guy Frégault’s assessment: “This bourgeois seigneur is ambitious.”26 Although the grant of the domain he had been given in Acadia in 1696 was revoked, three years later in 1699, he had amassed 5,500 livres, enough to buy the settled seigneurie of Lauzon across the Saint Lawrence from Quebec City.27 Lauzon was, in fact, the oldest seigneurie on the South Shore, and Duplessis immediately set out improving its management. In a litigious society, this meant lawsuits against tenants and the seller’s family, but he seems to have been an energetic and successful landholder. He had surveys done and built two mills, and defended his right as seigneur to have the pew of honour in the parish church of Saint Joseph. In 1706, the domain had 431 inhabitants.28 The 1712 description by the engineer and surveyor Gédéon Catalogne says that because of its proximity to Quebec, the parish’s residents were quite well off, and mentions the production of lime, as well as the harvest of grain, vegetables, eels, and salmon.29 Duplessis also was a partner in various ventures. In 1704, he invested in a group that sent privateers to pick off English shipping near Newfoundland; in 1712, he partnered with a businessman building a thirty-six-cannon warship in Quebec’s harbour. He began envisaging a role for himself in governing circles. Not shy about putting himself forward, in 1701, he proposed himself to the minister of the navy for one of two vacant seats on the Sovereign Council.30 That same year, when his fortune seemed on the rise, he also began sending lengthy proposals to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain for the economic development of the colony. At least four of them survive (1701, 1704, 1705, 1707) in whole or as summaries. The most revealing, according to Guy Frégault, suggested in 1704 changes in the colony’s political structure that would give greater voice to its residents. Duplessis proposed an assembly of notables that would meet weekly; one section would generate general policy and a second chamber would decide particular issues. He presented himself as spokesman for those who believed that only the colony’s an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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own inhabitants could properly insure the smooth flow of commerce: “Sustaining the commerce of this colony is impossible as long as it is not handled directly by the persons who make it up, because of the colony’s paucity of resources.” His dream was that such an assembly would go beyond the narrow self-interest of individuals and form “together a single body, a single spirit, and have the same views to maintain among themselves a community of peace, union, and understanding.”31 Duplessis proposed himself as a member of a threeperson committee charged with executing the assembly’s decisions in conjunction with the intendant and governor. Beyond his personal ambition, according to Frégault, Duplessis was really speaking for the members of the upper classes, especially the bourgeois, who were engaged in international commerce and government administration, and who were dissatisfied with their relative lack of influence on the Superior Council.32 Around 1701, when fortune smiled on Duplessis, complaints arose that he was profiting personally from his position. The king’s engineer Levasseur de Neré wrote Pontchartrain that Duplessis was in collusion with merchants (to whom he was loaning the treasury’s funds at 8 or 9 percent) to defraud workers who were forced to take part of their wages in goods instead of cash from these same merchants.33 It was also in 1701 that the hapless Company of the Colony that would eventually cause Duplessis much grief was organized.34 The fur trade was in disarray because of overproduction. Louis Guigues, the Parisian holder of the monopoly since 1697, was required to buy all fur that Canadians presented to him at a fixed price, but his warehouses in France were full of beaver that could not be sold to hatters. Canadian merchants were confident they could do a better job of managing the market than financiers in distant France, and they created the Company of the Colony. However, lack of access to capital, mismanagement, corruption, and, above all, continued poor market conditions led them to bankruptcy. In September 1705, to salvage the situation, the newly arrived intendants Jacques and Antoine-Denis Raudot took control of the company, installing their own choices as directors, one of whom was Duplessis. This new arrangement only lasted a year at the most, because a new syndicate based in France bought out the Company the following spring. Duplessis’s appointment crowned

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fifteen years of successive promotions and increasing responsibility in the financial and administrative circles of the colony due to his ability to make the networks of colonial governance work to his advantage. However, coping with the debts of the Company went on for decades and would lead to Duplessis’s undoing. Duplessis came under attack on two fronts in the affair. The first was the manner in which the Raudot team imposed him and his fellow director René-Louis Chartier de Lotbinière on the company.35 The second charge, the accusation that Duplessis used his position to cover certain personal debts, would long haunt him. In November 1706, the Raudots wrote that Duplessis “wanted to make the company responsible for a bankruptcy that had been inflicted on him by a merchant of this country.”36 When the Company’s books were examined, it was determined that he owed it 20,950 livres, which Jacques Raudot ordered Duplessis to pay.37 Duplessis, in turn, appealed to the king’s council in France, using his wife’s funds as security, and claimed that the Company owed him 14,000 livres.38 It may have been too late in the sailing season to gather all the documents to send to France for a speedy judgment, but Duplessis did have time to send Marie Leroy that November to lobby on his behalf before the papers’ arrival in France. She seems to have spent three years there.39 Whether or not it was due to her efforts, in June 1708 the minister wrote suspending the sentence for a year to allow for examination of the documents.40 During that time, Duplessis was able to reach an accommodation with the Company by which the counterclaims were cancelled, as Raudot announced to Pontchartrain in October 1708. Marie Leroy, who was in France at that time, wrote the minister asking him to confirm this compromise.41 It was accepted, grudgingly it seems, since the 6 July 1709 letter written in the name of the king stipulates that Duplessis “should think himself fortunate to get out of this business with the Company on such good terms.”42 Guy Frégault in his summary of the affair flatly accused Duplessis of “underhanded practices.”43 The accounts of the Company would be a matter of contention for many years, and this episode marks the turning point in Duplessis’s career, although he remained in the good graces of the Raudots and continued to be appointed an agent of the treasurer of the marine and the Western Domain.

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Duplessis’s Affairs Unravel In her second surviving letter to her friend Marie-Catherine Hecquet, Duplessis’s daughter dated the decline of the family fortunes to the fire on a frigid windy January night in 1713 that destroyed the palace of the intendant, located below the hospital in the lower town: “The unforeseen disaster of the palace created a huge breach in the wealth of our family.”44 Thus, it is hardly surprising that, of the four surviving accounts of the fire, Marie-André’s in the Annales is the longest and most vivid.45 The flames spread quickly, and although the intendant Michel de la Picardière Bégon and his pregnant wife escaped, three servants and the intendant’s secretary perished. Fifteen hundred livres of card money belonging to Bégon were destroyed, as well as records of the treasurer.46 As a consequence, Marie-André said that her father “believed himself obligated to sell a seigneurial domain that contained two parishes that he had in Canada to repay his Majesty.”47 Indeed, he sold the Lauzon seigneurie that included the parishes of Saint Joseph and Saint Nicolas to Etienne Charest fourteen months later on 28 March of the following year for 40,000 livres.48 The correspondence between the colonial authorities and the minister in France clearly shows that Duplessis’s situation had begun to unravel before the fire. In 1711, the minister sent word that further memoranda from Duplessis about the affairs of the Company of the Colony would be most unwelcome.49 In order to shore up his position with authorities in France, Duplessis requested a testimonial, which Vaudreuil duly sent Pontchartrain: “Duplessis has asked me to give you a report on his management. I can tell you that he fulfills his duties here in a way that satisfies everyone.”50 Nonetheless, that winter, auditors in France examined the accounts Duplessis had submitted covering the years 1707 through 1710. In November 1712, Nicolas Pinaud, who had the responsibility of cleaning up the Company of the Colony’s affairs, complained that Duplessis was resorting to obfuscation and delaying tactics. Instead of replying to the specific points that the auditors raised, Duplessis had written six long pages of “verbiage” that did not deal with the facts.51 The newly arrived intendant, Michel Bégon, wrote Pontchartrain that getting to the bottom of Duplessis’s accounts would be his priority for the coming

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months.52 Pontchartrain had had a warm relationship with Bégon and his father since 1696, and Bégon’s wife was related to the minister.53 Bégon, who was none too scrupulous, had just arrived in Quebec in the fall of 1712, and likely saw in Duplessis an easy mark. The treasurer had no powerful protector in France, and the Raudots, who had befriended him, had just left the colony. Marie-André certainly suggested as much when she said in 1720 that her mother “had to deal with a pitiless intendant, who, while piling on outward flattery, treated her in fact without humanity.”54 The correspondence between Bégon and the minister during 1713, after the fire, does not indicate that the fire itself impacted Duplessis’s status in any substantial way. In February 1714, Duplessis’s brother-in-law Denis Leroy, a lawyer in the Châtelet de Paris, wrote Pontchartrain on Duplessis’s behalf. According to the minister’s June 1714 reply, the intervention seems to have concerned funds that Duplessis claimed were due him from 1704 and 1707, but that Duplessis had not documented. The minister’s letter does not suggest that the missing records were lost in the fire.55 By June 1714, Duplessis himself had fallen so ill that he was unable to transact business with Bégon.56 The official record does not contain documents indicating that Duplessis had been ordered to make a reimbursement prior to the sale of Lauzon in March 1713. It could be that, with his health declining and having no adult male children, he wanted to liquidate his estate in advance of his death. Duplessis had always been in an untenable situation. 1690, the year after he was named to the post, marked the beginning of a period of permanent instability throughout the entire institution of the treasury of the marine caused by Louis XIV’s wars.57 Although an annual reconciliation of the books of the colonial treasurer was done each fall, truly balancing them was always impossible in a system where the treasurer general never sent enough money from France to cover expenses, where payments were made in merchandise instead of specie, where advances had to be made on funds that were never sent, and where the intendant put pressure on the agent to disburse money not authorized by the minister, not to mention the private dealings of the agent.58 A complete accounting was only possible at the death of an office-holder, and such accountings were always undertaken. When Jean Petit arrived in Quebec in 1701, he

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successfully sued the widow of his uncle, whom he replaced, for 30,000 livres that he claimed were missing. When he died in 1720, his own widow in turn would be held responsible for missing money. Duplessis died on 30 October 1714, and with his death, the ineluctable final examination of his books began. In Bégon’s letter of 12 November 1714 that announced Duplessis’s death to the minister, the intendant stated that he had not been able to do any business with Duplessis during the last five months of his life because of his illness. Duplessis had raised continual objections, instead of handing over the papers he held dealing with the bankrupt company and the playing-card money.59 Defending the estate and coping with any debts for which it might be held responsible fell to Marie Leroy.

A Resilient Widow At fifty-two, Marie Leroy found herself a widow. Besides fending off the investigation into her husband’s dealings, she had three sons to provide for, despite her reduced circumstances. François-Xavier was twenty, Joseph seventeen, and Charles-Denis ten. It was rare for widows in their fifties to remarry in Quebec at this time,60 and she had no network of blood relatives in Canada to rely on, as many widows had. Fortunately, she came from a family with a commercial and legal background in France that had enabled her to second her husband’s enterprises during his life. After his death, she used many of his strategies to fight off claims against his estate and see to the needs of her family. Marie Leroy’s marriage contract had given her substantial economic independence. Although she married according to the common regime of community property under which the husband managed the wife’s dowry, the farm that had come from her mother and 5,000 livres of the dowry funds are listed in the contract as lineage property (propres) of the bride. Lineage property did not enter into the marital community, and while the husband could administer it, he could not sell it without his wife’s permission.61 As early as 1700, a document indicates that Marie Leroy had gained even more control, since she is described as “séparée des biens.”62 This financial separation status allowed her to administer this property, although her husband’s agreement was needed to sell it. It also allowed her to 40

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serve as co-signer (caution) for her husband in his position in the treasurer’s office, which she did at least five times between 1706 and 1711 and during the investigation into the affairs of the Company of the Colony in 1707.63 Childrearing during her first decade in Quebec probably gave Marie Leroy little time to exercise her business sense. Pregnancies marked Leroy’s life in the interval between her arrival in Quebec in 1689 and her return to France in 1700 to retrieve Marie-André. Three of the six children born in quick succession during that period survived into adolescence: Marie-Joseph-Geneviève (7 February 1692), François-Xavier, the future Jesuit (13 January 1694), and Joseph (6 April 1697). Three died within months of their birth: Louis (1693), Nicolas-Joseph (1695), and Antoine-Louis (1699). Her last child, the prodigal Charles-Denis, was born on 22 June 1704, following her return from France.64 Georges Duplessis had had the good sense to use his wife’s lobbying skills. Her letter to Pontchartrain in 1709, when her husband was accused of wrongdoing, has already been mentioned. Apparently, she also lobbied him during her earlier 1700–01 trip to France. In a draft of a 1747/48 letter to Jean-Frédéric de Maurepas, the son and successor of Pontchartrain, Geneviève recounted how her mother had taken her to perform Indigenous dances for Madame Pontchartrain’s amusement. “This virtuous lady took pleasure at her dressing table having me sing and dance like a savage … Canadians were at that time considered something strange in France.”65 Marie Leroy had no qualms about using her daughter as bait in her lobbying. More importantly, she recognized the usefulness of wife-to-wife lobbying. Éléonore de La Rochefoucauld-Roye often advised her husband Jérôme de Pontchartrain on appointments, and, in fact, the women of the Pontchartrain clan played an active role in the networking that made that family so powerful.66 With the seigneurie of Lauzon lost even before Georges Duplessis’s death, Marie Leroy and her three surviving boys found themselves in much reduced straits in 1714, but not impoverished. In fact, her husband left Marie Leroy a comfortable home in the upper city that Marie-André described in 1720 as “one of the most beautiful houses in Quebec.” Situated on the Côte de la Fabrique near the cathedral, it had a fine garden, and there was a nearby orchard,67 and the 1716 census lists Marie Leroy as having a twenty-two-year-old servant.68 an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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2.1 Anonymous portrait of “Saint Helena, Empress,” the wife of Constantine the Great. Marie Leroy declared in her will that her Jesuit son had sent this portrait, and she requested that it go to Marie-André, who bore the saint’s name as a nun.

Her two oldest children, Marie-André and Marie-Joseph-Geneviève, were safely established as nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu. Geneviève had just professed, in fact, in July 1714. Marie Leroy’s 1731 will mentions two family paintings she owned that passed to her daughter MarieAndré after her death. One is a portrait of her Franciscan great-uncle Louis-François. The other depicts Saint Helen the Empress, an allusion to the name in religion of her elder daughter.69 The oldest boy, François-Xavier, who sailed for France in October 1716 to enter a Jesuit novitiate, is not listed in the census. He would never return to Canada. The middle son, Joseph, was present with his mother in the 1716 census, but is mentioned nowhere else after that date. J.-Edmond Roy surmises that he died shortly thereafter, since he does not figure in his siblings’ letters.70 Only Charles-Denis remained to be provided for. He left for France in 1719 to study at the Jesuit college at La Flèche. Paying for his studies was an issue. Shortly after his arrival, his Jesuit brother in 1721 reassured his mother than the investment in her son’s education was sound.71 Two years later, he reassured her that the expenses had only amounted to 400 livres a year, even though his priest uncle Jean Leroy had used saving money as an excuse to have Denis move to Paris where he could be an extern at Louis-le-Grand while living with his Parisian uncle, Denis Leroy.72 Charles-Denis would insist on a military career despite the reservations of his brother, who argued in 1723 that Charles-Denis did not have the financial resources for a profession that paid so little. The Jesuit hoped that a more bureaucratic job, such as their father had held, could be found for him in Quebec.73 In 1719, probably anticipating her youngest son’s return from France, Marie Leroy established allowances to provide petty expenses for her three remaining children in religion: 100 livres for the Jesuit and 75 each for the two nuns, “in order to provide for their urgent needs without anything being required by the superiors or other religious members of their convents or monasteries.”74 She renewed these funds as bequests in her 1731 will.75 In August 1736, after her death, her daughters initiated legal action against those who held the funds in trust because payments were not being made regularly.76 To raise money, Marie Leroy began selling off lots that her husband had left in the upper town on Saint Joseph, Saint Joachim, and an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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Saint Flavien Streets as early as 1715, in some cases taking annual payments instead of the full purchase price. The sales were approved by Charles Guillimin, a wealthy merchant, who was named to safeguard the interests of her minor children.77 In addition, she had a small income from annuities (rentes) on the Paris Hôtel de Ville that had been left her by her sister and an uncle. The value of such investments would be reduced by the devaluation of currency after the bankruptcy of John Law’s bank and the Mississippi Company. Finally, she inherited property in Limours that her daughter reports brought her next to nothing. This income would not have been sufficient to live on, according to Marie-André in 1720, but her mother supplemented it by selling items she had sent each year from France. This kind of small-scale resourcefulness permitted her to live in a certain modest comfort.78 While Marie Leroy was providing for her children, the investigation into her husband’s finances proceeded. By 1719, she had to deal with claims that were being made against his estate. Her Jesuit son, looking back on this period two years later, went so far as to call the family’s situation at this time “desperate.”79 However, she was aided by the fact that around 1712, the Lanoullier de Boisclerc brothers, first Nicolas and then Jean-Eustache, who had loose ties to her family, arrived to take posts in the same financial circles in which Georges Duplessis had operated.80 In 1720, Nicolas would be named to the same position, clerk of the treasurer of the marine, that Georges had held, and Jean-Eustache was early on a controller of the marine. They were probably related to Marie Leroy as cousins-by-marriage in some degree.81 Their tie to the Duplessis family was thus rather weak, but the Lanoulliers were their only family of any sort in Canada. In November 1719, by request of Jean-Eustache Lanoullier de Boisclerc, Marie Leroy’s husband’s estate was ordered to surrender 10,339 livres in card money that was owed the king.82 The next day she appealed, countering that her husband had never been reimbursed for an advance of 9,455 livres that he had made to Antoine Laumet de La Mothe de Cadillac in the early 1700s for the post the adventurer had founded at Detroit.83 An accounting made a few days later credits Duplessis’s estate with having reimbursed 18,567 livres.84 The next month, on 21 December, she signed Jean-Eustache’s marriage

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contract as a cousin. There is thus likely some connivance between the two in the matter of the 10,339 livres. These manoeuvres show her using the same strategies to delay a reckoning that her husband had used and that she had seconded – claims and counterclaims and the cooperation of relatives. As was the case in the response of Pontchartrain to her brother Denis Leroy’s 1714 letter on behalf of her husband, often her claims were not backed up with documentation. A year and a half before her death, she appealed to the minister for payment for arms saved from the Walker shipwreck back in 1711 that she said the departing intendant Dupuy had promised her in 1728. When the current intendant Gilles Hocquart looked into the matter, he reported that he would gladly pay her, even though the weapons were useless, if she could produce a proper written agreement for the sale.85 And just as she and her husband had always done, she tried to win the protection of the powerful, even the intendant Bégon, who according to Marie-André was pitiless toward her mother. Her daughter narrated her mother’s brush with death in July 1720 when she drove out in a carriage about two kilometres outside the capital in a welcoming party to greet the intendant and his wife, who were returning from Montreal. The horse pulling her carriage became winded on a steep hill, and the widow threw herself out of the door just in time. She rolled 250 feet down the embankment, but without serious injury.86 For the nun, a miracle had saved her mother from death, but the incident also shows Marie Leroy’s efforts to court the intendant by participating in the welcoming cavalcade. Marie-André provides the best overall view of her finances in an October 1720 letter to Hecquet: “Since the death of my father my mother has accounted for 1,200,000 livres to the king.”87 This sum would represent card money and finances of the Company of the Colony over many years. Marie-André totalled the payments made by her mother at that date at 45,000 livres, a substantial sum, but not the million livres that is sometimes cited by historians, who take the total sum accounted for as the amount paid by the estate. Her Jesuit brother, all the while rejoicing that as religious he and his sisters were protected from such worldly concerns, attributed his mother’s escape from complete bankruptcy to divine protection. She held on to the

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2.2 The Duplessis residence was near the corner of the present Rue de la Fabrique and Rue Sainte-Famille. It looked out across this square toward the Jesuit college with its attached church. Richard Short made this view in the wake of the 1759 shelling of the town, but it evokes the urban landscape the Duplessis family knew well.

family house itself and passed it on to Charles-Denis. The 1744 census lists him residing there with his wife, daughter, and Indigenous slave.88 The house would remain in his possession until 1757.89 Marie Leroy’s last years were marked by declining health. In a 1720 letter Marie-André describes her mother as becoming so infirm that she postponed a projected trip to France where her two sons were studying and where she wanted to attend to her holdings. By mid-June 1731, she could no longer live at home, even with the help of three attendants. It was common for widows to turn to their lay daughters and sons-in-law in such circumstances,90 and she did so in a sense when her daughters placed her in a room in their hospital that was usually reserved for military officers. An enslaved Indigenous woman who had been in her service for some time accompanied her. As far back as 1720, her daughter had reported that neither her age nor her illness had dampened her feisty temper. At the beginning of her stay at the Hôtel-Dieu, her pains were so intense that her outbursts were frequent. She suffered from asthma that resulted in uncontrollable fits of coughing, insomnia, legs so swollen from fluid that they burst, and rheumatism that prevented her from using her hands.91 Her Jesuit son urged her to offer her pain up as if she were a martyr: “Let us suffer submissively, in the spirit of patient endurance; let us live and die, as God wills, as martyrs of patience.”92 Several months before her death in April 1732, after ten months of hospitalization, the unedifying outbursts ceased. According to her daughter, she did eventually accept her suffering as submission to Providence.93 Like many pious residents of Quebec, Marie Leroy requested burial in the cemetery of the poor of the hospital as a sign of humility. In an era when most widows had to turn to some male,94 Marie Leroy had maintained her independence on her own terms.

Conclusion The success of a family’s head in mobilizing all the capital available, human and financial, can have far-reaching consequences for his children. Georges Regnard Duplessis started with modest resources at the disposal of his considerable ambition. Superiors quickly recognized his diligence and competence and offered him promotions, and he an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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was skillful in seeking out the ear and protection of government authorities. Yet, when he died in 1714, his widow Marie Leroy spent the rest of her life dealing with his creditors. When he accepted the position with the treasury of the marine in 1689, he could not have known that the institution would shortly lose its stability. Moreover, the Canadian colonial economy dominated by one industry – an industry in decline because of oversupply – offered limited potential for enrichment. Only the largest outfitters in the fur trade operating out of Montreal could hope for riches. Duplessis had to cast about for investment opportunities. Not that he would have been better off to be fully in the king’s service, as were military officers or the intendant. They too had to supplement their salaries with expedients. Duplessis’s multiple business ventures were made in hope of striking it rich. However, this dispersal of his attention may have played a part in their mediocre results. Duplessis sought out pious friends such as Paul Dupuy, willingly took on responsibilities such as the Poor Board, and used his office to aid the Hôtel-Dieu. His daughter Marie-André reserved this high praise for him in the annals: Georges Duplessis declared that “he had never tasted a more perfect joy in this world than when he brought relief to someone.”95 Did she want to excuse his lack of financial success? In sum, what is surprising is not that Duplessis left his widow in difficult financial straits, given Canada’s hostile economic climate, but that he had such a good run over twenty-five years. Marie Leroy did not seem to share her husband’s intense piety, but she was an able partner in his affairs. Having independent income that she could control allowed her to serve as a guarantor of Georges’s position with the treasury of the marine, and she lobbied for him in France. After his death, she managed the urban property and unresolved claims on his accounts with all the skill with which other widows managed seigneuries or business ventures left by more prosperous husbands. Nonetheless, she died with debts that her executor and principal heir, her son Charles-Denis, was slow to pay, according to his Jesuit brother.96 The legacy of Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy was multiple. All four surviving children were tightly loyal to each other. This was particularly necessary since they had no family clan in Canada to provide support. The youngest son, Charles-Denis, had 48

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his father’s ambition to enter the seignieurial class, but not his work ethic. Of the four, the two daughters especially inherited their parents’ entrepreneurial spirit and networking skills. While Charles-Denis seems to have had no more than the rather conventional piety of his mother, the two daughters and oldest son shared their father’s Jesuit spirituality with its strain of service to others.

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chapter

3

Spiritual Mothers and Friends: Seeking the Peace of the Lord in Hospitality After Marie-André Duplessis’s death in January 1760, her successor, Ursule-Marie Chéron des Anges, highlighted her sustained calm, despite the multitude of challenges of her last decade: “All these various trials only served to enhance her strength, her equanimity, and her perfect resignation to the will of God.”1 Death notices, such as the one Chéron wrote, highlight the ideal, and Duplessis’s correspondence during the 1759 siege of Quebec shows her prey to anxiety and fear. Her equanimity was always fragile, and this chapter traces Duplessis’s search for the peace of the Lord. It begins with the women who served as her models at the Hôtel-Dieu, her own days as a novice, and how she guided novices when she became a spiritual mother in her own right. Her early “temptation” was to seek peace in a form of the religious life that was incompatible with her status as a hospitaller. Her friendship with her sister could provide a refuge from the tension between her quest for peace and the incessant demands of her role as a hospital administrator, but this required dealing with her order’s strictures against having particular friends.

The Father’s Path into the Hôtel-Dieu When Marie-André arrived in Quebec in 1701 with her sister Geneviève and mother Marie Leroy, she met her two brothers, four-year-old Joseph

and seven-year-old François-Xavier, along with her father. Georges Regnard Duplessis was in many ways at the height of his career during the six years between his daughter’s arrival from Paris and her entry into the Hôtel-Dieu in July 1707. He had recently purchased the seigneurie of Lauzon, enjoyed the favour of the intendants, and had been named as agent of the Company of the Colony, although signs of his fall were already appearing. Through him, his daughter had access to the highest administrative circles in the capital. She signed the parish registry at baptisms as godmother along with members of the elite: in 1704 with the son of the governor, and in 1705 with Jean Petit, the treasurer of the marine.2 She attended ceremonies for visiting Indigenous dignitaries.3 According to her 1760 death notice, none of these worldly activities, nor the flattering attention that she drew, deflected her from a path into the Hôtel-Dieu: “She was admired by everyone in this town because of her distinguished look, her modesty, and her piety. God had given her the advantages of physical beauty and great intelligence. She served as a model to all the young ladies who felt themselves fortunate to be in her company. Having so many rare traits, she was sought out by several individuals of standing, but her love of God led her to refuse these offers. Never was her heart divided or attached to any creature.”4 In the Quebec of 1707, what Marie-André could not do was enter a contemplative order devoted exclusively to prayer and mortification, such as the Carmelites or Feuillantines. The king only authorized orders with a service mission in Canada. However, four groups of women religious were available in the colony’s capital, three of them cloistered. The Congrégation Notre-Dame had been present in the capital only since 1686, when Marguerite Bourgeoys had established a Providence of the Holy Family in a house in the upper city at the invitation of future Bishop Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrière de Saint-Vallier. It was a school for girls too poor for the Ursulines, where they received rudimentary elementary education, religious instruction, and training in household skills over the course of a year.5 Several years later Saint-Vallier tried to add the care of invalids to these duties of the Congrégation, but he soon realized that the two responsibilities were incompatible. Marguerite Bourgeoys’s Congrégation was much like a group of religious Marie-André had known in France, those who taught spiritual mothers and friends

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in the parish school in Chevreuse: uncloistered, taking only simple vows, linked to service in a particular parish.6 While it would not have been impossible for the daughter of the seigneur of Lauzon to become a “daughter of the parish” as a Congrégation member, it would have required a singular attraction to a teaching vocation to join a group that recruited largely among habitant and artisan families. The Congrégation’s base was Montreal, and its outpost in Quebec was not a monastery but a house that sheltered a small group of members. In 1701, the head of the Quebec group wrote that there were ordinarily five or six sisters teaching more than a hundred girls.7 The nuns of the Hôpital-Général formed the newest group. Nothing could deter Saint-Vallier from his dream of an almshouse under his direction. When the sisters of the Congrégation could not manage the care of invalids in addition to their teaching duties, he requested a detachment of hospital nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu. After much resistance, a contingent of four nuns was sent in 1693 to the new house that he founded just outside the town along the Saint Charles River in buildings he had purchased from the Recollets. Until 1701, these nuns remained under the nominal control of the Hôtel-Dieu, but as it became clearer that more nuns would be needed in the new establishment, Saint-Vallier forced the hand of the Hôtel-Dieu community as well as the civil authorities in France by organizing elections and taking in novices. A royal order officially separated the two communities. In 1707, only three of the nuns who had come from the Hôtel-Dieu were still alive, including their guiding spirit, Louise Soumande de Saint-Augustin. The others, including novices, were young recruits who had joined the community in the preceding nine years.8 Initially there had been great opposition among decision-makers in Quebec to Saint-Vallier’s vision, although by 1707 much of it had dissipated, according to the annals of the Hôpital-Général.9 Numerous city leaders would have preferred that the Poor Board, composed of laymen under the direction of a priest, continue to provide for indigents without building an institution, or that, if such an institution were created, it would remain under lay control. Furthermore, support for the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in their quarrel with the bishop was strong. It is likely that Georges Duplessis shared these views. His friend Paul Dupuy had two daughters at the Hôtel-Dieu, and he had relinquished his post as treasurer of the Poor Board to Duplessis 52

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3.1 Map of city showing major religious institutions and Duplessis residence: (1) the Hôtel-Dieu, (2) the Hôpital-Général, (3) the Ursulines, (4) the Jesuit college and church, (5) the approximate site of the Duplessis home, (6) the Seminary, (7) the Palace of the Intendant.

in 1698.10 If Marie-André had entered the Hôpital-Général in 1707, she would have found her tasks as a hospital nun much the same as those at the Hôtel-Dieu. However, it would have been a much smaller, younger group, under the controlling hand of its bishop founder. The Ursulines would have provided a suitable fit for a woman of Marie-André’s talent and background. Although devoted to teaching like the Congrégation, they were quite different. Whereas Bourgeoys’s group had only been approved in 1669 and had fought off attempts by Saint-Vallier to impose solemn vows as late as 1698, the Ursulines had been in their cloister in Quebec since 1639. Their school catered to the better-off segments of society, and their recruits included girls from the governmental and economic elite. In 1700, there had been around twenty-nine professed nuns and novices in the cloister, sixty or so boarders, and more day students.11 If Marie-André turned toward the Hôtel-Dieu instead of the Ursulines, it is likely because of ties that her father already had with that house. Paul Dupuy had introduced Georges Duplessis to the hospital, and for twenty-five years Duplessis “never let a chance to do us a favour pass without throwing himself into it whole heartedly,” according to the annals. His pleasure was to aid the nuns: he gave them advances on money owed by the king, facilitated drafts on accounts in France, and loaned them money without interest.12 Marie-André entered the Hôtel-Dieu during a glory period for its novitiate in terms of recruitment. Between 1703 and 1712, the Hôpital-Général received nine postulants, the Ursulines thirteen, and the Hôtel-Dieu thirty-one.13 Nine of these recruits belonged to the upper classes,14 a slightly higher percentage than either at the Ursulines or at Saint-Vallier’s almshouse.15 A new monastery wing had just been added to the Hôtel-Dieu in 1695–98 so that the community was comfortably lodged. When Marie-André entered it, the community of the Hôtel-Dieu was the largest, numbering about forty-five, including novices.16 Marie-André began her novitiate on 2 July 1707. Her parents promised a 3,000-livre dowry, payable before profession. Five months later, on 9 December, the chapter voted unanimously to receive her as a choir nun, and she was clothed on 3 January 1708 by Joseph de La Colombière, canon of the cathedral and vicar general of the diocese, and took the name Sainte-Hélène. Her mother could not 54

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have attended this second ceremony. She had left for France in November to support her husband’s appeal against the order that he repay the Company of the Colony. The head of Jesuit missions in Canada, Vincent Bigot, preached and reminded the novice that since a nun is wed to the cross, she should not be surprised if it weighed down on her.17

Spiritual Mothers Unlike those novices who might have had trouble adapting to their new state, Marie-André found satisfaction in conforming to convent life. Her death notice declared that obedience was a pleasure for her, as were all the observances prescribed by the rule. Her many talents came to the fore, among them her skill in making liturgical ornaments. There was nothing acerbic in her manners; her conversation was pleasing, and she was considerate of others. Although the preceding assessment of her time as a novice comes from her 1760 obituary letter, written fifty years after her novitiate, its author is Marie-Ursule Chéron, who joined her there as a novice and succeeded her as mother superior.18 Perhaps her only character trait that the letter does not mention is her tenacity, which could include, when needed, a touch of defiance. However, Marie-André encountered no obstacles during her probationary period to awaken this spirit, and obedience is a more fitting virtue in any case to highlight in a novice. On 1 December 1708, the chapter voted to accept her into the community, and she made her profession on 8 January 1709. The woman who had the deepest impact on Duplessis’s formation during her first twenty years at the Hôtel-Dieu was its grande dame. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté de Saint-Ignace came from one of the oldest Canadian families on both her mother’s and father’s sides. She was a link between the Hôtel-Dieu’s French foundresses and their New World successors. She entered the community with a precocious vocation at the age of twelve as a boarder under the influence of her aunt, Marie-Françoise Giffard de Saint-Ignace, the first Canadian hospitaller. Unlike Marie-André, she had to overcome the resistance of her mother, who would have preferred to see her eldest daughter marry. Her novice mistress had been Marie-Catherine Simon de Longpré de Saint-Augustin, who reported fighting off the demons spiritual mothers and friends

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3.2 This anonymous portrait of Duplessis’s mentor, JeanneFrançoise Juchereau de la Ferté de Saint-Ignace, was perhaps made during her last terms as mother superior from 1711–17. She died in 1723 at age seventy-two.

who were tempting her charge to abandon her vocation. Longpré illustrates a mystical spirituality marked by the extraordinary: apparitions, personal revelations of future events, physical objects set in motion by demons, etc. Jeanne-Françoise’s aunt, mother, and the Jesuit martyr Jean de Brébeuf all appeared to Longpré at JeanneFrançoise’s profession in 1666, according to Longpré’s own reports.19 Jeanne-Françoise herself never claimed to have experienced Catherine’s intense mystical connection with the divine, or to have been visited by visions. However, she did share the belief that God reveals the future to chosen souls and that divine forces can manifest themselves physically. Catherine de Saint-Augustin had inhabited a private world of saints and martyrs who appeared to her in visions, but whom she mentioned only to her confessor. Jeanne-Françoise’s stress was on external community devotions. She introduced ceremonies into the annual life of the community in honour of the Sacred Heart of Mary and Saint Joseph, devotions that were being popularized in France at this time. Likewise, Marie-André would be concerned with the same sort of institutionalized piety: gaining indulgences for the hospital chapel or properly displaying relics sent from Rome. Juchereau was also the first Canadian mother superior of the house, and she passed on to Marie-André her robust defence of its interests. She would be elected seven times beginning at age thirtythree and serve twenty-four years. She was first named vice-superior at twenty-six in 1676 to aid Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité, who would later be accused of having given in too readily to the demands of Bishop Laval.20 Such a charge could never be brought against Jeanne-Françoise, who opposed Bishop Saint-Vallier’s plans to staff the Hôpital-Général with nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu in the 1690s with so much effectiveness that he forbade the community to elect her vice-superior in 1699. Her strategy was multi-pronged. She made respectful but firm representations of her views to the bishop. She marshalled support among the elite of Quebec, including the intendant and former bishop François de Laval, sent her own memoranda to the minister in Versailles to counter those of Saint-Vallier, and attempted to win the sympathy of other houses of the order in France. Finally, she strove to maintain the internal cohesion of her community, since Saint-Vallier had won over some of the sisters to his plans. Her obituary letter stresses her “admirable equanimity.”21 spiritual mothers and friends

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Her concern for the community was global. She maintained an extensive correspondence with monasteries in France and cordial relations with the Ursulines fifteen minutes away. She undertook the construction of the new monastery in the late 1690s. In 1711, seeing the need for a property near Quebec that could produce income and farm supplies, she bought the Ile-aux-oies in the Saint Lawrence north of the Ile d’Orléans and invested dowry money to upgrade facilities there. Juchereau’s talents had been recognized early, and she had been initiated into administrative responsibilities while only in her twenties. In her old age, Juchereau singled out Marie-André, whom she appointed her secretary within a few years of her profession. In this post, the young Marie-André would have been an administrative assistant who learned firsthand the affairs of the community. She also entrusted to Marie-André the task of redacting the Annales to insure that the spiritual fervour she had known in the foundresses would live on in her younger charges. The intense affection and respect that the young nun felt for Juchereau come through in the obituary letter that Marie-André likely wrote about her mentor,22 even though the letter was signed by the superior of that time, MarieGeneviève Dupuy de la Croix. Marie-André’s own career is in many ways a transposition of Jeanne-Françoise’s piety and defence of the Hôtel-Dieu into new circumstances.

Cantate Domino canticum novum: The Musique spirituelle of the New Novice Mistress Juchereau had been elected novice mistress at age thirty. Duplessis became a spiritual mother in her own right when she was selected for the same post at thirty-one in March 1718. The choice is not surprising, since she is said to have been a model for other novices when she was one herself.23 Six postulants and novices either began or finished their probation period during her three years in office. They ranged in age from fourteen and a half to twenty at the time of their entrance. In spring 1719, her brother François-Xavier scolded her because he had learned of her new responsibility from a third party, and offered stern advice on how she should handle her new charges: 58

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“They are spouses who must be shaped for Jesus Christ; thus nothing terrestrial or unworthy of this divine union must be allowed in the formation that they are given … let us beware particularly of human prudence.”24 His tone is heavy-handed, if not patronizing, coming from someone seven years younger and less than three years into his own training as a Jesuit. In fact, by the time he had written his letter, his sister had composed a short text that was likely intended at least in part for her charges and that mixes the secular and the religious in a way that her brother might have found frivolous.25 The Musique spirituelle is an allegory that finds equivalents for monastic spirituality in various points of contemporary music theory and practice. A musicologist has called it “the first treatise on the theory and practice of music to have been undertaken in North America,”26 but it treats music as only a means to a spiritual end. The music in question is not monastic plainchant, but is written in the worldly vein of composers such as André Campra and Marc-Antoine Charpentier, whose motets the nuns adapted and performed. The Hôtel-Dieu’s lively and informed musical culture allowed Duplessis to find spiritual parallels for such fundamental notions as keys, scales, and notes, but also for more sophisticated Baroque vocal ornaments, such as glides, trills, and syncopation.27 Pleasure is her self-avowed method. In the dedicatory letter to Marie-Madeleine Dupuy de la Nativité, she praises the young nun for having already mastered the substance of the treatise, leaving the author with only the hope to entertain her. In the preface, she asserts that since music is a pleasing art, she trusts that those in the religious life will joyfully assimilate the “spiritual music” she proposes. The spiritual music that she describes surveys the whole range of monastic life, with more stress on spiritual development than on rules and regulations. Yes, it is necessary to study normative documents such as the order’s rule and constitutions, but that is because these texts promote virtue. She notes the need for regularity (observance of the rule) and obedience to superiors throughout, but she lauds flexibility as well: “Just as vocal flexibility is admired and greatly pleases the ear, in the same way, in this music, faithfulness in following up on inspirations and taking advantage of all opportunities to make progress is enchanting and is so profitable that with that one can become holy in very little time.”28 Monastic civility, the need to spiritual mothers and friends

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cultivate harmonious relations among sisters, is promoted: “sweet and kind words that sustain charity.”29 The particular institute of the hospitallers is a leitmotif: the five vows (enclosure and hospital service, in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience); the mixed life that combines active service and contemplation; and the stress created by night watches in the hospital wards. The vision emerges of a religious life that does not shirk from the ascetic – mortification, contempt for the world, penitence, etc. – but promises “the solid, uninterrupted joy that one enjoys by fulfilling all one’s duties, joy that makes virtue easy, giving it a lustre and a brilliance that makes one love it.” She adeptly compares this lustre to “a sustained closing trill.”30 The Musique spirituelle is proposed for the community generally, not just for the novices, but it would be especially appropriate for them. By using music as a springboard for monastic instruction, it combines the training the novices were receiving in singing religious texts with spiritual growth. It summarizes the key points the novices should master about life in the convent, from advice on how to behave at recreation and in the parlour to the primordial importance of developing a fervent prayer life. Beginning with the premise that in itself “music is a very pleasing thing,” so pleasing in fact that many learn it despite its difficulties,31 this short work presents the spiritual life in the monastic world as a superior form of music that is especially inviting and attractive. It lives up to its epigraph: “Cantate Domino canticum novum” – “Sing to the Lord a new song.”

A Particular Friendship: Sisters Bound More by Inclination than by Blood The Constitutions of the Augustinian sisters, like those of all female orders, contained a solemn warning against particular friendships with other members of the community, especially relatives.32 Teresa of Avila’s strictures in the Way of Perfection are typical: “For the love of the Lord, refrain from making individual friendships, however holy, for even among brothers and sisters such things are apt to be poisonous and I can see no advantage in them.”33 Attachments to humans interfered with the goal of uniting with Christ. On a more practical level, besides the unspoken fear of homosexual relationships, close ties between individuals could lead to cabals against the 60

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superiors and cliques that divided the community. Teresa had limited, in fact, the number of nuns in each convent of reformed Carmelites to around a dozen in the hope of forestalling such problems. Large communities with a limited recruiting pool, such as the Hôtel-Dieu, however, often included many family members. In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, when Marie-André and Geneviève joined the community, two sisters apiece from the Chéron, Tibierge, Fornel, and Corriveau families also entered. Marie-André herself was close to several members of her generation. In fact, she seems to have allied herself with one particular friend to coax an even closer one into the monastery. The other novice, who entered the monastery in 1707 with Duplessis, was Marie-Élisabeth Lemoyne de Longueuil, born in 1684 to an illustrious Montreal family. In 1711, she joined Marie-André to send Geneviève Duplessis a short text designed to encourage her to become a hospitaller with them. Marie-André and her sister had bonded during their passage together from France, and Geneviève had spent three years as a boarder in the monastery in 1707–10 during her mother’s trip to France.34 Entitled the Histoire de Ruma, the text is written out in MarieAndré’s hand, and she was likely its principal author. It recounts Geneviève’s life using biblical names in place of family ones to show that everything destined her for life as a nun. Not only is Geneviève’s piety exemplary, her temperament is even-handed, and she has mastered Latin so well that she has translated the New Testament. Somewhat of a tomboy, she enjoyed horseback riding and shooting guns. After her three-year stay as a boarder in the convent, which strengthened her bond with her older sister, Geneviève continued to practise the devotions she had learned there, despite being accused of hypocrisy.35 Her talents and charms attracted suitors, according to the death notice Marie-André composed in 1756: “She had natural charms that made her stand out in society; she was sought after and pursued with such persistence that people of virtue feared that she would give in to it. However, this made her resolve to leave the world behind.”36 The 1711 appeal of Marie-André and Marie-Élisabeth was not immediately successful, but Geneviève did enter the Hôtel-Dieu as a novice in January 1713. She could not join Marie-Élisabeth there, as that nun had died in December 1711, one of seven nuns who spiritual mothers and friends

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died while nursing victims of an epidemic. Geneviève replaced her in a sense, since she took Marie-Élisabeth’s name in religion, “de l’Enfant-Jésus.” When Geneviève died in May 1756, her sister described them as being more united “by inclination than by blood” in the obituary letter that she wrote. As she had explained to Hecquet in 1720, “We have a great affinity, and we are very united by sharing the same feelings. We look so much alike that often we are taken for each other. She is younger than I am, ruddier, and a bit heavier.”37 Geneviève added in a letter written the same day that they were often taken for one another both in appearance and in handwriting.38 The striking difference was temperament; Geneviève had inherited Marie Leroy’s testiness, while her older sister was calmer. Marie-André admits to her French correspondent in 1734 that this sometimes caused problems: “That doesn’t fail to tax our harmony from time to time, but without harming our bond.”39 Monastic warnings about particular friendships often denounced such bonds based on affinities, where natural affection could be mistaken for Christian charity. However, Marie-André’s openness in admitting her tie to Geneviève, both publically in a circular letter addressed to her whole order and privately to Hecquet, indicates that she did not see this bond as falling within the particular friendships proscribed by her order’s Constitutions. In fact, in the annals she described two such seventeenth-century friendships at the Hôtel-Dieu that could serve as authorizing precedents; one involved its candidate for sainthood, Catherine de Saint-Augustin.40 In their shared spiritual ambitions the Duplessis sisters found a way to reconcile their attachment to each other and their commitment to seek first of all union with the divine.

“Be Teresas”: Between Mary and Martha While Marie-André was forming future nuns as novice mistress and was praising the joy that makes doing one’s duty as a hospitaller easy in the Musique spirituelle, she was questioning her own spiritual progress. In June 1718, her Jesuit brother wrote to his sisters, “You seem, judging by your language, nevertheless to have degenerated and to have forgotten the goal you had to work toward perfecting 62

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yourselves.”41 In October 1720, writing to Hecquet, Marie-André complained of “a great cause of embarrassment,” her frustration that she was not meeting her spiritual goals. Hecquet wanted her eldest daughter, Marie-Catherine, to become a nun like Duplessis, but Marie-André admitted that she found herself an unworthy model for the girl who shared her nickname Manon. She thus requested prayers from her friend: “Pray, my dear friend, that God give me the grace to become what he wants me to be; in truth, you see me as completely different from what I am, since you say that you desire that this dear child who bears my nickname imitate me and commit herself to God’s service as a nun like me. However, may God preserve her from living as tepid a life as the one I lead, despite all the holy desires that he gives me.”42 She complains of a chronic tepidness in the face of her aspiration to live for God that should be the mark of her state as a nun vowed to strive for religious perfection. François-Xavier’s letters to his sisters make it clear that this was not just a moment of self-deprecating humility. His letters describe an ongoing period of uncertainty about how their vocations were playing out. He did not save their letters, but his counsel in his replies allows us to reconstruct much of the situation. Marie-André’s questioning of her spiritual state seems to date back at least to discussions in the monastery parlour, often in Father Bigot’s presence, when François-Xavier was preparing to leave for France to become a Jesuit in the fall of 1716. In May 1718, he alluded to a pact that he had made then with his sisters to increase the number of fervently committed religious: “Let us strive with courage to increase their number. We often discussed this goal, but the time has come now to work together to achieve it.”43 As religious, the three siblings were committed to aiming for the highest states of Christian perfection. In a letter of April 1717, he enthusiastically described his novitiate in Paris as a paradise filled with prayer and self-examination: “A more pleasing life than the one we lead cannot be imagined … what can satisfy more a soul that strives to unite itself to God.”44 A year later, in answer to their letter of fall 1717, he thanked them for their expression of pleasure in his “happiness” and gave an extended praise of the religious life, which, he contended, few people living in the world are able to comprehend: “They pity our fate; they claim compassion for us because they see spiritual mothers and friends

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what we have left behind and do not see what we have found.”45 He did not hesitate to propose ambitious models both for them and for himself. When he exclaimed, “Be Teresas and may I be a Xavier!”46 he reminded them of their initial ambition: Teresa of Avila, the Spanish foundress of the Carmelites, and Francis Xavier, the companion of Ignatius Loyola and missionary to the Indies. Teresa of Avila, the great mystic, might seem a strange model for two hospital nuns. The Hospitallers of the Mercy of Jesus saw their distinctive institute, or purpose, not primarily in terms of prayer, as did Teresa’s Carmelite order, but as the union of action and prayer. As the first chapter of their 1666 Constitutions puts it, “The distinguishing feature of our vocation is to join Martha and Mary, action and contemplation in unity, to seek out the love of God in its purity and the love of neighbor in its perfection.”47 The Constitutions, of course, present as a given what was, in fact, a point of great tension for all the Counter-Reformation active orders. If union with God in contemplation is taken as the most perfect form of the spiritual life, then caring for patients and managing a hospital were not only a source of endless distractions, but also reduced the time that could be allotted to prayer. How in these circumstances could FrançoisXavier propose that his sisters become new Teresas? His first letter about his novitiate had diagnosed their problem more explicitly: his sisters’ aspiration to a solely contemplative life. As he put it in 1717, the devil tempts us with the idea “that in a more secluded order we would become great saints.” “I saw you impeded sometimes,” he says, “by the same idea: you imagined that you would have been great contemplatives.”48 The devotional climate at the HôtelDieu might well have encouraged this attitude. The sermon preached at Geneviève’s clothing ceremony in 1713 makes no reference to service to the poor or ill; the sermon would be perfectly suited to a Carmelite novice. In fact, the preacher alludes to Teresa’s motto, “to suffer or die” for Christ.49 The remedy to what François-Xavier labels “this temptation” is to learn to love their vocation as hospitallers, which consists of welcoming Christ in each of the poor they serve. Without explicitly doing so, he is reminding them that the word “hospital” originally conveyed the connotation of hospitality or welcome. He further maintains that this loving service to the poor will produce in

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3.3 Claude François, “An Augustinian sister Caring of Christ in the Guise of a Patient” (1670–71). It depicts a nun in her white habit and black veil at the bed of a patient. The nuns belonged to the Hospital Sisters of the Mercy of Jesus of the Order of Saint Augustine and were encouraged to see Christ in each patient. The painting hung in the men’s ward.

them effects similar to the ones attributed to Teresa in her ecstasies: “If you had this spirit you would taste as pleasure and consolation to serve an ill person as Saint Teresa tasted in her ecstasies.”50 Here the young Jesuit is repeating a commonplace of the early seventeenth-century Catholic revival in France, that of “leaving God for God.” It is found in the letters of François de Sales, in Vincent de Paul’s exhortations to his Sisters of Charity, and in Barbe Acarie’s spirituality. When duty requires leaving prayer to serve neighbours, God is not left behind at all. Barbara Diefendorf described this engagement with God in the midst of mundane activities as “active mysticism” in her account of Barbe Acarie.51 Catherine Fino called it “the mysticism of action” and “the dynamics of contemplation in action” in her discussion of the Quebec Hôtel-Dieu.52 François-Xavier’s repeated invocations of Teresa in 1720 are to be taken in this light. “God wants to make you two Teresas. Be courageous my dear sisters; raise yourselves by an heroic effort above all that is not God … The age of Teresas is not over.”53 In 1717, the Duplessis sisters recommended to their brother a translation of Teresa of Avila’s autobiography.54 In it, they could have found a defence of the kind of spiritual friendship they saw themselves engaged in. In her Life, Teresa defended the usefulness of having friends who can be supportive comrades, particularly in the early stages of developing a life of prayer.55 She saw union with God in mental prayer, in fact, as an intimate sharing between friends, and human friends who shared this goal of uniting in friendship with Christ were valued as a gift of God.56 Thus Marie-André could see herself linked to Geneviève as companions in a common pursuit of friendship with God. Duplessis wrote a short text, probably destined as an oral instruction to her community, on the theme of friendship with Christ. “God wants to establish a particular friendship with each religious,” she insisted. She highlighted some of the features of particular friendships she considered important: intimate communication, equality, a willingness to sacrifice. She presented the life of a nun as a particular friendship with Christ. However, the text makes no mention of particular friendships among nuns either as an aid or as an obstacle to this friendship with God.57

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Detachment and Reorienting Oneself toward God: The Dissection spirituelle François-Xavier’s advice turned less on the prayer/activity tension implicit in the slogan “leave God for God” than on the need for detachment from the world in order to free up his sisters for God. When they recommended to him the translation of Teresa’s autobiography by Martial Chanut, he countered in 1718 that the works of Jean-Joseph Surin would teach them detachment: “There you will learn the methods to clear away all the obstacles that prevent you from becoming Teresas.”58 His sisters must not have reported progress, because in March 1719, he reiterated the counsel to read Surin: “That is where, with the grace of God, you will learn the way to demolish everything that serves as a roadblock to this noble and divine transformation into your spouse Jesus-Christ to which you are called.”59 Without Marie-André’s letters to her brother or any autobiographical accounts, the most extensive portrait of her struggle to free herself for union with God is found in her undated manuscript Dissection spirituelle. Its title suggests that it was written in the wake of the Musique spirituelle of 1718. It is composed of a series of thirty-one paragraph-length meditations – one for every day of a month – on how the physical, mental, and spiritual faculties can be re-oriented toward God. These meditations show her prayer life in action.60 On the one hand, they contain a sort of examination of conscience in which she enumerates her sins; on the other, her formulation of prayers to overcome her failings points to how she sought to make spiritual progress. These meditations offer special insight into how Duplessis saw her own situation, since they are tailored to a person of exactly her psychological make-up: someone, as she says in the ninth meditation, with “a peaceful temperament, a docile nature, and inclinations toward virtue.”61 This is her own calm disposition that Marie-André often contrasted to her sister’s impetuous vivacity. Attaining spiritual perfection is not as easy as it might appear, Duplessis went on to suggest in the ninth meditation, even for a person inclined by temperament to virtue as she is, although “the work is half done.” Complacency is one danger for such a soul, what she calls “virtue defined by one’s tastes.” She was likely more troubled,

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however, by the fact that she did not fit the classic model of heroic sainthood that called for conflict and battle: “One must do violence to oneself to merit heaven. Everything that is done out of temperament is not virtue, and the great diligent work of the saints is to continually fight against their natural disposition.” Here she echoed her brother’s dictum of 1719: “A heroic courage is necessary in order to sacrifice small attachments.”62 To be sure, contrition for a sinful past appears early and reoccurs frequently. On the third day, she laments, “How embarrassed I am to have spent so many years only concerning myself with evil, vain, and useless things and with filling my memory with so many matters unworthy of recall.” On the seventeenth day, she regretted “evil pleasures” and “vain praises;” on the twenty-first, the “songs and lyrics that displeased and offended you.” She also mentioned many issues that continued to trouble her: on the first day, impatience; on the eighth, jealousy and envy; on the ninth, discouragement. In the twenty-fifth meditation, she tried to cast herself as Mary Magdalen, but the past sins of which she accuses herself seem slight rather than grievous offenses, and these current failures are hardly major temptations. Particular friendships or human attachments do not figure on this list of temptations. What is striking in her approach is less her confessions of past failings than her effort to re-orient each of her faculties to God. She presents detachment as avoiding any ill use of her faculties, but this detachment is also clearly a prelude to positive action. Her brother’s only practical advice in 1719 was the general recommendation to renounce any natural pleasures that come one’s way and accept disagreeable things with resignation.63 The Dissection describes a systematic reorientation. She shows how a heightened attention can redirect each faculty to God. However, she does not offer specific techniques about how to accomplish this re-ordering. They would be out of place in a meditative work, wherein she casts her reflections as prayers that each faculty be put to higher service. For example, in the sixteenth meditation, on the eyes: “Let me lower my proud eyes to my own misery to humble myself and … raise them sometimes toward the holy mountains whence I await help.” It is noteworthy that her treatment of the body and mortification marks a movement away from the penitential asceticism of Catherine 68

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de Saint-Augustin and the community’s foundresses. To be sure, Duplessis repeats the traditional warning about the body being an obstacle to holiness. In her fifteenth meditation, the body is “like a weighty and clumsy burden that drags the soul into the precipice.” The saints “persecuted it, punished and reduced it to slavery.” However, after declaring that the body is a “great enemy,” she concludes, “It is a very fragile vase, but such as it is, one can sanctify it by making it obey.” Likewise, she grants in the tenth meditation that “our very passions can serve as steps of a ladder to rise to heaven.” This requires that the body as well as the mental faculties be re-oriented toward virtue. Her eyes should focus both on her sins and on her heavenly goal, according to the sixteenth meditation. The mortification she describes does not emphasize searching out extreme ways to subdue the body. Duplessis is content with the ordinary asceticism of monastery life, what she calls “mortification suitable to my position” in the nineteenth meditation: i.e. the simple fare at meals, the routine fasts and abstinence, and the restrictions of clausura, to which are added the burdens and dangers of caring for patients. This contrasts with what Catherine Fino called Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s “mystical martyrdom” that cultivated extraordinary self-mortification, both to fight temptation and to expiate the sins of others.64 Catherine scourged herself, slept with pointed bracelets, and embraced austere fasts; she mortified her sense of taste by eating the phlegm of patients.65

Detachment, Interior Peace, and the Will of God How effective was their brother’s encouragement that his sisters strive to become Teresas by integrating hospital duties into their spiritual lives and by cultivating detachment? In 1726, the two Duplessis sisters must have still been reporting difficulties to their Jesuit brother, to judge by a 1727 letter from François-Xavier that speaks of “contradictions and crosses from every direction on the exterior, a universal desolation within, and with all that, an ever stronger determination to move toward God.”66 After that date, we must largely rely on Marie-André’s comments to Hecquet. In 1729, Marie-André gave Hecquet an overall assessment of her spiritual state, which marks her progress over the 1720s. The previous spiritual mothers and friends

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3.4 The frontispiece of Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint Augustin, published three years after her death, shows her guided by two angels toward her heavenly reward. Her Jesuit director Jean de Brébeuf awaits her there, souls in purgatory implore her intercession, and a demon is vanquished.

couple of years had been particularly contentious in Quebec, full of quarrels with the intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy in 1727 and with the cathedral chapter after Bishop Saint-Vallier’s death in 1728. Canadian-born priests of the Seminary of Quebec then dominated the chapter. They took advantage of the absence of a bishop to replace the French-born Jesuits that Saint-Vallier had named as confessors to the Hôtel-Dieu and Ursulines with priests of their number. Duplessis reported to Hecquet in 1729 that neither community was happy with the new confessors: “Our confessor was taken away from us, and they gave us a young Canadian to whom several of us cannot adapt. These disturbances cause unfortunate biases that divide us.”67 Duplessis claimed to have weathered the turmoil around her by cultivating a spirit of detachment. She did not turn to Surin, whom her brother had recommended, but to Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ for inspiration. “I often blame myself that even though I am not attached to anything, I am not united to God as I should be, but that is explained by the author of the Imitation, who says that after we have left behind everything, we have still not yet left ourselves.” As difficult as it might be to detach oneself from oneself, in the last analysis, she was satisfied with the inner peace she experienced: “I don’t fail to enjoy great interior peace.”68 She also admitted to a practical strategy of refusing to choose sides that served her well: “I will admit to you in confidence that since I have been a nun, I have remained aloof from all partisanship. That has frequently been at a price, because to hold myself upright between two opposing tendencies, I have felt myself pulled in all directions, and people thought me to be opposed to everything that I didn’t embrace. Nonetheless, after the storm, I was found to be holding to my initial stance and my conduct was commended.” This required a delicate balancing act, as she points out to Hecquet, because the cloister was no shield from the world for a hospital nun. Contacts with patients, suppliers, and local administrators insured that she heard every rumour and bit of gossip in the town: “My suffering is to hear many complaints that one cannot agree with. That makes it awkward to respect charity. Charity does not blind us, and to console those who suffer, one must at times agree that they are in the right … Our vocation exposes us to a multitude of contacts with others so that, despite our status as nuns, few of the town’s rumours are spiritual mothers and friends

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unknown to us. This is a great trial for persons who scorn worldly affairs, for even if one does not dwell on these matters, one always hears too much.” Of course, the presence of a confidant within the community facilitated this strategy of expressing sympathy, without actually taking sides. “My sister and I have the small advantage of being employed together at the same post. Since our points of view are similar, we withdraw as often as possible from all ties and find ourselves better off for it.”69 She could air her true feelings with Geneviève. Their administrative duties gave these particular friends the excuse to confer in private. Marie-André maintained in 1731 to Hecquet that she had achieved a satisfactory prayer life. In the twenty-fourth meditation of the Dissection dealing with prayer, Duplessis had requested the attention, confidence, and respect that she said could result in the pure joy of union with God in prayer. Although she never reported mystical states, visions, or the intense spiritual consolations of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, she did find strength in the practice of mental prayer. “I feel more than ever the advantage of being experienced in mental prayer,” she wrote Hécquet, “because in this exercise one learns incentives that can aid us in taking advantage of the evils in this life to gain heaven. These great truths are engraved in the soul, and the memory of what they teach us gives us support in the periods of dejection to which our afflictions reduce us.”70 Some of the tepidness she accused herself of was likely less complacency than simply the absence of the great interior struggle that she was told she should be engaged in. The Dissection is not the work of someone trying to shake off a lukewarm period, but of a spiritually insightful person who is able to chart a strategic roadmap because she knows well her own temperament. It envisages a methodical re-orientation of her faculties rather than violence against them. Nonetheless, Marie-André admitted that the slogan “leave God for God” was not as easy to live as some might have it. Writing to MarieCatherine in 1742, she stressed how difficult this is even for a cloistered nun: “You see, my dear friend, how a nun must harmonize that with the peace of her status as a nun. It is rather difficult, and I do not succeed very well. I complain about it to people who have no sympathy at all. It is claimed that leaving God for God and that doing his will are more valuable than the most peaceful contemplative states. I do not 72

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cease to be fearful and to moan because I see danger everywhere and even more in the distractions generated by contacts with others than in the engagements that develop in the sequestered life.”71 In the case of Geneviève, one senses that the equilibrium she achieved was less an integration of the two than an intense prayer life that compensated for the distractions of her post as the hospital’s business manager. In the 1732 dedicatory letter of the manuscript La Manne de Bethléem, she said that she would have liked to become a Carmelite and noted all the impediments to contemplation her hospital activities created.72 To judge by her death notice, rather than transform her duties into a form of prayer, she offset the daytime distractions by nighttime prayer: “She discharged her hospital duties without detriment to her spiritual ones, so that when she had been diverted from the spiritual ones during the day, she spent her evenings fulfilling them and only found repose in prayer.”73 In 1751, nine years before her death, Marie-André assessed her spiritual state with satisfaction for the degree of detachment she had achieved, even if she attributed it more to the discipline of the religious life than to her own efforts: All stations have their crosses, but those of people in the world are heavier than those of the clergy. Providence saw me as being too weak to bear such great troubles. It has guided me by easy paths commensurate with my slight virtue, which nonetheless can rise to the highest perfection in the holy station I have embraced. I have been a nun for almost forty-five years, and this period has passed me by like a flash of lightening. If in this favoured vocation there had only been the release from worldly affairs, I would consider this to be of inestimable value, but my calling comes with so many other advantages that, in addition to those that I am aware of, I am convinced that we will only see the value of this grace in eternity.74 Likewise, she saw herself as having attained the union with God for which this detachment was the prelude. This union did not take the form of mystical experiences, or even a quest for inner peace, but instead resulted from the conformity of her will to God’s spiritual mothers and friends

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for her. She told Marie-Catherine in 1749 that once she had been ashamed of her lack of enthusiasm in pursuing detachment. Now she had come to appreciate how the religious life freed her from many concerns. More importantly, she had come to believe that the secret of holiness is accepting what God sends, rather than the quest for inner peace. “When I saw you completely occupied with the desire for withdrawal from the world, I was ashamed that, while being a nun, I didn’t find in myself this ardour for disengagement with the things of the world, even though I have always disliked temporal affairs. And now that you appear to be troubled in your solitude by the encumbrance of worldly things, I enjoy even more the fortune of my state that does not tie me to anything at all and that imposes on me the agreeable duty of belonging to God alone. The secret of holiness, my dear friend, is neither in peace, nor in agitation, but in accomplishing the will of God.”75 Peace was a byproduct, not the goal. To be sure, this declaration of inner peace based on trust in Providence was made well before the trials of her last decade of life, which would test her capacity for detachment: her brother Charles-Denis’s abandonment of his family, the fire that destroyed the hospital, Geneviève’s death, and the war and siege of Quebec. She may be exaggerating this peace to provide a model for Hecquet. Although Duplessis honoured the heroic asceticism and the visionary experience of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, her own Musique spirituelle, written when she was novice mistress, promotes a more moderate monasticism. Likewise, in her Dissection spirituelle, she takes the measure of how she could calmly and systematically reorient herself to meet her spiritual goals. Her letters to Hecquet offer reassurance to her friend, whose spiritual suffering and sense of guilt were greater than her own. The model that she proposed to Hecquet, in which acceptance of the will of God leads to peace, suggests that she would enter this troubled period claiming deep reserves.

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4

Friend of a Jansenist, Sister of a Jesuit: The 1718 Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu and Fashioning Epistolary Friendships In a 1720 letter, Duplessis ridiculed nuns in Marie-Catherine’s hometown of Abbeville who were so foolish that they signed an appeal against the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus, which condemned Jansenism: If I held the opinions of the new theologians, I assure you that I would find myself greatly relieved to be able to say that I lacked the grace to accomplish my good intentions, but it is clear to me that it is my own fault. Concerning these novelties, I will tell you that I could not prevent myself from laughing when I saw the Franciscan sisters of Abbeville on the list of those appealing to a future council. It seems to me that it is hardly appropriate for women to involve themselves in this sort of issue and that a party must feel itself very weak when it accepts and searches out such support. Their names have the honour of being below several bishops and above several scribblers and tract writers whose signatures were purchased to add to the total. This is the only misery, I mean error, that does not afflict Canada.1 Marie-André must not have known that her childhood friend, who had since married Jacques Hecquet, had become a committed

Jansenist herself, that she had been threatened with excommunication, and that her pastor had tried to confiscate her copy of Pasquier Quesnel’s Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament that Clement XI’s bull proscribes.2 Duplessis’s scorn for Jansenist women reflects the misogyny of Jesuit anti-Jansenist polemics and is so flippant that Hecquet could well have broken off relations. But she did not abandon their correspondence at this juncture. Nor did she break it off in 1736, when François-Xavier Duplessis preached a mission in Abbeville and Duplessis chided her friend for not attending. Nonetheless, the friendship and the correspondence that undergirded it would have to be refashioned. As a prelude, it will be useful to situate Marie-André’s hostility to Jansenism in relation to the evolution of the movement from its beginnings in the seventeenth century. The 1717–18 Georges-François Poulet affair that Duplessis recorded in her annals and that led in part to her sarcasm to Hecquet in 1720 offers a window into historical debates about the penetration of Jansenism into Canada and shows why Jansenism, which was such a divisive movement in France, never “afflicted” Canada – to use Duplessis’s expression – to the same degree.

Sister of a Jesuit, Niece of a Jansenist, and Jansenism’s Renewed Attraction Duplessis’s own opposition to Jansenism crystallized when a Jansenist scare hit Quebec and its convents around 1717. Her stance was as untroubled as Hecquet’s Jansenism was born of anguish and persecution. It had its roots in the Jesuit circles frequented by Georges Duplessis and owed even more to her brother’s decision to become a Jesuit, which matured in the years just after Clement XI’s Unigenitus was promulgated in 1713. The bull was widely seen, and not just by Jansenists, as the product of Jesuit manipulation of Louis XIV and the pope.3 To enter the Jesuits in the second decade of the century, as François-Xavier did, or to be aligned with the Society of Jesus, as his sister was, was to be a warrior against Jansenism. The two years between the promulgation of the papal bull in September 1713 and Louis XIV’s death on 1 September 1715 were marked by determined enforcement of Unigenitus by royal authorities. However, after the king’s death, the regent Philippe d’Orléans relaxed 76

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this policy and released imprisoned Jansenists. Opponents of the bull who had once been cowed dared speak their minds. François-Xavier arrived in France to begin his novitiate in late 1716, just as the movement toward an appeal of the bull to a general council of the church was gathering steam and as the Jesuits were coming under attack. The archbishop of Paris banned them from preaching in his diocese.4 Once in France, the young Jesuit Duplessis had to deal with an intransigent Jansenist in his own family. Jean Leroy, a brother of his mother, was pastor of Saint-Cénéré, a village east of Laval in the diocese of Le Mans. On 28 April 1717, François-Xavier reported to his sisters that Leroy had written him a cordial letter without commenting on his decision to enter the Jesuits.5 Duplessis’s visit to Leroy in October 1720 only confirmed reports that Jesuits had received regarding his uncle’s allegiance: “Several times we have heard rumours concerning his opinions, about which he is so stubborn that he will not listen to reason.”6 Jean Leroy handled his sister Marie Leroy’s business affairs in France and evidently used his letters to her as a forum for his rancour. However, in 1722, François-Xavier refuted his uncle’s invectives against the Jesuits as groundless: “Those with whom I have the honour to live are not as hard as he thinks … he sees all the blows against the unfortunate party he belongs to as coming from us … He only swears by his C[ornelius Jansen]… There are three portraits in his bedchamber, and the one of Quesnel is placed with honour. His book collection quite resembles his paintings.”7 What particularly frustrated anti-Jansenists, such as the Duplessis siblings, was that their uncle and “his party” refused to see themselves as heretics. Unlike the Huguenots who left the church, Jansenists claimed to hold fast to the authentic teaching of the early church fathers. Jansenists maintained this tradition was being replaced by an optimistic Counter-Reformation theology sponsored by the Jesuits, known as Molinism, that minimized the consequences of original sin. Anti-Jansenists had long been devising tests to oblige their enemies to self-identify as heretics in order to ferret out such wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unigenitus was only the latest example. Jansenism had many currents – moral severity, an ideal of informed devotional life, distrust of what many French Catholics saw as papal overreach and of the Jesuits – in addition to its interpretation of Augustine’s theology of grace, on which it was judged heretical.8 friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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The key currents were no doubt its penitential moral stance and its theory of efficacious grace, but no single current is adequate to define its attractiveness. The Duplessis brother and sister were distressed by Jansenism’s seemingly ever-expanding reach, but they were unable to see beyond the caricatures their party used in its invective and to understand why Jansenism attracted many devout Catholics. Penitential severity was the initial impulse that motivated Jean Duvergier de Hauranne de Saint-Cyran and Antoine Arnauld, his protégé and successor, the founders of the movement that would be called Jansenism by its enemies. Labelled “rigorism” by those who saw its severity as excessive, this pastoral stance required believers to align themselves with the strictest standards of behaviour and demanded proofs of deep repentance before absolution in the confessional.9 Saint-Cyran defended the need for contrition (sorrow for sin grounded in love of God who has been offended), rather than attrition (fear of God’s punishment for sin). Arnauld and his associates, such as Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters, accused the Jesuits of allowing their penitents to choose the easiest interpretation of a moral requirement, i.e. of laxism. Opponents retorted that Arnauld pitched moral standards so high that most Christians were discouraged about ever being able to live up to them. The Jansenist campaign against laxism was largely successful and pushed the French church, even some Jesuits, toward rigorism. One widely shared feature of this severity can be attributed to Augustine’s influence: a deep suspicion about sexual pleasure, whose danger was heightened by the original sin of Adam and Eve.10 When excessive severity – rigorism – became associated exclusively with the Jansenists,11 they were blamed for this widespread distrust of sexuality. However, it pervaded Ancien-Régime Catholicism, and it is found in other Christian traditions that took inspiration from Augustine, such as the Puritans in England. In a sense, the Jansenists’ victory over laxism ultimately worked against them, since they were held responsible for this “Catholic Puritanism.” By moving the dispute from penitential discipline to the theology of grace, the enemies of Arnauld found the objective tool they needed to force Arnauld and his allies to take a stand that would justify excluding them.12 They attacked the Augustinus, a Latin treatise on Augustine’s theology by Saint-Cyran’s friend Cornelius Jansen. They 78

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claimed that Jansen exaggerated Augustine’s pessimism about fallen human nature and the need for divine grace. Jansen taught a Calvinist brand of predestination that denied free will, his enemies said. The papal condemnations of Jansen, first in the 1650s and then in 1713, instead of quashing the movement, only fanned existing distrust of Rome. In 1653, Innocent X condemned five propositions on grace, predestination, and sin without specifically attributing them at first to Jansen’s 1640 Augustinus. The condemned propositions were ambiguous enough that Arnauld and his supporters could subscribe to the condemnation and thus affirm the church’s teaching authority. However, when the pope maintained that the condemned propositions indeed represented Jansen’s teaching, Jansenists maintained that papal infallibility did not extent to such questions of fact. Indeed, only one of the propositions could be found textually in Jansen’s book. Arnauld denied that the propositions adequately represented Jansen’s views. The pope refused this distinction between fact and doctrine, and all clergy were required to sign a formulary that condemned the five propositions and also affirmed that they came from Jansen. Louis XIV cooperated in enforcing the formulary because he saw the Jansenists as an obstacle to his goal of subordinating domestic and foreign policy to his absolutist state. Priests who refused to sign faced the loss of their church position, but they could go into hiding or escape into exile. The cloistered nuns of the abbey of Port-Royal, dominated by the Arnauld family, could do neither and were deprived of the sacraments. Unigenitus in 1713 sought to avoid the earlier fact/doctrine controversy by condemning not five abstract propositions, but one hundred and one direct quotations from a devotional text by Pasquier Quesnel, the Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament. Quesnel was considered Arnauld’s successor, and his widely used study guide for reading the New Testament had first been published in 1672 and had seen multiple editions and revisions. It had been approved by the cardinal-archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles, who was no friend of the Jesuits. However, in their zeal to finish off Jansenism for good, the Roman censors included among the condemned passages a number that were hardly unorthodox. Many Catholics who accepted the bull did so more out of submission to authority than from intellectual conviction. Unigenitus simply gave new life to Jansenism rather than extinguishing it. friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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Women such as Hecquet had good reason to be incensed by the bull. Quesnel had defended the right of women to read the Bible in French, and his eighty-third condemned quotation had disputed the assertion that the “simplicity of women” was a major cause of heresy. Hecquet’s aunt had raised her on frequent reading of scripture, and Hecquet found only edification in Quesnel’s book. On the devotional level, Jansenists encouraged an informed spirituality that appealed to women. The Jansenist ideal was to narrow the two-tiered system that had one level of spirituality for the clergy and a lower level for the laity.13 They sought to raise the laity to the devotional level of the clergy, something quite different from the Protestant priesthood of all believers. Thus, they believed all the faithful should have access to key texts that were generally reserved for the clergy after the Council of Trent. The Jansenists were among those active in translating the Bible, at a time when Rome insisted that it should be read in Latin and only by those certified by their pastor to be capable of understanding it. Likewise, they supported translating the missal so that the faithful could follow the words of the mass, instead of uniting themselves with the spirit of each section of the mass, the recommended practice for attending mass at that time. Although Jansenist leaders shared the general clerical misogyny of the era, these policies were especially attractive to women, who were generally not schooled in Latin. Aristocratic ladies had been key defenders of Jansenism early on, and by the eighteenth century female support was more broadly based, such as we find with Hecquet, who followed the controversies avidly. Unlike with Jansen’s Latin treatise, a wide public of both sexes was able to judge whether Quesnel’s book deserved the papal anathemas. Resistance was broader and took the form of an appeal to a general council of the whole church. In March 1717, four bishops signed their appeal and were shortly joined by about a dozen others. Numerous clerics in the lower clergy signed on as well. Refusal among nuns was not centred in a single convent, dominated by the Arnauld family. Ursulines, Carmelites, and Visitation nuns, as well as the Franciscan nuns of Abbeville, registered individual or collective opposition. However, the appeal was a desperate tactic, leading to a dead end. Although many clergy in the Paris region signed, less than 3 percent of the clergy of France joined the appeal,14 and the 80

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bishops of other countries were indifferent to the condemnation of a devotional text written in French.

Georges-François Poulet and the Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu Duplessis’s assertion to Hecquet in 1720 that Jansenism “does not afflict Canada” is a local victory cry of sorts. It came at the conclusion of a Jansenist scare in Quebec that she narrates in the Annales. In 1716 or 1717, authorities there realized that a stranger in his late twenties, who had arrived in 1715, was really a Benedictine monk fleeing Unigenitus. Georges-François Poulet was a member of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, an alliance of Benedictine abbeys in which support for Jansenism was strong.15 He had arrived in Canada dressed as a layman and had declared that his intention was to live the isolated life of a hermit in a remote location. After a short stay in Quebec – according to Duplessis in the best inn in the town – he headed downriver along the south shore to locate a suitable site. He spent his first winter near Cap Saint-Ignace, where he was befriended by its pastor, Pierre Leclair. In 1716, apprehensive that he was attracting too much attention, he relocated further downriver to Trois-Pistoles, with the help of its seigneur, Nicolas Rioux. It was apparently sometime during his stay there that his identity was discovered. He returned to Quebec in early 1718 to justify himself to Bishop Saint-Vallier and again in the fall of that year when pressure on him to leave from the bishop was mounting. He went back to France in November 1718. When Poulet had left La Rochelle in late spring 1715, Louis XIV was still alive and repression still unrelenting. Royal authorities were trying to arrest Poulet for a text he had written against the bull, but not published. His choice of Canada as a refuge might not have been as impractical as it seems. True, Canada’s first bishop, François de Laval, owed his bishopric to the Jesuits. However, administratively New France was not technically part of the French Church. Its bishop had no seat in the Assembly of the Clergy of France, through which the formularies against Jansenism were enforced in France.16 In fact, Laval had never required them of his clergy in Canada, and the 1665 formulary would not be required in Canada until 1730 under Bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet.17 Laval’s successor Bishop Saint-Vallier, while friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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no Jansenist, had strict views on confession and contrition which overlapped with Jansenist ones. He was a mercurial and abrasive leader who antagonized everyone, including the Jesuits. The Jesuit superior in Canada denounced his 1703 Rituel – a handbook of church practices – as having Jansenist tendencies.18 A July 1715 letter from the minister of the navy Jérôme de Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain to Charles-Guillaume de Maupeou, the general agent of the Clergy of France, shows that Saint-Vallier was not nearly as energetic in requiring prompt adherence to Unigenitus as Hecquet’s own bishop Pierre Sabatier had been.19 Thus, in 1715, Poulet might have had good reason to think he would not be troubled in Canada, and claimed he told the bishop himself as much in an interview in the winter of 1718.20 However, Saint-Vallier’s return to his diocese in 1713, after a thirteen-year absence in Europe, had been marked by a tactical rapprochement with the Jesuits.21 That year, before leaving France, he revised his 1703 handbook on ritual to conform to criticisms of the Quebec Jesuit superior.22 Once back in Quebec, he took the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Duparc as confessor in 1714. Protecting a declared Jansenist would not be opportune for the bishop. Both Poulet’s and Duplessis’s accounts show that the Benedictine found many sympathetic ears in the colony. He was young, charming, and seemingly well-funded, and attracted a following in devout circles. Among priests, the contacts he claimed were chiefly connected with the Seminary of Quebec. This institution was affiliated with the Seminary of Foreign Missions of Paris, which had been involved in a running dispute with the Jesuits about some accommodations to Chinese customs that the Jesuits had made in their Far Eastern missions. These accommodations had been condemned by Rome in what is called “the quarrel over Chinese rites.” Poulet must have gained a hearing in the town’s convents, although details are sketchy. Duplessis reports that his initial overtures at the Hôtel-Dieu were rebuffed: “Several individuals encouraged our mother superior [Juchereau de Saint-Ignace] to become acquainted with him with the thought that he was a very rich man who would make large gifts to our house, but she refused to take any steps about it.”23 Fear that the nuns might be contaminated was sufficiently strong that the bishop installed Jesuit confessors in all three convents, as the 82

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head of the Jesuits in Quebec reported with satisfaction in October 1717 to his superior in Rome. He noted that before Saint-Vallier became bishop, the Hôtel-Dieu and Ursulines had always had Jesuit confessors, but that Saint-Vallier had replaced them with priests of the Seminary in the 1690s. His letter makes it clear that the danger of false doctrine was not coming from just one man: “I am certain it was feared that the female religious orders might be imbued with harmful opinions by those of doubtful faith who came here from France and many among the churchmen seemed to be drawn into it.”24 He must have had in mind the priests of the Seminary. On 17 March 1717, Saint-Vallier named Jacques d’Heu as the Hôtel-Dieu’s confessor. Poulet cited d’Heu as the most vociferous of the Quebec Jesuits in denouncing the Jansenist menace.25 In October 1718, just when Saint-Vallier thought he had succeeded in forcing Poulet to leave his diocese, Poulet fell ill and was hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu in danger of death. Duplessis now had a ringside view of the denouement of the affair. According to Poulet, the nuns, although fearful of having an excommunicated priest die on their premises, did their best not to cause him new worries. “They were not unaware of my sad business; they were moved to the bottom of their hearts; out of their sympathy, they felt the repercussions of all the penalties against me, taking it upon themselves to soften them and to diminish everything in their power that might give me new ones.”26 Duplessis’s version of events includes none of this. She claimed that all efforts by priests to dissuade Poulet only redoubled the “fever” of his obstinacy.27 Saint-Vallier had instructed the town’s pastor Thomas Thiboult not to hear Poulet’s confession unless he accepted Unigenitus. However, while the two Duplessis sisters would have had little sympathy for the Jansenist, others in the community might have felt otherwise. Joachim Fornel, a seminarian at the Seminary of Quebec, whose warm November 1719 letter to Poulet shows he supported the Benedictine, had two sisters at the Hôtel-Dieu who had taken final vows in 1717 and 1718. Duplessis points explicitly to another community member with ties to Poulet, Marie-Madeleine Rioux, the sister of the seigneur of Trois-Pistoles, who had aided Poulet. She had just entered as a novice on 17 September. When Poulet was leaving the hospital, he offered her friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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a book in gratitude for her family’s hospitality. The mother superior demanded to see the book, and when she recognized it as a translation by the Jansenist Port-Royal solitaries, handed it back to him, saying, “Here we do not read the books of those gentlemen.” For Duplessis, this marked a triumphal rejection of “their pernicious doctrine.”28 Poulet’s account of Saint-Vallier’s dealings with Rioux shows a pattern of intimidation by the bishop and Father d’Heu. According to Poulet, when he met with the bishop during Lent of 1718, SaintVallier declared that if the Rioux brothers continued to help the erstwhile hermit, their sister would certainly not be received at the Hôtel-Dieu, where they were negotiating her entry. In response to Poulet’s retort that it was unfair to punish an innocent young girl, Saint-Vallier relented, but threatened to raise her dowry by a third.29 On 15 September, two days before she did finally enter as a novice, he issued a pastoral ordinance which declared that anyone who helped Poulet return to his hermitage would be guilty of mortal sin.30 To drive home his message of the danger that Poulet represented for the nuns, the bishop summoned the novice. “He had Mademoiselle Rioux brought to him to hear her out and to inspire horror for me in her. This poor girl was completely paralyzed with fear. Father d’Heu and another Jesuit Father Davaugour had exerted themselves hard so that my lord the bishop would press his zeal to this extent.”31

Assessing Jansenism’s Impact on the Canadian Church Duplessis was writing the Annales in 1720 when she included the disparaging allusion to Jansenist women in her letter to Hecquet. In fact, Duplessis was so determined to root out the Jansenist menace to the Hôtel-Dieu that she included accounts of two earlier incidents to underscore its tradition of anti-Jansenism.32 She concluded her version of the Poulet affair with a solemn prayer that Canada and the Hôtel-Dieu remain undefiled: “We cannot beg God enough that he continue to preserve Canada from the poison of heresy so that this church preserves the purity of the faith and that our attachment and respect for the vicar of Jesus Christ brings to us in this world and the next the blessings that are promised to truly faithful souls.”33 Clerical historians echoed her triumphal victory cry for two hundred years.34 84

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The Poulet episode does illustrate why Jansenism never impacted the Canadian church as it did the French church, but not necessarily for the reasons often given. Historians have looked chiefly at the theological stance of individuals suspected of Jansenism to assess their adherence to the movement. Three clerics who showed Poulet sympathy have sometimes been labelled as possible Jansenists: Pierre Leclair, Joachim Fornel, and Thomas Thiboult.35 However much these three and others may have railed against Unigenitus in private, though, they never took the kind of determined stand Poulet did. Rather than focus on individuals, it is perhaps more productive to analyze why New France lacked the institutional framework that facilitated Jansenism in France. First, corporate safe havens for declared Jansenists did not exist in Canada as they did in France. The Jesuits and the Sulpicians in Montreal were firmly in the anti-Jansenist camp, and the Recollet order of Franciscans, although smarting from the Jesuits having evicted it in 1629, was not pro-Jansenist. The Seminary in Quebec, allied to the Foreign Missions Seminary in Paris, had the potential to harbour Jansenist sympathizers, but the defining dogmatic quarrels over grace did not motivate the priests of the Quebec Seminary. They saw the Jesuits as too accommodating, both in their Chinese and North American missions and in confessionals in Quebec.36 In many ways, theirs was a quarrel with a rival organization. Second, in eighteenth-century France, the law courts became the venue of choice for Jansenists to press their claims, and many lawyers and judges were sympathizers. However, as Poulet pointed out, the members of the Canadian legal establishment had little of the training or intellectual depth of their French counterparts.37 The Superior Council had less jurisdiction than the French appeals tribunals, such as the Paris Parlement. In France, Jansenist priests, when disciplined by their bishop, appealed successfully to the civil courts in a process known as appel comme d’abus. Finally, Saint-Vallier had resisted giving tenure to parish pastors. Instead, he appointed many as missionaries, so that they served at his pleasure. Taking a stand as a Jansenist could mean losing one’s living.38 Clerical historians have cited Saint-Vallier’s harsh measures against Poulet as an example of how Canada was preserved from Jansenism. However, his expulsion of Poulet was the product of friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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special circumstances. With his local clergy, the bishop exhibited a forbearance which, combined with the lack of institutional support, is probably more responsible for Jansenism not taking root. Pressured by the Jesuits, whom he could hardly ignore, Saint-Vallier had no choice except to expel the Benedictine when Poulet persisted in refusing to submit to the papal bull, although Poulet stated that Saint-Vallier had no other objections to giving him faculties as a priest.39 Saint-Vallier did publish a pastoral letter (with some delay) accepting Unigenitus, but he did not require his priests to sign a formulary. Had he imposed subscribing to the bull on his clergy, reluctant priests would have found little institutional support. Few if any would have been likely to follow Poulet’s lead. But by not forcing them to declare themselves, the bishop preserved peace, and no Jansenist group coalesced.40 By the time Bishop Dosquet required a signature in 1730, the generation of priests that had sympathized with Poulet had lost its vigour or turned to other battles. Poulet repeatedly mentioned “my friends,” friends who remain unnamed and who offered advice and insider information about Quebec local politics.41 He remained in contact with them after his return to France until his death in September 1723, to judge by a series of letters showing that an audience for Jansenist writings existed in Canada at least until this date.42 However, whatever “Jansenism” remained in Canada after 1730 was the severe pastoral approach shared by most of the clergy of the period or distrust of the Jesuits, not the theological Jansenism condemned by successive popes.43 Thus, Duplessis’s treatment of Jansenism exaggerates the danger. Her accounts show that she rejected Jansenism out of hand and never went beyond the shibboleths current among its opponents.44 The core of her opposition was the ultramontane loyalty to the pope promoted by the Jesuits, but it also stemmed from her spiritual outlook. Like the Jesuits, she was more attuned to God’s mercy than to divine justice, and she was inclined to see how human faculties could be put to the service of charity, rather than stressing the effects of original sin on human nature, as Jansenists did.45 She followed the quarrels over Jansenism with great interest in a partisan way the rest of her life, with utter confidence in her duty to do whatever necessary to oppose it.46 The embarrassing fact that she had a Jansenist uncle might well have redoubled her zeal. 86

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François-Xavier’s 1736 Abbeville Mission Duplessis would not have couched her scorn for Jansenism in such brutal terms in her 1720 letter to Hecquet if she had known the religious evolution of her childhood friend. Only a few subsequent letters written in the 1720s to Hecquet survive, and they suggest that Hecquet must have decided that her friendship was too important to jeopardize by revealing her hand. She lived in fear of dying without the last sacraments and she had difficulty finding a priest at all, even in times of health, who would hear her confession. Such troubles surfaced in 1722, 1729, 1731, and 1732.47 Duplessis would never have flattered a Jansenist as she does Hecquet in October 1731: “All ladies of society are not learned as you are, my dear friend, who could teach the paths of virtue even to those who are charged with teaching it to others; one of the things that attaches me the most to you is to think that you are truly Christian.”48 She must still not have known Hecquet’s stance in 1735 when she heartily recommended a mission that her brother François-Xavier was to preach in nearby Amiens.49 He had abandoned thoughts of returning to Canada as a missionary and had become a prominent member of the teams of Jesuit preachers who sought to revive religious practice in towns and villages in France with month-long campaigns of sermons and services called “missions.” As he told his sisters who approved his choice in 1730, “I would find more to do in France than in Canada.”50 Two themes were dear to him: the cross and anti-Jansenist polemics. Through the 1730s, Marie-André included enthusiastic reports about her brother’s success as a preacher in her letters to Marie-Catherine. His fame grew immensely after 1738 when two cripples were healed in the northern French city of Arras after invoking the monumental cross he had erected there. Holy cards depicting the first miracle or the cross were widely distributed in France and Canada, and a book of devotions for people following his missions went through several editions in the 1740s.51 Hecquet would have also followed the critical articles on his missions in the clandestine Jansenist weekly, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques. There Hecquet found accounts that mocked his dramatic preaching style, refuted his attacks on Jansenism, and, above all, condemned the ease with which he was said to give absolution friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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4.1 Jesuit missions often included the erection of monumental crosses. The bishop of Arras in northern France attested that two cripples were healed in 1738 after invoking a cross raised there by François-Xavier Duplessis. This image, depicting the healed crippled woman at the foot of the cross where he is preaching, is the frontispiece of a 1742 edition of devotions for those following his missions.

in the confessional. For the Jansenists, the Jesuit missions were empty religious spectacle that only produced superficial conversions. François-Xavier also seldom missed an opportunity in his sermons to make fun of Jansenist women like Hecquet who dared think they had the right to be informed on religious issues. The Jesuit mocked them as “women theologians” and “priestesses.”52 A 1736 mission he preached in Abbeville compounded a personal crisis Hecquet was undergoing that year. In May 1736, she wrote a long letter of confession to Jean Soanen, her aunt Michelle Fontaine’s confessor, accompanied by a profession of faith.53 François-Xavier’s Abbeville mission began at the end of June, and Hecquet soon had to go to Paris to care for her husband. Before leaving, she instructed her servants to confess not to the Jesuit missionaries, but to their local parish priest. When she returned two months later, her pastor paid her a menacing call. Word had gotten back to him about her instructions, and the servants had been heard referring to Duplessis as the “Buffoon of God” (“Arlequin du Bon Dieu”).54 A long debate with the pastor ensued. She blamed the bull on the Jesuits. In the account she wrote that includes this episode, she only identifies Marie-André’s brother as “a native of Quebec.”55 Her family knew of her friendship with the Canadian nun, so there was no need to hide her connection to him from them. Hecquet must have intended for her account to circulate in her Jansenist networks, and she evidently did not want to advertise her cordial relations with the sister of the notorious Jesuit. She was a closet Jansenist in her relation to Duplessis and seems to have been equally secretive about her friendship with the sister of the Jesuit in her Jansenist circles.56 Hecquet never wrote her friend about the mission either. The next year Marie-André sent these gentle reproaches: “People inform me that there was a mission in Abbeville where my brother Father Duplessis was with his lordship the bishop of Amiens. I can hardly believe it because you do not say anything about it, and it seems to me, my dear friend, that if it had taken place, you are too Christian not to have participated and too civil not to have written me anything about it. Nonetheless, I will not let it come between us. Your busy activities could have made you forget it. People write us about the marvels of this dear brother. He is a man wholly filled with God who

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lives and breathes the salvation of souls and whose efforts heaven blesses wonderfully.”57 If Duplessis learned that Hecquet was a Jansenist it was probably after 1740, the year that she told Marie-Catherine of her hope that the then bishop of Amiens, Louis-François-Gabriel d’Orléans de La Motte, would become the bishop of Quebec.58 La Motte was a more intransigent tracker of Jansenists than even Sabatier. He was a friend of François-Xavier, but if the bishop informed the Jesuit of Hecquet’s stance, there is no indication in François-Xavier’s published letters to his sisters. Nonetheless, after 1740, Duplessis does not mention her brother’s missions to Hecquet. If indeed Marie-André did learn of her friend’s Jansenism, the nun seems to have displayed the tact with which François-Xavier reported his relations with his Jansenist uncle in 1722: “He is much to be pitied; I was greatly pained when I visited him, although I did not let it show.”59

Refashioning a Long-Distance Friendship through Letters Read retrospectively from the vantage point of the last letter of the exchange in 1758, the letters chronicle two women who separately weathered many storms. Read incrementally, letter by letter, the exchange is about reshaping a friendship that could easily have ended in 1699, when Marie-Catherine’s father took her back to Abbeville. Marie-André was twelve and Marie-Catherine thirteen when their shared experience ended. Only letters could refashion a bond that would be tested not just by physical separation, but also by new commitments. During the nineteen-year interval between that separation and the 1718 letter that is the first surviving one of the exchange, Duplessis had become novice mistress and was beginning her administrative career. Hecquet, a reluctant bride, was the mother of four children with two more to be born shortly. Duplessis was by then the sister of a Jesuit and Hecquet a persecuted Jansenist. Nothing guaranteed the continuation of the friendship. Duplessis’s 1720 letter appears to be an effort to catch up on news of common acquaintances: she inquires about Hecquet’s father, an aunt, and the doctor Philippe Hecquet, and gives news of Canadians 90

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whom Hecquet had encountered through her. However, their correspondence would have to be propelled by more than memories of a shared childhood and the people they knew in Paris. This familiar cast of characters would gradually be replaced by new ones who existed for each correspondent only in letters. Except for Hecquet’s father Jacques Homassel, who died in 1747, most news that each friend reported concerned people whom the other had never met. On Duplessis’s side, the list was short: her mother, two brothers, sister, and niece. As a mother of six, Hecquet’s cast of characters was much larger and constantly expanding.60 News of these new family members generated momentum for the exchange and was supplemented by general news of the colony or the mother country. In addition, the mechanics of the correspondence were a frequent topic, and Duplessis often hinted at the fragility of the exchange. Duplessis, in fact, complained in thirteen of the extant letters that she had not received one from Hecquet. She wrote even when Hecquet did not, and became the motive force of the correspondence. She had to perfect the art of scolding, sometimes in a playful way, sometimes with reproaches, so much so that complaints about no letters from Hecquet became a standard part of hers. In 1730, she mixed flattery with urgings to improve: “Whom will I blame this year so as not to hold you responsible for the offense that I have received none of your dear news. Because I tend to flatter myself in regard to you, my very dear friend, I imagined that because the vessels left France later than usual, your letter arrived too late to Monsieur Demus for him to send it on to me. I entreat you to take better steps next year, since I endure with difficulty being deprived of one of the sweetest satisfactions that I enjoy when I receive proofs of your ongoing friendship.”61 In 1733, Hecquet’s missing letter became first a pretext for worrying that Marie-Catherine had experienced some misfortune that prevented her from writing and then a pretext for claiming to find reassurance, before scolding Hecquet roundly for neglecting her obligation to console her Canadian friend whose mother had died. “I had no news from you this year, and Monsieur Demus wrote succinctly because he sent us nothing, and said not a word about you. That partly reassures me, my dear friend, because if something bad had happened to you, he would not have failed to inform me, since friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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he knows how I cherish you … My dear friend, it seems to me that you are especially obliged to demonstrate this mark of friendship because I wrote you news of my mother’s death, and surviving as an orphan in Canada, don’t I have the right to expect that you will soften the pain of my remoteness by the signs that you could give me of your affection?”62 In 1754, conversing with a recently returned visitor to France who had dined with Hecquet at her son-in-law’s home in Paris had to substitute for a letter: “I waited until the departure of the vessels to have the honour to write you, expecting some of your dear letters, but I have received no other news of you except from Monsieur Jacquelin, a merchant in this land, who came back from France this year and who assured me that he had dined with you, Madame, at Monsieur Bourdeau’s home, where you appeared to him to be happy to see someone who knows me. This is a proof of your friendship for which I thank you.”63 However, this vicarious face-to-face meeting cannot replace a letter actually written by her friend. Thus in 1755, Duplessis is politely blunt: “You owe me arrears. Pay your full due by giving me an ample accounting of your dear news.”64 Duplessis’s creativeness in varying the topos of the missing letter shows the inventive spark of the texts of her youth. In every case, she signalled the strength of her friendship by highlighting how much Hecquet’s letters meant to her, even when they did not make it across the Atlantic. Hecquet had described the love-at-first-sight bond between her and Marie-André in her biography of Michelle Fontaine. Duplessis told Hecquet herself as much in her 1742 letter, where she invoked “the tender friendship that I have pledged to you from my childhood days.”65 In 1720, Geneviève had described to Hecquet the “palpable” pleasure with which her sister received Hecquet’s letters: “We reread your letters in a festive mood, finding in them a certain piquancy that pleases us and allows one to easily judge your piety.”66 These frequent discussions of the mechanics of the correspondence reveal the relationship’s unstable dynamics. In the years before Hecquet moved to Paris after her father’s death in 1747, Duplessis routinely addressed the letters to Hecquet’s home in Abbeville. But once in the capital, Hecquet seems to have refused to give her address. Duplessis complained in 1748, “Where are you, and where will I address my letters in the future?”67 The next year, Duplessis renewed 92

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her complaint: “I seek you out in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in SaintGermain, and in Saint-Honoré, and I am not sure of finding you in whatever place you may be.”68 Hecquet had, in fact, found a house on the Rue Mouffetard, in the neighbourhood of the Saint-Médard church, a pilgrimage site for Jansenists, because one of their saintly heroes, the deacon François de Pâris, had been buried its cemetery. Her address might have revealed her hand. Duplessis had to send her letters via Hecquet’s son-in-law, the merchant Pierre Bourdeau, who lived on the right bank, or via the Mounier merchants, a Protestant family with branches in Quebec and France. According to Duplessis, there was a much easier method for getting letters to Canada: “I do not understand how you can find it difficult to get them to me. Nothing is easier today.” She suggested using the Jesuit headquarters at their college Louis-le-Grand or the Missions Étrangères.69 In 1751, she reiterated the suggestion: “I entreat you, my dear friend, give me your address since you dwell in Paris. That will make it much easier for me to get you my letters, and I would have yours sooner if you would send them to the father procurator of the Canadian missions at the college of Louis-le-Grand.”70 However, Hecquet wanted nothing to do with the Society of Jesus. Perhaps Duplessis still did not know of Hecquet’s Jansenist ties. The family news that Duplessis reported was generally more upbeat than Hecquet’s. While Marie-André did report Geneviève’s chronic respiratory problems and their mother’s death, for the most part, she relayed successes: the crowds at François-Xavier’s missions; Charles-Denis’s charm with the ladies, his marriage, and his promotion. To judge by Duplessis’s comments on the family news Hecquet sent, it was increasingly filled with disappointments and pain. Nicolas Lyon-Caen’s book on Hecquet’s family background allows readers now to know more about Marie-Catherine’s trials than she herself probably ever revealed to the nun.71 Hecquet’s father Jacques Homassel was a domineering industrialist who sacrificed family to business. Her husband was chronically depressed and perhaps alcoholic. The three children who married in Abbeville led calm lives, but the other three were sources of worry. The two daughters who married Parisian merchant brothers in 1736 died early, as did some of their children and one of the husbands, leaving Marie-Catherine as a grandchild’s guardian. Judging by her 1751 letter, where Hecquet alluded to some of friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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these problems, she only reported them to Duplessis in veiled terms: “I see all my children, of whom the oldest is about thirty-eight, with such weak constitutions and impaired lungs that I worry daily that they are about to take leave of the numerous children that they all have. One of them [Philippe], without dying, has weighed me down with six, not to mention himself.”72 In fact, her son Philippe in Amiens was a drunkard who accumulated business debts, and whose children she had to support. She had him condemned for debts in 1749 and kept him interned in a series of asylums and prisons until he was eventually deported to Guadeloupe, where he died in 1770.73 To protect the interests of her children, Hecquet obtained a property separation from her husband in 1741. She had him interned in asylums several times, at least once by lettre de cachet around 1755.74 She was no patsy, as her long-suffering aunt Michelle Fontaine, who raised her, had been. In her will, Hecquet deducted all the money she had spent on Philippe and his children from their portion of her estate.75 In 1736 and again in 1738, Duplessis confessed rather sheepishly that Hecquet might find her expressions of “tender friendship” unbecoming of a nun.76 “But don’t you find, Madame, that for a nun, I speak very much according to nature? Shouldn’t one mortify somewhat one’s inclinations?” Duplessis quickly justified herself: “I don’t blame myself because I esteem you as much as I love you, and our bond has edified me more that it can harm me.”77 As she put it two years later, “I admit to you that the senses still have so much power over me that I enjoy a great pleasure in cultivating my virtuous friends here on earth.”78 She ignored the seventeenth-century strictures in her order’s constitutions that discouraged such friendships for nuns. Instead, she cited the more general commonplace of Christian friendship based on mutual esteem for virtue and edification. When Duplessis confessed to going beyond the conventions of convent writing for Marie-Catherine, she affirmed the unique character of her friendship, which she frequently described as “steadfast.” The persecuted Jansenist Hecquet could only be delighted to receive Duplessis’s esteem for her as a true Christian. The unspoken subtext of the exchange between the two childhood friends Marie-André and Marie-Catherine is Hecquet’s closet Jansenism. Since only three examples of Hecquet’s letters to Canada 94

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survive – two drafts (1740 and 1751) kept by Hecquet and a 1756 letter received by Duplessis79 – the evidence of how much she revealed is inconclusive. This beleaguered Jansenist woman, who felt persecuted by the official church in France, sought the nun’s affirmation of her piety and true Christian spirit. Marie-André was happy to affirm a tie to the city of her birth and childhood and to have another person to turn to for needed supplies from France. After the 1755 fire, she implored Hecquet to send glasses: “I even lost my glasses. I can hardly either read or do needlework. Have pity on me, my dear friend.”80 Duplessis countered what might have been Hecquet’s attempts at withdrawal by writing even when Hecquet did not. Her childhood friendship with Hecquet overlapped with an instrumental one where mutual benefit mixed with nostalgia and generic Christian values. Each partner wrote for different reasons, but their letters generated a friendship that was stronger than theological differences and geographic separation.

Fashioning Networks of Friends of the Hospital The annual letters of Duplessis to Hecquet over the course of forty years form the tightest ensemble within her correspondence and are the only part of her intimate correspondence written by her to have survived. Thirty-three remain because Marie-Catherine preserved many of her friend’s missives written between 1718 and 1758,81 just as the Duplessis sisters saved the letters they received from their Jesuit brother in France. Two sets of business letters in French archives have been published alongside those to Hecquet: ten letters by MarieAndré and Geneviève to their representative in Paris, François de Montigny, and forty-eight by both sisters to the apothecary Jacques Tranquillain Féret in Dieppe. In addition to the sixty published letters by Marie-André, at least another sixty have been identified in the Hôtel-Dieu archives. To her letters must be added the many drafts of letters by her sister and administrative partner Geneviève, particularly from the late 1740s, in the monastery archives. Because of Duplessis’s desire to maintain links with the country of her birth and her managerial roles, she had multiple networks of correspondents in France. Indeed, as Marie-André wrote Hecquet in 1731, “We are in contact with a great number of people … who send friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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us a thousand proofs of very pure affection.”82 She had exchanges with suppliers and financial representatives in France, as well as officials of the ministry of the navy. The record contains formal petitions to ministers as well as letters to prominent figures in France who might lobby for her hospital. She exchanged letters with many convents in France, not just with those of her own order such as the one at Dieppe that founded her own, but with Visitandines, Carmelites, and Cistercians, among others. She seems to have sent them annual letters each fall, much as she did to Hecquet and her relatives.83 Autumn was letter-writing season in Canada because the colony was cut off from direct contact with Europe between the departure in November of the last ships and May when the earliest ships from France arrived.84 As she reminded Hecquet in 1730, “Fall is a crushing season in Canada because all business is transacted then. Letters from France are received; we reply to them promptly; we lay in supplies; debts are paid … so much negotiation is required to come to terms that twice the amount of time that one has would scarcely suffice.”85 Within the colony, she had frequent dealings by letter with local authorities and suppliers. Although one of the most revealing series of letters dates from her conflict with the intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy in 1727, the record is strongest starting in the late 1740s. Many letters must have been lost in the 1755 fire. The two most complete administrative exchanges are some thirty letters with the intendant François Bigot during the last decade of the colony and sixty letters between her and Bishop Pontbriand beginning in 1747. Since these administrative letters will be extensively cited in subsequent chapters, it is useful here to establish that they are much more than straightforward business correspondence. Even as relatively dry financial exchanges, they would be rare. The other major sets of letters by colonial women of New France, those of Marie Guyart in the seventeenth century and Duplessis’s contemporary Élisabeth Bégon, consist mostly of reportage – news of the colony and family or of their interior lives – and lack such seemingly routine managerial letters. However, beyond what these business letters reveal about the financial dealings of the Duplessis sisters, they also show how the Duplessis sisters used correspondence to fashion friendships, in this case to make friends of the hospital. They sought to acquire 96

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donors, lobbyists, functionaries, and suppliers who would go the extra mile for their institution, who would give funds or favours. They recognized the difficulty of creating these necessary relationships. As Marie-André put it to Montigny, their business agent in Paris, “It is rare to find people who wish to take up the interests of those far away.”86 Their strategies build on the conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing, which the sisters were careful to observe in official correspondence, including greetings at New Year’s and on saints’ days to local authorities, the exchange of gifts, and, in some cases, professions of personal friendship. Exchanges of gifts accompanied the exchange of letters. As Geneviève explained to Féret in 1743, “When we receive some service or token of friendship, we are pleased to give something in return.”87 Tokens of esteem designed to keep the hospital in the thoughts of their correspondents were the simplest form of these gifts, such as the two hundred or more palls that Marie-André embroidered during spare moments in the refectory. These square rigid pieces of cloth cover the chalice during the mass, and thus the priests to whom she gave them would likely remember her in their prayers during the service. As she explained to Hecquet in 1752, “Our parish pastors to whom I give them receive them with great pleasure and tell me that this is a fine way for them to remember me at the holy sacrifice of the mass. I keep a small catalogue of the ones that I distribute. I do this in wasted moments in the refectory. Since I eat rather fast and am among the first to be served, I always finish before the others, and while waiting for the signal to fold the napkins, I take a little bag out of my pocket with everything I need for needlework. Sometimes I do few stitches, other times more, and little by little, I make six or seven of them a year, and I give them away as they are done.”88 She wrote short prayers of paragraph length to accompany palls and sent them to priests throughout New France from the Illinois Country in the west to Acadia along the Atlantic, and even some to France. One went to Hecquet with the request that Marie-Catherine identify the recipient so she could enter the name in her catalogue. Duplessis’s log and text of her prayers survive, but no entry in it corresponds to this request. Was Hecquet reluctant to admit that she had given the pall to a Jansenist priest? friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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4.2 This embroidery measuring 16 x 17 cm on linen fabric is for a pall that covers the chalice during mass. It depicts a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young with its blood, a traditional allegory of Christ’s death on the cross. Duplessis’s catalogue of 220 palls records one for 24 December 1737 with this theme. The Hôtel-Dieu preserves nine palls embroidered by Duplessis.

The sisters’ staple present to correspondents in France was syrup of capillaire. This concoction, made by boiling the fronds of maidenhead ferns, was a remedy for chest ills. It was usually drunk as an infusion, but could also be applied as a balm directly on the skin. Duplessis’s first surviving letter in 1718 to Hecquet mentions having already sent it several times because Hecquet reported that it gave her relief. She sent it to her Jesuit brother in the late 1740s when he began suffering from lung problems. François-Xavier found it so effective that he even used the recipe of his Jansenist uncle!89 It was a particularly apt gift because the syrup from Canadian ferns was reputed to be especially potent, and Duplessis tried to send local products. Finding appropriate Canadian gifts was not easy, given Marie-André’s low estimation of Canada’s riches. She reiterated a similar apology as this one found in her 1720 letter to Hecquet to correspondent after correspondent: “We can only send wretched trinkets from this land, but you give magnificent presents.”90 Indigenous items were another frequent present with a local flavour. Around 1752, for example, she sent “a little item of native handiwork” to a potential benefactor she hoped to woo, the duchesse d’Ayen.91 Duplessis’s hope was that the exoticism of such gifts would mitigate their modest nature. Her last “gift” to Hecquet in 1758 was two songs celebrating French victories in the Seven Years War.92 For the Dieppe apothecary Féret, she and Geneviève scoured the colony for rare specimens from the natural world that he could include in his cabinet of curiosities, and when those were lacking, Geneviève sent her devotional texts.93 The sisters sometimes addressed letters to potential benefactors with whom they had tenuous links. The seventeenth-century foundress of the hospital had been the duchesse d’Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. In 1751, they did not hesitate to contact the current holder of the titles, even though the blood relationship was weak, in hope of awakening an interest in the hospital. The sisters included syrup of capillaire with their letter to the duchess. The stable of their regular correspondents could expand overnight in moments of crisis such as the Dupuy affair in the late 1720s or after the 1755 fire, when they mounted letter-writing campaigns of appeals. Many of these letters also appear to have been written cold. In each, they

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introduce their plea with an attempt to establish some link between the correspondent and the hospital. When the Duplessis sisters detected a sympathetic ear, they sought to exploit this goodwill, especially when such an individual had the ear of powerful figures they thought hostile or indifferent. In June 1727, during their conflict with Dupuy, they wrote his secretary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau to explain their side of the quarrel, saying they were much impressed by the courtesy and civility with which he had received their memoranda, and included the proviso that he should only show their letter to the intendant if he deemed it helpful to their cause. In the 1750s, during their battle with Bigot over paying for the hospital’s expansion, they courted Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, who had briefly served as governor of the colony. They confided to him that in his exit interview in 1750 before returning to France, he had inspired “a secret intuition” that he would be “very useful and favourable to the hospital since he knew its true situation.”94 They continued to write him hoping that he would lobby the naval ministry. Their most potent strategy, and one reserved for a privileged few, was to add private friendship to friendship for the hospital. This can be seen developing in the series of letters to Féret that span 1733 to 1752, where the sisters begin by sharing family news and gradually add more personal details. In 1741, Geneviève hoped that the apothecary would “continue to be among our friends, and that beyond the ties of self-interest that we share because of our hospital, we will be more united by esteem and the affection of Christian charity.”95 Perhaps the most striking example is found in Geneviève’s letters to the military engineer Louis Franquet, who had drawn up plans for the proposed hospital expansion. In a 1753 declaration of friendship that is almost unseemly in a nun, the spiritual friendship that Geneviève professed for him might well be bested by a natural one: “I do not doubt that spiritual sympathies exist, as do natural ones, and I feel it in respect to you, sir, because when I have the honour to write you, my pen proceeds on its own and anticipates my thoughts … I desire your happiness so much that mine own would not be complete if yours fell short in any respect.”96 The sisters felt he had understood their point of view during their discussions with him and counted on the engineer to report back to La Galissonière.

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These hospital friendships had uneven success. Some correspondents, such as Bigot, would never be won over despite persistent overtures, while others would prove to be influential supporters. It is not clear that either Franquet or La Galissonière, who had both impressed the sisters in person, helped the hospital substantially, but the duchesse d’Aiguillon, whom they had never met, eventually did. The Duplessis sisters’ concept of Christian friendship based on esteem for virtue, on charity, and on shared spiritual goals was capacious enough to justify an attachment to a woman Marie-André likely learned was a heretic, and it had found room for the particular friendship between the two nun sisters. It readily encouraged them to enlist supporters as friends of the hospital.

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chapter

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A Sister Team Managing the Oldest Hospital North of Mexico: Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Mother Superior (1732–38; 1744–50) “I am only beginning to become knowledgeable about the house’s business,” Marie-André wrote her business correspondent in France in October 1732, six months after having been elected mother superior.1 This, of course, is a flagrant understatement. Her protest in 1719 against Bishop Saint-Vallier’s unilateral decision to build a separate building to care for sick priests shows that she had been well-informed about hospital financing very early on. She sounded an alarm that would become a leitmotif for the next forty years: the fear that the hospital might not survive. These concerns are emblematic of her long administration of the hospital’s affairs: juggling income to meet the institution’s day-to-day needs while protecting its current assets and assuring that expansion be put on solid footing. In 1719, her determination to defend the interests of the community took the form of a solemn protest. When she was appointed hospital bursar in 1725, she began channelling this same spirit into the management of the hospital. Visitors from the British colonies to the south and from France would have been surprised by the important role the Hôtel-Dieu played in the medical life of the town. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm, who visited the British middle colonies before travelling to Canada in 1749 and who left the most complete existing description of the Hôtel-Dieu, could not have reported on such an institution in

Philadelphia or New York. A hospital along the lines of the Hôtel-Dieu would only open in Philadelphia in 1752.2 In British America, medical care was the province of the family. The Reformation had destroyed the tradition of hospitals often staffed by religious orders in England. Such hospitals remained a fixture in every French town of some size, but they were reserved for the poor who could not count on home support. Thus a well-off patient from France at the Hôtel-Dieu in 1718 (Georges Poulet, in fact), when writing for a French public, felt obliged to explain, “The custom in that land is that everyone sick is brought there – the great, the rich, and all the clergy – because of the easy access to doctors and medicine and the special care the nuns have for the patients.”3 While the local poor and a floating population of transient soldiers and sailors were the primary clientele of the forty beds of the hospital’s two wards, unlike in France, the Canadian upper classes did not disdain using its services. They were free for the poor, but more well-off patients were expected to pay, and the king paid a per diem for soldiers. Unlike twenty-first-century ones, eighteenth-century hospitals were usually marginal in the delivery of health care across society and served a marginal clientele. This was not the case at the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec.4 Initially, the finances of the community and the hospital had not been distinguished. However, by the 1660s, the nuns felt the need to separate the two. They knew they risked being accused of living at the expense of the hospital, and they feared being asked to use dowry funds intended for their living expenses for hospital purposes. In 1676, the property and investments were divided with the agreement of Bishop Laval. The nuns held the hospital in trust, with the hospital bursar, appointed by the bishop, administering its finances. The bursar’s title in French, dépositaire des pauvres, came from the fact that the hospital’s intended clientele (besides the Indigenous people) was the worthy poor. From the beginning of this separation, the nuns insisted that the bursar only had to open her books to the community’s ecclesiastical superior, appointed by the bishop, rather than to civil officials.5 The sums that the hospital handled were substantial during the thirty-seven years Duplessis was at the helm. Yearly income when she entered office in 1732 was around 8,000 livres; revenues ranged between 10,000 and 12,000 livres until 1737, when they began a climb managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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that reached 22,000 just before the beginning of the Seven Years War.6 The pressure on the hospital’s administrators was intense because in twenty-one of the thirty years between 1723 and 1752, the institution operated at a deficit.7 The colonial economy presented a manager such as Duplessis with multiple challenges, whether the lack of specie, the reliance on military expenditure, the tiny local manufacturing base, or the endemic administrative corruption. After the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the colony gradually entered a period of relative economic expansion and even prosperity, in comparison with the dark first decade of the century during which Georges Duplessis’s affairs had floundered. During the thirty or so prosperous years before the wars with Britain resumed in 1744 and even beyond, the nuns’ goal was to invest wisely with an eye toward expanding or upgrading their hospital plant. However, the hospital’s growing military role stressed its finances to the breaking point.

Women, Business, and Family Ties Few women in Canada managed as much money over such a long period or had business dealings that ranged as widely. The participation of women, whether lay or nuns, in the colony’s economy is best understood as a function of their family. The family acted as a unit that strove to advance its social position. The absence of the guild system in Canada made it difficult for an unmarried woman to operate her own enterprise, as Marie-Anne Leroy had in France.8 Canadian women functioned as extensions of their husbands, often collaborating in their professional activity. The wives of craftsmen and shopkeepers participated in the production and sale of goods. The wives of seigneurs were responsible for running at least a large household, if not aspects of the estate. Administrators’ wives cultivated contacts who could promote their husband’s career. When merchants or military officers left home on business or for war, they gave their wives an authorization to act in their name. Widows could continue their husband’s business in the name of minor children. At all levels of society, a family’s network of relatives, friends, and patrons was cultivated to further its interests.9 In theory, a nun’s solemn vows signalled a civil death that cut ties to her family. She could neither inherit nor pass on family property. 104

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But the family mentality penetrated the monastery as it did life outside. Nuns advanced the interests of the house, just as their relatives in the world sought to consolidate family fortunes, and individual nuns made use of their network of family members to lobby for their community with all the skill they would have devoted to establishing their children had they married. In terms of managerial autonomy, their status as brides of Christ situated them somewhere between a widow and a married woman who had been granted a financial separation from her husband (séparée des biens). The Coutume de Paris, the French customary law that governed civil matters in Canada, entrusted the entire management of the community property as well as any property a wife brought into the marriage to her husband. The courts sometimes granted a wife a financial separation, usually when the husband’s misconduct threatened the family. Hecquet had obtained a separation for this reason in 1741. Such separations gave wives the ability to manage their finances, but they still could not sell property without their husband’s consent.10 Marie Leroy had also obtained this status, not because of any family disorder, but to protect the property that her mother had reserved to her in her 1686 marriage contract as “propres,” property reserved to the wife. A widow could administer the community property on behalf of minor children without any immediate oversight, but not sell it. The Coutume de Paris conceived her power as transitional; she assured the family’s well-being in the interim between her husband’s death and a son’s accession.11 In most cases, a widow did not take on her husband’s active role if an adult son was available, or she surrendered it when a son reached majority.12 A religious community had a corporate identity and system of internal self-government that allowed the nuns great latitude to manage their affairs. While, in theory, major decisions concerning property were to be discussed and approved in chapter meetings or by the advisory council, in normal circumstances such meetings simply ratified the proposals of the community’s leaders. In legal documents, the nuns are often accorded the same honorifics as laywomen; both Marie-André and Geneviève are referred to as “Dame Duplessis.” Male clerical oversight was built into the system. The bishop appointed a priest as superior with the responsibility of approving all decisions. The nuns submitted financial accounts to managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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the bishop each year, he or his representative presided at the election of officers, and he appointed directly the hospital bursar. This episcopal supervision paralleled the authority of a husband over his wife – even one with a financial separation – but the corporate nature of the religious community and the complexity of its affairs gave the nuns a standing more like that of a widow. When relations were smooth, the nuns managed day-to-day operations independently, and the bishop approved their larger initiatives, much as the chapter meetings ratified the proposals of the mother superior. However, the potential for tension, if not conflict, was always just below the surface. The bishop could intervene in elections, as he had in 1699 when Saint-Vallier prevented the community from electing Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau to any post, and he could impose his own initiatives such as the Hôpital-Général. Moreover, this immediate oversight existed within a larger framework, in which even decisions that would seem local, such as vacating hospital property to extend a street, had to be ratified by the ministry of the navy in Versailles. Multiple layers of oversight delayed action, but also multiplied the possibilities for negotiation of disputes.

A Sister Team and “Independence” The Hôtel-Dieu was unique among Canadian communities in that Marie-André’s sister Geneviève seconded her during much of her career. When Marie-André began alternating as mother superior and assistant with Catherine Tibierge de Saint-Joachim in 1732, Geneviève took over the job of hospital bursar – “the linch-pin” office in convent hospitals, according to an historian of the institution in France.13 The younger sister would hold the office with only a few breaks until her death in 1756. The two seem to have collaborated so closely that they were seen by outsiders as a team. One sister, writing to the former governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, recalled that he had chided them for their reputation of opposition to the expansion of the hospital: “I recall a slight criticism that you made of us one day in the convent parlour when you told us that the Duplessis Ladies didn’t have the reputation of being inclined to expand the hospital.”14 “Les Dames Duplessis” were a joint force in the colony to be reckoned with. 106

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The closest to this team in other convents during Duplessis’s life might be Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay and Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay at the Hôpital-Général. However, their collaboration is more an example of how competent nuns rotated in administrative posts. Like Geneviève, Ramezay was a longtime bursar, holding the office for twenty-six years, but she held higher positions as well, and was mother superior for six years. Juchereau Duchesnay was superior for nineteen years, and energetically defended her institution’s interests. She arranged with the court for the hospital to house invalid soldiers, appealed successfully to Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas in 1737 in the quarrel over the hospital’s claims to ownership of the episcopal palace, and expanded the hospital buildings in 1736. Daughters of the military and seigneurial elite, Ramezay and Juchereau Duchesnay could count on aristocratic connections the bourgeois Duplessis sisters lacked.15 The Duplessis sisters knew that their initiatives were often attacked and that they were accused of “independence,” of bypassing male supervision. They retorted that they never acted without the approval of the community’s chapter and the bishop.16 In a colonial economy, where successful management meant a knack for finding expedients when events thwarted even careful planning, they were worldly-wise. It was a man’s world in which they competed ably, given the limitations of clausura which prevented them from visiting the hospital’s rural properties and forced them to deal through male intermediaries. Only in moments of extreme frustration did they invoke their handicap as women. Geneviève did so in 1747, when their bookkeeping methods were challenged: “If the accounts do not appear clear to people who would wish that they adhered to the practices of governmental administrative offices or of merchants, that is not possible for women, and above all for nuns, who only leave the world so that they don’t have to know its rules.”17 As always, they invoked their good faith, their devotion to the cause of the poor, and what they saw as the miraculous way in which the hospital managed to survive under their keeping, as guarantees of their accounting practices. The Duplessis sisters might have rejected the condescending attitude of male civil and ecclesiastical officials who considered the sisters’ determination to manage the hospital’s affairs themselves unseemly managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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female “independence,” but they could display a similar condescension toward the members of their own community. In a memo to Bishop Pontbriand, Marie-André requested that he not reveal to the other nuns the permission that he was giving the bursar to make minor discretionary expenditures: “I know by experience that we have never had peace except when these things are done secretly; as soon as they are known, they become a source of murmurs and disturbance.” Underlying this request for secrecy is the misogynistic commonplace that women are given to quarrelsome gossip. She could boast in the same memo, “There have been more deliberations of the chapter and advisory committee since we became bursars than since the founding of the house,”18 but that was perhaps because she had learned how to manage her community to ratify her formal proposals. The Duplessis sisters’ “independence” from someone looking over their shoulders worked in two directions.

Managing Investments during Thirty Years of Peace: Fixed Income, Urban, and Agricultural In 1720, the community faced a difficult choice in the wake of the bankruptcy of John Law’s Mississippi Company, which had merged with his royal bank. Interest rates were reduced drastically and paper currency issued by the bank became all but worthless. Much of the initial endowment of the Hôtel-Dieu, as well as subsequent dowry funds, like those of most religious communities, had been invested in the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. These rentes, which functioned somewhat as bonds, had been paying interest at a rate of 5 percent before 1713.19 The royal authorities offered the choice of accepting only 2 percent or repatriating the capital to Canada, and suggested that the repatriated funds be used to purchase land in the colony that could become income-producing. When on 7 October 1720 the nuns assembled in chapter to deliberate this proposal, they had already discussed the matter with knowledgeable advisors, as was their custom. The minutes written by Duplessis foresaw catastrophe: the cost of developing virgin land would reduce the house to beggary and force its closure, just as the lower interest rate would “ruin them completely.” The chapter therefore stated that it would prefer to use the funds to develop more fully the farm property it already held.20 Duplessis was only the chapter 108

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secretary at this time, but one senses her hand in the outcome. The dire prediction is similar to the one she made in her protest of 1719. She knew from her father’s experience as the enterprising seigneur of Lauzon how difficult it was to make agricultural lands productive. She was equally well acquainted with the working of rentes on the Hôtel de Ville from her mother’s finances. Indeed, the hospital counted on such income in hard currency to buy supplies in France that could not be obtained locally. Writing to Hecquet two weeks after the chapter meeting, Marie-André probably underestimated the impact the measure would have on the community: “Having something in France and being able to withdraw a certain amount every year for the small needs of the house is very agreeable.”21 In reality, the income loss was sorely felt: during the ten years between 1704 and 1713, such rentes had accounted for 15.7 percent of the hospital’s revenue; in 1724–33 they fell to 6.1 percent.22 As in the 1719 affair of separate quarters for priests, Duplessis’s worst fears were not realized. By the time the community’s agent in France received its instructions in 1720, he had already decided to leave the funds invested there at an interest rate that turned out to be 2.5 percent instead of 2 percent.23 In 1724, when the government ordered a one-third devaluation of money, Duplessis, to protect the 13,758 livres that the hospital held in cash, arranged to lend out this amount on favourable terms with the bishop’s consent.24

Urban Property Management A conflict that began in 1727 over the community’s administration with the recently arrived intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy illustrates how Duplessis could mobilize allies to support her defensive policies.25 The initial issue at stake might seem minor: Dupuy halted construction of a stone wall between the hospital’s garden and the adjoining street, the Rue des Pauvres, now the Côte du Palais. This escalated into demands from the intendant to inspect the hospital’s financial records and a demand that the hospital sell off part of its holdings as building lots. It is tempting to reduce the dispute to the clash of two strong-willed individuals. However, two visions of the hospital’s role in the colony were also in play. The intendant, charged with the civil administration of Canada, and imbued with the ideal of the service du roi, the king’s managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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service, somewhat akin to the notion of public service, envisaged the needs of the entire colony. Duplessis, as hospital bursar, largely limited her view to the service of the hospital’s primary clients, the poor, and in a lesser measure the king’s soldiers. An exchange of correspondence between the two sisters with François-Madeleine-Fortuné Ruette d’Auteuil in June 1727 offers a rare inside look into the sisters’ strategizing. Although quarrelsome by nature and out of favour with the authorities, the elderly former royal attorney general was in many ways an understandable choice as a confidant. In 1699, he had acted in their father’s behalf as a secret go-between in the purchase of Lauzon. But he had protested energetically in 1705 against the way in which Georges Duplessis had been named a director of the Company of the Colony. His obsession with precedent and procedures was useful here, since the hospital would assert that the intendant’s demand that it make a financial accounting to him violated its established privileges. The sisters acted as a team. Geneviève wrote the first letter on 9 June on behalf of her older sister, who was isolated in a retreat. Even though Geneviève held no office, she was clearly in the know. Yet secrecy was deemed essential. The sisters did not want their consultation with Ruette d’Auteuil revealed to the outside public, and likewise they did not divulge their negotiations to the community at large.26 Knowledge thereof remained within the convent’s leadership. They discussed tactics for winning the support of Saint-Vallier, whom they saw as unreliable and as conniving with the intendant.27 They saw the governor Charles de Beauharnois de la Boische as a potential ally because he had quarrelled with Dupuy, but wanted to hold him in reserve.28 Marie-André showed a keen awareness of rhetorical tone. She told Ruette d’Auteuil that when he composed briefs to be given the authorities on behalf of the hospital, he must remember to speak with the humility expected of nuns: “Keep in mind, if you please, that nuns are speaking, and consequently they must always be mild, without however sacrificing anything of the vigour that is needed.”29 Duplessis no longer acted alone as she had in her 1719 protest. Although the current mother superior signed the official protests, it is clear that Duplessis’s hand was behind them. The thirty-year period during which Marie-André guided the community, even 110

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when Marie-Catherine Tibierge was officially mother superior, had already begun in 1727. Ruette d’Auteuil counselled carefully limiting the hospital’s appeals in order not to diffuse their impact: “I am glad that you are not taking too many procedural steps.”30 This was difficult for Marie-André, who could react in intemperate ways herself. For example, when Dupuy had suggested selling off lots during his visit to the construction in May, she had riposted that they would only do this if ordered by the king. But she later seemed to have learned to follow Ruette d’Auteuil’s advice to never react on the spur of the moment. Eventually, in the fall, after consulting Ruette d’Auteuil further, she mounted an elaborate appeal that included a formal request to the minister of the navy, and letters requesting the support of the queen, the prime minister, and the duc de Richelieu, among others. Duplessis attributed Dupuy’s escalating demands to ill will caused when one of his servants, whom his wife accused of theft, had been protected in the hospital in December 1726.31 According to Duplessis, the intendant then began giving credence to every hostile accusation against the nuns’ administration of the hospital that circulated in the town. Previously, early that fall, he had apparently visited the wall and had expressed no complaints. At some point, however, his attention turned to the hospital. The nuns’ opposition activated his ambitious urbanization plans for the town and his concept of proper civil administration. Selling off lots from the hospital’s properties would be a more efficient use of urban space, and hospital finances in France were often in the hands of lay administrators who contracted with nuns for their services.32 Whatever merit his ideas may have had, he proposed them as threats. Duplessis’s tactics delayed a reckoning until a larger controversy engulfed the intendant. His demands were forgotten when he was recalled in the fall of 1728 because of widespread complaints over his divisive, impulsive management style. His role in the unseemly disputes over Saint-Vallier’s funeral in early 1728 was the primary occasion for his disgrace, but the hostile petition Duplessis had sent the court the previous fall likely did him no good. However, the three issues he raised persisted. The first to be resolved was the wall. At the second chapter meeting in 1732 at which she presided after her election as mother managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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5.1 This 1886 painting by Henry Richard S. Bunnett depicts the two wings of the monastery originally built in 1695–98 and rebuilt in 1756–57, after the 1755 fire. The wings formed two sides of a square. The street between the ramparts overlooking the Saint Charles River and the monastery’s wall is visible.

superior, Duplessis stressed her reluctance to see the community take on debt, but she found a way to continue the construction and also to enclose the community’s garden that bordered on the escarpment and ramparts.33 The bone of contention was less the wall itself than its placement, and from Duplessis’s point of view, paying for it. The royal authorities insisted that it be far enough from the escarpment to facilitate traffic by the public; the nuns saw this as an expansion of the right of way they had already granted that would diminish their garden with no compensation.34 In the end, at least forty feet were reserved for public passage between the bluff and the nuns’ stone wall, as the authorities wished, and without any compensation to the hospital.35 The nuns also began making building lots available, not as outright sales, but in return for annual payments. They seem to have conceded on these points. The second demand, that the nuns be accountable for their financial administration of the hospital to royal officials, not just to the bishop, was dropped for the moment. However, since the hospital relied on public subsidies, this issue would resurface periodically. Even the intendant Gilles Hocquart, a much more able and moderate administrator than Dupuy, whom he replaced in 1729, reported to the minister in October 1733 that it was good to be on one’s guard against the enterprises of the nuns, “which are not always congruent with the common good.”36

Rural Property Management Duplessis’s most striking initiative was agricultural: the purchase and development of the seigneurie at Saint-Augustin, upriver from Quebec. It was not the Hôtel-Dieu’s first land holding, but was by far the most successful. The earliest was Grondines between TroisRivières and Quebec, sold in 1683 because its revenue was modest.37 A second, much smaller property, Argentenay, was sold in 1700.38 Duplessis would have been much more familiar with the purchase of the Ile-aux-oies, just downriver from the Ile d’Orléans, which the hospital bought from Paul Dupuy in 1711. In fact, her dowry paid for it. She might very well have been among the eight nuns who made a nine-day visit to inspect the small island in the summer of 1714. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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The description in the Annales has the vividness of a first-person account and is made with an eye to the economic potential of the property’s hay meadows and woodlands. The account in the Annales updates the island’s status since its purchase by describing how a boat was subsequently bought to transport its produce and how hay was bartered for improvements to the farm.39 The hospital administration kept a watchful eye on the farm, and further inspection visits by the mother superior are mentioned in 1727 and 1729 in various documents.40 The island had the advantage of being closer to the town than Girondines, but it was too small to provide enough income, and its produce had to be transported by boat. In 1733, the opportunity to acquire a larger, more favourably situated property at Saint-Augustin, just upriver from Quebec, arose, and the chapter accepted Duplessis’s proposition as recently elected mother superior that the hospital bursar, now her sister Geneviève, place a bid in the hospital’s name.41 Opportunity to purchase the property is an understatement. The seigneurie was in debt, and the hospital was its principal creditor. While no record seems to exist that the Duplessis sisters visited the site prior to the purchase, they must have been well acquainted with it. Jean Juchereau de la Ferté, the grandfather of Marie-André’s mentor, Jeanne-Françoise de SaintIgnace, had established it. The holder of the indebted estate in 1733 was Marie-Thérèse de La Lande Gayon, the widow of the nephew of Duplessis’s mentor. The hospital, under the Duplessis sisters’ leadership, demanded the seizure and sale of the seigneurie to assure payment of its debt of 10,000 livres. The sisters might have planned all along not just to reclaim their debt by having the seigneurie put up for auction, but to purchase it for the hospital.42 For the chapter meeting at which the transaction was discussed, Geneviève prepared a detailed prospectus listing the advantages of the purchase and means for paying for it. The seigneurie was close to the town, was accessible at all times by either land or boat, had a mill and over two hundred concessions worked by habitants, and would allow the hospital to raise its own livestock, instead of using the services of various farmers in the area. She envisaged the acquisition in terms of the hospital’s larger financial situation. It would provide a source of stable income at a time when other sources of revenue could not be counted on consistently.43 114

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The Duplessis sisters directed the development of the seigneurie, which had about eight hundred inhabitants living on around two hundred forty tracts of land that had been granted to tenant farmers.44 Rural Canada was developed using the seigneurial landholding system, under which royal authorities assigned large tracts of land (seigneuries) to individuals or religious institutions, who were expected to recruit settlers. These tenant farmers or copyholders cleared the land and paid dues and rents to the owner of the seigneurie, who were in turn expected to provide certain services, such as building a mill. The Duplessis sisters’ first order of business was a thorough survey in 1735, followed by a detailed cadastral register drawn up in 1743–47 that recorded the fees owed the hospital by the copyholders who farmed on the seigneurie. The gristmill was improved in 1737 and a sawmill added in 1740. In 1744–45 a canal was constructed to assure the area an adequate supply of water. During the twenty-five-year period of Duplessis management, from roughly 1734 to 1759, about sixty new concessions were granted to copyholders, which greatly expanded the land used for productive crops.45 As cloistered nuns, the Duplessis sisters could not visit the hospital’s holding and relied on agents for business that they could not conduct in the convent parlour. Overall, the Hôtel-Dieu seems to have managed its seigneurie as competently as the male orders in Canada – the Jesuits, Sulpicians, and Seminary of Quebec – managed theirs. This good management did not prevent the nuns from showing more clemency to copyholders who were in arrears with their payments than did similar male ecclesiastical administrators.46 Although the nuns frequently claimed that they had to invest more in Saint-Augustin than the property produced,47 the seigneurie more than lived up to its proponents’ initial enthusiasm. It did require the expenditure of capital, for example to improve the mill in 1737, but it also provided stable income, and besides any cash payments, it was a source of produce for the hospital’s kitchens and stables. Quebec merchants as well as inhabitants of the seigneurie paid to use its mill. Most of all, because the various forms of income the property produced arrived throughout the year, it stabilized revenue for the hospital and provided a solid base of capital.48 The unsentimental weighing of the pros and cons for every business decision is typical of Duplessis’s careful management style. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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Whenever a repair or new construction was required, the short- and long-term consequences were always considered: could the cost of an immediate repair be recuperated? Or would it be better to sell the asset without further investment? The minutes of chapter meetings record such deliberations over the next twenty-seven years until Marie-André’s death in 1760. Even when Marie-André was listed as assistant, or vice-superior, she usually presented the proposal for major initiatives. Likewise, her recognition of the need for careful record-keeping and respect for procedures is everywhere evident. When she was not herself superior, she often served as chapter secretary, as well as assistant; thus, she retained control of the community’s memory of its business. She even added notes about the disposition of decisions made, especially to explain why, occasionally, they were not executed. In all cases, the minutes of meetings record that after her proposals were presented and deliberated, they were unanimously accepted by the voting sisters. If there were reservations, such as the ones she had expressed so energetically in 1719, they did not find their way into the minutes Duplessis wrote. The consultations themselves show her respect for chapter ten of the second part of the Constitutions, which specifies a long list of topics that must be brought before the voting nuns at chapter meetings.49 The Saint-Augustin purchase also illustrates the tight collaboration between the Duplessis sisters. As bursar, Geneviève had a much closer hand in the various necessary legal transactions and in the seigneurie’s operation than Marie-André. However, both shared a management philosophy that certainly owed much to their father’s experience as seigneur of Lauzon. At the back of their minds, the hospital’s eventual expansion was always envisaged; but expansion should not occur without long-term financial security, preferably some kind of investment income.

Managing Daily Supplies in Peace and War Two facts made supplying the hospital’s needs taxing for its administrators: the fluctuations in patient load and supplying patient needs in a cash-short economy. The hospital’s nominal capacity of thirty-two to fifty beds had changed little since the seventeenth century. Patient 116

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load varied considerably over the course of a year. The winter months could be slow, with mostly local patients, giving the caregivers four or five months to catch their breath. Usage spiked in late summer and the fall – September was the peak month – when ships arrived from France with their contingent of sick and vermin-infested passengers. However, as the city grew, as the economy included manufacturing enterprises such as the royal shipyards, and especially as war became ever-present, the hospital was often over capacity by the 1740s. A day-to-day account of the nuns’ purchases over the decades is not as important as how they defended themselves when their business practices came under fire from intendants. Their defence reveals their personalities and how they conceived their duties. Two periods are particularly well documented. The first is the Dupuy affair during Marie-André’s tenure as bursar; the second, in the late 1740s when Geneviève held the reins under Hocquart and Pontbriand, who had become bishop in 1741. At issue was what Marie-André described in a June 1727 letter to Dupuy’s secretary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau as the “minor methods” that the hospital used in its local purchases. She lined up providers in advance and bought in bulk when prices were lowest: “We do not wait until we need things to buy them because when they become required, one must pay the going price. As long as the hospital could only supply itself when items were needed, it went greatly into debt. This experience has led us to store in our heavy supplies when we find them cheap.”50 If it turned out that more supplies had been purchased than needed, the surplus was sold. For example, meat would be sold while it was still frozen near the end of Lent to butchers, who could then resell it once the forty days of abstinence were over. What she saw as “a wise measure of precaution,” others saw as profiteering and market manipulation. She was proud to stretch the hospital’s inadequate income in a way that avoided going into debt as the hospital had in the past. Only once does she allow herself a jab at those who use the hospital’s services and then reward it with “the calumnies that they broadcast against us.” Her very real pride in her resourcefulness does not overpower her larger argument that any reasonable person in her position would employ the same methods. Geneviève had trouble maintaining Marie-André’s moderation when similar charges were renewed in 1748. Jean-François Gaultier, managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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the royal physician, reported to her that someone had complained to the intendant that she had farm suppliers lined up who provided her with produce she could resell for a profit. She wrote the newly arrived intendant François Bigot directly and claimed to be “accustomed to the exaggerations that are made concerning her simple and plain management,” but hoped to disabuse Bigot at the start of his term. She noted that the previous year similar charges had been lodged with the lieutenant-general of the police, François Daine, who after investigation dropped the affair. Her exasperation surfaced throughout the letter. After summarizing the same purchasing methods in more detail that her sister had done in 1727, she could not resist a touch of irony: “The mighty trade of the Hôtel-Dieu that provokes jealousy consists of this.” She closed with an apology for her tone and asked Bigot to excuse “a few slight barbs that he might find too straightforward; when one is weary of an issue over a long period of time, the choice of words is not too refined.”51 Two issues fired her irritation. After so many years as bursar, she was fed up with what she saw as the growing bad faith of many Canadians. In fact, she declared to Bigot that she had offered her resignation to the bishop the previous year. Financial pressures caused by increases in the hospital’s patient load since the 1720s magnified her exasperation. Her sister had used this same purchasing scheme to avoid borrowing. Now, expenses to meet the needs of ill soldiers were so high, the king’s repayment so slow, and his administrators so unresponsive that the hospital could only feed its patients by resorting to short-term borrowing. Geneviève does not mention these loans in her letter to Bigot,52 but her sister does in a letter written earlier in 1748 to Pontbriand.53 This kind of borrowing had always been anathema to “the Duplessis Ladies.” One form of petty commerce that the Duplessis sisters engaged in does not seem to have aroused hostility. They received and placed items for retail sale with their suppliers, both in France and Canada, probably as a strategy for offsetting the cost of their purchases. Letters in the late 1740s to Geneviève from a certain widow Portneuf, who bought food products for them in the Montreal area, mention shirts the nuns had made that Portneuf hoped to retail to voyageurs headed to the upper country.54 Correspondence in 1737–38 with the apothecary Féret in Dieppe discusses ivory devotional items sent to Canada for 118

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sale55 and Indigenous belts that the Duplessis sisters sent to France for him to sell.56 Letters usually discuss these transactions in terms of the difficulty of finding buyers, which probably explains why these sales did not result in complaints. The Duplessis sisters traded in minor articles imported from France much as their mother Marie Leroy had done to supplement her income during her widowhood.

Managing Popular Piety and Community Observance Marie-André saw attracting the faithful to the hospital chapel as part of her responsibility to build support for the institution. When she surveyed her tasks as newly elected superior in 1732, she realized that its indulgences were expiring. That October, she wrote François de Montigny at the Foreign Missions in Paris for advice about renewing them in Rome.57 The next year, while noting that the papal bulls needed to reauthorize them had not yet been obtained, she added a question about how to obtain relics for the chapel.58 In 1735, she became even more insistent: “It seems to me that since you know the ways of Rome and have connections there, it would not be too difficult for you to obtain for us [some relics] for our church which is quite bare. I am sending you a list of the bulls for our indulgences that need to be renewed since they were given to us for ten years in 1726.”59 When the relics did arrive,60 she cajoled her friend MarieCatherine, whose family dealt in the luxury fabric trade, to donate crimson silk that could be used to line the reliquaries. She had written to the pope to obtain them, Duplessis said, and she was sure they would become a centrepiece of the chapel.61 The mother superior was undoubtedly thinking ahead to the festivities in August 1739 that would mark the centenary of the hospital’s founding. Duplessis was superior in 1737 when an anonymous letter arrived that offered an ex-voto statue of the Virgin. The letter was from a sailor who had made a vow to the Virgin when he had faced shipwreck on a voyage out of Quebec at the end of the previous century. Duplessis immediately recognized the potential of the votive statue to attract other miracle-seekers. She was no longer superior when the statue was delivered the following year, but must have had a hand organizing its ceremonial visit to the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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5.2 Although the initial miracle that led to the gift of this statue in 1738 was only attested in the anonymous letter offering the statue, Duplessis skillfully turned the statue into an object of veneration for miracle seekers, and it still resides on a lateral altar of the Hôtel-Dieu.

and in placing it in a prominent position in the church in 1739, where it became a site of pilgrimage for sailors and the ill. Indeed, at the August 1739 centenary celebrations, the statue and reliquaries were central attractions of the chapel, along with the plenary indulgence that had finally been obtained.62 She was once again mother superior in 1744 when Bishop Pontbriand announced that a small crucifix that had been desecrated in Montreal in 1742 would be entrusted to the Hôtel-Dieu. A trickster, François-Charles Havard de Beaufort, had used the crucifix in a case of alleged sorcery in June 1742 in Montreal. The culprit was arrested, tried, and sentenced to the galleys by mid-August of that year. In September 1742, the bishop issued a pastoral letter ordering that the profaned crucifix be publically venerated in churches in Montreal in reparation for the sacrilege. To give it a permanent home, he assigned it in March 1744 to the Hôtel-Dieu. At the chapter meeting on 24 April 1744, Duplessis noted that Pontbriand had chosen their church over others that had solicited the honour, a modest way of announcing that she had submitted the successful bid. It could well be that she had a personal interest in seeing it housed in her community’s church because preaching the cross was the specialty of her brother François-Xavier in France. The monumental cross he had erected at Arras in France in 1738 at the close of a mission there had already become a pilgrimage site, famous for miracles attributed to it.63 The crucifix was displayed in a reliquary and became the site of yearly ceremonies of reparation, just as novenas were made invoking Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces. Duplessis wrote short accounts of the statue and crucifix in which she highlighted miraculous favours attributed to them, including the cure of a nun’s urinary retention after invoking the crucifix and the preservation of sailors from shipwreck. Her hospital’s chapel could now attract its share of miracle-seekers. In September 1747, the hospital contributed funds to the erection of an outdoor calvary at a crossroads on its seigneurie at SaintAugustin. Geneviève’s account of the dedication ceremony attributed the initiative to the domain’s inhabitants,64 but the Duplessis sisters, as mother superior and bursar, were surely the real motive force for this wayside cross, built in the spirit of the ones their brother inspired across France. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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Strict in her personal observance of the rule – for example, she would welcome the bishop’s dispensation when illness prevented her from duties in the wards – Marie-André maintained discipline and devotion by instructing the community regularly, as was expected of superiors who took their duties seriously. The zeal for observing the rule of Saint Augustine for which she would be praised in her death notices was animated by a spirit of flexibility rather than one of mechanical punctiliousness. This comes through most clearly in notes she wrote concerning differences between the letter of the order’s governing documents and slight variations in their observance in her house. The circumstances that motivated the notes are unclear. It might have been at a time when male superiors tried to enforce stricter conformity with the rule, or it might have been an in-house attempt to update practice. Duplessis makes it clear that what counts for her is the spirit of the law, not its letter: “an honest liberty is more suitable to encouraging nuns to do nothing against their duty than establishing new regulations that are different from those that have been observed here up to this time.”65

Harnessing Family Bonds The Duplessis sisters were a formidable duo within the Hôtel-Dieu. However, they were distinctly disadvantaged in terms of family connections in comparison with the more aristocratic nuns of the Hôpital-Général. The Duplessis sisters seem to have had no family members in Canada, until the very end of their father’s career when the Lanoullier de Boisclerc brothers, Nicolas and Jean-Eustache, arrived around 1712. Of the two, Jean-Eustache had a more successful career and may have aided the hospital sisters at times, just as he had helped Marie Leroy in November 1719. He was appointed royal road commissioner by Hocquart in 1730, and he energetically improved roadways throughout the colony. His major accomplishment was the king’s road linking Quebec and Montreal. The respect he enjoyed likely made him a useful ally for Marie-André and Geneviève; however, his position in itself had minor impact on the hospital.66 He may have been involved in settling the dispute about widening the street next

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to the hospital garden in the 1730s,67 and in improving road access at Saint-Augustin.68 In 1720, Nicolas took on the same post Georges Duplessis had held as agent of the treasurer of the marine. His trajectory only followed the downward cycle of Georges. He too dabbled in various enterprises on the side, and his were even less successful.69 He kept somewhat afloat by means of various royal posts that the intendant Hocquart gave him: member of the Superior Council, keeper of its seal, and controller of the royal domain. He died greatly in debt in 1756. There is no record of his aiding the hospital in any appreciable way, but during the Dupuy crisis, among the many letters the sisters sent to France in 1727 to important personages seeking support, one went to Nicolas’s sister-in-law, Marie-Madeleine Mercier, who had been Louis XV’s wet nurse and who held a position in the royal household. The modest Lanoullier connection was useful to the extent that the brothers enjoyed the respect of Hocquart, but it could not substitute for having blood relatives in high positions of influence. As Geneviève noted in 1740, the only real family member they had in the colony was their brother Charles-Denis.70 Charles-Denis had been a junior officer since 1724 following his return from France. He was posted at Fort Frontenac in 1726, and in 1727 at Fort Niagara where the stone fort that was then being constructed still stands. As the only lay sibling, he inherited his mother’s small estate in 1732. In fall 1733, he made a trip to France to clear up matters from his father’s accounts with the treasurer of the marine. Upon his return the next fall, he was named aide-major for the Quebec garrison, where he served from 1734 until 1744. He only married on 29 May 1742, when he and twenty-one-yearold Geneviève-Élisabeth Guillimin were wed by Bishop Pontbriand. She came from a prominent merchant family of the lower town that had fallen on bad times. Her father had been one of Quebec’s most prosperous traders in the first decades of the century and had become a member of the Superior Council in 1721. He had represented the interests of Georges Duplessis’s minor children, including CharlesDenis, when Marie Leroy was selling lots from her husband’s estate in 1715. However, he died a poor man in 1739, and the bride’s brother Guillaume, who was also her guardian, represented her family at

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the wedding. Thanks to Hocquart’s support, Guillaume was named in 1744 to the Superior Council, where Nicolas Lanoullier was also serving. It was probably as good a marriage as Charles-Denis could expect, given his own rather modest prospects.71 When hostilities broke out in 1744, Charles-Denis was posted to the upper country to command a fort on Lake Superior. In his account of his service, he touted an episode in 1746–47 when he convinced a group of Potawatomi along the Saint Joseph River near presentday Niles, Michigan, who were wavering in their support for the French, to send warriors to Montreal as they had done in the past.72 He does not seem to have been able to translate his posting in fur country into profits in the fur trade as many military commanders managed to do, and he aspired to a promotion that would take him back to Quebec. In May 1749, he was successful when he was named grand provost marshal of the mounted constabulary for Canada. This position involved supervising a small constabulary force and allowed Charles-Denis to live in Quebec with his wife and daughter Marie-Joseph-André, who had been born in February 1743.73 Charles-Denis owed his new position to the one family connection with real influence, his older brother François-Xavier, whose career as a mission preacher had taken off in France. More and more bishops solicited his services, especially in the north of France, and his success gave him access to devout circles at the court. In the case of his brother, François-Xavier’s lobbying in Versailles had more impact than the recommendation of the intendant and governor-general, who had nominated another person for the constabulary post. The Jesuit listed the personages he had contacted in 1745 – the king’s confessor, the duc de Penthièvre, the comtesse de Toulouse – but reported that the minister of the navy, Maurepas, was ill-disposed.74 In 1749, he added that he had lobbied Canadian administrators Jacques-Pierre de la Jonquière and Charles de Beauharnois.75 The preacher found such lobbying distasteful, and he had reservations about his brother’s unstable character and modest level of religious practice. Nonetheless, family loyalty impelled him. Just the same, he said he derived more pleasure from using his connections to help a Morampont cousin from Saint-Utin in Champagne settle a lawsuit than from working for Charles-Denis.76 The new provost marshal

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only piled up debts once he returned to Quebec. On the other hand, in the 1750s, François-Xavier became a privileged channel for his sisters’ lobbying efforts for the hospital.

Taking Stock of Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Superior: Pehr Kalm’s Report of His 1749 Visit “This morning I visited the largest nunnery in Quebec. Men are prohibited from visiting under very heavy punishments, except in some rooms, divided by iron rails, where the men and women that do not belong to the convent stand without and the nuns within the rails and converse with each other. But to increase the many favors which the French nation heaped upon me as a Swede, the governorgeneral got the bishop’s leave for me to enter the convent and see its construction.”77 So begins the botanist Pehr Kalm’s account of his visit on 8 August 1749, a visit that was not limited to the convent parlour grill. The governor-general La Galissonière had assigned the royal physician, Jean-François Gaultier, as Kalm’s guide, and Gaultier, who practised at the Hôtel-Dieu, knew the institution well. Kalm was a sympathetic and informed outsider, and he received similar access to the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, and could thus make comparisons. He took an interest in the lives of the nuns as well as the operation of the hospital. In March 1750, Duplessis completed her second stint as mother superior (1744–50, her first term having been 1732–38). For much of the intervening six years (1738–44), she had been either assistant superior or hospital bursar. Assessing Kalm’s observations on the state of the buildings, finances, recruitment, patient care, the routines of the nuns, etc. facilitates taking stock of these eighteen years when Duplessis was the community’s chief guiding force. His commentary reflects his personal observations as well as his contacts with the colonial elite, and it does not always tally with Duplessis’s views, nor with convent records. Kalm’s description of the Hôtel-Dieu and the interior of the monastery is the most extensive we have from the eighteenth century, about 2,000 words in the English translation. He gives a privileged view of the institution.

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Recruiting Kalm remarked that in all three convents the nuns seemed old.78 “I was told by several people here, some of which were ladies, that none of the nuns went into a convent till she had attained an age in which she had small hopes of ever getting a husband.”79 As for the HôtelDieu, “This convent, they say, contains about fifty nuns, most of them advanced in years, scarcely any being under forty years of age. At this time there were two young ladies among them who were being instructed in those things which belong to the knowledge of nuns.”80 While Kalm was correct in his estimation of the size of the community (forty-seven instead of his fifty),81 he was wrong in implying women entered it when beyond the age for marriage. Dale Miquelon lists 22.4 as the average age of women in Canada at the time of their first marriage in the eighteenth century.82 The average age of the four women accepted as postulants in 1747 who would take their final vows in April 1749, four months before Kalm’s visit, was 22, and the average for the four who entered between 1740 and 1747 was 21.83 The Hôtel-Dieu did not have boarding students from whom to recruit, as did the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, and the chance of early death among the choir nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu, who served patients with contagious diseases, was much higher than at the Hôpital-Général’s almshouse, which served the infirm. The Hôtel-Dieu’s converse nuns had less direct contact with the ill and lived seven years longer on average than its choir nuns.84 Kalm does not mention the one factor that hampered recruitment over which civil authorities had control: the dowry system. Only two nuns entered during the period between 1722, when royal authorities raised the required amount from 3,000 to 5,000 livres, and the early 1730s. Even when they lowered the amount back to 3,000, recruitment was slow; only six entered in the rest of the 1730s.85 In 1744, Pontbriand noted that families in Canada could not pay the required 3,000 livres in cash; convents would die out for lack of new members, he wrote Maurepas.86 At the Hôtel-Dieu, where Duplessis was superior, the situation was becoming a crisis by 1747, when three more nuns had died serving contagious patients. But as she told Hecquet in October, “It seems that God wishes to compensate us by the vocations that are making 126

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themselves known. We already have five postulants and several others ask to be received. If we had the means to take them for nothing, we would not be lacking nuns.”87 Duplessis had already acted when she wrote her friend. She had convinced the bishop to receive four postulants without paying the required sum. Three of the four had already been received in September 1747 when Pontbriand wrote Maurepas in October that he had granted the superior’s request.88 The same day La Galissonière and Hocquart added their approval in their letter to the minister.89 Maurepas yielded, but without much grace. He realized that the need for hospital nuns to treat the troops trumped the long-standing royal policy aimed at assuring that convents were properly endowed.90 The following October, Duplessis could report to her friend, “We have a novitiate that merits our affection despite the corruption of the age. A few girls present themselves. We do not admit them too easily, and yet some enter here or in other convents.”91 The two nuns in training that Kalm mentioned are not the four who had entered in 1747, some of whom had taken solemn vows in April. Kalm most likely referred to two postulants who entered officially two weeks after his visit.92 He seemed unaware of how successfully Duplessis had manoeuvred the bishop, intendant, and governor-general into renewing the community on her terms.93

Hospital Facilities and Financing The hospital “consists of two large halls, and some rooms near the apothecary’s shop. In the halls are two rows of beds on each side. The beds next to the wall are furnished with curtains, the outward ones are without them. In each bed are fine bedclothes with clean double sheets. As soon as a sick person has left his bed, it is made again to keep the hospital in cleanliness and order. The beds are two or three yards distant, and near each is a small table. There are good iron stoves, and fine windows in this hall. The nuns attend the sick people, and bring them food and other necessaries. Besides them, there are some men who attend, and a surgeon. The royal physician is likewise obliged to come hither once or twice every day, look after everything and give prescriptions.”94 Kalm’s description of the hospital wards is accurate. He even includes the small rooms just managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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off the main wards that had been added in 1733 at the beginning of Duplessis’s first term.95 In an era when medical care was impotent in the face of most disease, simply providing wholesome meals that usually included meat at least once a day was probably the most effective treatment the hospital provided. Three times daily, at 6:30 a.m., 10 a.m., and 4:30 p.m., choir nuns entered the wards in procession to feed the patients. The mother superior ladled out the portions for each patient from a central table. Kalm does not allude to the fifteen minutes the choir nuns spent each afternoon in the wards instructing the patients; they saw caring for the soul as a corollary to healing the body. Duplessis certainly would not have agreed with Kalm’s suggestion that troops were the primary clientele of the hospital, nor with his description of its royal financing: “They commonly receive sick soldiers into this hospital, who are very numerous in July and August, when the king’s ships arrive, and in time of war. But at other times, when no great number of soldiers are sick, other poor people can take their places, as far as the number of empty beds will reach. The king provides everything here that is requisite for the sick persons, viz. provisions, medicines, fuel, etc. Those who are very ill are put into separate rooms, in order that the noise in the great hall may not be troublesome to them.” Admissions did rise sharply in July and August; September and October, in fact, were peak months. However, Duplessis would have pointed out that Kalm inverted the hospital’s mission by implying that civilian patients could be admitted when soldiers left vacant space. The nuns saw service to their poor clients as their first duty. To emphasize that the poor were the hospital’s raison d’être, when the community celebrated its centenary on 1 August 1739, the nuns organized a special supper for the patients that was served by the capital’s leading citizens.96 Kalm could only have gotten this mistaken judgment that the king paid all the hospital’s expenses from the civil authorities who organized his visit. Duplessis had been pointing out their inadequate funding to them for years. While the yearly royal subsidy was an important component of its financing – between 1744 and 1753 it accounted for 25 percent of the hospital’s funding – in fact, the percentage had

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been declining over the century.97 As she pointed out to Hecquet, the additional six sous per diem the king paid for soldiers’ rations did not cover costs.98 The nuns looked for expedients where they could. Since at least the early 1730s, they were in a running battle with intendants over their practice of keeping the clothing of soldiers who died in their care.99 In October 1749, the new intendant François Bigot proposed that by way of compensation, the king pay three livres for the coffins and funeral masses of dead soldiers, as was done at Louisbourg.100

A Closing Exchange “Upon my leaving, the abbess asked me if I was satisfied with their institution, whereupon I told them that their convent was beautiful enough, though their mode of living was much circumscribed. Thereupon she told me that she and her sisters would heartily ask God to make me a good Roman Catholic. I answered her that I was far more anxious to be and remain a good Christian, and that as a recompense for their honors and prayers I would not fail earnestly to ask God that they too might remain good Christians, because that would be the highest degree of a true religion that a mortal could find. Thereupon she smilingly bade me farewell.”101 At the close of his visit, Kalm reports this final good-natured conversation with Duplessis, the only such personal interchange he mentions in the three convents he inspected. Kalm was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and died one himself. His reference to the restricted nature of the nuns’ lives is a standard Protestant criticism of the cloistered life, although he tempered it with praise of the monastery. It is characteristic of Duplessis’s well-bred politeness that her response was an expression of concern for his spiritual welfare. She managed to be faithful to her duty to proselytize, without turning the exchange into a debate. She cut it off with an amiable smile. Her calm demeanour with Kalm belies her running battle with the civil authorities over hospital expansion and reimbursements during the final years of her second term. She could take pride in the acquisition of Saint-Augustin and in having added new members to the community, but her last decade would not be easy. The War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s strained the community that she

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had so successfully headed during her first term in office in the 1730s. The Hôtel-Dieu’s situation would become even more precarious amid the struggle to control North America in the 1750s, during her last period as superior.

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chapter

6 Writing the Spiritual Life at the Hôtel-Dieu

This chapter and the next on the Annales, along with the section in chapter 4 on her correspondence, point toward the claim in the concluding chapter that Marie-André Duplessis counts among the major women writers of New France. Indeed, because of the range and quality of her writing, she merits recognition as among the premier authors of the colony. New France does not figure prominently in this chapter, as it does in her Histoire and her letters. Rather, her versatility and innovative streak are more in play in these texts dominated by spiritual goals. This chapter first shows how her early innovative texts embody a worldly wit that is unique in Canadian writing of the period. Her brief, more conventional devotional texts are then compared to Geneviève’s more substantial works. Finally, Marie-André’s short narrative texts that she might have eventually incorporated into a sequel to the Annales are analyzed. The emphasis here is on literary features; other chapters also treat many of these texts with an eye to what they reveal about her career and values.

Playing with Worldly Wit Worldly wit, the kind of esprit mondain that denotes playfulness, a taste for the surprising, for a clever turn of thought, is not usually associated with the literature of New France. Instead, accounts of

adventure and discovery, whether the travel narratives of explorers or the spiritual relations of the missionaries, both often cast in the heroic mode, are pervasive. Duplessis’s own best-known text, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, is written largely in the vein of official reporting that characterizes most texts from Canada. In France, the esprit mondain was nurtured at the court and in the salons, and some of it found its way to Quebec in administrative circles. Jean Talon is said to have written poems and epigrams, and the Raudots, father and son, gave regular concerts in the early eighteenth century.1 An incipient salon culture was slow to develop in Canada. Jan Noel, in her history of French Canadian women, attributes a salon to LouiseÉlisabeth Joybert de Vaudreuil, wife of the governor-general, in the first part of the eighteenth century, and in the last two decades of French rule, the circles around the intendant François Bigot featured regular gatherings hosted by women.2 However, literary activities were not as prominent at these latter events as fine food, gambling, and dancing. Worldly wit sometimes found its way into women’s monasteries in seventeenth-century France. At least five seventeenth-century French nuns have been labelled as précieuses.3 Mary M. Rowan, who pioneered the study of relations between convent and salon, has analyzed the writings of perhaps the most accomplished of these five, MarieÉléonor de Rohan, Benedictine abbess in Caen, Malnoue, and Paris, where she participated in salon life.4 In Canada, there are antecedents for this sort of conventual worldly writing. A seventeenth-century superior of the Hôtel-Dieu, Marie-Renée Boulic, mother superior from 1670 to 1676, cultivated it. According to her death notice in the Annales, she possessed “an admirable facility for expressing herself and for writing, whether in prose or poetry. The intendant Monsieur Talon, who dabbled in poetry, sometimes sent her madrigals and epigrams to which she replied on the spot, very wittily, in the same style, and her compositions were esteemed by all who saw them and who were connoisseurs of this sort of writing.”5 Duplessis, who wrote this passage and who did not hesitate to criticize Boulic for being too subservient to the bishop elsewhere in the Annales, reported Boulic’s literary accomplishments with pride. Boulic was witty, articulate, and able to improvise, like salon women in France.

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Three of Duplessis’s texts share this tendency. The first, the 1711 Histoire de Ruma, written only a few years after her own profession as a nun, is her earliest known text.6 The second, the Musique spirituelle, has been edited by a musicologist as a musical treatise.7 Both are short, about 1,500 to 2,000 words long. To these two, a third can be attached, the Dissection spirituelle. It is more extensive – about 9,000 words – and undated, but seems by its title related to the Musique spirituelle, and was likely written soon after. These early texts put worldly wit (esprit) to the service of a religious mission. They are spirituel in the two seemingly contradictory meanings of the word in French as defined in Antoine Furetière’s 1690 Dictionnaire universel: spiritual in the sense of devout, to be sure, but also written “in an ingenious way, full of wit.” This second meaning is the mental subtlety associated with the English word “wit,” that of “a well-informed lively mind that thinks in a pleasing way.” We have seen these texts in other contexts. The Histoire de Ruma could be entitled the “Histoire de Geneviève Duplessis,” because it narrates the life of the younger sister of Marie-André from birth to about age nineteen. Although all the characters certainly existed, they are given names that for the most part come from the Old Testament in the manner of the romans à clef that were so popular in the salons. The Musique spirituelle is not really a music manual, but a treatise on the convent life that finds monastic equivalents for some forty musical terms or practices. The third text, the Dissection spirituelle, is much more straightforward. It earns the name “dissection” because it inventories body parts as well as the faculties of the mind and soul. The goal of the Dissection is to show how each mental or corporal component can be harnessed to contribute to the devout life. It is less focused on the monastic experience than the Musique spirituelle, and much of it is suitable for anyone trying to live as an eighteenth-century Catholic. All three texts treat some aspect of a nun’s vocation: the Histoire tries to recruit Geneviève; the Musique spirituelle stresses the specifics of life in a convent; the Dissection focuses on broader aspects of spirituality. The worldly wit or esprit mondain that makes this spirituality (spiritualité) witty (spirituelle) is not so much style, but the organizing principle of each text. Duplessis’s style has none of

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6.1 The title page of the manuscript of the Musique spirituelle imitates a printed book. The reference to “first edition” adds a playful note. Title pages of books by religious often mentioned that the volume was printed by “permission” of civil or religious authorities, with the permission’s text included in the book. The manuscript contains an approbation by La Colombière, but no permission.

the prominent features commonly attributed to the précieuses: no superlatives, no wordplay, no striking images, no pithy maxims. However, in other fundamental ways, these texts incorporate features that give them a playful cast that echoes salon writing. Collaboration was often a mark of salon literature. The Histoire is, in fact, signed by two authors, although Duplessis is certainly the principal one. She figures as a character in the story under the name Tharsis and would have been privy to details about her sister’s life. However, Marie-Élisabeth Le Moyne de Longueuil, who entered the Hôtel-Dieu about the same time as Marie-André, appears on the title page as an author and in the story as Ariste. The Musique spirituelle is signed by Duplessis alone, but it contains an approbation signed by the monastery’s male superior that is written in the same playful vein as the body of the text. “Having read a work entitled Spiritual Music … we have found nothing in it contrary to the rules and charms of the art of singing.”8 All books dealing with religion published at this time contained such approbations by ecclesiastical censors, but one would have to search long to find another that verges so closely on parody. If Joseph de La Colombière truly wrote it, he entered into the same witty spirit as Duplessis. It could well be that this approbation is a sort of fictional collaboration written by Duplessis herself, instead of the priest. Likewise, these first two texts are placed under the auspices of a key principle of salon literature: pleasure (plaire) and the delightful (agréer). The pleasures of the body and society are not rejected out of hand. The “veracious story” (histoire véritable) is embedded in a preface/letter that presents itself as a link in a continuing exchange of letters between Geneviève that the two nuns have placed under the sign of pleasure: “We have no keener joy than to think of you and to maintain contact with our letters.”9 They claim, first of all, to amuse Geneviève, and the word plaisir  appears nine times and forms of agréable five times. The Musique spirituelle also takes as its premise that the pleasure of secular music is legitimate: “Since music is a very pleasing thing and numerous people learn it with pleasure despite its difficulties, I believe that there exist a good number of religious who will apply themselves with joy to the study of a kind of music that is much more advantageous to know than the ordinary sort.”10 These texts strive to elevate their intended reader to the higher pleasure of writing the spiritual life

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divine love. Geneviève moves through the pleasures of friendship and of physical exercise like horseback riding to those of study, and eventually, study of scripture. The Histoire and the Musique spirituelle are presented as miniature books with all the characteristics of printed ones except the use of type: a title page, numbered pages, and, in the case of the Musique spirituelle, a dedication letter, an approbation, a preface, a table of contents, and even running titles at the top of each page. The production of manuscript books as gifts was a feature, of course, of salon life, the most famous example being La Guirlande de Julie (1641), an anthology of poetry given to the daughter of the hostess of the Rambouillet salon. Utilitarian manuscript copies of texts were often made in convents to save printing costs, but these two manuscripts have the characteristics of presentation copies.11

The Histoire de Ruma The Histoire is said to be a “true story” (histoire véritable), found by chance in a manuscript, that narrates the life of a young girl using largely biblical names. It is really a sort of biographie à clé of Geneviève’s life from her birth in 1692 until 1711: her early education in Quebec; her trip to France in 1700 at age eight when her mother went to Paris to retrieve Marie-André; her three-year stay as a boarder at the Hôtel-Dieu; and her more serious life after leaving the monastery in 1710. The geography of the tale is vague. Geneviève is said to be born in an unnamed “barbarous land” to parents from Europe who remain attached to their “fatherland.” Neither Canada nor France is identified by name. The found manuscript was a frequent convention in early modern fiction to lend an air of authenticity. Likewise, the notion of a fictional story as an “histoire véritable” was a common device. What is unique here is that the story is indeed “veracious,” although presented with all the markers of fiction used in this period. Enough of the details given about Geneviève’s life can be corroborated from other sources to suggest that those details that are only found here are equally true. Like the romans à clé of Madeleine de Scudéry, real people are disguised with assumed names, here mostly from the Bible.

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The biblical names chosen might puzzle readers who are not immersed in scripture as Geneviève is said to have become.12 Why would the dear grandmother of the two Duplessis sisters be given the name Athalie, the murderess made famous by Jean Racine’s tragedy? Other names, such as Ruma, are obscure place names. It is likely that Duplessis had access to an edition of the Bible published by Antoine Vitré in the mid-seventeenth century that included in its appendices an “Explanation of Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek Names.” The Jesuit college in Quebec owned a 1702 Latin edition that could have been lent to her (translations from a 1701 edition are cited here).13 Ruma means “elevated,” probably a reference to Geneviève’s aspiration to higher forms of the devout life. Her father Georges Duplessis appears as Abinadab, the name of at least two minor figures in the first book of Samuel. The name means “father of good will.” His wife Marie Leroy appears as Attalia, a city mentioned in the book of Acts, which means “one who augments or nourishes.” The name Athalie, given to the Duplessis sisters’ pious grandmother Andrée Douin, means “Time of the Lord.” There is only one close parallel between a name in the Histoire and a biblical figure. The friend of the father of Ruma – probably the pious Paul Dupuy – who taught her Latin is named Jérobaal, another name for Gideon. The authors of the Histoire explain the choice in this one case: “The historian names him Jerobaal and notes that this name suited him very well since he always quarrelled with the idols of the world.”14 The game for Geneviève would be trying to use her biblical knowledge to understand the choice of names. The Histoire includes features of another salon genre: the portrait. We learn that Geneviève had a high forehead, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and wore a hat “with the best grace in the world.” Her character is of course more important than these physical traits: her good disposition that pleases everyone, her serious temperament, and her vivacity. Her intelligence made her a quick learner who was able to rapidly pick up enough Latin to translate the New Testament. Although she spent her childhood enjoying all the pleasures a good upbringing entails, she was never tempted by “false worldly lustre.” She was never prey to coquetry or to the “innocent passions” that she awoke in young men.

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As her character matured, Geneviève became more serious and devout and thus, according to her sister, was destined to enter the convent. To sum up, because of “her wisdom, her piety, and her learning,” Geneviève could be counted among “the illustrious women of her century.”15 In other words, she was worthy to figure in one of the many books that came out of the salons celebrating notable ladies, such as the Galerie des femmes fortes (1647) of the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne or Les Femmes illustres (1642) of Madeleine de Scudéry. The HôtelDieu, in fact, owns a copy of one such collection of biographies that the two Duplessis sisters could well have been familiar with, Hilarion de Coste’s Éloges et Vies des reynes, princesses, dames et damoiselles illustres en piété, courage et doctrine, first published in 1630. Hilarion de Coste specifically singled out in his table of contents women like Geneviève who displayed a love of learning and letters, in addition to the queens and princesses he featured. The Histoire incorporates one final element of salon writing: an invitation to participate in the act of writing, in this case by completing the story of Ruma. We are told that the last pages, which contain the end of Ruma’s story, have been ripped out of the manuscript. “We believe, my dear sister, that you will have as much regret as we do about not knowing the ending; we have reason to believe it to be happy after such a beautiful start.”16 The happy ending, of course, would be for Geneviève to join her sister and Longueuil as nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu, which she indeed did two years later in 1713. She took the name in religion held by Marie-Élisabeth de Longueuil de l’Enfant-Jésus, who had died in December 1711 in a typhus epidemic that killed six hospitallers, becoming Geneviève de l’Enfant-Jésus. The Histoire de Ruma might well be considered Canada’s first literary fiction. An even shorter oriental tale, “Zélim,” signed only by a “Canadien curieux,” which appeared in Gazette littéraire de Montréal in late 1778, has long been the contender for this honour. Written in the vein of Voltaire’s early contes philosophiques, Zadig and Memnon, “Zélim” tells the story of a poor gardener who bewails his humble state. Only when he happens upon the sultan who also is lamenting his misfortunes does he realize that wealth and power do not insure happiness.17 A reader unaware that Duplessis’s “histoire véritable” has a factual basis would take it for fiction, since it uses multiple conventions of the novel of the period. By purporting to be fiction, 138

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the Histoire is fiction and not biography. After her sister’s death in 1756, Duplessis did write a biographical account of her sister’s life in the obituary notice that she circulated to convents of the order. It follows the conventions of this genre of convent writing and will be examined to conclude this chapter. How to account for this early worldly wit? The young co-authors of the Histoire de Ruma were unique among their cohort of nuns because they had been exposed to fine society in Paris before entering the convent. Longueuil was the granddaughter of the richest man in Montreal, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil (1626–85). Her father, likewise named Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil (1656–1729), was the only Canadian to be named a baron by Louis XIV, in recognition of his service in the wars against the Iroquois, and at the time of the Histoire de Ruma’s composition was the king’s lieutenant in Montreal. In 1691, at the age of seven, his daughter followed him to France, where she lived in the household of the Princess Palatine, Charlotte-Élisabeth de Bavière, the king’s sister-in-law, who corresponded with her after her return to Canada in the late 1690s. According to the Annales, “This princess always honoured her with a singular friendship and herself gave assurances of it by means of her letters and gifts that she sent after her profession.”18 The Princess Palatine held the title of “Madame” as the wife of “Monsieur,” the king’s brother, and lived between the Palais-Royal in Paris, an estate at Saint-Cloud, and apartments at the château of Versailles. She devoured French novels and possessed an extensive collection of French fiction in her personal library.19 Duplessis’s family connections were much less illustrious, but still positioned her to observe polite society. She had spent much time in Marie-Anne Leroy’s dressmaking shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Like Marie-Catherine, she would have had contact with the elegant customers, some of whom likely invited her to their homes as they invited Marie-Catherine. Her maternal great-uncle held a minor position in the household of the duchesse de Bourgogne, wife of the heir to the throne, and she might have visited Versailles through him. Once in Canada after 1701, she had contact through her father with the intendants Champigny and Raudot, whose households were local centres of culture. In addition, Duplessis described what might be called a season of wit in fall 1711, after the shipwreck in the Saint Lawrence of an English fleet poised to attack Quebec. When the writing the spiritual life

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news of Walker’s disaster arrived, according to Duplessis, “Parnassus became accessible to everyone.” Even women, priests, and religious entered into the poetic spirit to “exercise their wit and their pen on this subject.”20 The whole town became poets and composed verse and songs to celebrate Canada’s deliverance.21 It may be that the next year this contagious spirit inspired Duplessis to direct her wit to attracting her sister into the Hôtel-Dieu, and vocal music, in fact, is at the centre of the second text that embodies this playful wit.

The Musique spirituelle and Dissection spirituelle If the Histoire uses such salon genres as the roman à clé and the portrait, the ingenuity at the heart of the Musique spirituelle is in the parallels between music and monasticism. Indeed, the organizing principle of the Musique and the Dissection is not narrative as in the Histoire, but conceptual. Seeking out parallels is a staple of convent writing which was encouraged by the figurative exegesis that was pervasive in devotional writing. However, the parallels were commonly between two spiritual elements. For example, Angélique de SaintJean d’Arnauld d’Andilly listed ways in which the situation of her persecuted Port-Royal nuns echoed that of Christ in the Eucharist in her “On the Conformity of the State to which Port-Royal is Reduced to the State of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.”22 Duplessis innovates by making something secular her starting point for the analogies. She organized her text as an orderly progression through the basics of music, such as was found in many handbooks of the period. It starts with scales, keys, sharps, and flats and the conventions of musical notation. It goes on to consider a number of sophisticated vocal ornaments prized by Baroque performers, before turning to rests, accompaniments, and tempos. While plainchant was only found in religious music, such ornaments were used by composers in both secular works and sacred motets, the latter of which the nuns sang in simplified versions in their church. The concluding section presents a synthesis in which the mother superior harmonizes the entire musical enterprise. Duplessis showed considerable mental dexterity in proposing her forty or so parallels. Some of the comparisons are obvious and rather facile: the mother superior is the director; the scales are the rule and constitutions. Some are 140

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particularly inspired: being in tune is when one is at peace with God, one’s self, and one’s neighbour. Despite the description by its editor as a music manual, the Musique spirituelle is truly a manual of monastic life that aims at reminding the nuns of community practices. There is little or no explanation of the highly technical musical terms the Musique spirituelle uses. It takes for granted that the nuns are familiar with such ornaments of Baroque vocal performance as mordents, vibratos, legatos, trills, and quarter rests. Moreover, many of the parallels it draws are not as obvious as the one between the mother superior and the director of an orchestra, and this is Duplessis’s further innovation. Most of her parallels assume that the nuns have enough technical expertise to recognize the parallels. Just as the Histoire de Ruma proposed to Geneviève the intellectual pleasure of recognizing the appropriateness of the biblical names given to members of her family and friends, the Musique invites the nuns to grasp the aptness of the musical-monastic parallels, and indeed to take pleasure in the process. Some of the less obvious ones might even elicit a touch of admiration for the ingenuity of the author. B flat is the contemplative life of a nun given over to prayer because it requires a singer to lower the voice a half tone. B sharp, which raises the voice a half tone, is equated with the active life, that is to say with service in the hospital wards. B natural is the mixed life, both contemplative and active, i.e. the life of a cloistered hospital nun of the Hôtel-Dieu, who spends time both in the choir and in the hospital. Such a taste for the surprising, for the unusual, is typical of salon conceits. Nonetheless, one wonders if it does not distract from Duplessis’s expectation that the parallels will also lead her readers to reflect on their monastic vocation. The third text that seems to belong to this series, the unpublished Dissection spirituelle, incorporates worldly wit only in its title and marks a step away from the intellectual pleasure that the first two texts offer.23 The anatomical terminology of the title is justified by a listing of some thirty faculties – corporal (eyes, ears, tongue, etc.), mental (memory, understanding, imagination, etc.), and spiritual (soul, conscience, free will, etc.) – much as the Musique spirituelle is structured around a themed list of musical features. However, there is no striving after surprising conceits and unexpected parallels. writing the spiritual life

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Instead, one finds insightful ascetic comments on how each faculty can be offered to God in order to live a holy life. The Dissection sets out to be both a work of thanksgiving for the physical, mental, and spiritual gifts that God has given and a work of reparation, since these gifts have been misdirected to worldly pleasures. It is a discreetly personal text. Unlike the Musique spirituelle, whose parallels are set out impersonally, the Dissection is written in the first person. The “I” is clearly identifiable with Duplessis herself for those familiar with her calm level-headed temperament, and with what she identified as her own failings. While most of the suggestions for reform are suitable to any pious person, lay or religious, the Dissection’s power comes from the urgency with which Duplessis prays for assistance in redressing her personal faults such as impatience and discouragement. Occasionally some aspect of her own life as a hospital nun’s life is evoked. For example, in discussing the sense of smell, Duplessis states, “I, who am a sinner, search you out while passing by the putrid odors of a hospital and after having been so unfortunate to have breathed with pleasure the poisoned air of the world, I am punished for my past sensuality by the bad odor that the poor patients give off.” Although structured around parallels just as the Histoire and the Musique are, the Dissection signals a move away from an early aesthetic of playful wit that takes pleasure in recognizing subtle parallels. It corresponds to the spiritual maturation suggested by her correspondence with her brother during his first years as a Jesuit. The Musique spirituelle merely notes the parallel between music and the monastic life, leaving the reader to work out the rationale for the link in her mind; the Dissection devotes a paragraph to each faculty, spelling out explicitly how each can be harnessed for the spiritual life. Duplessis designed it as a systematic aid to mental prayer, much like her other shorter devotional texts that have been preserved in the Hôtel-Dieu archives, texts that are thoroughly conventional. Thus, while the Dissection lists thirty faculties, one for each day of a month, the Retreat on the Chief Important Truths of Our Holy Life as Religious (Retraite sur les principales et grandes verités de notre sainte religion) has three short meditations for each day of a weeklong retreat.24 A typical retreat with meditations on sin, death, hell, and judgment, it uses Ignatian features such as reflections 142

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on the two standards from Loyola’s spiritual exercises. A shorter text has twelve meditations on the virtues of the Virgin Mary for Saturdays, the day reserved for Marian devotions.25 Another text is for Mondays, the Devotion to the Holy Spirit for the Seven Mondays between Easter and Pentecost (Dévotion au Saint-Esprit pour les sept lundis qui se trouvent entre Pâques et la Pentecôte);26 each day is given over to one of the seven traditional gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, fortitude, etc.27 According to the 1760 circular letter written after her death by Ursule-Marie Chéron, Duplessis wrote such devotional texts for her private use, but they were quickly shared within the community.28 She must have also had in mind her duty to guide the spiritual life of her community as novice director and later as mother superior. The texts could have become the basis of talks delivered in chapter meetings or been given to nuns making retreats as aids to their meditations. In his letter of condolences the same year, Jean-Olivier Briand praised these oral presentations that were part of the duties of every conscientious head of a women’s community. They are “words full of unction and the spirit of God by which she tried either to console you, to lead you to virtue, or to inspire in you the zest for the things of God with which she was so imbued.”29

Devotional Writing by Geneviève de l’Enfant-Jésus Much more substantial than these texts by Marie-André that consist of short paragraph-length reflections are two longer manuscripts by her sister Geneviève, The Manna of Bethlehem (La Manne de Bethléem),30 dated 1732, and the 1745 Reflection on the Mystery of the Ascension of Our Lord (Réflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension de notre Seigneur).31 La Manne de Bethléem is structured, like her sister’s Dissection, as a day-by-day meditation guide, with forty meditation topics, instead of the thirty of the Dissection. However, it has a different dynamic. Reflections in the mind are designed to activate the imagination, the physical senses, and the emotions, and lead them to an affective response that relies on what Geneviève calls the interior senses of the soul, as opposed to the exterior bodily ones. The movement that she envisages here is typical of eighteenth-century spirituality. It begins in the body and mind and goes to the soul that ideally goes writing the spiritual life

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on to experience the spiritual effusions found in contemplation. The silent eloquence of the Infant Jesus that Geneviève seeks to promote is heart-to-heart communication in contemplative prayer. It is a very personal text in that it focuses on the Christ child, Geneviève’s name as a nun. Geneviève’s Reflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension, dated thirteen years later, likewise deals with the union of the divine and human nature in Christ – she even uses the technical theological term, the hypostatic union – but in a more intense register. Rather than a series of considerations proposed for meditation, it is a colloquy in which the meditant converses with God, who replies, not directly in dialogue, but in the form of scriptural passages that address her concerns. The Réflexion illustrates the best conventions of spiritual writing of the day: it is grounded in theology, uses citations of scripture and liturgical texts, not as illustration, but as part of the dialogue, and generates emotional involvement by use of an elevated rhetorical style. What did this devotional writing mean to the sisters? Both had complained as early as 1716 to their brother about their frustration that their duties as hospitallers interfered with their aspirations to become “great contemplatives.”32 In dedicating La Manne to the Carmelites of France, Geneviève regretted that Providence did not allow her to fulfill her aspiration to a purely contemplative life such as theirs. Indeed, the French crown only allowed service-oriented religious orders in the colony. Writing her devotional texts was a sort of compensation. “It is, therefore, to temper the annoyances that arrive to slow my fervour in the midst of subhuman duties that I applied myself to draw up forty holy points that will only inspire feelings of tenderness and supernatural love in me, while I fulfill the duties of an office that is as much the opposite of meditation as it is distracting in itself, since I have been long entrusted with the temporal business of a hospital.”33 “Inspire” is the key word here. Her writing is not a report of spiritual experiences she has had, as are the texts of the Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnation published under the title Retraites by her son, which her modern editor Albert Jamet says are more accounts of her prayer life than a retreat manual.34 Geneviève instead claimed to write to stimulate her own devotions to greater heights. She did share her texts with the community, as did her older sister, but the 144

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initial impulse was personal. It was the method she used to further what she called in a moment of self-depreciation in 1741 “the little spiritual space that I cultivate.”35 What is perhaps the most noteworthy is that she not only sent copies to France, as well as sharing them with her sister nuns, but envisaged their publication. La Manne, dedicated to the Carmelites of Paris, must have been sent to them soon after its composition in 1732. Six years later, her brother reported receiving a text from her on “the meditations of the mysteries of the blessed childhood of our Lord” – probably La Manne – that he would try to have printed.36 He does not, however, seem to have been successful. Although in the heyday of convent expansion in the seventeenth century, devotional texts by nuns had been published, there was little market for this sort of spiritual literature by the 1730s. Geneviève would have to be content with circulating her manuscript versions through convent channels. As she wrote her apothecary correspondent Jacques Féret in Dieppe when she sent him another text in 1743, “It is a small work by a nun which may edify a lay person a bit. You will show it to our hospitallers if you judge that it will please them.”37

Storytelling and Devotion Many of Marie-André’s own writings from her time in administration relate events connected with the community. One series deals with the inception of three devotional practices in the community. The first, On the Devotion to the Holy Family (De la dévotion à la sainte famille), dated to the early 1730s, narrates the establishment of the confraternity devoted to the Holy Family in the colony. These events took place in the seventeenth century, and the Hôtel-Dieu is not mentioned in Duplessis’s account, although one of its benefactresses, Marie-Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust, was an early promoter of the devotion.38 She donated a painting of the Holy Family that was displayed in the monastery’s chapel until the 1755 fire destroyed it.39 Two others relate the establishment of devotions within the monastery in which Duplessis played a direct role: the statue of Notre-Dame de Toute-Grâce, which the community received in 1738, and the account of the Profaned Crucifix that Bishop Pontbriand entrusted to it in 1744.40 These texts institutionalize the memory writing the spiritual life

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of new devotions being added to the community’s repertoire. The Annales themselves are studded with such accounts of the origin of similar earlier devotions introduced into community life. A crucial text that would have eventually found its way into the Annales is Duplessis’s account of the 1755 fire that destroyed the hospital. It had, of course, a more immediate goal than the long-term memory of the community: securing the aid of friends and protectors to meet urgent needs and finance reconstruction. Duplessis crafted a narrative of the fire that was sent with a personalized appeal to potential donors in France.41 Just as these cover letters show Duplessis’s mastery of the rhetoric of supplication, her account displays the best of her narrative talents. The prose is spare and thus echoes the rapidity with which the fire destroyed the hospital complex, one building after the next, in less than an hour. She highlights three dramatic episodes: the rescue of a dying nun carried from the infirmary in a blanket; the death of the only victim, a nun who perished inside the building when she returned to her room; the escape of a nun trapped on the fourth floor who courageously made her way down a ladder that brave rescuers had to lift with their arms because it was too short to reach her. In this last vignette, she lingers over the multiple obstacles that the nun had to overcome: the first ladder used fell apart; the second was too short; the nun had to slide down part of it when steps were missing; she clung to it with one hand while brushing away embers with the other, etc. It occupies about 20 percent of the 1,500-word account. In itself, it is a gripping story that sums up the resilience of all the nuns in this disaster. Duplessis did not reveal in this official version that the nun in question was her sister Geneviève. Only in the version she gave to Marie-Catherine Hecquet did she express her own fear: “Judge my distress on her account since the fire cut me off from going to rescue her.”42 In the official account, she evokes pity by stressing how the community lost everything to the conflagration. She concludes by describing the generosity with which the Ursulines and Jesuits shared their quarters and supplies with the homeless hospitallers, a generosity Duplessis hoped her correspondents would imitate. She ends laconically by noting that six weeks after the fire, the nuns reopened hospital wards in their temporary lodgings, all the better to underline their social utility. 146

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Biographical Death Notices When she finished the Musique spirituelle in late 1718, she was already embarked upon the book that would be her legacy, the Annales. She did not indicate if she envisaged someday writing a sequel when she finished them around 1720. A book that she likely did plan a few years later, but also never wrote, was a life of her mentor Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace. Geneviève Dupuy de la Croix, the mother superior at that time, signed the circular letter after Juchereau’s death in 1723. It promises a biography, perhaps along the lines of the one Claude Martin wrote of his Ursuline mother or the one the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau wrote for Catherine de Saint-Augustin.43 The following year, the Jesuit explorer Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix sent a presentation copy of his 1724 biography of Marie de l’Incarnation to “les dames Duplessis,” whom he had no doubt met during his stay in Quebec.44 But the vogue for lives of foundresses and mystic nuns, so popular in the seventeenth century, had passed, and Duplessis would have had difficulty finding a publisher in France for a biography of a superior whose talents were chiefly those of an administrator, just as Geneviève found no publisher for her devotional texts. A final series of texts written after the 1755 fire shows Duplessis’s skill in adapting a biographical genre of convent writing, the circular letter requesting the prayer of houses of her order throughout France for the souls of deceased members. Such letters were customary in the new orders founded in the seventeenth century that had many convents dispersed across France, such as the Carmelites, Ursulines, and Visitandines. Sometimes called “summaries of the life and virtues” (abrégés de la vie et des vertus), they conform to a template that first shows how the deceased came to discover her vocation and enter the convent, and ends with an edifying account of her death. The deceased’s life itself was not necessarily narrated chronologically, but was often organized around the chief virtues she embodied, her particular devotions, and her quest for monastic perfection. In its first decades, the Hôtel-Dieu produced many excellent examples of the genre that include the circular letters for the three foundresses who arrived from Dieppe in 1639, Marie Guenet, Anne Le Cointre, and Marie Forestier.45 Duplessis adapted such letters as the basis of the biographical account that the Annales devotes to every nun upon writing the spiritual life

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her death. None that she wrote as mother superior prior to the 1755 fire has survived. If the first goal of the letters was to shorten the deceased’s time in purgatory by means of the solicited prayers, the second was to reinforce the order’s value system by holding the dead nun up as much as possible as a model of the collective identity. Elizabeth Rapley warns against taking circular letters at face value: “As accurate portrayals of real people they must be taken with a large pinch of salt … It was not the true character of the deceased that counted, but rather the way in which it could be used to personify the [order’s] institute.”46 Although circular letters were officially designed to solicit prayers, Duplessis turned them into a tool for soliciting aid from monasteries in France by informing them of the needs of her house. Eleven circular letters written by Duplessis in her hand after the fire survive in the Hôtel-Dieu archives. The first three narrate the deaths of the two nuns who died at the time of the fire and of a third who died caring for the sick during that summer when the hospital reopened in the Jesuit college. Duplessis was assistant and secretary at this time; at the bottom of the first one, her signature has been crossed out and the superior’s written below it, as if Duplessis’s first impulse had been to send it out over her name. They are dated 10 September and would have been dispatched at the same time as her “official” account of the fire in the vessels departing for France that fall. The first account, which narrates the death of Marie-Anne de Lajoüe, who died when she returned to her room, begins, not with any statement about her, but with a paragraph describing the total ruin of the monastery and hospital and the nuns’ distress. The paragraph concludes, “we had to sacrifice not only our monastery, but also furniture, house linen, clothing, beds, etc. which could only happen, my reverend mother, with much bitterness, although we submit to the harsh decrees of divine Providence.” Only after this very unusual preface does Duplessis launch into “the tragic death” of the nun. She says little of her life, perhaps because there was little to say. Lajoüe had been received out of gratitude to her father, the architect of the 1695 wing of the hospital, despite the fact that she limped. Instead, in a more traditional way, the letter tells how Lajoüe had had premonitions of an imminent death and had recently made a retreat that prepared her well.47

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The second letter capitalizes on the dramatic circumstances of the death of a nun who was dying in the infirmary when the fire broke out. It adds details not in the “official” account about how she was carried from house to house outside the convent as one after the other caught fire. Her identity, Marie-Joseph Maillou, is only revealed halfway through the account, as if the fire is the true subject of the letter. To show the solidarity of the nuns in Quebec, her funeral at the Ursuline convent is described as the most imposing ever held for any nun in the colony; the ceremony featured ninety-two Ursuline and Hôtel-Dieu nuns, each holding a candle. Again, little is said of her life, which is not surprising since she spent thirteen of her nineteen years as a nun in the infirmary suffering from lung disease. The chief virtue attributed to her is her “endurance in continually suffering,” but she too had prepared well for death.48 The third is the most conventional. It quickly gives an account of the unusual way in which Marie-Marthe des Roches entered the religious life when she claimed a dowry that a younger sister had hoped to use. The letter ends as part of the campaign of solicitation for the Hôtel-Dieu by noting soberly that her death was from smallpox contracted from patients at the newly reopened hospital. The liturgical pomp at her funeral, “this lugubrious ceremony,” is likewise narrated in detail. Duplessis shows the Jesuits to be as welcoming as the Ursulines described in the previous letter, another example of solidarity among religious orders.49 Duplessis, who had become superior once again in March 1756, wrote and signed the fourth and last letter of the series.50 It is the only one of the four which follows the traditional template. What makes it unique is that Marie-André was writing about “my sole sister,” Geneviève, who died on 12 May of that year. She opened the letter by acknowledging her personal “sharp sorrow” and closed with an expression of gratitude for the support her sister nuns had shown: “I cannot tell you, my dear mother, how much all our nuns give her signs of sincere affection, as well as to me in a such a painful circumstance since this separation could only be extremely painful to two sisters more united by inclination than blood. This redoubles my attachment to a house to which I owe so much, and it commits me to spare nothing in proving my gratitude to it.”

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Beyond this poignant expression of rare emotion in Duplessis, the letter offers a unique opportunity. In the case of Geneviève, there are multiple controls to assess her circular letter. The Histoire de Ruma, written when Geneviève was nineteen, in hope of persuading her to become a nun, can be compared to this retrospective on her career forty-five years later, and although Marie-André’s report to her Jesuit brother of their sister’s death is missing, François-Xavier’s response survives. The circular letter slights details about Geneviève’s youth, to make room for her years as a nun: the same early qualities that show up in the Histoire are listed – innocence, good nature, and talents – but without illustrations. The letter does not even mention her trip to France in 1700. Instead, it highlights her reaction to the death of two nuns during her three-year stay as a boarder. This event is not mentioned in the Histoire, even though, according to the circular letter, it was the seed of her vocation. Its importance was evidently not recognized by Marie-André at the time she tried to convince Geneviève to enter the convent in the Histoire. Geneviève’s twentyeight years of indefatigable service as hospital business manager are the pivot of her life as a nun in the circular letter. She did not let the thirty years she suffered from the lung disease that finally killed her prevent her from her duty. Nor did she allow the incessant worries over the hospital’s funding to keep her from developing a deep prayer life: “When she had been kept away from prayer during the day, she spent her evenings satisfying her desire for it, and only found respite in prayer.” However, the letter does not refer to the devotional texts she wrote that grew out of these meditations. She was buried in the vaults of the Jesuit church because the nuns were still housed in a wing of their college after the fire. She died a “gentle death” that conforms to the ideal of the good convent death, according to the circular letter. Fortified with the last sacraments, she was surrounded by part of the community. No mention, however, is made of the pious resignation that often features in such accounts. In fact, François-Xavier’s reply in 1757 to Marie-André’s private report of their sister’s death in a letter to him suggests that at some point in Geneviève’s two-month final illness, her disposition was not entirely peaceful: “Given this abandonment in which the superior faculties remain entirely submissive and attached 150

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to the holy will of God, the complaints that our dear sister expressed at that time were only the effects of her desire in the last moments of her life to be more intimately united than ever with her divine spouse.”51 He excused Geneviève’s outbursts as involuntary reactions of the body, despite her mind and soul’s submission to God’s will. Like her mother Marie Leroy, Geneviève was quick-tempered and impatient (vive), and as with her mother in 1732, these traits did not disappear in her last days. Marie-André could have included similar pious comments in the circular letter, but preferred that Geneviève’s death be entirely peaceful in the public record. She presents Geneviève’s model death in the circular letter as a release from the fundamental tension that troubled her during her entire life, the tension between the active and contemplative life that was at the heart of the hospital nun’s vocation. Geneviève had constantly complained that her duties as business manager prevented her from attaining her spiritual aspirations. Her reward was to achieve them in death, thus confirming the order’s institute that combined the life of prayer of Mary and the service of Martha. The circular letters are far removed from the wit that gave Marie-André’s early writing a unique flavour. When she became an administrator, the institutional needs that shape the conventions of convent writing dominated her texts. However, her skill as a storyteller and her personal involvement with the subject at hand give even these official texts, especially the ones written in the years after the 1755 fire, an edge that sets them apart from those written by her seventeenth-century predecessors.

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chapter

7 Duplessis Takes Women’s History Public: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec

The Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, written between 1717 and 1721, are a unique example of an extremely common monastic genre. Most convents produced such histories of their houses, and, indeed, chronicles survive from five of the six women’s communities founded in Canada in the seventeenth century.1 But the 1751 publication in Montauban of the Hôtel-Dieu’s annals makes them the only Canadian ones to appear in print during the French regime. In fact, they seem to be the only annals of any French-speaking community of nuns published before the Revolution. The Benedictine Albert Jamet published a monumental critical edition in 1939 in honour of the tercentenary of the hospital. Dom Jamet promoted the Annales as “one of the most precious sources for the history of New France.”2 The focus here is on women writing their own history and what happens when this history written for themselves is shared with others. The Annales are, in fact, the effort of a largely Canadian-born group of women to protect and further their collective interests within colonial strictures. Sorting out Duplessis’s role in the communal writing practices that produced the Annales is a first step. Her view of Canada’s current spiritual and political situation as a struggling colony shaped how she traced the Hôtel-Dieu’s history from its founding. Nor did she shrink from tackling the gender tensions between the nuns and their ecclesiastical superiors. Finally, the circumstances

that led Duplessis to seek publication of this in-house document point to how a male editor adapted the Annales for a wider public.

Duplessis’s Composite Text The manuscript of the Annales in the archives of the Hôtel-Dieu, written in Duplessis’s hand, consists of 229 numbered folios arranged much as a printed book.3 A title page gives the title in large characters – Histoire abrégée de l’Établissement de l’hôtel-Dieu de Quebec, fondé par l’illustre Dame Marie de Vignerot, Duchesse d’Aiguillon, en l’année 1636 – and the name of the author – Par la Rde Mère Jeanne-françoise Juchereau de St-Ignace, ancienne Religieuse de ce Monastere.4 Three short texts on unnumbered folios pages precede the annals proper: a dedication to the Virgin, a letter to current and future nuns of the house that Juchereau herself signed in the manuscript, and a short history of the colony called a foreword. An index and biography of Juchereau follow the historical account, again on unnumbered folios. The annals themselves proceed in strict chronological fashion, year by year, with no chapter divisions. The only divisions in the text are subtitles in the pages’ margins that give the dates of events and briefly summarize them. However, what presents itself as a unified book with Juchereau as its author is really a composite text, compiled and largely written by Duplessis. Juchereau points to one aspect of the collective composition of the Annales in her letter. She takes pride in having persuaded Marie Forestier de Saint-Bonaventure-de-Jésus, the last surviving of the three founding nuns who arrived from France in 1639, to recount the beginning of the house before Forestier slipped into senility. The Annales thus begin, after a brief introduction, with Forestier’s account, which Jamet signalled by adding quotation marks not found in the manuscript for thirteen pages. Although the typographical marks that signal direct quotation fade away, the narration continues seamlessly with the same voice in the first person plural throughout the book (with occasional first-person-singular asides). In her prefatory letter, Juchereau describes the technique: “We preserve and cherish the little notebooks in which Mother Bonaventure de Jésus wrote what happened during her time. Her style is simple and naïve. I have tried to imitate it by continuing as she had begun, that duplessis takes women’s history public

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7.1 The title page of the manuscript of the Annales features the arms of the Hôtel-Dieu’s foundress, Marie de Vignerot, duchesse d’Aiguillon. Duplessis dates the duchess’s decision to finance the hospital to 1636, although the contact was only signed in 1637, and the nuns arrived on 1 August 1639. It includes the Jesuit motto, “To the Greater Glory of God.”

is to say that I have related the events that preceded me as those who saw them might have.” In addition, Juchereau located accounts made by several other members, including Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Such an effort to document the early days of a convent by collecting the founders’ recollections was common practice in early modern convents. Perhaps the best known were gathered by the seventeenth-century abbess of Port-Royal in Paris, Angélique de Saint-Jean d’Arnauld d’Andilly. She never turned this raw material into a single narrative account, though, and the documents were eventually published in three volumes in 1742 by supporters of the destroyed monastery under the title Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal. However, the composite nature of the Annales goes well beyond the incorporation of such accounts. Part of the great reform movement that reorganized French convent life in the first half of the seventeenth century was the expectation that monasteries keep careful records.5 Well-managed communities kept registers of entrances, professions, and deaths of members; minutes of deliberations recorded chapter meetings; necrologies recounted the lives of deceased members and benefactors; circular letters were sent to other houses on such occasions. The Annales are based on such documentation, noting for example the results of elections, the entrance of members, and important business decisions. The Annales provide a short account of the principal virtues of each deceased member based on the necrologies; these can vary in length from a single line for young members to several pages for prominent ones. Other convent documents, most of them written by the nuns, are incorporated directly into the narrative: contracts, alliances with other communities, supplications to the Virgin Mary, an amende honorable (a sort of ceremonial judicial penance) addressed to Saint Joseph in reparation for blasphemies. The Annales are thus a compendium of many of the genres of writing practised by nuns.6 Juchereau largely concealed a second aspect of the Annales’s collaborative nature. In her letter to her fellow sisters that serves as preface, Juchereau described her role in terms that would lead one to believe that she also wrote it: “I begin this narrative … I note briefly … I have tried to imitate it.” However, although she oversaw the project, she left its execution to her secretary Duplessis de SainteHélène. The Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Chardon wrote Duplessis, “Mother duplessis takes women’s history public

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Saint-Ignace gave you all the information for this history. She selected you to execute her project and to give form to the substance that she furnished you, by relying on you for its style, its ordering, its structure and piety, as she testified to me.”7 Duplessis was thirty when the sixty-seven-year-old Juchereau, who had just finished her last term as superior, singled her out for this task around 1717. The humility so prized by nuns makes it appropriate that there is no indication in the Annales themselves of Duplessis’s role. Although the ten years since Duplessis’s entrance in 1707 account for only 13 percent of the eighty-year span that her Annales chronicle, she devoted 23 percent of the text in Jamet’s edition to the years she knew personally. At first glance, readers may have difficulty discerning any overarching point of view on the eighty years of the community’s history narrated in the Annales. Events are recounted on a year-by-year basis, with only an occasional glance at what is to come, as if the Annales had been composed incrementally, like many convent journals, by annually adding a summary of the year’s events. However, the book was composed in a relatively short period between 1717 and 1721 according to Jamet,8 and one can detect an assessment of the community’s situation around 1720 that is projected retrospectively back to 1636. The community itself is spiritually sound and functions in an efficient, harmonious manner; yet its financial underpinnings are uncertain, due not to any imprudence of the nuns, but to the colony’s poor economic climate. This view echoes Duplessis’s stance in her opposition to Saint-Vallier’s plans in August 1719. From its first pages, the Annales cite examples of the sanctity and dedication of the nuns and of their impact on those that they serve. Furthermore, there is no hint of scandal or lack of orthodoxy. The annalist repeatedly takes pride that no Jansenism taints the house, reflecting Duplessis’s ties to her Jesuit brother.9 This worthiness has been rewarded. By 1720, the three French nuns who arrived in 1639 had multiplied into sixty, almost all of whom were Canadian-born. In 1698, the community and hospital had moved into expanded quarters. Thus, the Annales are not an appeal to recover some lost spiritual ideal of the foundresses. Rather, future nuns are enjoined to remain worthy of a treasure they still possess by assuring that only worthy novices be received as members. 156

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The threats in the late 1710s were seen as chiefly due to the degradation of the colony’s economy. For the year 1671, in the wake of the expansion of the population under Jean Talon’s leadership, the annalist had seen signs for great hope: “God having given his blessing to his works by its great success, Canada in little time saw itself in the midst of abundance that gave reason to hope that it would be one day a very fine land.”10 But by the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was clear that such expectations had not been fulfilled. Witness the annalist’s plea for help that closes the foreword: “May God grant that Louis XV take into his affection this poor colony that … finds itself reduced to desperate straits so that under his reign we rise up again from the miseries that are heaped upon us.”11 In fact, “this poor land” becomes a leitmotif to describe New France. Writing during the Regency, in the wake of both the bankruptcy of John Law’s bank that reduced the value of the community’s investments and the devaluation of the colonial playing-card money,12 the annalist found herself a member of a struggling community in a struggling colony. This pessimistic view of Canada’s situation is probably closer to Duplessis’s than Juchereau’s. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau was the quintessential Canadian. Linked by both her father and mother to the earliest and most distinguished inhabitants of New France,13 she represented the transition in the community from a French foundation to a truly Canadian institution. On the other hand, Duplessis’s colonial roots were more recent. Moreover, during the years she was composing the Annales, her mother was struggling with the debts left by her father.

Corporate Pietas / Corporate Know-How The importance of the Annales to the community is signalled by the fact that the order’s Règlements list a monastery’s annals as the first of many books and registers that the secretary must keep.14 The corporate interests that shape the Annales are explicit in its three introductory texts and in its closing pages. Instruction and edification go hand in hand in furthering the ultimate goal of the Annales proposed in the book’s dedication to the Virgin: the continued spiritual health of the community. “May this house that is so especially dedicated to you be a school of virtue and perfection duplessis takes women’s history public

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in which your servants grow in holiness; may fervour, charity, and observance of the rule grow there every day.”15 In the letter to current and future members that follows this invocation, Juchereau states that learning the community’s history should first encourage gratitude, both to God and to the hospital’s many benefactors for whom the nuns should offer prayer. In addition, the edifying stories of the founding nuns and their successors – their “tireless zeal” and “sublime virtue” – are proposed as models for imitation. Both virtues are singled out in these nuns: “a profound humility and a sincere obedience” foster harmonious community life, “a great peace,” which is proposed as an ideal.16 Little wonder that Chardon’s letter reiterates a recommendation that the Annales be read out loud “when the community is gathered at table,” that is, included in the public readings during meals in the refectory.17 The Annales inspire a communal pietas by reminding its members of the traditions behind its unique devotional practices – why the Salve Regina is sung daily before matins; kissing the feet of the statue of the Virgin before saluting the newly elected mother superiors; offering the Virgin a meal that will be given to the poor once a month. The Annales recount the history of the construction of the monastery’s buildings, but also highlight the paintings and statuary within them: a portrait of the Jesuit Jean-François Régis done by an Indigenous artist; images of the Virgin and Saint Joseph. The artworks’ aesthetic is subordinated to devotion and to a reminder to pray for the donor. Hand-in-hand with this piety goes subtle encouragement to develop corporate know-how. Calls to pray for benefactors are also reminders to cultivate friends who might provide funds, of course, but more often those who may donate other essential services. Duplessis’s narrative repeatedly refers to “our friends” who remain unnamed but who proffered insider advice. She singled out select individuals by name, especially “our old friend” the surgeon Robert Giffard de Moncel in the early days of the hospital; Paul Dupuy, “one of our true friends” at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and, of course, “his faithful friend who became ours,” her own father, Georges Duplessis.18 Corporate know-how, Duplessis knew, meant knowing how to enlist the support of reliable friends.

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Colonial History and the Hand of God The Annales include, however, much information that is not specifically edifying. They go far beyond the call of the Règlements to consign memorable events that took place within the monastery19 and situate the community’s history in that of the colony. Financial data of all sorts are given – a general overview of the exploration and settlement of the colony and of its changing economic conditions, including a disquisition on the playing-card currency that culminates in an assessment of the community’s investments around 1720. All this is handled with the expertise one would expect from a daughter of a treasurer of the marine. A chronicle of political and economic events in the colony parallels the evolution of the house’s internal administration: the arrivals and departures of intendants and governors are noted along with the annual election of the house’s officers. Allusions to political events are not unusual in convent annals, but here they take on a special interest on several counts. First, the Annales do not hesitate to justify this historical excursus in terms of pleasure and curiosity. Thus, the introductory letter states, “I believed I would please you by relating several items that concern Canada in general,”20 and the foreword hopes that such history will “satisfy the curiosity of nuns, who, in reading this book, might wish to learn when and how this colony was established.”21 The book concludes with the hope that the future generations of nuns who read it will “find some pleasure” in reading it, as well as being edified.22 The appeal to curiosity and pleasure here echoes Duplessis’s Histoire de Ruma and Musique spirituelle. The conclusion also highlights the unusual care taken to assure the accuracy of the information about the colony. Two sorts of experts read the draft as it was being composed: individuals with long experience in Canada and others knowledgeable about previously published accounts. “They have found nothing regarding what we say about this country in general that does not conform to the truth and to what the most reliable historians relate.”23 Duplessis saw herself as an historian among historians. Although the foreword says it will not duplicate what is found in previously published histories of the colony, it gives a succinct

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overview of the exploration of Canada beginning with John Cabot’s voyages for England. Duplessis highlights how the French kings initiated trips by a parade of explorers to show the importance of royal protection for Canada. She pays special heed to the rebirth of the colony in 1632 after its three-year occupation by the Kirke brothers for the English. The arrival of the Hôtel-Dieu nuns in 1639, in fact, was part of the expansion of the missionary, agricultural, and trade efforts during the 1630s that solidified permanent French settlement. The Annales’s historical observations are more extensive than is habitually the case. Only in the last five years of the French regime did there seem to be an annalist in another Canadian monastery with such an eye for the colony’s history. The Ursulines’ Charlotte Daneau de Muy de Sainte-Hélène situated the campaigns in the French and Indian War in their military-political frame with even more detail than Duplessis had done for the earlier period.24 The extracts of Daneau de Muy’s chronicle that have been published give one the impression of reading a nationalist historian as much as a convent annalist. Duplessis, except in rare cases such as the unsuccessful attacks of William Phips in 1690 and Hovenden Walker in 1711, almost always linked political and military affairs to the history of her house and evaluated colonial administrators in terms of their overall piety and their role as benefactors. These two accounts are exceptional in their length and illustrate the strengths and limitations of Duplessis’s historical method. She could modulate a narrative around a central thesis: in both these cases, how divine protection saved the unprepared colony. For the longer 1690 account, to highlight the unexpectedness of the attack, she invokes a misogynous commonplace. When first reports of a possible invasion arrived, they were discounted, except by the nuns: “either because women are more credulous or more fearful, we began prayers and penances so that God would remove this scourge.”25 The foolish virgins proved to be wise when the invasion was confirmed, but Duplessis continued to feature the nuns’ fear by using colourful anecdotes. They buried their sacred vessels in a cache and tearfully prepared to evacuate to the countryside. The focus in the next pages shifts resolutely to the military manoeuvrings of male leaders with only brief references to their impact on the Hôtel-Dieu. Gradually, however, Duplessis includes more examples of how the entire town 160

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followed the nuns’ lead by offering intercessory prayers and doing penance. The whole account becomes an act of thanksgiving that extends to the Te Deum sung in the cathedral to celebrate the victory as a written narrative memorial. The 1711 Walker fiasco – wherein a storm destroyed a substantial portion of the British fleet in the Saint Lawrence before it reached Quebec – is again a proof of God’s intervention to protect “the true religion.”26 As the nineteenth-century Boston historian Francis Parkman – confident in the superiority of Anglo-American culture – was happy to point out, in her eagerness to see the hand of God everywhere, she displayed her own credulity. She made the bolt of lightning that destroyed a British ship an act of “the justice of God,” and she claimed that the humiliated Walker committed suicide by blowing up his boat in the Thames upon returning to London. The explosion was in fact accidental, and he was still very much alive when Duplessis was writing.27 Jamet, whose notes throughout his edition compare Duplessis’s version of events to other accounts, found that despite such lapses, she is generally reliable on a factual basis. When her evaluation of political figures might be questioned, it is generally in order to edify or because of her tendency to judge officials in terms of their contribution to the hospital’s mission.28 Duplessis intended the Annales to hand on to future generations of nuns the working knowledge they would need to maintain the community’s collective well-being – its health as a spiritual institution, of course, but also its financial stability and its internal cohesion – and for this reason she situates them in an overview of New France.

A Fallen Colony The Hôtel-Dieu had been founded as a missionary enterprise. The Jesuits counted on the nuns’ example as much as on the medical attention they could provide to convert the Indigenous peoples. Christianity’s superiority would be seen in the contrast between their care lavished on their sick and aged and “the ancient and barbarous custom” of the savages who “slew their aged to put an end to their pain.”29 But other than some Algonquians and part of the Wendats, early conversions did not match expectations. As early as 1644, when the nuns left their original site near the Jesuit mission station duplessis takes women’s history public

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at Sillery for Quebec, the focus shifted to the European population: the settlers themselves, the sailors who arrived in the port, and the soldiers sent to defend the colony. By the time of Duplessis, the small number of converts was matched by the loss of devotion among the French themselves. In the foreword’s account of Canadian history, the re-creation of the fervour of the primitive church among the first settlers went hand in hand with the conversion of the Indigenous. Louis XIII is said to have had an apostolic vision for the colony that was realized in its early days: “the savages were being converted every day and the French lived like the first Christians.”30 The Annales suggest that this exemplary life lasted into the 1680s. In 1651, “in New France at that time one only breathed devotion.”31 In 1659, “people lived there in simplicity, good faith, and union that was close to what one admired in the first Christians.”32 Describing a fire that destroyed the lower town in 1682, the annalist specifically noted the piety and probity of the city’s merchants: “People lived in an enchanting warm harmony that made New France completely delightful; all the troubles that we have since experienced and that grow daily were unknown.”33 The nuns saw themselves as part of a society where the devout outnumbered the backsliders, a society more pious than France. But as this last quotation shows, by the first years of the eighteenth century, this fervour was in decline. The annalist attributed a threatened invasion by New Englanders in 1711 to divine anger “against this poor land where, in truth, sins were on the rise daily.”34 By the second decade of the eighteenth century when the Annales were written, the nuns’ relationship to the settler society had changed. The community now more closely resembled those of France, where a convent might see itself as a beacon of piety in a fallen society. Economic prosperity did not replace the colony’s earlier fervour. According to the Annales, the colony had not realized its potential from the expansion in the 1660s. It remained poor, sustained by God, the support of the king, and gifts from French benefactors. The precarious economic situation of Canada and the Hôtel-Dieu explains the general praise for royal authorities in the Annales. Her narrative stresses how successive administrators have favoured the hospital. Jamet attributed her indulgence toward the colonial administrators, whom she refrains from criticizing, to “her pen … always guided by 162

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charity.”35 It might better be seen as instructing the community on how to deal with them to the hospital’s advantage. Duplessis realized that the ultimate authority was the king himself and maximized his devout intentions. In the foreword, she stated that if Louis XIV did not heed the colony’s detractors who “often make representations to him about the expenses he incurs there without any compensating profits,” it was because he shared the pious vision of his father.36 After recounting how the British siege in 1690 was lifted, she gave thanks that Louis did not then abandon the colony as so many advised him to do because he shared her own providentialist vision: “The sole desire to spread the faith and to see God served and adored in these lands led this great prince to sustain this country for which Heaven had so openly declared itself.”37 Writing during the Regency, the annalist praised the young Louis XV’s “fortunate predisposition to do good” and his “fine qualities.”38 For better or for worse, the hospital’s fortunes were linked to those of the colony, thus the need to maintain good working relations with its royal administrators.

Dealing with Patriarchy As much as the Annales stress the protection of the king and his administrators and profess deference to male civil and ecclesiastical authority, they highlight women’s agency. Today readers prize the entrepreneurial and managerial skills that the foundresses displayed in creating a viable institution in the wilderness. However, as Allan Greer pointed out, in the seventeenth century, nuns were praised above all for their spiritual gifts: their mystical experiences, their ability to predict the future, their mortification.39 Humility, obedience, and submission were valued qualities. Thus two long entries recount the life and spiritual gifts of Catherine de Saint-Augustin.40 The spiritual favours received by Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust, a widow and donor who retired to the Hôtel-Dieu, are recounted at even greater length.41 Their agency is not synonymous with managerial skills, but with the ability to prophecy and to convert, even from beyond the grave. The same moral and spiritual agency is singled out in the short eulogies that mark the deaths of Indigenous converts, most of them women. The French claimed that sexual promiscuity was a principal obstacle to the conversion of Indigenous peoples, and thus the chastity duplessis takes women’s history public

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of the women converts is stressed. When the Annales point to the contribution of the nuns to their conversion, agency is portrayed in terms of qualities often considered feminine: the “mildness,” “modesty,” and “charity” of the nuns encouraged such conversions.42 Even when women were actively involved in important negotiations, the Annales often prefer to highlight other aspects of their role. In his introduction, Jamet recounted in detail how the great Carmelite prioress Madeleine Du Bois de Fontaines-Marans de Saint-Joseph convinced the duchesse d’Aiguillon to take an interest in the Canadian missions and how d’Aiguillon negociated with the Dieppe hospital nuns to begin the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec. The Annales mention little of this.43 Their focus is on how fortunate the community was to have as its foundress the niece of the great Cardinal Richelieu. In a society where clientage was so central, the prayers of gratitude the nuns said daily for d’Aiguillon were a constant reminder that they had an illustrious protectress. In fact, they believed that her protection continued in heaven after her death and invoked her intercession in times of trouble.44 However, the Annales are much more than a chronicle of providential protection and extraordinary mystical gifts. Especially after the arrival in 1659 of New France’s first bishop, François de Laval, they relate how the nuns dealt with the tensions between their community and its male superiors, whose intervention at times generated internal tension or conflicts with other female communities. Since the Council of Trent, nuns had been subject to tight ecclesiastical oversight. Open defiance was not unheard of, but seldom resorted to. The Annales can be read as advice to future nuns in three areas where male interference could be felt: conserving internal unity when tensions arise within the community; defending the community’s corporate interests against domineering clerics; and maintaining good relations with other religious communities. First, the Annales model how to maintain internal unity within the community. Tension with the bishops began with Laval’s arrival in the colony in 1659, over whether to recognize his authority. Previously, the colony had been under the oversight of the bishop of Rouen, whose vicar, Gabriel Thubières de Levy de Queylus, had protected the hospital. The remark “We found ourselves fairly perplexed” indicates some internal discussion, but after consulting 164

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God and “more enlightened people,” undoubtedly the Jesuits, who supported Laval, the nuns rallied to the new arrival.45 Second, the Annales trace the direct conflicts between the community and its ecclesiastical superiors. The Annales note that from the very beginning of his episcopate, Laval attempted to modify or ignore provisions of the nuns’ constitutions. In 1660, “although there was something to the contrary in our constitutions,” he ordered the nuns to reduce the number of days they fasted.46 In 1663, elections were postponed “following the orders that his Lordship had left.”47 The Annales make the best of this intervention by attributing it to Laval’s “paternal care.”48 The Annales’ harsh assessment of the monastery’s fifth mother superior is a warning to future superiors. Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité, who was superior from 1670 to 1676, is described as “too subservient toward her superiors” – that is, too prompt to comply with Laval’s wishes. At issue was Laval’s order to the community to share bequests with the hospital. Boulic is thus accused of not defending the collective interests of the nuns with sufficient energy in the face of male authority. To be sure, the annalist mutes her criticism: when Boulic “thought she was complying with the will of the lord bishop,” she was only doing what other superiors had done. The annalist even breaks into her own voice to defend Boulic: “I do not believe, moreover, that this story detracts from the esteem owed to Mother Marie-Renée de la Nativité.”49 But even if Boulic’s compliance to the bishop was not a moral failing, and even if she was not the only offender, by mentioning it, the annalist exhorted future superiors to be more assertive. Finally, because the Hôtel-Dieu’s Annales seek to promote harmonious relations with other Canadian orders, male and female, their histories are narrated alongside its own. Indeed, the first hospital nuns arrived in 1639 in the ship with the founding Ursuline nuns, accompanied by Jesuits. At their simplest, the Annales are careful to include entries on the noteworthy leaders of these orders, on calamities such as fires that struck them, and on their holy members. However, the interference of male clerics quickly threatened good relations with other women’s communities. An early example merely required discretion on the part of the nuns. In 1658, just before the arrival of Laval, l’abbé de Queylus sent two Hôtel-Dieu nuns to duplessis takes women’s history public

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Montreal to look into the possibility of founding a second house there. But because Queylus knew that the Montreal leaders wanted to bring another order of nuns from France for the new hospital, the two emissaries had to travel on other pretexts. The Montreal leaders held firm, and the nuns returned to Quebec, but “the matter remained highly secret.”50 An event in 1671 required compromise with Laval himself. On 17 July the nuns learned that a ship in the harbour brought three new nuns from France to the community. “That surprised us all the more since we did not know that they had been requested and we did not expect them.”51 Laval, fearing that not enough Canadian vocations were forthcoming, had recruited in France. While some members opined that the three should be returned to France because the community had not requested them, the majority took a more conciliatory stance: “After examining everything, we thought that we should submit without resistance to his Lordship who had only acted out of goodness.”52 But the community insisted on having the last word, even if it was not directed at the bishop but at convents in France who heeded his appeal. The Hôtel-Dieu sent a letter to sister houses in France threatening to return any nun who arrived without an invitation from the community’s chapter.53 The most contentious issue with other communities was born out of the Hôtel-Dieu itself: the Hôpital-Général.54 In 1693, Laval’s successor Bishop Saint-Vallier announced his intention of founding an almshouse to serve the indigent and invalid, staffed by a contingent of nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu. The complicated story that the Annales recount is a lesson in damage control to future generations of nuns. The Hôtel-Dieu nuns were fearful that not enough funding was available for two communities of hospital nuns, and, above all, that the new establishment would cut into their recruitment, since the Hôpital-Général was better located and its members less exposed to contagious diseases. Unable to stop their determined bishop, they first sought to make the new community report to them, and when this failed, to limit the number of its members to twelve. They skillfully appealed to parties who might be favourable to their case. They enlisted the aid of local authorities resentful of Saint-Vallier’s other attempts to impose his vision.55 They wrote briefs to the king, who they knew opposed the establishment of new cloistered communities in New France.56 166

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This marshalling of support by Juchereau pushed Saint-Vallier to single her out as the instigator of resistance to his wishes. “He laid the blame especially on Mother Jeanne-Françoise de Saint-Ignace whom he accused of pulling all her strings and of controlling everyone in this community.”57 Juchereau thus becomes a counter-model to Boulic, whom the Annales had accused earlier of not defending the community’s interests with sufficient energy against Laval. Juchereau was, of course, also the instigator of the Annales themselves. Making sure that the account of this conflict is told from her point of view could well have pushed her toward initiating the project. After all, the Hôpital-Général had begun its own annals to record its version in 1704–05.58 By lending out its own annals in later years, the HôtelDieu insured that its version of the events was known. In this record intended for posterity, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu rein in their bitterness toward Saint-Vallier and the Hôpital-Général community. The bishop had tried to break the unity of the community by winning over individual members.59 Nonetheless, the account in the Annales, written while he was still bishop, is much more deferential than the following description of him in their letter to the Dieppe community at the time of the events: “If one points out to him that one cannot accede to his desires, he becomes furious, he thunders, he threatens, and talks of our affairs, making a terrible commotion so that all Canada is beset with rumours; that makes us give in to everything to avoid scandal … He is capable of anything when one resists him no matter how just the cause.”60 The Annales highlight the nuns’ desire to avoid the scandal of a public dispute and their compassion for the bishop: “He came here to convey to us his sorrow with such touching language and mien that he dismayed us.”61 Perhaps even more important was reducing the friction with the Hôpital-Général, a community that they would have to live alongside long after Saint-Vallier’s death. The annalist generally minimizes the agency of the Hôpital-Général nuns and presents them as being manipulated by their founder. To signal reconciliation, mutual visits by members of both communities in 1712 are narrated. If the meeting was first “fairly cold because so much had taken place that pleased neither party,” it ended with a common meal and assurances that both sides only wanted union, peace, and mutual comprehension.62 duplessis takes women’s history public

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The one point on which the Hôtel-Dieu remained adamant – its refusal to accept the members professed into the rival community63 – echoes its reluctance to accept the new members recruited by Laval in 1671. Passing the spirit of the community from one generation to the next was the fundamental goal of the Annales. Being sure that novices absorb this spirit by controlling their initiation was crucial. Throughout the conflict with Saint-Vallier over the Hôpital-Général, union was thus the watchword at the Hôtel-Dieu: “During this storm, we were strongly united among ourselves.”64

Tension Points in the Manuscript These tensions left physical traces in the Annales. At about twenty points throughout the manuscript, strips of paper containing new wording in Duplessis’s handwriting have been pasted over the original text. They vary in size from a single word to a short paragraph. In most cases they are a line or two long. The paper of both the strips and the manuscript itself is so thick that the unaided eye cannot decipher this original text underneath. It is unlikely that they are merely corrections of errors of transcription or stylistic improvements. They almost always concern a sensitive issue: claims of martyrdom for some individual,65 the state of the colony, but especially relations with male civil and ecclesiastical superiors. Jamet did not discuss these corrections in his edition, but twice he cited what he calls the “first version” in notes,66 without, however, indicating their source. The longest variant that Jamet gave tempers the assessment of the governor Augustin de Saffray de Mézy, who was in Canada from 1663 to his death in 1665.67 Another one tempers criticism of Laval himself. The original text, concerning Laval’s decision to bring new recruits from France without consulting the community, stresses the scandal that sending the unwanted nuns back would provoke: “We thought we should not inflict this affront on his Lordship and wanted to avoid the stir that their return would have caused.”68 The revised text simply stresses obedience and attributes good intentions to the bishop: “We thought that we should submit without resistance to his Lordship who had only acted out of goodness.”69 Elsewhere we can only speculate on the criticism that might have been in the original text. For example, we read with new eyes the passage cited previously 168

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excusing the submission of Marie-Renée Boulic to Laval when we know that it is a correction: “this reverend mother and other superiors believed they should comply with the will of the lord bishops.”70 The revised text attributes a laudable spirit of obedience to Boulic, who shares blame with other superiors. But it leaves open the question of whether she and the other superiors should have been so submissive. The changes were likely made sometime before October 1731, when Bertrand de La Tour, the dean of the cathedral chapter and superior of the community, returned to France. When he left, he seems to have taken a copy of the annals as part of the documentation he had gathered for his projected biography of Laval, which would only appear in print in 1761. The municipal library of Montauban, which holds his collection of books and manuscripts, owns this copy of the Annales. It has similar strips of paper bearing the same corrections as found in the Hôtel-Dieu manuscript.71 The Montauban copy itself is not in Duplessis’s hand, but she herself wrote out the corrections pasted into the copy. La Tour arrived in Canada in September 1729, with the newly appointed coadjutor bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet. In March 1730, Dosquet appointed La Tour superior of the Hôtel-Dieu and of the other two women’s communities. Duplessis’s initial impression of the new bishop and his dean was not positive. In October 1730, she wrote Hecquet, “He [Dosquet] has a grand vicar aged twenty-eight to whom he refers all the internal administration of the diocese; however well-intentioned they may be, since they have just arrived … they do not acquaint themselves with former practices but … profess to establish much wiser rules.”72 Conflict marked La Tour’s stay as both dean and superior, and he returned to France after only two years. Another circumstance suggests that the changes could well have been made during the stay of La Tour in Quebec. After Saint-Vallier’s death in late 1727, in the absence of a resident bishop, the cathedral chapter claimed the right to appoint confessors to the women’s communities. Duplessis reported in 1729 that this caused turmoil at the Hôtel-Dieu, where the nuns preferred their Jesuit confessor to the young Canadian one the chapter imposed on them.73 The conflict at the Ursulines was much graver; there, as Duplessis noted, the chapter deprived the leaders of the monastery of communion and confession. When Bishop Dosquet arrived, he put an end to these duplessis takes women’s history public

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disputes, but he also required the Ursulines to delete a section from their annals that narrated the conflict with the cathedral chapter.74 Since the Hôtel-Dieu’s annals stop around 1716 they do not treat this episode. But in the same spirit of reconciliation that guided the Ursulines’ revisions, it could well be that Duplessis found it wise, especially if she knew La Tour would be taking a copy back to France, to revise some earlier judgments. He was as ferocious a denouncer of Jansenists as Duplessis’s brother, which might have eventually softened her toward him.

Publication: A New Readership and the Eye of the Censors The Hôtel-Dieu copy of the Annales is conceived as a deluxe manuscript-book, a handsome folio to be preserved in the monastery archives and read publicly at communal events. Although such convent chronicles were normally meant to stay within the cloister, in this case, the nuns shared theirs with outsiders. In a previously cited letter to Duplessis, the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Chardon stated how much he had been edified by reading them. Another undated letter from a Jesuit, written to Duplessis before the centenary of the house, suggests that the Annales were lent out to friends of the community: “I have kept your work for almost a month now. It is time to make restitution and to thank you for the pleasure that you have given me in passing it to me a second time. I read it completely, from one end to the other, and even with eagerness.”75 However, the fact that the Annales appeared in print in 1751 is exceptional. The publication of biographies of foundresses and saintly nuns, such as the 1671 life of Catherine de Saint-Augustine by Paul Ragueneau, was common in the seventeenth century, although it had become rarer by the eighteenth. Less common, but still frequent, were spiritual writings by nuns, such as the Retraites of Marie de l’Incarnation, published by her son Claude Martin in 1682. A late 1751 letter – written in any case before the printed version arrived in Quebec – shows that the publication was part of the community’s campaign to win support in France. “Because we need protection, without relying too much on secular arm, we have written to the duc de Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon whose ancestors 170

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founded this hospital. Monsieur de La Tour, former dean of the chapter of this cathedral and presently pastor at Montaubon, out of esteem for this house, has had its annals published; he promises them to us for next year; he has dedicated them to the duc de Richelieu, who accepted them with affection.”76 When the printed copies arrived in Quebec, Duplessis would have learned that Richelieu must not have accepted the dedication, since the Annales bear instead a sort of default dedication to the current bishop of Quebec, signed by the community, but almost certainly written by La Tour, according to Jamet.77 La Tour was working at this time on his biography of Canada’s first bishop. In a 1750 letter to the Hôpital-Général, he promised, “Next year you will see two works that I am having published: the first volume of the life of Monsieur de Laval and the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.”78 Much of La Tour’s editing involved cuts, and they were made directly on the manuscript held in Montauban. Honorific titles were shortened, doublets eliminated, and whole paragraphs left out. He obviously found Duplessis’s style wordy. Yet La Tour’s transformation of the text was not limited to simply updating the style and making abridgements. He was attempting, however timidly, to move the book out of convent literature and into more mainstream accounts of Canada. The nuns had recorded the important facts of the community’s spiritual, political, and financial heritage for their internal use. La Tour sought to open the book to outsiders in France. He rewrote the first sentences of the narrative to reflect the shift from the hospital’s initial mission of nursing ill Indigenous patients to serving the French settlers and soldiers. Duplessis had given priority to service to the Indigenous: “For several years a hospital had been desired in Canada, not only for the relief of the few French people living there but much more for the relief of the savages, who were subject to severe illnesses.”79 La Tour’s revision presented the hospital as a central public institution of the colony and added an allusion to the illnesses suffered by Europeans during the Atlantic crossing: “One of the great desires of the French colony was the establishment of a hospital in Canada. Men transplanted into a very bitter climate, after a long and perilous navigation, were exposed to severe and frequent illnesses.”80 La Tour also struck passages that made the colony appear too precarious. A sentence at the end of the foreword citing “the complaints of those who did not like Canada and often made representations to duplessis takes women’s history public

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him [Louis XIV] about the expenses he incurred there without any compensating profits” disappeared, as did a whole paragraph from the entry for the year 1646 describing the nuns’ continued stay in Canada as “uncertain.”81 In other cases, La Tour excised material that might have served as useful warnings to the nuns, but was not of interest to general readers. For example, he eliminated several paragraphs describing fires that had been narrowly avoided in the period 1712–15.82 Duplessis had included a long passage on the esteem generated in France, the Caribbean colonies, and even in England by the artificial flowers the nuns skillfully manufactured. La Tour reproduced this bragging, but dropped Duplessis’s concluding exhortation to her community not to forsake such a profitable enterprise.83 More importantly, La Tour had to respond to a growing unease, even among many believers, about claims of visions and divine revelations. He eliminated, for example, a prophecy made by Paul Dupuy that the nuns would someday own the Ile-aux-oies.84 He left out a long paragraph that described a vision by a person who saw Catherine de Saint-Augustin received in heaven as a saint in glory by the Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf and Saint Augustine.85 In fact, a 1751 letter to the director of the book trade Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes shows that publication was delayed because one censor believed that La Tour’s cuts were not extensive enough.86 As director, Malesherbes oversaw the censorship process and held ultimate responsibility for granting permission for books to be printed. On 20 August 1751, one of his censors, François Greinoz, wrote him that the wife of the Montauban printer Légier had visited him and requested that he send Malesherbes a report so that an authorization to publish could be issued. Greinoz had previously reported to Maboul that cuts were needed: “I found in it some miracles worked by means of, or in virtue of, certain trifling devotional practices and several visions and apparitions that it seems to me should be cut from the book to authorize its printing.” However, in the meantime, a second censor, Louis de Cahusac, had given a favourable report: “This manuscript has been revisited by Monsieur Cahusac who approved it. I do not believe its publication should be deferred longer. I agree to it from my side and will give my official approbation, if you think that is necessary.” Cahusac is better known 172

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as the author of opera libretti for Jean-Philippe Rameau than for theological knowledge, but he had been born in Montauban and had roots there, and may have been given La Tour’s manuscript to counter Greimoz’s resistance. Under those circumstances, and since in Greinoz’s eyes the book was perfectly orthodox, Greimoz did not want to hold up publication: “I had only asked Monsieur Maboul to have something cut from the book to make it more perfect, because in itself and fundamentally this history is edifying and only radiates piety and sound behaviour. I gave this same assessment of Monsieur Gibert, who spoke to me about the manuscript.”87 In all, three censors, Greinoz, Cahusac, and Joseph-Baltasar Gibert, had been involved, and the official authorization would only be forthcoming on 8 November, almost three months after Greimoz’s letter. The text of the permission was included in the book, but not Cahusac’s approbation, as was sometimes the case when censors did not want to take public responsibility. Perhaps as a concession to Greinoz, tucked away in the introductory material of the book is a short notice to the effect that most of the miracles and visions it contains also appear in Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin. The implication is that such miracles had been approved earlier by the approbators of that work. However, the 1751 edition of the Annales contains many miracles not found in Catherine’s biography. For example, some of Mme d’Ailleboust’s visions are so extravagant that the Benedictine Jamet called them of “questionable authenticity” in his 1939 edition.88 Likewise, some reported miracles, such as the Jesuit François Crespieul finding his lost portable chapel and mass kit after invoking Catherine de Saint-Augustin,89 are telling examples of the trivial devotional practices that Greinoz had objected to. As François Moureau points out, such skittishness among censors reflected not just a growing squeamishness about miracles and visions among believers; it also showed a fear of giving Protestants and skeptics ammunition against religion. Moureau cites the case just one year later of a censor refusing to approve a perfectly orthodox pastoral letter by the archbishop of Vienna because it praised the cult of images and confidence in indulgences to the point of “superstition and extravagance.” What inspired devotion in Austria could become a source of scandal in France!90 duplessis takes women’s history public

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7.2 This copy of the printed Annales bears Duplessis’s handwritten corrections and according to the note “Ch. Supre” seems to have been kept in the room of the mother superior. The title page of some printed copies adds that the book was sold in Paris by the printer Jean-ClaudeBaptiste Hérissant, Rue Notre-Dame, aux trois vertus.

Reception with Reservations Duplessis had reservations about her book as published. She was proud of how much history of the colony she had included, but could only be dismayed by the carelessness with which the book was printed and proofread. “The Reverend Father La Tour, dean of Montauban, who was formerly vicar general in Canada, has had our annals published under the title Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec,” she wrote Hecquet. “I think you will not read them without pleasure and without being edified, although there are many printing errors. Many events concerning the founding of this country are narrated in it.”91 Indeed, proper names were frequently garbled, more likely by the printer than by the dean of Montauban himself. It is hardly likely that La Tour, who was writing a biography of Canada’s first bishop, would have changed Monseigneur de Laval to Madame Laval,92 giving the bishop a wife! The name of Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust is rendered “a barbarous name of Boulogne,” and she is referred to later as “Monsieur.”93 Any pleasure or edification Hecquet might have had in reading Duplessis’s book would also have been muted by the anti-Jansenism that pervades it. The Hôtel-Dieu holds a copy that Duplessis corrected using much the same technique she had used on the two manuscripts of the Annales: thin bands of paper have been pasted over the printed text on which the corrections are written (although some corrections in ink are made directly on the printed page).94 Most simply restore the proper spellings of names. However, Duplessis also remained sensitive to gender issues. On at least one occasion she softens a criticism of Laval that La Tour had slipped in. Describing Boulic’s willingness to sacrifice the interests of the community, Duplessis’s original text had cited Boulic’s submission to the wishes of Laval. La Tour, on the other hand, had attributed to Boulic a criticism of the bishop in the Montauban printed version: “she submitted without a rejoinder, although that did not always appear to her to be just.”95 Duplessis restored the original wording to “although that did not always appear to her to be required,”96 so that the mother superior did not appear to be accusing the bishop of injustice. The book does not seem to have attracted much attention in French publications. It was announced in the August 1752 issue of duplessis takes women’s history public

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the Journal des savants, but without any commentary.97 Even journals aligned with the Catholic establishment appear to have ignored it. It is not mentioned in the Journal de Trévoux of the Jesuits, who are given much praise in Duplessis’s book. However, in April 1755, AnneGabriel de Meusnier de Querlon’s Affiches de province reviewed it in the category of French literature. The review begins by recounting the hospital’s founding, stressing the strong financial contribution of the duchesse d’Aiguillon and the support of royal administrators in Canada. The review continues, “One might consider it a sort of necrology of the house.” But the review then rejects this view, exclaiming, “How many curious, instructive, and even amusing details are found in it!” and proceeds to give examples: the reaction of the Indigenous natives to these virgin women; the 1663 earthquake; the Walker expedition. The review concludes with Marie-André’s description of the so-called hospital rock on the Ile-aux-Oies where birds wounded by hunters found refuge and healing.98 Two further mentions of the book can be traced back to this review. Pierre Rousseau, who was the Parisian literary correspondent of the elector palatine Charles Theodore of Mannheim, summarized it in his private letters on affairs in France for his patron. Rousseau managed to garble several points. For example, in his version, “having been obliged to land at New Orleans, these courageous women went in a small boat to their destined place,” confusing the town in Louisiana with the Ile d’Orléans. However, he added favourable judgments not found in Meusnier de Quélon’s review, although one wonders if Rousseau had really consulted the book itself. “A work of this kind seems to announce great dryness. The author has found the secret of making it interesting without betraying its subject … the style is simple; it is the eloquence of the heart, always the best.”99 Eight years later, Jean-Louis Alléon-Dulac included the passage on the hospital rock that Rousseau did not quote in his Mélanges d’histoire naturelle. He cited the Affiche review as his source.100 Rousseau had stressed the religious commitment of the nuns to the elector his patron, who was close to the Jesuits. Alléon-Dulac found a curious detail of interest to the scientific community, an indication of the breadth of subjects Duplessis managed to include in her book.

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Conclusion The Annales are the first text written by a Canadian woman published during her lifetime. When Claude Martin published his mother’s letters in 1681, he divided the volume into spiritual and historical sections, even though Marie de l’Incarnation never thought of herself as an historian. The annalist of the Hôtel-Dieu, on the other hand, explicitly wove the community’s life into the history of Canada. This is done more prominently than in the annals produced by other colonial communities, such as Marie Morin’s of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal. It is done so successfully, in fact, that early readers of the manuscript in Quebec judged Duplessis competent to write a history of the colony itself: “Her ease in composing and her penetrating understanding made her able to write the history of the foundation of Canada.”101 Although she certainly possessed the necessary vision of the sweep of the colony’s history, she seemed to have had neither the inclination nor perhaps the time to undertake an overview, such as the Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale that Bacqueville de La Potherie would publish in 1722 or the Histoire et description générale de la NouvelleFrance published by Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix in 1744. Her focus was too squarely on the hospital itself, and even with that commitment, she never attempted a continuation of her Annales. Her approach is certainly closer to Charlevoix’s. Both relied on previously written documents. In her case, they were largely internal ones, while the Jesuit cast his net wider to published accounts, official reports, and personal interviews. He attempted a critical analysis of his sources, except those from his own Jesuit order, because, like Duplessis, he wrote providentialist history.102 However, the publication of the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec in 1751 meant that, for the first time, history written by, about, and for women stood alongside eighteenth-century male-authored accounts of Canadian nuns such as Charlevoix’s 1724 Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation and François-Michel Ransonnet’s 1728 Vie de la Sœur Marguerite Bourgeoys. Neither priest had known his subject and both relied on previous compilations. The publication of Duplessis’s book resulted from a campaign for support that the nuns themselves orchestrated, a campaign to enlist the aid of contemporary representatives

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of the family of their foundress, the duchesse d’Aiguillon. In the conclusion we will see that forty years after Duplessis composed the book, and ten years after its publication, her campaign bore fruit. Ironically, the hoped-for aid would come not directly from the French court, but from the new colonial British masters.

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1750–55 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Aborted Expansion, Burnout, and the Encyclopédie Seven months after being re-elected superior in March 1744 for what would become a six-year stint in office, Marie-André confided her reluctance to take on this burden. She claimed to have no liking for it, and felt inadequate: “You have your sorrows and I mine, my dear friend. The one that weighs on me today is that I see myself placed back again in the office that I have already held and for which I have neither inclination nor talent.”1 In 1750, at the end of these two three-year terms, she aspired to relief: “I am at last released from the office of mother superior, and I delight in the peace that my vocation as a hospital nun can offer because our position, particularly in this country where nothing is well-ordered, is always a bit agitated. But since the order established by God is found in this agitation … I attempt to not let it harm my peace, which seems to me to be the greatest good that we can possess in this world where this peace is never perfect, nonetheless.”2 Even though she had fallen back into the secondary position of assistant superior and secretary, with Marie-Catherine Tibierge returning as official head of the community, Duplessis would experience more agitation than peace during the next six years. The War of Austrian Succession might have ended, but Canada was on a war footing. Marie-André’s administrative talents and connections kept her in a guiding role, even though she would not be re-elected superior until March 1756.

Her second term in the 1740s had been more trying than her first in the 1730s. The last ten years would be even more so, not just because of the outbreak of hostilities in 1754, but because she increasingly experienced Canada as a site of frustration, where nothing worked as it should, and where disorder, both administrative and moral, was on the rise. As she had put it to Marie-Catherine as early as 1734, Canada was a land of “crosses and suffering.”

A Land of “Crosses and Suffering”?3 Her ambivalence toward Canada must have originated in her immigrant parents. In the 1711 “Histoire de Ruma,” she noted that they had taken care to give Geneviève a better education with more proper manners than was commonly available in this “barbarous land.”4 In November 1751, she complained to Marie-Catherine about the training of her niece: “Canadian upbringing does not cultivate enough her good qualities.”5 She had left France in 1701 for Quebec with “a reluctance … to leave her country whose attractive qualities she prized more than her sister.” 6 In October 1729, she compared herself to Geneviève: “My sister who is Canadian by birth is completely French by inclination. She often launches into invectives against her native land. She thinks she has the right to criticize its weak points and says things that I would blame myself for, if I happened to say them.”7 Her judgments on Canadian economic prospects were consistently reserved. For example, when she reported in 1744 that that diamonds had supposedly been discovered in Canada, she compared them to all Canadian productions: “Those diamonds cut glass, but like all Canada’s products do not have great soundness; they only cut one or two times, and then they become dull. That could come from the hard frosts of this climate that ruin everything.”8 The climate was also to blame for problems in exploiting a potential silver mine: “Ventures in Canada commonly have little success. The seasons are too short, so that the work of a whole year must be done in four or five months. The freezes upset all preparatory measures, so that one is always beginning anew. That wears down everyone who is involved.”9 Her equally pessimistic comments in 1741 on the iron production at Trois-Rivières pick up on this theme of expenses caused by the climate and a disheartened workforce: “There is much misapprehension 180

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between the stockholders and the workers. All is absorbed by the great expenses. In this land, work is only done at great cost. That is what causes ventures to fail in Canada. Other mines are not even spoken of; one loses heart to discover any. This colony will never be rich.”10 As brutal as this judgment may be, it is based on her assessment of Canadian realities, and shares none of the moralism of Hecquet, who, when told of potential silver mines, opined in 1740, “May God … maintain Canada in its sterility and poverty lest it lose a grain of the love it owes God alone.”11 The Canadian economy, in fact, was improving substantially during this period. Although the promise of the diamond and silver mines was illusory, the Saint-Maurice ironworks and the royal shipyards were not failures. They stimulated activity, even if they were not as successful as Gilles Hocquart hoped. Duplessis was devoid of boosterism. She viewed the economy from the treadmill of supplying her hospital. War and preparations for war brought dramatic increases in royal expenditures to the colony, which generally raised its economy, but with steep price inflation. Military expenditures replaced the fur trade as the economic motor. The male civilian population was diverted from agriculture to war construction and militia service, which heightened food shortages. The hospital’s clients were those left behind by prosperity. Although the hospital functioned more and more as a military institution, the king did not invest in it as he did in fortifications, nor even adequately reimburse the expenses of ill troops. For Duplessis, on the moral level Canada was the mirror reflection of France with all its ills, instead of a purified, improved version as its idealistic founders had envisaged. One of the most striking formulations of this judgment is found in a 1753 letter. Except for religious dissidence, Canada suffered from all the ills of France: “I consider Canada the echo of France in terms of vice, self-interest, bad faith, and libertine conduct. Luxury, fine dining, and all of the devil’s pomp are on display here.”12 This attitude is present from her first surviving letter of 1718, and over the years she gave Hecquet many examples: calumny and backbiting are especially bad in Canada; French friendships are stronger (1729); everyone complains about the situation and no one seeks remedies (1730); sexual libertinage undermines attempts to convert the Indigenous population (1740); Canadians are not as 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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willing to do favours (1750). Her distress in the 1753 formulation was heightened by her frustrations with the intendant François Bigot’s administration and the permissiveness that flourished in his social circle. Geneviève, embittered by years of dealing with petty vendors in her role as business manager of the hospital, was even more forthright on the lack of morality in Canadian business practices. Several factors temper this negative assessment of Canada. In every case, such comments are in letters to correspondents in France with whom she hopes to reaffirm her bonds. Geneviève gave a striking formulation to this topos in a letter to correspondents in France: “The only compensations that we find in this barbarous land are the few connections we have in France whose pleasures we tasted during our short stay there.”13 Disparaging comments about what Canada has to offer were often simply excuses for not being able to send more elaborate gifts of local products. Like her religiously oriented correspondents in France, Marie-André felt increasingly alienated from French society, seen as gone amiss. The letters of the Jansenist Marie-Catherine and her Jesuit brother contain even stronger condemnations of ambient corruption and godlessness in France. However, unlike her two Canadian brothers – the Jesuit François-Xavier, who chose a preaching career in France, and the soldier Charles-Denis, who refused to return to Canada after going to Paris in the mid-1750s – Marie-André was bound by her vows to Quebec. This Parisian may have always seen herself more as living in Canada than as a Canadian, but she worked her French ties relentlessly to advance the interests of a central Canadian institution. She was fully committed to this “land of crosses and suffering.” Three issues would test her during her last decade. First, the increasingly bitter dispute with the colony’s administrators, especially François Bigot, over funding daily operations that had begun in the mid-1740s continued; the disputes over funding in the early 1750s were overshadowed by the devastating food shortages during the last years of the war. Second, this ongoing conflict was the backdrop for disputes over two issues that involved major capital investments: who would pay for expanding the hospital’s physical plant to serve military patients and then for rebuilding it after the fire of 1755? Geneviève was Marie-André’s partner, when not the lead player, in these quarrels. Finally, family problems strained Marie-André’s resilience: the 182

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death of Geneviève in 1756, her Jesuit brother’s declining health, and her younger brother’s profligacy.

Hospital Expansion and a Pyrrhic Victory Pehr Kalm did not comment on the need for hospital expansion although the nuns and the government authorities both agreed on the issue since at least the early 1740s. In 1742, Duplessis wrote the pharmacist Féret in Dieppe, “our hospital [is] always more than full, that is to say, there are more patients than beds.”14 In September of that year, the newly arrived Bishop Pontbriand, after his first episcopal visitation, wrote Maurepas citing the need for a new ward.15 The next year the bishop noted that the hospital was overflowing with patients from the Rubis:16 “We have them all the way up to our attics.”17 The situation was even worse in 1750: “The king has sent 800 soldiers to Canada of whom two-thirds arrived sick, and although the intendant has rented houses to transform into hospitals, ours cannot hold them all; we had the largest share, and we fill our wards with them along with all the out-buildings and even the attics. This gives us much work and weariness, and to top it off, a cold has attacked us all at the same time so that twenty nuns are in the infirmary beds and the ones left to serve them, the wards, and the routine chores are not much better off. We have great difficulty finding two nuns each night able to serve as watch.”18 The intendant’s and governor-general’s annual letters to Maurepas in the late 1740s show that they had been actively investigating various schemes to pay for expansion. Hocquart seems to have revived his proposals, dating to the early 1730s, for appointing lay administrators for the hospital.19 Combining the funds of the hospital and the community was suggested, but rejected. Another proposal, also deemed ill-advised, was to combine the Hôtel-Dieu with the Hôpital-Général.20 With these avenues closed off, the civil authorities encouraged the nuns to borrow to pay for the expansion. In 1750, the civil authorities took action. A plan for enlarging the hospital by adding a ward for soldiers had been drawn up the previous year because the increase in the number of soldiers did not leave enough room for the civilian poor. The intendant and the governor-general asked the minister to issue orders to the nuns to 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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make the expansion. Direct orders were necessary, the two officials said, because the nuns were only concerned “with increasing the holdings of their community.”21 Duplessis, of course, saw matters differently in her description of the crisis to Hecquet in 1750: “These multitudes of patients who arrive often and for whom the king gives only six sous a day while we spend much more; in the last ten years that has caused us to go fifteen thousand francs into debt despite the representations that we do not fail to make, but which go unheard by those who should heed them. On the contrary, so as not to give us any relief, they say that we are extremely rich and that we all conspire together not to say where our money is hidden. God has reserved us for an exceedingly callous age.”22 To her mind, Bigot was merely renewing charges that his predecessor Claude-Thomas Dupuy had made in 1727, to the effect that the nuns thought only of enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and their employees.23 During the 1740s, she had been pressing the bishop to support expansion, while providing financial data about the hospital’s precarious state. Pontbriand generally seconded her efforts. In 1742, he asked Maurepas for help for the hospital in noting the need for a new ward, and in 1743, he declared that he did not believe the nuns could finance it themselves.24 In 1747, he reported that the hospital was much over capacity and that while expenses had tripled, revenues had remained the same.25 Duplessis reiterated her horror of borrowing in a summer 1748 letter to the bishop. While the topic was the short-term borrowing that the hospital had been forced into since 1740 to meet operating expenses, her words would apply as well to borrowing to meet construction costs. She was skeptical of an argument she often heard: “To encourage us to borrow, these gentlemen assure us that the king will never let down this hospital.”26 Was the hospital really too important to the king for him to allow it to fail by not covering its debts? It was a risk she did not intend to take. Even though her term as superior had ended in March 1750, that fall she organized a counterattack. On 10 October, the advisory council signed a memo of protest. Besides the standard argument that the hospital’s revenues could not support additional expense, the council rejected the suggestion to sell the hospital garden because it was already too small, and claimed that replacing the hospital bursar 184

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with lay administrators would result in expenses a third higher. They sought support in France. Prior contacts with Bertrand de La Tour resulted in the annals’ publication in 1751. Just as in 1726, a letter-writing campaign to patrons in France was launched. Maurepas had been ousted in 1749 by a palace coup engineered by the duc de Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, so a letter was written to the duke. Geneviève indicated that he had agreed to accept the dedication of the annals, adding highly placed patronage to the general publicity it was hoped that the printed book would bring.27 Marie-André wrote the dowager duchesse d’Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, on 20 October: “A short letter of recommendation to our governor and intendant for our house proving that you have the goodness to protect it … would inspire them to treat us with more accommodation.” Forcing the community to spend the endowment given it by the first duchesse d’Aiguillon, she said, would break the foundation contract. “We beg you, Madame, not to allow this expansion to absorb our endowment. If this ward is erected, it must be built, furnished, and endowed for those who will be treated in it.”28 In other words, the king should pay for his soldiers. The Duplessis sisters, in fact, were sure that Bigot had been sending negative reports about the hospital, and drafts of 1752 memos to Maurepas’s successor Antoine-Louis Rouillé show them trying to counter these reports and justify bypassing him. On this last score they shifted the blame to Bigot: “We would have indeed wished to have profited from a moment’s presence of Monsieur the Governor or Monsieur the Intendant in order to communicate to them what we have the honour to send you concerning this hospital, but the multitude of their tasks makes them unavailable to our invitations.” Instead of dealing face to face with them, Bigot sent messengers. The nuns began this draft by noting that the hospital seemed to have lost the confidence of the navy office, which they attribute squarely to “ill-founded prejudices” which “have lost us the favour of Monsieur the Intendant, who despite his benevolent attitude, has taken no interest in this hospital.”29 They ran their drafts past a sympathetic military engineer, Louis Franquet, who had visited the Quebec region in 1752–53 to inspect fortifications and who had furnished plans for siting the projected hospital expansion. He suggested that they soften 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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some of the wording about the intendant since their missives would be sent in any case by the minister to Bigot for his comments.30 By the next year, it was clear that Duplessis had won on one point: the community would not be required to go into debt for any expansion. However, Duplessis’s victory came with a cost. On 8 June 1753, Rouillé wrote them coldly: “I found rather extraordinary your refusal … to contribute to the expenses of building the new ward that it is necessary to erect in your hospital for patients on the pretext that the funds of the hospital are separate from those of the community of nuns.”31 He made short shrift of the accusation against Bigot and Duquesne and stressed the nuns’ failure to cooperate: “No one has tried to give me impressions against your community … Messieurs Duquesne and Bigot have not indicated anything to me that does not announce a predisposition favourable to your community, and you will always find in both the ready aid you will need, when your community lends itself for its part to the arrangements that are necessary for the good of the king’s service, with the zeal it has always shown and that they have not failed to acquaint me with.”32 He noted rather pointedly that requests should be routed through the intendant and governor-general rather than sent to him directly.33 The minister thus resoundingly rejected their claims, their accusations against Bigot, and their attempts to bypass the intendant. The nuns would not be forced to borrow or expend the community’s funds, but no royal subsidy was forthcoming either, and thus no expansion was possible. The Duplessis sisters might have won a battle, but had they lost the war? Bigot was self-serving and intent on profiting from his tour of duty in Canada, but he was also efficient.34 He had little patience for the Duplessis sisters’ insistence that the hospital be expanded only on terms they judged most favourable for their institution, nor for their steady stream of requests for exemptions and favours. Sensing that they would throw up delay after delay, he favoured other institutions that were more compliant. Geneviève complained in an October 1751 letter to the former governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière that Bigot gave preference to the Hôpital-Général: “His lordship the intendant does not refuse these ladies anything, which puts them in a position to be more obliging than us.”35 She reported the next year that he 186

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reimbursed that community at a higher rate for treating soldiers than her own.36 Jan Noel attributes the authorities’ favouring the Hôpital-Général to its nuns’ mastery of the politics of clientage.37 The fact that its nuns were more willing to cooperate with government initiatives was probably as important a factor. Bigot could also move expeditiously. When it became clear in 1755–56 that the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal needed expansion because of the war, Pontbriand arranged for Bigot to build two wards cheaply in wood instead of stone in that hospital’s gardens; they were called the royal wards because they were destined to serve the troops.38 The Montreal nuns had reservations about the enterprise, but they lacked the united leadership the Duplessis sisters gave the Quebec hospital. According to their chronicler, “This proposal much alarmed some members who foresaw at that very moment the crosses that it would create in the future. But nonetheless, we had to comply.”39 It was inevitable that Bigot would come into conflict with Geneviève, who saw her life’s mission as protecting the interests of the poor. He was only too happy to use the excuse of the nuns’ refusal to invest. He might have had less leverage with the minister if the nuns had been seen in Versailles as more cooperative. Had they taken the risk to expand, and even to borrow, the Duplessis sisters might have found more sympathy in the 1750s, both for adequately supplying the hospital and for its rebuilding in 1755. Were the daughters of Georges Regnard Duplessis overly cautious? According to François Rousseau, in the years between 1730 and 1755, the community (as opposed to the hospital) operated with revenue averaging 27,000 livres each year and mostly matched expenses.40 In September 1739, the chapter had agreed to borrow 4,000 livres to rebuild the kitchens and extend that wing of the monastery 60 feet. In 1755, after fire destroyed the hospital and monastery, the nuns agreed to borrow. It was initially calculated that they would need loans of between 20,000 and 25,000 livres, although the final debt turned out to be closer to 100,000 livres!41 The 1739 loan was taken out before the hospital began experiencing operating shortfalls; in the second case, the community was faced with a life and death situation. Not to borrow in 1755 to rebuild would have meant its extinction. The Duplessis sisters had overplayed their hand. This was the opinion of Pierre de la Rue, the abbé de l’Isle-Dieu, Bishop 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Pontbriand’s savvy and sympathetic liaison with the ministry at Versailles. La Rue was Pontbriand’s vicar general in France, and he reported to the bishop that the officials at the court thought the nuns had “given into fear too easily and too strongly.” La Rue never mentioned that the issue of borrowing had come up, although the ministry did want the nuns to contribute what they could afford to the expansion, leaving it up to the bishop to determine if this was feasible. Moreover, La Rue maintained that the nuns undercut their case by importuning the minister with multiple petitions written directly, and especially by asking permission to acquire a new property at the same time they were claiming they had nothing to offer for expansion. This request gave rise to “all sorts of ideas and suspicions that they might be well-to-do.”42 La Rue surely directed part of his pique against women who showed too much independence; male officials, ecclesiastical and civil, believed that they should handle such issues themselves. Nonetheless, some of La Rue’s complaints seem well-founded, and the Duplessis sisters’ strategies failed to build support for the hospital with civil authorities in Quebec and in Versailles. Their father had likewise been admonished that his memoranda on the colonial economy were no longer welcome. Throughout the conflict, the authorities accused the nuns of trying to protect their own finances by refusing to combine the funds of the hospital and community. The Duplessis sisters cast themselves above all as defenders of the poor for whom the hospital had been founded, and objected to diverting their own funds or funds destined for the poor to the troops for whom the expansion was needed. However, there was an element of self-interest as well: families would be less willing to pay profession dowries if the money might go to fund the hospital rather than their daughters’ support.43 Offhand remarks by Geneviève also suggest that she would have preferred not having soldiers as patients at all. “Serving the troops is so disheartening that it is not in our interest to seek it out,” she confided to La Galissonière.44 Whether the Duplessis sisters realized it or not, their resistance to expansion was in part a reluctance to accept the mission shift from civilian-oriented service to the military role that the war effort imposed on them.

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Isolation and Geneviève’s Burnout The difficulty of financing day-to-day operations only increased. Geneviève found all manner of expedients, some new, some old, to make ends meet, most needing administrative approval from the intendant. Could the hospital be excused from maintaining its side of the Rue des Pauvres, along the north side of its property, since it had contributed to paving the street and had furnished part of the right of way? The hospital had sold some land years ago when it had little value; could the hospital be awarded the resale taxes now that the new owner was selling it? Could the hospital again share in the proceeds of fines and confiscations and be exempted from import duties? The old issue of the hospital keeping the clothes of soldiers who died there to pay for their funeral expenses resurfaced. And, of course, there were continuing complaints from butchers about the hospital’s practice of selling off supplies that it did not need. The Duplessis sisters saw these as small items that allowed the hospital to compensate for inadequate royal funding for His Majesty’s ill troops. The Duplessis sisters continued their strategy of seeking allies and intercessors. A subsequent letter to Franquet (probably sent in 1753) is in fact a list of seven talking points he could use in defending their cause. The sixth in particular illustrates the isolation they felt: if he has friends in the navy office “who are of a disposition to share with him his kindnesses for this house,” could Franquet put them in contact with the nuns so that they could better know what “what we might ask for or obtain?”45 They corresponded with the former governor-general La Galissonière. They professed to have disabused him of his prejudices against the hospital shortly before his departure in 1749 and counted him among their allies in France.46 The Duplessis sisters were aware of the collusion between Bigot and the personnel of the navy office. In 1751, François-Xavier had warned them, “the navy office appears inflexible, and I believe that you will still have many heavy crosses to bear … there is reason to believe that the officials of the bureau have an understanding with those who are the authors of your misfortunes.”47 What they failed to realize was how high the collusion went. Arnaud de Laporte, the senior official who oversaw correspondence from the colony reaching

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the minister, was a collaborator in the intendant’s enterprises.48 In 1752, Geneviève even complained in a draft of a letter to Laporte about Bigot: “We do not know why Monsieur the intendant has become so cold toward this house about which he cannot say a good word and for which he has not given the slightest benefit ... Permit, if you please, sir, that to unburden my heart, I tell you the extent to which even the advantages that we receive are accompanied by unpleasant aspects.”49 On the local front, they also cultivated allies. Marie-André sent Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial an enthusiastic letter of congratulations on 29 June 1755, a week after his arrival in Quebec as governor-general. She reminded him that he had once said that if he returned one day to Canada “our house would be his favourite.”50 She established good relations with Louis-Joseph de Montcalm upon his arrival in 1756 and asked him to write the duc de Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon on the hospital’s behalf.51 Once Montcalm became acclimated to Canada, the general led the charge in denouncing Bigot to the minister, which could only have pleased Duplessis. However, her most common dealings for daily business were with the intendant and the bishop, not the military chiefs of the colony. With the intendant Bigot, who had veto over most of their initiatives, hostile52 and the minister in Versailles ill-disposed, the two sisters felt blocked at both the local and metropolitan levels. They began to doubt even their friends. A 1756 letter from Franquet reassured them that, to his knowledge, Bishop Pontbriand had always supported them; Franquet closed by refusing to reply directly to insinuations that had been reported to them that even he was wavering in his support: “I am not replying to the suspicions that you have been given about my way of thinking about your interests.”53 Likewise, in 1752, their Jesuit brother had informed them that they had been deceived if they had been told that he had been receiving gifts to fund dowries, as if they questioned whether he was doing all he could to help.54 The burden of day-to-day purchasing, of hiring workers, and of producing detailed financial reports fell principally on Geneviève, who felt increasingly beleaguered, and her sharp temper surfaced. For example, in 1752, she had called a baker named Maurice, who had cancelled a promised sale of wheat to the hospital, “a scoundrel” (“un coquin”). He in turn, certain of Bigot’s protection, charged her 190

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with defamation. This would have cost the hospital 300 livres had not his suit been quashed.55 Maligned, attacked, and forced to deal with an unresponsive and dishonest intendant, there is a note of acute discouragement verging on burnout in a 1755 letter to Pontbriand after the fire: “I am reaching the beginning of my eternity which preoccupies me much more than the reestablishment of this house.”56 Discouragement, however, did not mean dereliction of duty. She refused Pontbriand’s offer to reduce her duties, if it meant combining the finances of the hospital and community,57 and she remained in office until her health failed the next spring.

Duplessis Enters the Encyclopédie: Lahontan, and the Wild Girl of Châlons In October 1753, Duplessis acknowledged receipt of a manuscript narration Hecquet had sent that spring, “the account that you sent me concerning the adventures of Mademoiselle Leblanc.” It was the draft of what was to become Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans when it was published in 1755. Duplessis agreed with Hecquet’s contention concerning the wild girl’s origin. “I believe like you, my dear friend, that she is an Eskimo.”58 Without her connection to Duplessis, Hecquet would likely never have written the Histoire or identified the girl as Inuit.59 Their correspondence provides definitive proof of Hecquet’s authorship, which has sometimes been attributed to the explorer and philosophe Charles-Marie de La Condamine. Although there is nothing overtly Jansenist about the book, Hecquet’s Jansenism also played a role in its creation. Marie-Angelique Leblanc, as the wild girl came to be known, had long been shedding her savage ways since her capture in 1731 and Hecquet’s encounter with her in November 1752. However, when the wild girl emerged from the woods near Châlons-en-Champagne in 1731, her exotic wildness fascinated the public. She was completely at home in the river water and caught fish and frogs that she ate raw along with nuts and berries; she clambered up trees with the agility of a squirrel. Enlarged fingers facilitated her tree-climbing. There was much speculation about her origins, some saying she was from Norway, others from the Caribbean. Accounts appeared in the Mercure 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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8.1 The title page of the first (1755) Paris edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage.

de France and other papers. Intellectuals used the case of the feral girl to advance their own theories of human nature, for example the Jansenist Louis Racine, the atheist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and the deist Voltaire. Leblanc was protected after her capture by local authorities, and then, as her case attracted more attention, by members of the highest aristocracy, including the king’s cousin Louis d’Orléans and the queen’s mother.60 Hecquet came in contact with Leblanc in 1752 in the monastery on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris of the hospital nuns of Saint-Marcel, who belonged to the same order of Augustine sisters as Duplessis. Marie-Angelique, however, was not there to become a hospitaller, but as a boarder who was recovering from an injury that she had received in the Royal Abbey of Sainte-Perrine in Chaillot, where she had been received as a postulant in January 1751. Her stay had been cut short by an accident caused by a falling window, and she moved in June of that year to the Rue Mouffetard, in hope of a recovery that would allow her return. Leblanc relied on benefactors for her support, and was in need of new ones, since her principal protector, the duc d’Orléans, had recently died. Hecquet lived nearby on the Rue Mouffetard, and the nuns of Saint-Marcel had Jansenist ties,61 which might explain why Hecquet frequented their monastery, where she encountered Leblanc. By taking an interest in Leblanc, she was imitating her aunt Michelle Fontaine, who had often taken in unfortunates she encountered on the streets of Paris. Hecquet was greatly impressed by Leblanc’s confidence in Providence and seems to have written up Leblanc’s story to help her find new protectors. In the first part of the Histoire, Hecquet dwells on the civilizing process that changed the wild girl into a devout woman who was eager to enter a convent; in the second part she discusses various hypotheses about Leblanc’s origins. Hecquet advances the view that Leblanc was an “Eskimo.” In support of that claim, she cites information about the Inuit peoples obtained from Duplessis. Hecquet’s deep interest in Canada’s Indigenous population was, in fact, one of the threads that held together her correspondence with Duplessis. The nun’s letters contain a number of substantial reports on them (1718, 1723, 1751), all reports that Hecquet solicited, and many shorter ones. The first letter from Marie-André that Hecquet preserved is only a long 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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8.2 This page from the 1761 Paris edition introduces Hecquet’s experiment with the dolls and miniature canoe that Duplessis had sent in 1751 and the extract of the accompanying letter that would form the basis of the article “Eskimaux” in the Encyclopédie.

fragment that describes Indigenous customs. Hecquet had requested this information, and Duplessis sent along a pair of moccasins. In 1751, Duplessis sent Hecquet not just one artifact, but a whole collection of dolls, each illustrating the garb, male and female, of many different nations. Two letters with extensive descriptions of each group accompanied the dolls. Hecquet used the dolls in a sort of experiment that she organized with Leblanc that confirmed her hypothesis that Leblanc was Inuit: “I had the box of savage dolls brought along. When it was opened, I took care to examine her reactions and what would strike her eyes first. Although several dolls were more pleasing and more embellished than those of the Eskimos, which hardly look human, she reached all of a sudden for the Eskimo woman, then took up the Eskimo man, and looked at them one after the other in silence, not like people to whom a new and astonishing thing has appeared, but like a thing they have already seen, without knowing where, and which they strive to recognize.”62 In a second step, Hecquet brought out a model bark canoe Duplessis had also sent. Leblanc said it was not like the ones she knew and proceeded to describe a kayak. “As this description of the canoe was completely consistent with the one Madame Duplessis gives me of the Eskimo canoes, of which Mademoiselle Leblanc surely had no knowledge, I did not doubt any longer that she was of this nation.”63 Sure of her identification, Hecquet included Duplessis’s description of the Inuit as an appendix to the Histoire for documentation, along with extracts from Louis-Armand de Lahontan’s Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale. First published in 1703, Lahontan’s three books (Les Nouveaux voyages, Les Mémoires, and La Suite des voyages) went through multiple editions. They are based on his experiences as a military officer and explorer in Canada and the upper country between 1683 and 1693. Embedded in his compendium of information about the land’s geography, history, flora, and fauna is his portrait of its Indigenous inhabitants as virtuous and noble, living in accord with nature and reason, un-degraded by the vices and inequality of Europe. He popularized the notion of the noble savage that Enlightenment writers would promote. In 1740, Duplessis and Hecquet had an exchange about Lahontan that can serve to situate their views on Indigenous peoples of New 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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France. That year Hecquet seems to have reported to Duplessis that she had read Lahontan to increase her knowledge of Canada and its inhabitants. The surviving draft of Hecquet’s letter from that year does not mention Lahontan, but does contain an idealized portrait of Indigenous Christians praying in front of relics in the Hôtel-Dieu chapel and being unconcerned about impressing other worshippers with their dress, as French worshippers would have been.64 However, Hecquet saw the simplicity of the first Christians where Lahontan saw natural equality, and Duplessis warned against any idealized portrait, either of the domiciled Christian Indigenous groups living in one of the seven mission villages or of those not yet converted: I am happy that the baron Lahontan has allowed you to familiarize yourself a bit with Canada. He tells the truth on several subjects and also lies by exaggerating too much about what he puts forward. Even the savages who are neighbours to our towns are as filthy and have kept all the customs of former times. They consider themselves to be above all other peoples and see the French as slaves of minor polite practices that social life imposes. They are dirty gentlemen, although among them there are some fervent Christians in the missions who are instructed, because most listen to the mysteries that are preached to them as if they were legends which make no impression on them. The only fruit that missionaries in some areas have is to baptize many children who die in infancy and to give to these barbarians a fine notion of our religion by the purity of their lives.65 Despite being a cloistered nun, Duplessis had multiple sources of information on the Indigenous: some were patients in the hospital or did work for it; her mother and brother Charles-Denis each owned one as a slave, and he served among them in the upper county; she was close to the missionaries who spent their lives among them. She never varied from her initial reaction, dating to her pre-convent days, that mixed a bit of admiration for the colourfulness that they could display and for their inventiveness with an almost physical revulsion for everything she found uncivilized about them, a revulsion 196

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that she overcame out of a sense of duty: “Before I became a nun, I was occasionally at their ceremonies. I had the advantage of being pleasing to some of those people. They came toward me to present their hands in a way to make me tremble, but I touched them without a fuss because one must not refuse them. They would take that for an insult.”66 She found most of them to be as impervious to adopting French customs as to accepting Christianity. For her, they embodied fully the term which was commonly applied to them in her day, “savage.”67 The fierce cruelty that “savage” suggests in today’s usage was certainly a component; she cited their blood feuds, torture of prisoners, and scalping practices. However, that was only one facet of what she saw as the wild, undisciplined nature of these peoples who resisted European civilization. Still, she dutifully reported on the exemplary converts among them, such as Kateri Tekakwitha, and noted on occasion the discovery of a new tribe in the far west that seemed more likely prospects for lasting conversion.68 When Hecquet requested accounts in 1723 about “the lifestyle and customs of our savages,” including information about “how they are dressed, how they marry and how they are buried,”69 Duplessis dutifully complied with reports which are at times almost ethnographic. Nonetheless, such accounts have a way of turning into a catalogue of reasons why their lifestyle was an obstacle to conversion: sexual and marriage practices, collective guilt to punish killings, shamans who communicate with the devil. She concludes one such section with “they have numerous other bad characteristics such as inconstancy and fickleness; they are perfidious and very superstitious.”70 The list was almost endless in her eyes. She had written off the Indigenous, and without the solicitations of Hecquet, she would not have not have reported so fully on them. Duplessis’s own reserved attitude reflected the fallback stance of the Jesuits on the missions once they realized that converts would not come easily: the personal sanctification of the missionaries due to the hardships they endured could compensate for the paucity of conversions.71 Ironically, Duplessis’s pessimism about solid conversions aligned with seventeenth-century Jansenist skepticism about the number of conversions the early Jesuits claimed in their missions.72 To a certain extent, she was also aligned with Lahontan. He included a section 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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entitled “Beliefs of the Savages and Obstacles to Their Conversion.”73 Like her, he noted that they “listen to all that the Jesuits preach to them without contradicting them.” But the anticlerical Lahontan adds, “It is enough for them to mock among themselves the sermons these fathers preach in church.”74 While Lahontan saw the indifference of most of the Indigenous to Christian claims and their rejection of the French lifestyle as proof that they were guided by natural reason, Duplessis only saw blindness to Christian truth caused by their immorality. She was as unable to understand their beliefs as she was to comprehend Jansenism. Instead of seeing that the Indigenous groups did not convert because they viewed Christianity as irrelevant to their lives, she blamed the bad example of the French. As she put it in her 1740 letter, “The libertine life-style and self-interest of the French undermine the faith in these lands.” Brandy sales and debauching Indigenous women were the problems, in her eyes. The Jansenist Hecquet, who had no direct experience of North America’s Indigenous peoples, was more optimistic on the possibility of conversions than Duplessis. Hecquet seems to have misread Duplessis’s letters just as she did Lahontan. In 1740, the Jansenist had imagined converts who had no thought of showing off their fine clothes in church. However, in 1723, Duplessis had already noted, after describing such finery, “All that finery has its beauty among them, and they are as vain about it as the French are about their rich clothes.”75 Hecquet’s obsession with the Indigenous and her wishful thinking about their conversion had roots in her Jansenism. Eighteenth-century Jansenist exegesis of biblical prophecy postulated that the apostasy which the Catholics of France displayed in complying with Unigenitus would be compensated for by the conversion of the Jews and other unbelievers. According to Jansenist theologian Jacques-Joseph Duguet and his disciple Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Ménilles d’Étemare, the conversion of the Jews would be followed by that of all nations, even those to whom the gospel had not previously been preached.76 Hence Hecquet’s intense interest in converts in the New World. Hecquet comes the closest to expressing this belief explicitly in her 1756 letter to Duplessis. There she inquired “[i]f our holy religion does not make some progress among these idolaters whom I love, because I hope that their near or distant conversion, which is nevertheless assured according to God’s word, will console our holy mother church for 198

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all the bad Christians who now afflict it?”77 Hecquet, Duplessis, and Lahontan could only see the Indigenous through European eyes. For Hecquet, they would rejuvenate a church fallen into apostasy; for Duplessis, they were unwashed, wild, and unamenable to Christianity; for Lahontan, they were proto-philosophes.

The Jansenist and the Nun Edited by Philosophes Just as publication of Duplessis’s Annales in 1751 had been arranged by Bertrand de La Tour, who edited the manuscript heavily, a man found a publisher for Hecquet’s account after editing it. We know that La Tour intervened chiefly to abridge Duplessis’s text since her manuscript survives; however, it is not possible to ascertain the extent of La Condamine’s changes. The mathematician and explorer of South America La Condamine had begun helping Leblanc as early as 1747. He only admitted to making slight changes involving Hecquet’s speculations on Leblanc’s origins. His intervention might have been more extensive. The Histoire could have painted Leblanc in such a way that her conversion to Christianity was accompanied by a great moral revolution, a miracle of transforming Jansenist efficacious grace. Instead, it stresses Leblanc’s positive characteristics from the beginning: her compassion for her companion’s suffering; her good humour, not to mention her trust in Providence that had won over Hecquet from the start. Any negative characteristics are attributed to the instinct of self-preservation. Quite early in the Histoire, Leblanc is presented as having “a very gay temperament and a character marked by gentleness and humanity that savage and ferocious ways, necessary for the preservation of life, had not completely erased.”78 There is no allusion to original sin such as is found in the Jansenist Louis Racine’s treatment of Leblanc.79 Even more telling might be the frequent remarks that attribute Leblanc’s actions to natural instincts. To be sure, this intervention of natural instincts is not incompatible with religion. In fact, when the notion is introduced, it is attributed to divine Providence: “Providence, which has supplied all creatures with all the natural instincts and characteristics for the conservation of their species, had given to her an unimaginable mobility of eyesight.”80 Nevertheless, this view of 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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instinct stems from a view of human nature that gives short shrift to the Jansenist belief that Adam’s sin left humans with an inclination toward evil. Natural instinct is seen as more reliable than reasoning. The word “instinct” does not appear to be in Hecquet’s vocabulary. It does not occur in any of her letters, her spiritual texts, or her autobiographic accounts that have survived. Tellingly, the word “instinct” has been added to the passage from Duplessis’s letter on the Inuits that is found in as an appendix in the Histoire, where Duplessis’s “modesty”81 is expanded to “instinct of modesty.”82 It is more plausible that La Condamine made this change than Hecquet. La Condamine was a philosophe, although he did not trumpet his stance as Voltaire did. He had little use for the Jansenists and ridiculed their miracles. It is unlikely that Hecquet would collaborate closely with him. He probably took the account she had written in 1753 and made changes, before finding a publisher in late 1754. He kept his distance from the book when it appeared in early 1755 and published disclaimers limiting his involvement. In them, he described her as a widow, even though her husband did not die until 1762, a sign that he did not know her well.83 Hecquet might well have kept her distance also. She does not seem to have sent Duplessis a copy of the book, as if the manuscript she had previously sent sufficed. In fall 1755, Duplessis reported to Hecquet having seen a copy, but it was a volume that someone had carried back from France and brought to her attention.84 Whatever the level of collaboration between Hecquet and La Condamine, it worked well for Leblanc. She found new benefactors, among them the queen, and managed to live independently in Paris until her death in 1775. There was a bonus for Duplessis as well. By including part of Duplessis’s letter in the Histoire, Hecquet gained entrance for her friend into that battle horse of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie. Louis de Jaucourt made Duplessis’s remarks the core of his article “Eskimaux” in volume five of the Encyclopédie that appeared in November 1755, giving her this credit, “Extract of a letter of Saint-Helen of 30 October 1751.”85 He minimized any positive descriptions of the Inuit people in the section of Duplessis’s letter that Hecquet had published. Thus Jaucourt’s article presents them in Duplessis’s words as “the savages among the savages” (“les sauvages des sauvages”), in keeping with Enlightenment opinion that placed 200

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the Inuit in an almost subhuman category.86 In closing his article, Jaucourt mentioned Lahontan’s writing on the Inuit and the Recueil de voyages au nord (1715), published by Jean-Frédéric Bernard, but warned that they only contained “fictions.” Duplessis is thus deemed a more reliable source. Hecquet had succeeded in writing a work that found a place both in convent hagiography collections and in the libraries of philosophes. She was primed to write it because of her correspondence with Duplessis, who probably never discovered she had entered the Encyclopédie. Marie-André would have been dismayed, as might Hecquet have been, had she learned. The Jesuits were widely seen by those in the know as having been instigators of the condemnation of the Encyclopédie in February 1752 by the king’s council that almost sunk the publishing enterprise, and the Jansenist periodical the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques joined in the attack that same month.87

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chapter

9

1755–58 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Fire, Family Crosses, and War The community was in the refectory at lunch on 7 June 1755 when a nun interrupted the meal with the cry of “Fire!” Duplessis was ordinarily a quick eater, and her custom, as she told Hecquet, was to embroider chalice covers while she waited for the others to finish. For the date of the fire, one is recorded with the title “To the consuming blaze” in her log. In less than two hours, the fire wreaked its destruction. The principal building was a square around a central courtyard, with the wards in the northern section and the church and monastery occupying the other three sides. There were also a number of outbuildings, a barn, an icehouse, a chicken house, etc. The hospital wards suffered the most damage, but all the buildings and their furnishings along with stockpiled supplies were unusable. The patients numbered probably in the twenties and were evacuated. The only direct fatality was a nun who became trapped when she returned to her cell. Many of the treasures in the church were saved, as was a substantial part of the archives,1 more perhaps than in previous fires in other Canadian convents. While much past correspondence was lost, François-Xavier’s letters to his sister dating back to 1716 were rescued. The nuns’ personal effects were lost, and the forty-five nuns, one novice, and two postulants were taken in by the Ursulines.2

Fires were a constant menace in Canada. The destruction of the intendant’s palace with its records in 1713 had been a reversal for Georges Duplessis. The Quebec Jesuits’ house had burned in 1640, the Ursulines’ in 1650 and 1686, the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal in 1695, 1721, and 1734, and the house of the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières in 1752. In the annals, Duplessis noted each time fires struck other communities and recounted the close calls her own had had. She attributed her house’s good fortune to the general protection of the Virgin and Saint Joseph and the special protection of Saint Thecla. Each 23 September, the community made a general communion and sang the hymn of the thanksgiving of the youths who escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.3 That day in September was the Feast of Saint Thecla, who, when thrown into flames, had not been touched. In addition, the community invoked her special protection each day, a daily reminder to be watchful. The fire that destroyed the Ursulines’ house of Trois-Rivières on 22 May 1752 was an important recent precedent. Besides their school, they hosted a small hospital with ten beds.4 The ten professed Ursulines and their two novices were put up temporarily in the nearby Recollet house during the eighteen months of reconstruction. Bishop Pontbriand had been in Montreal at the time of the fire; he stopped briefly to survey the damage during his return to Quebec, where he began immediately soliciting funds. The following May he moved to Trois-Rivières and supervised rebuilding during the six months before the nuns could return in November 1753. The bishop described his multiple roles to his brother in France: “For the last six months I have been in Three-Rivers, housed badly in the middle of fifty workers of every sort whom I guide, spur on, and pay … You ask where I find the money? I make the nuns borrow. All my household staff works. I make requests to the court to contribute. Two thousand livres of alms have been collected. I have become a bishop, a cabinet maker, a carpenter, a labourer, a carrier of bricks and pipes.”5 This intense personal involvement is a sign of his solicitude for religious communities and probably also reflects his judgment that the small Ursuline one was not up to managing the rebuilding on its own. After losing six members in a 1749–50 epidemic, the community

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had asked the colonial officials for permission to close the hospital, but Bigot had refused.6 Pontbriand mobilized three funding sources. He collected gifts from local and French donors. 7,000 livres were obtained, not directly from the court, but from the Commission des secours,7 a government body, which made grants to deserving convents, when it was not suppressing ones deemed unneeded.8 Finally, the bishop made the Ursulines borrow. When fire struck the Quebec Hôtel-Dieu, the Duplessis sisters already had a working relationship with Pontbriand. After SaintVallier, who favoured his Hôpital-Général’s foundation, and the fourteen-year interval following his death in 1727 when bishops were seldom in residence, Marie-André was relieved to be favourably impressed by the young bishop who arrived in 1741. A year later, she reported to Hecquet, “We have a prelate who has greatly lightened my burden by the way he deals with me and by the satisfaction that he seems to have had in examining the hospital accounts entrusted to us which he is quite satisfied with. I did not experience a similar gentleness during the oversight of the reverend grand vicars. May God be praised who wounds and heals.”9 A year after the fire, Duplessis expressed effusive gratitude for the way the bishop took an intimate role in rebuilding her hospital, as he had at Trois-Rivières: “Our worthy prelate has given us notable signs of his paternal benevolence, because he wishes to take this task greatly to heart. He has made the contracts with the workers and goes to see them daily to encourage them. He has made us take on large loans for this that greatly indebt us, but necessity forces us to take them on. His lordship further aids us greatly in this effort by using his good reputation so we do not have to make payments, and although this expenditure is not made at his expense, his protection is very advantageous to us, and we can never be grateful enough for the debt we have to him.”10

Rebuilding with an Imperious Bishop If Marie-André had not had an incapacitating skin rash in the summer following the fire, this version of the reconstruction that describes a smooth working relationship with Pontbriand might stand. The 19 September 1756 letter, however, was addressed to the bishop’s sisters, 204

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Visitation nuns in France, with the expectation that they would relay Duplessis’s gratitude to their brother. During a brief period around August 1755, while Marie-André was recuperating from a case of erysipelas that left her face red, Geneviève, who was much less diplomatic, took over correspondence duties. In the draft of one letter she wrote to an unnamed priest in France, she lays out a much more fraught relationship: “His lordship our bishop who, as you may think, has great authority over us and an innate impulsiveness with which is very difficult to deal, so much so that we hardly dare say a word to him. He wants us not to get involved in anything or to write and solicit our friends. He considers things like that as shows of independence. He has tired us out more since our fire with his projects and initiatives than the fire itself distressed us.”11 Even though this assessment was written at a moment of heightened tension between Geneviève and Pontbriand over her role as bursar, it shows the Duplessis sisters’ view of the underlying dynamics of power between them and the bishop. His micromanagement in Trois-Rivières was not just a reflection of his judgment that the small Ursuline community was not up to rebuilding on its own. Dealing with the Duplessis sisters, however, would be a different matter. Even though Marie-André was second-in-command as assistant and secretary at the time of the fire, and would not become mother superior until March 1756, she was at the centre of decision-making. Her experience and fiercely protective attitude would have to come to terms with the bishop’s will to exercise his authority to supervise all aspects of the affairs of women’s communities. Pontbriand was again in Montreal at the time of the fire. On 14 June, he sent the nuns a letter of condolence12 with a memorandum that presented them his detailed plan for securing suitable housing and restoring hospital services. Taking the long view, he did not envisage their rebuilding in less than two years. In the short term, staying through the winter with the Ursulines was impractical. He would move from his palace to the Seminary so that a portion of the community could be housed in his residence, where hospital wards could be opened. In the meantime, patients would be directed to the Hôpital-Général. The other part of the community could stay in a section of the Jesuit college. He seems to have thought through every detail; he contacted the intendant and gave the nuns permission to 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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visit the ruins of their monastery as often as needed. He ends his memorandum peremptorily: “I will arrive on 7 July in Quebec. I want to find the nuns in my palace.”13 The nuns, however, found a more satisfactory arrangement. Instead of dividing the community, on 28 June, all of it moved into a portion of the Jesuit college formerly occupied by boarding students, where they welcomed patients into two wards by 16 July. That summer the bishop also had a thirteen-point plan for financial operations that the Duplessis sisters certainly found inopportune, although what exactly motivated him is not known.14 His proposal was presented as a stopgap, “for the time that the nuns stay with the Jesuit fathers.” He proposed giving many of the purchasing duties of the hospital bursar to other convent officers, including the community’s bursar. This last provision might simply have been made in hopes of avoiding Geneviève’s frequent conflicts with suppliers. She, in effect, would manage income while others would deal with expenses. Geneviève, certainly in conjunction with her sister, prepared a response. As they had done in the past, they consulted sympathetic outside advisors. Geneviève complained to Jean-Victor Varin de La Marre, the subdelegate of the intendant, about the bishop’s imperious character: “We fear all of his hasty temper; he does not want to listen to any expression of opinion.”15 She requested that Varin de La Marre intervene with Governor-General Vaudreuil and even Bigot, if necessary. The Duplessis sisters’ official response appeals to general principles instead of addressing Pontbriand’s proposals dealing with purchasing. The overall effect of the bishop’s plan, Geneviève maintained, would have been a return to the situation before 1664 when the hospital and community’s finances had been united. Worse, “It is clear that his lordship wants to have the nuns live off the revenues of the hospital.”16 They had objected to the community financing hospital expansion a few years earlier, citing the separation of the two institutions’ finances; now they defended the same principle by insisting that the hospital should not fund the community. Was the bishop’s plan simply a way of dealing with the immediate crisis? Was he using the crisis to introduce changes he had long wanted? Or was he merely dealing with a personnel issue? His plan was never implemented, although the records do not say why. François 206

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Rousseau is surely right to cite this incident to illustrate “the degree of liberty and independence that for a long while characterized the community.”17 It also illustrates the close oversight bishops could devote to the community’s affairs. The bishop objected to the nuns soliciting aid from their supporters in France. However, among Geneviève’s drafts is one written on 12 August to the duchesse d’Aiguillon asking for her protection.18 The bishop would have certainly objected to the request in another draft that its recipient lobby the navy office “before his lordship the bishop, Messieurs the general and the intendant join together to present their project and the views that they might had for this enterprise.”19 Even though the Duplessis sisters had been warned in the past about appealing over the heads of the colony’s leaders, or in this case behind their backs, the sisters seemed determined to do so. They had their own views and wanted them heard before those of the three officials reached the ministry. Their hope was that a promise of reconstruction aid would be sent that fall through Louisbourg so that it would reach Quebec in time to finance work in the spring. They also suggested that someone sympathetic to their needs, such as the engineer Louis Franquet, be placed in charge of the project. Another series of drafts reflects a campaign that probably eventually had Pontbriand’s blessing to mobilize donors in France. Shortly after the disaster, Marie-André had composed a narration that served as the “official” account of the fire.20 The monastery archives contain drafts of eight letters sent to various figures such as the archbishop of Paris, the duc de Mirepoix, and a confidant of the queen, most likely in fall 1755. Each letter appeals to some individual trait of the recipient and suggests a specific way in which that person might aid the Hôtel-Dieu. Mirepoix controlled a lottery whose proceeds went to needy convents. The nuns ask the superior of the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris to share some bit of the “immense amount of alms” that her institution received. They remind the Abbé de la Viegerie that he had already contributed to the reconstruction of the Trois-Rivières hospital. The letters are short and served as cover letters to Duplessis’s account of the fire that accompanied them.21 The nuns were impatient to leave their temporary quarters. That summer, while waiting for the nuns to decide just how to rebuild and how to finance the project, workmen began restoring the outbuildings 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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of the hospital.22 In late November, when no word from France had arrived from the ministry promising aid, more comprehensive plans could no longer be postponed. Instead of a multiple-point proposal like the ones he had presented in June offering his palace, Pontbriand merely sent the nuns a series of discussion points for and against waiting until the following year to begin reconstruction. He did not envisage rebuilding the entire hospital-monastery complex, only the northeast wing that had been most seriously damaged and that had housed the hospital wards. According to Duplessis, “he left us the freedom to choose between the two proposals he presented.”23 Borrowing money was unavoidable, and he knew the Duplessis sisters’ horror of debt; thus the sum he mentioned to be borrowed – up to 25,000 livres – was probably set deliberately low. He characterized the arguments for postponing a decision until the following year as being based only on “panicked terrors.” The record of the discussions, first by the advisory council and then by all the professed nuns, was made by Marie-André as chapter secretary, who also had a guiding voice in both bodies as assistant superior. The decisions that were reached reflect her prudent, longterm perspective. Waiting until the next year was judged impractical. The nuns went further than the bishop’s proposal. Instead of just rebuilding the northeast wing, they also proposed reframing and reroofing two additional wings to protect their masonry walls that were still standing, but needed immediate repair. For the time being, they would concentrate on stabilizing the exterior structure and would postpone interior finishing work. They noted that an offered gift of local wood that could be used for reframing might disappear if not accepted immediately. Duplessis’s record of the deliberations masked any tension between bishop and community. She was at her deferential finest. The initiative was presented as coming from Pontbriand, and the “full liberty” he left the nuns in reality amounted to adjusting his proposals. However, since all parties agreed that rebuilding and borrowing at some point was necessary and since the minister at Versailles was unresponsive, the competent leadership within the community refined the bishop’s suggestions. Whatever initial tension there was between the Duplessis sisters and the bishop, as reflected in Geneviève’s summer 1755 letters, a 208

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9.1 Richard Short’s view of Quebec after the 1759 siege from the northwest along the Saint Charles River shows the palace of the intendant (two-storey building with turret in centre) below the bluff. One of the rebuilt wings of the Hôtel-Dieu is the two-storey building with a steep pitched roof on the bluff, just left of centre. Little destruction from the bombing is visible in this view.

smooth working relationship was established. Pontbriand could be imperious, but he was not inflexible. A November 1756 letter to her friend Marie-Catherine repeats the praise of Pontbriand that MarieAndré sent the bishop’s sisters at about the same time.24 As rebuilding progressed that winter, letters show that Duplessis relied on the bishop’s constant involvement. Could he supply windowpanes for the door of their chapel (2 January 1757)? Could she take advantage of the offer of a loan without interest (21 January 1757)? He reported his negotiations for 3,000 planks of wood (22 January 1757). In discussing the possible loan, he reminded her, “finding lodging is a necessity” (4 March 1757), and reassured her that the money would be found to pay it back in a single installment (19 March 1757). The previous fall, when a formal petition to the court for rebuilding funds was being prepared, she asked his advice about how her cover letter should be headed and whether she alone should sign it, or have it signed by other nuns. Pontbriand replied that “Monseigneur” sufficed as a heading, and that she alone should sign (13 September 1756).25 Duplessis had extensive experience writing official correspondence. Did she seek advice and exaggerate her incapability to show deference to the bishop? A formal request to the court was indeed sent in fall 1756. On 11 November, Pontbriand wrote the current minister of the navy, JeanBaptiste de Machault d’Arnouville, that the nuns’ petition had been endorsed by the intendant Bigot and the governor-general Vaudreuil. It was accompanied by architectural designs for expansion from the engineer Louis Franquet.26 The bishop estimated the cost at 200,000 francs.27 With France officially at war, no such sum was forthcoming. In the last letter Marie-André received in 1759 from her Jesuit brother, François-Xavier reported having heard from Marie de Rupelmonde, an aristocrat who had become a Carmelite and was close to the queen.28 A request that Marie-André had sent this nun in 1755 to appeal to the queen was finally bearing fruit. The Carmelite had intervened with the bishops on the Commission des secours, and 4,000 livres would reportedly be forthcoming,29 3,000 livres less than the Commission had awarded the Trois-Rivières Ursulines. The community moved into the partially restored buildings on 1 August 1757, over two years after the fire. That date corresponded to the foundresses’ arrival in Quebec in 1639. 210

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Family Crosses Marie-André had been predicting Geneviève’s death for so long that it was perhaps a surprise when her sister finally succumbed on 12 May 1756 to the lung inflammation that had laid her low so often over the preceding thirty years. In her report to Marie-Catherine Hecquet that fall, Duplessis described her intimate bond with Geneviève in much the same terms as Hecquet had used many years earlier to describe her attachment to Marie-André. Duplessis wrote, “I was more bound to her by sentiment than blood.”30 Hecquet had likewise attributed her immediate attraction to Duplessis as a child to a “similarity of humours.”31 After the separation of the two childhood friends on the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marie-André had found a new soulmate in the cloister. Hecquet, on the other hand, had entered a loveless marriage and even found her attachments to her daughters tested. MarieCatherine had learned to live with what Marie-André now foresaw, a loneliness that would accompany her for the rest of her life: “She has left me in a great solitude.”32 Duplessis’s grief work, as she had affirmed in Geneviève’s circular letter to communities in France, would be to rededicate herself to the project she had shared with her sister: the defence of her community and its hospital. The mutual attachment of “les Dames Duplessis” – the Duplessis Ladies – was too well-known for her not to receive many condolences that invariably noted Geneviève’s indefatigable devotion to the hospital. One notable expression of concern was received from Vaudreuil before Geneviève’s death. If the memoirs of Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, who met the sisters around 1717 when he was housed at the hospital, are to be believed, the future governor-general had had a romantic interest in Geneviève in their youth. Montigny wrote that Geneviève “preferred to follow the fine example of her sister in taking religious vows rather than accept the hand of marriage offered to her by M. de Cavagnial, the son of M. the marquis de Vaudreuil.”33 On 29 March 1756 at the beginning of her fatal illness, his expression of sympathy to Marie-André stays within conventional formalities, but that could hardly be otherwise: “I learn with much sorrow, Madame, that Madame of the Infant Jesus is ill to the point of death. If my wishes for her are fulfilled, her health will be restored. She is important for your community and for the poor of the hospital. Please accept my 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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sincere expression of concern. I hope that when my letter reaches you, she will be in a state to receive my thousand-fold pledges of respect.”34 A second letter received a week before Geneviève’s death illustrates the esteem for the Duplessis sisters in the other Quebec women’s communities. It also suggests a connection back to the period in Geneviève’s youth around 1710–12 recounted in the Histoire de Ruma and alluded to by Dumont de Montigny. The former New England captive, current Ursuline novice mistress, and future mother superior of the Quebec Ursulines, Esther Wheelwright, wrote Marie-André to express her personal concern about her sister’s health. Wheelwright also took the occasion to congratulate Marie-André, whose community had just re-elected her superior, by citing “the good fortune and consolation that it has to be under your gracious direction.” “I hope,” she wrote, “that you will be so kind as to keep for me some small part in your dear friendship that I value more than my pen can express.” Wheelwight shared the name in religion “Infant Jesus” with Geneviève, but her description of her bond to her suggests a much stronger tie than with a person she had only come to know the previous year, when the Hôtel-Dieu nuns had taken refuge for three weeks with the Ursulines after their fire. She called Geneviève “this dear friend whom I love as tenderly as if she were a near relative to me.”35 Moreover, Wheelwright pointedly says that her affection is so strong that she feels compelled to add her personal letter to the one her community had sent (probably in response to Marie-André’s request for their prayers). Within the previous ten years, Esther had rebuffed two of her own blood relatives: her mother, who had written her from New England in 1747, and a nephew, who had visited her in Quebec in 1753–54. By rejecting their overtures, she confirmed the commitment she had made to remain in Canada as an Ursuline around 1710, when she had turned down entreaties from her family to return home. At that time, she was living in the Château Saint-Louis, under the sponsorship of Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, the father of the current governor. She could well have moved in circles that included Geneviève, who was herself trying to decide then if she should leave the world for the convent. In addition, Esther was the protégé of the Jesuit Vincent Bigot, the same priest who had preached at the ceremony in 1708, when Marie-André took the habit of a nun. There were thus multiple 212

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occasions for Esther and Geneviève to have met in the period just before both became nuns. Esther explained to her mother in 1747 that she had followed Christ’s injunction to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters behind.36 She could have seen Geneviève as a “near relative” in the new family of nuns she was entering. A year after her sister’s death, Marie-André acknowledged to Pontbriand just how irksome, if not exasperating, Geneviève could become when she thought the hospital’s interests were threatened. With the anniversary of Geneviève’s death approaching, Marie-André asked the bishop to offer mass for her sister and to forgive the trouble she had caused him: “I beg you to pardon her for the occasions of displeasure she might have given you so that she does not suffer on account of them in the other world.”37 Beginning about 1750, François-Xavier reported declining health that interfered with his preaching commitments. One hand trembled so much that he could not write or offer mass for four months, and he complained of rheumatism. As much as any identifiable disease, the Jesuit in his mid-fifties seemed worn out by the exhausting schedule of missions that kept him travelling in the provinces much of the year and by daily routines that could include three sessions in the pulpit and long hours in the confessional. Like his sister, he was frustrated to see his years of labour in jeopardy because of what he saw as the rapid increase of irreligiousness and moral decay that spread from the social elite to the general population: “However deplorable may be the state of our poor Canada, France is in a sadder and more lamentable condition before God; impiety, irreligion, disbelief, libertinage make the swiftest progress there on a daily basis.” As an example, he said that things had only degenerated in Orléans since his successful mission ten years earlier: “I found there more work to do than ever, and what distresses me, is that after having inspired the fear and love of the Lord in the people … there are so few ministers of the Lord who work to sustain these sentiments.”38 He placed the blame on the local pastors who failed to follow up on his work. He thus deflected the Jansenist critiques of his revival missions. Emotional preaching and assembly-line confessions were not likely to produce solid individual conversions, the Jansenists maintained. He never gave up on lobbying for his sisters’ community, any more than he gave up preaching. His letters of the 1750s are full of 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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accounts of his contacts with anyone who could help. However, as one person he enlisted in the effort reported to Marie-André, “everything is done here very slowly.”39 Above all, everything depended on patronage and the protection of the powerful. While Marie-André’s Jesuit brother had encouraging news about himself and his efforts for the hospital in the last letter she received from him before her death, he was distressed about the family of their younger brother Charles-Denis, who had been in Paris the last four years: “What a position for my sister-in-law and her dear daughter!” Charles-Denis had delayed returning to Quebec and had been avoiding the Jesuit for the last year: “My judgment is that he dare not appear before me.”40 No sooner had Denis obtained his commission as provost marshal in 1749 than he wrote the minister about the meagre resources allotted to the marshalsea: more horsemen were needed in both Quebec and Montreal, and he noted that his own salary of 500 livres was simply insufficient.41 In addition, he requested passage on the king’s ship to attend to family business in France; a lawsuit dealing with the Morampont estate required his presence. The following year, he reminded the minister of his requests for increased funding and for passage to France.42 Only in 1753 was he able to make the trip. Vaudreuil supported his request for a raise and told the minister that it was not possible for the provost marshal to live decently on 500 livres,43 but there is no record that the increase was granted, just as it seems that the Morampont estate was not settled in his favour. All this time, his financial and marital situation went from bad to worse. In 1752, François-Xavier had reported that the Guillimin family was so upset with Denis’s conduct that they wanted a financial separation between him and his wife to protect her interests. The Jesuit sympathized with his sister-in-law, whom he called a “virtuous and worthy wife,” and fretted that, given his brother’s irascible character, he anticipated his brother’s prospective trip to France would only cause him additional worries.44 The following year he expressed delight at Marie-André’s report that an illness that Charles-Denis had experienced had somewhat calmed him and that he appeared to show “his respectable spouse the affection and consideration she has earned,”45 and in October of that year Denis and his wife 214

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received the sacrament at the first communion of their daughter, to Marie-André’s great satisfaction.46 Any improvement was more apparent than real, however. His debts must have been substantial. In 1756, he owed 4,020 livres to his brother-in-law’s estate,47 and on 16 November of that year, a judgment was recorded against him for an unpaid obligation of 4,000 livres. The following summer, his house and a lot on the Côte de la Fabrique were seized and sold,48 as well as a property with a barn on the Petite Rivière Saint-Charles in the seigneurie of Saint-Gabriel in the vicinity of Quebec.49 In November, his wife was granted financial separation.50 In Quebec she had to face his creditors alone. Worse, Denis showed little willingness to return, to the growing frustration of his sister in Quebec and his Jesuit brother in France. François-Xavier tried to be positive in his initial reports. In August 1755, he said he had obtained the most favourable protections on his brother’s behalf at his disposal, and he saw encouraging signs that Denis was struggling to master his impulsive nature. Denis had promised to receive the sacraments frequently and the tears he shed at their last meeting seemed sincere. If Denis’s negotiations were successful, FrançoisXavier expected his brother to return to Canada that fall.51 But Denis did not return. The following April, François-Xavier again pointed to the positive, although complaining of the difficulty of reminding Denis of his family duties: “He still has his acute quick temper as soon as one gives him any advice that is not in accord with his way of thinking. Nonetheless, I thank God that he cannot be blamed for any moral dissoluteness.”52 In the fall of 1756, Marie-André must have been aware of the impending bankruptcy judgment that would come in November. When Denis did not appear on any of the boats arrived from France, she urged her correspondents there to persuade her brother to return; she received letters written in spring 1757 from four of them who reported on their efforts. François-Xavier assured her in January and March that Denis had promised to return.53 Two other priests, the Abbé de l’Isle-Dieu and François Sorbier de Villars of the Quebec Seminary, wrote that they had done their best, but had little news;54 one suspects that Denis had done his best to avoid them. A fellow officer, only thirty-five years old, at least got Denis to open up. Claude-Michel Sarrazin was the son of Michel Sarrazin, the 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Hôtel-Dieu’s distinguished long-term doctor earlier in the century. Although born in Quebec, Claude-Michel had left Canada for France, and happened to lodge quite near to Denis in Paris. In fact, they ate together frequently. Even if he acknowledged, like everyone else, Denis’s hot-tempered character, one senses in his reports a genuine sympathy that is missing in those of the older priests. In turn, Denis related to him the various pretexts that justified in his mind his reluctance to return. If he had delayed his departure, it was because he hoped for the Cross of Saint-Louis. But as Claude-Michel explained, even though Vaudreuil was disposed to recommend Denis for the honour, the governor backed off when he saw that Denis was not making prompt plans to sail.55 In his next letter, Claude-Michel reports what he considered the true reason for what he now realized was Denis’s decision never to return: “I think I have discovered that what prevents him from returning is some animosity toward the persons who are most dear to him there. Madame Duplessis, I believe, has written him too harshly; as you know, with his character, he cannot be manoeuvred by force.”56 He concluded by suggesting that Denis has been generally misunderstood, even by his sister: “You yourself, Madame, I insist, have believed falsehoods about him.” As he had previously said, Denis might have run through his money, but he was not debauched.57 Indeed, an earlier letter of François-Xavier had made it clear that Denis greatly feared his sister’s judgment: “He is so greatly apprehensive lest I criticize his impetuousness and his imprudence in the pursuit of what he proposes to obtain that he made me promise to assure you that he is doing his best.”58 As the direct witness of the consequences of Denis’s lack of responsibility toward his wife and daughter, Marie-André had little sympathy for her brother. While his property was being prepared for auction in his absence in Quebec, and his brother and family friends in Paris were urging him to return, Denis participated in a quasi-legal inquiry on the Pont Notre-Dame of Paris in April 1757. On 22 April, several art experts assembled in the studio of the painter Pierre Jauffroy at Denis’s request to determine if a portrait the artist had done of Duplessis resembled him, if it was painted in a workmanlike way, and if it was sturdy enough to be shipped to Canada. It is not surprising that the status-minded Duplessis would have commissioned a portrait. What 216

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the record does not show is why he requested the expert opinions. Did he truly believe the portrait was of inferior quality? Or was he merely trying to avoid paying for it? The experts found against Denis on all three questions. The portrait, they declared, was very much like the sitter, with fine colours, and sturdy enough to be shipped to places even more remote than Canada.59 This ineffectual attempt to officialize buyer’s remorse is typical of the youngest Duplessis’s failures that cascaded in the last years of his life. A second portrait was also in dispute, one of Pontbriand. The bishop had officiated at Duplessis’s wedding, but it is unlikely CharlesDenis would have commissioned the prelate’s portrait on his own account. His sisters had probably asked their brother to obtain it as part of their efforts to stay in Pontbriand’s good graces.60 Claude-Michel Sarrazin was correct. Denis never returned and ended badly. He was still in the French capital in December 1763 when he wrote Antoine de Sartine, the lieutenant-general of police in Paris, to request permission to visit Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan in the Bastille. Péan was imprisoned alongside Bigot, while on trial for corruption in the administration of the colony, in what was called the Affaire du Canada. Péan, like Duplessis, was a military officer, but came from a much more established family and was much more quickly promoted through the ranks, due to his organizational talents and his charm. He amassed an immense fortune as Bigot’s righthand man in various schemes to supply the army; in 1756, he had been awarded the Cross of Saint-Louis that Denis coveted. Denis had previously been granted permission to visit Péan in March of that same year. Attached to this December letter in the Archives of the Bastille is an internal note: “He talks like a crazy man. The Canadians say he is mad.”61 As family and friends had feared, Denis’s hot temper and resentment over not receiving the recognition he believed he merited had turned into a mania that made him totally ineffective.

Wartime Hardships in the Town, and Distant Providential Victories Canada was still on a war footing, as it had been since 1744, even though officially peace had come in 1748. Hostilities broke out again in North America in May 1754 when Major George Washington’s 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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forces killed and scalped Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville in what is now western Pennsylvania. The French government sent considerable reinforcements to Canada in 1755, but a declaration of war would have to wait until May 1756 when events in Europe required it. Marie-André had to face this intensification of hostilities in her partially rebuilt hospital and monastery without Geneviève. Plans for a reconstructed hospital were submitted to the ministry in Versailles in 1756, but funds now had to go to more direct military expenses. Arriving troop and supply vessels brought more contagious soldiers and sailors than even the pre-fire Hôtel-Dieu could have handled. The Hôpital-Général became a military hospital, perhaps the town’s principal one, and Pontbriand sent seven nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu to meet the increased workload there. Inflation pushed the prices of foodstuffs and supplies higher. Since able-bodied men were called to serve in the militia, finding workers for repairs or even service in the wards challenged Duplessis. She had the sympathetic ear of the bishop and the governorgeneral, but her bête noire, the intendant François Bigot, still controlled the local purse strings. He saw her nuns as uncooperative. As he put it in an April 1757 letter to Duplessis: “The ladies of the Hôtel-Dieu last winter refused to lend me a hand in finding sustenance for the people at a time when I saw the town on the verge of being short of bread.”62 In July, he accused Duplessis of not keeping the roads near Saint-Augustin in repair and threatened to have the work done at her expense.63 He did not cut the hospital off from supplies from the king’s storehouse that he controlled, but he more than once suggested that instead of running to him, they should do what he had done when they had not helped him: buy grain from habitants in the countryside. Marie-André’s marks of deference, such as New Year’s greetings and wishes on his saint’s day, were futile in the face of his belief that she controlled resources she would not commit. It was a considerable understatement when she wrote Pontbriand that Bigot “is not too well disposed toward us.”64 Life was difficult in the town, but major victories gave solace to Canadian pride during the first years of the war: Braddock’s defeat in July 1755, the fall of Oswego to Montcalm’s army in August 1756, and his win at Carillon in July 1758. She painted each as miraculous, 218

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much as in the Annales she had described the defeats of William Phips in 1690 and Hovenden Walker in 1711. They were signs that Providence intervened to protect the Catholic colony against its Protestant enemies. She attributed Jean-Daniel Dumas’s massacre of Braddock’s army squarely to the intervention of the Virgin, citing the witness of a British prisoner: “This man reported that the English saw over the French camp a lady dressed in white who extended her arms and that they fired more than four thousand musket shots at her. In truth, our soldiers came back saying that the English did not know how to aim and lost all their shots in the air.” In fact, the enemy never reached the French camp; they were surprised on a narrow forest road where the Canadians and their allies picked them off from the protection of the trees. Many of the English never saw their attackers. Her estimation of the forces on each side, however, is accurate: “2,500 English were repelled by eight hundred French and Indigenous warriors … our side killed them with the result that 1,700 were slain on the spot.”65 Duplessis called the surrenders of the garrison of Oswego (Chouaguen) and its nearby forts, which were surprised by a larger French force, miraculous because of their rapidity: “The most recent coup is completely miraculous; in four days we took three forts armed with cannons, and especially the one named Chouaguen where there was a 1,800 man garrison.” Just as she had in the case of the victory on the Monongahela, she included a detailed account of the booty taken. She noted that the day of the surrender was the Feast of the Assumption and thus linked it to the Virgin. Moreover, her account of the procession and Te Deum ceremony organized in the Quebec cathedral is almost as long as the description of the battle itself.66 She had written Montcalm to congratulate him on his first major victory, and he had replied on 27 August, “God worked a true marvel on this occasion.”67 No letter to Hecquet survives from 1757, and thus no report on Montcalm’s second victory, his capture of Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George in August of that year. As at Oswego, a great number of British were captured with little loss of French lives. The fall of the fort proved to be inconclusive because Montcalm did not press on to take Fort Edward on the Hudson, although it did prevent the enemy from advancing up Lake Champlain that year. 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Fort William Henry was also significant because of Montcalm’s consternation at what happened after the battle. Despite his pledge to the surrendered British, the Indigenous allies of the French scalped a number of them and took even more prisoner. Montcalm and his French officers were able to rescue some. The French were dismayed at how easily the Canadian officers condoned what to them was unpardonable savagery and disregard for the rules of war.68 Montcalm noted in his journal that this “detestable situation that cannot be described to those who were not there, and which makes even the victory sorrowful to the victorious.”69 Duplessis had described the treatment of prisoners in her 1756 letter to Hecquet, where she distanced the French from what she portrayed as the routine cannibalism of the nations of the upper country. “They have an implacable hatred toward the English and inflict unheard of cruelties on them. They scalp them, cut them up in pieces, boil them in their kettles, and eat them. The French officers have to put themselves between the savages and the English to save their lives.”70 In fact, Duplessis was caught between her revulsion and her recognition that the allies were an indispensable part of the war effort. In her version, the onus falls solely on them, rather than on the colonial officials such as Vaudreuil who relied on these allies. She can only pray that they might one day be converted and thus change: “I beg God to bring to the faith all those among these savages who serve us so well,” despite the fact that Catholic Wabanakis had begun the killing at Fort William Henry. While the recently arrived French officers such as Montcalm and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville were horrified by the colonial troops’ acceptance of the treatment of prisoners – as much out of a sense of aristocratic honour as morality – Duplessis was Canadian enough to take the support of “these barbarians who serve us so well”71 for granted. Her description of Montcalm’s final great victory at Carillon doubled the losses of the British army to heighten its miraculous nature: “Only 4,000 of our men had made it to this site when the English arrived numbering nearly 20,000. This disparity did not dampen the courage of the French. The battle took place on 8 July. It was violent and the firing brisk and continuous on each side. It lasted from noon until eight o’clock, when the English troops folded and retreated, leaving in place piles of their dead. Their losses are 220

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estimated at five to six thousand men and ours at five hundred. This victory appeared so marvelous that even those who won the day are astonished at it.”72 Duplessis’s figures merely echoed the inflated reports that Montcalm sent out about both the enemy’s casualties and the size of its army.73 She counted Montcalm as a supporter and was impressed with his piety. The victors, she said, “attribute all the glory to God, and the piety of the army pushed Monsieur the Marquis de Montcalm their general to plant a cross in the camp.”74 Patriotism and Providence went hand in hand in her eyes. God protected Canadian arms in these battles because of the piety of its defenders. Montcalm’s aidede-camp Bougainville also called the victory at Carillon miraculous, but for a very different reason.75 Only miracles, he implied, could save Canada because of the sorry state of its leadership under Vaudreuil and Bigot, who opposed Montcalm’s war plans. The jealousy and backbiting among the colony’s leaders hindered operations on the ground, and Montcalm’s defeatism gave officials in Versailles grounds not to fund the war effort. Duplessis might have had her favourites among the triumvirate of governor, marquis, and intendant, but she would need support from all three, even Bigot. Duplessis closed the 1758 letter that narrates the victory of Carillon with two songs celebrating French superiority over the English in lieu of the gifts she often sent. The longer of the two, entitled “The Likeness and the Difference,” is a reworking of a satirical song that circulated in France in 1756 that compared the duc de Richelieu unfavourably to the duc d’Estrées, a rival general. In the original, Richelieu is “the favourite of Louis,” the profligate monarch; his rival d’Estrées is “the favourite of Mars,” the god of war. As Jack Warwick pointed out, the Canadian version lacks the malicious barbs of the French one.76 Moreover, its stanza contrasting the treatment of prisoners glosses over Montcalm’s dismay about the actions of his Indigenous allies. The English take some prisoners We take them by the thousands That’s the likeness The French treat them well But the English treat them like dogs. That’s the difference.77 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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The same letter of Duplessis discreetly acknowledged that, despite Carillon, 1758 was a bad year for Canada. With little comment, she mentioned significant losses that tightened the British noose around the colony’s heartland in the Saint Lawrence valley. The fortress of Louisbourg that guarded the entrance to the Saint Lawrence fell on 26 July, and on 27 August, Fort Frontenac (Kingston, Ontario) at the entrance to the Great Lakes to the west was lost to the English, “which closes them in on us.”78 The three great victories buttressed morale for a garrison town that was stretched to the limits of its endurance. For Duplessis, they were consolations sent by God in a time of real distress, distress caused by penury that is amply described in the same letters to Hecquet. 1759 would test her inner reserves and capacity as a leader.

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A Woman’s Siege and Occupation: Navigating a Year of Male Military Failures “Madame, with your permission and without leaving the respect that you are due, may I have the honour to tell you that ladies must not speak of war?” Here the marquis de Montcalm recounts a November 1758 soirée during which Jeanne-Charlotte de Fleury Deschambault, wife of Governor-General Vaudreuil, intervened in a discussion of the French general’s tactics during the previous season’s campaign. Montcalm cut her off when she tried to continue: “Madame, without leaving the respect that you are due, allow me to say that if Madame Montcalm were here, and she heard us speak of war with the marquis de Vaudreuil, she would keep silent.”1 Vaudreuil’s wife might have been more open in expressing her opinion than Montcalm’s, but there is no indication the Canadian governor-general allowed women any real voice in affairs either. The voice that he, like Montcalm, requested from Duplessis (and from women in general) was simply their prayers, along with celebrating their victories and mourning the dead. In practical terms, other than women’s roles in nursing and feeding their menfolk, Vaudreuil held women out chiefly as a motivator for his colonial militia. In his proclamations in May 1759, the Canadians were enjoined to fight to defend their religion, to safeguard their wives, children, and property, and to avoid the cruel treatment suffered by the Acadians.2 Women are almost invisible in the written record of the siege of Quebec, not because they were absent or passive, but because

the accounts that have survived were written by males who envisaged war in masculine terms. The correspondence of the generals, the diaries written by civilians and soldiers during the events, and the retrospective accounts after the fact view the siege from a male perspective.3 A single narration of the siege written by a woman has been published, and it was penned six years after the event by a nun, Marie-Joseph Legardeur, the mother superior of the HôpitalGénéral, who in 1765 addressed members of her order in France with the hope that they would lobby the French crown to make good on its obligations to her institution.4 Historians have followed the lead of the eighteenth-century warriors and administrators, who largely ignored women, by not attending to how women lived the siege.5 However, the Hôtel-Dieu archives contain a wealth of letters written in 1759 by and to Duplessis. Her correspondence with the intendant, with the governor general, with the bishop, with the British occupiers, and with priests and nuns in France, as well as her two retrospective epistolary accounts, written less than a month after the fall of the town, allow us to access the war experience more immediately through a woman’s eyes. A handful of similar letters from the Ursulines and Hôpital-Général have been published. Duplessis’s extensive unpublished correspondence makes it possible to envisage the siege and occupation from a woman’s perspective. As Carol Cohn points out, war and gender relations both turn on the dynamics of power; “war hinges on disempowering one’s opponent, and gender difference encodes power.”6 War puts not just the power differential that the men claimed over women to the test, but their own masculinity. Men envisaged war in terms of their superiority: their duty was to do battle to protect a sex too weak and too fearful to defend itself. However, wars have a way of getting away from their makers. When soldiers face defeat, their rationale for their superiority as males is called into question. Furthermore, when men lose control of events, in the ensuing power vacuum, women sometimes take matters into their own hands in ways that do not necessarily please their male masters. The loss of New France was a male failure, whether one blames the abandonment of the colony by Louis XV and his ministers, the shortsightedness and rivalries of Vaudreuil and Montcalm, or the corruption of Bigot. It is no surprise that there have been efforts to 224

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feminize the defeat by invoking the influence of the king’s mistress, the marquise de Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and that of François Bigot, Angélique Renaud d’Avène Des Méloizes, the wife of Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan, who was the intendant’s middleman with suppliers.7 Duplessis’s position as head of a hospital with the mission of serving the poor put her in contact with the war experience of every sort of woman in the colony: elite, middling, and poor townswomen, the wives of habitants on the hospital’s seigneuries, and, of course, the other female religious communities. To be sure, she had advantages many of these women lacked: she counted as a “dame,” a lady, in a status-conscious society, and she headed an institution with crucial religious, civilian, and military functions. Thus, although providing bread to the hospital was her never-ending preoccupation, it would have been unthinkable, and not just impossible as a cloistered nun, for her to participate in the January bread riot of lower-class women. Likewise, her duties explain why she was not evacuated to Montreal or Trois-Rivières at the beginning of the siege, as were other elite women. This chapter will set Duplessis’s experience, as seen in her correspondence in 1759, against that of other women and the role that male authority figures envisaged for women in their accounts of the siege and their meagre reports of women’s actual activities. The generals’ military failures would push women to go beyond this role as silent helpmates whom men gallantly defend according to the civilized rules of warfare. All the facets of women’s experience that have been evoked above – the frivolity of Bigot’s circle, the food crises, evacuation, nursing the wounded, praying for divine protection, the terror of bombing, relations with the English occupier – will come into play in this chapter. It shows how Duplessis insured the survival of her community and hospital by exploiting both men’s self-image as protectors of women and the space left for female agency when men faltered.

Finding Supplies with the Intendant and Bishop: Unruly Women and Staying within the Rules Vaudreuil and Montcalm had each sent envoys to Versailles in fall 1758 to alert the minister of the urgency of the situation. No supplies a woman’s siege and occupation

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or new troops could be expected until May when shipping resumed. While Duplessis and the colony waited for relief, she was preoccupied during the cold days of winter and early spring with keeping the hospital supplied with bread, without dipping into the store of seed wheat needed to plant crops in the spring. Her dealings with the intendant and the bishop between January and May 1759, when ships from France did arrive, allow us to gauge her relations with these two key officials who would play crucial roles during the siege and occupation. Bigot controlled access to the king’s storehouse and bakery in the town and issued rules for how and under what circumstances foodstuffs could be bought and sold in the war economy. She needed Pontbriand’s approval for major decisions, and he had his own resources and network of informants across the colony. Montcalm, who scorned the intendant as much as Duplessis did, reported on 2 January that four hundred women had rioted when Bigot announced a reduction in the bread ration.8 The January 1759 riots were not the first food riots by women. Other French officers report them in Montreal in December 17579 and in April and June 1758 in Quebec.10 Although Montcalm used the word “riot” (“émeute”) here, “demonstration” might be just as appropriate.11 These gatherings might have been unruly, but they were also a familiar tactic for gaining the attention of authorities. They were was not uncommon in France and were likely encouraged by the husbands of the women involved. They usually included a presentation of complaints by representatives of the women to the authorities, who often offered some concession.12 In response to the January 1759 event, Bigot adjusted the reduction up to a half pound a day.13 Lower-class women might become unruly when authorities failed to maintain adequate food supplies, but Duplessis had established channels for dealing with Bigot. Despite her distrust of the intendant, she went beyond minimal conventional civilities like the New Year’s greetings that she sent him and to other officials. On 22 January, he thanked her for an unspecified gift she had sent that seems to have been some kind of food. On 13 April, Bigot thanked the hospital for the gift of a lamb probably sent to mark the end of the Lenten period of abstinence from meat.14 He invariably replied with administrative politeness. Still, from the start, he made clear that she was not to expect too much in return. He blamed circumstances that would prevent 226

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him from doing what he professed he wanted to do for the hospital. As he put it in his 3 January reply to her New Year’s wishes, “When I refuse, it is because I am forced to, and I have as many regrets … about it as those who obtain nothing.”15 In early February, Duplessis ran up against a similar provisioning wall as the townswomen had faced in January, and she tried to exploit the ties that she had cultivated with the intendant. She began her request to Bigot with a dramatic declaration of the initiatives she had taken: “We have sent out to the south, to the north, to the Ile d’Orléans, and even as far as to Trois-Rivières, and everywhere wheat is selling for twenty livres cash, which was impossible for us to accept since we do not have this ready money. We did obtain a few bushels paid for by warrants to extend a bit our harvest … I have waited as long as possible to interrupt you to make known our needs, but I do not believe I should wait for the last sheaf of the little wheat we have remaining to mill to beg you to have pity on our community … You can relieve our shortage by releasing the ration for the hospital … that would allow us to hold back a few bushels to sow, because if we do not plant, our destitution will grow, and we will become more of a burden.”16 With her usual foresight, Duplessis had been planning ahead for the crucial spring planting and feared coming up short. If the intendant would cover the patients’ ration of bread, enough wheat could be put aside for seed. Her closing plea suggests that her tendency to brood on future disasters might have triggered her request: “that you relieve me from the deadly anxiety that such a sad situation puts me in.” Bigot replied immediately on 9 February with a refusal: “I find it impossible to see to the feeding of sixty individuals in your house. I flatter myself that I can continue to obtain for the town people the bread that I am making available to them. I advise you to try again in the nearby countryside and to promise to pay for wheat in cash and even to sign contracts for it.” Try again with cash, he said, and if sellers refuse the paper warrants, report them to me.17 However, Bigot did not cut the hospital off completely. Several days later, on 12 February, he responded to a request from the hospital bursar by sending two small barrels of flour (quarts de farine). He noted that her need must have been exceptional, “persuaded that it could only be straitened circumstances that makes you undertake a woman’s siege and occupation

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this request to me.” This was the same amount he had sent occasionally the previous summer, and he continued sending this amount periodically during the next months as the town awaited the arrival of the resupply ships. His distrust is indicated in remarks in his next letter that show he kept a tight watch on the hospital’s affairs: he has heard the patient load has dropped; he suspects that some patients are being given too large a ration.18 Staying within the rules with the intendant seems to have won Duplessis no special treatment for her hospital, no increase in the daily ration such as the townswomen had obtained by taking to the streets. Bigot could not write the hospital off, although it was low in his priorities, and while he made sure it had enough to function, Duplessis’s gestures of civility and her pleas did not budge him. She continued to press him in firm but civil letters. On the other hand, mutual confidence had become the foundation of Duplessis’s relationship with the bishop. Upon receiving Bigot’s February refusal, she sent it and her letter off to Bishop Pontbriand for his reaction: “I have a bit of reluctance to follow the advice he is giving me and beg your lordship to indicate to me what I must do.” She saw Bigot’s recommendation to pay cash as confirmation of her longstanding assertion that everyone thought the hospital had more resources than it actually did: “Although we are poor, we are thought to pay well.” The bishop’s advice was brief; he did not approve Bigot’s proposal, and suggested that to raise any needed money she look for bills of exchange on the royal treasury (lettres de change) that had a higher credit rating than the warrants.19 She would probably have rejected the same proposal if it had come from Bigot. On 2 April, a few weeks after she had been re-elected mother superior on 12 March, the bishop gave her a blanket dispensation from clausura to allow carpenters, masons, surgeons, etc. to enter the monastery as necessary for her entire three-year term. She needed Pontbriand’s ecclesiastical authorizations, of course, but she also turned to him for practical advice and reassurance when she was anxious or uncertain, even when he could not provide solutions. Although he addressed her as “my dearest daughter,” in some ways, he was more like a fond son on whom an elderly parent relies in emergencies.20 On 18 April, Pontbriand issued a pastoral letter in which he called for prayers and repentance to avert God’s wrath on Canada. Two of 228

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the scandalous examples he cites of the colony’s sins contrast the positions of elite and low-status women. He cited “impious costumes that mock, or to speak more clearly, display hatred of religion.”21 In his journal, Montcalm criticized the bishop for damaging morale by revealing the sins of the elite and the weakness of the colony; the marquis also made explicit what Pontbriand veiled in paraphrase. During the pre-Lent carnival, Montcalm noted, “Entertainments, despite the extreme destitution … have been very animated. There have never been as many balls, games of chance … The governor-general, the intendant authorized them.”22 These soirées included participants masquerading in nuns’ and bishops’ garb,23 thus mocking, at least indirectly, Duplessis and her community. In his letter, Pontbriand also denounced in veiled terms a way in which non-elite women were drawn into the war economy: “houses devoted publically, as it were, to crime.”24 Montcalm again made this reference explicit: brothels set up near the town’s ramparts,25 likely to service the troops. Ladies such as Madame Péan were hostesses at soirées where they partied freely with military officers and administrative officials. At the other end of the social ladder, destitution pushed women into sex work for soldiers. In her cloister, Duplessis would have only heard about these events. She responded to the bishop’s directive by organizing a novena, nine days of intense prayer, the expected contribution of women, and especially nuns, to the war effort.26

Disorganized Evacuation and Orderly Retreat When the fleet of French cargo ships arrived at Quebec in May, they brought welcome supplies and news. They came with enough foodstuffs to feed the troops through July, although not enough to increase the hospital’s ration. Duplessis must have requested more flour from the king’s warehouses, because on 26 May, Bigot wrote to her (rather than to the bursar) bluntly, “We do not have sufficient quantities to give to the soldiers and militiamen who will fight for the defence of the colony, and it is only they who will have any. You must eat the livestock.”27 The boats also brought letters from France, an 18 February one from François Sorbier de Villars, the director of the Missions étrangères, and at least one from her Jesuit brother dated 25 February. a woman’s siege and occupation

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Villars informed Duplessis of the welcome news that La Porte’s successor in the ministry of the marine looked favourably on her three requests of the previous fall and that the Commission des secours had awarded the community 4,000 livres.28 However, François-Xavier’s letter brooded about the danger to Canada, where he saw God’s “holy religion on the verge of being destroyed,” and the danger to which his sister would be personally exposed, if the English took the city.29 This threat was made concrete by a third letter from a Congrégation de Notre-Dame nun, then in La Rochelle, that could only have fuelled Duplessis’s apprehension. Sister Saint-Arsène had survived James Wolfe’s siege and bombardment of Louisbourg in July 1758, but had been deported to France, where she languished: “Never has such a cruel siege been seen as the one we have come out of; I cannot think about it without being terrified, and what increases our suffering, is the thought of how much our dear Canada is in danger of being subjected to the same fate.”30 Siege, exile, and the rule of heretics could be the future that also awaited the Quebec nuns. This was the last shipment of letters from France that Duplessis likely received that year. Montcalm’s emissary Bougainville also returned on the ships with news of the impending English invasion up the Saint Lawrence. Before the end of May, word reached Quebec that Vaudreuil and Montcalm’s confidence that the river would be an obstacle to Wolfe’s fleet, as it had been for Admiral Hovenden Walker in 1711, was misplaced. As Duplessis put it in a letter written after the fall of Quebec, “By 24 May we learned that a huge English fleet was in our river with a favourable wind; it made its way and avoided with success all the dangers of the Saint Lawrence and came quite close to our harbour without entering it.”31 Vaudreuil and Montcalm had envisaged a staged evacuation of women and children, but their mistaken confidence in the difficulty the English would have navigating the river meant that their plans were implemented with great haste and disorder.32 On 23 May, Vaudreuil issued orders that able-bodied men on the northern and southern shores of the river above Quebec and the Ile d’Orléans report to the town for militia duty; their unprotected wives and children should retreat several miles into the forest with their livestock.33 Troops were sent to enforce this order. In the town itself, at the beginning of June, Montcalm issued a proclamation that all those who could not 230

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contribute to the defence of the capital or were susceptible to fear should withdraw to Trois-Rivières or Montreal.34 Being the prey of fear, of course, was traditionally attributed to women. On 5 June, the schooner Minerve left Quebec for Montreal with ladies and young women of the upper classes.35 On 24 June, the inhabitants of the lower town were instructed to move their belongings to the upper town or farther away as soon as the British ships were sighted off the port.36 Although the town’s fortifications were inadequate, Montcalm complained that supplies and wagons were diverted from the walls in order to build a bomb shelter at the home of Madame Péan on the Rue Saint-Louis.37 On the other hand, women and children, especially lower-class ones, suffered from the hastily implemented measures. Families of tradesmen found it difficult to evacuate the town, and many remained. The generals’ idea that the families from the farms along the river could wait for a French victory in makeshift cabins in the woods was ill-conceived. Compliance with Vaudreuil’s orders was sluggish at best. On the Ile d’Orléans, women and children died because supplies had not been stocked to feed them as they awaited evacuation to the north shore.38 It proved impossible to move all the livestock when the families were evacuated, and the cattle that the Indigenous allies of the French did not pillage39 remained along the coast to feed the English when they landed.40 Bishop Pontbriand, who prided himself on giving detailed instructions, as he had done after the 1755 fire, had in mind a more orderly evacuation for the three Quebec communities of nuns than the civil authorities had managed for the lay population. Although he was planning to leave the town himself along with Bigot and Vaudreuil, he tried to reassure Duplessis on 13 June: “Be calm, our very dear daughter; I will only leave Quebec when all arrangements have been made. I will see you several times.”41 By 26 June, Wolfe’s ships arrived at the Ile d’Orléans, and the next day English soldiers began disembarking. The siege was now imminent. Before the bishop left the town to take up residence in its outskirts at Charlesbourg near the French line of defence at Beauport, he sent a list of provisional confessors to the mother superiors of the three communities on 27 June, and two days later he sent them a circular letter of instructions. In the absence of his deputy, he authorized them to allow entry as needed into their monasteries, to choose confessors a woman’s siege and occupation

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10.1 This contemporary British map shows the bombardment which began from the heights of the former Duplessis seigneurie at Lauzon on 12 June and which destroyed the cathedral and former Duplessis residence on the Rue de la Fabrique on 22 July; the site of the Hôpital-Général where the Hôtel-Dieu nuns took refuge on 13 June; the battle of the Falls of Montmorency on 31 July; and the battle of the Plains of Abraham on 13 September.

from an approved list, and to borrow money if necessary, and he forbade taking novices or allowing novices to profess, among other provisions. Without giving the superiors carte blanche, the bishop allowed great discretion on their part: “On all these points as well as on several others that may come up, the mother superior will act according to the requirements of the case.”42 He probably saw his detailed instructions as reassurance, since they took into account many eventualities. However, they did not calm Duplessis, who the same day wrote back a letter that began “On the eve of the terrible siege that we await.” She informed the bishop of plans she had made for sending their barnyard animals to the country in the care of a few nuns for safekeeping. She added, “We will see them leave with sorrow, but we will have many others before we join them. We will have much baggage to be carted. We begin today.” In her mind, the nuns who would accompany the barnyard animals were an advance guard for the rest of the community. Pontbriand replied with ridicule: “Do you want to make a fool of yourself? Is this grounds to leave? What is the benefit? I was talking lightly when I said that I consented. My circular letter requires stronger grounds. I do not want you to envisage this eventuality, and I am surprised that you are thinking about it.”43 Indeed, in his circular letter, he had envisaged the possibility of one community taking refuge with another or even dispersing into private homes in the city or countryside, but did not authorize plans for wholesale evacuation. What for him was one of many eventualities was for Duplessis license to leave the threatened town. She had obviously already been thinking in terms of an orderly evacuation. What neither Portbriand nor Duplessis foresaw at this point – and for that matter, nor did the military men Vaudreuil or Montcalm – was that they were not just on the eve of a “terrible siege” that would blockade the city. Over the next few days, Wolfe’s troops easily took control of the heights at Pointe Lévy across from the city that Montcalm and Vaudreuil had left undefended and from which Quebec could be bombarded. Wolfe mounted his cannons on the cliffs of Georges Duplessis’s former seigneurie of Lauzon, which his daughter had likely visited in her youth. The townspeople were dismayed that their military leaders were doing nothing and demanded action. Finally, on the night of 12 July, a woman’s siege and occupation

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a party of about a thousand militia and local men, including boys from the Jesuit college, led by Jean-Daniel Dumas, crossed the river to storm the cannons. The bombing started that same evening, and the pastor of the town’s parish described in his journal how women and children gathered and waited for their attacking men to put an end to it. He portrayed them in terms of the roles typically reserved for women in times of war: fear, weeping, and prayer: “By two o’clock in the morning, people were waiting in the town with impatience for the party of Monsieur Dumas to put an end to the cannonade and the bombardment of the English that held the whole town in the grip of fear and especially the women with their children, who were in large number near the citadel, in tears, lamentations and prayer, which were unceasing among them, and they grouped themselves in clusters to say the rosary.”44 The British immediately demonstrated that their cannon range extended to the entire city, upper as well as lower. One bomb fell within fifty feet of the Saint-Jean gate, in the neighbourhood of the hospital.45 Meanwhile, the inexperienced and poorly led party that had crossed the river returned in failure, never having fired on the English. The next morning, women, finding their menfolk unable to defend them, fled with their children to the suburbs and countryside as soon as the town gates opened.46 Duplessis and her community experienced the same fear. She wrote the mother superior of the Hôpital-Général that same day.47 In her account written after the siege to communities in France, Duplessis said that the English “began to bombard the city and did it with a sharpness that much terrified us and which obliged us to ask his lordship our bishop permission to take refuge at the HôpitalGénéral.”48 Pontbriand’s initial reaction was a stern rebuke, and he tried to shame Duplessis by accusing her of unseemly fear. The authorities, in fact, were trying to reassure the terrified population that day. Montcalm visited the city, and the bishop wanted the nuns to set an example by not giving in to the panic. In his 13 July letter he minimized the danger and made light of the possibility of casualties, even deaths – at the most two nuns might die, he said – and asked pointedly who would care for the poor and sick. “Your sisters are not yet hardened to war. Even if a few bombs fell on your establishment, they would not set it afire. They would only make a hole in

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the floors, and I am persuaded that not even two nuns will be killed in the whole bombardment. Your dispersal will be too rushed. You must summon up your courage, and who will care for the patients and the poor? The Ursulines will soon be in the same situation. All the priests would desert.” Duplessis had often asked the bishop to shore up her courage when committing to loans over the course of the last few years. Now he accused her of giving in to fear rather than strengthening her community for the ordeal: “Strengthen your sisters and for that, I beg the Lord to fortify you. Because to speak frankly, I think you are a bit of a coward.”49 Still, a postscript acknowledged that he did not expect to persuade her and authorized her to follow her inclination: “There is no cure for fear; do what you wish. The mother superior of the Hôpital-Général indicates to me that she will gladly share with you.”50 He as much as admitted now that his June circular letter had been largely irrelevant; it was based on the supposition that he would be far from Quebec. However, since he remained in the vicinity, and could visit the Hôpital-Général easily, he expected to be consulted. In fact, he came there almost daily since Charlesbourg was nearby.51 Later that day, twenty-eight nuns from the hospital made their way down to the Hôpital-Général on the Saint-Charles River, out of cannon range. They brought with them their bedding and a food supply – bread, eggs, meat, and peas – so as to be as little a burden as possible. They were joined that evening by the Ursulines, whose monastery had actually been damaged by the bombing. The next day a smaller contingent of seven hospital nuns arrived. Five converse sisters had been left behind to protect against looting.52 On 13 July, the town’s lower-class women took matters into their own hands, just as they had demonstrated in January, when Bigot had reduced the food ration. They had to fend for themselves by fleeing out the gates when military leaders failed to protect them. Fear was certainly a factor, but it was a reasonable one. Duplessis reacted to the same male failures with equal determination in the deliberate way that was her trademark. Her foresight allowed her negotiations with administrators, whether the intendant or the bishop, to lead to outcomes that she had a hand in designing. Unlike Vaudreuil, Montcalm, and Pontbriand, Duplessis organized an orderly retreat.

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Women and the Rules of War Conditions at the Hôpital-Général were already crowded. Since the 1755 fire, it had served as the primary military hospital where soldiers who arrived sick from France were treated. Family members of the nuns and refugees of all sorts now packed its halls and outbuildings. Its nuns gave their sisters from the Hôtel-Dieu their own cells. The church was turned into a ward for the sick and wounded, and all three communities gathered in the adjoining choir area, separated by a grille from the main church, for their religious offices throughout the day. The Ursulines were on one side facing the two Augustinian hospital communities on the other.53 The communities had visited each other separately in the past, and the Ursulines had housed the Hôtel-Dieu community briefly after the 1755 fire, but never had the three been together. In her report to Pontbriand written the day after their arrival, Duplessis asked his permission for two items. The authorities wanted to set up a first aid station just outside the Saint-Jean gate using furniture and supplies from the Hôtel-Dieu and staffed in part by its nuns. Patients would then be directed to the Hôpital-Général. Would he permit this exception to clausura?54 Second, to reduce crowding there, Duplessis suggested that several sisters be lodged with family members in the area or at Saint-Augustin. Pontbriand replied enthusiastically to the first request, and refused the second. He wanted the nuns to maintain community life as much as possible: “I do not grant permission to visit or lodge with relatives. Stay where you are in a prayful attitude. That is what you have to do. Ready yourself to rise higher if you can.”55 This immediate experience of Duplessis and her community must be situated in the context of how the opposing generals viewed the campaign. Montcalm and Wolfe were agreed at least on one thing: it should be fought according to the standards of war prevalent in Europe. In fact, the British and French governments had signed an agreement for how prisoners of war in military hospitals would be treated. The two generals saw battles as staged affairs between uniformed soldiers; non-combatants, certainly women and children, and even civilian males, were not to be molested.56

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10.2 This view by Richard Short shows the destruction caused by the bombing in the neighbourhood of the Duplessis home. On the right is the Jesuit college. In the centre, where the Rue de la Fabrique (on the right leading to the cathedral) meets the Rue Saint-Joseph (to the left), is the home (with a porch) of Jacques Imbert, the current treasurer of the marine, the post once held by Georges Duplessis.

Wolfe could be accused of ignoring these gentlemanly rules of war early on. While the bombardment of a besieged town was not unprecedented in Europe, Wolfe’s destruction of Quebec went far beyond trying to silence its defenders’ batteries that hampered his access upriver. Very early in the bombing, shots coming from the seigneurie de Lauzon damaged sites in the upper city dear to Duplessis. On 18 July, the English directed their bombs to the neighbourhood of the Hôtel-Dieu. One destroyed a room of the building. Munitions had been stored in other rooms that fortunately did not explode.57 On 22 July, the cathedral burned along with the entire block of houses on the Côte de la Fabrique that included the former Duplessis family home.58 After the siege, Duplessis summed up the effects of the two months of daily bombing on the hospital and monastery in her letter to communities in France: “Fifteen bombs that did astonishing damage fell on our buildings, and a quantity of others around the house. So many bombs fell around our property that heaps of them have been piled up there. They broke down the trees in the garden, ploughed up the vegetable plots, and ruined all our hope for this year. Thieves pillaged the rest.”59 Despite her having left converse sisters to watch over the property, and despite the hanging of pillagers by the authorities, much property was lost to looters throughout the city. Wolfe was attacking civilian morale as much as the town’s military defences. He said as much in an episode that featured women and that involved playing loose with the rules of war. On 21 July, his forces succeeded in landing at Pointe-aux-Trembles above the town, where they made prisoner two hundred women who had sought refuge there. He took pride in treating them well, especially the elite ladies among them, and they were allowed to return to Quebec in a prisoner exchange after a few days. But as the French officers complained to him at the time, taking women prisoners needlessly contravened the rules of war. Montcalm noted in his journal that Wolfe only wanted to receive the prettiest ones of the group.60 Wolfe’s subordinate officer George Townshend drew caricatures that targeted Wolfe in the same vein. “Send me fifty beautiful virgins,” one of his cartoons has Wolfe saying.61 Wolfe seems to have had a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, by treating the women well, even permitting a priest captured 238

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10.3 George Townsend’s satirical cartoon evokes Wolfe’s interview with elite women after their capture on 21 July at Pointe-auxTrembles and Townsend’s disapproval. The petitioning women ask if Wolfe will spare the town. He replies using French, “that depends … more petitions … Send me quickly fifty beautiful virgins and we will see.”

with them to give spiritual comfort, he demonstrated his gentlemanly conduct. He also used the women to send back a message. As one Canadian account puts it, “He advised them strongly not to return to the town that in a few days would be reduced to ashes.”62 Duplessis, although at the Hôpital-Général, would have heard echoes of this event.63 At the end of July, a second episode in the campaign engaged the nuns’ nursing skills directly and had lasting consequences for the hospital. Previous wars in North America had been frontier ones that featured raids by Canadians deep into British territory or into contested areas. In the heart of Canada, European-style battles were possible. However, Wolfe found it difficult to identify a suitable site for the decisive battle he envisaged; Montcalm’s tactic was simply to wait him out, hoping the English would be forced to leave when cold weather arrived. On 31 July, Wolfe finally mounted a large attack against the French fortifications near the Montmorency Falls, the only major battle of his campaign until the Plains of Abraham six weeks later. Casualties at Montmorency were much higher on the British side than the French, and a few wounded British soldiers, at least those who were saved from being scalped by Vaudreuil’s Indigenous allies, were brought to the hospital. Among them was a Captain David Ochterlony who was rescued by French soldiers and who wrote to Wolfe praising the good care that he was receiving.64 Although Ochterlony died at the hospital on 14 August, Wolfe expressed his gratitude, first to his rescuers and later to the nuns who had cared for him: “In one of the letters of this same general, he indicated all his gratitude for the consideration that the lady hospitallers who cared for this officer showed. He declared that if fortune favoured his arms, he would order their house be honoured and respected.”65 Wolfe’s first letters had complained bitterly to Vaudreuil about French complicity with the scalping of wounded or captured soldiers. However, this episode showed the British officers that papist French nuns could be trusted to give equal treatment to their wounded compatriots and to enemy prisoners of war. At the same time, Wolfe’s gratitude signalled to the nuns that good relations were possible even with Anglican heretics. The British had their own military hospitals situated on the Ile

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d’Orléans, but they recognized the superiority of the ones directed by Canadian nuns. Duplessis does not mention this incident in her surviving writings, but Hôtel-Dieu nuns were certainly part of the care given Ochterlony. Many Hôtel-Dieu nuns already had experience at the Hôpital-Général. In 1757, while the Hôtel-Dieu was recovering from its fire, arriving soldiers with contagious diseases had been directed to the Hôpital-Général. Ten nuns of that community had died caring for them, and Pontbriand had sent temporary replacements from the Hôtel-Dieu. Legardeur says, in fact, that gratitude for this past aid made the Hôpital-Général nuns eager to welcome their sisters fleeing the bombardment of the town in 1759.66 Duplessis was uncharacteristically optimistic about how long the stay at the Hôpital-Général would last. In her 14 July letter she had talked about arrangements “for only a little time because I hope the battle will soon occur.” However, Vaudreuil and Montcalm continued their defensive strategy of waiting Wolfe out. Wolfe himself could not decide on another major encounter but added to his destruction of the besieged town by bombs a brutal campaign of burning the farms and crops of the habitants in the territory he controlled from Baie Saint-Paul to the Chaudière River on both sides of the Saint Lawrence. Wolfe justified this destruction on two accounts. His troops were harassed by Canadian militiamen defending their homes. All ablebodied Canadian men formed this militia; they were poorly uniformed, if uniformed at all, making the distinction between combatant and non-combatant hard to draw for the British soldiers. Second, the scalping practices of Vaudreuil’s allies that shocked Montcalm as much as they did Wolfe were advanced as justification. Matthew C. Ward has thoroughly assessed Wolfe’s scorched-earth campaign in the light of eighteenth-century standards of warfare. He concluded that while they were not “necessarily outside the established ‘rules of war,’” they were of “dubious morality,” and that even Wolfe’s immediate subordinates were troubled by them.67 The property damage Wolfe’s New England Rangers inflicted was enormous, and there were incidents of killing and even scalping civilians. However, the depredations were chiefly to property, and did not come close to the terrorizing tactics, which routinely included killing, scalping, and

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taking prisoners for ransom, that the allies of the French inflicted on New England settlements.68 As late as 1757, Vaudreuil had authorized such an attack on three hundred Palatine settlers at German Flats in the Mohawk River valley. Duplessis had no time to reflect on the rules of war during her stay at the Hôpital-Général, if one judges by her surviving correspondence. It shows her preoccupied with finding supplies for her charges. The food supplies that Duplessis had brought ran out, and her community could not count on the supplies of the HôpitalGénéral nuns. She turned to the colony’s three leaders, who now had their headquarters at Charlesbourg. On 7 August, Bigot wrote: “I am in despair about not being able to obtain foodstuffs for you … Meat must replace bread. Have some bought. Saving money is not at issue to preserve life. I have my hands more than full, and despite all my best efforts, cannot supply all needs.”69 Bigot’s advice to spend money on meat purchases reflects his longstanding assessment that Duplessis had resources she hesitated to commit. Three days later, Vaudreuil could do no better.70 Always thinking ahead, Duplessis realized that with all ablebodied men serving in the militia, it would be difficult to harvest the wheat crop that had just ripened. In fact, army officers reported major incidents of desertion as militiamen returned to the Montreal area for the harvest. To remedy the situation, Vaudreuil and Montcalm released some of their troops for the task, and Duplessis must have requested her share, because on 26 August, Vaudreuil asked her to furnish a list of names and their companies before he would authorize this help.71 The hospital’s major agricultural holdings were at Saint-Augustin, behind French lines. She had reported to Hecquet the previous year that women had had to join in the harvest,72 and again they likely joined any soldiers Duplessis was able to obtain in 1759. Likewise, women replaced able-bodied men by helping to ferry supply wagons. At the end of the month, her situation must have been worse, because Pontbriand reported on 26 August that despite his strongest efforts, he could obtain nothing for the two refugee communities at the Hôpital-Général: “I have found everything unrelenting in trying to obtain bread for you and the Ursulines.” His advice was characteristically both practical and spiritual: “You must do like the Poor 242

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Clares and hope to be able to gather a hundred pounds of flour in the country parishes. I do not see any other solution.” They should imitate the Franciscan nuns who lived by begging daily alms. Of the three leaders to whom Duplessis turned, the bishop was the one who was eventually able to purchase food. Two months later he wrote Duplessis that the supplies which he sent her and the Ursulines from Charlesbourg could be considered a gift that they need not repay.73

Women Deal with Their Generals’ Defeat While there were skirmishes that brought wounded French and English soldiers to the hospital during August and the first weeks of September, Thursday 13 September was an entirely different matter. Retrospectively, the battle on the Plains of Abraham has come to symbolize the fall of New France, but none of the participants on either side saw the colony’s defeat as irreversible. The actual battle began about ten a.m. and was over in half an hour. The English pursued the retreating French troops but did not prevent many, like the wounded Montcalm, from taking shelter within the town walls. Other French soldiers made their way back down the escarpment toward Beauport. A contingent of colonial militia troops covered their escape by defending access to the pontoon bridge across the Saint Charles River. This action was near enough to the Hôpital-Général for the nuns to observe. According to Legardeur, “Several Canadian officers with large families met the same fate [as Montcalm]. We saw this slaughter from our windows.”74 By about noon, the British decided to regroup on the battlefield and this allowed the retreating French to make their way back to Beauport. Wounded soldiers began to arrive en masse at the hospital, some of them relatives of the nuns. “We were surrounded by the dead and dying who were being brought to us by the hundreds all together, of whom some were closely related to us. We had to hide our legitimate sorrow and seek out where to put them … imagine our perplexity and our terror.”75 The French still controlled the town itself and Beauport, but had retreated to the east side of the Saint Charles River, leaving the hospital in a sort of no man’s land. “The enemy was master of the countryside and at our doorstep; at risk from the fury of the soldiers, we had everything to dread.”76 a woman’s siege and occupation

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That evening about six o’clock, Vaudreuil called a council at which it was decided to evacuate the army immediately to positions on the Jacques Cartier River, further up the Saint Lawrence. The evacuation went on all night, unnoticed by the British. The Hôpital-Général, like the town, where only a small garrison remained with the townspeople, had been abandoned by the French army. That night, those nuns who were not caring for the wounded gathered for prayer. “The three communities … prostrated themselves at the foot of the altars to beg divine mercy – like Moses, we only prayed with our hearts.” Between ten p.m. and midnight, their prayers were interrupted. Legardeur continues her account: “The silence and consternation that reigned among us allowed us to hear the loud and repeated knocks at our doors. Two young nuns who carried soup to the patients could not avoid being there when the portal was opened. The pallor and terror that had overcome them touched the officer, and he prevented the whole guard from entering.” The officer had been sent by Brigadier-General George Townshend, who had taken charge after Wolfe’s death. Legardeur noted, “He ordered the three mother superiors to come to him. He knew that the others had found refuge with us. He told the three of us that we should all be reassured, that a part of their army would encircle and take over our house so that the French army, which he knew was not far away, could not take their entrenchments by force.”77 Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay, who held the post of king’s lieutenant, was in charge of the beleaguered town. He was a military officer from a distinguished family of Canadian nobility. His older sister, Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay de Saint-Claude de la Croix, had just stepped down as mother superior of the Hôpital-Général earlier that year, and had reassumed the position of bursar. Since mid-August he had been a patient in his sister’s hospital, and was there, in fact, when the battle took place on the Plains of Abraham. He left immediately, however, to retake command of the town upon hearing of Montcalm’s defeat, despite his ill health. In deciding to withdraw his army from Beauport, Vaudreuil had sent directions to Ramezay to hold out only as long as food supplies allowed. Vaudreuil also sent a draft of articles of surrender. By 17 September, when Ramezay received some food and, more importantly, news that Lévis had rallied the soldiers upriver at the Jacques Cartier 244

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and had arrived at Saint-Augustin, less than a day’s march from the city, it was too late: Ramezay had already agreed to surrender. The articles were signed the next day, and the British entered the city. Women figured prominently in the reasons given for the town’s surrender. One witness calculated their number at four thousand.78 Ramezay himself cited two thousand six hundred women and children.79 On 15 September, the town’s remaining principal merchants and bourgeois drafted a request to Ramezay that urged surrender. They begged that their wives and children be spared the rage of the English: “What a spectacle for this small remaining group to see their wives and children immolated to their fury.”80 They asserted that the military officials should not sacrifice the few remaining men in the town; these husbands were needed to provide for their families: “Endeavour to preserve them for their wives and children.”81 In May, Vaudreuil had urged Canadians to fight to defend their property, women, and children. In September, the Canadians cited their families as a reason for saving what was left of their possessions in the town by surrendering it. While property damage had been high because of the bombardment and subsequent looting, there had been few civilian deaths. Wolfe had succeeded in breaking Canadian morale.82 Having failed to defend their women and children from the British, Canadian males attributed their surrender to this same duty to protect their wives and offspring. The sixth article of capitulation dealt with religion and gave protections to religious orders as part of permitting the practice of Catholicism: “The free exercise of the Roman religion is granted, likewise safe-guards to all religious persons.”83 The favourable experiences of the British at the Hôpital-Général must have aided Wolfe’s temporary successor, George Townshend, to accept this clause. The Hôtel-Dieu community returned to the upper city on 21 September. Legardeur of the Hôpital-Général recorded that “[t]he reverend mother Sainte-Hélène … touched when she saw us weighed down under the burden of work that increased daily, left twelve of her dear daughters who stayed until autumn and who were a great help to us.”84 Jérôme de Foligné described the very real uncertainties that awaited the town women when they returned after the surrender with rhetorical flourish: “It was on this day that we saw our unfortunate women come out of the woods dragging behind them their small a woman’s siege and occupation

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children, devoured by flies, without clothes, bewailing their hunger. What dagger blows for the poor women who did not know if they still had husbands and where their men would take them and with what aid they would give their poor children, at the beginning of a season during which it is difficult to protect oneself when one is in one’s household.”85 Like the Hôtel-Dieu nuns, they returned to bombed quarters needing repair, unsure where they would find food and firewood to survive the winter. However, the nuns discovered upon their return an advantage that ordinary women lacked. On 22 September, patients were admitted to the Hôtel-Dieu, but only a few. The daily register for admissions for that date notes: “The English, having reserved and taken our house for their sick troops, and having forbidden us from admitting any others without their orders or consent.”86 For the next two decades there would be few civilian patients.87 The Duplessis sisters had spent the last ten years fighting off attempts to turn the Hôtel-Dieu into a de facto military hospital. It would now be one until 1784, but changed circumstances meant that its repurposing as a British military hospital would contribute to its salvation. The regular payments from the British to the Hôtel-Dieu over twenty-five years aided its eventual solvency and assured that immediate necessities would be secured.88

A Mother Superior Navigates Occupation Whatever her dismay might have been, Duplessis attacked the crisis with her habitual determination and sense of practicalities. Repairing the monastery for the winter and securing foodstuffs and firewood were the most immediate needs. She wrote Robert Monckton, the British commander at the time, to describe how the state of the building threatened his officers: “Our house was neither burned nor flattened by the bombs and cannons, but it is so much in disrepair and it has rained so excessively in it that in the room where your sick officers are located, one can scarcely find a spot to place their beds because the ceiling is so full of holes. There are several chimneys damaged by cannonballs that put us in danger of a fire.” Roof and chimney repairs were urgent. She requested permission to bring lime and sand from Beauport. The condition of their farms and garden showed that they could not provide food to their patients or 246

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themselves: “Our fields have been ruined by the armies and cattle so that we haven’t gotten a blade of straw, and our garden plots were pillaged by all sorts of people who took away what the artillery did not destroy.” She added that the French cavalry had confiscated their livestock.89 She closed her letter, in much the same way she closed letters to French authorities, by mentioning the 1755 fire from which the hospital had not yet recovered. Duplessis’s request was effective. The British supplied food from their stores and paid 956 livres for their officers and soldiers cared for at the hospital that autumn.90 Duplessis was attentive to the family needs of sisters in the community. Two nuns wrote Monckton immediately after the capitulation to ask that their brothers, who had been captured at Carillon by the British in 1758, be freed. The first was a choir nun, Marie-Madeleine Trudel de Saint-Paul. When she was successful, a converse sister, Marie-Madeleine Rocheron de Sainte-Apolline, requested the same favour for her brother on 21 September. It is likely that Duplessis wrote this letter, and she may have written the first.91 During this period, Duplessis’s sister-in-law Geneviève Guillimin found her way to Montreal, where she and her daughter became boarders in November 1759 with Marguerite d’Youville’s Grey Sisters.92 Duplessis was able to send off short letters to supporters in France. These are particularly valuable since no letters written by lay women in the aftermath of the defeat have been published. Duplessis was frank but prudent in her judgments. Her letter to Villars of the Missions étrangères in Paris is noteworthy for its defence of Montcalm. Vaudreuil tried to shift the blame for the defeat to the French general.93 Duplessis’s summary, written a month later, probably for Villars, stresses the piety with which Montcalm died and his high reputation at court before it tries to attenuate the circumstances of his defeat: “They made a landing on the thirteenth of the same month at a poorly guarded spot and their attack was so sudden, that although they were indeed fewer in numbers than our army, they had the advantage, being sited on a rise and the French in a valley. This battle was bloody. Our forces retreated in disorder. The English general was killed. Monsieur the marquis de Montcalm was wounded and died the next day, 14 September, on the eve of receiving from the king new and greater favours, by which he was honoured. He received the favour of dying in a most Christian way, very submissive a woman’s siege and occupation

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to God’s commands, and of receiving the last sacraments with great presence of mind.”94 However, the Anse au Foulon was poorly guarded because of Montcalm’s obsession that the English attack would come at Beauport, and he ordered his troops to charge on the Plains without waiting for nearby reinforcements. Duplessis’s claim that the French lines were disadvantaged because they were formed up in a valley is only partially true. Montcalm positioned his troops on the Buttes-à-Neveu, higher than the English lines, but, as his second-in-command FrançoisGaston de Lévis noted, the English were positioned initially behind a rise among the fields on the plain.95 As the French descended the Buttes, their ranks became somewhat disorganized, and they fired their first volley too soon against the English, who had advanced to the top of the rise. Duplessis was on excellent terms with Montcalm, and she downplays the general’s responsibility. The second part of her letter to Villars deals with business. Duplessis maintains that her hospital has been poorly treated by Bigot and company: “We were quite deprived of favours during the preceding regime, despite the need that we had to be helped.” Thus she simply asks that Villars continue to lobby for the three favours that she had requested the previous year: expansion of the hospital, a loan of 30,000 livres, and relief from certain taxes. Her second letter can be compared to Legardeur’s 1765 account in that it is a circular one addressed to houses of their order in France.96 Although she is writing to women, Duplessis’s succinct account does not describe the nuns’ reaction to events in terms of emotions commonly attributed to women such as apprehension, tears, terror, and consternation, as Legardeur would do. Furthermore, there is little of Pontbriand’s doloristic providentialism found in his pastoral letter of 28 October, which saw the sins of the Canadians as the cause of the disaster and which Legardeur also used in her account. According to the bishop, only the conversion of each Canadian heart could reverse the military defeat, which he attributed to the just and avenging arm of the Lord: “If each individual does not reform completely his conduct, can we reasonably hope that God will cease to punish us?”97 Duplessis had herself used similar language of a God of Justice when she had commiserated with Hecquet over the sins of France and Canada. However, here she limits herself to the need to submit to 248

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the divine will: “God has permitted this sad turn of events, and one must indeed accept it.” Without saying it explicitly, she seems guided by a corollary she had often expressed to her friend Marie-Catherine: even when God permits the elect to suffer, he sends consolations to lighten the burden. She does not scrimp on details of their plight that might encourage alms from France, but she tempers them with compensatory facts. The five converse nuns who rode out the siege might not have saved the garden from pillage, but they did successfully guard the building’s contents. Compared to her condemnation of the hospital’s treatment under Bigot in her letter to Villars, Duplessis is effusive in her praise for the English. The hospital’s needs are being met: “They exercise their victory properly and make one hope for gentleness in their manner of government … We have received many courtesies from them since our return to our house where they call often … The English are the ones buying us the things we need.” Of course, she knew her letter would likely be read by English officials. The hospital, as well as the town, was fortunate that James Murray, rather than Wolfe, directed the occupation. Like Townshend, he had voiced objections to Wolfe’s campaign of destruction in August and September.98 Duplessis probably also wrote the duchesse d’Aiguillon. William Pitt’s 5 January 1760 letter to the duchess that will be quoted in the concluding chapter shows that, with Quebec in English hands, Duplessis realized the importance of lobbying the London authorities as she had once lobbied the French court.99 Nonetheless, there seem to have been periods when the British did not meet her requests. A 19 January 1760 letter from Murray’s secretary implies that moving the community during that difficult winter had been considered. After regretting that the general was “mortified” that he could not provide supplies that Duplessis requested, his secretary Hector Théophilus Cramahé wrote: “If the difficulty of finding means of subsistence makes you decide to leave this town, the general has ordered me to assure you that he will take every sort of arrangement to facilitate your obtaining the means to go to the place you choose for your refuge and that of your community.”100 The letter’s tone is cordial and helpful, and rather than tension with Murray, it leads one to believe the British general regretted not being able to offer more help, rather than being an example of the a woman’s siege and occupation

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administrative courtesy of refusal Bigot excelled in. The letter was written the day Duplessis fell ill from the attack that would leave her dead five days later. Article six of the surrender had guaranteed to the bishop the “liberty to come and exercise freely and with decency the functions of his office.”101 However, Pontbriand did not avail himself of this provision. He left Quebec with Vaudreuil and Bigot for Montreal, where supplies were more plentiful and where the French administrative team was based. He named Jean-Olivier Briand as his vicar. Duplessis corresponded with the bishop, who congratulated her on her good relations with the English: “I note with pleasure that the government under which you are presently looks favorably on you.” But aware of the proselytizing tendencies she had shown ten years earlier with Pehr Kalm, he recommended discretion in regard to her British patients: “I advise you not to talk to them much about religion. That could antagonize them. The piety and modesty of your comportment will have more effect, if God so wills.” He justified disregarding the religious ministry that had always accompanied the nuns’ medical care on the principle that the defeated owe obedience to their masters: “The Christian religion demands for victorious rulers who have conquered the obedience and respect that one owes to the others; thus you and all your sisters can have the same merit as when you serve the French.” The merit the nuns accrued for heaven would be no less, he assured her.102 The reversal of policy in regard to Protestants must have been particularly hard for Duplessis to accept, since Pontbriand had never shown the slightest tolerance for them. In 1747, and again as recently as 1757, the bishop had complained to the minister in Versailles that Huguenots were in the colony despite regulations against their presence. The 1747 letter mentions seven or eight merchants, but that modest number was too large for Pontbriand, and he wanted them expelled.103 In December 1759, in addition to the nuns’ not witnessing to Protestants, the bishop specified that Catholic soldiers among the British wounded were off limits as well. Even on their deathbeds, a discreet anointing and general absolution would have to do.104 In the name of prudence, he reassured a troubled Duplessis on this point on 31 December: “You must not exhort them, even the ones who

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10.4 Geneviève Duplessis was buried in May 1756 in the vaults of the Jesuit church, shown in this Richard Short view. After the bombing in 1759, the only church edifice intact enough to hold services was the Ursuline chapel, which the town’s Catholic parish and the Anglican occupiers shared.

might be Catholic because the government is opposed to that.”105 The institutional survival of his church was this bishop’s priority.106 One first-hand account of a visit by a British officer to the HôtelDieu during the beginning of the occupation gives indirect praise of Duplessis, although it does not mention her by name. John Knox recounted his visit, during which he was shown the collections of paintings that survived the bombing.107 He visited all three monasteries and even spent a week posted at the Hôpital-Général, where he was impressed by the breeding, elegance, and politeness of the nuns, who invited him to a breakfast tea, and by the good care given to the English wounded.108 His assessment of the Hôtel-Dieu Augustinians is much briefer: “The sisters of this convent are, in general, elderly women, less polite and complaisant than in the other two nunneries; which I impute to their remarkable austerity.”109 Duplessis, whom Knox surely met, was seventy-two. She must have been more reserved and businesslike than her Hôpital-Général and Ursuline counterparts and less willing to hide her displeasure. She would have been, however, pleased that her house’s austerity had been recognized. Duplessis’s dealings with the bishop and British chiefs concerned coping with the coming severe winter under occupation. All parties realized, however, that the seizure of the colony’s capital might not be definitive. Many of the articles of surrender ended with “until the possession of Canada shall have been decided between their Britannic and most Christian Majesties.”110 Both the Canadians and the French left in Quebec, like Duplessis and the English occupiers, knew that a French army under Lévis was gathering strength for a spring offensive to retake the town. Canada was only one theatre of a world war, and the overall peace settlement might leave Canada in French hands.

Conclusion The year 1759 produced no maiden warriors for Canada such as MarieMadeleine Jarret de Verchères, who held off Iroquois assailants in 1692 in the absence of her father, as her mother had already done in 1690. War at times occasions such a reworking of gender roles. However, during the Quebec campaign, women are not even described as helping improve the town’s fortifications, as was sometimes the 252

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case in Europe. Their only practical contribution mentioned is pitching in with the harvest and supply trains. Nonetheless, 1759 did see women administrators such as Duplessis, working within their normal gender roles, assure survival for their institutions, despite the failures of the colony’s military leadership. During warfare it is common for women’s roles to coalesce around the traditional ones they know best.111 Over the years, Duplessis had learned to clothe a forthright demand that the hospital’s needs be met in the deferential tone thought appropriate for women. This skill allowed her to exploit French and British notions of the civilized rules of war in order to salvage as much as possible for her hospital and community during her most trying year. When even her bishop could not envisage the needed evacuation from the town, she was ready with her own plan of action.

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chapter

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Epilogue and Conclusion: Bride of an Unworthy Spouse: Femme forte or femme tendre? Death according to the Rule Duplessis had reported health problems as far back as 1730 at age fortythree, but in comparison with Geneviève, whose health was always worse and whose imminent death Marie-André prophesied as early as 1733, she minimized her own maladies. “People have predicted to me that I would bury my entire family … My health is better than ever, although I am not without much pain,” she reported in 1735.1 Both sisters suffered from lung problems; coughing up blood, accompanied by weakness, was the major symptom. While Geneviève had to be relieved of her duties as bursar several times, notably in 1747, it was only in 1754, at age sixty-seven, that Marie-André reported the need for a prolonged convalescence, although as usual, she played down her condition, citing her strong “French constitution”: “I indeed thought I was leaving for the other world six months ago. In our community, they are surprised to see me back on my feet. The milk that they had me drink did me much good. Nonetheless, my cough, which announces that my end is near, returned a few weeks ago, despite the measures of care that they oblige me to take. Even though I am speaking like this, do not think that I am at the point of death. One languishes sometimes for a long time. It was once predicted to

me that I would bury all my family, and that having a French body, it would be necessary to bludgeon me to death.”2 Then, in the summer of 1755, Marie-André was sidelined by a skin problem. When she became mother superior again in 1756, she was troubled by the example such exemptions from the rule gave to the community. They must have included being excused from her turn at night watch in the wards, since Bishop Pontbriand reassured her in a 1757 letter not to be disturbed on that score.3 The next year she was again minimizing her condition to Marie-Catherine, equating it simply with the gradual decline of old age: “Our age brings with it infirmities. Since God sees my spirit harried by worries, he graciously spares my body. I am doing well enough, and except for my weight, I would not consider myself old. Time passes very quickly and leads us to eternity.”4  She did not linger months between life and death as her mother and sister had done, and no unseemly outbursts, as in the first stages of their last illnesses, were reported. On 19 January 1760, she was attacked by a violent pain in the side. A French doctor was called, and General James Murray sent one of his own, but neither could save her. She remained lucid, and on the third day of her illness JeanOlivier Briand, who had been left as administrator of the Quebec church when Bishop Pontbriand left for Montreal, gave her the last sacraments, assisted by a Jesuit. Two days later, on 23 January, she died, a few months before her seventy-third birthday. As was the custom in monasteries when death could be predicted, she died surrounded by the entire community, which assembled to recite the prayers for the dying and to catch any last words and instructions. None, however, are reported in her death notice.5 The frankest report on her state of mind and on her legacy is not found in that notice, but in a letter written the following summer by the community’s assistant superior: “She died … with her heart pierced with sorrow, leaving a community without bread and other necessities of life, weighted down with debts caused by our fire; although she was not able to provide for our temporal needs because of the circumstances of the day, it is not the same on the spiritual side where she left us virtuous examples, whose memory will live eternally in our house.”6 She closed by requesting prayers for a principle dear

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to Duplessis’s heart: “that observance of the rule be practised as it has been up to the current moment.” Briand convened the community on 2 February to elect a successor. It chose Marie-Ursule Chéron des Anges. In congratulating her, Pontbriand reminded her that borrowing would be unavoidable in the circumstances, as if he wanted to warn her against Duplessis’s obsession: “It will indeed be necessary for you to take on debt, fortunate if you can find what it will take to keep your house afloat.”7 Chéron was an ailing caretaker and died in office in October 1762. Her successor, Marie-Louise Curot de Saint-Martin, whom Briand had named hospital bursar in 1760, proved to be the competent administrator Duplessis had been and eventually served six terms. The debt was practically eliminated. She would be superior when the community was able to reopen the hospital to civilians in 1784, after the British troops evacuated it. Duplessis’s manoeuvring in the 1750s to obtain patronage at court by trying to dedicate the annals to the duc de Richelieu played a role in this success. Letters from the marquis de Montcalm to Duplessis indicate that efforts to gain Richelieu’s support continued. On 12 November 1756, Montcalm noted that he had written to both Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon “to commend to them the interest of a house founded by their forebears and whose nuns serve so well God and the state.”8 The next year, he noted a letter from the duchesse stating she had solicited on the Hôtel-Dieu’s behalf.9 The dowager duchess Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac corresponded, in fact, with William Pitt, who promised protection for the hospital. The British leader wrote in early 1760, “Monsieur Pitt is deeply impressed by the flattering sign of kindly sentiments with which Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon has deigned to honor him. He is happy to be able to direct his attentions to a goal that is of value to humanity and gives him at the same time the honor of obeying the order of Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon.”10 Pitt contacted the military governor James Murray, who took steps to put the hospital on better financial footing by cancelling taxes Bigot had insisted the hospital owed.11 Duplessis might have been more astute to attempt to dedicate the annals to the duchess, rather than to Richelieu. The duchess continued her intervention in 1761 by asking Pierre de La Rue, who handled the affairs of the Quebec diocese in France, 256

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to intercede with both the French authorities and Pitt.12 Hans Stanley, whom Pitt had sent to Paris in late May 1761 to begin negotiations to end the war,13 wrote Pitt on 9 June: “The Duchess d’Aiguillon is most grateful for his Majesty’s gracious condescensions in favor of the convent founded by her ancestors at Quebec. She has recommended to my care some holy oils, to be used in the sacraments at Canada. If they reach you, I do not doubt of their being treated with that respect which she deserves, and which even a mistaken religion has a right to claim.”14 Whether or not these oils made their way to Quebec is less important than this proof of the nuns’ skill at setting in motion client-patron relations at the highest levels of state. The cosmopolitan solidarity of the British and French aristocracies trumped differences of religion and nationality. The Hôtel-Dieu found financial stability by becoming exactly what Duplessis had always opposed: a military hospital, and a British one at that. The Hôpital-Général, which had sought out a military role, faced bankruptcy after the fall of Quebec because of unreimbursed expenses for care that it had given to injured French troops and for wartime depredations to its estates. It saved itself by selling its most advantageous seigneurie in 1767.15 The reputation for solid piety and observance that the Hôtel-Dieu enjoyed under Duplessis’s leadership largely continued after her death. This is confirmed by three Protestant visitors to the Quebec convents: Pehr Kalm in 1749, John Knox in late 1759, and Frances Brooke between 1763 and 1767. All three were more struck by the noble manners of the Hôpital-Général nuns than by their piety. Knox noted what he called the “remarkable austerity” of the Hôtel-Dieu, although Kalm and Brooke suggested that the Ursulines had the greatest reputation for piety. None of the three found fault with the Hôtel-Dieu.16 There was no breakdown of religious discipline there, as was apparently the case at the Hôpital-Général in the aftermath of the war. In a secret instruction to the mother superior of that house that Micheline D’Allaire dates to about 1766, Briand, then bishop of Quebec, who knew that community well because he had made it his residence, taxed it with multiple offenses against poverty, obedience, and communal living.17 Despite the prediction that she would outlive her siblings, Marie-André was survived by her two brothers and by her friend Marie-Catherine Hecquet. The Jesuit lived another decade after bride of an unworthy spouse

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her. Just as Louis XV abandoned Canada to its unrelenting English enemies, the king acquiesced in 1764 to the suppression of the Society of Jesus, which had long been under fire from the philosophes and Jansenists. After the order was abolished, Jesuits were eligible for a pension, and François-Xavier, whose health had deteriorated, found refuge with the bishop of Langres. He died somewhere near Paris in December 1771.18 The only family member not in the Hôtel-Dieu’s orbit, CharlesDenis, ended badly, dying in Versailles on 14 August 1765.19 However, his wife seems to have managed to remake her life, many years after her husband’s death. After losing her home in 1757 in Quebec, Geneviève Guillimin eventually found her way to Montreal, where she and her daughter became boarders in November 1759 with Marguerite d’Youville’s Grey Sisters.20 The daughter, Marie-JosepheAndré Duplessis de Morampont, who bore the names of her two aunts in religion, signed a marriage contract with a young officer from France, Pierre-Louis de Rastel de Rocheblave, on 20 September 1760 in Montreal, just weeks after the surrender of that city to General Jeffery Amherst’s army.21 She and her mother seem to have still been in Montreal in 1762, but on 8 July 1766, the governor of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon wrote the minister in France that Madame Duplessis, having lost everything in the siege of Quebec, had been forced to spend the previous year on the islands, which remained French possessions, and that her husband had just died. Her request for relief was refused.22 She managed to reach France, probably with the help of her son-in-law, who continued his military service in other French colonies. On 25 May 1779 she married an officer in the coast guard, Antoine-Mathieu Jourjon, himself a widower, at the colonial port of La Rochelle.23 Upon his death, she finally received the royal pension she had sought; but not for the services of her first husband, rather for those of the second one!24 Marie-Catherine Hecquet died in her Parisian home on 7 July 1764, aged seventy-eight, in the presence of two Parisian in-laws with Jansenist sympathies. Burial was in her parish church of SaintHippolyte.25 Duplessis’s letters addressed to her eventually made their way to the French national archives because descendants with Jansenist ties preserved among family papers these marks of friendship from the sister of a Jesuit. 258

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Femme forte / femme tendre: The Managerial Femme forte When Duplessis died in 1760, she was eulogized for her devotion to observance of the rule, her talents as a writer, her prudence, and her gentleness. Only one eulogy mentions her force of character.26 H.R. Casgrain, in summing up Duplessis’s career in his history of the Hôtel-Dieu, contrasted her gentleness with the strength of her mentor Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. One was the “femme forte,” the strong woman, characterized by energy; the other the “femme tendre,” the gentle woman, characterized by mildness.27 However, Duplesssis’s gentleness, affability, and calm exterior belied both a steely tenacity and a tendency to brood over disasters she foresaw. Both character traits were present in her 1719 protest against the acquiescence of the advisory council to Saint-Vallier’s decision to build a house for ill priests at the hospital highlighted in this book’s introduction. Her reputed mildness was to some extent crafted, despite the contrast that she herself drew between her calmness and her sister’s impulsiveness. As one early business supplier learned, Marie-André could react “with a touch of fire,”28 but she moderated the tendency more successfully than Geneviève. In fact, Casgrain’s stark contrast between la femme forte and la femme tendre is misplaced and has contributed to an underestimation of Duplessis’s impact. Casgrain was working within the French hagiographic tradition that celebrated the cardinal virtue of fortitude in seventeenth-century holy women such as Jeanne de Chantal and Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation.29 This tradition took its inspiration from the Vulgate’s translation of the “capable wife” in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs as mulierem fortem. When rendered in French as femme forte, the title could apply to any woman as well as wives. In his history of the Hôtel-Dieu, Casgrain labelled Guyart, Juchereau, Catherine de Longpré de SaintAugustin, and even Marie-Catherine Tibierge de Saint-Joachim as femmes fortes, but not Duplessis. Casgrain was also implicitly invoking a second tradition of the femme forte, the warrior or amazon, since he compared Juchereau to Judith, who saved Israel by decapitating the Assyrian king Holofernes. These femmes fortes were celebrated during the regency of Anne d’Autriche when aristocratic women took up arms in the civil strife bride of an unworthy spouse

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called the Fronde. As Ian Maclean explained, such femmes fortes retained attributes usually ascribed to women – for example, beauty and compassion – but added masculine traits that invert misogynistic views of female nature: women are capricious and fickle; the femme forte is resolute and unswerving. Women are soft; the femme forte is energetic and courageous.30 If Casgrain had looked beyond received hagiographic stereotypes, he could have located a version of the femme forte that appeared toward in the second half of the seventeenth century and that allows for a more accurate assessment of Duplessis’s career. In reaction to amazon women who took political stands or participated in military action, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon used the praise of the good wife in Proverbs 31 to encourage aristocratic women to leave the temptations of city and court life and become efficient managers of their husbands’ rural estates.31 In his 1687 treatise on women’s education, De l’Éducation des filles, the future archbishop of Cambrai limited girls’ access to humanist learning,32 but proposed that they acquire the basic accounting, legal, and other skills needed for prudent stewardship of their families’ properties. Fénelon substituted an enhanced supervisory role for warrior qualities so that the new femme forte’s activities centred on domestic economy. Two decades before Fénelon, a woman, in fact a Benedictine abbess famous for her humanist learning and ties to Parisian salon circles, Marie-Éléonor de Rohan, had published a paraphrase of this last chapter of Proverbs centred on the same managerial role that is even more relevant for assessing Duplessis. Rohan’s paraphrase does not translate the Latin text of the Vulgate literally. It inserts features not found in the biblical text. For example, Rohan’s praise of the femme forte explicitly adds tenderness to the model: “All of her words are lessons of wisdom, and they are accompanied by a sweetness that is never interrupted by bursts of anger.”33 Even more importantly, Rohan’s version highlights the subordination of women inherent in this model. First, she emphasizes the silence expected of women by stating that the femme forte “only” speaks to console and instruct.34 In addition, her femme forte is not only the wife who manages her husband’s estates as competently as her husband might. Rohan adds that this wife multiplies her spouse’s wealth and advances his career: “She obtains for him the highest positions and makes him celebrated in the eyes of men.”35 260

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Duplessis found herself in the fraught position of this managerial femme forte. The model incorporates a grave gender imbalance that puts high expectations on the wife while prescribing limits on her speech and allowing her husband to reap the rewards of her foresight and industry. Duplessis was a supremely competent and resourceful wife married to an unstable, unreliable spouse. Nuns were, of course, seen as wedded to Christ, but Christ was not the unworthy husband here. The unreliable spouse was the colonial state that the hospital served, and its male administrators. Theirs was not the irresponsibility of her brother Charles-Denis who abandoned wife and daughter. Because the king chronically underfunded his colony, even the best of officials such as Gilles Hocquart were more like heads of a large harem, unable to provide for all their wives. The seraglio analogy can even be stretched to apply to Bishops Saint-Vallier and Pontbriand, who favoured the Hôpital-Général over the Duplessis sisters’ Hôtel-Dieu. Years of royal underinvestment and administrators who routinely put family advancement over service to the king came to a head in the military miscalculations of Montcalm, Vaudreuil, and Ramezay in the 1759 defeat. Women such as Duplessis were forced to cope with this colonial system that compounded the failings of the patriarchal French state and church. And unlike Marie-Catherine Hecquet and Duplessis’s sister-in-law Geneviève Guillimin, she could not file for a financial separation from an irresponsible spouse. The situation of the managerial femme forte caught in this colonial gender imbalance is crucial to assessing Duplessis’s accomplishments and impact in a Canada undergoing rapid change. Her career as an administrator was not without its disappointments. Her surest coup was the purchase of the Saint-Augustin seigneurie, which delivered steady income and supplies over the years. Her apparent failure was not engineering a major enlargement of the hospital. However, her legacy stands up well in comparison with other leaders of women’s communities, and indeed with other Canadian women of the period. Moreover, because we have the wide-ranging correspondence of Marie-André and her sister Geneviève – the sort of business and personal letters largely missing in the case of other mother superiors of her generation (or laywomen) – a much more rounded assessment has been possible.36 We have an inside view of how Duplessis worked the various networks of administrators, suppliers, and supporters in a bride of an unworthy spouse

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society where clientage was so important, and of how she mobilized her family to support the hospital. Bishops and intendants might grumble about the “independence” shown by the Duplessis sisters, but they tolerated it. Fifty years later, as François Rousseau noted, Canadian ecclesiastical authorities would judge such an independent attitude inadmissible.37 She seems to have sensed that her fears at times could paralyze her. On 15 July 1758, at a time of food shortages for everyone in the town, when the hospital was having difficulty feeding its patients and staff, Duplessis wrote Pontbriand asking him to give her courage. Flour was available, but at such an inflated price that she feared not being able to repay debts in the fall: “A word of reply from you will make me more courageous, and I will act boldly.” Pontbriand replied briskly and imperatively: “My dear daughter, one must insure that one has what is required to live. It is better to borrow than put life at risk. Buy the flour.” Sometimes she needed to have her back up against a wall. When the 1755 catastrophe made borrowing necessary to rebuild, Duplessis was more than up to the task. Despite her fears and need for occasional reassurance, she guided her twin institutions, the community and the hospital through the siege and beginning of the occupation.

Writing Her Community / Writing New France Duplessis’s firsts as a Canadian writer argue for a place for her among New France’s notable authors. Her earliest texts show an innovative spirit found nowhere else in the literature of the French regime. The fictional frame of her Histoire de Ruma could have been the product of a Parisian salon and seems to have no precedent in convent writing. Likewise, the structure of her Musique spirituelle, based on parallels between monastic life and Baroque music, stretches the conventions of convent texts. Although a nun, she had no qualms about declaring that one goal of her writing was to please and amuse and even to satisfy the curiosity of her readers. This is particularly prominent in her early texts, the Histoire de Ruma and the Musique spirituelle, and plays a role in the Annales. In wrapping up her encomium of Louis XIV in that book, she declared that she took pleasure in writing it, just as she expected her nun readers to enjoy it: “They will have as 262

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much pleasure in hearing this great king talked about, as I have in writing something regarding him.”38 In 1730, she addressed the issue head-on when she maintained to Hecquet that pleasure and edification could go hand in hand: “Although my state as a nun commits me to mortify myself in all things, I do not find fault with the pleasure that I experience in seeing your letters because they edify me while gladdening me.”39 However, by 1730, she had largely forgone the wit that marks her first two texts. The shift likely took place during the redaction of the Annales. Their dedicatory letter asserts that the entire book will be written in the “simple and naïve” style of the accounts of the early days of the hospital composed by the founding nuns that are quoted extensively in the first pages. In a 1720 letter to Hecquet, Duplessis roundly criticized the airs of a woman who had recently returned from aristocratic circles in France: “Nevertheless she has much wit. She is knowledgeable about numerous subjects. She has read all the tales, and her conversation is quite amusing, but I prefer less sparkle and a more natural tone. Affectation has always been odious to me.”40 Marie-André could well be accusing herself of similar failings. At the end of this letter she bemoaned her spiritual tepidness just at the time when her brother was exhorting her to aspire to a higher level of commitment to her vocation. No other eighteenth-century Canadian nun can rival Duplessis. Devotional texts, such as the many that Duplessis wrote for her community, do not seem to have survived from other convents. At the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal, Marie-Anne-Véronique Cuillerier and Catherine Porlier left short chronicles that mix coverage of the wars with events at their hospital and monastery. Their texts have nothing of the polish of Duplessis’s Annales and little of the verve of their predecessor, Marie Morin. Morin’s substantial annals are entitled, like Duplessis’s, a history of the “establishment” of her hospital, but their make-up is quite different. Morin composed hers over a twentyeight-year period from 1697 to 1725 and never attempted to blend its disparate parts into a smooth, coherent volume as Duplessis did. When Morin cited her “inability” and her “meagre” talent as an historian, or apologized for a lack of skill,41 she was not invoking the kind of exaggerated modesty that Duplessis used when she apologized that as a woman writer she could not summon the needed eloquence to bride of an unworthy spouse

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compose a proper encomium for Jean Talon.42 Although Morin had spent a few years as a pupil of the Ursulines of Quebec, she did not have Duplessis’s intellectual fibre. The “simple and naïve” style proclaimed in the dedicatory letter of the Quebec annals is not nearly as down-to-earth as the style of Morin’s Simple and True History that gives the Montreal annals their warm appeal and makes them compelling on their terms. Duplessis had been forced to hide her voice behind the official author of her history, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. Morin spoke directly with the authority of an eyewitness who had joined her community in 1662, just three years after its founding, and who had served as bursar and mother superior. Morin’s eye is focused pointedly on Montreal, unlike Duplessis, who situated her hospital in the entire sweep of the colony’s development. Morin felt obliged to include accounts of the Phips and Walker invasions, but hers are paltry in comparison with Duplessis’s lengthy reports. Both Morin and Duplessis seek to edify their communities, but Duplessis also aims to provide hers with practical information. The Ursulines had an annalist with a flair for eloquence, MarieCharlotte Daneau de Muy, who covered the military operations of the war leading up to the fall of Quebec with considerable detail, to judge by the many extracts included in the nineteenth-century history of that monastery.43 However, in late May 1759, she stopped including military events in her chronicle to concentrate on convent affairs, and she died the day after the battle of the Plains of Abraham. Also capable of rivalling Duplessis might have been Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny, whose account of the 1759 siege of Quebec viewed from the angle of the Hôpital-Général is somewhat longer and has more scope than any of Duplessis’s short later pieces. Like Duplessis, whose account of the 1755 hospital fire was a plea for help to rebuild, Legardeur shaped her narrative as a lobbying effort to convince the French court to pay its debt to her institution, but she left no other substantial texts. The Annales themselves may be a patchwork of shorter pieces, but they were conceived as a unified book covering eighty years of history. Duplessis’s own vision pervades her book. She takes pride in the spiritual valour of the foundresses and their successors, in the level of care the nuns provide, and in their prudent administration of the hospital. However, the colony’s precarious financial situation 264

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constantly jeopardizes their achievement. Canada did subsequently enjoy economic expansion after 1720, but Duplessis’s constant scramble to finance hospital operations meant that she always saw the colony as disadvantaged. Despite this overarching vision, the book is not meant to be read straight though. It summarizes conveniently various documents of record preserved in chapter meeting minutes, registers of professions, account books, etc. Thus, its most inviting sections – at least for modern readers – are the longer narrative set pieces that sometimes seem lost amid the routine chronicling of yearly elections and the entrances and deaths of minor members of the community. After the Annales were completed, Duplessis appears not to have undertaken any further texts of substantial length. When she announced their publication to Hecquet, she did not mention plans for a sequel. Shorter texts, in fact, became her comfort zone, either by talent or because she wrote when she could fit in time between other tasks. She had settled into the established genres of convent writing, which she executed with a sure hand. Although her community and its hospital were always her focus, she knew that she was writing a Canadian chronicle as well. From her perch in the upper town near the ramparts overlooking the Saint Charles and Saint Lawrence Rivers, she had a bird’s-eye view of the colony. Its religious, economic, and political affairs had a daily impact on her institution. However, Duplessis wrote New France quite differently from two other major women writers of the colony, Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon. Guyart’s and Bégon’s letters have been seen as giving Canadian literature worthy examples of famous European models. Already at the time of her death, Guyart was saluted as a second Teresa of Avila, “the Teresa of Canada.” Bégon’s reports of the life of Montreal’s high society have the allure of the court gossip that Madame de Sévigné sent her daughter, and her unrequited obsession with her son-in-law Honoré Michel de Villebois has the flavour of the passion that Julie de Lespinasse would have for Jacques-Hippolyte de Guibert later in the eighteenth century. Guyart’s correspondence with her son and Bégon’s with her son-in-law had largely unavowed compulsions as their subtext: the nun’s guilt for her abandonment of her adolescent son Claude to become an Ursuline and Bégon’s one-sided solicitude for Michel de Villebois. bride of an unworthy spouse

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New France was the site of Guyart’s mystical and apostolic epic. She never abandoned the utopic vision of a church in New France modelled on the early Christians that drove her initial missionary impulse. Her letters recounting the successes and challenges of the missions can be seen as part of the Jesuit publicity machine that produced the yearly published accounts known as the Jesuit Relations. The Jesuit editors, in fact, at times solicited texts from her. She saw the missions in terms of miracles of grace and martyrdom. At the end of her life, she did acknowledge that her early dream of “civilizing” the Indigenous population was illusory, but she did not give up her hope of Christianizing them on a large scale.44 Duplessis was disabused from the start on both scores. Her administrative letters to secure scarce resources give Duplessis’s correspondence a dimension missing in Guyart’s. Of Guyart’s two hundred seventy-eight surviving letters, only about three – routine letters to the governor and French financial agents – represent what must have been an extensive business and administrative correspondence. On the other hand, at least half of Duplessis’s remaining letters deal with hospital operations. If they were merely a dry suite of orders placed and accounts paid, this correspondence would have little resonance. However, she engaged colonial officials and patrons in France on many levels. She strategized with Ruette d’Auteuil over how to address the intendant Dupuy, fretted through multiple drafts of a petition to the minister of the marine Rouillé, and orchestrated campaigns to win support from French donors in the 1720s and 1750s. Her administrative correspondence – from routine letters dealing with the appointment of confessors with Pontbriand or flour supplies with Bigot to the formal bureaucratic eloquence of her requests to the minister in Versailles – is her passionate defence of “the poor,” that is the Hôtel-Dieu, poorly treated by French colonial administrators. Like Duplessis, Guyart wrote annual letters back to France each fall, but the Ursuline focuses more on the progress of “this new church” than on political and economic development. Duplessis’s letters to Hecquet span four decades from 1718 until 1758 and thus take up where the Annales end. They share the same vision of the colony’s precarious state found in that book. She organized them as chronicles like the Annales, as snapshots of the notable events in 266

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the colony and hospital of the year. Duplessis’s crisp style in these letters and the quality of the information she presented was evident to readers of two extracts from them published during her lifetime – her account of the Inuit in Hecquet’s book and her description of the “hospital rock” in the Annales. The first attracted the attention of Louis de Jaucourt, who used it in the Encyclopédie. Duplessis’s longest text is an institutional chronicle written for her sister nuns. Guyart’s is an account of her interior life written for her son, the Relation de 1654. It is a chronicle of sorts, in which time is not measured by years but by successive “states of prayer,” thirteen in all. This second thread of Guyart’s writing in Canada – her spiritual advice to her Benedictine son – met with more success than her missionary enterprise. Claude Martin became a pillar of his Congregation of Saint-Maur. By publishing her writings and her biography, he opened the cause that led to his mother’s canonization in 2014. Duplessis only focused incidentally on herself. Managing a poor hospital in a needy New France, she wrote to secure resources for her “poor,” and to maintain the quality of community spiritual life that she had found at the Hôtel-Dieu. Élisabeth Bégon was a close contemporary of Duplessis – only nine years younger – and she too could talk about her “poor country.”45 Canada might have been Bégon’s “dear fatherland,”46 but family loyalty propelled her. New France was the family’s stage. The only Canadian by birth of these three women, Bégon left her native land behind when prospects in France seemed brighter. She recounted the foibles and corruption of the Montreal elite for her son-in-law Michel de Villebois, who held a post in the colonial administration in New Orleans, between November 1748 and autumn of the next year, when she left for France. Once in Rochefort, she reported to him the news she received from correspondents in Canada and her contacts in the French colonial administration until his death in late 1752. Because she was unable to send letters regularly, Bégon recorded her daily routine as an intense, concentrated diary, written not just for herself, but with the hope of engaging her seemingly indifferent son-in-law. Her style has a gossipy sparkle that delights readers today. Bégon’s outlook was worldly and her piety conventional. She was chiefly motivated by advancing the prospects of her family, unlike Guyart and Duplessis, who were committed to Canadian institutions. bride of an unworthy spouse

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Bégon sent gossip not just to entertain Michel de Villebois, but also to further his career. Once in Louisiana, he began accusing his superiors, including Vaudreuil – whom Duplessis would later count as a protector – of corruption. Bégon, who had managed to rent her Montreal house to Bigot on advantageous terms, scolded her sonin-law for not grasping, as others had, how the colonial system was exploited by royal officials for their own benefit and for not grabbing his share of the bounty: “Thus take advantage, my dear son, of their lessons and work accordingly.”47 This corruption, clientism, and inefficiency that were the lifeblood of the colonial regime frustrated Duplessis at every turn. However, there is much more to Bégon’s letters than this socialite chronicle of New France’s elite. They are gripping because they reveal the intensity of her emotional life: her obsession with her son-in-law, and her devotion to the education of his daughter. They are infused with an immense, but largely unarticulated, frustration that goes beyond Michel de Villebois’s failure to reciprocate her solicitude. Colonial society could offer a laywoman like Bégon no social role to match her talents. She spotted the hypocrisies and contradictions of her world, but, trapped within them, had little urge to analyze them. What began in Bégon’s early diary entries as tittle-tattle about the colonial elite took a turn worthy of a sentimental novel in the final letters, when her son-in-law refused her career advice and withdrew guardianship of his daughter from her. Duplessis is the most wide-ranging and versatile writer of eighteenth-century New France, even though after her early innovative texts she stayed within the conventions of convent writing. She worked in many genres: devotional texts, lengthy and brief historical narratives, private and administrative correspondence. The difficulty of accessing her writings other than the Annales, her ambivalence about Canada (although she devoted fifty years to a key institution in Quebec), and her status as a nun have worked against the recognition she deserves. She excelled at narrative texts, but lacked an autobiographic flair. Personal effusions are spare in her writings. She preferred to chronicle the colony’s affairs, her community’s life, or her family’s activities. She wrote most of her texts for the HôtelDieu community with little thought of reaching a larger public. Still, she thought of some of them – especially early ones – as books. 268

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She gave the manuscripts of the Musique spirituelle and the Annales the layout of printed books.48 Toward the end of her career, she went further. By securing publication of the Annales in 1751, she recognized that she had indeed authored a book, a book that told a Canadian success story of the establishment of her hospital against great obstacles. The wrongheaded policies of colonial administrators now endangered that success, thus her need to reach an audience in France. Duplessis is the first Canadian woman to arrange publication of her own book. She is in fact one of the rare residents of French colonial Canada to do so. Most books about New France, such as those of Lahontan and Charlevoix, were published by men upon their return to Europe after a stint in the colony.49 Few writers of New France can match Duplessis’s legacy.

Force Allied with Mildness Duplessis spent her entire life, except for the short interlude in her father’s home in Quebec, in environments controlled by women. She was raised by two women in Paris who shaped her head for business and her devotion. At age twenty, she entered the convent, where she was joined shortly by Geneviève. Her defence of the nuns’ financial management of the hospital can be seen as an effort to maintain female control of an institution that women staffed. However, episcopal oversight and the need for public subsidies meant that males were not just looking over the nuns’ shoulders, but had the final word when they cared to assert themselves. Early on, at least, she showed uneasiness with this gender hierarchy by venting her displeasure with male authority figures onto other women. In 1719, it was her sisters on the advisory council who accepted Saint-Vallier’s house for ill priests. The next year, she displayed her scorn of male Jansenist leaders by mocking nuns who dared to take theological stands and join the appeal of Unigenitus: “Their names have the honour of being below several bishops and above several scribblers and tract writers whose signatures were bought to add to the total.”50 Although Duplessis was perhaps the closest thing to an intellectual woman that could be found in the colony, and perhaps the only one who might have read the papal bride of an unworthy spouse

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document, she was not troubled by the fact that the eighty-third of the 101 propositions condemned by the bull defended women’s right of access to scripture. It was the indiscreet Geneviève, not MarieAndré, who chafed in the 1750s against the restraints placed on nuns acting as businesswomen who could not leave their cloister to attend to affairs in person. Duplessis learned how to work with bishops, and sometimes around them. She learned how to prepare her proposals for chapter meetings so that the community inevitably adopted them. The model of the managerial femme forte who allied strength and gentleness allows us to understand how Duplessis used the rhetoric of humility and obedience expected from nuns. She instructed Ruette d’Auteuil in 1727 to work within its confines: “Keep in mind, if you please, that nuns are speaking, and consequently they must always be mild, without however sacrificing anything of the vigour that is needed.”51 Her recommendation to Ruette d’Auteuil to clothe force with gentleness points to how she negotiated the tensions inherent in this gender model. Douceur here is not so much mildness, sweetness, or softness, to judge by the drafts of letters sent in the Dupuy affair, as it is sensitivity to conventional social and gender hierarchies. Her force or amazon spirit was unswerving – and sometimes counterproductive – in standing up for the rights of the hospital. She combined this grit with a savvy about social conventions and an air of affability as she managed the hospital and community. Her success in guiding the Augustinian sisters for thirty years was made possible because behind her shield of “tenderness” this manager had the tenacity of a warrior femme forte. Writing this biography has been possible because two women can indeed be fast friends. Duplessis often chided Hecquet for not always being faithful to their annual rendezvous. However, of all the personal exchanges she maintained, this one has survived because her friend treasured her letters. Duplessis often closed them with some variant of the expression “our tender and constant friendship.” Despite separation, the Jansenist and the Jesuit’s sister used forbearance to refashion a version of their childhood bond under the banner of Christian friendship. In her 1755 Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, Hecquet conspicuously declared Marie-André to be “my intimate friend,”52 even though she seems to have hidden her fervent allegiance to Jansenism. On the 270

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other hand, complete intimacy did mark Marie-André’s particular friendship with her nun sister, and reading Geneviève’s frank letters against her sister’s has proved revealing. Their administrative collaboration brought them together, and they created for themselves a nest of security where they exchanged confidences about their spiritual ambitions and strategized for the hospital. They could let slip the mask of deference and decorum they had to display with male outsiders and even to some extent with other community members. The praise Geneviève made of her sister’s friendship with Hecquet applies better to her own with Marie-André: “one relishes the sweet pleasantness (douceur) of having solid and constant friends.”53 The sister-confidants had all the more fortitude to fight for their hospital because they could withdraw to this intimacy.

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notes Introduction 1 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, Actes capitulaires, 7 August 1719. 2 Ibid. 3 hdq-f1-k1, 3/3: 5, 20 May 1730 letter of Dupas, apothecary at La Rochelle. 4 See Choquette, “‘Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu.’” Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 81–92, shows how the concept was used by the Jesuits to attract female benefactors in France to finance the nun and lay “amazons in Canada.” 5 Gray’s The Congrégation de Notre-Dame deals with three mother superiors: Marie Barbier, who antedates Duplessis, and MarieJosèphe Maugue-Garreau and Marie Raizenne at the end of the eighteenth century. Noel has focused on the Hôpital-Général and stresses its aristocratic tendencies; she discusses the RamezayDuchesnay duo in “Besieged but Connected,” “Caste and Clientage,” and “Decoding the Eighteenth-Century Convent,” in Along a River, 182–204. This book synthesizes the last forty years of research on Canadian convents within a powerful interpretation of women’s roles in Canada into the 1830s. Noel generally focuses more on the official correspondence of governors and intendants than on internal documents that give the nuns’ perspective. 6 Wheelwright entered the Ursulines in 1713. Her documentary record as an Ursuline before she became mother superior is thin, and Little has to rely on generic descriptions of convent practices to reconstruct much of her life as a nun in The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Julie Wheelwright’s Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright makes excellent use of surviving

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Ursuline documents and is a more conventional biography, although it includes chapters that narrate the author’s research journey. Carr, “Une ‘histoire véritable’ littéraire,” 171–90. Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle (1718),” 50–9. At the 1945 colloquium in honour of the centenary of FrançoisXavier Garneau’s Histoire du Canada, Gustave Lanctot, the Dominion Archivist, regretted the absence of a paper on Duplessis in his plenary lecture: “A surprising thing that has not yet been pointed out is that the first Canadian to attempt historical work is a woman named Marie-Andrée Duplessis, whose Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec might well have deserved to have a place on the program of this centenary” (Centenaire de l’Histoire du Canada, 18). Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, ed. Ghislaine Legendre. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” ed. Verreau. Duplessis “is perhaps not inferior to her” (41). Casgrain, Histoire, 434. Ibid., 331. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, ed. J.-Edmond Roy. G. Duplessis, “La Manne de Jésus”; M.-A. Duplessis, “La Plaie du cœur divin.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” ed. A.-L. Leymarie. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, ed. Albert Jamet. Gies, “Mère Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, annaliste et épistolière.” Rémillard, “Mère Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène,” 388–408. Ibid., 388. LeBlanc, Anthologie, 226. Rousseau’s three books, based on an intimate knowledge of the Hôtel-Dieu’s archives, give a more balanced and authoritative treatment than any of the three colonial Quebec monasteries have received. Although his revised thesis, L’Œuvre de chère, focuses on food practices, it contains much detail about other aspects of the hospital’s operations. His two-volume history of the Augustinian sisters and their hospital, La Croix et le scalpel, combines an insightful account of the evolving spirituality that inspired the

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nuns with institutional practices. His La Passion de servir focuses on key figures in the pre-Duplessis history of the house. Melançon and Dubois, “Les Amitiés féminines,” 97–113. Simon, “Intérêt pharmaceutique des lettres adressées à l’apothicaire Féret.” J. Roy, “Stratégies épistolaires”; “Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre.” J. Roy, “Femmes et littérature … au-delà de la Sainte-Trinité.” Fino, L’Hospitalité, figure sociale de la charité. Théry, in De plumes et d’audace, makes use of the annals, but gives little attention to Duplessis as their author. Smart, in De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan, devotes a chapter to Élisabeth Bégon’s correspondence, but only mentions Duplessis’s in passing (97–8). Piché discusses the project in “‘Ma très chère mère du Canada.’”  Ursule-Marie des Anges in F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, ed. Roy, appendix, xiv. On the importance of transatlantic families, see Hardwick et al., “Introduction,” 205–24. The only work to shed new light on François-Xavier since J.Edmond Roy is Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis.” Hecquet, Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel. It was republished as an appendix by Lyon-Caen, who traced Hecquet’s entire family over several generations in Un Roman bourgeois.

Chapter One 1 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. Lyon-Caen’s Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV exploits a wealth of archival material about the Homassel family and to a lesser extent about the Leroys. 2 See Langer, Perfect Friendship, 14–39, for an overview that begins with antiquity and an analysis of the paradoxes of the standard canons of friendship. Hayes shows how two female moralists in the eighteenth century, the marquise de Lambert and Mme d’Arconville, doubted the possibility of friendship between women, just as previous male writers had (“Friendship and the Female Moralist,” 171–89). 3 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 48.

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4 For information on this monastery, see Houth, “Les Couvents du tiers ordre,” 459–62. 5 This information about Marie Leroy’s family comes from the wedding contract of her brother Denis Leroy (anf, Minutier central, 21 April 1686, Étude X, 210), and the 6 November 1694 inventory after the death of Pierre Josse (Minutier central, Étude XXXIII, 381), supplemented by information from Pasquier, Relevé des naissances, mariages. Le Peletier might have played a role in Georges Duplessis’s posting to Canada since he signed the wedding contract of Georges’s brother-in-law, Denis Leroy, in 1686. 6 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 42. 7 Angot, Dictionnaire historique, 3: 517–18. He died in his parish on 13 January 1724 (Archives de la Mayenne, parish register). In 1728, the parishioners sued the sons of his brother Denis Leroy, his heir, trying to reclaiming 3,000 livres they said their pastor owed the church (20 July 1728 judgment, Archives de la Mayenne, B 631). 8 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 144. 9 Ibid., 42. 10 anf, Minutier central, 31 March 1686, Étude CII, 134. 11 16 December 1701 burial according to the parish registers of SaintMartin de Chevreuse, Archives des Yvelines. She had died the previous day at age sixty-eight. Her son Denis Leroy was there, but Marie Leroy is not listed as present. 12 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 26, 107–10. 13 Ibid., 41–2. For more information on this guild, see Crowston, Fabricating Women, 74–6. 14 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. 15 Matthew 5:44. 16 John 15:13. 17 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 114. 18 Ibid., 127–8. 19 Ibid., 114. 20 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182. 21 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 111. 22 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 50. 23 Ibid., NF 4: 48. 24 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 194–5. 25 Ibid., appendix, xii.

276

notes to pages 19–24

26 On this institution, see Coüard, “Contribution à l’histoire de l’instruction publique.” 27 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 143. 28 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 194. 29 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 300–1. 30 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 118. 31 hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, Dissection spirituelle, twenty-first day. 32 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 114. 33 Ibid., 123–4. 34 Ibid., 127. 35 Ibid., 125. 36 The year 1702 is sometimes given as the date of her departure because Ursule-Marie des Anges said in her obituary letter that Duplessis’s mother came for her when she was fifteen. However, it is likely to have occurred in 1701, since Duplessis wrote Hecquet on 21 October 1720 that her mother had come for her in 1700, and Hecquet stated that Leroy cut short her visit because of her quarrel with her sister when Marie-André was about thirteen. In the Histoire de Ruma, Duplessis said she regretted leaving behind her grandmother who died in December 1701. Her departure must have predated this death. The intendant Jean Brochart de Champigny wrote the minister on 15 October 1700, “Madame Duplessis is travelling to France on the ship the Seine in order to bring back the rest of her family,” and requested that she be granted passage on the king’s ship for the return (anf anom col c11a 18/fol. 92–108v). 37 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182. 38 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 75. 39 Ibid., NF 3: 306. 40 Ibid., NF 3: 300–1. 41 On Jacques Homassel’s dealings with Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, see Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 91. A sample of Georges Duplessis’s dealings with his son, Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, is discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter Two 1 anf, Minutier central, 31 March 1686, Étude CII, 134. 2 Son of Georges Regnard and Jeanne Fournier, he was baptized on

notes to pages 24–30

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Easter day 1657 in the parish church of Saint-Utin. His godfather was Monsieur de Saint-Léger le jeune, and his godmother Mademoiselle de Meix-Tiercelin. His mother Jeanne Fournier died in 1680 and his father in 1682, according to parish registers (Archives de la Marne). Georges’s wedding contract lists both him and his deceased father as “sieur de Morampont,” but this honorific does not imply nobility or even possession of a seigneurie. Morampont is a manor house just outside of Saint-Utin. Georges might have taken the appellation “du Plessis” from a family property to distinguish himself from other brothers. His son Charles-Denis used the “de Morampont” appellation consistently. According to a letter of François-Xavier, his younger brother Charles-Denis was involved in the 1750s in a lawsuit involving a Morampont inheritance (11 April 1751 letter of F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 277). The fief of Morampont changed hands frequently, to judge by the number of persons holding the title of seigneur in the parish registers, and it is not certain when the Regnards acquired it. 3 Not present were two surviving brothers of her father, who lived in relative comfort. The best situated was Jacques Leroy (1638–1710), who died at Versailles, where he was an officer in the household of the duchess of Bourgogne. (Burial at Saint-Martin de Chevreuse, 10 February 1710, Archives des Yvelines.) For his will and inventory see anf, Minutier Central, 11 February 1710, Étude XXIII, 401. His post as serdeau involved clearing the table in the elaborate ceremonial of meals at the palace. One of four gentlemen holding this title, he served three months of the year, from January through March (Trabouillet, Etat de France, 2: 66). Another brother, Charles Leroy, who lived on the Rue de la Huchette, is listed as a “bourgeois de Paris” in his renunciation after the death of his brother Jacques (anf, Minutier central, 24 February 1710, Rénunciation, Étude XXIII, 401). 4 In addition to Gédéon Berbier du Metz, we find his brother Louis Berbier du Metz, commendatory abbot of the abbey of SaintMartin de Huiron near Vitry-Le-François. Their sister Marguerite was also present, along with her husband Antoine Le Ménestrel, treasurer of the king’s buildings (trésorier des bâtiments du roi). On the Berbier du Metz clan, see Castelluccio, Le Garde-Meuble de la couronne, 77–98. Jacques Fournier (not listed as a relative

278

notes to pages 30–1

5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

despite bearing the name of Georges’s mother) was captain-colonel of the three companies of guards and archers of Paris (capitainecolonel des trois compagnies des gardes et archers de Paris), a sort of bourgeois militia. anf, Minutier central, 21 April 1686, Étude X, 210. Georges Duplessis and Marie Leroy are not among the witnesses of her brother Denis’s contract, signed three weeks after theirs. Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances, 35–8, 50–5. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 138. Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: 89n. Pierre-Georges Roy notes that although in hundreds of documents Duplessis is called the treasurer of the marine in Quebec, he most likely only occupied that post on an interim basis and served rather as a deputy or associate to the official representative of the treasurer general (La Ville de Québec, 1: 474). On the overall functioning of the institution, see Legohérel, Les Trésoriers généraux; see Shortt, ed., Documents, for its functioning in Canada, e.g. 1: 49n. Keyes gives more information in “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux.” Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux,” 184–5. This category of financier, who held and dispersed monies, was distinct from the two other major groups of financiers during the Bourbon regime: the farmers general of taxes, who collected customs and excise taxes, and the receivers general of finances, who collected taxes on property, persons, and income such as the taille (Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 85–6). Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: 75n. Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 295–6. Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: xli. Ibid., 1: li. Ibid., 1: 87. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, i; notice biographique, xiv. 25 October 1696 letter of Champigny to the minister, anom col c11a 14/fol. 196–207v. 27 October 1698 letter of Champigny to the minister, anom col c11a 16/fol. 130.  4 November 1740 letter of G. Duplessis to Féret, in M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 95–6.

notes to pages 31–4

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20 19 October 1705 letter of Jacques Raudot to the minister, anom col c11a 22/fol. 297–319v. 21 On Dupuy’s piety, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 389–90. 22 Cliche, Les Pratiques de dévotion, 197. 23 J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 57. 24 anom col c11a 113/fol. 262–262v, 9 October 1721, “Balance des fonds remis, recettes extraordinaires et des dépenses de l’année 1711.” This salary had not increased in 1730. That year, the intendant Gilles Hocquart wrote concerning the current representative of the treasurer, Nicolas Lanoullier de Boisclerc, “How, with the 1,200 livres that is given Lanoullier by the treasurers of the Marine can they expect that the duties be well carried out? It is not possible that a man so poorly paid not to look for and find resources in his official funds” (16 October 1730, cited by Keyes, “Un Commis,” 199). 25 Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 97–9; on the business activities of Jean Petit, who held the office from 1702 until 1720 and with whom Duplessis worked, see Bosher, Business and Religion, 292–5. 26 Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 46. 27 J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 5. 28 Ibid., 2: 20–1. 29 Ibid., 2: 53. 30 4 November 1701 summary of letter of Duplessis to the minister, anom col c11a 19/fol. 73v–74f. 31 8 November 1704 memorandum of Duplessis, anom col c11a 22/ fol. 145–154v. 32 Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 185–6. 33 6 November 1701 letter of Levasseur de Neré to the minister, anom col c11a 19/fol. 89–90v. 34 Miquelon’s account in New France 1701–1744, 55–71, is followed here. Frégault’s more extensive and detailed account is critical of Duplessis (Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle canadien, 242–88). 35 Ruette d’Auteuil, who had previously helped Duplessis in the purchase of Lauzon by allowing his name instead of Duplessis’s to be used on the contract, led the first charge against him. Ruette d’Auteuil’s protest may have been correct in strict legal terms, but was untimely, according to D’Allaire, Montée et déclin d’une famille noble, 111.

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notes to pages 34–7

36 2 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister in ibid., 118. 37 See the 11 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister, anom col c11g 3/fol. 110–28. 38 11 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister, anom col c11g 3/fol. 128–9. 39 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 383. 40 18 June 1708 letter of Pontchartrain to Raudot, anom col c11g 21/ fol. 198–198v. 41 anom col c11A 29/fol. 354–7. The letter was probably written in 1709 since it mentions the 22 October 1708 agreement made at Quebec. 42 6 July 1709 letter of king to Vaudreuil and Raudot, anom col c11g 4/fol. 3–17; rapq (1942–43), 413. 43 Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle canadien, 274. 44 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 45 Marcel Moussette compares the other three accounts, all written by administrators, to Marie-André’s. Besides giving more details of the disaster, she emphasizes the moral qualities of the victims and their pious deaths according to the conventions of the annals genre. The annals relate the loss of her father’s papers impersonally, with no mention of its consequences for her family (Moussette, “Québec 1713,” 69–100). 46 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 382. 47 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 48 Roy, Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 58. 49 7 November 1711 summary of letter of Vaudreuil and Raudot, anom col c11a 32/fol. 195–204. 50 8 November 1711 letter of Vaudreuil, anom col c11a 32/fol. 65–81. 51 5 November 1712 letter of Nicolas Pinaud to the minister, anom col c11a 33/fol. 300–301v. 52 12 November 1712 letter of Vaudreuil and Bégon to the minister, anom col c11a 33/fol. 15–37. 53 Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances, 124. 54 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 55 1 June 1714 letter of the minister to Denis Leroy, anom col b36 fol. 195v. 56 12 November 1714 letter of Bégon to the minister, anom col c11a 34/fol. 303–320v.

notes to pages 37–9

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57 Legohérel, Les Trésoriers généraux, 294–8. 58 Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux,” 188–90. 59 J.-Edmond Roy is defensive in his account of Duplessis’s troubles and stresses his honesty: “Monsieur Duplessis could have, like so many finance officers, speculated with the king’s funds and have enriched himself, but he preferred to maintain the reputation of an honest honorable man that he had painstakingly acquired … The courts could have justified him from a strictly business point of view, but he wanted total vindication from the people who had confided in him their trust.” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, notice biographique, xi–xii.) 60 Brun. “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 40. 61 The contract lists Georges’s inheritance from his parents as his lineage property, without specifying what this inheritance consisted of. 62 anf, Minutier Central, 15 May 1700, Étude XVI, 621. 63 See J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 58, for a list of most of these. 64 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, i–ii. 65 hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 24, undated draft of letter of G. Duplessis to Maurepas, “Si je n’avais que mes intérêts.” 66 On these matrilineal networks, see Chapman, “Patronage as Family Economy,” 11–35. 67 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136. According to Philippe-Baby Casgrain, the site was later occupied by a commercial building constructed in 1900 by the widow of Samuel Fisher. That building is located at 8–12 Côte de la Fabrique, “Le Kent House,” 13. 68 Lafontaine, Recensements annotés, 19. 69 Boisclair, Catalogue des œuvres peintes, 74–7; banq, Étude Henry Hiché 220. Her Jesuit son had sent the painting of Saint Helen. In 1722, he mentioned the portrait of the Franciscan as being in his mother’s home (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 94). 70 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, ii. 71 Ibid., 74. 72 Ibid., 101. 73 Ibid., 108–9. 74 banq, 3 July 1719 donation of Marie Leroy, Étude Pierre Rivet Chevalier.

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notes to pages 39–43

75 banq, Étude Hiché, number 220, 10 September 1731 will of Marie Leroy, widow of Georges Regnard Duplessis. 76 hdq-f1-h4, 4/7: 11; Pierre André de Leigne, the officer of the prévôté court, approved their request on 3 August 1736. 77 banq, 15 June 1715, sale of a lot, Étude Barbel. 78 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136. 79 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 74. 80 On the family, see Pierre-Georges Roy, La Famille Lanoullier. 81 Marie Leroy signed the marriage contracts of Jean-Eustache in 1719 and of Nicolas in 1720 as a cousin, but when Nicolas signed Charles-Denis Duplessis’s contract in 1742, Nicolas listed his relationship as “allié,” that is, someone related by marriage rather than blood. The father of Nicolas and Jean-Eustache, Jean Lanoullier, came from Rungis and his 1681 contract was written by a notary named Josse in Monthléry, according to Macouin, Les Familles pionnières, 115. Marie Leroy’s grandmother was Andrée Josse of Limours. Monthléry is about 20 km from Limours, both in the modern Essonne department. 82 3 November 1719, anom col c11a fol. 332–332v. 83 4 November 1719 request of Marie Leroy, anom col c11a fol. 158–158v. 84 10 November 1719 accounting of card money by Pierre Peire, anom col c11a fol. 218–218v. 85 17 April 1731 letter of Maurepas to Hocquart, anom col c11a 56/fol. 53–57v; 17 October 1731 letter of Hocquart to Maurepas, anom col c11a fol. 217–222v. 86 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136–7. 87 Ibid., NF 2: 135. J.-Edmond Roy’s paraphrase and commentary, first in his edition of François-Xavier’s letters (“Notice biographique,” xxvi–xxvii) and then in his Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, has led historians to believe that she paid this sum, not accounted for it, as her daughter’s letter states. “His widow, who had always served as guarantor in all of his offices, had to account for a quarter-century administrative period. How could one verify so complicated a management when all the relevant documents had been destroyed? She was held responsible for 1,200,000 livres. All was paid.” Pierre-Georges Roy thus said she paid over a million livres in his entry on Marie Le Roy in A travers l’Histoire

notes to pages 43–5

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88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96

de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 135. Voisine writes in his dcb entry on Georges Duplessis: “In January 1713 all the treasury papers were destroyed when the intendant’s palace in Quebec burned. Duplessis was held responsible for the loss of the card money, treasury bonds, bills in hand, and vouchers for expenditures – all the treasury papers – and he was obliged to make reimbursement. He died on 30 Oct. 1714, before he had finished payment, and his widow had to pay more than a million livres.” Such an amount would have been impossible for an individual to reimburse. As a cumulative sum of money handled by the treasurer’s office over numerous years that had to be accounted for, it is plausible. Lafontaine, Recensements annotés, 129. banq, 16 July 1757 Seizure, TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P60. Brun, “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 44. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 97. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 163–4. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 105–6. Brun, “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 42. Brun does not discuss Leroy in her survey of widowhood, and Leroy, by exploiting a variety of ad-hoc strategies, seems to have fared better than most of the cases Brun cites. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 390. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 174.

Chapter Three 1 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. 2 See listings in the prdh database (“Programme de recherche en démographie historique”), nos. 62337, 62318, 62444, 62501, 62577, 62652. 3 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 44. 4 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xii. 5 Simpson, Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 127. 6 Coüard, “Contribution à l’histoire de l’instruction publique,” 184. 7 31 October 1701 letter of Sister Saint-Ignace, cited by Gosselin, L’Instruction au Canada, 192. 8 For the founding of the Hôpital-Général and its conflicts with the

284

notes to pages 47–52

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19

Hôtel-Dieu, see Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres. O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 186. J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 57. Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 1: 526. For this description of Georges Duplessis, written by his daughter, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 390–1. D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 69. D’Allaire divides the recruits whose family status can be identified into four groups: the elite of governmental function or dignity; entrepreneurs; craftsmen; rural dwellers subject to a quit-rent. The first two comprise the upper strata of society (ibid., 53–6). Ibid., 68–9. According to Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 135, on 31 December 1708, a week before Marie-André’s profession, the community had forty-three members, including four postulants and novices, and he calculates that in the decade 1699–1708, twenty-four recruits joined the community. Her brother says that in 1728 he met a Flemish Jesuit who had a copy of the sermon from papers he inherited from Bigot (Lettres, 152). There were two Bigot Jesuits in Quebec at this time, the brothers Jacques (1651–1711) and Vincent (1649–1720). Most likely the preacher was Vincent, who took an interest in the HôtelDieu. The previous year François-Xavier had reminded his sister that Bigot had preached on the cross: “I still keep in mind what the saintly Father Bigot said about it to my sister Sainte-Hélène the day that she had the happiness of being admitted among the spouses of Jesus-Christ. We have wed the cross; do not be surprised if Jesus Christ, who loves us in a special way, does not let a day pass without making us feel its weight. Let us love it despite our resistance and let us kiss with respect our chains despite nature’s revolt. Let us adore in silence and humility the Providence that permits many things that annoy and keep us busy from uniting ourselves interiorly to God … In a word, let us love the cross.” (Lettres, 139.) F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xii–xiii. Ragueneau, La Vie de la Mère Catherine, 196–7. In a political analysis of the biography, Lignereux, “Catherine de Saint-Augustin: une héroïcité sans héroïsme?” shows how Ragueneau exploited

notes to pages 52–7

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20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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Catherine’s spirituality to defend the Jesuit’s own largely theocratic vision of the colony; Pearson, “‘I willingly speak to you about her virtues,’” points out the extent to which Catherine’s private ascetic and mystical performance had public repercussions. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218–19. Ibid., 427. Ibid., 426–9. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiii. Ibid., 52. The text was completed by November 1718, the date of the approbation by Joseph de la Colombière found in the manuscript (M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55). Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle,” 51. On music at the Hôtel-Dieu, see Schwandt, “Le petit motet,” 231–54, and Pinson, “Les Communauté féminines,” 109–42, in GallatMorin and Pinson, La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France. M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 58. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 55. Recueil tiré des Constitutions, traité III (1, 2), 91. On monastic particular friendships, condemned by the patristic founders, rehabilitated to some extent in the Middle Ages, but again denounced after the Council of Trent, see Wright, Bonds of Perfection, 102–58, and McGoldrick, The Sweet and Gentle Struggle, 475–93. Quoted in Wright, Bonds of Perfection, 115. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 383. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181–5. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 105, undated circular death notice in MarieAndré’s hand beginning “Ce n’est pas sans une vive douleur.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 73. Ibid., NF 2: 77–8. Ibid., NF 3: 176. Marie Irwin de la Conception was “very much a friend” of Catherine Le Contre de Sainte-Agnès, “our Lord being the bond of their union.” So great was their friendship that they died within a week of each other (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 231).

notes to pages 57–62

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Catherine Longpré de Saint-Augustin was likewise “very much the friend” of Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité. They admonished each other on their hidden faults, and thus “both made great strides on the path toward perfection” (307–8). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 41. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 33. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 49. Recueil tiré des Constitutions, 4–5. The classic reference is to the two sisters in Luke 10:38–42. While Martha busies herself preparing for Jesus’s visit, Mary sits at his feet without helping and absorbs his teaching. When Martha complains, Jesus replies that Mary has chosen the better part. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 21. hdq-f1-d6/6-f1-e2, “Sermon prêché à la vêture de Geneviève Duplessis,” by an unnamed priest. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 22. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 90–1. Fino, L’Hospitalité, 201–2. F.-X Duplessis, Lettres, 67. Ibid., 35–6. Teresa of Avila, La Vie de Sainte Thérèse, ch. 7.21, p. 100; ch. 22.11, p. 347; ch. 24.6, p. 388. For a comprehensive analysis of Teresa’s view of friendship, see Soughers, “Friendship with the Saints,” 81–144. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 5. The text, written in her hand, begins by citing John 15:15, on which it is a commentary. “Je ne vous appellerai plus serviteurs mais amis parce qu’un serviteur ne sait pas les desseins de son maître, mais il communique tous ses secrets à ses amis”: “I will no longer call you servants but friends because a servant does not know the intentions of his master, but he communicates all his secrets to his friends.” F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 36. Ibid., 48. Fino analyzes the Dissection as a theological treatise. She situates it in terms of seventeenth-century spiritual authors to whose

notes to pages 63–7

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

writings Duplessis had access, such as Jean Eudes and Jean de Bernières-Louvigny. Fino’s discussion of how the tension between contemplation and action is worked out on the theological level is particularly rich. My emphasis is more on how the Dissection shows Duplessis working out this tension in her personal spiritual life (L’Hospitalité, 195–209). hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, Dissection spirituelle. I give the number of the meditation in which the citations are found. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 48. Ibid., 56. Fino, L’Hôspitalité, 185–95. Ragueneau, Vie de la Mère Catherine, 62, 55. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 146–7. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 49. Ibid., NF 3: 50. Ibid., NF 3: 49–50. Ibid., NF 3: 97. Ibid., NF 3: 290. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, La Manne de Bethléem. In dedicating this devotional text to the Carmelites she made explicit her attraction to them and her frustration as a hospitaller. She says that Providence did not allow her to enter the Carmelites’ holy retreat, despite her inclination to their life. Instead she finds herself “called for, badgered, tired out by the large number of patients” in the hospital, which requires her to function in a position that prevents her from attaining the composure needed for contemplation. She writes the devotional text to overcome the distractions of her work. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, circular letter in Marie-André’s hand beginning “Ce n’est pas sans une vive douleur.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 44. Ibid., NF 3: 306.

Chapter Four 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. 2 Hecquet recounts this period of her life between leaving Paris and her marriage in an unpublished memoir, “Account of the vexations undergone on account of the formulary” (“Relation des vexations

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3

4 5 6

7 8

essuyées au sujet du formulaire”). A sequel up to about age fifty is entitled “Continuation including the vexations undergone on account of the Constitution Unigenitus” (“Suite comprenant les vexations au sujet de la Constitution Unigenitus”). The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (SJ Ms 8/558), the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris (Ms 5356), and the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Paris (BO 875), hold copies. I quote from the Port-Royal manuscript. I discuss her journey into Jansenism at greater length in “Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction.” For a lucid analysis of why the bull was a theological and tactical disaster, unfair to Quesnel and bordering on intellectual dishonesty, see the account by McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2: 353–5, 370–7. He acknowledges that the bull condemns nine propositions that he deems indefensible, but adds that many more did not deserve anathemas (2: 354). He gives a detailed, theologically informed account of the Jesuits’ role and the ensuing controversies. Ibid., 2: 387. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 27. Ibid., 79. In this June 1721 letter Duplessis alludes to a letter missing from the published collection in which he described his uncle in more detail. Jean Leroy appears in the parish registers of SaintCénéré as pastor in 1692, although for most of the decade a vicar signs them; Leroy begins to appear regularly around 1699. Before coming to the diocese of Le Mans, Jean Leroy was a priest of the diocese of Paris, which was a Jansenist stronghold. He is not listed in Nivelle’s catalogue of clergy who registered a public appeal against Unigenitus, although the chapter of the cathedral of his diocese in Le Mans did (La Constitution Unigenitus déférée à l’Eglise universelle, ou recueil général des actes d’appel interjetés au futur concile). He was buried in the parish church on 20 January 1724 (Parish records, Archives de la Mayenne). On 31 January 1724, François-Xavier sent his sisters a report he had received of the death from relatives in Paris (Lettres, 116). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 97–8. On the early quarrels concerning Jansenism in the seventeenth century see Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France, 14–74, and McManners, Church and Society, 2: 345–52. Sedgwick’s

notes to pages 76–7

289

9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

18

19

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chapter answering the question “What Was Jansenism?” (193–207) is a short, classic assessment of the nature of the movement highlighting its contradictions and situating it in terms of other currents in the church. Quantin, in Le Rigorisme chrétien (12), points out that rigorism was equated with excessive rigour and was a label no one desired. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 15. McManners, Church and Society, 2: 349. This view of Jansenism is elaborated by Chédozeau, “Port-Royal et le jansénisme.” See also McManners, Church and Society, 2: 422–34, on this point and on the changing face of Jansenism, noting that the Jansenists were no more tolerant than their persecutors. McManners, Church and Society, 2: 394. Upon returning to France in 1718, he wrote an account of his Canadian experiences contrasting his harsh treatment by the bishop, egged on by the Jesuits, with more sympathetic treatment by most others (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada”). His version is complemented by one that Duplessis included in the Annales based on information she received from the Jesuits and her own contact with him as a patient at the hospital. She stressed how the Jansenist temptation represented by Poulet was overcome (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’HôtelDieu, 404–8). Hurtubise, “Ni janséniste, ni gallican, ni ultramontain,” 10–11. The cathedral canons noted this fact when Bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet required them to sign the formulary in November 1730. For their text, see Têtu, “Le Chapitre de la cathédrale de Québec,” 358. La Charité, “Les Deux Éditions du Rituel du diocèse de Québec.” La Charité uses a looser definition of Jansenism (82–3) than I use. I see Saint-Vallier as a rigorist on contrition who was distrustful of the Jesuits, but not as a Jansenist in terms of the theology of grace. “My Lord the bishop of Quebec has written me that he cannot take any measures about the acceptance of the pope’s bull that condemns the book of Quesnel because the gentlemen [?] of the Clergy have not written him about it, and to bring him to a decision it appears to me necessary to act with him in the same way as has been done with the other bishops who do not belong

notes to pages 78–82

20

21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

to the Clergy of France. He only awaits that to issue his pastoral letter when you will have sent the necessary dispatches on this subject.” (3 July 1715 letter of Pontchartrain to l’abbé de Maupeou, Archives publiques du Canada, B, 37, 125–125v, as cited by Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle, 153.) “I first expressed my surprise about the special treatment he reserved for me by requiring that I accept the bull, which he had not yet done from any of his other clergy” (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 217). The printed version of SaintValier’s “Mandement promulgant la constitution Unigenitus” in the Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires des Evêques de Québec, 1: 486–7, gives no date, although it appears in the collection between a text of 1713 and one of 1716. A note indicates that the text is truncated and thus without a date in the copies preserved in the diocesan archives, the archives of the Seminary, and the Hôpital-Général. Was the date eliminated on all three copies to conceal the bishop’s delay? See the testimony of the Jesuit superior in Canada in Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: 142. La Charité, “Les Deux Éditions du Rituel du diocèse de Québec,” 80–1. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 404. Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: 142. The Jesuit was so vociferous with secular officials that he had to be replaced, according to a sympathizer of Poulet’s at the Seminary, Joachim Fornel. See his 13 November 1719 letter to Poulet appended to Poulet’s relation of events, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 226–7. Indeed, Duparc, not d’Heu, is listed as confessor by the next year in Hôtel-Dieu records. Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 223. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 406. Ibid., 408. Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 218–19. On the Rioux brothers, see Grenier, “Jean Rioux: émigrant breton, seigneur canadien,” 73–88. Grenier does not mention this episode. Mandements des Evêques de Québec, 1: 496–8.

notes to pages 82–4

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31 Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 222. 32 The first is a Port-Royalist critique of Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 236–7). Jamet does not provide documentation in support of this claim of a Jansenist critique, and I have been unable to locate any. The second concerned André de Merlac, whom SaintVallier had installed as superior of the Hôtel-Dieu. He was accused of Jansenism and attempting to seduce some of the nuns with his ideas (279–80). The affair was treated with so much secrecy that it is difficult to verify the accusations. 33 Ibid., 408. 34 The Jesuit historian Lucien Campeau, who distinguished Jansenism clearly from rigorism, cited Duplessis in minimizing the penetration of Jansenism in the Canadian church (“Le Jansénisme en Nouvelle-France,” 309–10). 35 Thiboult was the pastor of the town parish and an officer in the local ecclesiastical tribunal. According to Poulet (“Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 224), “As for the ecclesiastical tribunal, M. Thiboult was the only one who could listen to reason. I do not know if his interests would have allowed him to do me justice. He had told me several times that everything I would do would be useless.” On Thiboult and Fornel, see Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle, 155; on Leclair, see note 38 below. 36 Fornel’s letter to Poulet makes these two points. The hypocritical Jesuits “have not been so scrupulous when they had to follow the pope in condemning their Chinese superstitions” (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 226). According to Fornel (227), the probabilism that the Jesuits teach allows for a “method that makes it easy in the confessional to hardly ever have to refuse absolution to the unworthy and thus drawing to themselves large numbers of people.” 37 “The council of Quebec is only made up of merchants, all ignorant of the fundamental laws of the kingdom and of what takes place in France, and most are devoted to the Jesuits” (ibid., 224). 38 This fact is made explicit in a memorandum to Cardinal de Noailles on behalf of Pierre Leclair, found in the bnf manuscript with papers addressed to the cardinal, that contains Poulet’s account. Leclair is described as “very full of zeal for the truth,”

292

notes to pages 84–5

39 40

41

42

the code expression for Jansenism among its supporters. “He noted that several of his colleagues are disposed to join with him in declaring themselves openly in favour of truth, but for that to happen, he would need tenure … The bishop of Quebec only has his parishes served by Canadian clerics as missionaries, who being revocable at pleasure, find themselves unable to support themselves and defend themselves in different affairs” (lac, mg 7, I, A2, vol. 20973, p. 60). Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 212–13. At least one priest who served in Canada did appeal Unigenitus, but only after his return to relative safety in France. Abel Maudoux (1652–1736), priest of the Foreign Missions, arrived in Canada in 1688 and served at Trois-Rivières and in Acadia. He left Canada in 1702 for the diocese of Le Mans where he signed the appeal in 1717 and 1721 (Nivelle, La Constitution Unigenitus, Suite du tome second, 196–9). Poulet’s stay overlapped with that of the future schismatic Jansenist bishop Dominique-Marie Varlet, who was in Quebec for thirteen months between September 1717 and October 1718. Varlet, a priest of the Foreign Missions, had left France before Unigenitus to be a missionary, first around Mobile and then at Cahokia. He left the Illinois Country for Quebec in 1717 to obtain recruits for his mission there. While he must have stayed at the Seminary and had contacts with devout circles, no traces of his Quebec stay have been found. Poulet does not cite him. Pierre Hurtubise expressed surprise that so few traces of this stay remain: “Did certain pious hands, desirous of maintaining the good reputation of the church of New France, learning later that Varlet became schismatic, take care to erase most of the traces of his stay in Canada? We will never know, perhaps” (Hurtubise, “Varlet,” 31–2). See his series of letters in the Utrecht Jansenist collection to Dom Thierry de Viaixnes, a Jansenist monk of the Benedictine Congregation of Vannes, exiled in Holland. On 26 April 1722, Poulet wrote that he had been busy with “much writing for Canada.” On 14 September, he said he had been able to send books by way of La Rochelle. A note included in an April/May 1723 letter gave an update: “Isn’t Monsieur Desprez in contact with some people in Quebec? I received two or three letters from there this

notes to page 86

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43

44

45 46

47

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year. They send no news of importance. The package of good books that I sent there last year arrived safely. I am sending another. It is a pity that I am missing the best texts” (Utrecht State Archive, PortRoyal Collection PR 3903). We do not know who these contacts were, but Fornel and Leclair are strong candidates, given their appearance in the same bnf manuscript that contains Poulet’s account. Rocher notes how this “non-Jansenist, rigorist tradition” came to dominate the Quebec church between 1850 and 1950 in his lecture “History and Social Change,” 362–3. Gauvreau shows that toward the end of this period, progressive Catholics in Quebec denounced this puritanical, clerical attitude, especially in regard to sexuality and marriage issues, as “Jansenistic” (The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 75, 88–9). This is especially ironic when one considers how proud the clerical establishment between 1850 and 1950 was that Canada had been kept uncontaminated by Jansenism. In the Annales, she said that the Port-Royalists measured God’s mercy according to the narrowness of their own hearts (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 236). See Fino on these points, especially her discussion of Duplessis’s “Dissection spirituelle” in L’Hospitalité, 200–2, 212–14. It is likely that Duplessis had direct or indirect access during this period to the Gazette d’Amsterdam, known commonly as the Gazette de Hollande. She alluded to the fact that Poulet published an account of his Canadian stay in it (Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 407); see the edition of 4 April 1719. The appeal of the Abbeville Cordelières, which she cited in her 1720 letter to Hecquet, is quoted in the 11 November 1718 edition of the paper, after an item on the appeal of the Sorbonne. She seems to have been given access to a 1729 anti-Jansenist tract, Quatrième Mémoire sur les projets jansénistes, as indicated by a note on a copy held by the Sulpician library in Montreal, according to Julie Roy and Michel Brisebois, La Bibliothèque de “Ces Messieurs,” 50–1. She recounts these trials in “Continuation including the vexations undergone on account of the Constitution Unigenitus,” the sequel to the account of her persecutions because of the formulary, found in the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, ms. 338bis.

notes to pages 86–7

48 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 98. 49 Ibid., NF 3: 177–8. 50 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 161. See also his letter of 21 May 1729 where he announced the decision (157). 51 See Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis et l’imagerie du calvaire d’Arras,” for details and illustrations. 52 François-Xavier’s misogyny is typical of Jesuit anti-Jansenist polemics. For other examples see Carr, “Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction.” Three editions of the Nouvelles contain accounts of the 1736 Abbeville mission: 17 November (182–3); 24 November (185–6); 1 December (192). François-Xavier is singled out as one of the most aggressive anti-Jansenist preachers there. He is ridiculed for repeating the frequent Jesuit accusation that the Jansenists had women priests, “women who reciting the canon of the mass imagine themselves consecrating” (183). The Jansenists maintained that the priest should pronounce the canon of the mass audibly so that those attending it could hear the words of consecration, and that the laity, even women, should have access to a French translation of the Latin text of the mass. The possibility that twelve to fifteen thousand attendees could have been adequately confessed in two to three weeks is ridiculed (185). The account of an earlier 1736 mission at Saint-Germain-en-Laye says that he mocked Jansenist women as “women theologians” (29 September 1736, 154). 53 30 May 1736 letter of Hecquet to Jean Soanen, State Archive Utrecht, Fonds Port-Royal, 6614. 54 Hecquet, “Suite comprenant les vexations,” 267. 55 Ibid., 258. The 14 July 1736 edition of the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, in its account of the Amiens mission of the previous year, identified François-Xavier in the same way as a “native of Canada” (109). 56 I discuss this episode from a slightly different perspective in “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist.” 57 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 230. 58 Ibid., NF 3: 283. 59 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 98. 60 Some new characters become partners in the exchange: Geneviève sent Hecquet a brief note in 1720, and Hecquet’s oldest daughter Marie-Catherine, whom she nicknamed Manon

notes to pages 87–91

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76

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after Marie-André, seems to have written at least two letters to Duplessis. The two friends used an uncle-by-marriage of Hecquet, Jean-Baptiste Demus, to exchange gifts, and later one of Hecquet’s sons-in-law, Pierre Bourdeau, to exchange letters. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 54. Ibid., NF 3: 171. Ibid., NF 4: 53–4. Ibid., NF 4: 57. Ibid., NF 3: 288. Ibid., NF 2: 77. Ibid., NF 3: 303. Ibid., NF 3: 306. Ibid., NF 3: 228. Ibid., NF 4: 43–4. Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 361. The indication of his alcoholism is found in the periodic reports that the supervisor of the prisoners on La Désirade was required to make. In 1765, he reported, “Antoine Philippe Duhecquet has always behaved well. His only failing is drink, which happens to him seldom, however.” Philippe seems to have reformed, but too late (anf, Colonies, C/10d/2). On 31 August 1755, she bought a house on the Rue de l’Oursine along the Bièvre River, not far from her house on the Rue Mouffetard. Her husband was required by law to give his authorization for such a transaction by his wife. The notary duly collected it, not in Paris, but in a parloir of the asylum run by the Frères de la Charité in Charenton, where Jacques Hecquet was interned “by order of his Majesty” (anf, Minutier central, Étude CXV, 689, 31 August 1755). She had evidently obtained a lettre de cachet against him. The Charenton hospital, where the marquis de Sade would be lodged from 1801 to 1814, catered to well-off individuals of the bourgeoisie or lower nobility thought to be insane. anf, Minutier central, Étude LXXVII, 297, 7 July 1764. Melançon and Dubois, “Les Amitiés féminines,” 104, point to how this tension ultimately reinforces their friendship.

notes to pages 91–4

77 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 227. 78 Ibid., NF 3: 232. 79 1740 draft in NF 3: 278–83; 1751 fragment of draft in NF 3: 359–61; 1756 letter in Carr, “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist,” 101–5. 80 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 58. 81 See Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 7–8, for the mechanics of the survival of Homassel family documents held in the anf, T 77. 82 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 98. 83 See Piché, “‘Ma très chère mère du Canada,’” for examples and an analysis of how they reflect the French view of Canada. A handful of post-1755 replies received from these convents survive, but none of hers. 84 On these material questions see Harrison, Until Next Year, 65. 85 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 56. 86 Ibid., NF 3: 179. 87 Ibid., NF 5: 371. 88 Ibid., NF 4: 47. 89 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 261–2. 90 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 134. 91 Her letter to the duchess is quoted in a note to a 25 February 1753 letter of her brother (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 284–5). 92 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 117–18. 93 Ibid., NF 4: 242. 94 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1:7, draft of a 20 October 1751 letter to La Galissonière by Geneviève Duplessis beginning “Nous numes pas lhonneur de recevoir des marques de votre souvenir.” 95 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 361. 96 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 12, This undated draft by Geneviève beginning “Je ne doute pas quil ny est des simpathies” can be dated to fall 1753 and identified as addressed to Franquet. It mentions that the Recollet priest Simple Bocquet, who returned to Quebec from his missions in the Gaspé area at that time to become pastor at TroisRivières, had crossed in the Saint Lawrence the ship in which the addressee was returning to France. Franquet sailed for France in autumn 1753. Of course, this is a draft and might not represent the letter actually sent.

notes to pages 94–100

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Chapter Five 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 164. 2 Kalm’s report is analyzed at the end of this chapter. The Philadelphia hospital was modelled on voluntary hospitals that were founded in Britain earlier in the eighteenth century (Williams, America’s First Hospital, 1–15). Colonial Mexico was more densely populated and had a network of as many as 128 hospitals by the early seventeenth century (Risse, “Medicine in New Spain,” 41). 3 Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 223. A 7 October 1731 letter from the intendant and governor to the minister repeats that the bourgeois and well-off habitants use the hospital and are charged for services received (anom col c11a 54/fol. 91– 96v). Hospitals in the British thirteen colonies evolved alongside of, or out of, almshouses. French and Canadian almshouses, hôpitaux généraux, were founded as a supplement to the already existing hôtels-Dieu. 4 Rousseau gives statistics on admissions, staffing, medical practice, and financing at the hospital in his indispensable history of the institution, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 55–84. 5 For Duplessis’s account of this separation and the nuns’ rationale for requesting it, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 137, 184–5. 6 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 104–5. 7 Other women’s communities in Canada managed somewhat comparable portfolios. For comparison, revenues at the HôtelDieu of Montreal in the period between 1723 and the early 1750s usually ranged between 12,000 and 15,000 livres according to Ducharme, “Les Revenus des Hospitalières de Montréal,” 223. At the Hôpital-Général in Quebec, revenues were somewhat higher: 20,026 livres in 1723 and 38,669 livres in 1752, although in the 1730s, the average income only ranged between 14,000 and 25,000 livres. Like the Hôtel-Dieu, it consistently showed a deficit between 1723 and 1752, according to D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 231–2. Moreover, all the houses had similar revenue sources, even if the percentage that each source contributed to the total varied from community to community: a royal subsidy; rentes from

298

notes to pages 102–4

8

9

10 11

12

13

investments in France; produce and the sale of produce from land holdings in the colony; sale of goods made by the nuns; gifts and payments from patients or boarders. Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the hospital’s finances (45–142). No other Canadian community has received such scrutiny, although D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, does provide some statistics. Noel, Along a River, points to several exceptions. The three single Desaunier sisters ran what she calls a “notorious smuggling ring” operating between Montreal and Albany (99–102). Noel notes that while the single Louise de Ramezay managed a series of enterprises, other women of her aristocratic clan were also involved in business (160). See the first five chapters of Noel’s Along a River for an overview of the economic position of women. Other articles and books I have found useful include Plamondon, “Une Femme d’affaires: MarieAnne Barbel”; Young, “‘… sauf les périls et fortunes de la mer’”; her Kin, Commerce, Community; and Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, veuve et seigneuresse. See Parent, “Entre le Juridique et le social,” 38–40, on the separation des biens. A notable exception of a widow directing seigneurial property is the mother of Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay of the HôpitalGénéral. Marie-Catherine Peuvret (1667–1739) became seigneuresse of Beauport just outside of Quebec in 1715 at age forty-eight upon the death of her husband. She did have a son who could have assumed management of the estate in 1715, and other sons who attained legal majority later, but they seemed not to have been interested in or capable of the duties, and she directed it until her death (Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, 120–3). See Grenier, “Réflexion sur le pouvoir féminin, Marie-Catherine Peuvret,” 306–7, and his detailed study of twenty-nine widows in his Seigneurs campagnards, 185–93; only two of the twenty-nine managed the seigneurie when a son of legal age was available. Dinet-Lecomte, Les Sœurs hospitalières en France, 297. Her book is a comprehensive examination of all aspects of nuns’ engagement with hospital work in the Ancien Régime based on archival work with many orders.

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14 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 3, 31 September 1749 draft of letter by G. Duplessis to La Galissonière. 15 Noel gives multiple examples of how the two Hôpital-Général nuns worked their noble connections to promote their house (185–95). See also O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 368–70, and the dcb articles on them. 16 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 5, “État de la situation de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec et de l‘administration du bien des pauvres depuis le 10e juillet 1724 jusqu’au 15e de mars 1747.” 17 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 10, “Observations sur ce que Monseigneur a souhaité qu’on éclaircit, et sur les causes de dépense extraordinaire de cet hôpital dans l’année 1747.” 18 Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, 81 CD SS. Hosp. H.-D, 1: 4. Undated memo in Marie-André’s hand to Pontbriand that seems related to the 1747 reports cited in the previous two notes. 19 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 85. 20 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” fol. 15–17. Besides her 21 October 1720 letter to Hecquet (NF 2: 76), Duplessis also takes up this case in the Annales, 403–4, which in part simply incorporates text from the chapter minutes. 21 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. 22 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 90. 23 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 404. 24 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 5, “État de la situation de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec et de l‘administration du bien des pauvres depuis le 10e juillet 1724 jusqu’au 15e de mars 1747.” 25 Dubé gives the best blow-by-blow overview of the affair in his biography, Claude-Thomas Dupuy, 281–6. D’Allaire discusses it briefly in her study of the D’Auteuil family, Montée et déclin d’une famille noble, 238–9. Also see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 398n.  26 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 1, 9 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 27 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 2, 11 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 28 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 1, 9 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 29 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 7, 21 June 1727 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Ruette d’Auteuil.

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notes to pages 106–10

30 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 8, 1 July 1727 letter of Ruette d’Auteuil to M.-A. Duplessis. 31 hdq-f1-h4, 4/11: 2, “Récit de ce qui s’est passé entre Mr Dupuy intendant et les religieuses de l’Hôtel-Dieu.” This four-page account is the sort of narrative that she would have incorporated into a second installment of the Annales. 32 Dinet-Lecomte in Les Sœurs hospitalières identifies several methods of hospital organization, with lay administrators being both the most widespread and giving the nuns the least independence, while the arrangement at the Hôtel-Dieu, where the nuns were in complete control of day-to-day operations, was rarer (284–308). 33 hdq- f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” 5 September 1732 minutes. 34 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 104. 35 2,000 livres of Marie-Geneviève Lefebvre’s 1732 dowry were used toward paying off the wall’s construction (D’Allaire, Les Dots des religieuses, 155n31). 36 14 October 1733 letter of Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, anom col c11a 59/fol. 161–162v. 37 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 112–14. 38 Ibid., 114–17. 39 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 393–6. 40 1727, a two-week visit by the mother superior and her assistant (letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil, 11 June 1727, hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 2); 1729, a stay of six weeks on the island (Actes capitulaires, note for the chapter meeting of 21 May 1729, written by MarieAndré, hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1). 41 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” chapter meeting of 25 July 1733. 42 hdq-f5-d44/13: 7, 4 July 1736 legal brief on behalf of de la Lande de Gayon accusing the nuns of “using the veil of the poor to despoil her and her children of their property” (“Répliques pour Dame Marie-Thérèse de La Lande Gayon”). 43 See Rousseau’s summary of her prospectus, L’Œuvre de chère, 117. He provides a detailed overview of the property (117–30). 44 Blais, “La ‘seigneurie des pauvres,’” 180. His thesis adds details not found in Rousseau’s L’Œuvre de chère and comparisons with other religious communities. 45 These improvements are discussed in Blais, “La ‘seigneurie des pauvres,’” 114–20.

notes to pages 111–15

301

46 Ibid., 182–4. Barthe’s “Du manoir au parloir,” 156–77, does not isolate the period of the Duplessis administration to permit comparisons with the Ursulines’ management or rural holdings. 47 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 127, cites documents of the nuns in 1747 and 1750 that make this argument. 48 See Rousseau’s overall assessment of Saint-Augustin’s contribution, L’Œuvre de chère, 127, and Blais’s conclusion. 49 Recueil tiré des Constitutions, 250–6. 50 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 6, June 1727 letter of Duplessis to Thomas-Jacques Taschereau. 51 hdq-f1-a6, 1/: 14, 1748, “Éclaircissements sur les usages de l’hôpital.” 52 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 14, draft of 1748 letter by G. Duplessis to Bigot. 53 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 15, 1748 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 54 The letters in the hdq date from 1747 and 1749. 55 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 290–1, 370–1. 56 Ibid., NF 5: 312. 57 Ibid., NF 3: 104–5. 58 Ibid., NF 3: 171. 59 Ibid., NF 3: 181. 60 Casgrain says that the relics were finally obtained through Charlevoix’s auspices (Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 363). 61 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 229–30. 62 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 371. 63 Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis et l’imagerie du calvaire,” 11–37. 64 Ibid., 31. 65 hdq-f1-b1, 8/1, “Observations de S. M.-André Duplessis dite SainteHélène sur plusieurs articles de nos règlements, 3.” 66 Another brother, Paul-Antoine-François Lanoullier des Granges, arrived in Canada in 1730 and became a royal notary in Quebec in 1748. In 1750, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu appointed him judge of their seigneurie of Saint-Bernard near Charlesbourg (GeorgesPierre Roy, La Famille Lanoullier, 24), an appointment that probably owed something to the Duplessis sisters. 67 31 October 1735 letter of Jean-Eustache Lanoullier to the minister, anom col c11a 64/fol. 263–6.

302

notes to pages 115–23

68 25 November 1750 request of Geneviève to J.-E. Lanoullier, banq, TL5, D2749. 69 On Nicolas see Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux de la marine.” Around 1734, Marie-André made inquiries on Nicolas’s behalf to Hecquet about importing fabric to Canada, probably one of his attempts to supplement his income. 70 “The only relative we have in this country is a brother who will apparently be married this winter” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 96). 71 The contract had been signed the previous day in the presence of Hocquart, who had supported her father in his difficulties. The bride came to the marriage with a dower of 6,000 livres, but how much of this was cash is uncertain since she only received 3,000 livres when her father’s modest estate was settled in 1744. For details, see Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, 68–9; banq-q, Greffe de Bardolet, 31 October 1744. On Guillimin, see Pierre-Georges Roy, La Famille Guillimin. 72 He gives an account of his military career in a complaint addressed to the minister dated 10 November 1748. He was distressed to see more junior officers advanced ahead of him in the last list of promotions (anom col e 160, “Duplessis de Morampont, prévôt des maréchaux de France au Canada, sa veuve Geneviève Guillemin, réfugiée aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon [1748/1766]”). Duplessis’s role is not mentioned in Dunning Idle’s detailed history of the Saint Joseph post, The Post of the St Joseph River. 73 In 1743, Marie-André professed to be delighted with her niece, who shared her name and reportedly shared her looks: “My young brother … has a small daughter that one says looks like us and whose mother and father are crazy about; she’s so sharp and good that she is a little jewel” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 292). 74 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 246–7. 75 Ibid., 265–6. 76 Ibid., 277. 77 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 443. The French edition, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada en 1749, has useful notes, but does not contain all of Kalm’s text available in English. 78 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 446.

notes to pages 123–6

303

79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

304

Ibid., 2: 445. Ibid., 2: 445. Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 135. Miquelon, New France, 223. In his Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 560–85, Casgrain lists all the choir and converse nuns by date of entrance, dates of profession and death, and years as nuns. Pelletier adds the profession of the fathers (Le Clergé en Nouvelle France, 247–58). In addition to his thorough analysis of multiple aspects of recruitment, Rousseau includes a chart that gives the total number of members including postulants by decade beginning with 1648 (La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 129–40). D’Allaire’s study of dowries in all the Canadian communities, Les Dots, is indispensable. Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 138. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 567–8. 30 October 1744 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 82/fol. 326–327v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 302. 8 October 1747 letter of Pontbriand to Maurepas, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. 8 October 1747 letter of Hocquart and La Galissonière to the minister, anom col c11a 107/fol. 56–8. According to the Recette et emploi des dots des religieuses professes, hdq-f1-a5, 6/1: 3, one of the four was received gratis; two paid 1,500 livres and the fourth paid 3,000 livres. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 305. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 569. D’Allaire discusses this episode, although not in these terms (Les Dots, 24). Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 446. Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 27. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 90, 96–7. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 356. See Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 93–6, on this per diem. 1733: anom col c11a 60/fol. 359–361v; 1737: col c11a 67/fol. 37–38v; 1742: col c11a 77/fol. 11–13v; 1749: col c11a 93/fol. 309–310v.

notes to pages 126–9

100 27 October 1749 letter of Bigot to the minister, anom col c11a 93/ fol. 309–310v. 101 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 445.

Chapter Six 1 Gallat-Morin and Pinson, La Vie musicale en Nouvelle France, 381–2. 2 Noel, Along a River, 295–6n. 3 Carr, “From the Cloister to the World,” 18. 4 Rowan, “Between Salon and Convent.” 5 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 187. 6 Carr, “Une ‘histoire véritable’ littéraire à l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.” 7 Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle (1718): Canada’s First Music Theory Manual.” 8 M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55. 9 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181. 10 M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55. 11 See Julie Roy, “Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre.” 12 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 185. 13 Biblia sacra: Vulgatæ editionis Sixti V. & Clementis VIII. Pont. Max. auctoritate recognita; La Sainte Bible traduite en françois, le latin de la Vulgate à côté. This last volume published in 1702 is now housed in the Jesuit library in Montreal. 14 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 184. 15 Ibid., 183–5. 16 Ibid., 185. 17 See Andrès, Histoires littéraires des Canadiens, 175–82, for an analysis of this short text and the controversies it provoked. 18 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 358. These letters are lost, but in a letter of 2 March 1709 to her sister Louise, the princess mentioned Charles Le Moyne (Charlotte-Élisabeth d’Orléans, Correspondance, 2: 16–18). 19 Van der Cruysse, Madame Palatine, 483–4. 20 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 369. 21 For examples of these poems, most of which are found in a manuscript of the Hôtel-Dieu, see Lemay, Échos héroï-comiques.

notes to pages 129–40

305

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43

306

Arnauld d’Andilly, “Sur la conformité,” 1: 250–6. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 4. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 6. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, p. 74. In a note in his edition of her brother’s letters, J.-Edmond Roy lists several other short devotional texts by Duplessis that I have not been able to identify in the Hôtel-Dieu archives: “Méditations sur l’eucharistie et la communion, sur la manière d’offrir à Dieu toutes les actions de sa journée” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 192). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. Cited in Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 433. hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 1. hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 2. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 21. Dedication letter, hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 1. Guyart, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 2: 415–21. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 379. “I have hardly been able to glance for several moments at your meditations on the mysteries of the blessed childhood of our Lord which were given to me several days ago. If I can have them published, you will indeed receive copies” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 192). M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 370. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 177. See Pouliot’s article that situates Duplessis’s account among other contemporary ones, “Une primeur québécoise: la fête et l’office de la Sainte Famille” (hdq-a-5, c 8). M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 220. Casgrain prints her account of the statue in Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 363–70. “Relation au sujet de notre incendie,” hdq-a5, 3/1: 15t, 16t; cover letters, hdq-f1-a6, 1/4: 5 and hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 56. “I would go beyond the limits of a letter if I said here all the good that she did; but since I hope in time to have her life written, one will see there in more detail her wonderful and striking deeds” (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 428). The 1666

notes to pages 140–7

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

Recueil tiré des Constitutions charges the secretary with composing circular letters for deceased nuns (368–9), even though the superior signed them. It is very likely that Duplessis wrote the letter for her beloved mentor at the request of Geneviève Dupuy and thus announced her plan to compose a biography. Fournier, “La Bibliothèque des Augustines,” item 297. Rousseau gives the text of the seventeenth-century letters in La Passion de servir. For analysis of how shifts in the spirituality of the Augustines from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth are reflected in the death notices, see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 337–53. Rapley, “‘Un Trésor enfoui,’” 157. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 102. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 103. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 104. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 105. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 295–6.

Chapter Seven 1 Marie Morin’s chronicle of the Montreal Hôtel-Dieu received a critical edition by Ghislaine Legendre in 1979, Histoire simple et véritable. Legendre also edited the much shorter continuations of Morin’s annals by Marie-Anne-Véronique Cuillerier, “Relation de sœur Cuillerier,” and by Catherine Porlier, “Relation de la sœur Porlier.” Substantial extracts of the Quebec Ursuline annals are quoted in Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, just as extracts of the annals of the Quebec Hôpital-Général are found in O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général. Likewise, those of the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières are quoted in Les Ursulines des Trois-Rivières. No such annals seem to exist for the fire-plagued Montreal Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Marguerite Bourgeoys. 2 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliv. Jamet discusses approximate dates of composition (xliii). For studies of the annals, besides Jamet’s introduction, see Gies, “Mère Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène.” 3 hdq-f1-a5, 1/1: 1. 4 Despite the title given by the nuns, Jamet published the book under

notes to pages 147–53

307

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

308

the title Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec 1636–1716. The book is not referred to as “annales” in the text itself, where “histoire” is used in the dedication to the Virgin. However, Duplessis uses the term “annales” in her 3 November 1753 letter to Hecquet announcing the book’s publication (“Lettres,” NF 4: 48), and it was used in her death notice. For example, the Coustumier et Directoire pour les sœurs religieuses de la Visitation goes into great detail on how “the one who will have charge of documents” should safeguard the convent’s records (159–63). For an overview of convent writing in French, see Carr, “From the Cloister to the World.” Cited in F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xviii. The entire letter held in the Hôtel-Dieu archives does not seem to have been published (hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of J.-B. Chardon to M.-A. Duplessis, tentatively dated to 11 April 1732). This quotation is printed in Roy’s edition and Jamet cites other extracts in his edition of the Annales. Ursule-Marie Chéron confirmed this statement in the circular letter she wrote after Duplessis’s death: “Our reverend mother J. F. de Saint Ignace, first Canadian mother superior, judged that she was capable of doing the annals of your house from its foundation. She proposed it to her, and she did it out of obedience and with so much success that this work was the admiration of everyone with taste who agreed that her facility in writing and her deep judgment made her capable of writing the history of the establishment of Canada.” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv.) M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliii. Ibid., 85, 236, 280, 404–8. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 401–3. François Rousseau notes how the revenues from the rentes, chiefly on the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, diminished by half between 1713 and 1720 (La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 111). M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xxxii–xxxiii. hdq-f1-b1, 2/1, Règlements des Religieuses hospitalières de la miséricorde de Jésus … établi à Dieppe, 159.

notes to pages 155–7

15 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, unpaginated pages in the dedication to the mother of God. 16 Ibid., unpaginated pages. 17 hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of J.-B. Chardon to M.-A. Duplessis, tentatively dated to 11 April 1732. 18 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 75, 374, 389. 19 According to the Règlements of the Hôtel-Dieu (hdq-f1-b1, 2/1), the secretary should record the following in the annals: “The first book will be that of the annals of the monastery in which will be told the beginnings and progress of the house; the names of its founders, of the first ecclesiastical superior, of the first mother superior and of the other nuns who accompanied her in its founding, of other persons who gave the most aid; the memorable events that happened there; the diverse monasteries from which they came; the deceased nuns of the house or its foundations who have excelled in virtue and sanctity of life, indicating the day, month and year of their death; the place of their burial and other items worthy of passing to posterity” (169–70). 20 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, unpaginated letter. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Ibid., 424. 23 Ibid., 424. 24 Daneau de Muy (1694–1759) became annalist around 1755, according to Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 322. Her detailed account of the war is quoted extensively in volume 2. Her perspective is as providentialist as Duplessis’s; Canada’s woes are a warning and punishment for the sins of its people. This compensates perhaps for the fact that she cannot always link military events to the affairs of her house. 25 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 246. 26 Ibid., 361. 27 Parkman, France and England in North America, 2: 456–7; M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 366–8. 28 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xl–xliii. 29 Ibid., 8. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 82.

notes to pages 158–62

309

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

310

Ibid., 104. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 361. Ibid., xli. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 421. Greer, “Colonial Saints,” 336–8. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 66–9, 236–42. Ibid., 210–20. Ibid., 132, 135. Ibid., x–xix, 8. Ibid., 10, 298. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 103–7. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166–7. For the Hôpital-Général’s view of the affair see O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 103–76, which includes extracts of their annals and other documents. For a more impartial view, see D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général, 23–30, and Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 296. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 292–3. Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres, 111–12. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 292. Cited by D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général, 25. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 297. Ibid., 378. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 44, for a note Jamet gives (hdq manuscript, p. 23): “[Isaac

notes to pages 162–8

66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

Jogues] found a death that one could consider that of a martyr.” Ibid., 142, 166. Ibid., 142, p. 78 of the hdq manuscript. Ibid., 166n3. Ibid., 166, p. 90 of the hdq manuscript. Ibid., 218, p. 118 of the hdq manuscript. Médiathèque Montauban, ms. 18. Although Jamet does not mention the Montauban manuscript in his edition, it might be the source of his variants. This manuscript’s paper is thinner than that of the Quebec one. In one of the cases where Jamet gives the original text, this text can be deciphered. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 55. “They removed our confessor, gave us a young Canadian one to whom several cannot adapt; these perturbations cause unfortunate biases that separate people” (ibid., NF 3: 49). Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 165–6. hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of Louis Gérard to M.-A. Duplessis. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xix. See also an undated draft of this letter, hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 25, from Geneviève to an unknown correspondent, beginning “Monsieur le danger que vous avez courut qui a conduit monsieur votre pere.” J.-Edmond Roy dates the letter to 8 November 1751. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliv. O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 297. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 7. M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 56. Ibid., 414–15. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 374; M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 492. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 238–9. This episode is discussed in Suire’s Sainteté et lumières, 367, and in Moureau, La Plume et le plomb, 246. Pearson discusses it from the Canadian angle in “Becoming Holy,” 323. 10 August 1751 letter of Abbé Geinoz to Malesherbes, lac, microfilm reel C-9193, vol. 22137. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218n.

notes to pages 168–73

311

89 Ibid., 224; Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada, 141–2. 90 Moureau, La Plume et le plomb, 246–7. According to Moureau (251–2), the censor, Alexandre-François Cotterel, was often charged with dealing with such difficult cases. 91 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 49. 92 M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 279. 93 Ibid., 267, 279. La Tour made most of these changes directly on the Montauban manuscript, crossing out passages and writing new connecting text between the lines. Such changes can be found on practically every page of the manuscript. 94 On the back of the title page an early archivist has written “Writing of Mother Saint-Helen” (“Écriture de Mère Ste-Hélène”). The copy seems to have been the one reserved for the mother superior since another notation on the title page itself specifies “superior’s room” (“ch. Supre 1811”). 95 M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 279. 96 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218. 97 Journal des savants, August 1752, 574. 98 Meusnier de Querlon, Annonces, affiches, et avis divers, known as the Affiches de province, 2 April 1755, 53–4. 99 Pierre Rousseau, Correspondance littéraire, 364–5. The book was also announced as selling for two livres ten sous, but without a review, in the 7 April 1755 issue of the Parisian Annonces, affiches et avis divers, known as the Affiches de Paris to distinguish it from Meusnier de Querlon’s paper with the same title (214). 100 Alléon-Dulac, Mélanges, 2: 436. 101 Ursule-Marie Chéron in her 1760 circular letter, in F.-X. Duplesssis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. 102 Berthiaume, “1744: François-Xavier de Charlevoix.”

Chapter Eight 1 2 3 4 5 6

312

M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 295–6. Ibid., NF 3: 357. Ibid., NF 3: 175. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 45. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182.

notes to pages 173–80

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 51. Ibid., NF 6: 42. Ibid., NF 3: 285–6. Ibid., NF 5: 363–4. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 282. Ibid., NF 4: 51. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, lxxxiii. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 367. 28 September 1742 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 78/fol. 423–428v. 20 October 1743 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 80/fol. 349–353v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 292. Ibid., NF 3: 255–6. 1747 letter of Pontbriand to Maurepas, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. 25 September 1748 letter of Bigot and La Galissonière, anom col c11a 91/fol. 32–35v; 4 October 1748 letter of same, anom col c11a 107/fol. 51–2. 16 October 1750 letter of Bigot and Jonquière to the minister, anom col c11a 95/fol. 70–72v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 256. “1727 Rapport ou feuille au roi,” anom c11a 106/fol. 120–36. 28 September 1742 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 78/fol. 423–428v; 20 October 1743 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom c11a 80/fol. 349–353v. 1747 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 15, 20 January 1748 letter of Duplessis to Pontbriand. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 25, 1751 draft of letter by Geneviève to unknown correspondent, “Le danger que vous avez couru qui a conduit monsieur votre père.” hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 16, 20 October 1750 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to d’Aiguillon. hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 7, draft of 1752 memorandum by Geneviève beginning “Nous nous sommes tenues dans le silence depuis plusieurs années.”

notes to pages 180–5

313

30 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 5, 28 October 1752 letter of Louis Franquet to one of the Duplessis sisters. 31 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 10, letter of Antoine-Louis Rouillé of 8 June 1753 to the mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Poussou, “Les Débats entre historiens,” 32–3. 35 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 7, 20 October 1751 letter of Geneviève to La Galissonière, beginning “Nous numes pas lhonneur de recevoir des marques de votre souvenir.” In fact, favouring the HôpitalGénéral was a longstanding policy of the colony’s administrators. Hocquart wrote the minister in October 1744 of his intention to favour that institution (col c11a 81/fol. 400–401v). The nuns of the Hôpital-Général believed that Pontbriand favoured them over the other two Quebec communities, as Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny noted in her relation on the siege of the city: “Monseigneur [Pontbriand] … since his arrival in this country has always protected, I could even say, preferred us” (Hébert, Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 20). 36 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 11, 1752 draft of letter by Geneviève to La Galissonière beginning “quelque precotion qune religieuse doive prendre.” She adds that though they are reimbursed at a higher rate, “[t]hey have sometimes in a month more than this hospital has in a year … I think that the policy of several persons is to discredit this house to raise up and sustain the other.” 37 Noel, Along a River, 194–5. 38 See Vaudreuil to the minister, 22 October 1756, col c11a 101/ fol. 127–8, and Allard, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 42. Faillon cites Vaudreuil’s letter including these remarks about Pontbriand: “This prelate is indefatigable … He has made a trip to Montreal just to hurry the workers hired to build the two wards of the hospital” (Vie de Mlle Mance, 2: 256). 39 Porlier, “Relation de la sœur Porlier,” 171–2. 40 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 150–3. 41 Ibid., 1: 158–60. 42 La Rue, “Lettres,” 327, 367, 387. 43 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 6, draft of 1751 letter by Geneviève to unknown correspondent (perhaps Franquet) beginning “Monsieur, le respect

314

notes to pages 186–8

et la confiance combattent un peu le penchant.” 44 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 11, 1752 draft of letter of Geneviève Duplessis to La Galissonière beginning “quelque precotion qune religieuse doive prendre.” 45 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 7, “Notes des articles sur lesquels on peut se rendre service à cet hôtel-Dieu de Québec.” 46 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 3A, draft of 16 July 1752 letter by Geneviève, probably destined for Franquet. 47 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 276–7. 48 On La Porte, see Frégault, François Bigot, 1: 289–93. 49 hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 23, 1752 letter of Geneviève Duplessis to Arnaud de Laporte beginning “Jay assez de matiere pr avoir l’honneur de vous entretenir.” 50 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 16, draft of a 29 June 1755 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to welcome Vaudreuil. Vaudreuil had arrived in Quebec on 23 June, and the letter is written on his saint’s day. 51 hdq-f1-g18/14: 43, 12 November 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 52 Two memos in 1751 and 1752 lay out in detail her charges of neglect and active hostility by Bigot (hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 2, and hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 1A). 53 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 20, 17 April 1756 letter from Franquet to M.-A. Duplessis. 54 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 281. 55 The affair left traces in the court records. See banq TL1,S11,SS1,D99,P896, 21 March 1752, default to Maurice Jean Boulanger; see hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 17. 56 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 18B, “Exposition qui peut apprendre la vérité à ceux qui pensent qu’on fait un grand tort aux pauvres.” 57 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161–3. 58 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52. 59 I cite the 1755 first edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage with my own translations. Aroles’s extensive archival work in Marie-Angélique: Haut Mississippi, 1712 – Paris, 1775 documented the wild girl’s life from her discovery in 1731 to her death and set forth an account of her prior life as a member of the Fox nation in Wisconsin who became a French slave. It is fundamental to a study of the case, but only available in a few

notes to pages 188–91

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60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

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French libraries. Because it lacks academic annotation, scholars have not fully exploited its richness. For more details, see two academic studies which situate the case in Enlightenment debates and complement each other: Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster, and Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children. Benzaquén does not take into account Aroles’s findings. Douthwaite’s book is chiefly useful as an examination of the eighteenth-century writers who discuss the case. She seems not to have consulted Duplessis’s letters published in Nova Francia around 1930 that confirm Hecquet’s authorship, thus missing the opportunity to explore how Hecquet’s Jansenist allegiance shaped the Histoire, both in its genesis and in its point of view (41–4). A subsequent update, “La jeune Fille sauvage mise à jour,” which brings into play European attitudes toward North American Indigenous peoples, also is a lost opportunity because it does not take into account Hecquet’s longstanding interest in them. On the other hand, Scholl, “La Correspondance de MarieAndrée Regnard Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène et la réception de son image des Esquimaux,” does consider them. A graphic biography by Gaëlle Hersent, loosely based on Aroles’s reconstruction, was published in 2015: Sauvage, biographie de Marie-Angélique. It presents Hecquet and La Condamine collaborating closely in producing the Histoire, which is unlikely given his anti-Jansenism (123–5, 144–8). The classic account is by the historian of Jansenism Gazier, Une Suite à l’histoire de Port-Royal. Hecquet, Histoire, 60–1. Ibid., 63–4. Hecquet compares the Indigenous to the first Christians: “I therefore in imagination saw your poor savages only paying attention to how they could acquire the favour of their new intercessors before God without being distracted by the display of their own finery or by considering that of others in the places where they found themselves” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 280). Ibid., NF 4: 52. Ibid., NF 3: 44. For an overview of relations between the French and Indigenous

notes to pages 193–7

68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79

peoples, see the chapter of Moogk, “Europeans and ‘the Wild People’: French-Amerindian Relations,” in La Nouvelle France, 17–50, especially 47–50 on Lahontan. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52–3. Ibid., NF 2: 39, 42. Ibid., NF 2: 40. “All the fruit that the missionaries have in some areas is to baptize many infants who die quite young and to give these barbarians an idea of our religion by the purity of their lives. The missionaries usually sanctify themselves greatly there, and we have known several who, when coming back from their work completely broken, were so united to God that hearing and seeing them, we were entirely edified and burned with the desire for virtue” (25 October 1740 letter of M.-A. Duplessis, NF 3: 285). Goddard notes that some Jesuits who sought to work in the foreign missions – he cites Louis Lallemant in the early seventeenth century – sought posts in Canada in the belief that the crosses and travails they expected to experience there would purify them, no matter their success in winning Native souls (“Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought,” 189). See Arnauld’s 1691 La Morale pratique des Jésuites. Canada is discussed, including a reference to Ragueneau’s biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, Œuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld, 34: 714. Lahontan, Œuvres complètes, 1: 653–68. Ibid., 1: 655. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 43. Catherine Maire explicates this scenario in a number of her works. One of the most explicit on the conversion of the pagans is “La Date du ‘retour’ d’Israël,” 218. The basis for this exegesis is found in Le Sesne d’Étemare’s transcription of lectures by Duguet in Explication de quelques prophéties touchant la conversion future des Juifs, 4; for the failures of the missions to the pagans, see 23. Carr, “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist,” 105. Hecquet, Histoire, 20. Racine, “L’Epître II sur l’homme,” in Poésies nouvelles, 2: 28–33, where he speaks of “Le penchant où conduit la coupable nature / The propensity to which guilty nature leads.”

notes to pages 197–9

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80 81 82 83

84 85 86

87

Hecquet, Histoire, 40. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 37. Hecquet, Histoire, 66. “The only role I had in this production is to have made some changes in the manuscript, whose original I still possess, and to have cut some facts which were only founded on hearsay and without any plausibility, and to have added, especially at the end, some conjectures to those of Madame H. on the way that the young savage and her companion might have been transported to France” (“Lettre à M. de Boissy,” Année littéraire, 20 January 1755, 215–16). “I recognized myself in the place where you cite me; I only told you the truth” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 57). Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5: 949. On this point see Bruna, “Les Esquimaux des Lumières.” She presents a detailed analysis of Enlightenment attitudes toward the Inuit. Wilson gives a blow-by-blow account of the manoeuvrings in Diderot, 150–72.

Chapter Nine 1 Casgrain lists four sets of documents that were lost: the deeds to the Saint Augustin holdings; contracts for property holdings in the city and records of donations; various contracts of the hospital; and the chapter proceedings dealing with the hospital (Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 385). 2 For an account of the fire, see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 156–63. 3 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 412–15. 4 For this episode, see Les Ursulines de Trois-Rivières, 1: 269–87, and Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 182–98. 5 Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 189–90. 6 Séguin, Atlas historique du Québec, 15. 7 Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 198. 8 See Rapley’s 1994 article “The Shaping of Things to Come.” She gives an excellent overview of the financial difficulties of female

318

notes to pages 199–204

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

communities, which were largely caused by royal policies, and how royal authorities acted to suppress the monasteries. See 435–6 on patronage. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 290. Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 202. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, undated draft of Geneviève Duplessis to unnamed correspondent, “Ma soeur avait l’honneur de vous écrire quelquefois.” Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 397–8. hdq-f1-g2/1: 42, “Mémoire de Monseigneur l’évêque de Québec à l’occasion de l’incendie de l’Hôtel-Dieu.” hdq-f1-g1/1: 45, “Projet pour l’administration des biens des pauvres pendant le temps que les dames hospitalières demeurent chez les révérends pères jésuites.” See Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161–2, on this episode. hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 17, 10 August 1755 letter of G. Duplessis to Victor Varin de La Marre. hdq-f1-g2/1: 46, “Réplique au projet de Monseigneur.” Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 162, 331. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, 12 August 1755 draft of Geneviève Duplessis to the duchesse d’Aiguillon. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, draft of letter of Geneviève to unnamed correspondent that begins, “Vous recevrez par M votre secrétaire une lettre.” hdq-f1-a5, 3/1: 15, “Relation de la mère Ste-Hélène au sujet de notre incendie 1755.” hdq-f1-a6, 1: 45, “Brouillons de lettres à diverses personnes après 1755 demandant secours.” Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 157. The minutes of the 23 November 1755 chapter meeting contain the bishop’s memorandum followed by the nuns’ discussion and response (hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1). Rousseau discusses the choices in La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 157–61. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 113. See hdq, correspondence of Duplessis with Pontbriand, for these letters. 11 November 1756 letter of Pontbriand, anom col c11a 107/fol. 36–7.

notes to pages 204–10

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27 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161. 28 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 302. On de Rupelmonde, see Villermont, La Société au XVIIIe siècle, 289–331. 29 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 302n1. 30 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 111. 31 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. 32 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 111. 33 Dumont de Montigny, The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 77. According to the Registre journalier des malades, Montigny began his stay at the hospital as a patient on 22 September 1717. After his recovery, he stayed on as a military boarder, listed as a “canonnier” or gunner. He left the hospital on 13 November 1718. hdq-f5-g1, 2/1:3. 34 hdq-t30, Vaudreuil, 2, 29 March 1756 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. 35 hdq-f1-g9/95: 1, 5 May 1756 letter of Esther Wheelwright to M.-A. Duplessis. Neither Julie Wheelwright, Esther: The Remarkable True Story, nor Little, The Many Captivities of Esther, discusses this letter. See Little, 79–125, for Wheelwright’s life between her arrival in Quebec in 1708 and her entry into the Ursulines in 1713. 36 Esther’s letter to her mother is cited by Little, The Many Captivities of Esther, 183–6. 37 hdq-f1-g2/1: 74, 9 May 1757 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 38 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 283–4. 39 Ibid., 297n1, 18 February 1757 letter of Villars. 40 Ibid., 301–3. 41 7 November 1749 letter to the minister in his personnel file, lac mg1-e, Microfilm reel no. F-614, F-828. 42 7 October 1750 letter to the minister in his personnel file, lac mg1-e, Microfilm reel no. F-614, F-828. 43 4 November 1756 letter of Vaudreuil, anom col c11a 101/fol. 143–143v. 44 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 280–1. 45 Ibid., 284. 46 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52. 47 Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, 242. 48 13 July 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P61. 49 19 July 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P62.

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notes to pages 210–15

50 12 November 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D108,P19. 51 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 288–9. 52 Ibid., 292. 53 Ibid., 297, 299–300. 54 hdq-f1-k1, 3/5: 6, 12 March 1757 letter of l’abbé de l’Isle-Dieu to M.-A. Duplessis and 18 February 1757 letter of François Sorbier de Villars to Duplessis. 55 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 13, 11 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 56 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 9, 25 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 57 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 13, 11 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 58 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 289. 59 Wildenstein, Rapports d’experts, 60–3; anf, Y 1901. Charles-Denis’s address is listed as “la rue des Grès, l’hostel Chaumont.” This street was located near the present Place du Panthéon. 60 The portrait had been painted from a profile of Pontbriand, and the experts opined that it was as faithful as could be expected when turning a profile into a full-face portrait. The portrait must have included the bishop’s coat of arms, reproduced with slight variation, according to the experts, from a silver seal that they were shown (Wildenstein, Rapports d’experts, 59–61). Jouffroy was at the beginning of his career (Geyssant, “Pierre Jouffroy,” 62–73). The Musée de la civilization in Quebec holds a portrait of the bishop, attributed to an Ursuline said to have painted it for the cathedral chapter in 1749 (accession number 1991.3874). It has the awkwardness of a portrait done from a profile view. 61 31 December 1763 letter of Charles-Denis Duplessis to Antoine de Sartine, bnf, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Archives de la Bastille, Prisonniers vol. 12146; lac, Reel F-1542. 62 hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 22, 19 April 1757 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. 63 hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 29, 8 July 1757 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. 64 hdq-f1-g2/1: 96, 8 September 1758 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 65 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 113. 66 Ibid., NF 4: 113–14.

notes to pages 215–19

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67 hdq-f1-g18/14: 39, 27 August 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 68 According to Stanley, perhaps thirty were killed and two hundred taken captive (New France: The Last Phase, 161, 289n24). Frégault points out that “the massacre at Fort William Henry was one more atrocity – a spectacular one – in a long series of atrocities. Bands of Indians, sometimes led by Canadian officers, had spread terror and destruction along the British frontiers” (Canada: The War of the Conquest, 154). Crouch highlights that the junior French officers were particularly aghast at William Henry and stresses that their allies felt betrayed when Montcalm deprived them of the reward they expected (Nobility Lost, 85–9). 69 Montcalm, Journal, 7: 292–3. 70 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 114. Bougainville expressed his horror in 1757 at several episodes of eating British prisoners in his journal (Écrits sur le Canada: 12 June, 206; 24 July, 228; 15 August at Montreal, 256). 71 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 114. 72 Ibid., NF 4: 115–16. 73 Frégault debunks this inflation (Canada: The War of the Conquest, 221–2). 74 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 115–16. 75 Bougainville, Écrits sur le Canada, 314. 76 Warwick, “Littérature de la Nouvelle France,” 261. 77 “L’Anglais fait des prisonniers / Nous en faisons à milliers / Voilà la ressemblance / Le Français les traite bien / Mais l’Anglais les traite en chien / Voilà la différence” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 117–18). 78 Ibid., NF 4: 116.

Chapter Ten 1 Montcalm, Journal, 7: 285. 2 Cited in Courville, Mémoires, 126. 3 Andrès and Willemin-Andrès give a useful bibliography of such accounts in their edition of Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 229–34. 4 Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 11–31. Legardeur’s retrospective account is a circular letter ostensibly addressed to the order’s

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notes to pages 219–24

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12

communities in France designed to encourage them to lobby for funds owed the Hôpital-Général by Versailles. See Julie Roy’s analysis of this text that skillfully links its rhetorical strategies to the emergence of a Canadian identity, “Marie-Joseph Legardeur.” Charlotte Daneau de Muy de Sainte-Hélène, the Ursuline annalist, included the military situation in her chronicle until late May 1759, when she began concentrating on convent events alone (Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 380–90). Noel focuses on the role of the noble nuns at the Hôpital-Général, not women in general, in her vivid account of how the colony’s women’s religious communities weathered the British victory, Along A River, 197–202. Dechêne gives examples concerning women, but focuses on the male militia in Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 408–18. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, includes the most complete account that I have found of the experience of Canadian women, including Indigenous ones, and even discusses the women camp followers of Wolfe’s forces. MacLeod’s short “Women of War” singles out Legardeur as the only woman to have written about the siege, but surveys the multiple aspects of women’s participation that are elaborated on in this chapter. Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 58–79, discusses examples of the participation of elite and non-elite women as combatants in Canada and Acadia during the seventeenth century. Cohn, “Women and Wars,” 10. My thinking on this issue has been informed by her essay (1–35). A classic example is Pepper’s chapter “The Two Pompadours or Women in the Downfall of New France,” in Maids and Matrons of New France, 269–86. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 492. Lévis, Journal, 1: 119. Bougainville, Écrits sur le Canada, 277, 286. Other French officers use the word “attroupement,” an unruly, unauthorized gathering, for previous similar events. While such events in France could involve violence and property damage and thus merit the term “riot,” this is not reported in the Canadian ones I have found described. See Bouton, The Flour War. Bouton noted that women led 93.5 percent of such riots in France where the gender of participants

notes to pages 224–6

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13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

324

is known. Authorities tended to excuse women’s participation in these events by attributing it to their maternal role, and punished female participants much less harshly than male ones (224–33). Dechêne dismissed these demonstrations by women in 1757 and 1758 (she does not mention the 1759 one) as “weak” because they did not lead to violence (Le Partage des subsistances, 171). Montcalm, Journal, 7: 492. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 51, 22 January 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis; hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 58, 13 April 1759 letter of Bigot to the bursar. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 50, 3 January 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 54, early February 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Bigot. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 52, 9 February 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 53, 12 February 1759 letter of Bigot and undated one of Bigot to the bursar. hdq-f1-g2/1: 101, 10 February 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand with his reply at the foot of the letter. hdq-f1-g2/1: 98, 2 April 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires, 2: 135.  Montcalm, Journal, 7: 495. Ibid., 7: 510–11. Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires, 2: 135. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 511. hdq-f1-g2/1: 102, 27 April 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 61, 26 May 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-t2-c336/2, 18 February 1759 letter of Villars to M.-A. Duplessis. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 301. Marie-Marguerite-Daniel Saint-Arnaud de Saint-Arsène to Duplessis on 12 February 1759, in Lemire-Marsolais, Histoire de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 5: 93–4. Original in hdq-f1-g9/22: 1. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. This

notes to pages 226–30

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

undated copy of a fall 1759 circular letter of Duplessis to convents of the order in France begins “Je ne doute point que les nouvelles publiques ne vous aient informées de la prise de Québec.” It is not in her hand. Deschênes gives abundant examples of the poor implementation of the evacuation on the south shore (L’Année des Anglais, 29–44). Dechêne includes examples from the north shore (Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 402–6). Montcalm, Journal, 7: 524. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 4: 168. Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 65. Ibid., 78. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 542; Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 75. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, 65–6. Panet, Journal du siège de Québec, 5. Joannès, Mémoire sur la campagne de 1759, 4: 221. hdq-f1-g2/1: 103, 13 June 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq- f1-g2/1: 105, 27 June 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g2/1: 106, 29 June 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand with his reply at bottom of page. Récher, Journal du Siège de Québec, 17–18. Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 94. Hébert, ed., Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 84. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 13. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. hdq-f1-g2/1: 107, 13 June letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g2/1: 108. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 14. hdq-f1-g2/1: 109, 14 July 1759 letter to Pontbriand from M.-A. Duplessis. These details come from Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 13–14. hdq-f1-g2/1: 109, 14 July 1759 letter to Pontbriand from M.-A. Duplessis. French soldiers did not always respect the nuns working in these mobile hospital stations. O’Reilly tells how a Hôpital-Général nun, Marie-Thérèse de Lantagnac de

notes to pages 230–6

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55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64

65

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Sainte-Élisabeth, was more than once insulted by soldiers. On one occasion, a soldier put his sword to her throat and snatched away food she had prepared for the wounded (Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 627). hdq-f1-g2/1: 109; his replies are written on Duplessis’s 14 July letter. For a thoughtful and full assessment of the standards of war as applied to Wolfe’s Quebec campaign, see Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 44–68. He takes into account British, French, Canadian, and Indigenous views and practice. Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 98–9. Panet, Journal du siège de Québec, 14. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 580–1. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, illustration 42. Illustration 43 shows a second Townshend caricature that has this dialogue between Wolfe and a subordinate: Wolfe: “We will not let any of them escape my dear Isaac, the pretty ones will be furnished at Headquarters.” The subordinate replies: “I understand you completely General. Strike ‘em in their weakest part Egad!” Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 101. One of the elite women taken prisoner, Marie-Françoise Chartier de Lotbinière, was the sister-in-law of the mother superior of the Hôpital-Général and the wife of the man whom Duplessis’s brother Charles-Denis had bested for the position of provost marshal in 1749, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay. Récher says the captain wrote on 2 August (Journal du siège, 28). See also the notes of Andrès and Willemin-Andrès in their edition of Fauteux, Journal du siege, 201, 206. O’Reilly recounts a similar rescue at the vestibule of the Hôpital-Général. A warrior entered the hospital’s vestibule with a bound captive British officer whom he intended to torture. Sister Marguerite-Françoise Hiché de Saint-Henri had the presence of mind to cut the prisoner’s bonds so that he could escape inside, while other nuns distracted his captor (Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 617–18). Hébert, ed., Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 98. Montcalm confirms the tenor of this last letter without giving its contents. In his Journal for 24 August, he noted, “Monsieur le marquis de Vaudreuil, pressured

notes to pages 236–40

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

by Monsieur le marquis de Montcalm, wrote General Wolfe, to inform him of the death of the captain of the Royal Americans wounded in the battle of 31 August. We send back at the same time his trunk and silver. Reply of Monsieur Wolfe that was very polite, unlike his ordinary practice” (7: 597). See Doughty’s note on this incident in Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 20–1. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 12. Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 34. See also his chapter “The Distasteful War” in The Battle for Quebec, 113–70. Dechêne is particularly vigorous in exposing how eighteenthcentury Canadians and French-Canadian historiography turned a blind eye to these depredations (Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 167–87). hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 64, 7 August 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 1/2: 14, 10 August 1759 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 1/2: 15, 26 August 1759 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 116. hdq-f1-g2/1: 111, 12 October 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 18. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 18–19. The three mother superiors were Duplessis, MarieJoseph Duchesnay de l’Enfant-Jésus of the Hôpital-Général, and the Ursuline Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat de la Nativité. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 4: 208. Ramazay, “Conseil de guerre,” Mémoire du sieur de Ramezay, 28. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 27. Poussou points out in his review of the performance of each of the male leaders in the campaign that the Canadian Ramezay’s surrender of the town without a struggle was as much responsible for the overall defeat in 1759 as the tactical errors of the Frenchman Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham (“Les Débats entre historiens,” 30–1).

notes to pages 241–5

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83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102

328

Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 129–30. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 21. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 214. Trudel, L’Église canadienne sous le régime anglais, 2: 258. His book offers detailed comparisons of the female and male communities based on their archives. Ibid., 2: 258. Ibid., 2: 302–16, 269–84. Duplessis’s letter of 14 October 1759 to Monckton (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 256–7). These figures come from Trudel, whose sub-chapter, “The Presence of the English Becomes Lucrative,” sums up his evaluation (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 263–74. The letters are summarized in the calendar of letters for The Northcliffe Collection, 273–4. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Guillimin, 17. While Poussou approves Montcalm’s overall strategy, he faults his tactical errors on 13 September (“Les Débats entre historiens”).  hdq-f1-k1, 3/10: 3a, draft of letter of M.-A. Duplessis probably to Villars beginning “Je vs ay une double obligation de mavoir fait lhonneur de mécrire cette année.” This draft seems to be answered by a 10 February one written by Villars who says he is replying to a letter she wrote on 16 October 1759 (hdq-f1-k1, 3/10: 4). Lévis, Journal des Campagnes, 1: 209. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. Mandements, lettres pastorales, 2: 141. Dechêne notes that the first pastoral letter of Pontbriand that speaks in terms of calamity and guilt only dates from January 1758. She suggests a reading of his pastoral letters in which it is not France that abandoned Canada, but God (Dechêne, Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 451–3). Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 54–5. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 438. 19 January 1760 letter Hector Theophilus Cramahé to M.-A. Duplessis (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 266). Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 130. hdq-f1-g2/1: 111, 12 October 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis.

notes to pages 245–50

103 col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. His 30 October 1757 letter that mentions this issue is addressed to Pierre de La Rue, his representative in France. As much as Duplessis respected honorable Protestant merchants in town, such as the member of the Mounier family who brought her Marie-Catherine’s letters, she supported the bishop’s policy. Mounier was “one of the most obstinate of his sect,” despite being a “very honest gentleman” (“très honnête homme”). “If there are a few Huguenots in the town,” she wrote Hecquet in 1753, “they are abhorred and not allowed to dogmatize” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 51). Two Mounier merchants signed the declaration requesting that Ramezay surrender the town in September 1759 (Ramezay, Mémoire, 27). 104 Trudel cites his 9 December 1759 letter to his vicar general Briand on this point (L’Église canadienne, 1: 72–3). 105 hdq-f1-g2/1: 113, 31 December 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. 106 Galland, writing fifty-seven years after Trudel’s study, confirms that loyalism to the new regime characterized the stance of the clergy (“In tempore tribulationis,” 60–2). 107 “The Hotel de Dieu is a spacious fair building, with an Attic story; and seems as if intended, in process of time, to be enlarged in the form of a square; but at present, it consists of two wings only, making a saliant angle. By an inscription, I perceived it was constructed in the year 1639, at the sole expense of Mary de Vignerot, duchess of Aiguillon; of whom I saw a tolerable portrait, on her knees in a praying posture: her Grace dedicated this house to St Joseph, who is also the Patron of Canada. I had a view of many other paintings of angels, saints, &c. but they are too indifferent to deserve any notice.” (Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 224–5.) 108 Ibid., 2: 233–8. 109 Ibid., 2: 225. Trudel compares the composition of the communities in September 1760. He notes that the Hôpital-Général community was also the youngest. The average age at the Hôtel-Dieu was 45.6 and 35.1 at the Hôpital-Général (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 260–3). 110 Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 130. 111 Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 119, notes that with

notes to pages 250–3

329

the end of the Iroquois wars and the militarization of Canadian society, “the need for women’s physical participation in the wars of the eighteenth century” was largely eliminated.

Epilogue and Conclusion 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 178. 2 Ibid., 4: 54. 3 hdq-f1-g2/1: 80, 14 September 1757 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. 4 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 116. 5 In addition to her circular letter written by her successor UrsuleMarie Chéron (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xi–xvi), Briand wrote a letter of consolation to the community two days after her death (Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 432–4). Auguste Gosselin cites a fragment of the letter sent by Pontbriand on 2 March 1760 in L’Église du Canada, 3: 204. Briand’s letter is useful for its list of her attributes – “her gentleness, her good nature, her prudence, her modesty, her humility, her poverty, her love of prayer, her mortification, her observance of the rule, and complete fidelity in everything, even in the smallest points, by which she climbed to this intimate union with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that is the delight of saints” – on which the circular letter elaborates. 6 hdq-f1-a6, 2/6: 1, letter of the assistant, Marie-Jeanne Tibierge de Sainte-Agnès, to houses in France, written in the summer of 1760. 7 hdq-f1-g2/1: 115, 2 March 1760 letter of Pontbriand to Chéron. 8 hdq-f1-g18/14: 43, 12 November 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 9 hdq-f1-g18/14: 44, 3 September 1757 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 10 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 437. 11 Ibid., 4: 438. 12 hdq-f1-g18/14: 21a, 18 April 1761 letter of the abbé de l’Isle-Dieu to the duchess. 13 Pitt, Correspondence of William Pitt, 2: 119. 14 Ibid., 2: 127. 15 O’Reilly, Monsieur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 393.

330

notes to pages 254–7

16 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 443–6 on the Hôtel-Dieu, 2: 453–5 on the Hôpital-Général, and 2: 470–1 for the Ursulines; Knox, An Historical Journal, 212–25; Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 14–16. 17 D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 184–6. 18 Ibid., lxx–lxxiii, for an account of his last years. 19 Archives des Yvelines, état civil, registre paroissial Notre-Dame, 15 July 1765. 20 P.-G. Roy, La famille Guillimin, 17. 21 Would Charles-Denis, who aspired to a noble lifestyle that was beyond his means, have taken satisfaction from the fact that his granddaughter, Marie-Geneviève, was certified in May 1772 to Louis XV as having two centuries of noble linage? The girl had been born on 21 August 1761 in Montreal where Charles-Denis’s wife and daughter had taken refuge. Two facts, however, might have blunted his delight. His granddaughter’s noble status was not based on Denis’s Morampont lineage, but on that of her father, Louis de Rastel. The Rastel de Rocheblave family could document its ancestry back to nobility in Dauphiné in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the certification was only done to allow the girl entry into the Maison Royale de l’Enfant-Jésus. This academy resembled the more famous Saint-Cyr, founded by Madame de Maintenon, in that it educated children of impoverished nobility. But it served a clientele of more reduced means and of lower status (Armelin, Preuves de noblesse, 2). 22 In 1774 a similar request for a 200-livre pension, this time with the support of the archbishop of Paris, was refused. The minister explained that unlike refugees from Ile Royale, the inhabitants of Quebec had been at liberty to sell their property with the advent of the British regime, and thus no compensation would be made (anom col e 160, “Duplessis de Morampont, prévôt des maréchaux de France au Canada, sa veuve Geneviève Guillemin, réfugiée aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon [1748/1766]”). 23 Hebert, Acadians in Exile, 174. 24 A 1791 list of pensioners has her down for 200 livres, the amount she had requested in 1774 (État nominatif des pensions, 3: 427). 25 Archives de Paris, V3E/D 746, fichiers de l’état civil reconstitué de Paris, 7 July 1764.

notes to pages 257–8

331

26 Chéron included it among other virtues: “her strength, her equanimity, her perfect resignation to the will of God” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv). 27 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 434. 28 hdq-f1-k1, 3/3: 5, 20 May 1730 letter of Dupas, apothecary at La Rochelle. 29 Lencquesaing analyzes this tradition that emphasizes valour in the context of nuns and hagiography in terms of gender theory and Jeanne de Chantal in “Confisquer l’exceptionnel féminin.” Gagnon shows how this tradition was adapted by Casgrain and other nineteenth-century Quebec clerical hagiographers in his chapter on them in Le Québec et ses historiens, 71–121. They used the femme forte tradition to attribute reputedly masculine traits to Canadian holy women (76–7). 30 See Maclean’s chapter “The New Feminism and the Femme Forte, 1630–1650,” in Woman Triumphant, 64–87, especially 86–7. 31 Fénelon, Œuvres, 1: 153–66, ch. 11–12. See Stanton, The Dynamics of Gender, 103–11, on Fénelon. The femme forte model was alive at the Hôtel-Dieu for superiors well into the nineteenth century. François Rousseau notes that Julie-Élisabeth Gibson de Saint-Henry was eulogized as a femme forte in her 1888 circular letter (La Croix et le scapel, 1: 347). 32 Nonetheless, Fénelon made room for belle-lettristic reading – ancient and modern history, poetry, and eloquence – in ch. 12. 33 Rohan published the first edition of La Morale du Sage in 1667. I cite the 1681 edition, 252. The Douai-Rheims translation based on the Vulgate and used by English Catholics in the seventeenth century gives for verse 26 “She hath opened her mouth to wisdom, and the law of clemency is on her tongue.” 34 Rohan’s paraphrase (252) of verse 26 adds a sentence that has no basis in the Vulgate: “She only opens her mouth to instruct and console those who need it.” 35 Ibid., 251. For verse 23, Douai-Rheims gives “Her husband is honourable in the gates, when he sitteth among the senators of the land.” 36 D’Allaire, in the conclusion to her history of the Hôpital-Général, bewailed the dearth of such letters for that institution (L’HôpitalGénéral de Québec, 228).

332

notes to pages 259–61

37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 332. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 420. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 54. Ibid., NF 2: 74. The woman in question was Anne-Catherine André de Leigne, the oldest daughter of Pierre André de Leigne; she married Nicolas Lanoullier de Boisclerc in January 1721. Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, 8, 17, 184. “He deserves to be praised by persons more eloquent than we, who being simple women, confine all our gratefulness to praying that God reward our benefactors” (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 180). See Julie Roy, “Des Femmes de lettres avant la lettre,” for an analysis of another lengthy work by her, the l’Abrégé de la vie de la comtesse de Pontbriand. 1 September 1668 letter to Claude Martin on the difficulty of “civilizing” them (Guyart, Correspondance, 809). She expressed great hopes for miraculous large-scale conversions in her 1 October 1669 letter to Cécile de Saint-Joseph in the wake of the pacification of the Iroquois in the late 1660s when Jesuit missionaries could be more active (854–5). See Deslandres, “L’Utopie mystique et les tracas,” 113–30, for an overview of this issue. Cowan, “Education, Francisation, and Shifting Colonial Priorities,” sorts out the various strands in the evolving Ursuline attitude. Bégon, Lettres au cher fils, 356 (10 April 1751), 378 (2 January 1752). Ibid., 369 (23 July 1751). Ibid., 330 (10 December 1750). See Julie Roy, “Des Femmes de lettres avant la lettre,” on the manuscript book. The list of authors who published their books and died in Canada is short. It includes Nicolas Denys, Bishop Saint-Vallier, and Pierre Boucher. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 7, 21 June 1727 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Ruette d’Auteuil. Hecquet, Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 59–60. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 77.

notes to pages 262–71

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356

bibliography

index Abbeville, 17, 20, 27, 75, 89, 90, 92–3 Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, duchesse d’: solicitation of, 99, 101, 170, 177–8, 185, 190, 207, 249–50; intervention of, 256–7 Aiguillon, Marie-Madeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’, foundress, 99, 153, 164, 176, 178, 185 Alléon-Dulac, Jean-Louis: Mélanges d’histoire naturelle, 176 André de Leigne, Anne-Catherine, 263, 333n40 Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu: antiJansenism in, 156, 175; appeal to pleasure and curiosity in, 159; censorship of, 172–3; colony’s history in, 4, 159–61; composite nature of, 153–5; Duplessis’s authorship of, 114, 155–6; Duplessis’s corrections to manuscript of, 168–70; Duplessis’s corrections of printed book of, 175; Duplessis’s point of view in, 156–7, 161–3;

edition and publication in 1751 by La Tour, 131, 171–3, 185; evaluation of, 177–8, 263–5; financial information in, 159; on Hôpital-Général’s founding, 166–8; Jamet’s edition of, 9, 131, 171, 173; Juchereau’s role in, 155– 7, 264; never-written sequel to, 132, 145–7, 177, 265; promotion of community’s spiritual life in, 157–8; providentialist history in, 159–63, 177; published reviews of, 175–6; reliability of, 159, 161; title of, 307n4. See also Augustinian Sisters; Duplessis, Marie-André (writings); HôtelDieu de Québec Arnauld, Antoine, 78–9, 317n72 Arnauld, d’Andilly, Angélique de Saint-Jean de, 140, 155 Assembly of Clergy of France, 81–2 Augustine of Hippo, 77–9 Augustinian Sisters of Mercy: action/prayer tension, 60, 64–6, 141; chapter meetings, role of, 108, 116; dowry system and recruiting, 54, 61, 126–7, 166, 168, 188; monastery, 54,

58; moderate monastic life, 59–60, 74; musical culture, 59; separation of finances from hospital, 103, 191, 206; warning against particular friendships, 60. See also Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Ayen, duchesse d’, 99 Bacqueville de La Potherie, Claude-Charles Le Roy de: Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale, 177 Barbier, Marie, 7 Bavière, Charlotte-Élisabeth de, 139 Beauharnois de la Boische, Charles, 110, 124 Bégon, Élisabeth, 7, 11–12, 96, 265, 267–8, 275n28 Bégon, Michel de la Picardière, 38–40, 45 Berbier du Metz, Gédéon, 31 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric: Recueil de voyages au nord, 201 Bigot, François, 16, 96, 129, 132, 190, 204, 210, 217, 221, 226, 268; corruption of, 182, 189–90, 217, 224–5; and Duplessis’s efforts to woo, 101, 118, 218, 226–7, 228; efficiency of, 187; hostility to hospital of, 183–6, 190, 218, 226–9, 242, 249, 256 Bigot, Vincent, 55, 63, 212, 285n17 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 220–1, 230 Boulic, Marie-Renée de la Nativité, 57, 132, 287n40; criticism of, 132, 165–9, 175

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Boullongne d’Ailleboust, MarieBarbe de, 145, 163, 173, 175 Bourdeau, Pierre, 92–3, 296n60 Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 6, 51, 54 Braddock’s defeat, 218–19 Branssat, Marie-Anne Migeon de, 7, 327n77 Brébeuf, Jean de, 57, 172 Briand, Jean-Olivier, 143, 250, 255 Brooke, Frances, 257 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe de, 44 Cahusac, Louis de, 172–3 Campra, André, 59 capillaire, syrup of, 99 Carillon, battle of, 220–1 Carmelites, 51, 61, 64, 73, 80, 96, 144–5, 147 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond, 8–9, 16, 259–60 Catalogne, Gédéon, 35 Catherine de Saint-Augustin. See Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine de Saint-Augustin Champigny, Jean Brochart de, 32, 33–4, 139 Chantal, Jeanne de, 259 Chapter of cathedral of Quebec, 169–70, 290n17, 321n60 Chardon, Jean-Baptiste, 155–6, 158, 170 Charest, Étienne, 38 Charlevoix, Pierre-FrançoisXavier de, 302n60; Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 177; Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 147, 177

Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 59 Chartier de Lotbinière, RenéLouis, 37 Chéron, Ursule-Marie, 50, 143, 256, 275n30, 277n36, 308n7 Chevreuse, 19, 23–4, 30 Cohn, Carol, 224 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 19, 31 Commission des secours, 204, 210, 230 Company of the Colony, 36–41, 45, 55, 110 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 7, 51–2, 54, 230, 307n1 Congregation of Saint-Maur, 81, 267 Congregation of the Virgin, 34 convent writing, 14, 94, 151, 262, 265, 268; annals, 131; obituary letters, 51, 139, 140, 147–8; précieuses abbesses, 132; recordkeeping, 155 Coste, Hilarion de: Éloges et Vies des reynes, princesses, 138 Council of Trent, 80, 164 Cramahé, Hector Théophilus, 249–50 Crespieul, François, 173 Cuillerier, Marie-Anne-Véronique: Relations, 263, 307n1 Curot, Marie-Louise de SaintMartin, 256 D’Allaire, Micheline, 257 Daine, François, 118 Daneau de Muy, Charlotte, 160, 264 Demus, Jean-Baptiste, 91, 296n60 Desprez (correspondent of Poulet), 293n42

Diefendorf, Barbara, 66 Dosquet, Pierre-Herman, 81, 86, 169–70 Douin, Andrée: family background, 18–19; as wife, 17– 19; as mother, 19, 21, 26, 30–1; as pious grandmother, 17, 18, 23–4, 28–9, 137; death of, 276n11 Douin, Louis-François, 19, 43 dressmakers’ guild (linen-drapers, lingères), 19, 20, 24 Dubois, Paul-André, 10 Duguet, Jacques-Joseph, 198 Dumas, Jean-Daniel, 219, 234 Dumont de Montigny, JeanFrançois-Benjamin, 211–12 Duparc, Jean-Baptiste, 82, 291n25 Dupas (apothecary), 4, 332n28 Duplessis, Charles-Denis: birth, 41, education, 5, 43; Morampont name of, 278n2; marriage, 12, 47, 123–4; military career, 43, 48–9, 123–4; as provost marshal, 214; last trip to Paris, 214–17; abandonment of family and bankruptcy, 74, 214–16; dispute over portraits, 216–17; last years and death, 217, 258 Duplessis, François-Xavier, 12, 23, 99, 230; birth, 33, 41; Jesuit novitiate, 5, 43, 63–6, 76–7; spiritual advice to sisters, 58–9, 62–7, 69; on the cross, 87, 121, 285n17; lobbying for family, 124–5; lobbying for hospital, 12, 125, 189–90, 210, 213–14, 230; as mission preacher, 14, 87, 93; mission at Abbeville, 76, 87–90;

index

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anti-Jansenist polemics and misogyny, 77, 87–9, 90; and publishing Geneviève’s texts, 145; on Geneviève’s death, 150–1; on Charles-Denis’s marital problems, 214–16; declining heath and death, 99, 213, 258 Duplessis, Geneviève: birth, 41; Paris trip and education, 28, 41, 136, 180; attachment to her sister, 13, 28, 61–2, 66, 72, 211, 271; vivacity, 62, 67, 117–18, 151; vocation as nun, 5, 43, 61–2, 64, 136–8; Carmelite contemplative “temptation,” 64–7, 73, 144–5, 150–1, 288n72; as bursar, 12, 114, 116–19, 206; as part of administrative team, 12, 106, 110, 182, 205; on clausura, 107, 270; hopes for publication, 145; burnout, 81–2, 117–18, 189–91; in 1755 fire, 146; health and death, 74, 149–51, 211–13, 254; La Manne de Bethléem, 9, 73, 143–5; Réflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension, 144–5 Duplessis, Georges Regnard: baptism, 278n1; family background and name, 30–1, 278n2; marriage, 19, 30–2; posting to Canada, 5, 17, 32, 276n5; as father, 27, 137; as treasurer of the marine office, 32–3, 39, 279n8; business activities, 9, 33–7; as friend of hospital, 158; friendship with Dupuy, 34, 52; Jesuit piety, 34, 48, 54, 76; relations with

360

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Canadian authorities, 33–4, 37–9; financial decline, 38–40; death and posthumous debts, 40, 44–6, 283n87; evaluation, 47–8, 282n59 Duplessis, Joseph, 40; birth, 41; death, 43 Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character): spelling of name, 16; birth, 5; devotion to grandmother, 18, 23–4; education and business apprenticeship in Paris, 23–6; as a Parisian, 28, 93, 95, 182; ambivalence toward Canada, 180–2, 268; attachment to Hecquet, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 26–7, 76, 90–5, 101, 121, 270–1; as motive force of correspondence with Hecquet, 91–2; departure from France, 26–8, 277n36; attachment to Geneviève, 13, 28, 61–2, 66, 72, 211, 271; adolescence in Quebec, 5, 51–4; family home in Quebec, 41; novitiate, 54–5, 113; on detachment, 67–74; on flexibility concerning the rule, 59, 74, 122; on inner peace, 69–74; on Jansenism, 75–6, 83–6, 156; on mental prayer, 72, 142; oral instructions to community, 122, 143; and proselytizing Protestants, 129, 250; calm disposition, 50, 62, 67, 129, 142, 259; foresight, 117, 227; fearfulness, 3–4, 102, 208, 227, 234–5, 262; touch of fire, 4,

55, 111, 259; death, 6, 205, 254–6. See also Augustinian Sisters; Duplessis, Geneviève; Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel; Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Duplessis, Marie-André (managerial career): administrative correspondence, 11, 95–101, 266; on borrowing, 118, 184, 208, 256, 261; and clausura, 107, 115, 125, 228, 236, 270; and conflicts over purchasing practices, 117–18; evacuation plans in 1759, 233–5; and independence, 107–8, 113, 188, 205, 207, 262; leading role when not mother superior, 110–11, 121, 125, 208; letterwriting campaigns, 111, 123, 185, 207; managerial philosophy, 115–16; and managerial team with Geneviève, 12, 106, 110, 114, 116, 182, 205; mentoring by Juchereau, 5, 14, 58; minor trade, 118–19; as managerial femme forte, 259–62, 270; as femme tendre, 9, 259, 270; as novice mistress, 58–60; and popular piety, 119–21; and protest over priests’ house, 3–6; reaction to Pontbriand’s rebuilding plans (1755), 204–10; and rebuke by Rouillé, 186–8; and rhetorical tone of nuns, 110, 253, 270; and secrecy, 108, 120. See also Augustinian sisters; Duplessis, Geneviève; Dupuy, Claude-Thomas; Hôtel-Dieu de

Québec; Pontbriand, HenriMarie Dubreil de; siege of Quebec Duplessis, Marie-André (writings): Canadian firsts, 7, 10, 177, 262, 269, 274n9; circular death notices, 147–51; and epistolary conventions, 97; as historian, 4, 7, 159, 177, 308n7; and manuscript-books, 136, 153, 170, 269; pleasure in, 59, 135, 141, 159, 262–3; short devotional texts, 142–3; short narrative texts, 145–6; and wit (esprit), 131–3, 140–2, 263; Dissection spirituelle, 67–9, 72, 74, 133, 140–3; Histoire de Ruma, 7, 11, 15, 27, 61, 133–9, 150, 159, 262; Musique spirituelle, 7, 10, 13, 15, 58–60, 62, 67, 74, 133–6, 140–2, 159, 262, 269. See also Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu; Hecquet, Marie-Catherine; New France; salons; women Duplessis, Marie-Joseph-André, 124, 215, 247, 258 Dupuy, Claude-Thomas, 71, 96, 99, 100, 109–13, 117, 123, 184, 270 Dupuy, Geneviève de la Croix, 34, 58 Dupuy, Marie-Madeleine de la Nativité, 59 Dupuy de Lisloye, Paul, 34, 48, 52, 54, 113, 137, 158, 172 Duquesne de Menneville, Ange, 186 Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 15, 200–1, 267

index

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Étemare, Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Ménilles de, 198 femme forte, 9, 16; as amazon, 252, 259–60; biblical origins of, 259–60; in hagiography, 6, 259–60; as manager, 260–1 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-: De l’Éducation des filles, 260 Féret, Jacques Tranquillain, 11, 95, 97, 99–100, 118, 145 Ferland, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 8 Fiducie du patrimoine culturel des Augustines, 11 Filles de la Croix, 24, 28 Fino, Catherine, 11, 66, 69 Fleury Deschambault, JeanneCharlotte de, 223 Foligné, Jérôme de, 245 Fontaine, Guillaume, 19–20 Fontaines-Marans, Madeleine Du Bois de Saint-Joseph de, 164 Forestier, Marie, 147, 153 Fornel, Joachim, 83, 85, 291n25, 292n36 Fort William Henry, 219–20 Fox nation, 315n59 Franciscan sisters of Abbeville, 75, 80, 269 Franquet, Louis, 100–1, 185–6, 189, 190, 207, 210 Frégault, Guy, 35–7, 322n68 friendship, 10, 13–14; Christian, 22, 62, 94–5, 100–1; classical notions of, 21, 22; epistolary, 90–5; friends of the hospital, 96–101, 158, 170, 190, 205;

362

index

with God, 66; friends as supporters, 31, 139; friends as work colleagues, 31; and instrumental friends, 95; particular friendships at the Hôtel-Dieu, 62, 68; between women, scepticism about, 18, 21, 275n1; warning against particular friends in the religious life, 50, 60–2, 94. See also Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character) Frontenac, Louis de Buade de, 33 Gaultier, Jean-François, 117–18, 125 Gauvreau, Michael, 294n43 Gérard, Louis, 170, 311n75 Gies, Loretto, 10 Giffard, Marie-Françoise de SaintIgnace, 55 Giffard de Moncel, Robert, 158 Greer, Allan, 163 Greinoz, François, 172–3 Groulx, Lionel, 10 Guenet, Marie, 147 Guigues, Louis, 36 Guillimin, Charles, 44, 123 Guillimin, Geneviève-Élisabeth, 123, 214–16, 247, 258 Guillimin, Guillaume, 123–4 Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation, 6, 8, 10, 12, 96, 259; as historian, 177, 265–7; Relation de 1654, 267; Retraites, 144, 170 Hardy, Claire, 24 Havard de Beaufort, FrançoisCharles, 121

Hecquet, Jacques, 75, 93, 94; at Charenton asylum, 296n74 Hecquet, Marie-Catherine (Manon, daughter of MarieCatherine Homassel Hecquet), 63, 295n60 Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel: and father, 18, 26–7, 93; education under Michelle Homassel, 20–3; on MarieAnne Leroy, 22; friendship with Duplessis, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 26–7, 76, 90–5, 101, 121, 270–1; and Jansenism, 29, 75–6, 80, 87–90, 198–9, 201; as closet Jansenist, 89–90, 94–5, 97, 175, 270; marriage and financial separation, 75, 90, 94; as mother, 63, 90, 93–4; as unreliable correspondent of Duplessis, 91–3, 95; and gift exchanges with Duplessis, 95, 97, 99, 119, 221; Paris home, 93, 193; obsession with Indigenous peoples and ties to wild girl, 15, 191–9; and La Condamine, 200; death, 257–8; preservation of correspondence by descendants, 8, 95, 258; Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 13, 15, 191–201, 270; Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel, 13, 18. See also Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character); Jansenism Hecquet, Philippe (doctor), 28–9, 90 Hecquet, Philippe (son of MarieCatherine Hecquet), 94

Heu, Jacques d’, 83–4, 291n25 Hocquart, Gilles, 45, 113, 117, 123–4, 127, 181, 183, 261, 303n71 Homassel, Jacques: as businessman, 17, 26–7, 29, 93; as father, 17, 26–8, 90–1 Homassel, Marie-Catherine. See Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel Homassel, Michelle Fontaine, 13, 17–18, 28–9, 89, 94; charity, 193; educational practices, 22–3; as partner of Marie-Anne Leroy, 21–2, 26; as wife and mother, 19–20; spiritual practices, 20 Hôpital-Général, 7, 8, 34, 107, 119, 122, 125–6, 205, 298n7; annals of, 167, 307n1; favoured by administrators, 186–7, 204, 261; opposition to its establishment, 52–4, 57, 166–8; novices, 54; as military hospital, 218, 257; during 1759 siege, 234–45; postsiege, 252, 257 hospitality, ix, 64 Hôtel de Ville de Paris investments, 44, 108–9 Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 7, 166, 203, 298n7; annals, 263–4, 307n1; construction of royal wing, 187 Hôtel-Dieu de Québec (hospital): agricultural holdings of, 113–15; as British military hospital, 246–7, 256–7; bursar’s role in, 103, 106; clientele, 103, 161–2; damage during siege, 238, 246–8; finances, 103–4,

index

363

108–9, 187; and 1755 fire, 146, 148–9, 202–4; and health care in Quebec, 102–3; as French military hospital, 128–9, 181, 188; operating plant, 125–8; patient care, 103, 128; patient load, 116–17, 128; paying for expansion, 183–8, 261; priests’ house in, 3–4, 102, 109, 259, 269; rebuilding after fire, 204–10; royal support, 128–9, 181, 184; urban holdings of, 109–13. See also Augustinian Sisters Huguenots, 77, 250–1 Ile-aux-oies, 58, 113–14, 172, 176 Indigenous peoples: as allies of French, 32, 220; as converts, 163–4, 161, 181, 194–7, 266; exoticism of, 41, 99, 119; as noble savages, 193–4; Duplessis’s opinion of, 51, 196–9, 220; Hecquet’s interest in, 15, 193–9; as patients at hospital, 103, 161– 2, 171; as slaves, 47, 196, 315n56; war practices of, 220, 241–2 indulgences, 119, 121, 173 Innocent X, 79 Jacquelin (Quebec merchant), 92 Jamet, Albert, 9, 144, 152–3, 156, 161–2, 164, 168, 171, 173 Jansen, Cornelius: Augustinus, 77, 78 Jansenism and Jansenists, 10, 12; in Canada, 14, 81–6, 156, 294n43; components of, 77–9, 200; and conversion of unbelievers, 198–9;

364

index

and criticism of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 201; and fact/ doctrine distinction, 79; and formularies against, 81–2, 86; and Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 87, 201; as opponents of the Jesuits, 76–80, 197, 213, 258; and scepticism about Jesuit missions, 88–9, 197, 213; and women, 75, 80. See also Jesuits; Poulet; rigorism; Unigenitus Jaucourt, Louis de, 200–1, 207 Jauffroy, Pierre, 216–17 Jesuits, 71, 258; Canadian land holdings, 115; Canadian missions, 161, 197–8, 266; as critics of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 201; as friends of Duplessis family, 29, 34, 49, 55, 76, 93, 212; and misogyny, 76, 89; as opponents of Jansenism, 76–7, 82–6; as supporters of HôtelDieu, 71, 146, 149–50, 161–2, 176, 206. See also Jansenism Josse, Guy, 19 Josse, Pierre, 19, 31–2 Jourjon, Antoine-Mathieu, 258 Journal de Trévoux, 176 Juchereau de la Ferté, Jean, 114 Juchereau de la Ferté, JeanneFrançoise, 3, 5, 7–9, 54–8, 82, 147, 157–8, 264; and conflict with Saint-Vallier, 57, 167–8; as femme forte, 9, 259; as mentor of Duplessis, 14, 57–8, 114. See also Annales Juchereau Duchesnay, MarieJoseph, 7, 107, 299n11

Kalm, Pehr, 14, 102, 125–9, 183, 250, 257 Knox, John, 252, 257 La Colombière, Joseph de, 54, 135, 286n25 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de, 191; as editor of Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 199–200 La Galissonière, Roland-Michel Barrin de, 100–1, 106, 125, 127, 186, 188–9 La Guirlande de Julie, 136 La Jonquière, Jacques-Pierre de, 124 La Lande Gayon, Marie-Thérèse de, 114 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 193 La Motte, Louis-François-Gabriel d’Orléans de, 90 La Porte, Arnaud de, 189–90 La Rochefoucauld-Roye, Éléonore de, 41 La Rue, Pierre de, abbé de l’IsleDieu, 187–8, 215, 256–7 La Tour, Bertrand de, 9, 15; Duplessis on, 169; as editor of Annales, 169–73, 175, 185, 199 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de: Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale, 195–9, 201 Lajoüe, Marie-Anne, 148 Lanctot, Gustave, 274n9 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, JeanEustache, 44–5, 122–3, 283n81 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, Nicolas, 44, 122–4, 280n24, 283n81 Lanoullier des Granges,

Paul-Antoine-François, 302n66 Lauzon, 35, 38–9, 41, 51, 109–10, 116, 233, 280n35 Laval, François de, 57, 81, 103, 164–9, 171, 175 Law, John (bank and Mississippi company), 44, 108, 157 laxism. See rigorism Le Cointre, Anne, 147 Le Moyne, Pierre: La Galerie des femmes fortes, 138 Le Peletier, Claude, 19, 31–2, 276n5 LeBlanc, Léopold, 10 Leblanc, Marie-Angélique: benefactors of, 193, 200; death, 200; discovery of, 191–2; Duplessis on, 191, 299; meeting with Hecquet, 193–5; speculation over origins, 192–5, 199 Leclair, Pierre, 81, 85, 292n38, 294n42 Legardeur de Repentigny, MarieJoseph: Relation du siège de Québec, 224, 241, 243–5, 248, 264 Leroy, Denis, 19, 31, 39, 43, 45, 276n5, 276n7 Leroy, Jacques, 139, 278n3 Leroy, Jean (husband of Andrée Douin), 19 Leroy, Jean (son of Andrée Douin), 19, 43, 99; Jansenism, 29, 77, 90; death, 276n7, 289n6 Leroy, Marie, 151, 279n5; marriage contract, 19, 30–2, 137; as mother, 26–7, 41–4; trips to Paris, 26–7, 37, 41, 55, 276n11;

index

365

financial dealings as wife, 37, 40–1; as widow, 40–7, 77, 119, 122, 283n87, 284n94; allowances for religious children, 43; illness and death, 47; evaluation of, 48, 137 Leroy, Marie-Anne: as business woman, 13, 19–20, 24–6, 104, 139; Duplessis’s opinion of, 22, 28; Hecquet’s opinion of, 22; as partner of Michelle Homassel, 21–2 Lespinasse, Julie de, 265 Levasseur de Neré, Jacques, 36 Lévis, François-Gaston de, 244, 248, 252 Leymarie, A.-L., 9 Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne de (1626–1685), 139 Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne de (1656–1729), 139 Longueuil, Marie-Élisabeth Lemoyne de, 61–2, 135, 138–9 Louis XIII, 162 Louis XIV, 19, 39, 76, 79, 81, 139, 163, 172, 262 Louis XV, 123, 157, 163, 221, 224, 257–8 Louis-le-Grand (Jesuit college, Paris), 43, 93 Lubert, Louis de, 32 Lyon-Caen, Nicolas, 93, 275n1, 275n33 Maboul (book censor), 172–3 Machault D’Arnouville, JeanBaptiste de, 210 Maclean, Ian, 260 Maillou, Marie-Joseph, 149 Malesherbes, Guillaume de

366

index

Lamoignon de, 172 Malidor, Pierre, 33 Mance, Jeanne, 6 Marie de l’Incarnation. See Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation Martin, Claude, 144, 147, 170, 177, 265, 267 Maudoux, Abel, 293n40 Maupeou, Charles-Guillaume de, 82 Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de, 6, 41, 107, 124, 126–7, 183–5 Maurice (baker), 190–1 Melançon, François, 10–11 Mercier, Marie-Madeleine, 123 Merlac, André de, 292n32 Meusnier de Querlon, Gabriel de, Affiches de province, 176 Mézy, Augustin de Saffray de, 168 Miquelon, Dale, 126, 280n34 Molinism, 77. See also Jesuits Monckton, Robert, 246–7 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de: criticism of Bigot, 229, 231; criticism of Vaudreuil, 224, 229; dismay at Indigenous allies, 220–1; Duplessis on his death, 247–8; Duplessis on his victories, 217–21; as friend of hospital, 190, 221, 256; on women, 223. See also siege of Quebec Montigny, François de, 95, 97, 119 Moogk, Peter N., 32 Morin, Marie, 7, 11; Histoire simple et véritable, 7, 177, 263–4, 307n1 mortification, 20, 51, 60, 68–9, 74, 163, 330n5. See also Simon

de Longpré, Catherine de Saint-Augustin Mounier (Protestant merchants), 93, 329n103 Moureau, François, 173 Murray, James, 249, 255–6 music: and Baroque ornaments, 140–1; and monastic spirituality, 59–60, 140–1; naughty songs, 24, 68; plainchant, 59, 140; and pleasure, 60, 135; songs celebrating French victories, 99, 221 mutilated crucifix, 121, 145–6 New France: Élisabeth Bégon’s perspective on, 265, 267–8; Duplessis’s perspective on, 4, 7, 12, 97, 157, 161, 265–9; Guyart’s perspective on, 265–7; literature of, 7, 10–11, 131–2, 262, 269 Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, 77, 79, 292n38 Noel, Jan, 132, 187, 273n5 Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces, 119–20, 145–6 Ochterlony, David, 240–1 Oratorians, 20, 22, 29 Oswego (Chouaguen), 218–19 palls, 97, 202 Pâris, François de, 93 Parkman, Francis, 161 Pascal, Blaise, 78 patriarchal colonial state, 16, 162, 261, 268–9

Péan, Michel-Jean-Hugues, 217, 225 Pearson, Timothy G., 286n19, 311n86 Petit de Verneuil, Jacques, 32–3, 39–40, 51 Petit, Jean, 39–40, 51, 280n25 Philippe d’Orléans, 76–7 philosophes, 12, 191, 199–201, 258 Phips, William: 1690 attack, 160–1, 163, 219, 264 Pinaud, Nicolas, 38–9 Pitt, William, 249, 256–7 playing-card money, 33, 40, 157, 159 Poisson, Jeanne-Antoinette, marquise de Pompadour, 225 Pontbriand, Henri-Marie Dubreil de, 11, 96, 108, 117, 123, 188, 191, 241; Duplessis’s relation with, 204, 226, 228, 255, 262; and 1759 evacuation, 231–6; pastoral letters, 228–9, 248; portrait, 217; and Protestants, 250–1; role after 1755 fire, 15, 204–10; support for hospital, 121, 126–7, 145, 183–4, 190, 226, 228, 242–3, 256; role after Trois-Rivières Ursuline fire, 203–4 Pontchartrain, Jérôme Phélypeaux de, 34–9, 41, 45, 82 Pontchartrain, Louis Phélypeaux de, 32, 277n41 Poor Board, 34, 48, 52 Porlier, Catherine, 263 Portneuf (widow), 118 Port-Royal, 20, 29, 79, 84, 140, 155, 292n32, 294n44. See also Jansenism Potawatomi nation, 124

index

367

Poulet, Georges-François, 14, 76, 81–6, 103. See also Jansenism; Jesuits; Saint-Vallier Puritanism, 78. See also rigorism Quesnel, Pasquier, Réflexions morales, 76–7, 79–80 Queylus, Gabriel Thubières de Levy de, 164–6 Racine, Louis, 193 Ragueneau, Paul: Vie de la Mère Catherine, 147, 170, 173, 285n19, 292n32, 317n72 Ramezay, Jean-Baptiste-NicolasRoch de, 244–5, 261, 327n82 Ramezay, Marie-Charlotte de Sainte Claude de, 7, 107, 244 Rapley, Elizabeth, 148 Rastel de Rocheblave, Pierre-Louis de, 258 Raudot, Antoine-Denis, 34, 36–7, 39, 132, 139 Raudot, Jacques, 34, 36–7, 39, 132, 139 Recollets, 52, 85, 203 relics, 57, 119, 196 Rémillard, Juliette, 10 Renaud d’Avène Des Méloizes, Angélique, 225, 229, 231 Richelieu, Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal de, 99, 164, 170–1 Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, 6, 99, 111, 170–1, 185, 190, 221, 256 Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Pierre de, 216, 231, 261, 268; as suitor of Geneviève, 211–12;

368

index

attitude to women in wartime, 223–4, 245; and practices of Indigenous allies, 220, 240–2; as ally of hospital, 190, 206, 210, 242. See also siege of Quebec Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Philippe de, 38, 212 rigorism, 78, 86, 294n43. See also Jansenism Rioux, Marie-Madeleine, 83–4 Rioux, Nicolas, 81, 83–4 Rocher, Guy, 294n43 Rocheron, Marie-Madeleine de Sainte-Apolline, 247 Roches, Marie-Marthe des, 149 Rohan, Marie-Éléonor de, 132, 260 Rouillé, Antoine-Louis, 185–6, 266 Rousseau, François, 10, 187, 207, 262 Rousseau, Pierre: Correspondance littéraire, 176 Rowan, Mary M., 132 Roy, J.-Edmond, 9, 12, 43, 282n59, 283n87 Roy, Julie, 11 Ruette d’Auteuil, FrançoisMadeleine-Fortuné, 270; conflict with Dupuy, 110–11, 266; purchase of Lauzon, 110, 280n35 rules of war, 220, 225, 236–42. See also Indigenous peoples; siege of Quebec; Wolfe, James Rupelmonde, Marie de, 210 Sabatier, Pierre, 82, 90 Saint-Arnaud, Marie-MargueriteDaniel de Saint-Arsène, 230

Saint-Augustin (seigneurie), 113–15, 121, 123, 218, 236, 242, 245, 261 Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne de, 78 Saint-Marcel hospital nuns, 193 Saint-Utin (Marne), 30–1, 124 Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix-Chevières de, 3–4, 71, 102, 106, 110–11, 169, 269; and Hôpital-Général, 51–4, 57, 166–8, 261; and Jansenism, 81–6, 110, 111, 290n18, 292n31; and Rituel de Québec, 82 salons, 10; in Canada, 132, 139; conventions of salon writing, 133–8, 141; in France, 136, 138, 260, 262; and nuns as précieuses, 132; and worldly wit, 131–3, 139–40 Sarrazin, Claude-Martin, 215–16 Sartine, Antoine de, 217 Schwandt, Erich, 10 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 136; Les Femmes illustres, 138 seamstress’s guild (couturières), 20 Seminary of Foreign Missions, Paris, 82, 85, 93, 119, 229, 247 Seminary of Quebec, 71, 82–3, 85, 115, 205 siege of Quebec: bombardment during, 234–5, 238, 246; and bread riots, 226; destruction on south shore during, 241–2; elite women during, 225, 226, 229, 231; failed evacuation of countryside during, 230–1; and generals’ strategic failures,

224, 230, 231, 248, 261; at Hôpital-Général, 243–4; lower-class women during, 225, 226, 229, 230–1, 234, 242; and Montmorency Falls battle, 240–1; and women at town’s surrender, 245–6 Simon, Lorène, 10 Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine de Saint-Augustin, 155; and Duplessis, 72, 74; as femme forte, 259; miracles and visions, 55–7, 72, 74, 163, 172–3; and mortification, 69, 74; spiritual friendships, 62; Ragueneau’s life of, 147, 170, 173. See also mortification Soanen, Jean 20, 22, 89 Soumande, Louise de SaintAugustin, 52 Sovereign/Superior Council, 35–6, 85, 123–4 Stanley, Hans, 257 Sulpicians, 85, 115 Surin, Jean-Joseph, 67, 71 Talon, Jean, 132, 157, 264 Taschereau, Thomas-Jacques, 100, 117 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 197 Teresa of Avila, 60–1, 62–6, 265; Life, 66–7; Way of Perfection, 60 Thiboult, Thomas, 83, 85 Thierry de Viaixnes, 293n42 Thomas à Kempis: Imitation of Christ, 71 Tibierge, Catherine de SaintJoachim, 61, 106, 111, 179, 259

index

369

Townshend, George, 238, 244, 245, 249 Treasury of the Marine, 18, 32–3, 39–40, 44, 48, 123, 279n9, 279n10, 280n24 Trudel, Marie-Madeleine de SaintPaul, 247 Unigenitus (Clement XI), 14, 75–7, 79–82, 85–6, 289n3, 293n40. See also Jansenism; Poulet Ursulines, 8, 51, 54, 58, 71, 80, 119, 126, 125–6, 257; annals of, 160, 264, 307n1; conflict over their annals, 169–70; fire in TroisRivières, 203–4, 210; hospitality after 1755 fire, 149, 202–3, 212; during 1755 siege, 235–6 Varin de La Marre, Jean-Victor de, 206 Varlet, Dominique-Marie, 293n41 Vaudreuil, Louise-Élisabeth de Joybert de, 33, 132 Verchères, Marie-Madeleine Jarret de, 252 Verreau, H.-A., 8, 10 Villars, François Sorbier de, 215, 229–30, 247–8 Villebois, Honoré Michel de, 265, 267–8 Visitation nuns, 80, 96, 147 Vitré, Antoine, 137 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 138, 193, 200

370

index

Walker, Hovenden: 1711 expedition of, 45, 139–40, 160–1, 162, 176, 219, 230, 264 Ward, Matthew C., 241 Warwick, Jack, 221 Wheelwright, Esther, 7; friendship with Geneviève, 212–13 Wolfe, James, 230–3, 244–5; and rules of war, 236–41, 249; and women, 238–40 women: and brothels, 229; and family mentality, 61, 104–6, 267; financial and legal status, 104–6; financial separation from husband, 40, 94, 105, 261; lobbying by, 41; and male oversight, 105–6, 164, 204, 207, 269; misogynous commonplaces used by Duplessis, 75–6, 108, 160, 269; as motivator in war, 223, 245–6; spiritual agency, 163–4; wartime role, 223, 229, 242, 252–3. See also friendship

a touch of fire

mcgill-queen’s studies in early canada / avant le canada Series editors / directeurs de la collection : Allan Greer and Carolyn Podruchny This series features studies of the history of the northern half of North America – a vast expanse that would eventually be known as Canada – in the era before extensive European settlement and extending into the nineteenth century. Long neglected, Canada-before-Canada is a fascinating area of study experiencing an intellectual renaissance as researchers in a range of disciplines, including history, geography, archeology, anthropology, literary studies, and law, contribute to a new and enriched understanding of the distant past. The editors welcome manuscripts in English or French on all aspects of the period, including work on Indigenous history, the Atlantic fisheries, the fur trade, exploration, French or British imperial expansion, colonial life, culture, language, law, science, religion, and the environment. Cette série de monographies est consacrée à l’histoire de la partie septentrionale du continent de l’Amérique du nord, autrement dit le grand espace qui deviendra le Canada, dans les siècles qui s’étendent jusqu’au début du 19e. Longtemps négligé par les chercheurs, ce Canada-avant-le-Canada suscite beaucoup d’intérêt de la part de spécialistes dans plusieurs disciplines, entre autres, l’histoire, la géographie, l’archéologie, l’anthropologie, les études littéraires et le droit. Nous assistons à une renaissance intellectuelle dans ce champ d’étude axé sur l’interaction de premières nations, d’empires européens et de colonies. Les directeurs de cette série sollicitent des manuscrits, en français ou en anglais, qui portent sur tout aspect de cette période, y compris l’histoire des autochtones, celle des pêcheries de l’atlantique, de la traite des fourrures, de l’exploration, de l’expansion de l’empire français ou britannique, de la vie coloniale (Nouvelle-France, l’Acadie, Terre-Neuve, les provinces maritimes, etc.), de la culture, la langue, le droit, les sciences, la religion ou l’environnement.

1 A Touch of Fire Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France Thomas M. Carr, Jr

a touch of fire Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France

thomas m. carr, jr

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 isbn 978-0-2280-0094-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0095-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0234-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0235-2 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from the Maude E. Wisherd Fund of the Emeriti and Retirees Association of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: A touch of fire : Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the writing of New France / Thomas M. Carr, Jr. Names: Carr, Thomas M., 1944- author. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in early Canada = Avant le Canada ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200214667 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200214764 | isbn 9780228000952 (softcover) | isbn 9780228000945 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228002345 (pdf) | isbn 9780228002352 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Duplessis, Marie-Andrée, 1687-1760. | lcsh: Duplessis, MarieAndrée, 1687-1760— Correspondence. | lcsh: Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. | lcsh: Nuns—Québec (Province)—Québec—Biography. | lcsh: Hospitalers—Québec (Province)—Québec—Biography. | lcsh: Hospitals—Québec (Province)— Québec— History—18th century. | lcsh: Canada—History—To 1763 (New France) | lcgft: Biographies. Classification: lcc fc351.D87 C37 2020 | ddc 971.4/014092—dc23

contents Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

1

Two Girls’ Friendship on the Rue Saint-Honoré in the Orbit of Independent Women 17

2

The Networks of an Enterprising Father and a Resilient Mother 30

3

Spiritual Mothers and Friends: Seeking the Peace of the Lord in Hospitality 50

4

Friend of a Jansenist, Sister of a Jesuit: The 1718 Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu and Fashioning Epistolary Friendships 7 5

5

A Sister Team Managing the Oldest Hospital North of Mexico: Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Mother Superior (1732–38; 1744–50) 102

6

Writing the Spiritual Life at the Hôtel-Dieu 131

7

Duplessis Takes Women’s History Public: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec 152

8

1750–55 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Aborted Expansion, Burnout, and the Encyclopédie 179

9

1755–58 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Fire, Family Crosses, and War 202

10

A Woman’s Siege and Occupation: Navigating a Year of Male Military Failures 223

11

Epilogue and Conclusion: Bride of an Unworthy Spouse: Femme forte or femme tendre? 254

Notes 273 Bibliography 335 Index 357

vi

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figures 1.1 Lingère, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1784. Special collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, photo by Laura Weakly. 25 1.2 Couturière, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1784. Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, photo by Laura Weakly. 25 2.1 Anonymous, Sainte Hélène impératrice, late seventeenth / early eighteenth century. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2249. 42 2.2 Richard Short, A View of the Jesuits College and Church. McCord Museum M2485. 46 3.1 Adaptation by Robert Nickel of the 1776 Plan of the City of Quebec by T. Bowen. 53 3.2 Anonymous, Mère Juchereau de Saint-Ignace. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2214. 56 3.3 Claude François, known as Frère Luc, Hospitalière soignant le Seigneur dans la personne d’un malade. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2018.51. 65 3.4 Frontispiece of Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Archives du monastère des Augustines, hdq. 70 4.1 François-Xavier Duplessis at cross of Arras, Avis et pratiques pour profiter de la mission, 1742, photo by Laura Weakly. 88 4.2 Pall embroidered by Duplessis with pelican. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2198.2. 98 5.1 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Hotel Dieu, Quebec. McCord Museum, M338. 112

5.2 Statue of Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces, first half of eighteenth century. Collection du Monastère des Augustines. 120 6.1 Title page of manuscript of the Musique spirituelle. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 1. 134 7.1 Title page of manuscript of the Annales, Histoire de l’HôtelDieu de Québec, 1720. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq. 154 7.2 Title page of printed Annales, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1751. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq. 174 8.1 Title page of Hecquet’s 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage, photo by Laura Weakly. 192 8.2 Page in 1761 edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage, photo by Laura Weakly. 194 9.1 Richard Short, A View of the North West Part of the City of Quebec, Taken From St. Charles’s River. McCord Museum, M2482. 209 10.1 Plan of the River St. Lawrence from Sillery to the Fall of Montmorency with the Operations of the Siege of Quebec, 1759 (Compagnie de lithographie Burland-Desbarats, 1881). Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. 232 10.2 Richard Short, A View of the Treasury, and Jesuits College. McCord Museum, M2484. 237 10.3 George Townshend, General James Wolfe, at Quebec 1759. McCord Museum, M1791. 239 10.4 Richard Short, A View of the Inside of the Jesuits Church. McCord Museum, M2486. 251

viii

figures

acknowledgments My gratitude to the many people who have helped me year after year is heartfelt. Sister Claire Gagnon and François Rousseau welcomed me to the Hôtel-Dieu archives when I only envisaged a very limited project. They directed me to documents that transformed my view of Duplessis and aided me repeatedly as an article project became a biography. I have returned repeatedly to François Rousseau’s books for their authoritative treatment of the Hôtel-Dieu. They are exemplars of the best historical writing. Their successors, Chantal Lacombe and Sara Bélanger, have continued their tradition of hospitality on which the Hôtel-Dieu was founded in 1639. Chantal’s knowledge of the archives has been invaluable during the last stages of my research and the selection of illustrations. In France, the librarians of the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, Valérie Guittienne-Mürger and Fabien Vandermarcq, introduced me to Bernard Homassel whose extensive repository of documents dealing with all branches of the Homassel family has been crucial. The archival work of Nicolas Lyon-Caen on the Homassels has proven an essential resource. Two student assistants were especially helpful: Elizabeth Stacey Khalil with Duplessis’s correspondence and Rebecca Ankenbrand with her Musique spirituelle. Senior editor Kyla Madden and readers at McGillQueen’s University Press gave nuanced suggestions, which resulted in fruitful revisions. Josh Caster and Laura Weakly of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries helped with illustrations. Kay and Bob Nickel also contributed to the illustrations and in innumerable other ways. Sylvie Robert shared her familiarity with Saint-Utin and deciphered a crucial document. Early grants from the Québec Ministère de relations internationales and the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec were

crucial. Further funding came from the University of NebraskaLincoln’s Research Council, its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the Wisherd Fund of the Emeriti and Retirees Association of un-l.

x

acknowledgments

introduction

In August 1719, Marie-André Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, the secretary of the advisory council to the mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, entered into the minutes a solemn personal protest against an action the group had taken: “I will never repent of having refused my consent to it because I followed without passion the insight God gave me and the movement of my conscience.”1 Their bishop, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix-Chevières de Saint-Vallier, had imposed construction of a separate house where ill priests would be cared for within the hospital grounds. The proposal had not been debated properly either by the council or by the community as a whole at a chapter meeting. The failing matriarch of the community, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace, who was assistant mother superior at the time, had only agreed to it after a change in wording; the secretary Duplessis had to sign for her because of her paralysis. Duplessis’s objection was that the priests would expect special attention, strain the community’s limited resources, and detract from its core mission, the care of the poor. Her protest was directed at her sister nuns, whom she accused of bad faith in ignoring future problems: “In the hope that they would no longer be present when that would trouble us, they agreed grudgingly, expecting that they would not be committing themselves personally to anything.”2 Marie-André was the only one of the seven to refuse her signature.

At thirty-two, she was the youngest member of the council, and her written protest is unique in the monastery’s records of that period. While the bishop’s imposition of his will occasioned it, the protest was directed as much at her sisters’ acquiescence to male authority as to that authority itself. It was born of her frustration at not winning the other nuns over to her view. Two things emerge from a reading of subsequent chapter minutes. The priests’ house never was mentioned again as a problem, which suggests that Duplessis had overreacted. Repeatedly in later years, the chapter approved proposals she brought before it when she became mother superior. What did not change was her fiery reaction when she perceived a threat to her hospital, as a supplier with whom she was unhappy learned to his chagrin. He noted in replying to one of her letters, “I had the honour of your letter written with a touch of fire.”3 In 1719, Duplessis was already well into the preparation of her best-known work, the annals of her community and its hospital. Although all her writings have their source in her commitment to those two institutions, the development of New France is omnipresent in all but the most spiritual of them. The foreword of the annals evokes the exploration of New France, beginning not with Jacques Cartier or even Giovanni da Verrazzano, but with John Cabot, whose voyages were authorized by Henry VII of England in the late 1490s. Her texts, in fact, encompass two hundred and fifty years of Canadian history, since her last letters recount the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the beginning of the British occupation of Quebec in 1759. The annals anchor the history of the hospital in the history of the colony. Her surviving writings are extensive, and all are shaped by her experience of directing Canada’s first hospital from her vantage point in the upper town, high above the Saint Lawrence and Saint Charles Rivers.

1718: The Hinge in a Versatile Career Her outspoken protest at the beginning of what would be a long administrative and writing career is a useful hinge for a biography of Duplessis. How was her protest a product of her family background and early experience as a nun? What more productive ways to channel her resolute energy did she find when she moved into a leadership 4

a touch of fire

role? Two early texts, one written in 1712 and the other in 1718, have a more playful aspect than later ones. How did her outlook change as she moved into higher positions of responsibility? A sketch of her life can be divided conveniently into five periods: childhood in Paris (1687–1701); adolescence in Quebec (1701–07); early years as a nun (1707–18); increasing involvement in community affairs (1718–32); full-time administrator (1732–60). She grew up in Paris, where she was born on 28 March 1687, under the tutelage of her maternal grandmother, to whom her parents confided her at age two when they left for Quebec in 1689. Her father had been named to a post in the office of the treasurer of the navy (Trésorier de la Marine) in Quebec. On the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, she met Marie-Catherine Homassel, who was being raised by an aunt. Homassel’s aunt was a business associate of one of Marie-André’s own aunts. Marie-André’s mother retrieved her in 1701, and she spent her years between the ages of fourteen and twenty in her father’s household in Quebec’s upper town. Georges Regnard Duplessis had solidified his position in the treasurer’s office, acquired a seigneurie, and taken advantage of the business opportunities his post afforded. With a father well respected by the colony’s chief military and civilian administrators, Marie-André had access to the elite of Canada’s society. Although her talents attracted suitors, in 1707 she entered the Hôtel-Dieu. She convinced her younger sister Geneviève to join her in 1713; the next year her father died in trying financial straits. Her brother François-Xavier left for France in 1716 to become a Jesuit, and her youngest brother Charles-Denis sailed to study at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in 1719. The year 1718 marked her coming of age both as a key member of the Hôtel-Dieu administrative team and as a writer. She had previously been singled out as the personal secretary of the mother superior, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. In 1718, she was elected novice mistress, which made her automatically a member of the advisory council. She also became the recording secretary of the chapter about this time. 1718 marked as well the beginning of the drafting of her major text, the annals of her house, in collaboration with Juchereau. In the fourteen years between 1718 and 1732, she gradually increased her administrative involvement, serving one year as assistant superior, and then was named bursar of the hospital (économe des pauvres) by introduction

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the bishop in 1725. This post put her in charge of hospital finances. During the period 1732–60, she was elected superior six times and served sixteen years in the office. When she was not superior herself, she was almost always the vice-superior, known as the assistant, and thus no less involved in the affairs of the community and hospital. As the head of a mature institution, her first challenge was to maintain adequate financing and insure a steady stream of supplies. The colony’s economy had come out of the doldrums of the first two decades of the century, but it was on a war footing after 1744. In fact, the hospital began to take on a military role, making its expansion all the more necessary; but who would pay for it, the nuns or the king? The 1755 fire that destroyed hospital and monastery made this question moot. Rebuilding mobilized Duplessis’s energies during the last years of her life, a period that culminated in the 1759 siege and capture of Quebec. She died in January 1760, while there was still hope that the town could be retaken and that the colony could be saved for France.

A Woman of Canadian Firsts It would be difficult to identify a laywoman in New France during the four decades before the Conquest who had the sustained administrative and financial responsibilities of Duplessis. She was the powerhouse of a central colonial institution. Her position put her in contact with all the major figures in the ecclesiastical, civil, and military establishments. Her reach extended into France, where she corresponded with colonial authorities such as minister of the navy Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas and cultivated patrons such as the third duc de Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis. Her success as an administrator depended on being able to adapt her institution to the evolution of the colony’s fortunes when economic development resumed in the 1720s and when, beginning in the 1740s, military expenses increasingly dominated. The heroic “Amazones du grand Dieu,” the French foundresses of the seventeenth century who had been inspired by the fervour of the Catholic revival, such as Marie Guyart, Jeanne Mance, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, have been amply studied.4 Duplessis represents not this first generation, nor even the Canadian-born second one 6

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that consolidated their work, such as Marie Morin of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal, Marie Barbier of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, or Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté at Duplessis’s own institution. Duplessis figures in the third wave of religious superiors active in the eighteenth century whom historians have only begun to examine. Her terms in office corresponded almost exactly with those of her contemporary, Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat, mother superior of the Ursulines. Although Duplessis was ten years older, she is comparable in some ways to an aristocratic duo of nuns who governed the Hôpital-Général during the same period, Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay and Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay.5 The Ursuline Esther Wheelwright, a New England girl, who joined that order after having been a captive of the Wabanakis for five years, belongs to their generation, but she only became mother superior in 1760 after Duplessis’s death.6 Besides this administrative career, no other eighteenth-century nun in New France – nor any woman of that time and place, for that matter – can equal the range and quality of Duplessis’s writings. The list of firsts that have been claimed for her as a Canadian writer is lengthy: first literary narrative, the Histoire de Ruma;7 first musical treatise, the Musique spirituelle;8 first Canadian to attempt an historical work, the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.9 This book was not the first such convent chronicle in Canada; Marie Morin had begun the annals of her Montreal Hôtel-Dieu in 1697.10 However, Duplessis’s book, when printed in 1751 as the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, was the first book published by a Canadian woman during her lifetime. The historical current runs deep in her writing, even if she is not primarily an historian. She was ever attentive to the impact of New France’s past on current conditions in the colony and her hospital. She would find multiple ways of writing New France, in addition to the Histoire: annual letters, business correspondence, administrative reports. Her earliest known work, the Histoire de Ruma, embodies a playful spirit that is rare in Canadian writing of the period. Duplessis’s letters to her friend Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet stand as one of the major surviving private correspondences of eighteenthcentury Canada. Only Élisabeth Bégon’s rivals hers. An intellectual drive that led her to seek out information from books, gazettes, introduction

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and informants nourished her writing. She had her biases, but her network of correspondents in France kept her always well informed. She merits sustained attention simply as an author.

A Corpus Rediscovered Duplessis was almost unknown in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Little wonder, since the 1751 edition of the annals printed in Montauban had attributed its authorship exclusively to JeanneFrançoise Juchereau, and her correspondence with Hecquet was unpublished. It took over eighty years before a sufficient portion of her writings became accessible so that her accomplishment could be appreciated. The process began after the discovery in 1856–57 of her letters to Hecquet in Paris archives by Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. Her providentialist view of Canadian history appealed to the clerically minded savants who introduced her to nineteenth-century readers. A selection of her letters to Hecquet was serialized in the Revue canadienne in 1875 by H.-A. Verreau, who planned to write her biography. To promote the letters, Verreau presented them as a continuation of those of Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation. He noted that the Ursuline’s correspondence stops in 1671 and covers the first part of the French regime; Duplessis’s takes up its last four decades. Verreau is almost willing to place her as the equal of Marie de l’Incarnation: Duplessis “is perhaps not inferior to her.”11 A fuller picture of Duplessis began to emerge three years later in 1878, when Henri-Raymond Casgrain made her the centrepiece of the eighteenth-century section of his Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu. All three Quebec City historic women’s monasteries published their histories at this time, but while the Ursulines and Hôpital-Général turned to their own members, the Hôtel-Dieu commissioned a professional author who was furnished documents from their archives. In Casgrain they had a priest-writer at the heart of Quebec’s literary ferment and an experienced nationalist historian. His history makes ample use of Duplessis’s annals for the period up to about 1718; for the era of her administration, he extensively quotes or paraphrases her short historical pieces. Since Casgrain was writing an institutional history, he discusses her challenges, successes, and disappointments as an administrator. His point of comparison is not with foundresses such as Marie de 8

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l’Incarnation, but with Duplessis’s mentor Juchereau: “Before her Mother Juchereau de Saint-Ignace had been the model of the strong woman (la femme forte); Mother Sainte-Hélène was the model of the tender, gentle woman (la femme tendre).”12 While Juchereau “reigned by a forceful spirit,” Duplessis “governed with a mild touch.”13 Although regional historian J.-Edmond Roy published no additional writings by Duplessis, his books in the 1890s added substantially to knowledge about her. In 1892, Roy brought out an edition of her Jesuit brother’s letters to her and her sister Geneviève.14 Much information about Marie-André can be surmised from FrançoisXavier’s allusions to shared concerns. Like Casgrain, Roy had access to the monastery’s archives, and he used his expertise as a notary to supplement them with documents from the public record. In the introduction and apparatus to François-Xavier’s letters and again in his 1897 Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, he gives an ample account of her parents’ land dealings and short accounts of the lives of her brothers and sister. Extracts of two devotional texts, one by Geneviève and another by Marie-André, appeared in a pious newsletter in 1902 and 1905.15 A.-L. Leymarie’s publication between 1927 and 1931 in the journal Nova Francia of the entire holdings in the French National Archives of Duplessis’s letters to Hecquet made her candid observations on colonial affairs available to historians, who gradually began to mine them. He also expanded the corpus by locating her letters, mixing business and personal remarks, to an apothecary in Dieppe and to a business agent in Paris.16 Albert Jamet’s 1939 authoritative edition of the annals, commissioned for the third centenary of the hospital, did much more than make the book as Duplessis wrote it widely available for the first time;17 the Benedictine scholar also clarified the role she and Juchereau played in the elaboration of the annals. Jamet established that if Juchereau supplied the material for the early history of the house, she left its organization and redaction to the younger nun. His extensive annotations added context about the personages and events that Duplessis discussed, and confirmed her reliability as an historian. The publication of this critical edition of the annals restored her original text that Bertrand de La Tour had modified in 1751. The first round of discovery of her achievement as a writer was complete. introduction

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Toward Recognition Once Duplessis’s core corpus had been established, scholars turned to its analysis. Sister Mary Loretto Gies’s 1949 Laval University doctoral dissertation on Duplessis as a letter writer and annalist was squarely in the clerical tradition dating from Verreau,18 as was the overview for the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française by Juliette Rémillard, niece and secretary of the nationalist historian Lionel Groulx, who founded that journal.19 Gies was the first critic to confront the militant Jansenism of Duplessis’s friend, and it clearly troubled her. Duplessis did not profit when the secular-minded proponents of a Quebec national literature during the Quiet Revolution looked back for antecedents in their colonial past. Her status as a nun and her Parisian birth worked against her. Even Rémillard, in her 1962 article, which is in many ways a last hurrah for the older clerical tradition, felt the need to reassure on that last score: Duplessis is “a Canadian at heart although French by birth.”20 When Léopold LeBlanc included an extract from Duplessis’s annals in his 1978 anthology of Quebec literature from the New France era, he introduced her as the first example of a Quebec-France collaboration. He did perceive the worldly current that underlies much of her style, noting that she “is closer to the salons and to the polished society of the eighteenth century” than Marie de l’Incarnation.21 Slowly, beginning in the late 1980s, fresh approaches gave new perspectives on Duplessis’s basic corpus established between 1873 and 1939. Erich Schwandt published her Musique spirituelle in 1988, calling it “Canada’s First Music Theory Manual.” Just as importantly, perhaps, Schwandt pointed toward the inventiveness behind the lighter tone that Leblanc had noted but could not explain. François Rousseau gave many examples of the managerial prowess of the Duplessis sisters in his 1989 history of the hospital, La Croix et le scalpel, and drew on their administrative correspondence held in the archives. He was attentive to women’s agency and underscored the Duplessis sisters’ maneuvers to circumvent male ecclesiastical authority.22 François Melançon and Paul-André Dubois recognized the importance of her published correspondence and situated it in terms of exchanges based on friendship and learned curiosity. Their article mapped out the key features of her approach to friendship, 10

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which can be explored now that more of her letters are available and more is known about her correspondents.23 In a more specialized vein, Lorène Simon’s doctoral dissertation on Duplessis’s letters written to the Dieppe apothecary Féret between 1733 and 1752 showed how rich they are in information about eighteenth-century pharmaceutical practices in France and Canada.24 In a series of insightful articles that stem from her doctoral dissertation, Julie Roy began the process of giving Duplessis her due as a woman author without singling her out.25 Roy showed that the field of women writers in New France goes well beyond the “trinity” – consisting of Marie de l’Incarnation, Marie Morin, and Élisabeth Bégon – canonized by literary historians.26 Catherine Fino examined Duplessis for the first time as a spiritual author and situated her among the writers of the French School of Spirituality whom Duplessis mentioned in her own works.27 I expanded her corpus by locating the previously unknown Histoire de Ruma in a library in Montauban. However, Duplessis has not figured prominently in the burgeoning studies focusing on female religious communities during the French regime, and she is largely absent from overviews of women writers of that period.28 The absence of a convenient edition of Duplessis’s correspondence has been a significant impediment to the recognition of her stature. The letters in the French archives were serialized in a long-defunct journal, Nova Francia. However, the Fiducie du patrimoine culturel des Augustines is transforming access to her writings. Established in 2009 by the sisters, the Fiducie holds in trust the archives and collections of eleven Augustine communities with a central depository in the Hôtel-Dieu. It has embarked on an ambitious plan to digitize documents from its holdings and post them online.29 As I write in 2019, Duplessis’s correspondence with Bishop Pontbriand is already accessible.

Shaping a Biography of Duplessis According to Duplessis’s death notice, her contemporaries of “good taste” who read her Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec judged that her “ease of composing and penetration” made her “capable of writing the history of the founding of Canada.”30 Despite my title, The Writing introduction

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of New France, this cannot be exclusively a literary biography of an historian of New France. The biography also analyzes the managerial career of the woman who administered the first hospital built north of Mexico for almost thirty years. Duplessis wrote extensively and well, and more than the duties of her office required. However, like two other major women writers of New France, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon, she never thought of herself as a writer. Except for her letters to Hecquet, all her surviving texts stem from her convent responsibilities. Thus, although New France is omnipresent in her writing, she always viewed Canada from the Hôtel-Dieu. This overarching commitment to the hospital pervades her writings and this biography. Biographies of eighteenth-century women are invariably portraits of their families.31 Their trajectory toward marriage or the convent was set in motion by their parents’ circumstances and desires, and once they were established as a mother or a mother superior, this new family became their preoccupation. Moreover, Marie-André worked in tandem with her sister Geneviève, who took over duties as hospital bursar when Duplessis was elected mother superior. Her Jesuit brother in France, François-Xavier, lobbied relentlessly for it. She worried over the undistinguished military career and failed marriage of her quarrelsome younger brother Charles-Denis. Neither Geneviève nor François-Xavier has received the biographical treatment they merit. J.-Edmond Roy’s account of the Jesuit’s life in his 1892 edition of his letters is hagiographic and slights the hostile reactions to his preaching by Jansenists and philosophes alike.32 Neither party had any more use for the Jesuit than he had for them. Geneviève, who oversaw hospital finances for years, was much more than the junior partner of her older sister. She was more outspoken than Marie-André, and her frank letters have often proved to be more revealing. She was also an active spiritual author who envisaged publishing in France. Room must also be made for Marie-André’s childhood friend, Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet. Duplessis first came to attention in the nineteenth century when her letters to Hecquet were discovered in the French National Archives. Marie-André revealed herself in a more unguarded way in these letters than in any of her other writings. In addition, most of what we know of Duplessis’s childhood 12

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comes by way of Hecquet’s biography of her aunt Michelle Homassel Fontaine. It was first published in 1862 but seems to have remained unknown to scholars in Canada.33 Marie-Catherine became a militant Jansenist, while Duplessis adopted her Jesuit brother’s hostility to what the church considered a heresy. Their forty-year correspondence impacted Marie-Catherine’s life at a crucial juncture in 1736, and it triggered the one book Hecquet published during her lifetime, the 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois. A rigid chronological approach hardly does justice to a figure such as Duplessis, whose impact touched so many domains. Her skill as a writer, her managerial expertise, and her spiritual development all merit attention. Thus, the spine of this biography is her life from her family’s origins, through her childhood and early convent years, to her long period of administrative service, ending with the British seizure of Quebec. However, chapters on her spirituality, spiritual writing, redaction of the annals, and friendship with Hecquet are inserted within this frame. Although this approach entails placing some material out of chronological order and considering it from different angles in successive chapters, it allows for a more focused analysis of her accomplishments. This arrangement disperses a key period in her life: her creative years between 1717 and 1720. These years mark her entry into the community’s leadership. They are years of intense spiritual enthusiasm, as can be seen in her Jesuit brother’s letters to his two sisters. She wrote her major work, the Annales, and one of her most original minor texts, the Musique spirituelle, during them. Chapters 1 and 2 examine Duplessis’s childhood years in Paris and the relatives who shaped her life. Chapter 1 looks at the influence of three independent women in whose households Marie-André was raised in Paris: her grandmother, an aunt, and a friend of her aunt. Their business savvy and religious devotion were central to her upbringing. In the household of her aunt Marie-Anne Leroy she became fast friends with Marie-Catherine Homassel. Leroy recognized her niece’s potential as a manager and groomed her to take over her fashionable dressmaking business. This chapter also begins the analysis of the tensions that surrounded her key friendships, treated in subsequent chapters: her “particular” convent friendship with her sister nun Geneviève and her anti-Jansenist barbs in her introduction

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letters to Marie-Catherine. The second chapter traces the career of her enterprising parents, Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy, who re-entered her life when she arrived in Quebec in 1701. Marie Leroy’s trajectory shows how a wife could second a husband who had to create his own network in the colony and how a widow could maintain a measure of independence. Chapter 3 treats Duplessis’s path into the Hôtel-Dieu and her spirituality. There she encountered remarkable women such as Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau who recognized her gifts. Her Jesuit brother’s letters to her give a glimpse into her early spiritual ambitions. However, the evidence about her spiritual experience in the last decades of her life is much sketchier. Chapter 4 focuses on the threat to Duplessis’s friendship with Hecquet after Marie-Catherine became an intransigent Jansenist, while Duplessis’s brother François-Xavier made his career in France as an anti-Jansenist preacher. Duplessis’s correspondence with MarieCatherine may now be the most engaging and accessible part of her oeuvre, but nothing assured the continuation of their friendship. Their first surviving letter dates from 1718, just when New France underwent a Jansenist scare and when Marie-Catherine in Abbeville experienced a bout of persecution for her refusal to adhere to the papal bull Unigenitus condemning Jansenism. The outing of the Jansenist monk Georges Poulet, who was briefly a patient at the hospital in 1718, illustrates why Jansenism never had the impact in Canada that it had in France. The chapter examines how, despite these tensions, Duplessis refashioned their friendship through letters. It concludes by situating her exchange with Hecquet within her other epistolary networks. Chapter 5 is the first of four that examine how Duplessis met the challenges of administering a hospital and large religious community. Beginning with her appointment as hospital bursar in 1725, it analyzes the achievements of her first two six-year terms as mother superior. The naturalist Pehr Kalm’s account of his visit in 1748 offers a vantage point for assessing the generally favourable state of the hospital at the end of this period of economic expansion for the colony. However, Duplessis’s defensive management style limited her ability to maneuver in the new climate dominated by war. The next two chapters focus on Duplessis as a woman author who stretched the conventions of convent writing. Chapter 6 examines 14

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the short texts that she wrote, first as a newly professed nun, then as novice mistress, and finally as mother superior. Particularly innovative are the early Histoire de Ruma and the Musique spirituelle. Her spirited vignettes often enliven even the more conventional monastic texts that she later produced in her role as mother superior – meditations, short accounts of notable events in the life of the convent, and circular letters commemorating deceased nuns. Chapter 7 presents the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec as a unique example of women publishing their history. Duplessis wrote it around 1720, before she became mother superior. She had it published in 1751 in France by a former ecclesiastical superior of the house, Bertrand de La Tour. Revisions that she had previously made, seemingly to smooth over relations with male church officials, are examined, as are her reactions to changes that La Tour introduced into her text when he adapted an in-house history for a wider public. The eighth and ninth chapters assess how gender impacted her negotiations with colonial officials during her trying last decade in what she termed “a land of crosses and suffering.” They analyze her attempts to fend off demands that she fund the hospital’s expansion to serve royal troops. After the 1755 fire that left the monastery and hospital unusable, Bishop Pontbriand tried to impose his own vision of reconstruction. Her multiple exchanges with Hecquet about Indigenous peoples led to the publication of her friend’s 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage and Duplessis’s own entrance into Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The death of her sister and administrative partner Geneviève in 1756 left her isolated just as the war intensified. The final chapter focuses on 1759, the last year of her life, in terms of women’s experience of the British siege and occupation of Quebec. Eighteenth-century accounts of the campaign largely ignored the role of women, which hardly fared better in the commemorations 250 years later in 2009. The defeat of the Canadians and French was a male failure, and women coped with this failure of their supposed protectors according to their social status. Duplessis did not need to participate in the January 1759 street protests by women to make her need for food supplies known to officials. Likewise, the rules of “civilized” warfare worked to the advantage of her hospital, while poorer townswomen and country wives fared much worse. The chapter uses her extensive and often conflictual correspondence with introduction

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the intendant François Bigot, Bishop Pontbriand, and the British occupiers. It sets her letters alongside the accounts of the campaign by male participants, both French and British, who hardly took into account women’s experience of the events. The conclusion begins with her death in January 1760, four months into the British occupation and two months short of her seventythird birthday. The 1759 defeat is emblematic of a failed patriarchal colonial state with which resourceful women like Duplessis had to contend. Indeed, the conclusion argues that despite H.-R. Casgrain’s characterization of her as a “gentle woman” instead of as a femme forte, her skills as an administrator align better with a model of the femme forte that dates to the last third of the seventeenth century. Finally, no other eighteenth-century woman in New France, and perhaps no man, left a corpus written with such versatility, verve, and range. The conclusion proposes Duplessis as a major figure of colonial Canadian letters. A note on names: I have tried to conform to the spellings of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The chief exception is the subject of this book, which the Dictionary gives as Marie-Andrée Regnard Duplessis. However, she generally signed her name on documents and letters as Marie André Duplessis, without the second ‘e’ that her grandmother Andrée Douin used, and without her father’s name Regnard. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

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Two Girls’ Friendship on the Rue Saint-Honoré in the Orbit of Independent Women In spring 1693, two young “orphaned” girls in Paris began a friendship that would last almost seventy years. Marie-Catherine Homassel described the meeting as love at first sight: “Seeing each other and loving each other was the same thing. The similarity of our ages and perhaps of our temperaments created in us a union that even a separation of fifteen hundred leagues and an absence of more than twenty years have not yet been able to change.”1 Marie-Catherine was seven and Marie-André six. They would share six years of close proximity, often living under the same roof, until their parents reclaimed them. The two girls, of course, were not orphans at all, but, as so often happened in an age when spouses died prematurely or parents had to travel, they had been confided to close relatives. Marie-André had been entrusted to Andrée Douin, her maternal grandmother, when her father Georges Regnard Duplessis was named to a post in the treasury of the marine’s office in Quebec in 1689. Jacques Homassel, owner of a luxury fabric manufactory in Abbeville, had asked his sister Michelle Homassel to care for Marie-Catherine after the death of her mother in childbirth in 1691. The girls’ formative years were spent under the aegis of women who had found the measure of independence from male domination that society offered to lay women of their rank. Andrée Douin was an older widow of some means.

Michelle Homassel was a younger, poorer widow who had not remarried, even though this meant living in much reduced straits. A third woman must be added to the mix, an unmarried but legally emancipated daughter of Andrée Douin, Marie-Anne Leroy. The two girls met when Leroy, an enterprising dressmaker who ran a successful business on the fashionable Rue Saint-Honoré, took her niece to visit her friend Michelle Homassel. Little of Marie-André’s childhood would be known without the biography of her own aunt Michelle Homassel that Marie-Catherine wrote for her children. The friendships that are described in this chapter both belie and confirm the opinion of most male writers on friendship from Antiquity to the Renaissance – from Aristotle to Montaigne. These philosophers and moralists held that if true friendship between two men is difficult to achieve, friendship between a man and a woman is unlikely, and friendship between women is all but impossible. They cited the list of commonplaces that were used to justify the subordination of women and separate them from each other: women’s fickleness, their lack of resolve, their intellectual weakness, etc.2 Despite this misogynistic view, the friendship of the two girls would last a lifetime. However, the tight bond between Marie-André and Marie-Catherine would also be used to undermine the independence of one member of the trio of adult women, Michelle Homassel. Women’s friendship could indeed have its perils.

A Trio of Independent Women Andrée Douin, the most independent of the trio, was about fiftysix when her two-year-old granddaughter was entrusted to her. All her life, Marie-André would remain grateful for the affection and upbringing she received from this grandmother to whom she was closer in many ways than to her mother. As she wrote Hecquet in 1752, “a grandmother’s tenderness is greater than a mother’s; I experienced this, as you know, having been raised by a saintly grandmother. The stronger my reason becomes, the more I recognize the debt I owe her.”3 These emotional bonds were reinforced by the financial security and solid community ties that her grandmother’s family enjoyed. Andrée Douin came from a well-connected administrative family in Limours-en-Hurepois (Essonne), a town thirty-one kilometres 18

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southwest of Paris. Her father, Anne Douin, had been king’s attorney (procureur du roi au baillage) for Limours. A brother, Louis, was the superior of a small local Franciscan monastery there that belonged to the order of Picpus, named for its headquarters in that Parisian suburb.4 Marie-André would eventually inherit his portrait, which is now held by the Hôtel-Dieu. A sister, Anne Douin, was married to Guy Josse, an attorney (procureur) in the local court at Limours. One of their sons, Pierre, became a clerk (greffier) at the Châtelet of Paris and a secretary to Claude Le Peletier, who succeeded Jean-Baptiste Colbert as general controller of finance for Louis XIV in 1683.5 Douin’s husband, Jean Leroy, had been a tanner-merchant in Chevreuse, situated about seven kilometres north of Limours. His was one of the many tanneries along the Yvette that flows through the town. After becoming a widow, Andrée Douin lived at times in Paris and in Chevreuse. Jean Leroy left his twenty-nine-year-old widow in 1662 in a comfortable enough situation that she did not have to remarry while she raised and established four children. The oldest daughter, Marie-Anne Leroy, was received as a mistress in the dressmakers’ guild in January 1675 and set up in business.6 Jean Leroy, originally a priest of the diocese of Paris, was pastor of SaintCéneré (Mayenne), a village seventeen kilometres east of Laval that had 174 households in 1696.7 He is described as having “a benefice with a considerable income” in a 1702 will of Anne-Marie Leroy.8 In spring 1686 Douin saw her remaining son and daughter married. Denis Leroy was an attorney at the Châtelet in Paris. This position would have cost his mother around 8,000 livres,9 and she gave him 6,000 livres at the time of his wedding in April 1686. A month before Denis’s marriage, Andrée Douin had established her other daughter Marie Leroy by marrying her to Georges Regnard Duplessis with a dowry of 7,000 livres.10 In addition, when she died at Chevreuse in December 1701,11 Douin left a farm to her daughter Marie Leroy at Villevert, a kilometre or so west of Limours. The least independent of the trio was Michelle Homassel, whose social and financial position was much less secure than Andrée Douin’s or that of any of the Leroy children. She had made an unpromising marriage at age twenty-one in 1676 to a young man from near Alençon, Guillaume Fontaine. He did not bring financial security, good health, or even a stable character to the altar. Shortly after the wedding, he two girls’ friendship

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had to flee Paris because he had participated in a duel. His refuge was Valenciennes, where he held a modest position collecting excise taxes.12 After her husband’s death around 1677, Michelle returned to Paris, and rather than remarry, she devoted herself to the education of their daughter. When the child died at age two, Michelle turned to the retired life of prayer and asceticism of a devout widow, while supplementing the modest income that her husband had left her by working as a seamstress. She was unconcerned with material acquisition. She was thirty-six when she brought the five-and-a-halfyear-old Marie-Catherine to Paris from Abbeville in October 1691, and immediately turned her attention to raising the girl according to the standards of unostentatious piety by which she had lived during the twelve years since her daughter’s death. This meant sessions of prayer upon arising and before going to bed, daily mass, reading scripture and devotional books. A regimen of fasting and bodily mortification supplemented this regime. She hid her devotional life and mortifications from others, and did not seek or report mystical raptures or visions, or align herself with any party such as that of Port-Royal. Her one spiritual “luxury” was that she had placed herself under the direction of the Oratorian Jean Soanen, who became famous as a court preacher in the 1680s, but she hid her identity from him for many years, preferring the status of an anonymous penitent in his confessional. Funded by her mother’s capital, Marie-Anne Leroy created a growing business in one of the few fields where women could operate independently of men. Her linen-drapers’ (lingères) guild was smaller, more prestigious, and older than the newer seamstresses’ (couturières) guild that had been established in 1675. Both were among the rare exclusively female guilds. Fees to become a mistress were 200 livres for Leroy’s linen-drapers, but only 50 for the seamstresses.13 Although the linen-drapers’ original function had been to sell linen cloth and finished goods such as aprons, shirts, and sheets, its members quickly moved into dressmaking. With a shop situated in the stylish Rue Saint-Honoré neighbourhood near the Louvre, Marie-Anne’s clients included women of quality whom she might visit in their residences. In the early 1690s, she envisaged expansion by taking in young needy women to make her clients’ dresses in her shop, rather than hiring out the work. 20

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Inseparable Friends and the Perils of Devout Friendship Accounts of childhood friendships in this period are rare, which makes situating Marie-André and Marie-Catherine’s bond among typical friendships between girls difficult. However, as Marie-Catherine presents her tie to the young Duplessis, it encompasses a number of the standard commonplaces of friendship. In addition to the conformity of character highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, she stresses its extraordinary nature: true friendship is a privileged relationship that is not often achieved. The classical theorists of friendship also stressed its voluntary nature, unlike most family relationships. When Marie-Anne Leroy took her niece for her first visit to Marie-Catherine in Michelle’s lodgings in 1693, Marie-André was so taken by the other girl that she refused to leave. According to Marie-Catherine, “It was not possible to wrest this little one from my side, and her aunt was forced to leave her there for a time.”14 While Marie-André’s attraction to Michelle’s niece was perhaps too immediate to be a deliberate choice, her willful attachment to the older girl and demand to stay by her side is the first recorded instance of the determination she would show all her life. The girls’ refusal to separate poised a problem for their adult guardians: how to persuade Marie-André to return to her aunt’s shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré? Marie-Anne Leroy had a solution that would satisfy the girls’ desire to be together and make possible the expansion she wanted. Michelle Homassel would leave her own lodgings and move with Marie-Catherine to Leroy’s shop. Andrée Douin would also take quarters there. All three adults and both girls would be housed under the same roof. However, this was also a business proposition. Leroy wanted to staff her shop with young seamstresses, but she could not both supervise them and deal with her client base. Michelle would oversee the seamstresses, leaving Leroy free to handle the front end of the enterprise. Michelle’s sense of duty would ensure order among the seamstresses, upon whom she would impose her own disciplined piety. According to her niece, Michelle had reservations about the arrangement from the start. It put her in a very unequal position in relation to Leroy, who controlled the capital. She would be less a two girls’ friendship

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partner than an employee and would be housed on her employer’s premises. Furthermore, what was uppermost in her mind was the education of Marie-Catherine, and she foresaw that the tight control that she had been able to maintain by secluding her niece would not be possible in the shop, given the intrusions of worldly clients and the proximity of the young seamstresses. Her devout friendship, however, led her to accept Leroy’s offer. The two women had several things in common. They were both single women of about the same age earning their living in the clothing trade. Above all, they shared the same pious outlook that proposed that devout women lead as retired a life as possible, devoted to prayer, church services, and works of mercy. Moreover, they shared the same director, Jean Soanen, and moved in the same Oratorian circuit. Aristotle had posited that the most perfect form of friendship was based on virtue. When his concepts were Christianized, virtue became conflated with the theological virtue of charity. This involved a certain amount of tension since Christian charity was not conceived as reserved for friends, but had a universal character. Had not Christ said, “Love your enemies”?15 Christian charity also claimed a sacrificial orientation, modelled on Jesus’s death on the cross: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”16 This sacrificial ethos no doubt motivated Michelle, but she was also following the directive of their common advisor Soanen, who thought that Michelle’s even temper would moderate the impetuosity and imperious personality of Leroy.17 The fundamental compatibility between the two girls produced an enduring friendship. However, Michelle radically misjudged Leroy and thus entered into a relationship of self-sacrifice that she interpreted as submission to divine Providence. According to her niece, she became the “victim of friendship” of this “false friend.”18 It would be a purgatory in this life for her. Marie-Catherine flatly accused Leroy of being a hypocrite whose ostentatious piety was a masquerade. “Devotion does not always drive out selfish motives,” as she put it.19 Her friend Marie-André echoed this judgment in a softer, ironic register, describing her aunt as being “in a lofty devotion.”20

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Education and Business Apprenticeship Although Andrée Douin continued to alternate with her granddaughter between Chevreuse and Paris, when she was in the capital, the two girls were in close proximity and shared exposure to Parisian life, devotional practices, and an informal apprenticeship in a thriving business. However, there were many differences in their upbringing. Michelle sought total control over her niece’s education, which she handled herself according to a strict daily schedule of prayer, reading of scripture, and recitation of lessons learned. Rather than send her charge to the parish school, she was Marie-Catherine’s primary instructor, and she only brought in a tutor to teach writing. “She decided that no one but she would teach me anything she could teach me herself.”21 Even when Marie-Catherine was prepared for her first communion, her aunt gained permission from the pastor of Saint-Eustache to do the instruction herself, rather than send the girl to the classes organized by the parish. We know less about the specifics of Marie-André’s upbringing under Andrée Douin. Writing in 1753 to Marie-Catherine, whose eldest daughter had just died, leaving an orphan girl, Marie-André consoled her friend by proposing that a grandmother can have more affection than a mother: “Grandmothers commonly raise maternal tenderness to a higher level. I remember with much joy and gratitude the great kindnesses that my grandmother, whom you met, had for me. Everything that she said for my wellbeing is so deeply engraved in my soul that I remember it with pleasure.”22 More than tender affection, her grandmother instilled in her abiding religious principles, as she said the preceding year.23 Douin’s holiness was recognized by those who knew her grandmother in Chevreuse. Marie-André’s Jesuit brother François-Xavier tells how as late as 1738, parishioners still held her in veneration, as he discovered when he visited the parish church of Saint Martin and read his breviary in the pew near the spot where she was buried.24 Marie-André must have shared her gratitude to her grandmother with her community of nuns because her successor Ursule-Marie des Anges featured it as well in her obituary letter: “This virtuous lady spared nothing to raise her in piety and innocence,” and the young girl considered her grandmother’s

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teaching and advice “a divine command.”25 While Marie-Catherine’s religious upbringing was shaped almost entirely by her aunt’s orientation, Marie-André was exposed to multiple influences: for example, parish life in Chevreuse and her Franciscan uncle Louis-François. She could have attended the parish school for girls in Chevreuse that had been founded in 1683.26 The teachers were local single women who banded together in a community under the supervision of the pastor without the formality of vows. The women were well-regarded by the Leroy family. Marie-Anne Leroy bequeathed a thousand livres to them in her 1702 will.27 Claire Hardy had been named mistress in 1687 and might well have been Marie-André’s teacher. Her Jesuit brother reported during his 1738 stay in Chevreuse that Marie-André’s memory was still alive when he visited the community: “I was invited by the pastor who has a special regard for you. I steal away every day for a few minutes to go to the community where I hear them speak of the favours that God has given my dear sister Sainte-Hélène.”28 Instruction in Chevreuse would have been rudimentary: reading, writing, and strong doses of catechism. In theory, the school was destined for poor girls of the parish. At some point, Marie-André’s grandmother boarded with the Filles de la Croix on the Rue SaintAntoine near the Place des Vosges. Besides accepting women boarders, they also ran a school that Marie-André could have attended, but she made no explicit mention of their classes when she alluded to her grandmother’s stay there in a letter to Hecquet in 1747.29 Marie-Catherine was explicit that her friend was not under Michelle Homassel’s direction at the Rue Saint-Honoré, but the two girls did see each other after lunch and supper for periods of about an hour that Marie-Catherine remembers as being devoted more to pleasure than to instruction.30 This might have included song sessions, because Marie-Catherine accused herself of having sung “naughty,” “bad” songs in the company of the young seamstresses. In a later devotional text, Marie-André would similarly, but without giving any specifics, accuse herself of having misused her voice by singing “songs and words that displeased and offended you [i.e. God].”31 Rather than just sell cloth and accessories made off-premises, as many members of her linen-drapers’ guild did, Leroy ran what might be seen as an embryonic fashion house. As Marie-Catherine reported, “Because her trade was extensive, she could not have managed it all, 24

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1.1 and 1.2 Although these plates of the Encyclopédie méthodique (1784) appeared almost hundred years after Duplessis worked in Marie-Anne Leroy’s shop, they evoke the atmosphere of the female guilds. Leroy was a linen-draper (lingère) who sold fabric, but who also employed seamstresses (couturières) to make apparel on-site.

if she had not found a person like my aunt to watch over the interior of her premises while she was doing business outside.”32 Rich clients came to the shop, and they were sometimes so taken by the young Marie-Catherine Homassel that they insisted she accompany them home for a visit. At other times Marie-Anne Leroy might ask the girl to come along when she called on clients in their homes. Her own niece Marie-André certainly participated in these activities, because Leroy eventually aspired to retire to a life of prayer and to leave her business to her niece. Andrée Douin would operate the business in the transition period until Marie-André was old enough to take charge.33 Leroy must have noted the young Duplessis’s potential as a businesswoman. The project collapsed when Marie-Anne Leroy quarrelled with her mother Andrée Douin, who apparently was much less acquiescing than Michelle Homassel. Leroy’s affection for her own niece Marie-André cooled, and in a surprising reversal, she decided to groom Marie-Catherine to take over the business. Michelle realized the inherent impossibility of such a scheme immediately. Jacques Homassel would certainly have other designs for his daughter. Moreover, the plan would not only increase tensions within the Leroy family, but would create problems between them and herself. True to her character, Michelle temporized instead of giving Leroy a flat refusal. Although she did not tell her niece about the plan, the girls might well have noted the shift in Leroy’s attentions, thus causing competition that could have endangered their friendship. Relations between Leroy and her mother became so inflamed that Andrée Douin left Paris for a country house she owned. Her other daughter, Marie Leroy, the mother of Marie-André, who had arrived in 1700 from Quebec, cut short her stay in France and returned with MarieAndré earlier than planned.34

Separation and Return to Parents It was not the quarrel over Leroy’s business that precipitated the girls’ separation, but the desire of their parents to reclaim them. Jacques Homassel had remarried for the third time in early 1697. He had two surviving children from his first marriage, Marie-Catherine herself and a boy who had been born a year after her. Marie-Catherine attributed 26

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her return to Abbeville in late 1699 at age thirteen to her father’s new wife, who wanted Jacques’s children restored to their father’s household.35 The fact that it was almost three years after the marriage that Jacques Homassel reclaimed his daughter suggests another reason. His business had prospered and he was thinking seriously about associating his children in the enterprise. His son was probably sickly, since he died in June 1700. His death left the adolescent Marie-Catherine as Jacques’s sole living child. She could provide a son-in-law. Marie-André would only leave for Canada in 1701.36 Jacques Homassel did not allow his daughter to return to Paris, so the girls probably did not see each other during the year and a half that Marie-André was still in the Paris area, although they may have corresponded. Nor do we know exactly what motivated the decision of Marie-André’s parents to reclaim her. Had they planned all along to bring her over to Canada, or had they concurred in MarieAnne Leroy’s project to pass her business to her niece and only changed their mind after the linen-draper quarrelled with the family? They might have not thought of their stay in Canada as permanent, and might have envisaged rejoining their daughter in France. Leaving their guardians behind was difficult for both girls, but especially traumatic for Marie-Catherine. Marie-Catherine did not return to a welcoming family, and she left a surrogate mother. Since Michelle had kept her isolated from other children, Marie-Catherine likely had an especially strong attachment to Marie-André, the one girl her age with whom she had had prolonged contact. This might have led her to idealize their friendship in retrospect. She records no other female friendships upon her return to Abbeville, nor, for that matter, during the course of her life. In Marie-André’s earliest known writing, the Histoire de Ruma, she described the pain of leaving her grandmother “who had raised her tenderly.” Leaving Paris for Canada also meant leaving behind “her country,” a country to whose “attractive features” she said she had become very much attached. However, she made a determined effort to hide her strong reluctance, aided by gratitude to her mother for the difficult trip that Marie Leroy had undertaken to come for her and the hope of seeing her father of whom she had heard so many good things. two girls’ friendship

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Not only did she regain loving parents, but she discovered a new soul mate. Her mother had brought along on the trip to France MarieAndré’s eight-year-old sister Geneviève, whom she had never seen. Marie-André said she was quickly linked in a “tight friendship” with her sister that she attributed to their sharing “a kind disposition,”37 just as Marie-Catherine had attributed her friendship with Duplessis to a harmony of temperaments. Their bond must have been strengthened by the close quarters they shared on the voyage across the Atlantic. Both sisters would eventually enter the Hôtel-Dieu, where they developed bonds of intimacy and collaboration such as Marie-André and Marie-Catherine might have done, had they not been separated.

Conclusion The years Marie-André and Marie-Catherine shared gave them a common store of memories and experiences that united them the rest of their lives. Each met the other’s family. In 1720, Marie-André specifically mentioned Jacques Homassel, his younger sister Élisabeth who lived for a time in Marie-Anne Leroy’s household, and Philippe Hecquet, a cousin of Marie-Catherine’s mother who was making a name for himself as a doctor in the 1690s.38 Their shared years made them both Parisians, even if MarieAndré spent the rest of her life in Quebec, and Marie-Catherine almost forty years raising a family in Abbeville before establishing herself definitively in Paris. As late as 1749, Marie-André could evoke her intimate knowledge of the city in trying to visualize where her friend had finally settled in the capital. “I seek you out in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in Saint-Germain, and in Saint-Honoré.”39 All her life she assiduously cultivated ties with her home country by maintaining multiple exchanges of letters and by engaging with travellers arrived from France. Her own family connections there, especially her Jesuit brother’s long residence in France, facilitated this access. Both rejected the ostentatious piety of Marie-Anne Leroy for the less showy devotion of their guardians, although Michelle’s brand was certainly more austere that that of Andrée Douin. MarieAndre’s description in 1747 of the comforts her grandmother had known while boarding at the Filles de la Croix would have seemed too soft for Michelle. “There were a number of well off ladies of all 28

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the better classes, even duchesses, who lived there, as if it was a tiny paradise. They visited each other as much as they wished; they prayed as much as their piety inclined them.”40 In neither case do the very divergent future religious affiliations of each girl stand out clearly. The Oratorians who directed Michelle steered clear of the Jansenist Port-Royal, and the connections Marie-Catherine had with Jansenistleaning individuals, such as her cousin Philippe Hecquet, were more familial than doctrinal. Likewise, there is no sign that Andrée Douin had any privileged connections with the Jesuits; her priest son Jean Leroy, in fact, became an outspoken Jansenist. Both girls were tapped in turn to take on the responsibility of Marie-Anne Leroy’s dress business on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Both observed closely how the enterprise was managed, and both had contact with the milieu of its wealthy customers. This supplemented the introduction to the ruling administrative elites that they had through their parents’ business affairs. Both fathers, for example, had dealings with ministers of the powerful Pontchartrain family who had authority over the colonies and internal trade.41 The tenacity, the financial acumen, and the spirituality that Marie-André and MarieCatherine would both display as adults owe much to the example of this trio of independent women.

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chapter

2

The Networks of an Enterprising Father and a Resilient Mother

Friends and Family In late March 1686, a year before Marie-André’s birth, about twenty friends and relatives gathered in the quarters of Andrée Douin on the Rue Saint-Honoré to sign the marriage contract of MarieAndré’s parents, Georges Regnard Duplessis (1657–1714) and Marie Leroy (1662–1732).1 The composition of the assembled guests and the stipulations of the contract reveal much about the networks that Georges and Marie would use to create for their children a comfortable situation among the bourgeois merchants and functionaries in Quebec during twenty-five years of stressful economic times in the colony, before their affairs began to unravel around 1710. None of the witnesses at the signing on the husband’s side was a family member, while all of Marie Leroy’s were. This is not surprising, since Georges Regnard came from Saint-Utin (Marne), a village in the Champagne region about twenty-three kilometres south of Vitry-le-François and two hundred kilometres east of Paris.2 He was a younger son, and his brothers and sisters remained in that region. Coming from Chevreuse, just south of Paris, Marie Leroy already had a sister and brother living in the capital who were present, along with an uncle and cousins.3

All of Georges’s witnesses are listed as “friends,” not intimate ones in the sense used in the last chapter, but in another meaning of the word common in this period. Such friends could include non-related supporters such as patrons and other allies, or working companions. Listed first among Georges’s “friends” was a major royal official, Gédéon Berbier du Metz, steward and general controller of the crown furniture and treasurer of the royal treasury.4 The Berbier du Metz family dominated the area of Champagne where Saint-Utin is located, and a younger brother of Gédéon seems to have held the title of seigneur de Saint-Utin. The wife or mother-inlaw of this younger brother was Georges’s godmother, in fact. The Regnards likely came from the group of prosperous farmers called “laboureurs” who had moved into minor, local administrative offices and were thus clients of the Berbier du Metz clan. Although Georges is not listed as such in the contract, he was probably a clerk in the royal treasury controlled by Gédéon, since the last two “friends” on the list of witnesses are identified as clerks there. Such patron-client networks, often overlapping with baptismal ties, oiled Ancien Régime society. The only witness on Marie Leroy’s side who approached the spheres of royal power was a cousin, Pierre Josse, who was secretary to Claude Le Peletier, the successor to Jean-Baptiste Colbert as controller-general of finances. The bride’s family brought greater financial capital to the union than the groom’s. Georges’s parents were deceased, and whatever his inheritance as a younger son might have been, the contract only specifies that he provided 200 livres of dower. The dower was an annuity promised to a widow if the husband died first. In comparison, his future brother-in-law Denis Leroy would promise 300 livres at his marriage a month later and indicated that the capital behind the annuity could be recuperated.5 As noted in the previous chapter, Andrée Douin also furnished a dowry of 7,000 livres and the promise of the farm near Limours. Moreover, no matter how close to royal power Georges’s witness friends might have been, surviving documents and letters do not indicate that they aided him once he was in Canada, while his wife’s matrilineal networks proved to be a resource for them there. In fact, if indeed Georges held a position in the royal treasury thanks to the Berbier du Metz connection, Pierre Josse likely

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played a role in his posting in 1689 to Canada. The patron of Pierre Josse was the controller-general Claude Le Peletier, who in turn was mentor and patron of Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, who became controller-general himself in 1689 and minister of the navy and colonies the next year.6 This made for a rather modest tie to the three generations of Pontchartrains who would have responsibility for New France between 1690 and 1748. However, in what Peter N. Moogk called “a society built upon networks of kinship and patronage,”7 Georges Duplessis’s family exploited this tie to the maximum.

A Father on the Make Georges Regnard sieur Duplessis arrived in Quebec in 1689 at age thirty-two, apparently as temporary agent of the treasurer general of the marine (the royal navy).8 The department of the marine had responsibility for the general administration of the colony, and its treasurer general for its finances.9 However, the treasurer general and his agents in the colonies were not government officials. The treasurer was a financier who bought his post from the king and served as something of a private banker to the state. The treasurer received funds from the government and disbursed them for authorized expenses, but during the interval, the funds were under his private control.10 At the time of Duplessis’s arrival in Canada, Jacques Petit de Verneuil occupied the position of representative or agent (commis) in Canada of the treasurer general in France, Louis de Lubert,11 and Duplessis likely served as Petit de Verneuil’s associate or deputy. Disbursals had to be authorized by the intendant, who was charged with the civil administration of the colony, and so the treasurer’s representative worked closely with this government official. Jean Bochart de Champigny was intendant during Duplessis’s first decade in the colony. The monies handled by the treasurer’s office in Quebec were substantial. The funds included those destined for the administration of the colony under the heading of the état du roi, for such expenses as building and maintaining fortifications, salaries of workers, soldiers, and government officials, purchase of supplies, and gifts to Indigenous allies. These sums averaged half a million livres a year around 1700.12

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Among the duties that fell to treasurer’s office in Quebec was issuing the so-called “playing-card money.” Specie was in short supply in the colony; very little coin made its way west across the Atlantic. The main source of hard currency was funds sent by the navy department for government expenditures. Not enough specie was available to the residents of Canada for purchasing supplies from France or for internal commerce. A first expedient was to increase arbitrarily the value of the coins in circulation in Canada by a quarter, creating a difference between the currency of France (monnaie de France) and currency of Canada (monnaie du pays).13 In the years just before Duplessis arrived, this shortage was compounded by delays in the arrival of government funds, and by funding that was insufficient to meet expenditures. This was particularly the case during wartime, and Duplessis’s arrival coincided with the beginning of the War of the League of Augsburg, which would last until 1697. Officials resorted to a second expedient: issuing promissory notes written on playing cards, signed by the agent of the treasurer of the marine and countersigned by the intendant and governor. Cards had to be used since there were no printing presses in Canada. The first cards were promptly redeemed when funds arrived from France, but as early as 1690, it became the practice to leave some cards in circulation without redeeming them, thus effectively increasing the money supply.14 In March 1690, a certain Pierre Malidor was sentenced to flogging for forging the signatures of Duplessis and Petit on counterfeit cards.15 Duplessis must have shown the business competence and diplomatic skills needed to please his superiors, because successive governors and intendants protected and promoted him. In 1693, the governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac served as godfather to his son Louis. The following year, the future governor’s wife, LouiseÉlisabeth de Joybert de Vaudreuil, stood as the godmother of his son François-Xavier.16 In 1696, Champigny proposed naming Duplessis superintendant of forests (grand maître des eaux et forêts).17 The same year, Frontenac granted him a seigneurial concession in Acadia, near the mouth of the Cocagne River on the Northumberland Strait, across from Prince Edward Island in present-day New Brunswick. In 1698, Champigny named him receiver of funds owed to the Admiralty in the case of two English vessels that had been captured.18

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Champigny’s successors as intendant, the father-and-son team of Jacques and Antoine-Denis Raudot, took a special liking to Duplessis and the whole family. Geneviève Duplessis reported in 1740, “We were especially close to Monsieur [Antoine-Denis] Raudot while he was in this country … He was intendant at Quebec and in this country with his father who had a great liking for our family and who could not spend a day without his coming to our home or our coming to his.”19 Jacques Raudot described Georges in 1705 as “very skilled and a good accountant” in a report to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, the minister of the marine.20 At the same time, Duplessis cultivated ties in devout circles. Duplessis’s “faithful friend” was Paul Dupuy de Lisloye.21 Because of his reputation for integrity and devotion, Champigny lured this pious military officer, who had come to Canada with the CarignanSalière regiment and married a descendent of the first colonist, from his manor on an island in the Saint Lawrence to become the king’s attorney in the provost’s court in Quebec. Once in Quebec, Dupuy was active in the Jesuits’ Congregation of the Virgin that attracted the colony’s pious elite, and served on the Poor Board (bureau des pauvres) that administered money gathered for beggars and the indigent. Duplessis moved in the same circles. He was chosen vice-prefect of the Jesuits’ Congregation in 1695,22 and in March 1698 he was named treasurer of the Poor Board, which also served as the administrators of the newly founded almshouse, the Hôpital-Général.23 Dupuy was admired for his integrity and impartiality in administering justice. However, Duplessis would not imitate his sacrifice of worldly affairs to piety. Dupuy died impoverished in 1713, having been forced to sell his holding on the Ile-aux-oies to settle his debts, including the 3,000-livre dowry of a daughter, Geneviève de la Croix, at the Hôtel-Dieu. His 500-livre annual salary from the king was simply not sufficient. There was nothing unusual about his situation. No official in the colonial service of the king could live on his government salary, and Dupuy seems to have been one of the few such officers who did not take advantage of their post to supplement their salary with private trading of some sort. Duplessis faced this challenge because his salary in 1711 only amounted to 1,200 livres.24 However, enterprise was directly embedded in his post, since he was not a government functionary but 34

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the representative of a private banker. Despite his piety, he did not remain aloof from the colony’s commercial networks. It was normal, in fact, for agents of the treasurers general in Quebec to be part-time merchants.25 Duplessis had a gift for seizing opportunities and for self-promotion that led him to take advantage of a number of business opportunities. Hence Guy Frégault’s assessment: “This bourgeois seigneur is ambitious.”26 Although the grant of the domain he had been given in Acadia in 1696 was revoked, three years later in 1699, he had amassed 5,500 livres, enough to buy the settled seigneurie of Lauzon across the Saint Lawrence from Quebec City.27 Lauzon was, in fact, the oldest seigneurie on the South Shore, and Duplessis immediately set out improving its management. In a litigious society, this meant lawsuits against tenants and the seller’s family, but he seems to have been an energetic and successful landholder. He had surveys done and built two mills, and defended his right as seigneur to have the pew of honour in the parish church of Saint Joseph. In 1706, the domain had 431 inhabitants.28 The 1712 description by the engineer and surveyor Gédéon Catalogne says that because of its proximity to Quebec, the parish’s residents were quite well off, and mentions the production of lime, as well as the harvest of grain, vegetables, eels, and salmon.29 Duplessis also was a partner in various ventures. In 1704, he invested in a group that sent privateers to pick off English shipping near Newfoundland; in 1712, he partnered with a businessman building a thirty-six-cannon warship in Quebec’s harbour. He began envisaging a role for himself in governing circles. Not shy about putting himself forward, in 1701, he proposed himself to the minister of the navy for one of two vacant seats on the Sovereign Council.30 That same year, when his fortune seemed on the rise, he also began sending lengthy proposals to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain for the economic development of the colony. At least four of them survive (1701, 1704, 1705, 1707) in whole or as summaries. The most revealing, according to Guy Frégault, suggested in 1704 changes in the colony’s political structure that would give greater voice to its residents. Duplessis proposed an assembly of notables that would meet weekly; one section would generate general policy and a second chamber would decide particular issues. He presented himself as spokesman for those who believed that only the colony’s an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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own inhabitants could properly insure the smooth flow of commerce: “Sustaining the commerce of this colony is impossible as long as it is not handled directly by the persons who make it up, because of the colony’s paucity of resources.” His dream was that such an assembly would go beyond the narrow self-interest of individuals and form “together a single body, a single spirit, and have the same views to maintain among themselves a community of peace, union, and understanding.”31 Duplessis proposed himself as a member of a threeperson committee charged with executing the assembly’s decisions in conjunction with the intendant and governor. Beyond his personal ambition, according to Frégault, Duplessis was really speaking for the members of the upper classes, especially the bourgeois, who were engaged in international commerce and government administration, and who were dissatisfied with their relative lack of influence on the Superior Council.32 Around 1701, when fortune smiled on Duplessis, complaints arose that he was profiting personally from his position. The king’s engineer Levasseur de Neré wrote Pontchartrain that Duplessis was in collusion with merchants (to whom he was loaning the treasury’s funds at 8 or 9 percent) to defraud workers who were forced to take part of their wages in goods instead of cash from these same merchants.33 It was also in 1701 that the hapless Company of the Colony that would eventually cause Duplessis much grief was organized.34 The fur trade was in disarray because of overproduction. Louis Guigues, the Parisian holder of the monopoly since 1697, was required to buy all fur that Canadians presented to him at a fixed price, but his warehouses in France were full of beaver that could not be sold to hatters. Canadian merchants were confident they could do a better job of managing the market than financiers in distant France, and they created the Company of the Colony. However, lack of access to capital, mismanagement, corruption, and, above all, continued poor market conditions led them to bankruptcy. In September 1705, to salvage the situation, the newly arrived intendants Jacques and Antoine-Denis Raudot took control of the company, installing their own choices as directors, one of whom was Duplessis. This new arrangement only lasted a year at the most, because a new syndicate based in France bought out the Company the following spring. Duplessis’s appointment crowned

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fifteen years of successive promotions and increasing responsibility in the financial and administrative circles of the colony due to his ability to make the networks of colonial governance work to his advantage. However, coping with the debts of the Company went on for decades and would lead to Duplessis’s undoing. Duplessis came under attack on two fronts in the affair. The first was the manner in which the Raudot team imposed him and his fellow director René-Louis Chartier de Lotbinière on the company.35 The second charge, the accusation that Duplessis used his position to cover certain personal debts, would long haunt him. In November 1706, the Raudots wrote that Duplessis “wanted to make the company responsible for a bankruptcy that had been inflicted on him by a merchant of this country.”36 When the Company’s books were examined, it was determined that he owed it 20,950 livres, which Jacques Raudot ordered Duplessis to pay.37 Duplessis, in turn, appealed to the king’s council in France, using his wife’s funds as security, and claimed that the Company owed him 14,000 livres.38 It may have been too late in the sailing season to gather all the documents to send to France for a speedy judgment, but Duplessis did have time to send Marie Leroy that November to lobby on his behalf before the papers’ arrival in France. She seems to have spent three years there.39 Whether or not it was due to her efforts, in June 1708 the minister wrote suspending the sentence for a year to allow for examination of the documents.40 During that time, Duplessis was able to reach an accommodation with the Company by which the counterclaims were cancelled, as Raudot announced to Pontchartrain in October 1708. Marie Leroy, who was in France at that time, wrote the minister asking him to confirm this compromise.41 It was accepted, grudgingly it seems, since the 6 July 1709 letter written in the name of the king stipulates that Duplessis “should think himself fortunate to get out of this business with the Company on such good terms.”42 Guy Frégault in his summary of the affair flatly accused Duplessis of “underhanded practices.”43 The accounts of the Company would be a matter of contention for many years, and this episode marks the turning point in Duplessis’s career, although he remained in the good graces of the Raudots and continued to be appointed an agent of the treasurer of the marine and the Western Domain.

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Duplessis’s Affairs Unravel In her second surviving letter to her friend Marie-Catherine Hecquet, Duplessis’s daughter dated the decline of the family fortunes to the fire on a frigid windy January night in 1713 that destroyed the palace of the intendant, located below the hospital in the lower town: “The unforeseen disaster of the palace created a huge breach in the wealth of our family.”44 Thus, it is hardly surprising that, of the four surviving accounts of the fire, Marie-André’s in the Annales is the longest and most vivid.45 The flames spread quickly, and although the intendant Michel de la Picardière Bégon and his pregnant wife escaped, three servants and the intendant’s secretary perished. Fifteen hundred livres of card money belonging to Bégon were destroyed, as well as records of the treasurer.46 As a consequence, Marie-André said that her father “believed himself obligated to sell a seigneurial domain that contained two parishes that he had in Canada to repay his Majesty.”47 Indeed, he sold the Lauzon seigneurie that included the parishes of Saint Joseph and Saint Nicolas to Etienne Charest fourteen months later on 28 March of the following year for 40,000 livres.48 The correspondence between the colonial authorities and the minister in France clearly shows that Duplessis’s situation had begun to unravel before the fire. In 1711, the minister sent word that further memoranda from Duplessis about the affairs of the Company of the Colony would be most unwelcome.49 In order to shore up his position with authorities in France, Duplessis requested a testimonial, which Vaudreuil duly sent Pontchartrain: “Duplessis has asked me to give you a report on his management. I can tell you that he fulfills his duties here in a way that satisfies everyone.”50 Nonetheless, that winter, auditors in France examined the accounts Duplessis had submitted covering the years 1707 through 1710. In November 1712, Nicolas Pinaud, who had the responsibility of cleaning up the Company of the Colony’s affairs, complained that Duplessis was resorting to obfuscation and delaying tactics. Instead of replying to the specific points that the auditors raised, Duplessis had written six long pages of “verbiage” that did not deal with the facts.51 The newly arrived intendant, Michel Bégon, wrote Pontchartrain that getting to the bottom of Duplessis’s accounts would be his priority for the coming

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months.52 Pontchartrain had had a warm relationship with Bégon and his father since 1696, and Bégon’s wife was related to the minister.53 Bégon, who was none too scrupulous, had just arrived in Quebec in the fall of 1712, and likely saw in Duplessis an easy mark. The treasurer had no powerful protector in France, and the Raudots, who had befriended him, had just left the colony. Marie-André certainly suggested as much when she said in 1720 that her mother “had to deal with a pitiless intendant, who, while piling on outward flattery, treated her in fact without humanity.”54 The correspondence between Bégon and the minister during 1713, after the fire, does not indicate that the fire itself impacted Duplessis’s status in any substantial way. In February 1714, Duplessis’s brother-in-law Denis Leroy, a lawyer in the Châtelet de Paris, wrote Pontchartrain on Duplessis’s behalf. According to the minister’s June 1714 reply, the intervention seems to have concerned funds that Duplessis claimed were due him from 1704 and 1707, but that Duplessis had not documented. The minister’s letter does not suggest that the missing records were lost in the fire.55 By June 1714, Duplessis himself had fallen so ill that he was unable to transact business with Bégon.56 The official record does not contain documents indicating that Duplessis had been ordered to make a reimbursement prior to the sale of Lauzon in March 1713. It could be that, with his health declining and having no adult male children, he wanted to liquidate his estate in advance of his death. Duplessis had always been in an untenable situation. 1690, the year after he was named to the post, marked the beginning of a period of permanent instability throughout the entire institution of the treasury of the marine caused by Louis XIV’s wars.57 Although an annual reconciliation of the books of the colonial treasurer was done each fall, truly balancing them was always impossible in a system where the treasurer general never sent enough money from France to cover expenses, where payments were made in merchandise instead of specie, where advances had to be made on funds that were never sent, and where the intendant put pressure on the agent to disburse money not authorized by the minister, not to mention the private dealings of the agent.58 A complete accounting was only possible at the death of an office-holder, and such accountings were always undertaken. When Jean Petit arrived in Quebec in 1701, he

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successfully sued the widow of his uncle, whom he replaced, for 30,000 livres that he claimed were missing. When he died in 1720, his own widow in turn would be held responsible for missing money. Duplessis died on 30 October 1714, and with his death, the ineluctable final examination of his books began. In Bégon’s letter of 12 November 1714 that announced Duplessis’s death to the minister, the intendant stated that he had not been able to do any business with Duplessis during the last five months of his life because of his illness. Duplessis had raised continual objections, instead of handing over the papers he held dealing with the bankrupt company and the playing-card money.59 Defending the estate and coping with any debts for which it might be held responsible fell to Marie Leroy.

A Resilient Widow At fifty-two, Marie Leroy found herself a widow. Besides fending off the investigation into her husband’s dealings, she had three sons to provide for, despite her reduced circumstances. François-Xavier was twenty, Joseph seventeen, and Charles-Denis ten. It was rare for widows in their fifties to remarry in Quebec at this time,60 and she had no network of blood relatives in Canada to rely on, as many widows had. Fortunately, she came from a family with a commercial and legal background in France that had enabled her to second her husband’s enterprises during his life. After his death, she used many of his strategies to fight off claims against his estate and see to the needs of her family. Marie Leroy’s marriage contract had given her substantial economic independence. Although she married according to the common regime of community property under which the husband managed the wife’s dowry, the farm that had come from her mother and 5,000 livres of the dowry funds are listed in the contract as lineage property (propres) of the bride. Lineage property did not enter into the marital community, and while the husband could administer it, he could not sell it without his wife’s permission.61 As early as 1700, a document indicates that Marie Leroy had gained even more control, since she is described as “séparée des biens.”62 This financial separation status allowed her to administer this property, although her husband’s agreement was needed to sell it. It also allowed her to 40

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serve as co-signer (caution) for her husband in his position in the treasurer’s office, which she did at least five times between 1706 and 1711 and during the investigation into the affairs of the Company of the Colony in 1707.63 Childrearing during her first decade in Quebec probably gave Marie Leroy little time to exercise her business sense. Pregnancies marked Leroy’s life in the interval between her arrival in Quebec in 1689 and her return to France in 1700 to retrieve Marie-André. Three of the six children born in quick succession during that period survived into adolescence: Marie-Joseph-Geneviève (7 February 1692), François-Xavier, the future Jesuit (13 January 1694), and Joseph (6 April 1697). Three died within months of their birth: Louis (1693), Nicolas-Joseph (1695), and Antoine-Louis (1699). Her last child, the prodigal Charles-Denis, was born on 22 June 1704, following her return from France.64 Georges Duplessis had had the good sense to use his wife’s lobbying skills. Her letter to Pontchartrain in 1709, when her husband was accused of wrongdoing, has already been mentioned. Apparently, she also lobbied him during her earlier 1700–01 trip to France. In a draft of a 1747/48 letter to Jean-Frédéric de Maurepas, the son and successor of Pontchartrain, Geneviève recounted how her mother had taken her to perform Indigenous dances for Madame Pontchartrain’s amusement. “This virtuous lady took pleasure at her dressing table having me sing and dance like a savage … Canadians were at that time considered something strange in France.”65 Marie Leroy had no qualms about using her daughter as bait in her lobbying. More importantly, she recognized the usefulness of wife-to-wife lobbying. Éléonore de La Rochefoucauld-Roye often advised her husband Jérôme de Pontchartrain on appointments, and, in fact, the women of the Pontchartrain clan played an active role in the networking that made that family so powerful.66 With the seigneurie of Lauzon lost even before Georges Duplessis’s death, Marie Leroy and her three surviving boys found themselves in much reduced straits in 1714, but not impoverished. In fact, her husband left Marie Leroy a comfortable home in the upper city that Marie-André described in 1720 as “one of the most beautiful houses in Quebec.” Situated on the Côte de la Fabrique near the cathedral, it had a fine garden, and there was a nearby orchard,67 and the 1716 census lists Marie Leroy as having a twenty-two-year-old servant.68 an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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2.1 Anonymous portrait of “Saint Helena, Empress,” the wife of Constantine the Great. Marie Leroy declared in her will that her Jesuit son had sent this portrait, and she requested that it go to Marie-André, who bore the saint’s name as a nun.

Her two oldest children, Marie-André and Marie-Joseph-Geneviève, were safely established as nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu. Geneviève had just professed, in fact, in July 1714. Marie Leroy’s 1731 will mentions two family paintings she owned that passed to her daughter MarieAndré after her death. One is a portrait of her Franciscan great-uncle Louis-François. The other depicts Saint Helen the Empress, an allusion to the name in religion of her elder daughter.69 The oldest boy, François-Xavier, who sailed for France in October 1716 to enter a Jesuit novitiate, is not listed in the census. He would never return to Canada. The middle son, Joseph, was present with his mother in the 1716 census, but is mentioned nowhere else after that date. J.-Edmond Roy surmises that he died shortly thereafter, since he does not figure in his siblings’ letters.70 Only Charles-Denis remained to be provided for. He left for France in 1719 to study at the Jesuit college at La Flèche. Paying for his studies was an issue. Shortly after his arrival, his Jesuit brother in 1721 reassured his mother than the investment in her son’s education was sound.71 Two years later, he reassured her that the expenses had only amounted to 400 livres a year, even though his priest uncle Jean Leroy had used saving money as an excuse to have Denis move to Paris where he could be an extern at Louis-le-Grand while living with his Parisian uncle, Denis Leroy.72 Charles-Denis would insist on a military career despite the reservations of his brother, who argued in 1723 that Charles-Denis did not have the financial resources for a profession that paid so little. The Jesuit hoped that a more bureaucratic job, such as their father had held, could be found for him in Quebec.73 In 1719, probably anticipating her youngest son’s return from France, Marie Leroy established allowances to provide petty expenses for her three remaining children in religion: 100 livres for the Jesuit and 75 each for the two nuns, “in order to provide for their urgent needs without anything being required by the superiors or other religious members of their convents or monasteries.”74 She renewed these funds as bequests in her 1731 will.75 In August 1736, after her death, her daughters initiated legal action against those who held the funds in trust because payments were not being made regularly.76 To raise money, Marie Leroy began selling off lots that her husband had left in the upper town on Saint Joseph, Saint Joachim, and an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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Saint Flavien Streets as early as 1715, in some cases taking annual payments instead of the full purchase price. The sales were approved by Charles Guillimin, a wealthy merchant, who was named to safeguard the interests of her minor children.77 In addition, she had a small income from annuities (rentes) on the Paris Hôtel de Ville that had been left her by her sister and an uncle. The value of such investments would be reduced by the devaluation of currency after the bankruptcy of John Law’s bank and the Mississippi Company. Finally, she inherited property in Limours that her daughter reports brought her next to nothing. This income would not have been sufficient to live on, according to Marie-André in 1720, but her mother supplemented it by selling items she had sent each year from France. This kind of small-scale resourcefulness permitted her to live in a certain modest comfort.78 While Marie Leroy was providing for her children, the investigation into her husband’s finances proceeded. By 1719, she had to deal with claims that were being made against his estate. Her Jesuit son, looking back on this period two years later, went so far as to call the family’s situation at this time “desperate.”79 However, she was aided by the fact that around 1712, the Lanoullier de Boisclerc brothers, first Nicolas and then Jean-Eustache, who had loose ties to her family, arrived to take posts in the same financial circles in which Georges Duplessis had operated.80 In 1720, Nicolas would be named to the same position, clerk of the treasurer of the marine, that Georges had held, and Jean-Eustache was early on a controller of the marine. They were probably related to Marie Leroy as cousins-by-marriage in some degree.81 Their tie to the Duplessis family was thus rather weak, but the Lanoulliers were their only family of any sort in Canada. In November 1719, by request of Jean-Eustache Lanoullier de Boisclerc, Marie Leroy’s husband’s estate was ordered to surrender 10,339 livres in card money that was owed the king.82 The next day she appealed, countering that her husband had never been reimbursed for an advance of 9,455 livres that he had made to Antoine Laumet de La Mothe de Cadillac in the early 1700s for the post the adventurer had founded at Detroit.83 An accounting made a few days later credits Duplessis’s estate with having reimbursed 18,567 livres.84 The next month, on 21 December, she signed Jean-Eustache’s marriage

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contract as a cousin. There is thus likely some connivance between the two in the matter of the 10,339 livres. These manoeuvres show her using the same strategies to delay a reckoning that her husband had used and that she had seconded – claims and counterclaims and the cooperation of relatives. As was the case in the response of Pontchartrain to her brother Denis Leroy’s 1714 letter on behalf of her husband, often her claims were not backed up with documentation. A year and a half before her death, she appealed to the minister for payment for arms saved from the Walker shipwreck back in 1711 that she said the departing intendant Dupuy had promised her in 1728. When the current intendant Gilles Hocquart looked into the matter, he reported that he would gladly pay her, even though the weapons were useless, if she could produce a proper written agreement for the sale.85 And just as she and her husband had always done, she tried to win the protection of the powerful, even the intendant Bégon, who according to Marie-André was pitiless toward her mother. Her daughter narrated her mother’s brush with death in July 1720 when she drove out in a carriage about two kilometres outside the capital in a welcoming party to greet the intendant and his wife, who were returning from Montreal. The horse pulling her carriage became winded on a steep hill, and the widow threw herself out of the door just in time. She rolled 250 feet down the embankment, but without serious injury.86 For the nun, a miracle had saved her mother from death, but the incident also shows Marie Leroy’s efforts to court the intendant by participating in the welcoming cavalcade. Marie-André provides the best overall view of her finances in an October 1720 letter to Hecquet: “Since the death of my father my mother has accounted for 1,200,000 livres to the king.”87 This sum would represent card money and finances of the Company of the Colony over many years. Marie-André totalled the payments made by her mother at that date at 45,000 livres, a substantial sum, but not the million livres that is sometimes cited by historians, who take the total sum accounted for as the amount paid by the estate. Her Jesuit brother, all the while rejoicing that as religious he and his sisters were protected from such worldly concerns, attributed his mother’s escape from complete bankruptcy to divine protection. She held on to the

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2.2 The Duplessis residence was near the corner of the present Rue de la Fabrique and Rue Sainte-Famille. It looked out across this square toward the Jesuit college with its attached church. Richard Short made this view in the wake of the 1759 shelling of the town, but it evokes the urban landscape the Duplessis family knew well.

family house itself and passed it on to Charles-Denis. The 1744 census lists him residing there with his wife, daughter, and Indigenous slave.88 The house would remain in his possession until 1757.89 Marie Leroy’s last years were marked by declining health. In a 1720 letter Marie-André describes her mother as becoming so infirm that she postponed a projected trip to France where her two sons were studying and where she wanted to attend to her holdings. By mid-June 1731, she could no longer live at home, even with the help of three attendants. It was common for widows to turn to their lay daughters and sons-in-law in such circumstances,90 and she did so in a sense when her daughters placed her in a room in their hospital that was usually reserved for military officers. An enslaved Indigenous woman who had been in her service for some time accompanied her. As far back as 1720, her daughter had reported that neither her age nor her illness had dampened her feisty temper. At the beginning of her stay at the Hôtel-Dieu, her pains were so intense that her outbursts were frequent. She suffered from asthma that resulted in uncontrollable fits of coughing, insomnia, legs so swollen from fluid that they burst, and rheumatism that prevented her from using her hands.91 Her Jesuit son urged her to offer her pain up as if she were a martyr: “Let us suffer submissively, in the spirit of patient endurance; let us live and die, as God wills, as martyrs of patience.”92 Several months before her death in April 1732, after ten months of hospitalization, the unedifying outbursts ceased. According to her daughter, she did eventually accept her suffering as submission to Providence.93 Like many pious residents of Quebec, Marie Leroy requested burial in the cemetery of the poor of the hospital as a sign of humility. In an era when most widows had to turn to some male,94 Marie Leroy had maintained her independence on her own terms.

Conclusion The success of a family’s head in mobilizing all the capital available, human and financial, can have far-reaching consequences for his children. Georges Regnard Duplessis started with modest resources at the disposal of his considerable ambition. Superiors quickly recognized his diligence and competence and offered him promotions, and he an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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was skillful in seeking out the ear and protection of government authorities. Yet, when he died in 1714, his widow Marie Leroy spent the rest of her life dealing with his creditors. When he accepted the position with the treasury of the marine in 1689, he could not have known that the institution would shortly lose its stability. Moreover, the Canadian colonial economy dominated by one industry – an industry in decline because of oversupply – offered limited potential for enrichment. Only the largest outfitters in the fur trade operating out of Montreal could hope for riches. Duplessis had to cast about for investment opportunities. Not that he would have been better off to be fully in the king’s service, as were military officers or the intendant. They too had to supplement their salaries with expedients. Duplessis’s multiple business ventures were made in hope of striking it rich. However, this dispersal of his attention may have played a part in their mediocre results. Duplessis sought out pious friends such as Paul Dupuy, willingly took on responsibilities such as the Poor Board, and used his office to aid the Hôtel-Dieu. His daughter Marie-André reserved this high praise for him in the annals: Georges Duplessis declared that “he had never tasted a more perfect joy in this world than when he brought relief to someone.”95 Did she want to excuse his lack of financial success? In sum, what is surprising is not that Duplessis left his widow in difficult financial straits, given Canada’s hostile economic climate, but that he had such a good run over twenty-five years. Marie Leroy did not seem to share her husband’s intense piety, but she was an able partner in his affairs. Having independent income that she could control allowed her to serve as a guarantor of Georges’s position with the treasury of the marine, and she lobbied for him in France. After his death, she managed the urban property and unresolved claims on his accounts with all the skill with which other widows managed seigneuries or business ventures left by more prosperous husbands. Nonetheless, she died with debts that her executor and principal heir, her son Charles-Denis, was slow to pay, according to his Jesuit brother.96 The legacy of Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy was multiple. All four surviving children were tightly loyal to each other. This was particularly necessary since they had no family clan in Canada to provide support. The youngest son, Charles-Denis, had 48

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his father’s ambition to enter the seignieurial class, but not his work ethic. Of the four, the two daughters especially inherited their parents’ entrepreneurial spirit and networking skills. While Charles-Denis seems to have had no more than the rather conventional piety of his mother, the two daughters and oldest son shared their father’s Jesuit spirituality with its strain of service to others.

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chapter

3

Spiritual Mothers and Friends: Seeking the Peace of the Lord in Hospitality After Marie-André Duplessis’s death in January 1760, her successor, Ursule-Marie Chéron des Anges, highlighted her sustained calm, despite the multitude of challenges of her last decade: “All these various trials only served to enhance her strength, her equanimity, and her perfect resignation to the will of God.”1 Death notices, such as the one Chéron wrote, highlight the ideal, and Duplessis’s correspondence during the 1759 siege of Quebec shows her prey to anxiety and fear. Her equanimity was always fragile, and this chapter traces Duplessis’s search for the peace of the Lord. It begins with the women who served as her models at the Hôtel-Dieu, her own days as a novice, and how she guided novices when she became a spiritual mother in her own right. Her early “temptation” was to seek peace in a form of the religious life that was incompatible with her status as a hospitaller. Her friendship with her sister could provide a refuge from the tension between her quest for peace and the incessant demands of her role as a hospital administrator, but this required dealing with her order’s strictures against having particular friends.

The Father’s Path into the Hôtel-Dieu When Marie-André arrived in Quebec in 1701 with her sister Geneviève and mother Marie Leroy, she met her two brothers, four-year-old Joseph

and seven-year-old François-Xavier, along with her father. Georges Regnard Duplessis was in many ways at the height of his career during the six years between his daughter’s arrival from Paris and her entry into the Hôtel-Dieu in July 1707. He had recently purchased the seigneurie of Lauzon, enjoyed the favour of the intendants, and had been named as agent of the Company of the Colony, although signs of his fall were already appearing. Through him, his daughter had access to the highest administrative circles in the capital. She signed the parish registry at baptisms as godmother along with members of the elite: in 1704 with the son of the governor, and in 1705 with Jean Petit, the treasurer of the marine.2 She attended ceremonies for visiting Indigenous dignitaries.3 According to her 1760 death notice, none of these worldly activities, nor the flattering attention that she drew, deflected her from a path into the Hôtel-Dieu: “She was admired by everyone in this town because of her distinguished look, her modesty, and her piety. God had given her the advantages of physical beauty and great intelligence. She served as a model to all the young ladies who felt themselves fortunate to be in her company. Having so many rare traits, she was sought out by several individuals of standing, but her love of God led her to refuse these offers. Never was her heart divided or attached to any creature.”4 In the Quebec of 1707, what Marie-André could not do was enter a contemplative order devoted exclusively to prayer and mortification, such as the Carmelites or Feuillantines. The king only authorized orders with a service mission in Canada. However, four groups of women religious were available in the colony’s capital, three of them cloistered. The Congrégation Notre-Dame had been present in the capital only since 1686, when Marguerite Bourgeoys had established a Providence of the Holy Family in a house in the upper city at the invitation of future Bishop Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrière de Saint-Vallier. It was a school for girls too poor for the Ursulines, where they received rudimentary elementary education, religious instruction, and training in household skills over the course of a year.5 Several years later Saint-Vallier tried to add the care of invalids to these duties of the Congrégation, but he soon realized that the two responsibilities were incompatible. Marguerite Bourgeoys’s Congrégation was much like a group of religious Marie-André had known in France, those who taught spiritual mothers and friends

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in the parish school in Chevreuse: uncloistered, taking only simple vows, linked to service in a particular parish.6 While it would not have been impossible for the daughter of the seigneur of Lauzon to become a “daughter of the parish” as a Congrégation member, it would have required a singular attraction to a teaching vocation to join a group that recruited largely among habitant and artisan families. The Congrégation’s base was Montreal, and its outpost in Quebec was not a monastery but a house that sheltered a small group of members. In 1701, the head of the Quebec group wrote that there were ordinarily five or six sisters teaching more than a hundred girls.7 The nuns of the Hôpital-Général formed the newest group. Nothing could deter Saint-Vallier from his dream of an almshouse under his direction. When the sisters of the Congrégation could not manage the care of invalids in addition to their teaching duties, he requested a detachment of hospital nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu. After much resistance, a contingent of four nuns was sent in 1693 to the new house that he founded just outside the town along the Saint Charles River in buildings he had purchased from the Recollets. Until 1701, these nuns remained under the nominal control of the Hôtel-Dieu, but as it became clearer that more nuns would be needed in the new establishment, Saint-Vallier forced the hand of the Hôtel-Dieu community as well as the civil authorities in France by organizing elections and taking in novices. A royal order officially separated the two communities. In 1707, only three of the nuns who had come from the Hôtel-Dieu were still alive, including their guiding spirit, Louise Soumande de Saint-Augustin. The others, including novices, were young recruits who had joined the community in the preceding nine years.8 Initially there had been great opposition among decision-makers in Quebec to Saint-Vallier’s vision, although by 1707 much of it had dissipated, according to the annals of the Hôpital-Général.9 Numerous city leaders would have preferred that the Poor Board, composed of laymen under the direction of a priest, continue to provide for indigents without building an institution, or that, if such an institution were created, it would remain under lay control. Furthermore, support for the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in their quarrel with the bishop was strong. It is likely that Georges Duplessis shared these views. His friend Paul Dupuy had two daughters at the Hôtel-Dieu, and he had relinquished his post as treasurer of the Poor Board to Duplessis 52

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3.1 Map of city showing major religious institutions and Duplessis residence: (1) the Hôtel-Dieu, (2) the Hôpital-Général, (3) the Ursulines, (4) the Jesuit college and church, (5) the approximate site of the Duplessis home, (6) the Seminary, (7) the Palace of the Intendant.

in 1698.10 If Marie-André had entered the Hôpital-Général in 1707, she would have found her tasks as a hospital nun much the same as those at the Hôtel-Dieu. However, it would have been a much smaller, younger group, under the controlling hand of its bishop founder. The Ursulines would have provided a suitable fit for a woman of Marie-André’s talent and background. Although devoted to teaching like the Congrégation, they were quite different. Whereas Bourgeoys’s group had only been approved in 1669 and had fought off attempts by Saint-Vallier to impose solemn vows as late as 1698, the Ursulines had been in their cloister in Quebec since 1639. Their school catered to the better-off segments of society, and their recruits included girls from the governmental and economic elite. In 1700, there had been around twenty-nine professed nuns and novices in the cloister, sixty or so boarders, and more day students.11 If Marie-André turned toward the Hôtel-Dieu instead of the Ursulines, it is likely because of ties that her father already had with that house. Paul Dupuy had introduced Georges Duplessis to the hospital, and for twenty-five years Duplessis “never let a chance to do us a favour pass without throwing himself into it whole heartedly,” according to the annals. His pleasure was to aid the nuns: he gave them advances on money owed by the king, facilitated drafts on accounts in France, and loaned them money without interest.12 Marie-André entered the Hôtel-Dieu during a glory period for its novitiate in terms of recruitment. Between 1703 and 1712, the Hôpital-Général received nine postulants, the Ursulines thirteen, and the Hôtel-Dieu thirty-one.13 Nine of these recruits belonged to the upper classes,14 a slightly higher percentage than either at the Ursulines or at Saint-Vallier’s almshouse.15 A new monastery wing had just been added to the Hôtel-Dieu in 1695–98 so that the community was comfortably lodged. When Marie-André entered it, the community of the Hôtel-Dieu was the largest, numbering about forty-five, including novices.16 Marie-André began her novitiate on 2 July 1707. Her parents promised a 3,000-livre dowry, payable before profession. Five months later, on 9 December, the chapter voted unanimously to receive her as a choir nun, and she was clothed on 3 January 1708 by Joseph de La Colombière, canon of the cathedral and vicar general of the diocese, and took the name Sainte-Hélène. Her mother could not 54

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have attended this second ceremony. She had left for France in November to support her husband’s appeal against the order that he repay the Company of the Colony. The head of Jesuit missions in Canada, Vincent Bigot, preached and reminded the novice that since a nun is wed to the cross, she should not be surprised if it weighed down on her.17

Spiritual Mothers Unlike those novices who might have had trouble adapting to their new state, Marie-André found satisfaction in conforming to convent life. Her death notice declared that obedience was a pleasure for her, as were all the observances prescribed by the rule. Her many talents came to the fore, among them her skill in making liturgical ornaments. There was nothing acerbic in her manners; her conversation was pleasing, and she was considerate of others. Although the preceding assessment of her time as a novice comes from her 1760 obituary letter, written fifty years after her novitiate, its author is Marie-Ursule Chéron, who joined her there as a novice and succeeded her as mother superior.18 Perhaps her only character trait that the letter does not mention is her tenacity, which could include, when needed, a touch of defiance. However, Marie-André encountered no obstacles during her probationary period to awaken this spirit, and obedience is a more fitting virtue in any case to highlight in a novice. On 1 December 1708, the chapter voted to accept her into the community, and she made her profession on 8 January 1709. The woman who had the deepest impact on Duplessis’s formation during her first twenty years at the Hôtel-Dieu was its grande dame. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté de Saint-Ignace came from one of the oldest Canadian families on both her mother’s and father’s sides. She was a link between the Hôtel-Dieu’s French foundresses and their New World successors. She entered the community with a precocious vocation at the age of twelve as a boarder under the influence of her aunt, Marie-Françoise Giffard de Saint-Ignace, the first Canadian hospitaller. Unlike Marie-André, she had to overcome the resistance of her mother, who would have preferred to see her eldest daughter marry. Her novice mistress had been Marie-Catherine Simon de Longpré de Saint-Augustin, who reported fighting off the demons spiritual mothers and friends

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3.2 This anonymous portrait of Duplessis’s mentor, JeanneFrançoise Juchereau de la Ferté de Saint-Ignace, was perhaps made during her last terms as mother superior from 1711–17. She died in 1723 at age seventy-two.

who were tempting her charge to abandon her vocation. Longpré illustrates a mystical spirituality marked by the extraordinary: apparitions, personal revelations of future events, physical objects set in motion by demons, etc. Jeanne-Françoise’s aunt, mother, and the Jesuit martyr Jean de Brébeuf all appeared to Longpré at JeanneFrançoise’s profession in 1666, according to Longpré’s own reports.19 Jeanne-Françoise herself never claimed to have experienced Catherine’s intense mystical connection with the divine, or to have been visited by visions. However, she did share the belief that God reveals the future to chosen souls and that divine forces can manifest themselves physically. Catherine de Saint-Augustin had inhabited a private world of saints and martyrs who appeared to her in visions, but whom she mentioned only to her confessor. Jeanne-Françoise’s stress was on external community devotions. She introduced ceremonies into the annual life of the community in honour of the Sacred Heart of Mary and Saint Joseph, devotions that were being popularized in France at this time. Likewise, Marie-André would be concerned with the same sort of institutionalized piety: gaining indulgences for the hospital chapel or properly displaying relics sent from Rome. Juchereau was also the first Canadian mother superior of the house, and she passed on to Marie-André her robust defence of its interests. She would be elected seven times beginning at age thirtythree and serve twenty-four years. She was first named vice-superior at twenty-six in 1676 to aid Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité, who would later be accused of having given in too readily to the demands of Bishop Laval.20 Such a charge could never be brought against Jeanne-Françoise, who opposed Bishop Saint-Vallier’s plans to staff the Hôpital-Général with nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu in the 1690s with so much effectiveness that he forbade the community to elect her vice-superior in 1699. Her strategy was multi-pronged. She made respectful but firm representations of her views to the bishop. She marshalled support among the elite of Quebec, including the intendant and former bishop François de Laval, sent her own memoranda to the minister in Versailles to counter those of Saint-Vallier, and attempted to win the sympathy of other houses of the order in France. Finally, she strove to maintain the internal cohesion of her community, since Saint-Vallier had won over some of the sisters to his plans. Her obituary letter stresses her “admirable equanimity.”21 spiritual mothers and friends

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Her concern for the community was global. She maintained an extensive correspondence with monasteries in France and cordial relations with the Ursulines fifteen minutes away. She undertook the construction of the new monastery in the late 1690s. In 1711, seeing the need for a property near Quebec that could produce income and farm supplies, she bought the Ile-aux-oies in the Saint Lawrence north of the Ile d’Orléans and invested dowry money to upgrade facilities there. Juchereau’s talents had been recognized early, and she had been initiated into administrative responsibilities while only in her twenties. In her old age, Juchereau singled out Marie-André, whom she appointed her secretary within a few years of her profession. In this post, the young Marie-André would have been an administrative assistant who learned firsthand the affairs of the community. She also entrusted to Marie-André the task of redacting the Annales to insure that the spiritual fervour she had known in the foundresses would live on in her younger charges. The intense affection and respect that the young nun felt for Juchereau come through in the obituary letter that Marie-André likely wrote about her mentor,22 even though the letter was signed by the superior of that time, MarieGeneviève Dupuy de la Croix. Marie-André’s own career is in many ways a transposition of Jeanne-Françoise’s piety and defence of the Hôtel-Dieu into new circumstances.

Cantate Domino canticum novum: The Musique spirituelle of the New Novice Mistress Juchereau had been elected novice mistress at age thirty. Duplessis became a spiritual mother in her own right when she was selected for the same post at thirty-one in March 1718. The choice is not surprising, since she is said to have been a model for other novices when she was one herself.23 Six postulants and novices either began or finished their probation period during her three years in office. They ranged in age from fourteen and a half to twenty at the time of their entrance. In spring 1719, her brother François-Xavier scolded her because he had learned of her new responsibility from a third party, and offered stern advice on how she should handle her new charges: 58

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“They are spouses who must be shaped for Jesus Christ; thus nothing terrestrial or unworthy of this divine union must be allowed in the formation that they are given … let us beware particularly of human prudence.”24 His tone is heavy-handed, if not patronizing, coming from someone seven years younger and less than three years into his own training as a Jesuit. In fact, by the time he had written his letter, his sister had composed a short text that was likely intended at least in part for her charges and that mixes the secular and the religious in a way that her brother might have found frivolous.25 The Musique spirituelle is an allegory that finds equivalents for monastic spirituality in various points of contemporary music theory and practice. A musicologist has called it “the first treatise on the theory and practice of music to have been undertaken in North America,”26 but it treats music as only a means to a spiritual end. The music in question is not monastic plainchant, but is written in the worldly vein of composers such as André Campra and Marc-Antoine Charpentier, whose motets the nuns adapted and performed. The Hôtel-Dieu’s lively and informed musical culture allowed Duplessis to find spiritual parallels for such fundamental notions as keys, scales, and notes, but also for more sophisticated Baroque vocal ornaments, such as glides, trills, and syncopation.27 Pleasure is her self-avowed method. In the dedicatory letter to Marie-Madeleine Dupuy de la Nativité, she praises the young nun for having already mastered the substance of the treatise, leaving the author with only the hope to entertain her. In the preface, she asserts that since music is a pleasing art, she trusts that those in the religious life will joyfully assimilate the “spiritual music” she proposes. The spiritual music that she describes surveys the whole range of monastic life, with more stress on spiritual development than on rules and regulations. Yes, it is necessary to study normative documents such as the order’s rule and constitutions, but that is because these texts promote virtue. She notes the need for regularity (observance of the rule) and obedience to superiors throughout, but she lauds flexibility as well: “Just as vocal flexibility is admired and greatly pleases the ear, in the same way, in this music, faithfulness in following up on inspirations and taking advantage of all opportunities to make progress is enchanting and is so profitable that with that one can become holy in very little time.”28 Monastic civility, the need to spiritual mothers and friends

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cultivate harmonious relations among sisters, is promoted: “sweet and kind words that sustain charity.”29 The particular institute of the hospitallers is a leitmotif: the five vows (enclosure and hospital service, in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience); the mixed life that combines active service and contemplation; and the stress created by night watches in the hospital wards. The vision emerges of a religious life that does not shirk from the ascetic – mortification, contempt for the world, penitence, etc. – but promises “the solid, uninterrupted joy that one enjoys by fulfilling all one’s duties, joy that makes virtue easy, giving it a lustre and a brilliance that makes one love it.” She adeptly compares this lustre to “a sustained closing trill.”30 The Musique spirituelle is proposed for the community generally, not just for the novices, but it would be especially appropriate for them. By using music as a springboard for monastic instruction, it combines the training the novices were receiving in singing religious texts with spiritual growth. It summarizes the key points the novices should master about life in the convent, from advice on how to behave at recreation and in the parlour to the primordial importance of developing a fervent prayer life. Beginning with the premise that in itself “music is a very pleasing thing,” so pleasing in fact that many learn it despite its difficulties,31 this short work presents the spiritual life in the monastic world as a superior form of music that is especially inviting and attractive. It lives up to its epigraph: “Cantate Domino canticum novum” – “Sing to the Lord a new song.”

A Particular Friendship: Sisters Bound More by Inclination than by Blood The Constitutions of the Augustinian sisters, like those of all female orders, contained a solemn warning against particular friendships with other members of the community, especially relatives.32 Teresa of Avila’s strictures in the Way of Perfection are typical: “For the love of the Lord, refrain from making individual friendships, however holy, for even among brothers and sisters such things are apt to be poisonous and I can see no advantage in them.”33 Attachments to humans interfered with the goal of uniting with Christ. On a more practical level, besides the unspoken fear of homosexual relationships, close ties between individuals could lead to cabals against the 60

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superiors and cliques that divided the community. Teresa had limited, in fact, the number of nuns in each convent of reformed Carmelites to around a dozen in the hope of forestalling such problems. Large communities with a limited recruiting pool, such as the Hôtel-Dieu, however, often included many family members. In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, when Marie-André and Geneviève joined the community, two sisters apiece from the Chéron, Tibierge, Fornel, and Corriveau families also entered. Marie-André herself was close to several members of her generation. In fact, she seems to have allied herself with one particular friend to coax an even closer one into the monastery. The other novice, who entered the monastery in 1707 with Duplessis, was Marie-Élisabeth Lemoyne de Longueuil, born in 1684 to an illustrious Montreal family. In 1711, she joined Marie-André to send Geneviève Duplessis a short text designed to encourage her to become a hospitaller with them. Marie-André and her sister had bonded during their passage together from France, and Geneviève had spent three years as a boarder in the monastery in 1707–10 during her mother’s trip to France.34 Entitled the Histoire de Ruma, the text is written out in MarieAndré’s hand, and she was likely its principal author. It recounts Geneviève’s life using biblical names in place of family ones to show that everything destined her for life as a nun. Not only is Geneviève’s piety exemplary, her temperament is even-handed, and she has mastered Latin so well that she has translated the New Testament. Somewhat of a tomboy, she enjoyed horseback riding and shooting guns. After her three-year stay as a boarder in the convent, which strengthened her bond with her older sister, Geneviève continued to practise the devotions she had learned there, despite being accused of hypocrisy.35 Her talents and charms attracted suitors, according to the death notice Marie-André composed in 1756: “She had natural charms that made her stand out in society; she was sought after and pursued with such persistence that people of virtue feared that she would give in to it. However, this made her resolve to leave the world behind.”36 The 1711 appeal of Marie-André and Marie-Élisabeth was not immediately successful, but Geneviève did enter the Hôtel-Dieu as a novice in January 1713. She could not join Marie-Élisabeth there, as that nun had died in December 1711, one of seven nuns who spiritual mothers and friends

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died while nursing victims of an epidemic. Geneviève replaced her in a sense, since she took Marie-Élisabeth’s name in religion, “de l’Enfant-Jésus.” When Geneviève died in May 1756, her sister described them as being more united “by inclination than by blood” in the obituary letter that she wrote. As she had explained to Hecquet in 1720, “We have a great affinity, and we are very united by sharing the same feelings. We look so much alike that often we are taken for each other. She is younger than I am, ruddier, and a bit heavier.”37 Geneviève added in a letter written the same day that they were often taken for one another both in appearance and in handwriting.38 The striking difference was temperament; Geneviève had inherited Marie Leroy’s testiness, while her older sister was calmer. Marie-André admits to her French correspondent in 1734 that this sometimes caused problems: “That doesn’t fail to tax our harmony from time to time, but without harming our bond.”39 Monastic warnings about particular friendships often denounced such bonds based on affinities, where natural affection could be mistaken for Christian charity. However, Marie-André’s openness in admitting her tie to Geneviève, both publically in a circular letter addressed to her whole order and privately to Hecquet, indicates that she did not see this bond as falling within the particular friendships proscribed by her order’s Constitutions. In fact, in the annals she described two such seventeenth-century friendships at the Hôtel-Dieu that could serve as authorizing precedents; one involved its candidate for sainthood, Catherine de Saint-Augustin.40 In their shared spiritual ambitions the Duplessis sisters found a way to reconcile their attachment to each other and their commitment to seek first of all union with the divine.

“Be Teresas”: Between Mary and Martha While Marie-André was forming future nuns as novice mistress and was praising the joy that makes doing one’s duty as a hospitaller easy in the Musique spirituelle, she was questioning her own spiritual progress. In June 1718, her Jesuit brother wrote to his sisters, “You seem, judging by your language, nevertheless to have degenerated and to have forgotten the goal you had to work toward perfecting 62

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yourselves.”41 In October 1720, writing to Hecquet, Marie-André complained of “a great cause of embarrassment,” her frustration that she was not meeting her spiritual goals. Hecquet wanted her eldest daughter, Marie-Catherine, to become a nun like Duplessis, but Marie-André admitted that she found herself an unworthy model for the girl who shared her nickname Manon. She thus requested prayers from her friend: “Pray, my dear friend, that God give me the grace to become what he wants me to be; in truth, you see me as completely different from what I am, since you say that you desire that this dear child who bears my nickname imitate me and commit herself to God’s service as a nun like me. However, may God preserve her from living as tepid a life as the one I lead, despite all the holy desires that he gives me.”42 She complains of a chronic tepidness in the face of her aspiration to live for God that should be the mark of her state as a nun vowed to strive for religious perfection. François-Xavier’s letters to his sisters make it clear that this was not just a moment of self-deprecating humility. His letters describe an ongoing period of uncertainty about how their vocations were playing out. He did not save their letters, but his counsel in his replies allows us to reconstruct much of the situation. Marie-André’s questioning of her spiritual state seems to date back at least to discussions in the monastery parlour, often in Father Bigot’s presence, when François-Xavier was preparing to leave for France to become a Jesuit in the fall of 1716. In May 1718, he alluded to a pact that he had made then with his sisters to increase the number of fervently committed religious: “Let us strive with courage to increase their number. We often discussed this goal, but the time has come now to work together to achieve it.”43 As religious, the three siblings were committed to aiming for the highest states of Christian perfection. In a letter of April 1717, he enthusiastically described his novitiate in Paris as a paradise filled with prayer and self-examination: “A more pleasing life than the one we lead cannot be imagined … what can satisfy more a soul that strives to unite itself to God.”44 A year later, in answer to their letter of fall 1717, he thanked them for their expression of pleasure in his “happiness” and gave an extended praise of the religious life, which, he contended, few people living in the world are able to comprehend: “They pity our fate; they claim compassion for us because they see spiritual mothers and friends

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what we have left behind and do not see what we have found.”45 He did not hesitate to propose ambitious models both for them and for himself. When he exclaimed, “Be Teresas and may I be a Xavier!”46 he reminded them of their initial ambition: Teresa of Avila, the Spanish foundress of the Carmelites, and Francis Xavier, the companion of Ignatius Loyola and missionary to the Indies. Teresa of Avila, the great mystic, might seem a strange model for two hospital nuns. The Hospitallers of the Mercy of Jesus saw their distinctive institute, or purpose, not primarily in terms of prayer, as did Teresa’s Carmelite order, but as the union of action and prayer. As the first chapter of their 1666 Constitutions puts it, “The distinguishing feature of our vocation is to join Martha and Mary, action and contemplation in unity, to seek out the love of God in its purity and the love of neighbor in its perfection.”47 The Constitutions, of course, present as a given what was, in fact, a point of great tension for all the Counter-Reformation active orders. If union with God in contemplation is taken as the most perfect form of the spiritual life, then caring for patients and managing a hospital were not only a source of endless distractions, but also reduced the time that could be allotted to prayer. How in these circumstances could FrançoisXavier propose that his sisters become new Teresas? His first letter about his novitiate had diagnosed their problem more explicitly: his sisters’ aspiration to a solely contemplative life. As he put it in 1717, the devil tempts us with the idea “that in a more secluded order we would become great saints.” “I saw you impeded sometimes,” he says, “by the same idea: you imagined that you would have been great contemplatives.”48 The devotional climate at the HôtelDieu might well have encouraged this attitude. The sermon preached at Geneviève’s clothing ceremony in 1713 makes no reference to service to the poor or ill; the sermon would be perfectly suited to a Carmelite novice. In fact, the preacher alludes to Teresa’s motto, “to suffer or die” for Christ.49 The remedy to what François-Xavier labels “this temptation” is to learn to love their vocation as hospitallers, which consists of welcoming Christ in each of the poor they serve. Without explicitly doing so, he is reminding them that the word “hospital” originally conveyed the connotation of hospitality or welcome. He further maintains that this loving service to the poor will produce in

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3.3 Claude François, “An Augustinian sister Caring of Christ in the Guise of a Patient” (1670–71). It depicts a nun in her white habit and black veil at the bed of a patient. The nuns belonged to the Hospital Sisters of the Mercy of Jesus of the Order of Saint Augustine and were encouraged to see Christ in each patient. The painting hung in the men’s ward.

them effects similar to the ones attributed to Teresa in her ecstasies: “If you had this spirit you would taste as pleasure and consolation to serve an ill person as Saint Teresa tasted in her ecstasies.”50 Here the young Jesuit is repeating a commonplace of the early seventeenth-century Catholic revival in France, that of “leaving God for God.” It is found in the letters of François de Sales, in Vincent de Paul’s exhortations to his Sisters of Charity, and in Barbe Acarie’s spirituality. When duty requires leaving prayer to serve neighbours, God is not left behind at all. Barbara Diefendorf described this engagement with God in the midst of mundane activities as “active mysticism” in her account of Barbe Acarie.51 Catherine Fino called it “the mysticism of action” and “the dynamics of contemplation in action” in her discussion of the Quebec Hôtel-Dieu.52 François-Xavier’s repeated invocations of Teresa in 1720 are to be taken in this light. “God wants to make you two Teresas. Be courageous my dear sisters; raise yourselves by an heroic effort above all that is not God … The age of Teresas is not over.”53 In 1717, the Duplessis sisters recommended to their brother a translation of Teresa of Avila’s autobiography.54 In it, they could have found a defence of the kind of spiritual friendship they saw themselves engaged in. In her Life, Teresa defended the usefulness of having friends who can be supportive comrades, particularly in the early stages of developing a life of prayer.55 She saw union with God in mental prayer, in fact, as an intimate sharing between friends, and human friends who shared this goal of uniting in friendship with Christ were valued as a gift of God.56 Thus Marie-André could see herself linked to Geneviève as companions in a common pursuit of friendship with God. Duplessis wrote a short text, probably destined as an oral instruction to her community, on the theme of friendship with Christ. “God wants to establish a particular friendship with each religious,” she insisted. She highlighted some of the features of particular friendships she considered important: intimate communication, equality, a willingness to sacrifice. She presented the life of a nun as a particular friendship with Christ. However, the text makes no mention of particular friendships among nuns either as an aid or as an obstacle to this friendship with God.57

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Detachment and Reorienting Oneself toward God: The Dissection spirituelle François-Xavier’s advice turned less on the prayer/activity tension implicit in the slogan “leave God for God” than on the need for detachment from the world in order to free up his sisters for God. When they recommended to him the translation of Teresa’s autobiography by Martial Chanut, he countered in 1718 that the works of Jean-Joseph Surin would teach them detachment: “There you will learn the methods to clear away all the obstacles that prevent you from becoming Teresas.”58 His sisters must not have reported progress, because in March 1719, he reiterated the counsel to read Surin: “That is where, with the grace of God, you will learn the way to demolish everything that serves as a roadblock to this noble and divine transformation into your spouse Jesus-Christ to which you are called.”59 Without Marie-André’s letters to her brother or any autobiographical accounts, the most extensive portrait of her struggle to free herself for union with God is found in her undated manuscript Dissection spirituelle. Its title suggests that it was written in the wake of the Musique spirituelle of 1718. It is composed of a series of thirty-one paragraph-length meditations – one for every day of a month – on how the physical, mental, and spiritual faculties can be re-oriented toward God. These meditations show her prayer life in action.60 On the one hand, they contain a sort of examination of conscience in which she enumerates her sins; on the other, her formulation of prayers to overcome her failings points to how she sought to make spiritual progress. These meditations offer special insight into how Duplessis saw her own situation, since they are tailored to a person of exactly her psychological make-up: someone, as she says in the ninth meditation, with “a peaceful temperament, a docile nature, and inclinations toward virtue.”61 This is her own calm disposition that Marie-André often contrasted to her sister’s impetuous vivacity. Attaining spiritual perfection is not as easy as it might appear, Duplessis went on to suggest in the ninth meditation, even for a person inclined by temperament to virtue as she is, although “the work is half done.” Complacency is one danger for such a soul, what she calls “virtue defined by one’s tastes.” She was likely more troubled,

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however, by the fact that she did not fit the classic model of heroic sainthood that called for conflict and battle: “One must do violence to oneself to merit heaven. Everything that is done out of temperament is not virtue, and the great diligent work of the saints is to continually fight against their natural disposition.” Here she echoed her brother’s dictum of 1719: “A heroic courage is necessary in order to sacrifice small attachments.”62 To be sure, contrition for a sinful past appears early and reoccurs frequently. On the third day, she laments, “How embarrassed I am to have spent so many years only concerning myself with evil, vain, and useless things and with filling my memory with so many matters unworthy of recall.” On the seventeenth day, she regretted “evil pleasures” and “vain praises;” on the twenty-first, the “songs and lyrics that displeased and offended you.” She also mentioned many issues that continued to trouble her: on the first day, impatience; on the eighth, jealousy and envy; on the ninth, discouragement. In the twenty-fifth meditation, she tried to cast herself as Mary Magdalen, but the past sins of which she accuses herself seem slight rather than grievous offenses, and these current failures are hardly major temptations. Particular friendships or human attachments do not figure on this list of temptations. What is striking in her approach is less her confessions of past failings than her effort to re-orient each of her faculties to God. She presents detachment as avoiding any ill use of her faculties, but this detachment is also clearly a prelude to positive action. Her brother’s only practical advice in 1719 was the general recommendation to renounce any natural pleasures that come one’s way and accept disagreeable things with resignation.63 The Dissection describes a systematic reorientation. She shows how a heightened attention can redirect each faculty to God. However, she does not offer specific techniques about how to accomplish this re-ordering. They would be out of place in a meditative work, wherein she casts her reflections as prayers that each faculty be put to higher service. For example, in the sixteenth meditation, on the eyes: “Let me lower my proud eyes to my own misery to humble myself and … raise them sometimes toward the holy mountains whence I await help.” It is noteworthy that her treatment of the body and mortification marks a movement away from the penitential asceticism of Catherine 68

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de Saint-Augustin and the community’s foundresses. To be sure, Duplessis repeats the traditional warning about the body being an obstacle to holiness. In her fifteenth meditation, the body is “like a weighty and clumsy burden that drags the soul into the precipice.” The saints “persecuted it, punished and reduced it to slavery.” However, after declaring that the body is a “great enemy,” she concludes, “It is a very fragile vase, but such as it is, one can sanctify it by making it obey.” Likewise, she grants in the tenth meditation that “our very passions can serve as steps of a ladder to rise to heaven.” This requires that the body as well as the mental faculties be re-oriented toward virtue. Her eyes should focus both on her sins and on her heavenly goal, according to the sixteenth meditation. The mortification she describes does not emphasize searching out extreme ways to subdue the body. Duplessis is content with the ordinary asceticism of monastery life, what she calls “mortification suitable to my position” in the nineteenth meditation: i.e. the simple fare at meals, the routine fasts and abstinence, and the restrictions of clausura, to which are added the burdens and dangers of caring for patients. This contrasts with what Catherine Fino called Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s “mystical martyrdom” that cultivated extraordinary self-mortification, both to fight temptation and to expiate the sins of others.64 Catherine scourged herself, slept with pointed bracelets, and embraced austere fasts; she mortified her sense of taste by eating the phlegm of patients.65

Detachment, Interior Peace, and the Will of God How effective was their brother’s encouragement that his sisters strive to become Teresas by integrating hospital duties into their spiritual lives and by cultivating detachment? In 1726, the two Duplessis sisters must have still been reporting difficulties to their Jesuit brother, to judge by a 1727 letter from François-Xavier that speaks of “contradictions and crosses from every direction on the exterior, a universal desolation within, and with all that, an ever stronger determination to move toward God.”66 After that date, we must largely rely on Marie-André’s comments to Hecquet. In 1729, Marie-André gave Hecquet an overall assessment of her spiritual state, which marks her progress over the 1720s. The previous spiritual mothers and friends

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3.4 The frontispiece of Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint Augustin, published three years after her death, shows her guided by two angels toward her heavenly reward. Her Jesuit director Jean de Brébeuf awaits her there, souls in purgatory implore her intercession, and a demon is vanquished.

couple of years had been particularly contentious in Quebec, full of quarrels with the intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy in 1727 and with the cathedral chapter after Bishop Saint-Vallier’s death in 1728. Canadian-born priests of the Seminary of Quebec then dominated the chapter. They took advantage of the absence of a bishop to replace the French-born Jesuits that Saint-Vallier had named as confessors to the Hôtel-Dieu and Ursulines with priests of their number. Duplessis reported to Hecquet in 1729 that neither community was happy with the new confessors: “Our confessor was taken away from us, and they gave us a young Canadian to whom several of us cannot adapt. These disturbances cause unfortunate biases that divide us.”67 Duplessis claimed to have weathered the turmoil around her by cultivating a spirit of detachment. She did not turn to Surin, whom her brother had recommended, but to Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ for inspiration. “I often blame myself that even though I am not attached to anything, I am not united to God as I should be, but that is explained by the author of the Imitation, who says that after we have left behind everything, we have still not yet left ourselves.” As difficult as it might be to detach oneself from oneself, in the last analysis, she was satisfied with the inner peace she experienced: “I don’t fail to enjoy great interior peace.”68 She also admitted to a practical strategy of refusing to choose sides that served her well: “I will admit to you in confidence that since I have been a nun, I have remained aloof from all partisanship. That has frequently been at a price, because to hold myself upright between two opposing tendencies, I have felt myself pulled in all directions, and people thought me to be opposed to everything that I didn’t embrace. Nonetheless, after the storm, I was found to be holding to my initial stance and my conduct was commended.” This required a delicate balancing act, as she points out to Hecquet, because the cloister was no shield from the world for a hospital nun. Contacts with patients, suppliers, and local administrators insured that she heard every rumour and bit of gossip in the town: “My suffering is to hear many complaints that one cannot agree with. That makes it awkward to respect charity. Charity does not blind us, and to console those who suffer, one must at times agree that they are in the right … Our vocation exposes us to a multitude of contacts with others so that, despite our status as nuns, few of the town’s rumours are spiritual mothers and friends

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unknown to us. This is a great trial for persons who scorn worldly affairs, for even if one does not dwell on these matters, one always hears too much.” Of course, the presence of a confidant within the community facilitated this strategy of expressing sympathy, without actually taking sides. “My sister and I have the small advantage of being employed together at the same post. Since our points of view are similar, we withdraw as often as possible from all ties and find ourselves better off for it.”69 She could air her true feelings with Geneviève. Their administrative duties gave these particular friends the excuse to confer in private. Marie-André maintained in 1731 to Hecquet that she had achieved a satisfactory prayer life. In the twenty-fourth meditation of the Dissection dealing with prayer, Duplessis had requested the attention, confidence, and respect that she said could result in the pure joy of union with God in prayer. Although she never reported mystical states, visions, or the intense spiritual consolations of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, she did find strength in the practice of mental prayer. “I feel more than ever the advantage of being experienced in mental prayer,” she wrote Hécquet, “because in this exercise one learns incentives that can aid us in taking advantage of the evils in this life to gain heaven. These great truths are engraved in the soul, and the memory of what they teach us gives us support in the periods of dejection to which our afflictions reduce us.”70 Some of the tepidness she accused herself of was likely less complacency than simply the absence of the great interior struggle that she was told she should be engaged in. The Dissection is not the work of someone trying to shake off a lukewarm period, but of a spiritually insightful person who is able to chart a strategic roadmap because she knows well her own temperament. It envisages a methodical re-orientation of her faculties rather than violence against them. Nonetheless, Marie-André admitted that the slogan “leave God for God” was not as easy to live as some might have it. Writing to MarieCatherine in 1742, she stressed how difficult this is even for a cloistered nun: “You see, my dear friend, how a nun must harmonize that with the peace of her status as a nun. It is rather difficult, and I do not succeed very well. I complain about it to people who have no sympathy at all. It is claimed that leaving God for God and that doing his will are more valuable than the most peaceful contemplative states. I do not 72

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cease to be fearful and to moan because I see danger everywhere and even more in the distractions generated by contacts with others than in the engagements that develop in the sequestered life.”71 In the case of Geneviève, one senses that the equilibrium she achieved was less an integration of the two than an intense prayer life that compensated for the distractions of her post as the hospital’s business manager. In the 1732 dedicatory letter of the manuscript La Manne de Bethléem, she said that she would have liked to become a Carmelite and noted all the impediments to contemplation her hospital activities created.72 To judge by her death notice, rather than transform her duties into a form of prayer, she offset the daytime distractions by nighttime prayer: “She discharged her hospital duties without detriment to her spiritual ones, so that when she had been diverted from the spiritual ones during the day, she spent her evenings fulfilling them and only found repose in prayer.”73 In 1751, nine years before her death, Marie-André assessed her spiritual state with satisfaction for the degree of detachment she had achieved, even if she attributed it more to the discipline of the religious life than to her own efforts: All stations have their crosses, but those of people in the world are heavier than those of the clergy. Providence saw me as being too weak to bear such great troubles. It has guided me by easy paths commensurate with my slight virtue, which nonetheless can rise to the highest perfection in the holy station I have embraced. I have been a nun for almost forty-five years, and this period has passed me by like a flash of lightening. If in this favoured vocation there had only been the release from worldly affairs, I would consider this to be of inestimable value, but my calling comes with so many other advantages that, in addition to those that I am aware of, I am convinced that we will only see the value of this grace in eternity.74 Likewise, she saw herself as having attained the union with God for which this detachment was the prelude. This union did not take the form of mystical experiences, or even a quest for inner peace, but instead resulted from the conformity of her will to God’s spiritual mothers and friends

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for her. She told Marie-Catherine in 1749 that once she had been ashamed of her lack of enthusiasm in pursuing detachment. Now she had come to appreciate how the religious life freed her from many concerns. More importantly, she had come to believe that the secret of holiness is accepting what God sends, rather than the quest for inner peace. “When I saw you completely occupied with the desire for withdrawal from the world, I was ashamed that, while being a nun, I didn’t find in myself this ardour for disengagement with the things of the world, even though I have always disliked temporal affairs. And now that you appear to be troubled in your solitude by the encumbrance of worldly things, I enjoy even more the fortune of my state that does not tie me to anything at all and that imposes on me the agreeable duty of belonging to God alone. The secret of holiness, my dear friend, is neither in peace, nor in agitation, but in accomplishing the will of God.”75 Peace was a byproduct, not the goal. To be sure, this declaration of inner peace based on trust in Providence was made well before the trials of her last decade of life, which would test her capacity for detachment: her brother Charles-Denis’s abandonment of his family, the fire that destroyed the hospital, Geneviève’s death, and the war and siege of Quebec. She may be exaggerating this peace to provide a model for Hecquet. Although Duplessis honoured the heroic asceticism and the visionary experience of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, her own Musique spirituelle, written when she was novice mistress, promotes a more moderate monasticism. Likewise, in her Dissection spirituelle, she takes the measure of how she could calmly and systematically reorient herself to meet her spiritual goals. Her letters to Hecquet offer reassurance to her friend, whose spiritual suffering and sense of guilt were greater than her own. The model that she proposed to Hecquet, in which acceptance of the will of God leads to peace, suggests that she would enter this troubled period claiming deep reserves.

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Friend of a Jansenist, Sister of a Jesuit: The 1718 Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu and Fashioning Epistolary Friendships In a 1720 letter, Duplessis ridiculed nuns in Marie-Catherine’s hometown of Abbeville who were so foolish that they signed an appeal against the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus, which condemned Jansenism: If I held the opinions of the new theologians, I assure you that I would find myself greatly relieved to be able to say that I lacked the grace to accomplish my good intentions, but it is clear to me that it is my own fault. Concerning these novelties, I will tell you that I could not prevent myself from laughing when I saw the Franciscan sisters of Abbeville on the list of those appealing to a future council. It seems to me that it is hardly appropriate for women to involve themselves in this sort of issue and that a party must feel itself very weak when it accepts and searches out such support. Their names have the honour of being below several bishops and above several scribblers and tract writers whose signatures were purchased to add to the total. This is the only misery, I mean error, that does not afflict Canada.1 Marie-André must not have known that her childhood friend, who had since married Jacques Hecquet, had become a committed

Jansenist herself, that she had been threatened with excommunication, and that her pastor had tried to confiscate her copy of Pasquier Quesnel’s Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament that Clement XI’s bull proscribes.2 Duplessis’s scorn for Jansenist women reflects the misogyny of Jesuit anti-Jansenist polemics and is so flippant that Hecquet could well have broken off relations. But she did not abandon their correspondence at this juncture. Nor did she break it off in 1736, when François-Xavier Duplessis preached a mission in Abbeville and Duplessis chided her friend for not attending. Nonetheless, the friendship and the correspondence that undergirded it would have to be refashioned. As a prelude, it will be useful to situate Marie-André’s hostility to Jansenism in relation to the evolution of the movement from its beginnings in the seventeenth century. The 1717–18 Georges-François Poulet affair that Duplessis recorded in her annals and that led in part to her sarcasm to Hecquet in 1720 offers a window into historical debates about the penetration of Jansenism into Canada and shows why Jansenism, which was such a divisive movement in France, never “afflicted” Canada – to use Duplessis’s expression – to the same degree.

Sister of a Jesuit, Niece of a Jansenist, and Jansenism’s Renewed Attraction Duplessis’s own opposition to Jansenism crystallized when a Jansenist scare hit Quebec and its convents around 1717. Her stance was as untroubled as Hecquet’s Jansenism was born of anguish and persecution. It had its roots in the Jesuit circles frequented by Georges Duplessis and owed even more to her brother’s decision to become a Jesuit, which matured in the years just after Clement XI’s Unigenitus was promulgated in 1713. The bull was widely seen, and not just by Jansenists, as the product of Jesuit manipulation of Louis XIV and the pope.3 To enter the Jesuits in the second decade of the century, as François-Xavier did, or to be aligned with the Society of Jesus, as his sister was, was to be a warrior against Jansenism. The two years between the promulgation of the papal bull in September 1713 and Louis XIV’s death on 1 September 1715 were marked by determined enforcement of Unigenitus by royal authorities. However, after the king’s death, the regent Philippe d’Orléans relaxed 76

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this policy and released imprisoned Jansenists. Opponents of the bull who had once been cowed dared speak their minds. François-Xavier arrived in France to begin his novitiate in late 1716, just as the movement toward an appeal of the bull to a general council of the church was gathering steam and as the Jesuits were coming under attack. The archbishop of Paris banned them from preaching in his diocese.4 Once in France, the young Jesuit Duplessis had to deal with an intransigent Jansenist in his own family. Jean Leroy, a brother of his mother, was pastor of Saint-Cénéré, a village east of Laval in the diocese of Le Mans. On 28 April 1717, François-Xavier reported to his sisters that Leroy had written him a cordial letter without commenting on his decision to enter the Jesuits.5 Duplessis’s visit to Leroy in October 1720 only confirmed reports that Jesuits had received regarding his uncle’s allegiance: “Several times we have heard rumours concerning his opinions, about which he is so stubborn that he will not listen to reason.”6 Jean Leroy handled his sister Marie Leroy’s business affairs in France and evidently used his letters to her as a forum for his rancour. However, in 1722, François-Xavier refuted his uncle’s invectives against the Jesuits as groundless: “Those with whom I have the honour to live are not as hard as he thinks … he sees all the blows against the unfortunate party he belongs to as coming from us … He only swears by his C[ornelius Jansen]… There are three portraits in his bedchamber, and the one of Quesnel is placed with honour. His book collection quite resembles his paintings.”7 What particularly frustrated anti-Jansenists, such as the Duplessis siblings, was that their uncle and “his party” refused to see themselves as heretics. Unlike the Huguenots who left the church, Jansenists claimed to hold fast to the authentic teaching of the early church fathers. Jansenists maintained this tradition was being replaced by an optimistic Counter-Reformation theology sponsored by the Jesuits, known as Molinism, that minimized the consequences of original sin. Anti-Jansenists had long been devising tests to oblige their enemies to self-identify as heretics in order to ferret out such wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unigenitus was only the latest example. Jansenism had many currents – moral severity, an ideal of informed devotional life, distrust of what many French Catholics saw as papal overreach and of the Jesuits – in addition to its interpretation of Augustine’s theology of grace, on which it was judged heretical.8 friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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The key currents were no doubt its penitential moral stance and its theory of efficacious grace, but no single current is adequate to define its attractiveness. The Duplessis brother and sister were distressed by Jansenism’s seemingly ever-expanding reach, but they were unable to see beyond the caricatures their party used in its invective and to understand why Jansenism attracted many devout Catholics. Penitential severity was the initial impulse that motivated Jean Duvergier de Hauranne de Saint-Cyran and Antoine Arnauld, his protégé and successor, the founders of the movement that would be called Jansenism by its enemies. Labelled “rigorism” by those who saw its severity as excessive, this pastoral stance required believers to align themselves with the strictest standards of behaviour and demanded proofs of deep repentance before absolution in the confessional.9 Saint-Cyran defended the need for contrition (sorrow for sin grounded in love of God who has been offended), rather than attrition (fear of God’s punishment for sin). Arnauld and his associates, such as Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters, accused the Jesuits of allowing their penitents to choose the easiest interpretation of a moral requirement, i.e. of laxism. Opponents retorted that Arnauld pitched moral standards so high that most Christians were discouraged about ever being able to live up to them. The Jansenist campaign against laxism was largely successful and pushed the French church, even some Jesuits, toward rigorism. One widely shared feature of this severity can be attributed to Augustine’s influence: a deep suspicion about sexual pleasure, whose danger was heightened by the original sin of Adam and Eve.10 When excessive severity – rigorism – became associated exclusively with the Jansenists,11 they were blamed for this widespread distrust of sexuality. However, it pervaded Ancien-Régime Catholicism, and it is found in other Christian traditions that took inspiration from Augustine, such as the Puritans in England. In a sense, the Jansenists’ victory over laxism ultimately worked against them, since they were held responsible for this “Catholic Puritanism.” By moving the dispute from penitential discipline to the theology of grace, the enemies of Arnauld found the objective tool they needed to force Arnauld and his allies to take a stand that would justify excluding them.12 They attacked the Augustinus, a Latin treatise on Augustine’s theology by Saint-Cyran’s friend Cornelius Jansen. They 78

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claimed that Jansen exaggerated Augustine’s pessimism about fallen human nature and the need for divine grace. Jansen taught a Calvinist brand of predestination that denied free will, his enemies said. The papal condemnations of Jansen, first in the 1650s and then in 1713, instead of quashing the movement, only fanned existing distrust of Rome. In 1653, Innocent X condemned five propositions on grace, predestination, and sin without specifically attributing them at first to Jansen’s 1640 Augustinus. The condemned propositions were ambiguous enough that Arnauld and his supporters could subscribe to the condemnation and thus affirm the church’s teaching authority. However, when the pope maintained that the condemned propositions indeed represented Jansen’s teaching, Jansenists maintained that papal infallibility did not extent to such questions of fact. Indeed, only one of the propositions could be found textually in Jansen’s book. Arnauld denied that the propositions adequately represented Jansen’s views. The pope refused this distinction between fact and doctrine, and all clergy were required to sign a formulary that condemned the five propositions and also affirmed that they came from Jansen. Louis XIV cooperated in enforcing the formulary because he saw the Jansenists as an obstacle to his goal of subordinating domestic and foreign policy to his absolutist state. Priests who refused to sign faced the loss of their church position, but they could go into hiding or escape into exile. The cloistered nuns of the abbey of Port-Royal, dominated by the Arnauld family, could do neither and were deprived of the sacraments. Unigenitus in 1713 sought to avoid the earlier fact/doctrine controversy by condemning not five abstract propositions, but one hundred and one direct quotations from a devotional text by Pasquier Quesnel, the Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament. Quesnel was considered Arnauld’s successor, and his widely used study guide for reading the New Testament had first been published in 1672 and had seen multiple editions and revisions. It had been approved by the cardinal-archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles, who was no friend of the Jesuits. However, in their zeal to finish off Jansenism for good, the Roman censors included among the condemned passages a number that were hardly unorthodox. Many Catholics who accepted the bull did so more out of submission to authority than from intellectual conviction. Unigenitus simply gave new life to Jansenism rather than extinguishing it. friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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Women such as Hecquet had good reason to be incensed by the bull. Quesnel had defended the right of women to read the Bible in French, and his eighty-third condemned quotation had disputed the assertion that the “simplicity of women” was a major cause of heresy. Hecquet’s aunt had raised her on frequent reading of scripture, and Hecquet found only edification in Quesnel’s book. On the devotional level, Jansenists encouraged an informed spirituality that appealed to women. The Jansenist ideal was to narrow the two-tiered system that had one level of spirituality for the clergy and a lower level for the laity.13 They sought to raise the laity to the devotional level of the clergy, something quite different from the Protestant priesthood of all believers. Thus, they believed all the faithful should have access to key texts that were generally reserved for the clergy after the Council of Trent. The Jansenists were among those active in translating the Bible, at a time when Rome insisted that it should be read in Latin and only by those certified by their pastor to be capable of understanding it. Likewise, they supported translating the missal so that the faithful could follow the words of the mass, instead of uniting themselves with the spirit of each section of the mass, the recommended practice for attending mass at that time. Although Jansenist leaders shared the general clerical misogyny of the era, these policies were especially attractive to women, who were generally not schooled in Latin. Aristocratic ladies had been key defenders of Jansenism early on, and by the eighteenth century female support was more broadly based, such as we find with Hecquet, who followed the controversies avidly. Unlike with Jansen’s Latin treatise, a wide public of both sexes was able to judge whether Quesnel’s book deserved the papal anathemas. Resistance was broader and took the form of an appeal to a general council of the whole church. In March 1717, four bishops signed their appeal and were shortly joined by about a dozen others. Numerous clerics in the lower clergy signed on as well. Refusal among nuns was not centred in a single convent, dominated by the Arnauld family. Ursulines, Carmelites, and Visitation nuns, as well as the Franciscan nuns of Abbeville, registered individual or collective opposition. However, the appeal was a desperate tactic, leading to a dead end. Although many clergy in the Paris region signed, less than 3 percent of the clergy of France joined the appeal,14 and the 80

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bishops of other countries were indifferent to the condemnation of a devotional text written in French.

Georges-François Poulet and the Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu Duplessis’s assertion to Hecquet in 1720 that Jansenism “does not afflict Canada” is a local victory cry of sorts. It came at the conclusion of a Jansenist scare in Quebec that she narrates in the Annales. In 1716 or 1717, authorities there realized that a stranger in his late twenties, who had arrived in 1715, was really a Benedictine monk fleeing Unigenitus. Georges-François Poulet was a member of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, an alliance of Benedictine abbeys in which support for Jansenism was strong.15 He had arrived in Canada dressed as a layman and had declared that his intention was to live the isolated life of a hermit in a remote location. After a short stay in Quebec – according to Duplessis in the best inn in the town – he headed downriver along the south shore to locate a suitable site. He spent his first winter near Cap Saint-Ignace, where he was befriended by its pastor, Pierre Leclair. In 1716, apprehensive that he was attracting too much attention, he relocated further downriver to Trois-Pistoles, with the help of its seigneur, Nicolas Rioux. It was apparently sometime during his stay there that his identity was discovered. He returned to Quebec in early 1718 to justify himself to Bishop Saint-Vallier and again in the fall of that year when pressure on him to leave from the bishop was mounting. He went back to France in November 1718. When Poulet had left La Rochelle in late spring 1715, Louis XIV was still alive and repression still unrelenting. Royal authorities were trying to arrest Poulet for a text he had written against the bull, but not published. His choice of Canada as a refuge might not have been as impractical as it seems. True, Canada’s first bishop, François de Laval, owed his bishopric to the Jesuits. However, administratively New France was not technically part of the French Church. Its bishop had no seat in the Assembly of the Clergy of France, through which the formularies against Jansenism were enforced in France.16 In fact, Laval had never required them of his clergy in Canada, and the 1665 formulary would not be required in Canada until 1730 under Bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet.17 Laval’s successor Bishop Saint-Vallier, while friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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no Jansenist, had strict views on confession and contrition which overlapped with Jansenist ones. He was a mercurial and abrasive leader who antagonized everyone, including the Jesuits. The Jesuit superior in Canada denounced his 1703 Rituel – a handbook of church practices – as having Jansenist tendencies.18 A July 1715 letter from the minister of the navy Jérôme de Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain to Charles-Guillaume de Maupeou, the general agent of the Clergy of France, shows that Saint-Vallier was not nearly as energetic in requiring prompt adherence to Unigenitus as Hecquet’s own bishop Pierre Sabatier had been.19 Thus, in 1715, Poulet might have had good reason to think he would not be troubled in Canada, and claimed he told the bishop himself as much in an interview in the winter of 1718.20 However, Saint-Vallier’s return to his diocese in 1713, after a thirteen-year absence in Europe, had been marked by a tactical rapprochement with the Jesuits.21 That year, before leaving France, he revised his 1703 handbook on ritual to conform to criticisms of the Quebec Jesuit superior.22 Once back in Quebec, he took the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Duparc as confessor in 1714. Protecting a declared Jansenist would not be opportune for the bishop. Both Poulet’s and Duplessis’s accounts show that the Benedictine found many sympathetic ears in the colony. He was young, charming, and seemingly well-funded, and attracted a following in devout circles. Among priests, the contacts he claimed were chiefly connected with the Seminary of Quebec. This institution was affiliated with the Seminary of Foreign Missions of Paris, which had been involved in a running dispute with the Jesuits about some accommodations to Chinese customs that the Jesuits had made in their Far Eastern missions. These accommodations had been condemned by Rome in what is called “the quarrel over Chinese rites.” Poulet must have gained a hearing in the town’s convents, although details are sketchy. Duplessis reports that his initial overtures at the Hôtel-Dieu were rebuffed: “Several individuals encouraged our mother superior [Juchereau de Saint-Ignace] to become acquainted with him with the thought that he was a very rich man who would make large gifts to our house, but she refused to take any steps about it.”23 Fear that the nuns might be contaminated was sufficiently strong that the bishop installed Jesuit confessors in all three convents, as the 82

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head of the Jesuits in Quebec reported with satisfaction in October 1717 to his superior in Rome. He noted that before Saint-Vallier became bishop, the Hôtel-Dieu and Ursulines had always had Jesuit confessors, but that Saint-Vallier had replaced them with priests of the Seminary in the 1690s. His letter makes it clear that the danger of false doctrine was not coming from just one man: “I am certain it was feared that the female religious orders might be imbued with harmful opinions by those of doubtful faith who came here from France and many among the churchmen seemed to be drawn into it.”24 He must have had in mind the priests of the Seminary. On 17 March 1717, Saint-Vallier named Jacques d’Heu as the Hôtel-Dieu’s confessor. Poulet cited d’Heu as the most vociferous of the Quebec Jesuits in denouncing the Jansenist menace.25 In October 1718, just when Saint-Vallier thought he had succeeded in forcing Poulet to leave his diocese, Poulet fell ill and was hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu in danger of death. Duplessis now had a ringside view of the denouement of the affair. According to Poulet, the nuns, although fearful of having an excommunicated priest die on their premises, did their best not to cause him new worries. “They were not unaware of my sad business; they were moved to the bottom of their hearts; out of their sympathy, they felt the repercussions of all the penalties against me, taking it upon themselves to soften them and to diminish everything in their power that might give me new ones.”26 Duplessis’s version of events includes none of this. She claimed that all efforts by priests to dissuade Poulet only redoubled the “fever” of his obstinacy.27 Saint-Vallier had instructed the town’s pastor Thomas Thiboult not to hear Poulet’s confession unless he accepted Unigenitus. However, while the two Duplessis sisters would have had little sympathy for the Jansenist, others in the community might have felt otherwise. Joachim Fornel, a seminarian at the Seminary of Quebec, whose warm November 1719 letter to Poulet shows he supported the Benedictine, had two sisters at the Hôtel-Dieu who had taken final vows in 1717 and 1718. Duplessis points explicitly to another community member with ties to Poulet, Marie-Madeleine Rioux, the sister of the seigneur of Trois-Pistoles, who had aided Poulet. She had just entered as a novice on 17 September. When Poulet was leaving the hospital, he offered her friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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a book in gratitude for her family’s hospitality. The mother superior demanded to see the book, and when she recognized it as a translation by the Jansenist Port-Royal solitaries, handed it back to him, saying, “Here we do not read the books of those gentlemen.” For Duplessis, this marked a triumphal rejection of “their pernicious doctrine.”28 Poulet’s account of Saint-Vallier’s dealings with Rioux shows a pattern of intimidation by the bishop and Father d’Heu. According to Poulet, when he met with the bishop during Lent of 1718, SaintVallier declared that if the Rioux brothers continued to help the erstwhile hermit, their sister would certainly not be received at the Hôtel-Dieu, where they were negotiating her entry. In response to Poulet’s retort that it was unfair to punish an innocent young girl, Saint-Vallier relented, but threatened to raise her dowry by a third.29 On 15 September, two days before she did finally enter as a novice, he issued a pastoral ordinance which declared that anyone who helped Poulet return to his hermitage would be guilty of mortal sin.30 To drive home his message of the danger that Poulet represented for the nuns, the bishop summoned the novice. “He had Mademoiselle Rioux brought to him to hear her out and to inspire horror for me in her. This poor girl was completely paralyzed with fear. Father d’Heu and another Jesuit Father Davaugour had exerted themselves hard so that my lord the bishop would press his zeal to this extent.”31

Assessing Jansenism’s Impact on the Canadian Church Duplessis was writing the Annales in 1720 when she included the disparaging allusion to Jansenist women in her letter to Hecquet. In fact, Duplessis was so determined to root out the Jansenist menace to the Hôtel-Dieu that she included accounts of two earlier incidents to underscore its tradition of anti-Jansenism.32 She concluded her version of the Poulet affair with a solemn prayer that Canada and the Hôtel-Dieu remain undefiled: “We cannot beg God enough that he continue to preserve Canada from the poison of heresy so that this church preserves the purity of the faith and that our attachment and respect for the vicar of Jesus Christ brings to us in this world and the next the blessings that are promised to truly faithful souls.”33 Clerical historians echoed her triumphal victory cry for two hundred years.34 84

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The Poulet episode does illustrate why Jansenism never impacted the Canadian church as it did the French church, but not necessarily for the reasons often given. Historians have looked chiefly at the theological stance of individuals suspected of Jansenism to assess their adherence to the movement. Three clerics who showed Poulet sympathy have sometimes been labelled as possible Jansenists: Pierre Leclair, Joachim Fornel, and Thomas Thiboult.35 However much these three and others may have railed against Unigenitus in private, though, they never took the kind of determined stand Poulet did. Rather than focus on individuals, it is perhaps more productive to analyze why New France lacked the institutional framework that facilitated Jansenism in France. First, corporate safe havens for declared Jansenists did not exist in Canada as they did in France. The Jesuits and the Sulpicians in Montreal were firmly in the anti-Jansenist camp, and the Recollet order of Franciscans, although smarting from the Jesuits having evicted it in 1629, was not pro-Jansenist. The Seminary in Quebec, allied to the Foreign Missions Seminary in Paris, had the potential to harbour Jansenist sympathizers, but the defining dogmatic quarrels over grace did not motivate the priests of the Quebec Seminary. They saw the Jesuits as too accommodating, both in their Chinese and North American missions and in confessionals in Quebec.36 In many ways, theirs was a quarrel with a rival organization. Second, in eighteenth-century France, the law courts became the venue of choice for Jansenists to press their claims, and many lawyers and judges were sympathizers. However, as Poulet pointed out, the members of the Canadian legal establishment had little of the training or intellectual depth of their French counterparts.37 The Superior Council had less jurisdiction than the French appeals tribunals, such as the Paris Parlement. In France, Jansenist priests, when disciplined by their bishop, appealed successfully to the civil courts in a process known as appel comme d’abus. Finally, Saint-Vallier had resisted giving tenure to parish pastors. Instead, he appointed many as missionaries, so that they served at his pleasure. Taking a stand as a Jansenist could mean losing one’s living.38 Clerical historians have cited Saint-Vallier’s harsh measures against Poulet as an example of how Canada was preserved from Jansenism. However, his expulsion of Poulet was the product of friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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special circumstances. With his local clergy, the bishop exhibited a forbearance which, combined with the lack of institutional support, is probably more responsible for Jansenism not taking root. Pressured by the Jesuits, whom he could hardly ignore, Saint-Vallier had no choice except to expel the Benedictine when Poulet persisted in refusing to submit to the papal bull, although Poulet stated that Saint-Vallier had no other objections to giving him faculties as a priest.39 Saint-Vallier did publish a pastoral letter (with some delay) accepting Unigenitus, but he did not require his priests to sign a formulary. Had he imposed subscribing to the bull on his clergy, reluctant priests would have found little institutional support. Few if any would have been likely to follow Poulet’s lead. But by not forcing them to declare themselves, the bishop preserved peace, and no Jansenist group coalesced.40 By the time Bishop Dosquet required a signature in 1730, the generation of priests that had sympathized with Poulet had lost its vigour or turned to other battles. Poulet repeatedly mentioned “my friends,” friends who remain unnamed and who offered advice and insider information about Quebec local politics.41 He remained in contact with them after his return to France until his death in September 1723, to judge by a series of letters showing that an audience for Jansenist writings existed in Canada at least until this date.42 However, whatever “Jansenism” remained in Canada after 1730 was the severe pastoral approach shared by most of the clergy of the period or distrust of the Jesuits, not the theological Jansenism condemned by successive popes.43 Thus, Duplessis’s treatment of Jansenism exaggerates the danger. Her accounts show that she rejected Jansenism out of hand and never went beyond the shibboleths current among its opponents.44 The core of her opposition was the ultramontane loyalty to the pope promoted by the Jesuits, but it also stemmed from her spiritual outlook. Like the Jesuits, she was more attuned to God’s mercy than to divine justice, and she was inclined to see how human faculties could be put to the service of charity, rather than stressing the effects of original sin on human nature, as Jansenists did.45 She followed the quarrels over Jansenism with great interest in a partisan way the rest of her life, with utter confidence in her duty to do whatever necessary to oppose it.46 The embarrassing fact that she had a Jansenist uncle might well have redoubled her zeal. 86

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François-Xavier’s 1736 Abbeville Mission Duplessis would not have couched her scorn for Jansenism in such brutal terms in her 1720 letter to Hecquet if she had known the religious evolution of her childhood friend. Only a few subsequent letters written in the 1720s to Hecquet survive, and they suggest that Hecquet must have decided that her friendship was too important to jeopardize by revealing her hand. She lived in fear of dying without the last sacraments and she had difficulty finding a priest at all, even in times of health, who would hear her confession. Such troubles surfaced in 1722, 1729, 1731, and 1732.47 Duplessis would never have flattered a Jansenist as she does Hecquet in October 1731: “All ladies of society are not learned as you are, my dear friend, who could teach the paths of virtue even to those who are charged with teaching it to others; one of the things that attaches me the most to you is to think that you are truly Christian.”48 She must still not have known Hecquet’s stance in 1735 when she heartily recommended a mission that her brother François-Xavier was to preach in nearby Amiens.49 He had abandoned thoughts of returning to Canada as a missionary and had become a prominent member of the teams of Jesuit preachers who sought to revive religious practice in towns and villages in France with month-long campaigns of sermons and services called “missions.” As he told his sisters who approved his choice in 1730, “I would find more to do in France than in Canada.”50 Two themes were dear to him: the cross and anti-Jansenist polemics. Through the 1730s, Marie-André included enthusiastic reports about her brother’s success as a preacher in her letters to Marie-Catherine. His fame grew immensely after 1738 when two cripples were healed in the northern French city of Arras after invoking the monumental cross he had erected there. Holy cards depicting the first miracle or the cross were widely distributed in France and Canada, and a book of devotions for people following his missions went through several editions in the 1740s.51 Hecquet would have also followed the critical articles on his missions in the clandestine Jansenist weekly, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques. There Hecquet found accounts that mocked his dramatic preaching style, refuted his attacks on Jansenism, and, above all, condemned the ease with which he was said to give absolution friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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4.1 Jesuit missions often included the erection of monumental crosses. The bishop of Arras in northern France attested that two cripples were healed in 1738 after invoking a cross raised there by François-Xavier Duplessis. This image, depicting the healed crippled woman at the foot of the cross where he is preaching, is the frontispiece of a 1742 edition of devotions for those following his missions.

in the confessional. For the Jansenists, the Jesuit missions were empty religious spectacle that only produced superficial conversions. François-Xavier also seldom missed an opportunity in his sermons to make fun of Jansenist women like Hecquet who dared think they had the right to be informed on religious issues. The Jesuit mocked them as “women theologians” and “priestesses.”52 A 1736 mission he preached in Abbeville compounded a personal crisis Hecquet was undergoing that year. In May 1736, she wrote a long letter of confession to Jean Soanen, her aunt Michelle Fontaine’s confessor, accompanied by a profession of faith.53 François-Xavier’s Abbeville mission began at the end of June, and Hecquet soon had to go to Paris to care for her husband. Before leaving, she instructed her servants to confess not to the Jesuit missionaries, but to their local parish priest. When she returned two months later, her pastor paid her a menacing call. Word had gotten back to him about her instructions, and the servants had been heard referring to Duplessis as the “Buffoon of God” (“Arlequin du Bon Dieu”).54 A long debate with the pastor ensued. She blamed the bull on the Jesuits. In the account she wrote that includes this episode, she only identifies Marie-André’s brother as “a native of Quebec.”55 Her family knew of her friendship with the Canadian nun, so there was no need to hide her connection to him from them. Hecquet must have intended for her account to circulate in her Jansenist networks, and she evidently did not want to advertise her cordial relations with the sister of the notorious Jesuit. She was a closet Jansenist in her relation to Duplessis and seems to have been equally secretive about her friendship with the sister of the Jesuit in her Jansenist circles.56 Hecquet never wrote her friend about the mission either. The next year Marie-André sent these gentle reproaches: “People inform me that there was a mission in Abbeville where my brother Father Duplessis was with his lordship the bishop of Amiens. I can hardly believe it because you do not say anything about it, and it seems to me, my dear friend, that if it had taken place, you are too Christian not to have participated and too civil not to have written me anything about it. Nonetheless, I will not let it come between us. Your busy activities could have made you forget it. People write us about the marvels of this dear brother. He is a man wholly filled with God who

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lives and breathes the salvation of souls and whose efforts heaven blesses wonderfully.”57 If Duplessis learned that Hecquet was a Jansenist it was probably after 1740, the year that she told Marie-Catherine of her hope that the then bishop of Amiens, Louis-François-Gabriel d’Orléans de La Motte, would become the bishop of Quebec.58 La Motte was a more intransigent tracker of Jansenists than even Sabatier. He was a friend of François-Xavier, but if the bishop informed the Jesuit of Hecquet’s stance, there is no indication in François-Xavier’s published letters to his sisters. Nonetheless, after 1740, Duplessis does not mention her brother’s missions to Hecquet. If indeed Marie-André did learn of her friend’s Jansenism, the nun seems to have displayed the tact with which François-Xavier reported his relations with his Jansenist uncle in 1722: “He is much to be pitied; I was greatly pained when I visited him, although I did not let it show.”59

Refashioning a Long-Distance Friendship through Letters Read retrospectively from the vantage point of the last letter of the exchange in 1758, the letters chronicle two women who separately weathered many storms. Read incrementally, letter by letter, the exchange is about reshaping a friendship that could easily have ended in 1699, when Marie-Catherine’s father took her back to Abbeville. Marie-André was twelve and Marie-Catherine thirteen when their shared experience ended. Only letters could refashion a bond that would be tested not just by physical separation, but also by new commitments. During the nineteen-year interval between that separation and the 1718 letter that is the first surviving one of the exchange, Duplessis had become novice mistress and was beginning her administrative career. Hecquet, a reluctant bride, was the mother of four children with two more to be born shortly. Duplessis was by then the sister of a Jesuit and Hecquet a persecuted Jansenist. Nothing guaranteed the continuation of the friendship. Duplessis’s 1720 letter appears to be an effort to catch up on news of common acquaintances: she inquires about Hecquet’s father, an aunt, and the doctor Philippe Hecquet, and gives news of Canadians 90

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whom Hecquet had encountered through her. However, their correspondence would have to be propelled by more than memories of a shared childhood and the people they knew in Paris. This familiar cast of characters would gradually be replaced by new ones who existed for each correspondent only in letters. Except for Hecquet’s father Jacques Homassel, who died in 1747, most news that each friend reported concerned people whom the other had never met. On Duplessis’s side, the list was short: her mother, two brothers, sister, and niece. As a mother of six, Hecquet’s cast of characters was much larger and constantly expanding.60 News of these new family members generated momentum for the exchange and was supplemented by general news of the colony or the mother country. In addition, the mechanics of the correspondence were a frequent topic, and Duplessis often hinted at the fragility of the exchange. Duplessis, in fact, complained in thirteen of the extant letters that she had not received one from Hecquet. She wrote even when Hecquet did not, and became the motive force of the correspondence. She had to perfect the art of scolding, sometimes in a playful way, sometimes with reproaches, so much so that complaints about no letters from Hecquet became a standard part of hers. In 1730, she mixed flattery with urgings to improve: “Whom will I blame this year so as not to hold you responsible for the offense that I have received none of your dear news. Because I tend to flatter myself in regard to you, my very dear friend, I imagined that because the vessels left France later than usual, your letter arrived too late to Monsieur Demus for him to send it on to me. I entreat you to take better steps next year, since I endure with difficulty being deprived of one of the sweetest satisfactions that I enjoy when I receive proofs of your ongoing friendship.”61 In 1733, Hecquet’s missing letter became first a pretext for worrying that Marie-Catherine had experienced some misfortune that prevented her from writing and then a pretext for claiming to find reassurance, before scolding Hecquet roundly for neglecting her obligation to console her Canadian friend whose mother had died. “I had no news from you this year, and Monsieur Demus wrote succinctly because he sent us nothing, and said not a word about you. That partly reassures me, my dear friend, because if something bad had happened to you, he would not have failed to inform me, since friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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he knows how I cherish you … My dear friend, it seems to me that you are especially obliged to demonstrate this mark of friendship because I wrote you news of my mother’s death, and surviving as an orphan in Canada, don’t I have the right to expect that you will soften the pain of my remoteness by the signs that you could give me of your affection?”62 In 1754, conversing with a recently returned visitor to France who had dined with Hecquet at her son-in-law’s home in Paris had to substitute for a letter: “I waited until the departure of the vessels to have the honour to write you, expecting some of your dear letters, but I have received no other news of you except from Monsieur Jacquelin, a merchant in this land, who came back from France this year and who assured me that he had dined with you, Madame, at Monsieur Bourdeau’s home, where you appeared to him to be happy to see someone who knows me. This is a proof of your friendship for which I thank you.”63 However, this vicarious face-to-face meeting cannot replace a letter actually written by her friend. Thus in 1755, Duplessis is politely blunt: “You owe me arrears. Pay your full due by giving me an ample accounting of your dear news.”64 Duplessis’s creativeness in varying the topos of the missing letter shows the inventive spark of the texts of her youth. In every case, she signalled the strength of her friendship by highlighting how much Hecquet’s letters meant to her, even when they did not make it across the Atlantic. Hecquet had described the love-at-first-sight bond between her and Marie-André in her biography of Michelle Fontaine. Duplessis told Hecquet herself as much in her 1742 letter, where she invoked “the tender friendship that I have pledged to you from my childhood days.”65 In 1720, Geneviève had described to Hecquet the “palpable” pleasure with which her sister received Hecquet’s letters: “We reread your letters in a festive mood, finding in them a certain piquancy that pleases us and allows one to easily judge your piety.”66 These frequent discussions of the mechanics of the correspondence reveal the relationship’s unstable dynamics. In the years before Hecquet moved to Paris after her father’s death in 1747, Duplessis routinely addressed the letters to Hecquet’s home in Abbeville. But once in the capital, Hecquet seems to have refused to give her address. Duplessis complained in 1748, “Where are you, and where will I address my letters in the future?”67 The next year, Duplessis renewed 92

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her complaint: “I seek you out in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in SaintGermain, and in Saint-Honoré, and I am not sure of finding you in whatever place you may be.”68 Hecquet had, in fact, found a house on the Rue Mouffetard, in the neighbourhood of the Saint-Médard church, a pilgrimage site for Jansenists, because one of their saintly heroes, the deacon François de Pâris, had been buried its cemetery. Her address might have revealed her hand. Duplessis had to send her letters via Hecquet’s son-in-law, the merchant Pierre Bourdeau, who lived on the right bank, or via the Mounier merchants, a Protestant family with branches in Quebec and France. According to Duplessis, there was a much easier method for getting letters to Canada: “I do not understand how you can find it difficult to get them to me. Nothing is easier today.” She suggested using the Jesuit headquarters at their college Louis-le-Grand or the Missions Étrangères.69 In 1751, she reiterated the suggestion: “I entreat you, my dear friend, give me your address since you dwell in Paris. That will make it much easier for me to get you my letters, and I would have yours sooner if you would send them to the father procurator of the Canadian missions at the college of Louis-le-Grand.”70 However, Hecquet wanted nothing to do with the Society of Jesus. Perhaps Duplessis still did not know of Hecquet’s Jansenist ties. The family news that Duplessis reported was generally more upbeat than Hecquet’s. While Marie-André did report Geneviève’s chronic respiratory problems and their mother’s death, for the most part, she relayed successes: the crowds at François-Xavier’s missions; Charles-Denis’s charm with the ladies, his marriage, and his promotion. To judge by Duplessis’s comments on the family news Hecquet sent, it was increasingly filled with disappointments and pain. Nicolas Lyon-Caen’s book on Hecquet’s family background allows readers now to know more about Marie-Catherine’s trials than she herself probably ever revealed to the nun.71 Hecquet’s father Jacques Homassel was a domineering industrialist who sacrificed family to business. Her husband was chronically depressed and perhaps alcoholic. The three children who married in Abbeville led calm lives, but the other three were sources of worry. The two daughters who married Parisian merchant brothers in 1736 died early, as did some of their children and one of the husbands, leaving Marie-Catherine as a grandchild’s guardian. Judging by her 1751 letter, where Hecquet alluded to some of friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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these problems, she only reported them to Duplessis in veiled terms: “I see all my children, of whom the oldest is about thirty-eight, with such weak constitutions and impaired lungs that I worry daily that they are about to take leave of the numerous children that they all have. One of them [Philippe], without dying, has weighed me down with six, not to mention himself.”72 In fact, her son Philippe in Amiens was a drunkard who accumulated business debts, and whose children she had to support. She had him condemned for debts in 1749 and kept him interned in a series of asylums and prisons until he was eventually deported to Guadeloupe, where he died in 1770.73 To protect the interests of her children, Hecquet obtained a property separation from her husband in 1741. She had him interned in asylums several times, at least once by lettre de cachet around 1755.74 She was no patsy, as her long-suffering aunt Michelle Fontaine, who raised her, had been. In her will, Hecquet deducted all the money she had spent on Philippe and his children from their portion of her estate.75 In 1736 and again in 1738, Duplessis confessed rather sheepishly that Hecquet might find her expressions of “tender friendship” unbecoming of a nun.76 “But don’t you find, Madame, that for a nun, I speak very much according to nature? Shouldn’t one mortify somewhat one’s inclinations?” Duplessis quickly justified herself: “I don’t blame myself because I esteem you as much as I love you, and our bond has edified me more that it can harm me.”77 As she put it two years later, “I admit to you that the senses still have so much power over me that I enjoy a great pleasure in cultivating my virtuous friends here on earth.”78 She ignored the seventeenth-century strictures in her order’s constitutions that discouraged such friendships for nuns. Instead, she cited the more general commonplace of Christian friendship based on mutual esteem for virtue and edification. When Duplessis confessed to going beyond the conventions of convent writing for Marie-Catherine, she affirmed the unique character of her friendship, which she frequently described as “steadfast.” The persecuted Jansenist Hecquet could only be delighted to receive Duplessis’s esteem for her as a true Christian. The unspoken subtext of the exchange between the two childhood friends Marie-André and Marie-Catherine is Hecquet’s closet Jansenism. Since only three examples of Hecquet’s letters to Canada 94

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survive – two drafts (1740 and 1751) kept by Hecquet and a 1756 letter received by Duplessis79 – the evidence of how much she revealed is inconclusive. This beleaguered Jansenist woman, who felt persecuted by the official church in France, sought the nun’s affirmation of her piety and true Christian spirit. Marie-André was happy to affirm a tie to the city of her birth and childhood and to have another person to turn to for needed supplies from France. After the 1755 fire, she implored Hecquet to send glasses: “I even lost my glasses. I can hardly either read or do needlework. Have pity on me, my dear friend.”80 Duplessis countered what might have been Hecquet’s attempts at withdrawal by writing even when Hecquet did not. Her childhood friendship with Hecquet overlapped with an instrumental one where mutual benefit mixed with nostalgia and generic Christian values. Each partner wrote for different reasons, but their letters generated a friendship that was stronger than theological differences and geographic separation.

Fashioning Networks of Friends of the Hospital The annual letters of Duplessis to Hecquet over the course of forty years form the tightest ensemble within her correspondence and are the only part of her intimate correspondence written by her to have survived. Thirty-three remain because Marie-Catherine preserved many of her friend’s missives written between 1718 and 1758,81 just as the Duplessis sisters saved the letters they received from their Jesuit brother in France. Two sets of business letters in French archives have been published alongside those to Hecquet: ten letters by MarieAndré and Geneviève to their representative in Paris, François de Montigny, and forty-eight by both sisters to the apothecary Jacques Tranquillain Féret in Dieppe. In addition to the sixty published letters by Marie-André, at least another sixty have been identified in the Hôtel-Dieu archives. To her letters must be added the many drafts of letters by her sister and administrative partner Geneviève, particularly from the late 1740s, in the monastery archives. Because of Duplessis’s desire to maintain links with the country of her birth and her managerial roles, she had multiple networks of correspondents in France. Indeed, as Marie-André wrote Hecquet in 1731, “We are in contact with a great number of people … who send friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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us a thousand proofs of very pure affection.”82 She had exchanges with suppliers and financial representatives in France, as well as officials of the ministry of the navy. The record contains formal petitions to ministers as well as letters to prominent figures in France who might lobby for her hospital. She exchanged letters with many convents in France, not just with those of her own order such as the one at Dieppe that founded her own, but with Visitandines, Carmelites, and Cistercians, among others. She seems to have sent them annual letters each fall, much as she did to Hecquet and her relatives.83 Autumn was letter-writing season in Canada because the colony was cut off from direct contact with Europe between the departure in November of the last ships and May when the earliest ships from France arrived.84 As she reminded Hecquet in 1730, “Fall is a crushing season in Canada because all business is transacted then. Letters from France are received; we reply to them promptly; we lay in supplies; debts are paid … so much negotiation is required to come to terms that twice the amount of time that one has would scarcely suffice.”85 Within the colony, she had frequent dealings by letter with local authorities and suppliers. Although one of the most revealing series of letters dates from her conflict with the intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy in 1727, the record is strongest starting in the late 1740s. Many letters must have been lost in the 1755 fire. The two most complete administrative exchanges are some thirty letters with the intendant François Bigot during the last decade of the colony and sixty letters between her and Bishop Pontbriand beginning in 1747. Since these administrative letters will be extensively cited in subsequent chapters, it is useful here to establish that they are much more than straightforward business correspondence. Even as relatively dry financial exchanges, they would be rare. The other major sets of letters by colonial women of New France, those of Marie Guyart in the seventeenth century and Duplessis’s contemporary Élisabeth Bégon, consist mostly of reportage – news of the colony and family or of their interior lives – and lack such seemingly routine managerial letters. However, beyond what these business letters reveal about the financial dealings of the Duplessis sisters, they also show how the Duplessis sisters used correspondence to fashion friendships, in this case to make friends of the hospital. They sought to acquire 96

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donors, lobbyists, functionaries, and suppliers who would go the extra mile for their institution, who would give funds or favours. They recognized the difficulty of creating these necessary relationships. As Marie-André put it to Montigny, their business agent in Paris, “It is rare to find people who wish to take up the interests of those far away.”86 Their strategies build on the conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing, which the sisters were careful to observe in official correspondence, including greetings at New Year’s and on saints’ days to local authorities, the exchange of gifts, and, in some cases, professions of personal friendship. Exchanges of gifts accompanied the exchange of letters. As Geneviève explained to Féret in 1743, “When we receive some service or token of friendship, we are pleased to give something in return.”87 Tokens of esteem designed to keep the hospital in the thoughts of their correspondents were the simplest form of these gifts, such as the two hundred or more palls that Marie-André embroidered during spare moments in the refectory. These square rigid pieces of cloth cover the chalice during the mass, and thus the priests to whom she gave them would likely remember her in their prayers during the service. As she explained to Hecquet in 1752, “Our parish pastors to whom I give them receive them with great pleasure and tell me that this is a fine way for them to remember me at the holy sacrifice of the mass. I keep a small catalogue of the ones that I distribute. I do this in wasted moments in the refectory. Since I eat rather fast and am among the first to be served, I always finish before the others, and while waiting for the signal to fold the napkins, I take a little bag out of my pocket with everything I need for needlework. Sometimes I do few stitches, other times more, and little by little, I make six or seven of them a year, and I give them away as they are done.”88 She wrote short prayers of paragraph length to accompany palls and sent them to priests throughout New France from the Illinois Country in the west to Acadia along the Atlantic, and even some to France. One went to Hecquet with the request that Marie-Catherine identify the recipient so she could enter the name in her catalogue. Duplessis’s log and text of her prayers survive, but no entry in it corresponds to this request. Was Hecquet reluctant to admit that she had given the pall to a Jansenist priest? friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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4.2 This embroidery measuring 16 x 17 cm on linen fabric is for a pall that covers the chalice during mass. It depicts a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young with its blood, a traditional allegory of Christ’s death on the cross. Duplessis’s catalogue of 220 palls records one for 24 December 1737 with this theme. The Hôtel-Dieu preserves nine palls embroidered by Duplessis.

The sisters’ staple present to correspondents in France was syrup of capillaire. This concoction, made by boiling the fronds of maidenhead ferns, was a remedy for chest ills. It was usually drunk as an infusion, but could also be applied as a balm directly on the skin. Duplessis’s first surviving letter in 1718 to Hecquet mentions having already sent it several times because Hecquet reported that it gave her relief. She sent it to her Jesuit brother in the late 1740s when he began suffering from lung problems. François-Xavier found it so effective that he even used the recipe of his Jansenist uncle!89 It was a particularly apt gift because the syrup from Canadian ferns was reputed to be especially potent, and Duplessis tried to send local products. Finding appropriate Canadian gifts was not easy, given Marie-André’s low estimation of Canada’s riches. She reiterated a similar apology as this one found in her 1720 letter to Hecquet to correspondent after correspondent: “We can only send wretched trinkets from this land, but you give magnificent presents.”90 Indigenous items were another frequent present with a local flavour. Around 1752, for example, she sent “a little item of native handiwork” to a potential benefactor she hoped to woo, the duchesse d’Ayen.91 Duplessis’s hope was that the exoticism of such gifts would mitigate their modest nature. Her last “gift” to Hecquet in 1758 was two songs celebrating French victories in the Seven Years War.92 For the Dieppe apothecary Féret, she and Geneviève scoured the colony for rare specimens from the natural world that he could include in his cabinet of curiosities, and when those were lacking, Geneviève sent her devotional texts.93 The sisters sometimes addressed letters to potential benefactors with whom they had tenuous links. The seventeenth-century foundress of the hospital had been the duchesse d’Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. In 1751, they did not hesitate to contact the current holder of the titles, even though the blood relationship was weak, in hope of awakening an interest in the hospital. The sisters included syrup of capillaire with their letter to the duchess. The stable of their regular correspondents could expand overnight in moments of crisis such as the Dupuy affair in the late 1720s or after the 1755 fire, when they mounted letter-writing campaigns of appeals. Many of these letters also appear to have been written cold. In each, they

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introduce their plea with an attempt to establish some link between the correspondent and the hospital. When the Duplessis sisters detected a sympathetic ear, they sought to exploit this goodwill, especially when such an individual had the ear of powerful figures they thought hostile or indifferent. In June 1727, during their conflict with Dupuy, they wrote his secretary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau to explain their side of the quarrel, saying they were much impressed by the courtesy and civility with which he had received their memoranda, and included the proviso that he should only show their letter to the intendant if he deemed it helpful to their cause. In the 1750s, during their battle with Bigot over paying for the hospital’s expansion, they courted Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, who had briefly served as governor of the colony. They confided to him that in his exit interview in 1750 before returning to France, he had inspired “a secret intuition” that he would be “very useful and favourable to the hospital since he knew its true situation.”94 They continued to write him hoping that he would lobby the naval ministry. Their most potent strategy, and one reserved for a privileged few, was to add private friendship to friendship for the hospital. This can be seen developing in the series of letters to Féret that span 1733 to 1752, where the sisters begin by sharing family news and gradually add more personal details. In 1741, Geneviève hoped that the apothecary would “continue to be among our friends, and that beyond the ties of self-interest that we share because of our hospital, we will be more united by esteem and the affection of Christian charity.”95 Perhaps the most striking example is found in Geneviève’s letters to the military engineer Louis Franquet, who had drawn up plans for the proposed hospital expansion. In a 1753 declaration of friendship that is almost unseemly in a nun, the spiritual friendship that Geneviève professed for him might well be bested by a natural one: “I do not doubt that spiritual sympathies exist, as do natural ones, and I feel it in respect to you, sir, because when I have the honour to write you, my pen proceeds on its own and anticipates my thoughts … I desire your happiness so much that mine own would not be complete if yours fell short in any respect.”96 The sisters felt he had understood their point of view during their discussions with him and counted on the engineer to report back to La Galissonière.

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These hospital friendships had uneven success. Some correspondents, such as Bigot, would never be won over despite persistent overtures, while others would prove to be influential supporters. It is not clear that either Franquet or La Galissonière, who had both impressed the sisters in person, helped the hospital substantially, but the duchesse d’Aiguillon, whom they had never met, eventually did. The Duplessis sisters’ concept of Christian friendship based on esteem for virtue, on charity, and on shared spiritual goals was capacious enough to justify an attachment to a woman Marie-André likely learned was a heretic, and it had found room for the particular friendship between the two nun sisters. It readily encouraged them to enlist supporters as friends of the hospital.

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A Sister Team Managing the Oldest Hospital North of Mexico: Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Mother Superior (1732–38; 1744–50) “I am only beginning to become knowledgeable about the house’s business,” Marie-André wrote her business correspondent in France in October 1732, six months after having been elected mother superior.1 This, of course, is a flagrant understatement. Her protest in 1719 against Bishop Saint-Vallier’s unilateral decision to build a separate building to care for sick priests shows that she had been well-informed about hospital financing very early on. She sounded an alarm that would become a leitmotif for the next forty years: the fear that the hospital might not survive. These concerns are emblematic of her long administration of the hospital’s affairs: juggling income to meet the institution’s day-to-day needs while protecting its current assets and assuring that expansion be put on solid footing. In 1719, her determination to defend the interests of the community took the form of a solemn protest. When she was appointed hospital bursar in 1725, she began channelling this same spirit into the management of the hospital. Visitors from the British colonies to the south and from France would have been surprised by the important role the Hôtel-Dieu played in the medical life of the town. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm, who visited the British middle colonies before travelling to Canada in 1749 and who left the most complete existing description of the Hôtel-Dieu, could not have reported on such an institution in

Philadelphia or New York. A hospital along the lines of the Hôtel-Dieu would only open in Philadelphia in 1752.2 In British America, medical care was the province of the family. The Reformation had destroyed the tradition of hospitals often staffed by religious orders in England. Such hospitals remained a fixture in every French town of some size, but they were reserved for the poor who could not count on home support. Thus a well-off patient from France at the Hôtel-Dieu in 1718 (Georges Poulet, in fact), when writing for a French public, felt obliged to explain, “The custom in that land is that everyone sick is brought there – the great, the rich, and all the clergy – because of the easy access to doctors and medicine and the special care the nuns have for the patients.”3 While the local poor and a floating population of transient soldiers and sailors were the primary clientele of the forty beds of the hospital’s two wards, unlike in France, the Canadian upper classes did not disdain using its services. They were free for the poor, but more well-off patients were expected to pay, and the king paid a per diem for soldiers. Unlike twenty-first-century ones, eighteenth-century hospitals were usually marginal in the delivery of health care across society and served a marginal clientele. This was not the case at the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec.4 Initially, the finances of the community and the hospital had not been distinguished. However, by the 1660s, the nuns felt the need to separate the two. They knew they risked being accused of living at the expense of the hospital, and they feared being asked to use dowry funds intended for their living expenses for hospital purposes. In 1676, the property and investments were divided with the agreement of Bishop Laval. The nuns held the hospital in trust, with the hospital bursar, appointed by the bishop, administering its finances. The bursar’s title in French, dépositaire des pauvres, came from the fact that the hospital’s intended clientele (besides the Indigenous people) was the worthy poor. From the beginning of this separation, the nuns insisted that the bursar only had to open her books to the community’s ecclesiastical superior, appointed by the bishop, rather than to civil officials.5 The sums that the hospital handled were substantial during the thirty-seven years Duplessis was at the helm. Yearly income when she entered office in 1732 was around 8,000 livres; revenues ranged between 10,000 and 12,000 livres until 1737, when they began a climb managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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that reached 22,000 just before the beginning of the Seven Years War.6 The pressure on the hospital’s administrators was intense because in twenty-one of the thirty years between 1723 and 1752, the institution operated at a deficit.7 The colonial economy presented a manager such as Duplessis with multiple challenges, whether the lack of specie, the reliance on military expenditure, the tiny local manufacturing base, or the endemic administrative corruption. After the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the colony gradually entered a period of relative economic expansion and even prosperity, in comparison with the dark first decade of the century during which Georges Duplessis’s affairs had floundered. During the thirty or so prosperous years before the wars with Britain resumed in 1744 and even beyond, the nuns’ goal was to invest wisely with an eye toward expanding or upgrading their hospital plant. However, the hospital’s growing military role stressed its finances to the breaking point.

Women, Business, and Family Ties Few women in Canada managed as much money over such a long period or had business dealings that ranged as widely. The participation of women, whether lay or nuns, in the colony’s economy is best understood as a function of their family. The family acted as a unit that strove to advance its social position. The absence of the guild system in Canada made it difficult for an unmarried woman to operate her own enterprise, as Marie-Anne Leroy had in France.8 Canadian women functioned as extensions of their husbands, often collaborating in their professional activity. The wives of craftsmen and shopkeepers participated in the production and sale of goods. The wives of seigneurs were responsible for running at least a large household, if not aspects of the estate. Administrators’ wives cultivated contacts who could promote their husband’s career. When merchants or military officers left home on business or for war, they gave their wives an authorization to act in their name. Widows could continue their husband’s business in the name of minor children. At all levels of society, a family’s network of relatives, friends, and patrons was cultivated to further its interests.9 In theory, a nun’s solemn vows signalled a civil death that cut ties to her family. She could neither inherit nor pass on family property. 104

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But the family mentality penetrated the monastery as it did life outside. Nuns advanced the interests of the house, just as their relatives in the world sought to consolidate family fortunes, and individual nuns made use of their network of family members to lobby for their community with all the skill they would have devoted to establishing their children had they married. In terms of managerial autonomy, their status as brides of Christ situated them somewhere between a widow and a married woman who had been granted a financial separation from her husband (séparée des biens). The Coutume de Paris, the French customary law that governed civil matters in Canada, entrusted the entire management of the community property as well as any property a wife brought into the marriage to her husband. The courts sometimes granted a wife a financial separation, usually when the husband’s misconduct threatened the family. Hecquet had obtained a separation for this reason in 1741. Such separations gave wives the ability to manage their finances, but they still could not sell property without their husband’s consent.10 Marie Leroy had also obtained this status, not because of any family disorder, but to protect the property that her mother had reserved to her in her 1686 marriage contract as “propres,” property reserved to the wife. A widow could administer the community property on behalf of minor children without any immediate oversight, but not sell it. The Coutume de Paris conceived her power as transitional; she assured the family’s well-being in the interim between her husband’s death and a son’s accession.11 In most cases, a widow did not take on her husband’s active role if an adult son was available, or she surrendered it when a son reached majority.12 A religious community had a corporate identity and system of internal self-government that allowed the nuns great latitude to manage their affairs. While, in theory, major decisions concerning property were to be discussed and approved in chapter meetings or by the advisory council, in normal circumstances such meetings simply ratified the proposals of the community’s leaders. In legal documents, the nuns are often accorded the same honorifics as laywomen; both Marie-André and Geneviève are referred to as “Dame Duplessis.” Male clerical oversight was built into the system. The bishop appointed a priest as superior with the responsibility of approving all decisions. The nuns submitted financial accounts to managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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the bishop each year, he or his representative presided at the election of officers, and he appointed directly the hospital bursar. This episcopal supervision paralleled the authority of a husband over his wife – even one with a financial separation – but the corporate nature of the religious community and the complexity of its affairs gave the nuns a standing more like that of a widow. When relations were smooth, the nuns managed day-to-day operations independently, and the bishop approved their larger initiatives, much as the chapter meetings ratified the proposals of the mother superior. However, the potential for tension, if not conflict, was always just below the surface. The bishop could intervene in elections, as he had in 1699 when Saint-Vallier prevented the community from electing Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau to any post, and he could impose his own initiatives such as the Hôpital-Général. Moreover, this immediate oversight existed within a larger framework, in which even decisions that would seem local, such as vacating hospital property to extend a street, had to be ratified by the ministry of the navy in Versailles. Multiple layers of oversight delayed action, but also multiplied the possibilities for negotiation of disputes.

A Sister Team and “Independence” The Hôtel-Dieu was unique among Canadian communities in that Marie-André’s sister Geneviève seconded her during much of her career. When Marie-André began alternating as mother superior and assistant with Catherine Tibierge de Saint-Joachim in 1732, Geneviève took over the job of hospital bursar – “the linch-pin” office in convent hospitals, according to an historian of the institution in France.13 The younger sister would hold the office with only a few breaks until her death in 1756. The two seem to have collaborated so closely that they were seen by outsiders as a team. One sister, writing to the former governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, recalled that he had chided them for their reputation of opposition to the expansion of the hospital: “I recall a slight criticism that you made of us one day in the convent parlour when you told us that the Duplessis Ladies didn’t have the reputation of being inclined to expand the hospital.”14 “Les Dames Duplessis” were a joint force in the colony to be reckoned with. 106

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The closest to this team in other convents during Duplessis’s life might be Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay and Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay at the Hôpital-Général. However, their collaboration is more an example of how competent nuns rotated in administrative posts. Like Geneviève, Ramezay was a longtime bursar, holding the office for twenty-six years, but she held higher positions as well, and was mother superior for six years. Juchereau Duchesnay was superior for nineteen years, and energetically defended her institution’s interests. She arranged with the court for the hospital to house invalid soldiers, appealed successfully to Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas in 1737 in the quarrel over the hospital’s claims to ownership of the episcopal palace, and expanded the hospital buildings in 1736. Daughters of the military and seigneurial elite, Ramezay and Juchereau Duchesnay could count on aristocratic connections the bourgeois Duplessis sisters lacked.15 The Duplessis sisters knew that their initiatives were often attacked and that they were accused of “independence,” of bypassing male supervision. They retorted that they never acted without the approval of the community’s chapter and the bishop.16 In a colonial economy, where successful management meant a knack for finding expedients when events thwarted even careful planning, they were worldly-wise. It was a man’s world in which they competed ably, given the limitations of clausura which prevented them from visiting the hospital’s rural properties and forced them to deal through male intermediaries. Only in moments of extreme frustration did they invoke their handicap as women. Geneviève did so in 1747, when their bookkeeping methods were challenged: “If the accounts do not appear clear to people who would wish that they adhered to the practices of governmental administrative offices or of merchants, that is not possible for women, and above all for nuns, who only leave the world so that they don’t have to know its rules.”17 As always, they invoked their good faith, their devotion to the cause of the poor, and what they saw as the miraculous way in which the hospital managed to survive under their keeping, as guarantees of their accounting practices. The Duplessis sisters might have rejected the condescending attitude of male civil and ecclesiastical officials who considered the sisters’ determination to manage the hospital’s affairs themselves unseemly managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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female “independence,” but they could display a similar condescension toward the members of their own community. In a memo to Bishop Pontbriand, Marie-André requested that he not reveal to the other nuns the permission that he was giving the bursar to make minor discretionary expenditures: “I know by experience that we have never had peace except when these things are done secretly; as soon as they are known, they become a source of murmurs and disturbance.” Underlying this request for secrecy is the misogynistic commonplace that women are given to quarrelsome gossip. She could boast in the same memo, “There have been more deliberations of the chapter and advisory committee since we became bursars than since the founding of the house,”18 but that was perhaps because she had learned how to manage her community to ratify her formal proposals. The Duplessis sisters’ “independence” from someone looking over their shoulders worked in two directions.

Managing Investments during Thirty Years of Peace: Fixed Income, Urban, and Agricultural In 1720, the community faced a difficult choice in the wake of the bankruptcy of John Law’s Mississippi Company, which had merged with his royal bank. Interest rates were reduced drastically and paper currency issued by the bank became all but worthless. Much of the initial endowment of the Hôtel-Dieu, as well as subsequent dowry funds, like those of most religious communities, had been invested in the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. These rentes, which functioned somewhat as bonds, had been paying interest at a rate of 5 percent before 1713.19 The royal authorities offered the choice of accepting only 2 percent or repatriating the capital to Canada, and suggested that the repatriated funds be used to purchase land in the colony that could become income-producing. When on 7 October 1720 the nuns assembled in chapter to deliberate this proposal, they had already discussed the matter with knowledgeable advisors, as was their custom. The minutes written by Duplessis foresaw catastrophe: the cost of developing virgin land would reduce the house to beggary and force its closure, just as the lower interest rate would “ruin them completely.” The chapter therefore stated that it would prefer to use the funds to develop more fully the farm property it already held.20 Duplessis was only the chapter 108

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secretary at this time, but one senses her hand in the outcome. The dire prediction is similar to the one she made in her protest of 1719. She knew from her father’s experience as the enterprising seigneur of Lauzon how difficult it was to make agricultural lands productive. She was equally well acquainted with the working of rentes on the Hôtel de Ville from her mother’s finances. Indeed, the hospital counted on such income in hard currency to buy supplies in France that could not be obtained locally. Writing to Hecquet two weeks after the chapter meeting, Marie-André probably underestimated the impact the measure would have on the community: “Having something in France and being able to withdraw a certain amount every year for the small needs of the house is very agreeable.”21 In reality, the income loss was sorely felt: during the ten years between 1704 and 1713, such rentes had accounted for 15.7 percent of the hospital’s revenue; in 1724–33 they fell to 6.1 percent.22 As in the 1719 affair of separate quarters for priests, Duplessis’s worst fears were not realized. By the time the community’s agent in France received its instructions in 1720, he had already decided to leave the funds invested there at an interest rate that turned out to be 2.5 percent instead of 2 percent.23 In 1724, when the government ordered a one-third devaluation of money, Duplessis, to protect the 13,758 livres that the hospital held in cash, arranged to lend out this amount on favourable terms with the bishop’s consent.24

Urban Property Management A conflict that began in 1727 over the community’s administration with the recently arrived intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy illustrates how Duplessis could mobilize allies to support her defensive policies.25 The initial issue at stake might seem minor: Dupuy halted construction of a stone wall between the hospital’s garden and the adjoining street, the Rue des Pauvres, now the Côte du Palais. This escalated into demands from the intendant to inspect the hospital’s financial records and a demand that the hospital sell off part of its holdings as building lots. It is tempting to reduce the dispute to the clash of two strong-willed individuals. However, two visions of the hospital’s role in the colony were also in play. The intendant, charged with the civil administration of Canada, and imbued with the ideal of the service du roi, the king’s managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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service, somewhat akin to the notion of public service, envisaged the needs of the entire colony. Duplessis, as hospital bursar, largely limited her view to the service of the hospital’s primary clients, the poor, and in a lesser measure the king’s soldiers. An exchange of correspondence between the two sisters with François-Madeleine-Fortuné Ruette d’Auteuil in June 1727 offers a rare inside look into the sisters’ strategizing. Although quarrelsome by nature and out of favour with the authorities, the elderly former royal attorney general was in many ways an understandable choice as a confidant. In 1699, he had acted in their father’s behalf as a secret go-between in the purchase of Lauzon. But he had protested energetically in 1705 against the way in which Georges Duplessis had been named a director of the Company of the Colony. His obsession with precedent and procedures was useful here, since the hospital would assert that the intendant’s demand that it make a financial accounting to him violated its established privileges. The sisters acted as a team. Geneviève wrote the first letter on 9 June on behalf of her older sister, who was isolated in a retreat. Even though Geneviève held no office, she was clearly in the know. Yet secrecy was deemed essential. The sisters did not want their consultation with Ruette d’Auteuil revealed to the outside public, and likewise they did not divulge their negotiations to the community at large.26 Knowledge thereof remained within the convent’s leadership. They discussed tactics for winning the support of Saint-Vallier, whom they saw as unreliable and as conniving with the intendant.27 They saw the governor Charles de Beauharnois de la Boische as a potential ally because he had quarrelled with Dupuy, but wanted to hold him in reserve.28 Marie-André showed a keen awareness of rhetorical tone. She told Ruette d’Auteuil that when he composed briefs to be given the authorities on behalf of the hospital, he must remember to speak with the humility expected of nuns: “Keep in mind, if you please, that nuns are speaking, and consequently they must always be mild, without however sacrificing anything of the vigour that is needed.”29 Duplessis no longer acted alone as she had in her 1719 protest. Although the current mother superior signed the official protests, it is clear that Duplessis’s hand was behind them. The thirty-year period during which Marie-André guided the community, even 110

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when Marie-Catherine Tibierge was officially mother superior, had already begun in 1727. Ruette d’Auteuil counselled carefully limiting the hospital’s appeals in order not to diffuse their impact: “I am glad that you are not taking too many procedural steps.”30 This was difficult for Marie-André, who could react in intemperate ways herself. For example, when Dupuy had suggested selling off lots during his visit to the construction in May, she had riposted that they would only do this if ordered by the king. But she later seemed to have learned to follow Ruette d’Auteuil’s advice to never react on the spur of the moment. Eventually, in the fall, after consulting Ruette d’Auteuil further, she mounted an elaborate appeal that included a formal request to the minister of the navy, and letters requesting the support of the queen, the prime minister, and the duc de Richelieu, among others. Duplessis attributed Dupuy’s escalating demands to ill will caused when one of his servants, whom his wife accused of theft, had been protected in the hospital in December 1726.31 According to Duplessis, the intendant then began giving credence to every hostile accusation against the nuns’ administration of the hospital that circulated in the town. Previously, early that fall, he had apparently visited the wall and had expressed no complaints. At some point, however, his attention turned to the hospital. The nuns’ opposition activated his ambitious urbanization plans for the town and his concept of proper civil administration. Selling off lots from the hospital’s properties would be a more efficient use of urban space, and hospital finances in France were often in the hands of lay administrators who contracted with nuns for their services.32 Whatever merit his ideas may have had, he proposed them as threats. Duplessis’s tactics delayed a reckoning until a larger controversy engulfed the intendant. His demands were forgotten when he was recalled in the fall of 1728 because of widespread complaints over his divisive, impulsive management style. His role in the unseemly disputes over Saint-Vallier’s funeral in early 1728 was the primary occasion for his disgrace, but the hostile petition Duplessis had sent the court the previous fall likely did him no good. However, the three issues he raised persisted. The first to be resolved was the wall. At the second chapter meeting in 1732 at which she presided after her election as mother managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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5.1 This 1886 painting by Henry Richard S. Bunnett depicts the two wings of the monastery originally built in 1695–98 and rebuilt in 1756–57, after the 1755 fire. The wings formed two sides of a square. The street between the ramparts overlooking the Saint Charles River and the monastery’s wall is visible.

superior, Duplessis stressed her reluctance to see the community take on debt, but she found a way to continue the construction and also to enclose the community’s garden that bordered on the escarpment and ramparts.33 The bone of contention was less the wall itself than its placement, and from Duplessis’s point of view, paying for it. The royal authorities insisted that it be far enough from the escarpment to facilitate traffic by the public; the nuns saw this as an expansion of the right of way they had already granted that would diminish their garden with no compensation.34 In the end, at least forty feet were reserved for public passage between the bluff and the nuns’ stone wall, as the authorities wished, and without any compensation to the hospital.35 The nuns also began making building lots available, not as outright sales, but in return for annual payments. They seem to have conceded on these points. The second demand, that the nuns be accountable for their financial administration of the hospital to royal officials, not just to the bishop, was dropped for the moment. However, since the hospital relied on public subsidies, this issue would resurface periodically. Even the intendant Gilles Hocquart, a much more able and moderate administrator than Dupuy, whom he replaced in 1729, reported to the minister in October 1733 that it was good to be on one’s guard against the enterprises of the nuns, “which are not always congruent with the common good.”36

Rural Property Management Duplessis’s most striking initiative was agricultural: the purchase and development of the seigneurie at Saint-Augustin, upriver from Quebec. It was not the Hôtel-Dieu’s first land holding, but was by far the most successful. The earliest was Grondines between TroisRivières and Quebec, sold in 1683 because its revenue was modest.37 A second, much smaller property, Argentenay, was sold in 1700.38 Duplessis would have been much more familiar with the purchase of the Ile-aux-oies, just downriver from the Ile d’Orléans, which the hospital bought from Paul Dupuy in 1711. In fact, her dowry paid for it. She might very well have been among the eight nuns who made a nine-day visit to inspect the small island in the summer of 1714. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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The description in the Annales has the vividness of a first-person account and is made with an eye to the economic potential of the property’s hay meadows and woodlands. The account in the Annales updates the island’s status since its purchase by describing how a boat was subsequently bought to transport its produce and how hay was bartered for improvements to the farm.39 The hospital administration kept a watchful eye on the farm, and further inspection visits by the mother superior are mentioned in 1727 and 1729 in various documents.40 The island had the advantage of being closer to the town than Girondines, but it was too small to provide enough income, and its produce had to be transported by boat. In 1733, the opportunity to acquire a larger, more favourably situated property at Saint-Augustin, just upriver from Quebec, arose, and the chapter accepted Duplessis’s proposition as recently elected mother superior that the hospital bursar, now her sister Geneviève, place a bid in the hospital’s name.41 Opportunity to purchase the property is an understatement. The seigneurie was in debt, and the hospital was its principal creditor. While no record seems to exist that the Duplessis sisters visited the site prior to the purchase, they must have been well acquainted with it. Jean Juchereau de la Ferté, the grandfather of Marie-André’s mentor, Jeanne-Françoise de SaintIgnace, had established it. The holder of the indebted estate in 1733 was Marie-Thérèse de La Lande Gayon, the widow of the nephew of Duplessis’s mentor. The hospital, under the Duplessis sisters’ leadership, demanded the seizure and sale of the seigneurie to assure payment of its debt of 10,000 livres. The sisters might have planned all along not just to reclaim their debt by having the seigneurie put up for auction, but to purchase it for the hospital.42 For the chapter meeting at which the transaction was discussed, Geneviève prepared a detailed prospectus listing the advantages of the purchase and means for paying for it. The seigneurie was close to the town, was accessible at all times by either land or boat, had a mill and over two hundred concessions worked by habitants, and would allow the hospital to raise its own livestock, instead of using the services of various farmers in the area. She envisaged the acquisition in terms of the hospital’s larger financial situation. It would provide a source of stable income at a time when other sources of revenue could not be counted on consistently.43 114

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The Duplessis sisters directed the development of the seigneurie, which had about eight hundred inhabitants living on around two hundred forty tracts of land that had been granted to tenant farmers.44 Rural Canada was developed using the seigneurial landholding system, under which royal authorities assigned large tracts of land (seigneuries) to individuals or religious institutions, who were expected to recruit settlers. These tenant farmers or copyholders cleared the land and paid dues and rents to the owner of the seigneurie, who were in turn expected to provide certain services, such as building a mill. The Duplessis sisters’ first order of business was a thorough survey in 1735, followed by a detailed cadastral register drawn up in 1743–47 that recorded the fees owed the hospital by the copyholders who farmed on the seigneurie. The gristmill was improved in 1737 and a sawmill added in 1740. In 1744–45 a canal was constructed to assure the area an adequate supply of water. During the twenty-five-year period of Duplessis management, from roughly 1734 to 1759, about sixty new concessions were granted to copyholders, which greatly expanded the land used for productive crops.45 As cloistered nuns, the Duplessis sisters could not visit the hospital’s holding and relied on agents for business that they could not conduct in the convent parlour. Overall, the Hôtel-Dieu seems to have managed its seigneurie as competently as the male orders in Canada – the Jesuits, Sulpicians, and Seminary of Quebec – managed theirs. This good management did not prevent the nuns from showing more clemency to copyholders who were in arrears with their payments than did similar male ecclesiastical administrators.46 Although the nuns frequently claimed that they had to invest more in Saint-Augustin than the property produced,47 the seigneurie more than lived up to its proponents’ initial enthusiasm. It did require the expenditure of capital, for example to improve the mill in 1737, but it also provided stable income, and besides any cash payments, it was a source of produce for the hospital’s kitchens and stables. Quebec merchants as well as inhabitants of the seigneurie paid to use its mill. Most of all, because the various forms of income the property produced arrived throughout the year, it stabilized revenue for the hospital and provided a solid base of capital.48 The unsentimental weighing of the pros and cons for every business decision is typical of Duplessis’s careful management style. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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Whenever a repair or new construction was required, the short- and long-term consequences were always considered: could the cost of an immediate repair be recuperated? Or would it be better to sell the asset without further investment? The minutes of chapter meetings record such deliberations over the next twenty-seven years until Marie-André’s death in 1760. Even when Marie-André was listed as assistant, or vice-superior, she usually presented the proposal for major initiatives. Likewise, her recognition of the need for careful record-keeping and respect for procedures is everywhere evident. When she was not herself superior, she often served as chapter secretary, as well as assistant; thus, she retained control of the community’s memory of its business. She even added notes about the disposition of decisions made, especially to explain why, occasionally, they were not executed. In all cases, the minutes of meetings record that after her proposals were presented and deliberated, they were unanimously accepted by the voting sisters. If there were reservations, such as the ones she had expressed so energetically in 1719, they did not find their way into the minutes Duplessis wrote. The consultations themselves show her respect for chapter ten of the second part of the Constitutions, which specifies a long list of topics that must be brought before the voting nuns at chapter meetings.49 The Saint-Augustin purchase also illustrates the tight collaboration between the Duplessis sisters. As bursar, Geneviève had a much closer hand in the various necessary legal transactions and in the seigneurie’s operation than Marie-André. However, both shared a management philosophy that certainly owed much to their father’s experience as seigneur of Lauzon. At the back of their minds, the hospital’s eventual expansion was always envisaged; but expansion should not occur without long-term financial security, preferably some kind of investment income.

Managing Daily Supplies in Peace and War Two facts made supplying the hospital’s needs taxing for its administrators: the fluctuations in patient load and supplying patient needs in a cash-short economy. The hospital’s nominal capacity of thirty-two to fifty beds had changed little since the seventeenth century. Patient 116

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load varied considerably over the course of a year. The winter months could be slow, with mostly local patients, giving the caregivers four or five months to catch their breath. Usage spiked in late summer and the fall – September was the peak month – when ships arrived from France with their contingent of sick and vermin-infested passengers. However, as the city grew, as the economy included manufacturing enterprises such as the royal shipyards, and especially as war became ever-present, the hospital was often over capacity by the 1740s. A day-to-day account of the nuns’ purchases over the decades is not as important as how they defended themselves when their business practices came under fire from intendants. Their defence reveals their personalities and how they conceived their duties. Two periods are particularly well documented. The first is the Dupuy affair during Marie-André’s tenure as bursar; the second, in the late 1740s when Geneviève held the reins under Hocquart and Pontbriand, who had become bishop in 1741. At issue was what Marie-André described in a June 1727 letter to Dupuy’s secretary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau as the “minor methods” that the hospital used in its local purchases. She lined up providers in advance and bought in bulk when prices were lowest: “We do not wait until we need things to buy them because when they become required, one must pay the going price. As long as the hospital could only supply itself when items were needed, it went greatly into debt. This experience has led us to store in our heavy supplies when we find them cheap.”50 If it turned out that more supplies had been purchased than needed, the surplus was sold. For example, meat would be sold while it was still frozen near the end of Lent to butchers, who could then resell it once the forty days of abstinence were over. What she saw as “a wise measure of precaution,” others saw as profiteering and market manipulation. She was proud to stretch the hospital’s inadequate income in a way that avoided going into debt as the hospital had in the past. Only once does she allow herself a jab at those who use the hospital’s services and then reward it with “the calumnies that they broadcast against us.” Her very real pride in her resourcefulness does not overpower her larger argument that any reasonable person in her position would employ the same methods. Geneviève had trouble maintaining Marie-André’s moderation when similar charges were renewed in 1748. Jean-François Gaultier, managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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the royal physician, reported to her that someone had complained to the intendant that she had farm suppliers lined up who provided her with produce she could resell for a profit. She wrote the newly arrived intendant François Bigot directly and claimed to be “accustomed to the exaggerations that are made concerning her simple and plain management,” but hoped to disabuse Bigot at the start of his term. She noted that the previous year similar charges had been lodged with the lieutenant-general of the police, François Daine, who after investigation dropped the affair. Her exasperation surfaced throughout the letter. After summarizing the same purchasing methods in more detail that her sister had done in 1727, she could not resist a touch of irony: “The mighty trade of the Hôtel-Dieu that provokes jealousy consists of this.” She closed with an apology for her tone and asked Bigot to excuse “a few slight barbs that he might find too straightforward; when one is weary of an issue over a long period of time, the choice of words is not too refined.”51 Two issues fired her irritation. After so many years as bursar, she was fed up with what she saw as the growing bad faith of many Canadians. In fact, she declared to Bigot that she had offered her resignation to the bishop the previous year. Financial pressures caused by increases in the hospital’s patient load since the 1720s magnified her exasperation. Her sister had used this same purchasing scheme to avoid borrowing. Now, expenses to meet the needs of ill soldiers were so high, the king’s repayment so slow, and his administrators so unresponsive that the hospital could only feed its patients by resorting to short-term borrowing. Geneviève does not mention these loans in her letter to Bigot,52 but her sister does in a letter written earlier in 1748 to Pontbriand.53 This kind of borrowing had always been anathema to “the Duplessis Ladies.” One form of petty commerce that the Duplessis sisters engaged in does not seem to have aroused hostility. They received and placed items for retail sale with their suppliers, both in France and Canada, probably as a strategy for offsetting the cost of their purchases. Letters in the late 1740s to Geneviève from a certain widow Portneuf, who bought food products for them in the Montreal area, mention shirts the nuns had made that Portneuf hoped to retail to voyageurs headed to the upper country.54 Correspondence in 1737–38 with the apothecary Féret in Dieppe discusses ivory devotional items sent to Canada for 118

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sale55 and Indigenous belts that the Duplessis sisters sent to France for him to sell.56 Letters usually discuss these transactions in terms of the difficulty of finding buyers, which probably explains why these sales did not result in complaints. The Duplessis sisters traded in minor articles imported from France much as their mother Marie Leroy had done to supplement her income during her widowhood.

Managing Popular Piety and Community Observance Marie-André saw attracting the faithful to the hospital chapel as part of her responsibility to build support for the institution. When she surveyed her tasks as newly elected superior in 1732, she realized that its indulgences were expiring. That October, she wrote François de Montigny at the Foreign Missions in Paris for advice about renewing them in Rome.57 The next year, while noting that the papal bulls needed to reauthorize them had not yet been obtained, she added a question about how to obtain relics for the chapel.58 In 1735, she became even more insistent: “It seems to me that since you know the ways of Rome and have connections there, it would not be too difficult for you to obtain for us [some relics] for our church which is quite bare. I am sending you a list of the bulls for our indulgences that need to be renewed since they were given to us for ten years in 1726.”59 When the relics did arrive,60 she cajoled her friend MarieCatherine, whose family dealt in the luxury fabric trade, to donate crimson silk that could be used to line the reliquaries. She had written to the pope to obtain them, Duplessis said, and she was sure they would become a centrepiece of the chapel.61 The mother superior was undoubtedly thinking ahead to the festivities in August 1739 that would mark the centenary of the hospital’s founding. Duplessis was superior in 1737 when an anonymous letter arrived that offered an ex-voto statue of the Virgin. The letter was from a sailor who had made a vow to the Virgin when he had faced shipwreck on a voyage out of Quebec at the end of the previous century. Duplessis immediately recognized the potential of the votive statue to attract other miracle-seekers. She was no longer superior when the statue was delivered the following year, but must have had a hand organizing its ceremonial visit to the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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5.2 Although the initial miracle that led to the gift of this statue in 1738 was only attested in the anonymous letter offering the statue, Duplessis skillfully turned the statue into an object of veneration for miracle seekers, and it still resides on a lateral altar of the Hôtel-Dieu.

and in placing it in a prominent position in the church in 1739, where it became a site of pilgrimage for sailors and the ill. Indeed, at the August 1739 centenary celebrations, the statue and reliquaries were central attractions of the chapel, along with the plenary indulgence that had finally been obtained.62 She was once again mother superior in 1744 when Bishop Pontbriand announced that a small crucifix that had been desecrated in Montreal in 1742 would be entrusted to the Hôtel-Dieu. A trickster, François-Charles Havard de Beaufort, had used the crucifix in a case of alleged sorcery in June 1742 in Montreal. The culprit was arrested, tried, and sentenced to the galleys by mid-August of that year. In September 1742, the bishop issued a pastoral letter ordering that the profaned crucifix be publically venerated in churches in Montreal in reparation for the sacrilege. To give it a permanent home, he assigned it in March 1744 to the Hôtel-Dieu. At the chapter meeting on 24 April 1744, Duplessis noted that Pontbriand had chosen their church over others that had solicited the honour, a modest way of announcing that she had submitted the successful bid. It could well be that she had a personal interest in seeing it housed in her community’s church because preaching the cross was the specialty of her brother François-Xavier in France. The monumental cross he had erected at Arras in France in 1738 at the close of a mission there had already become a pilgrimage site, famous for miracles attributed to it.63 The crucifix was displayed in a reliquary and became the site of yearly ceremonies of reparation, just as novenas were made invoking Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces. Duplessis wrote short accounts of the statue and crucifix in which she highlighted miraculous favours attributed to them, including the cure of a nun’s urinary retention after invoking the crucifix and the preservation of sailors from shipwreck. Her hospital’s chapel could now attract its share of miracle-seekers. In September 1747, the hospital contributed funds to the erection of an outdoor calvary at a crossroads on its seigneurie at SaintAugustin. Geneviève’s account of the dedication ceremony attributed the initiative to the domain’s inhabitants,64 but the Duplessis sisters, as mother superior and bursar, were surely the real motive force for this wayside cross, built in the spirit of the ones their brother inspired across France. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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Strict in her personal observance of the rule – for example, she would welcome the bishop’s dispensation when illness prevented her from duties in the wards – Marie-André maintained discipline and devotion by instructing the community regularly, as was expected of superiors who took their duties seriously. The zeal for observing the rule of Saint Augustine for which she would be praised in her death notices was animated by a spirit of flexibility rather than one of mechanical punctiliousness. This comes through most clearly in notes she wrote concerning differences between the letter of the order’s governing documents and slight variations in their observance in her house. The circumstances that motivated the notes are unclear. It might have been at a time when male superiors tried to enforce stricter conformity with the rule, or it might have been an in-house attempt to update practice. Duplessis makes it clear that what counts for her is the spirit of the law, not its letter: “an honest liberty is more suitable to encouraging nuns to do nothing against their duty than establishing new regulations that are different from those that have been observed here up to this time.”65

Harnessing Family Bonds The Duplessis sisters were a formidable duo within the Hôtel-Dieu. However, they were distinctly disadvantaged in terms of family connections in comparison with the more aristocratic nuns of the Hôpital-Général. The Duplessis sisters seem to have had no family members in Canada, until the very end of their father’s career when the Lanoullier de Boisclerc brothers, Nicolas and Jean-Eustache, arrived around 1712. Of the two, Jean-Eustache had a more successful career and may have aided the hospital sisters at times, just as he had helped Marie Leroy in November 1719. He was appointed royal road commissioner by Hocquart in 1730, and he energetically improved roadways throughout the colony. His major accomplishment was the king’s road linking Quebec and Montreal. The respect he enjoyed likely made him a useful ally for Marie-André and Geneviève; however, his position in itself had minor impact on the hospital.66 He may have been involved in settling the dispute about widening the street next

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to the hospital garden in the 1730s,67 and in improving road access at Saint-Augustin.68 In 1720, Nicolas took on the same post Georges Duplessis had held as agent of the treasurer of the marine. His trajectory only followed the downward cycle of Georges. He too dabbled in various enterprises on the side, and his were even less successful.69 He kept somewhat afloat by means of various royal posts that the intendant Hocquart gave him: member of the Superior Council, keeper of its seal, and controller of the royal domain. He died greatly in debt in 1756. There is no record of his aiding the hospital in any appreciable way, but during the Dupuy crisis, among the many letters the sisters sent to France in 1727 to important personages seeking support, one went to Nicolas’s sister-in-law, Marie-Madeleine Mercier, who had been Louis XV’s wet nurse and who held a position in the royal household. The modest Lanoullier connection was useful to the extent that the brothers enjoyed the respect of Hocquart, but it could not substitute for having blood relatives in high positions of influence. As Geneviève noted in 1740, the only real family member they had in the colony was their brother Charles-Denis.70 Charles-Denis had been a junior officer since 1724 following his return from France. He was posted at Fort Frontenac in 1726, and in 1727 at Fort Niagara where the stone fort that was then being constructed still stands. As the only lay sibling, he inherited his mother’s small estate in 1732. In fall 1733, he made a trip to France to clear up matters from his father’s accounts with the treasurer of the marine. Upon his return the next fall, he was named aide-major for the Quebec garrison, where he served from 1734 until 1744. He only married on 29 May 1742, when he and twenty-one-yearold Geneviève-Élisabeth Guillimin were wed by Bishop Pontbriand. She came from a prominent merchant family of the lower town that had fallen on bad times. Her father had been one of Quebec’s most prosperous traders in the first decades of the century and had become a member of the Superior Council in 1721. He had represented the interests of Georges Duplessis’s minor children, including CharlesDenis, when Marie Leroy was selling lots from her husband’s estate in 1715. However, he died a poor man in 1739, and the bride’s brother Guillaume, who was also her guardian, represented her family at

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the wedding. Thanks to Hocquart’s support, Guillaume was named in 1744 to the Superior Council, where Nicolas Lanoullier was also serving. It was probably as good a marriage as Charles-Denis could expect, given his own rather modest prospects.71 When hostilities broke out in 1744, Charles-Denis was posted to the upper country to command a fort on Lake Superior. In his account of his service, he touted an episode in 1746–47 when he convinced a group of Potawatomi along the Saint Joseph River near presentday Niles, Michigan, who were wavering in their support for the French, to send warriors to Montreal as they had done in the past.72 He does not seem to have been able to translate his posting in fur country into profits in the fur trade as many military commanders managed to do, and he aspired to a promotion that would take him back to Quebec. In May 1749, he was successful when he was named grand provost marshal of the mounted constabulary for Canada. This position involved supervising a small constabulary force and allowed Charles-Denis to live in Quebec with his wife and daughter Marie-Joseph-André, who had been born in February 1743.73 Charles-Denis owed his new position to the one family connection with real influence, his older brother François-Xavier, whose career as a mission preacher had taken off in France. More and more bishops solicited his services, especially in the north of France, and his success gave him access to devout circles at the court. In the case of his brother, François-Xavier’s lobbying in Versailles had more impact than the recommendation of the intendant and governor-general, who had nominated another person for the constabulary post. The Jesuit listed the personages he had contacted in 1745 – the king’s confessor, the duc de Penthièvre, the comtesse de Toulouse – but reported that the minister of the navy, Maurepas, was ill-disposed.74 In 1749, he added that he had lobbied Canadian administrators Jacques-Pierre de la Jonquière and Charles de Beauharnois.75 The preacher found such lobbying distasteful, and he had reservations about his brother’s unstable character and modest level of religious practice. Nonetheless, family loyalty impelled him. Just the same, he said he derived more pleasure from using his connections to help a Morampont cousin from Saint-Utin in Champagne settle a lawsuit than from working for Charles-Denis.76 The new provost marshal

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only piled up debts once he returned to Quebec. On the other hand, in the 1750s, François-Xavier became a privileged channel for his sisters’ lobbying efforts for the hospital.

Taking Stock of Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Superior: Pehr Kalm’s Report of His 1749 Visit “This morning I visited the largest nunnery in Quebec. Men are prohibited from visiting under very heavy punishments, except in some rooms, divided by iron rails, where the men and women that do not belong to the convent stand without and the nuns within the rails and converse with each other. But to increase the many favors which the French nation heaped upon me as a Swede, the governorgeneral got the bishop’s leave for me to enter the convent and see its construction.”77 So begins the botanist Pehr Kalm’s account of his visit on 8 August 1749, a visit that was not limited to the convent parlour grill. The governor-general La Galissonière had assigned the royal physician, Jean-François Gaultier, as Kalm’s guide, and Gaultier, who practised at the Hôtel-Dieu, knew the institution well. Kalm was a sympathetic and informed outsider, and he received similar access to the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, and could thus make comparisons. He took an interest in the lives of the nuns as well as the operation of the hospital. In March 1750, Duplessis completed her second stint as mother superior (1744–50, her first term having been 1732–38). For much of the intervening six years (1738–44), she had been either assistant superior or hospital bursar. Assessing Kalm’s observations on the state of the buildings, finances, recruitment, patient care, the routines of the nuns, etc. facilitates taking stock of these eighteen years when Duplessis was the community’s chief guiding force. His commentary reflects his personal observations as well as his contacts with the colonial elite, and it does not always tally with Duplessis’s views, nor with convent records. Kalm’s description of the Hôtel-Dieu and the interior of the monastery is the most extensive we have from the eighteenth century, about 2,000 words in the English translation. He gives a privileged view of the institution.

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Recruiting Kalm remarked that in all three convents the nuns seemed old.78 “I was told by several people here, some of which were ladies, that none of the nuns went into a convent till she had attained an age in which she had small hopes of ever getting a husband.”79 As for the HôtelDieu, “This convent, they say, contains about fifty nuns, most of them advanced in years, scarcely any being under forty years of age. At this time there were two young ladies among them who were being instructed in those things which belong to the knowledge of nuns.”80 While Kalm was correct in his estimation of the size of the community (forty-seven instead of his fifty),81 he was wrong in implying women entered it when beyond the age for marriage. Dale Miquelon lists 22.4 as the average age of women in Canada at the time of their first marriage in the eighteenth century.82 The average age of the four women accepted as postulants in 1747 who would take their final vows in April 1749, four months before Kalm’s visit, was 22, and the average for the four who entered between 1740 and 1747 was 21.83 The Hôtel-Dieu did not have boarding students from whom to recruit, as did the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, and the chance of early death among the choir nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu, who served patients with contagious diseases, was much higher than at the Hôpital-Général’s almshouse, which served the infirm. The Hôtel-Dieu’s converse nuns had less direct contact with the ill and lived seven years longer on average than its choir nuns.84 Kalm does not mention the one factor that hampered recruitment over which civil authorities had control: the dowry system. Only two nuns entered during the period between 1722, when royal authorities raised the required amount from 3,000 to 5,000 livres, and the early 1730s. Even when they lowered the amount back to 3,000, recruitment was slow; only six entered in the rest of the 1730s.85 In 1744, Pontbriand noted that families in Canada could not pay the required 3,000 livres in cash; convents would die out for lack of new members, he wrote Maurepas.86 At the Hôtel-Dieu, where Duplessis was superior, the situation was becoming a crisis by 1747, when three more nuns had died serving contagious patients. But as she told Hecquet in October, “It seems that God wishes to compensate us by the vocations that are making 126

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themselves known. We already have five postulants and several others ask to be received. If we had the means to take them for nothing, we would not be lacking nuns.”87 Duplessis had already acted when she wrote her friend. She had convinced the bishop to receive four postulants without paying the required sum. Three of the four had already been received in September 1747 when Pontbriand wrote Maurepas in October that he had granted the superior’s request.88 The same day La Galissonière and Hocquart added their approval in their letter to the minister.89 Maurepas yielded, but without much grace. He realized that the need for hospital nuns to treat the troops trumped the long-standing royal policy aimed at assuring that convents were properly endowed.90 The following October, Duplessis could report to her friend, “We have a novitiate that merits our affection despite the corruption of the age. A few girls present themselves. We do not admit them too easily, and yet some enter here or in other convents.”91 The two nuns in training that Kalm mentioned are not the four who had entered in 1747, some of whom had taken solemn vows in April. Kalm most likely referred to two postulants who entered officially two weeks after his visit.92 He seemed unaware of how successfully Duplessis had manoeuvred the bishop, intendant, and governor-general into renewing the community on her terms.93

Hospital Facilities and Financing The hospital “consists of two large halls, and some rooms near the apothecary’s shop. In the halls are two rows of beds on each side. The beds next to the wall are furnished with curtains, the outward ones are without them. In each bed are fine bedclothes with clean double sheets. As soon as a sick person has left his bed, it is made again to keep the hospital in cleanliness and order. The beds are two or three yards distant, and near each is a small table. There are good iron stoves, and fine windows in this hall. The nuns attend the sick people, and bring them food and other necessaries. Besides them, there are some men who attend, and a surgeon. The royal physician is likewise obliged to come hither once or twice every day, look after everything and give prescriptions.”94 Kalm’s description of the hospital wards is accurate. He even includes the small rooms just managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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off the main wards that had been added in 1733 at the beginning of Duplessis’s first term.95 In an era when medical care was impotent in the face of most disease, simply providing wholesome meals that usually included meat at least once a day was probably the most effective treatment the hospital provided. Three times daily, at 6:30 a.m., 10 a.m., and 4:30 p.m., choir nuns entered the wards in procession to feed the patients. The mother superior ladled out the portions for each patient from a central table. Kalm does not allude to the fifteen minutes the choir nuns spent each afternoon in the wards instructing the patients; they saw caring for the soul as a corollary to healing the body. Duplessis certainly would not have agreed with Kalm’s suggestion that troops were the primary clientele of the hospital, nor with his description of its royal financing: “They commonly receive sick soldiers into this hospital, who are very numerous in July and August, when the king’s ships arrive, and in time of war. But at other times, when no great number of soldiers are sick, other poor people can take their places, as far as the number of empty beds will reach. The king provides everything here that is requisite for the sick persons, viz. provisions, medicines, fuel, etc. Those who are very ill are put into separate rooms, in order that the noise in the great hall may not be troublesome to them.” Admissions did rise sharply in July and August; September and October, in fact, were peak months. However, Duplessis would have pointed out that Kalm inverted the hospital’s mission by implying that civilian patients could be admitted when soldiers left vacant space. The nuns saw service to their poor clients as their first duty. To emphasize that the poor were the hospital’s raison d’être, when the community celebrated its centenary on 1 August 1739, the nuns organized a special supper for the patients that was served by the capital’s leading citizens.96 Kalm could only have gotten this mistaken judgment that the king paid all the hospital’s expenses from the civil authorities who organized his visit. Duplessis had been pointing out their inadequate funding to them for years. While the yearly royal subsidy was an important component of its financing – between 1744 and 1753 it accounted for 25 percent of the hospital’s funding – in fact, the percentage had

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been declining over the century.97 As she pointed out to Hecquet, the additional six sous per diem the king paid for soldiers’ rations did not cover costs.98 The nuns looked for expedients where they could. Since at least the early 1730s, they were in a running battle with intendants over their practice of keeping the clothing of soldiers who died in their care.99 In October 1749, the new intendant François Bigot proposed that by way of compensation, the king pay three livres for the coffins and funeral masses of dead soldiers, as was done at Louisbourg.100

A Closing Exchange “Upon my leaving, the abbess asked me if I was satisfied with their institution, whereupon I told them that their convent was beautiful enough, though their mode of living was much circumscribed. Thereupon she told me that she and her sisters would heartily ask God to make me a good Roman Catholic. I answered her that I was far more anxious to be and remain a good Christian, and that as a recompense for their honors and prayers I would not fail earnestly to ask God that they too might remain good Christians, because that would be the highest degree of a true religion that a mortal could find. Thereupon she smilingly bade me farewell.”101 At the close of his visit, Kalm reports this final good-natured conversation with Duplessis, the only such personal interchange he mentions in the three convents he inspected. Kalm was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and died one himself. His reference to the restricted nature of the nuns’ lives is a standard Protestant criticism of the cloistered life, although he tempered it with praise of the monastery. It is characteristic of Duplessis’s well-bred politeness that her response was an expression of concern for his spiritual welfare. She managed to be faithful to her duty to proselytize, without turning the exchange into a debate. She cut it off with an amiable smile. Her calm demeanour with Kalm belies her running battle with the civil authorities over hospital expansion and reimbursements during the final years of her second term. She could take pride in the acquisition of Saint-Augustin and in having added new members to the community, but her last decade would not be easy. The War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s strained the community that she

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had so successfully headed during her first term in office in the 1730s. The Hôtel-Dieu’s situation would become even more precarious amid the struggle to control North America in the 1750s, during her last period as superior.

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chapter

6 Writing the Spiritual Life at the Hôtel-Dieu

This chapter and the next on the Annales, along with the section in chapter 4 on her correspondence, point toward the claim in the concluding chapter that Marie-André Duplessis counts among the major women writers of New France. Indeed, because of the range and quality of her writing, she merits recognition as among the premier authors of the colony. New France does not figure prominently in this chapter, as it does in her Histoire and her letters. Rather, her versatility and innovative streak are more in play in these texts dominated by spiritual goals. This chapter first shows how her early innovative texts embody a worldly wit that is unique in Canadian writing of the period. Her brief, more conventional devotional texts are then compared to Geneviève’s more substantial works. Finally, Marie-André’s short narrative texts that she might have eventually incorporated into a sequel to the Annales are analyzed. The emphasis here is on literary features; other chapters also treat many of these texts with an eye to what they reveal about her career and values.

Playing with Worldly Wit Worldly wit, the kind of esprit mondain that denotes playfulness, a taste for the surprising, for a clever turn of thought, is not usually associated with the literature of New France. Instead, accounts of

adventure and discovery, whether the travel narratives of explorers or the spiritual relations of the missionaries, both often cast in the heroic mode, are pervasive. Duplessis’s own best-known text, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, is written largely in the vein of official reporting that characterizes most texts from Canada. In France, the esprit mondain was nurtured at the court and in the salons, and some of it found its way to Quebec in administrative circles. Jean Talon is said to have written poems and epigrams, and the Raudots, father and son, gave regular concerts in the early eighteenth century.1 An incipient salon culture was slow to develop in Canada. Jan Noel, in her history of French Canadian women, attributes a salon to LouiseÉlisabeth Joybert de Vaudreuil, wife of the governor-general, in the first part of the eighteenth century, and in the last two decades of French rule, the circles around the intendant François Bigot featured regular gatherings hosted by women.2 However, literary activities were not as prominent at these latter events as fine food, gambling, and dancing. Worldly wit sometimes found its way into women’s monasteries in seventeenth-century France. At least five seventeenth-century French nuns have been labelled as précieuses.3 Mary M. Rowan, who pioneered the study of relations between convent and salon, has analyzed the writings of perhaps the most accomplished of these five, MarieÉléonor de Rohan, Benedictine abbess in Caen, Malnoue, and Paris, where she participated in salon life.4 In Canada, there are antecedents for this sort of conventual worldly writing. A seventeenth-century superior of the Hôtel-Dieu, Marie-Renée Boulic, mother superior from 1670 to 1676, cultivated it. According to her death notice in the Annales, she possessed “an admirable facility for expressing herself and for writing, whether in prose or poetry. The intendant Monsieur Talon, who dabbled in poetry, sometimes sent her madrigals and epigrams to which she replied on the spot, very wittily, in the same style, and her compositions were esteemed by all who saw them and who were connoisseurs of this sort of writing.”5 Duplessis, who wrote this passage and who did not hesitate to criticize Boulic for being too subservient to the bishop elsewhere in the Annales, reported Boulic’s literary accomplishments with pride. Boulic was witty, articulate, and able to improvise, like salon women in France.

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Three of Duplessis’s texts share this tendency. The first, the 1711 Histoire de Ruma, written only a few years after her own profession as a nun, is her earliest known text.6 The second, the Musique spirituelle, has been edited by a musicologist as a musical treatise.7 Both are short, about 1,500 to 2,000 words long. To these two, a third can be attached, the Dissection spirituelle. It is more extensive – about 9,000 words – and undated, but seems by its title related to the Musique spirituelle, and was likely written soon after. These early texts put worldly wit (esprit) to the service of a religious mission. They are spirituel in the two seemingly contradictory meanings of the word in French as defined in Antoine Furetière’s 1690 Dictionnaire universel: spiritual in the sense of devout, to be sure, but also written “in an ingenious way, full of wit.” This second meaning is the mental subtlety associated with the English word “wit,” that of “a well-informed lively mind that thinks in a pleasing way.” We have seen these texts in other contexts. The Histoire de Ruma could be entitled the “Histoire de Geneviève Duplessis,” because it narrates the life of the younger sister of Marie-André from birth to about age nineteen. Although all the characters certainly existed, they are given names that for the most part come from the Old Testament in the manner of the romans à clef that were so popular in the salons. The Musique spirituelle is not really a music manual, but a treatise on the convent life that finds monastic equivalents for some forty musical terms or practices. The third text, the Dissection spirituelle, is much more straightforward. It earns the name “dissection” because it inventories body parts as well as the faculties of the mind and soul. The goal of the Dissection is to show how each mental or corporal component can be harnessed to contribute to the devout life. It is less focused on the monastic experience than the Musique spirituelle, and much of it is suitable for anyone trying to live as an eighteenth-century Catholic. All three texts treat some aspect of a nun’s vocation: the Histoire tries to recruit Geneviève; the Musique spirituelle stresses the specifics of life in a convent; the Dissection focuses on broader aspects of spirituality. The worldly wit or esprit mondain that makes this spirituality (spiritualité) witty (spirituelle) is not so much style, but the organizing principle of each text. Duplessis’s style has none of

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6.1 The title page of the manuscript of the Musique spirituelle imitates a printed book. The reference to “first edition” adds a playful note. Title pages of books by religious often mentioned that the volume was printed by “permission” of civil or religious authorities, with the permission’s text included in the book. The manuscript contains an approbation by La Colombière, but no permission.

the prominent features commonly attributed to the précieuses: no superlatives, no wordplay, no striking images, no pithy maxims. However, in other fundamental ways, these texts incorporate features that give them a playful cast that echoes salon writing. Collaboration was often a mark of salon literature. The Histoire is, in fact, signed by two authors, although Duplessis is certainly the principal one. She figures as a character in the story under the name Tharsis and would have been privy to details about her sister’s life. However, Marie-Élisabeth Le Moyne de Longueuil, who entered the Hôtel-Dieu about the same time as Marie-André, appears on the title page as an author and in the story as Ariste. The Musique spirituelle is signed by Duplessis alone, but it contains an approbation signed by the monastery’s male superior that is written in the same playful vein as the body of the text. “Having read a work entitled Spiritual Music … we have found nothing in it contrary to the rules and charms of the art of singing.”8 All books dealing with religion published at this time contained such approbations by ecclesiastical censors, but one would have to search long to find another that verges so closely on parody. If Joseph de La Colombière truly wrote it, he entered into the same witty spirit as Duplessis. It could well be that this approbation is a sort of fictional collaboration written by Duplessis herself, instead of the priest. Likewise, these first two texts are placed under the auspices of a key principle of salon literature: pleasure (plaire) and the delightful (agréer). The pleasures of the body and society are not rejected out of hand. The “veracious story” (histoire véritable) is embedded in a preface/letter that presents itself as a link in a continuing exchange of letters between Geneviève that the two nuns have placed under the sign of pleasure: “We have no keener joy than to think of you and to maintain contact with our letters.”9 They claim, first of all, to amuse Geneviève, and the word plaisir  appears nine times and forms of agréable five times. The Musique spirituelle also takes as its premise that the pleasure of secular music is legitimate: “Since music is a very pleasing thing and numerous people learn it with pleasure despite its difficulties, I believe that there exist a good number of religious who will apply themselves with joy to the study of a kind of music that is much more advantageous to know than the ordinary sort.”10 These texts strive to elevate their intended reader to the higher pleasure of writing the spiritual life

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divine love. Geneviève moves through the pleasures of friendship and of physical exercise like horseback riding to those of study, and eventually, study of scripture. The Histoire and the Musique spirituelle are presented as miniature books with all the characteristics of printed ones except the use of type: a title page, numbered pages, and, in the case of the Musique spirituelle, a dedication letter, an approbation, a preface, a table of contents, and even running titles at the top of each page. The production of manuscript books as gifts was a feature, of course, of salon life, the most famous example being La Guirlande de Julie (1641), an anthology of poetry given to the daughter of the hostess of the Rambouillet salon. Utilitarian manuscript copies of texts were often made in convents to save printing costs, but these two manuscripts have the characteristics of presentation copies.11

The Histoire de Ruma The Histoire is said to be a “true story” (histoire véritable), found by chance in a manuscript, that narrates the life of a young girl using largely biblical names. It is really a sort of biographie à clé of Geneviève’s life from her birth in 1692 until 1711: her early education in Quebec; her trip to France in 1700 at age eight when her mother went to Paris to retrieve Marie-André; her three-year stay as a boarder at the Hôtel-Dieu; and her more serious life after leaving the monastery in 1710. The geography of the tale is vague. Geneviève is said to be born in an unnamed “barbarous land” to parents from Europe who remain attached to their “fatherland.” Neither Canada nor France is identified by name. The found manuscript was a frequent convention in early modern fiction to lend an air of authenticity. Likewise, the notion of a fictional story as an “histoire véritable” was a common device. What is unique here is that the story is indeed “veracious,” although presented with all the markers of fiction used in this period. Enough of the details given about Geneviève’s life can be corroborated from other sources to suggest that those details that are only found here are equally true. Like the romans à clé of Madeleine de Scudéry, real people are disguised with assumed names, here mostly from the Bible.

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The biblical names chosen might puzzle readers who are not immersed in scripture as Geneviève is said to have become.12 Why would the dear grandmother of the two Duplessis sisters be given the name Athalie, the murderess made famous by Jean Racine’s tragedy? Other names, such as Ruma, are obscure place names. It is likely that Duplessis had access to an edition of the Bible published by Antoine Vitré in the mid-seventeenth century that included in its appendices an “Explanation of Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek Names.” The Jesuit college in Quebec owned a 1702 Latin edition that could have been lent to her (translations from a 1701 edition are cited here).13 Ruma means “elevated,” probably a reference to Geneviève’s aspiration to higher forms of the devout life. Her father Georges Duplessis appears as Abinadab, the name of at least two minor figures in the first book of Samuel. The name means “father of good will.” His wife Marie Leroy appears as Attalia, a city mentioned in the book of Acts, which means “one who augments or nourishes.” The name Athalie, given to the Duplessis sisters’ pious grandmother Andrée Douin, means “Time of the Lord.” There is only one close parallel between a name in the Histoire and a biblical figure. The friend of the father of Ruma – probably the pious Paul Dupuy – who taught her Latin is named Jérobaal, another name for Gideon. The authors of the Histoire explain the choice in this one case: “The historian names him Jerobaal and notes that this name suited him very well since he always quarrelled with the idols of the world.”14 The game for Geneviève would be trying to use her biblical knowledge to understand the choice of names. The Histoire includes features of another salon genre: the portrait. We learn that Geneviève had a high forehead, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and wore a hat “with the best grace in the world.” Her character is of course more important than these physical traits: her good disposition that pleases everyone, her serious temperament, and her vivacity. Her intelligence made her a quick learner who was able to rapidly pick up enough Latin to translate the New Testament. Although she spent her childhood enjoying all the pleasures a good upbringing entails, she was never tempted by “false worldly lustre.” She was never prey to coquetry or to the “innocent passions” that she awoke in young men.

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As her character matured, Geneviève became more serious and devout and thus, according to her sister, was destined to enter the convent. To sum up, because of “her wisdom, her piety, and her learning,” Geneviève could be counted among “the illustrious women of her century.”15 In other words, she was worthy to figure in one of the many books that came out of the salons celebrating notable ladies, such as the Galerie des femmes fortes (1647) of the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne or Les Femmes illustres (1642) of Madeleine de Scudéry. The HôtelDieu, in fact, owns a copy of one such collection of biographies that the two Duplessis sisters could well have been familiar with, Hilarion de Coste’s Éloges et Vies des reynes, princesses, dames et damoiselles illustres en piété, courage et doctrine, first published in 1630. Hilarion de Coste specifically singled out in his table of contents women like Geneviève who displayed a love of learning and letters, in addition to the queens and princesses he featured. The Histoire incorporates one final element of salon writing: an invitation to participate in the act of writing, in this case by completing the story of Ruma. We are told that the last pages, which contain the end of Ruma’s story, have been ripped out of the manuscript. “We believe, my dear sister, that you will have as much regret as we do about not knowing the ending; we have reason to believe it to be happy after such a beautiful start.”16 The happy ending, of course, would be for Geneviève to join her sister and Longueuil as nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu, which she indeed did two years later in 1713. She took the name in religion held by Marie-Élisabeth de Longueuil de l’Enfant-Jésus, who had died in December 1711 in a typhus epidemic that killed six hospitallers, becoming Geneviève de l’Enfant-Jésus. The Histoire de Ruma might well be considered Canada’s first literary fiction. An even shorter oriental tale, “Zélim,” signed only by a “Canadien curieux,” which appeared in Gazette littéraire de Montréal in late 1778, has long been the contender for this honour. Written in the vein of Voltaire’s early contes philosophiques, Zadig and Memnon, “Zélim” tells the story of a poor gardener who bewails his humble state. Only when he happens upon the sultan who also is lamenting his misfortunes does he realize that wealth and power do not insure happiness.17 A reader unaware that Duplessis’s “histoire véritable” has a factual basis would take it for fiction, since it uses multiple conventions of the novel of the period. By purporting to be fiction, 138

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the Histoire is fiction and not biography. After her sister’s death in 1756, Duplessis did write a biographical account of her sister’s life in the obituary notice that she circulated to convents of the order. It follows the conventions of this genre of convent writing and will be examined to conclude this chapter. How to account for this early worldly wit? The young co-authors of the Histoire de Ruma were unique among their cohort of nuns because they had been exposed to fine society in Paris before entering the convent. Longueuil was the granddaughter of the richest man in Montreal, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil (1626–85). Her father, likewise named Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil (1656–1729), was the only Canadian to be named a baron by Louis XIV, in recognition of his service in the wars against the Iroquois, and at the time of the Histoire de Ruma’s composition was the king’s lieutenant in Montreal. In 1691, at the age of seven, his daughter followed him to France, where she lived in the household of the Princess Palatine, Charlotte-Élisabeth de Bavière, the king’s sister-in-law, who corresponded with her after her return to Canada in the late 1690s. According to the Annales, “This princess always honoured her with a singular friendship and herself gave assurances of it by means of her letters and gifts that she sent after her profession.”18 The Princess Palatine held the title of “Madame” as the wife of “Monsieur,” the king’s brother, and lived between the Palais-Royal in Paris, an estate at Saint-Cloud, and apartments at the château of Versailles. She devoured French novels and possessed an extensive collection of French fiction in her personal library.19 Duplessis’s family connections were much less illustrious, but still positioned her to observe polite society. She had spent much time in Marie-Anne Leroy’s dressmaking shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Like Marie-Catherine, she would have had contact with the elegant customers, some of whom likely invited her to their homes as they invited Marie-Catherine. Her maternal great-uncle held a minor position in the household of the duchesse de Bourgogne, wife of the heir to the throne, and she might have visited Versailles through him. Once in Canada after 1701, she had contact through her father with the intendants Champigny and Raudot, whose households were local centres of culture. In addition, Duplessis described what might be called a season of wit in fall 1711, after the shipwreck in the Saint Lawrence of an English fleet poised to attack Quebec. When the writing the spiritual life

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news of Walker’s disaster arrived, according to Duplessis, “Parnassus became accessible to everyone.” Even women, priests, and religious entered into the poetic spirit to “exercise their wit and their pen on this subject.”20 The whole town became poets and composed verse and songs to celebrate Canada’s deliverance.21 It may be that the next year this contagious spirit inspired Duplessis to direct her wit to attracting her sister into the Hôtel-Dieu, and vocal music, in fact, is at the centre of the second text that embodies this playful wit.

The Musique spirituelle and Dissection spirituelle If the Histoire uses such salon genres as the roman à clé and the portrait, the ingenuity at the heart of the Musique spirituelle is in the parallels between music and monasticism. Indeed, the organizing principle of the Musique and the Dissection is not narrative as in the Histoire, but conceptual. Seeking out parallels is a staple of convent writing which was encouraged by the figurative exegesis that was pervasive in devotional writing. However, the parallels were commonly between two spiritual elements. For example, Angélique de SaintJean d’Arnauld d’Andilly listed ways in which the situation of her persecuted Port-Royal nuns echoed that of Christ in the Eucharist in her “On the Conformity of the State to which Port-Royal is Reduced to the State of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.”22 Duplessis innovates by making something secular her starting point for the analogies. She organized her text as an orderly progression through the basics of music, such as was found in many handbooks of the period. It starts with scales, keys, sharps, and flats and the conventions of musical notation. It goes on to consider a number of sophisticated vocal ornaments prized by Baroque performers, before turning to rests, accompaniments, and tempos. While plainchant was only found in religious music, such ornaments were used by composers in both secular works and sacred motets, the latter of which the nuns sang in simplified versions in their church. The concluding section presents a synthesis in which the mother superior harmonizes the entire musical enterprise. Duplessis showed considerable mental dexterity in proposing her forty or so parallels. Some of the comparisons are obvious and rather facile: the mother superior is the director; the scales are the rule and constitutions. Some are 140

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particularly inspired: being in tune is when one is at peace with God, one’s self, and one’s neighbour. Despite the description by its editor as a music manual, the Musique spirituelle is truly a manual of monastic life that aims at reminding the nuns of community practices. There is little or no explanation of the highly technical musical terms the Musique spirituelle uses. It takes for granted that the nuns are familiar with such ornaments of Baroque vocal performance as mordents, vibratos, legatos, trills, and quarter rests. Moreover, many of the parallels it draws are not as obvious as the one between the mother superior and the director of an orchestra, and this is Duplessis’s further innovation. Most of her parallels assume that the nuns have enough technical expertise to recognize the parallels. Just as the Histoire de Ruma proposed to Geneviève the intellectual pleasure of recognizing the appropriateness of the biblical names given to members of her family and friends, the Musique invites the nuns to grasp the aptness of the musical-monastic parallels, and indeed to take pleasure in the process. Some of the less obvious ones might even elicit a touch of admiration for the ingenuity of the author. B flat is the contemplative life of a nun given over to prayer because it requires a singer to lower the voice a half tone. B sharp, which raises the voice a half tone, is equated with the active life, that is to say with service in the hospital wards. B natural is the mixed life, both contemplative and active, i.e. the life of a cloistered hospital nun of the Hôtel-Dieu, who spends time both in the choir and in the hospital. Such a taste for the surprising, for the unusual, is typical of salon conceits. Nonetheless, one wonders if it does not distract from Duplessis’s expectation that the parallels will also lead her readers to reflect on their monastic vocation. The third text that seems to belong to this series, the unpublished Dissection spirituelle, incorporates worldly wit only in its title and marks a step away from the intellectual pleasure that the first two texts offer.23 The anatomical terminology of the title is justified by a listing of some thirty faculties – corporal (eyes, ears, tongue, etc.), mental (memory, understanding, imagination, etc.), and spiritual (soul, conscience, free will, etc.) – much as the Musique spirituelle is structured around a themed list of musical features. However, there is no striving after surprising conceits and unexpected parallels. writing the spiritual life

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Instead, one finds insightful ascetic comments on how each faculty can be offered to God in order to live a holy life. The Dissection sets out to be both a work of thanksgiving for the physical, mental, and spiritual gifts that God has given and a work of reparation, since these gifts have been misdirected to worldly pleasures. It is a discreetly personal text. Unlike the Musique spirituelle, whose parallels are set out impersonally, the Dissection is written in the first person. The “I” is clearly identifiable with Duplessis herself for those familiar with her calm level-headed temperament, and with what she identified as her own failings. While most of the suggestions for reform are suitable to any pious person, lay or religious, the Dissection’s power comes from the urgency with which Duplessis prays for assistance in redressing her personal faults such as impatience and discouragement. Occasionally some aspect of her own life as a hospital nun’s life is evoked. For example, in discussing the sense of smell, Duplessis states, “I, who am a sinner, search you out while passing by the putrid odors of a hospital and after having been so unfortunate to have breathed with pleasure the poisoned air of the world, I am punished for my past sensuality by the bad odor that the poor patients give off.” Although structured around parallels just as the Histoire and the Musique are, the Dissection signals a move away from an early aesthetic of playful wit that takes pleasure in recognizing subtle parallels. It corresponds to the spiritual maturation suggested by her correspondence with her brother during his first years as a Jesuit. The Musique spirituelle merely notes the parallel between music and the monastic life, leaving the reader to work out the rationale for the link in her mind; the Dissection devotes a paragraph to each faculty, spelling out explicitly how each can be harnessed for the spiritual life. Duplessis designed it as a systematic aid to mental prayer, much like her other shorter devotional texts that have been preserved in the Hôtel-Dieu archives, texts that are thoroughly conventional. Thus, while the Dissection lists thirty faculties, one for each day of a month, the Retreat on the Chief Important Truths of Our Holy Life as Religious (Retraite sur les principales et grandes verités de notre sainte religion) has three short meditations for each day of a weeklong retreat.24 A typical retreat with meditations on sin, death, hell, and judgment, it uses Ignatian features such as reflections 142

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on the two standards from Loyola’s spiritual exercises. A shorter text has twelve meditations on the virtues of the Virgin Mary for Saturdays, the day reserved for Marian devotions.25 Another text is for Mondays, the Devotion to the Holy Spirit for the Seven Mondays between Easter and Pentecost (Dévotion au Saint-Esprit pour les sept lundis qui se trouvent entre Pâques et la Pentecôte);26 each day is given over to one of the seven traditional gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, fortitude, etc.27 According to the 1760 circular letter written after her death by Ursule-Marie Chéron, Duplessis wrote such devotional texts for her private use, but they were quickly shared within the community.28 She must have also had in mind her duty to guide the spiritual life of her community as novice director and later as mother superior. The texts could have become the basis of talks delivered in chapter meetings or been given to nuns making retreats as aids to their meditations. In his letter of condolences the same year, Jean-Olivier Briand praised these oral presentations that were part of the duties of every conscientious head of a women’s community. They are “words full of unction and the spirit of God by which she tried either to console you, to lead you to virtue, or to inspire in you the zest for the things of God with which she was so imbued.”29

Devotional Writing by Geneviève de l’Enfant-Jésus Much more substantial than these texts by Marie-André that consist of short paragraph-length reflections are two longer manuscripts by her sister Geneviève, The Manna of Bethlehem (La Manne de Bethléem),30 dated 1732, and the 1745 Reflection on the Mystery of the Ascension of Our Lord (Réflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension de notre Seigneur).31 La Manne de Bethléem is structured, like her sister’s Dissection, as a day-by-day meditation guide, with forty meditation topics, instead of the thirty of the Dissection. However, it has a different dynamic. Reflections in the mind are designed to activate the imagination, the physical senses, and the emotions, and lead them to an affective response that relies on what Geneviève calls the interior senses of the soul, as opposed to the exterior bodily ones. The movement that she envisages here is typical of eighteenth-century spirituality. It begins in the body and mind and goes to the soul that ideally goes writing the spiritual life

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on to experience the spiritual effusions found in contemplation. The silent eloquence of the Infant Jesus that Geneviève seeks to promote is heart-to-heart communication in contemplative prayer. It is a very personal text in that it focuses on the Christ child, Geneviève’s name as a nun. Geneviève’s Reflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension, dated thirteen years later, likewise deals with the union of the divine and human nature in Christ – she even uses the technical theological term, the hypostatic union – but in a more intense register. Rather than a series of considerations proposed for meditation, it is a colloquy in which the meditant converses with God, who replies, not directly in dialogue, but in the form of scriptural passages that address her concerns. The Réflexion illustrates the best conventions of spiritual writing of the day: it is grounded in theology, uses citations of scripture and liturgical texts, not as illustration, but as part of the dialogue, and generates emotional involvement by use of an elevated rhetorical style. What did this devotional writing mean to the sisters? Both had complained as early as 1716 to their brother about their frustration that their duties as hospitallers interfered with their aspirations to become “great contemplatives.”32 In dedicating La Manne to the Carmelites of France, Geneviève regretted that Providence did not allow her to fulfill her aspiration to a purely contemplative life such as theirs. Indeed, the French crown only allowed service-oriented religious orders in the colony. Writing her devotional texts was a sort of compensation. “It is, therefore, to temper the annoyances that arrive to slow my fervour in the midst of subhuman duties that I applied myself to draw up forty holy points that will only inspire feelings of tenderness and supernatural love in me, while I fulfill the duties of an office that is as much the opposite of meditation as it is distracting in itself, since I have been long entrusted with the temporal business of a hospital.”33 “Inspire” is the key word here. Her writing is not a report of spiritual experiences she has had, as are the texts of the Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnation published under the title Retraites by her son, which her modern editor Albert Jamet says are more accounts of her prayer life than a retreat manual.34 Geneviève instead claimed to write to stimulate her own devotions to greater heights. She did share her texts with the community, as did her older sister, but the 144

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initial impulse was personal. It was the method she used to further what she called in a moment of self-depreciation in 1741 “the little spiritual space that I cultivate.”35 What is perhaps the most noteworthy is that she not only sent copies to France, as well as sharing them with her sister nuns, but envisaged their publication. La Manne, dedicated to the Carmelites of Paris, must have been sent to them soon after its composition in 1732. Six years later, her brother reported receiving a text from her on “the meditations of the mysteries of the blessed childhood of our Lord” – probably La Manne – that he would try to have printed.36 He does not, however, seem to have been successful. Although in the heyday of convent expansion in the seventeenth century, devotional texts by nuns had been published, there was little market for this sort of spiritual literature by the 1730s. Geneviève would have to be content with circulating her manuscript versions through convent channels. As she wrote her apothecary correspondent Jacques Féret in Dieppe when she sent him another text in 1743, “It is a small work by a nun which may edify a lay person a bit. You will show it to our hospitallers if you judge that it will please them.”37

Storytelling and Devotion Many of Marie-André’s own writings from her time in administration relate events connected with the community. One series deals with the inception of three devotional practices in the community. The first, On the Devotion to the Holy Family (De la dévotion à la sainte famille), dated to the early 1730s, narrates the establishment of the confraternity devoted to the Holy Family in the colony. These events took place in the seventeenth century, and the Hôtel-Dieu is not mentioned in Duplessis’s account, although one of its benefactresses, Marie-Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust, was an early promoter of the devotion.38 She donated a painting of the Holy Family that was displayed in the monastery’s chapel until the 1755 fire destroyed it.39 Two others relate the establishment of devotions within the monastery in which Duplessis played a direct role: the statue of Notre-Dame de Toute-Grâce, which the community received in 1738, and the account of the Profaned Crucifix that Bishop Pontbriand entrusted to it in 1744.40 These texts institutionalize the memory writing the spiritual life

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of new devotions being added to the community’s repertoire. The Annales themselves are studded with such accounts of the origin of similar earlier devotions introduced into community life. A crucial text that would have eventually found its way into the Annales is Duplessis’s account of the 1755 fire that destroyed the hospital. It had, of course, a more immediate goal than the long-term memory of the community: securing the aid of friends and protectors to meet urgent needs and finance reconstruction. Duplessis crafted a narrative of the fire that was sent with a personalized appeal to potential donors in France.41 Just as these cover letters show Duplessis’s mastery of the rhetoric of supplication, her account displays the best of her narrative talents. The prose is spare and thus echoes the rapidity with which the fire destroyed the hospital complex, one building after the next, in less than an hour. She highlights three dramatic episodes: the rescue of a dying nun carried from the infirmary in a blanket; the death of the only victim, a nun who perished inside the building when she returned to her room; the escape of a nun trapped on the fourth floor who courageously made her way down a ladder that brave rescuers had to lift with their arms because it was too short to reach her. In this last vignette, she lingers over the multiple obstacles that the nun had to overcome: the first ladder used fell apart; the second was too short; the nun had to slide down part of it when steps were missing; she clung to it with one hand while brushing away embers with the other, etc. It occupies about 20 percent of the 1,500-word account. In itself, it is a gripping story that sums up the resilience of all the nuns in this disaster. Duplessis did not reveal in this official version that the nun in question was her sister Geneviève. Only in the version she gave to Marie-Catherine Hecquet did she express her own fear: “Judge my distress on her account since the fire cut me off from going to rescue her.”42 In the official account, she evokes pity by stressing how the community lost everything to the conflagration. She concludes by describing the generosity with which the Ursulines and Jesuits shared their quarters and supplies with the homeless hospitallers, a generosity Duplessis hoped her correspondents would imitate. She ends laconically by noting that six weeks after the fire, the nuns reopened hospital wards in their temporary lodgings, all the better to underline their social utility. 146

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Biographical Death Notices When she finished the Musique spirituelle in late 1718, she was already embarked upon the book that would be her legacy, the Annales. She did not indicate if she envisaged someday writing a sequel when she finished them around 1720. A book that she likely did plan a few years later, but also never wrote, was a life of her mentor Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace. Geneviève Dupuy de la Croix, the mother superior at that time, signed the circular letter after Juchereau’s death in 1723. It promises a biography, perhaps along the lines of the one Claude Martin wrote of his Ursuline mother or the one the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau wrote for Catherine de Saint-Augustin.43 The following year, the Jesuit explorer Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix sent a presentation copy of his 1724 biography of Marie de l’Incarnation to “les dames Duplessis,” whom he had no doubt met during his stay in Quebec.44 But the vogue for lives of foundresses and mystic nuns, so popular in the seventeenth century, had passed, and Duplessis would have had difficulty finding a publisher in France for a biography of a superior whose talents were chiefly those of an administrator, just as Geneviève found no publisher for her devotional texts. A final series of texts written after the 1755 fire shows Duplessis’s skill in adapting a biographical genre of convent writing, the circular letter requesting the prayer of houses of her order throughout France for the souls of deceased members. Such letters were customary in the new orders founded in the seventeenth century that had many convents dispersed across France, such as the Carmelites, Ursulines, and Visitandines. Sometimes called “summaries of the life and virtues” (abrégés de la vie et des vertus), they conform to a template that first shows how the deceased came to discover her vocation and enter the convent, and ends with an edifying account of her death. The deceased’s life itself was not necessarily narrated chronologically, but was often organized around the chief virtues she embodied, her particular devotions, and her quest for monastic perfection. In its first decades, the Hôtel-Dieu produced many excellent examples of the genre that include the circular letters for the three foundresses who arrived from Dieppe in 1639, Marie Guenet, Anne Le Cointre, and Marie Forestier.45 Duplessis adapted such letters as the basis of the biographical account that the Annales devotes to every nun upon writing the spiritual life

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her death. None that she wrote as mother superior prior to the 1755 fire has survived. If the first goal of the letters was to shorten the deceased’s time in purgatory by means of the solicited prayers, the second was to reinforce the order’s value system by holding the dead nun up as much as possible as a model of the collective identity. Elizabeth Rapley warns against taking circular letters at face value: “As accurate portrayals of real people they must be taken with a large pinch of salt … It was not the true character of the deceased that counted, but rather the way in which it could be used to personify the [order’s] institute.”46 Although circular letters were officially designed to solicit prayers, Duplessis turned them into a tool for soliciting aid from monasteries in France by informing them of the needs of her house. Eleven circular letters written by Duplessis in her hand after the fire survive in the Hôtel-Dieu archives. The first three narrate the deaths of the two nuns who died at the time of the fire and of a third who died caring for the sick during that summer when the hospital reopened in the Jesuit college. Duplessis was assistant and secretary at this time; at the bottom of the first one, her signature has been crossed out and the superior’s written below it, as if Duplessis’s first impulse had been to send it out over her name. They are dated 10 September and would have been dispatched at the same time as her “official” account of the fire in the vessels departing for France that fall. The first account, which narrates the death of Marie-Anne de Lajoüe, who died when she returned to her room, begins, not with any statement about her, but with a paragraph describing the total ruin of the monastery and hospital and the nuns’ distress. The paragraph concludes, “we had to sacrifice not only our monastery, but also furniture, house linen, clothing, beds, etc. which could only happen, my reverend mother, with much bitterness, although we submit to the harsh decrees of divine Providence.” Only after this very unusual preface does Duplessis launch into “the tragic death” of the nun. She says little of her life, perhaps because there was little to say. Lajoüe had been received out of gratitude to her father, the architect of the 1695 wing of the hospital, despite the fact that she limped. Instead, in a more traditional way, the letter tells how Lajoüe had had premonitions of an imminent death and had recently made a retreat that prepared her well.47

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The second letter capitalizes on the dramatic circumstances of the death of a nun who was dying in the infirmary when the fire broke out. It adds details not in the “official” account about how she was carried from house to house outside the convent as one after the other caught fire. Her identity, Marie-Joseph Maillou, is only revealed halfway through the account, as if the fire is the true subject of the letter. To show the solidarity of the nuns in Quebec, her funeral at the Ursuline convent is described as the most imposing ever held for any nun in the colony; the ceremony featured ninety-two Ursuline and Hôtel-Dieu nuns, each holding a candle. Again, little is said of her life, which is not surprising since she spent thirteen of her nineteen years as a nun in the infirmary suffering from lung disease. The chief virtue attributed to her is her “endurance in continually suffering,” but she too had prepared well for death.48 The third is the most conventional. It quickly gives an account of the unusual way in which Marie-Marthe des Roches entered the religious life when she claimed a dowry that a younger sister had hoped to use. The letter ends as part of the campaign of solicitation for the Hôtel-Dieu by noting soberly that her death was from smallpox contracted from patients at the newly reopened hospital. The liturgical pomp at her funeral, “this lugubrious ceremony,” is likewise narrated in detail. Duplessis shows the Jesuits to be as welcoming as the Ursulines described in the previous letter, another example of solidarity among religious orders.49 Duplessis, who had become superior once again in March 1756, wrote and signed the fourth and last letter of the series.50 It is the only one of the four which follows the traditional template. What makes it unique is that Marie-André was writing about “my sole sister,” Geneviève, who died on 12 May of that year. She opened the letter by acknowledging her personal “sharp sorrow” and closed with an expression of gratitude for the support her sister nuns had shown: “I cannot tell you, my dear mother, how much all our nuns give her signs of sincere affection, as well as to me in a such a painful circumstance since this separation could only be extremely painful to two sisters more united by inclination than blood. This redoubles my attachment to a house to which I owe so much, and it commits me to spare nothing in proving my gratitude to it.”

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Beyond this poignant expression of rare emotion in Duplessis, the letter offers a unique opportunity. In the case of Geneviève, there are multiple controls to assess her circular letter. The Histoire de Ruma, written when Geneviève was nineteen, in hope of persuading her to become a nun, can be compared to this retrospective on her career forty-five years later, and although Marie-André’s report to her Jesuit brother of their sister’s death is missing, François-Xavier’s response survives. The circular letter slights details about Geneviève’s youth, to make room for her years as a nun: the same early qualities that show up in the Histoire are listed – innocence, good nature, and talents – but without illustrations. The letter does not even mention her trip to France in 1700. Instead, it highlights her reaction to the death of two nuns during her three-year stay as a boarder. This event is not mentioned in the Histoire, even though, according to the circular letter, it was the seed of her vocation. Its importance was evidently not recognized by Marie-André at the time she tried to convince Geneviève to enter the convent in the Histoire. Geneviève’s twentyeight years of indefatigable service as hospital business manager are the pivot of her life as a nun in the circular letter. She did not let the thirty years she suffered from the lung disease that finally killed her prevent her from her duty. Nor did she allow the incessant worries over the hospital’s funding to keep her from developing a deep prayer life: “When she had been kept away from prayer during the day, she spent her evenings satisfying her desire for it, and only found respite in prayer.” However, the letter does not refer to the devotional texts she wrote that grew out of these meditations. She was buried in the vaults of the Jesuit church because the nuns were still housed in a wing of their college after the fire. She died a “gentle death” that conforms to the ideal of the good convent death, according to the circular letter. Fortified with the last sacraments, she was surrounded by part of the community. No mention, however, is made of the pious resignation that often features in such accounts. In fact, François-Xavier’s reply in 1757 to Marie-André’s private report of their sister’s death in a letter to him suggests that at some point in Geneviève’s two-month final illness, her disposition was not entirely peaceful: “Given this abandonment in which the superior faculties remain entirely submissive and attached 150

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to the holy will of God, the complaints that our dear sister expressed at that time were only the effects of her desire in the last moments of her life to be more intimately united than ever with her divine spouse.”51 He excused Geneviève’s outbursts as involuntary reactions of the body, despite her mind and soul’s submission to God’s will. Like her mother Marie Leroy, Geneviève was quick-tempered and impatient (vive), and as with her mother in 1732, these traits did not disappear in her last days. Marie-André could have included similar pious comments in the circular letter, but preferred that Geneviève’s death be entirely peaceful in the public record. She presents Geneviève’s model death in the circular letter as a release from the fundamental tension that troubled her during her entire life, the tension between the active and contemplative life that was at the heart of the hospital nun’s vocation. Geneviève had constantly complained that her duties as business manager prevented her from attaining her spiritual aspirations. Her reward was to achieve them in death, thus confirming the order’s institute that combined the life of prayer of Mary and the service of Martha. The circular letters are far removed from the wit that gave Marie-André’s early writing a unique flavour. When she became an administrator, the institutional needs that shape the conventions of convent writing dominated her texts. However, her skill as a storyteller and her personal involvement with the subject at hand give even these official texts, especially the ones written in the years after the 1755 fire, an edge that sets them apart from those written by her seventeenth-century predecessors.

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chapter

7 Duplessis Takes Women’s History Public: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec

The Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, written between 1717 and 1721, are a unique example of an extremely common monastic genre. Most convents produced such histories of their houses, and, indeed, chronicles survive from five of the six women’s communities founded in Canada in the seventeenth century.1 But the 1751 publication in Montauban of the Hôtel-Dieu’s annals makes them the only Canadian ones to appear in print during the French regime. In fact, they seem to be the only annals of any French-speaking community of nuns published before the Revolution. The Benedictine Albert Jamet published a monumental critical edition in 1939 in honour of the tercentenary of the hospital. Dom Jamet promoted the Annales as “one of the most precious sources for the history of New France.”2 The focus here is on women writing their own history and what happens when this history written for themselves is shared with others. The Annales are, in fact, the effort of a largely Canadian-born group of women to protect and further their collective interests within colonial strictures. Sorting out Duplessis’s role in the communal writing practices that produced the Annales is a first step. Her view of Canada’s current spiritual and political situation as a struggling colony shaped how she traced the Hôtel-Dieu’s history from its founding. Nor did she shrink from tackling the gender tensions between the nuns and their ecclesiastical superiors. Finally, the circumstances

that led Duplessis to seek publication of this in-house document point to how a male editor adapted the Annales for a wider public.

Duplessis’s Composite Text The manuscript of the Annales in the archives of the Hôtel-Dieu, written in Duplessis’s hand, consists of 229 numbered folios arranged much as a printed book.3 A title page gives the title in large characters – Histoire abrégée de l’Établissement de l’hôtel-Dieu de Quebec, fondé par l’illustre Dame Marie de Vignerot, Duchesse d’Aiguillon, en l’année 1636 – and the name of the author – Par la Rde Mère Jeanne-françoise Juchereau de St-Ignace, ancienne Religieuse de ce Monastere.4 Three short texts on unnumbered folios pages precede the annals proper: a dedication to the Virgin, a letter to current and future nuns of the house that Juchereau herself signed in the manuscript, and a short history of the colony called a foreword. An index and biography of Juchereau follow the historical account, again on unnumbered folios. The annals themselves proceed in strict chronological fashion, year by year, with no chapter divisions. The only divisions in the text are subtitles in the pages’ margins that give the dates of events and briefly summarize them. However, what presents itself as a unified book with Juchereau as its author is really a composite text, compiled and largely written by Duplessis. Juchereau points to one aspect of the collective composition of the Annales in her letter. She takes pride in having persuaded Marie Forestier de Saint-Bonaventure-de-Jésus, the last surviving of the three founding nuns who arrived from France in 1639, to recount the beginning of the house before Forestier slipped into senility. The Annales thus begin, after a brief introduction, with Forestier’s account, which Jamet signalled by adding quotation marks not found in the manuscript for thirteen pages. Although the typographical marks that signal direct quotation fade away, the narration continues seamlessly with the same voice in the first person plural throughout the book (with occasional first-person-singular asides). In her prefatory letter, Juchereau describes the technique: “We preserve and cherish the little notebooks in which Mother Bonaventure de Jésus wrote what happened during her time. Her style is simple and naïve. I have tried to imitate it by continuing as she had begun, that duplessis takes women’s history public

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7.1 The title page of the manuscript of the Annales features the arms of the Hôtel-Dieu’s foundress, Marie de Vignerot, duchesse d’Aiguillon. Duplessis dates the duchess’s decision to finance the hospital to 1636, although the contact was only signed in 1637, and the nuns arrived on 1 August 1639. It includes the Jesuit motto, “To the Greater Glory of God.”

is to say that I have related the events that preceded me as those who saw them might have.” In addition, Juchereau located accounts made by several other members, including Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Such an effort to document the early days of a convent by collecting the founders’ recollections was common practice in early modern convents. Perhaps the best known were gathered by the seventeenth-century abbess of Port-Royal in Paris, Angélique de Saint-Jean d’Arnauld d’Andilly. She never turned this raw material into a single narrative account, though, and the documents were eventually published in three volumes in 1742 by supporters of the destroyed monastery under the title Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal. However, the composite nature of the Annales goes well beyond the incorporation of such accounts. Part of the great reform movement that reorganized French convent life in the first half of the seventeenth century was the expectation that monasteries keep careful records.5 Well-managed communities kept registers of entrances, professions, and deaths of members; minutes of deliberations recorded chapter meetings; necrologies recounted the lives of deceased members and benefactors; circular letters were sent to other houses on such occasions. The Annales are based on such documentation, noting for example the results of elections, the entrance of members, and important business decisions. The Annales provide a short account of the principal virtues of each deceased member based on the necrologies; these can vary in length from a single line for young members to several pages for prominent ones. Other convent documents, most of them written by the nuns, are incorporated directly into the narrative: contracts, alliances with other communities, supplications to the Virgin Mary, an amende honorable (a sort of ceremonial judicial penance) addressed to Saint Joseph in reparation for blasphemies. The Annales are thus a compendium of many of the genres of writing practised by nuns.6 Juchereau largely concealed a second aspect of the Annales’s collaborative nature. In her letter to her fellow sisters that serves as preface, Juchereau described her role in terms that would lead one to believe that she also wrote it: “I begin this narrative … I note briefly … I have tried to imitate it.” However, although she oversaw the project, she left its execution to her secretary Duplessis de SainteHélène. The Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Chardon wrote Duplessis, “Mother duplessis takes women’s history public

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Saint-Ignace gave you all the information for this history. She selected you to execute her project and to give form to the substance that she furnished you, by relying on you for its style, its ordering, its structure and piety, as she testified to me.”7 Duplessis was thirty when the sixty-seven-year-old Juchereau, who had just finished her last term as superior, singled her out for this task around 1717. The humility so prized by nuns makes it appropriate that there is no indication in the Annales themselves of Duplessis’s role. Although the ten years since Duplessis’s entrance in 1707 account for only 13 percent of the eighty-year span that her Annales chronicle, she devoted 23 percent of the text in Jamet’s edition to the years she knew personally. At first glance, readers may have difficulty discerning any overarching point of view on the eighty years of the community’s history narrated in the Annales. Events are recounted on a year-by-year basis, with only an occasional glance at what is to come, as if the Annales had been composed incrementally, like many convent journals, by annually adding a summary of the year’s events. However, the book was composed in a relatively short period between 1717 and 1721 according to Jamet,8 and one can detect an assessment of the community’s situation around 1720 that is projected retrospectively back to 1636. The community itself is spiritually sound and functions in an efficient, harmonious manner; yet its financial underpinnings are uncertain, due not to any imprudence of the nuns, but to the colony’s poor economic climate. This view echoes Duplessis’s stance in her opposition to Saint-Vallier’s plans in August 1719. From its first pages, the Annales cite examples of the sanctity and dedication of the nuns and of their impact on those that they serve. Furthermore, there is no hint of scandal or lack of orthodoxy. The annalist repeatedly takes pride that no Jansenism taints the house, reflecting Duplessis’s ties to her Jesuit brother.9 This worthiness has been rewarded. By 1720, the three French nuns who arrived in 1639 had multiplied into sixty, almost all of whom were Canadian-born. In 1698, the community and hospital had moved into expanded quarters. Thus, the Annales are not an appeal to recover some lost spiritual ideal of the foundresses. Rather, future nuns are enjoined to remain worthy of a treasure they still possess by assuring that only worthy novices be received as members. 156

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The threats in the late 1710s were seen as chiefly due to the degradation of the colony’s economy. For the year 1671, in the wake of the expansion of the population under Jean Talon’s leadership, the annalist had seen signs for great hope: “God having given his blessing to his works by its great success, Canada in little time saw itself in the midst of abundance that gave reason to hope that it would be one day a very fine land.”10 But by the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was clear that such expectations had not been fulfilled. Witness the annalist’s plea for help that closes the foreword: “May God grant that Louis XV take into his affection this poor colony that … finds itself reduced to desperate straits so that under his reign we rise up again from the miseries that are heaped upon us.”11 In fact, “this poor land” becomes a leitmotif to describe New France. Writing during the Regency, in the wake of both the bankruptcy of John Law’s bank that reduced the value of the community’s investments and the devaluation of the colonial playing-card money,12 the annalist found herself a member of a struggling community in a struggling colony. This pessimistic view of Canada’s situation is probably closer to Duplessis’s than Juchereau’s. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau was the quintessential Canadian. Linked by both her father and mother to the earliest and most distinguished inhabitants of New France,13 she represented the transition in the community from a French foundation to a truly Canadian institution. On the other hand, Duplessis’s colonial roots were more recent. Moreover, during the years she was composing the Annales, her mother was struggling with the debts left by her father.

Corporate Pietas / Corporate Know-How The importance of the Annales to the community is signalled by the fact that the order’s Règlements list a monastery’s annals as the first of many books and registers that the secretary must keep.14 The corporate interests that shape the Annales are explicit in its three introductory texts and in its closing pages. Instruction and edification go hand in hand in furthering the ultimate goal of the Annales proposed in the book’s dedication to the Virgin: the continued spiritual health of the community. “May this house that is so especially dedicated to you be a school of virtue and perfection duplessis takes women’s history public

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in which your servants grow in holiness; may fervour, charity, and observance of the rule grow there every day.”15 In the letter to current and future members that follows this invocation, Juchereau states that learning the community’s history should first encourage gratitude, both to God and to the hospital’s many benefactors for whom the nuns should offer prayer. In addition, the edifying stories of the founding nuns and their successors – their “tireless zeal” and “sublime virtue” – are proposed as models for imitation. Both virtues are singled out in these nuns: “a profound humility and a sincere obedience” foster harmonious community life, “a great peace,” which is proposed as an ideal.16 Little wonder that Chardon’s letter reiterates a recommendation that the Annales be read out loud “when the community is gathered at table,” that is, included in the public readings during meals in the refectory.17 The Annales inspire a communal pietas by reminding its members of the traditions behind its unique devotional practices – why the Salve Regina is sung daily before matins; kissing the feet of the statue of the Virgin before saluting the newly elected mother superiors; offering the Virgin a meal that will be given to the poor once a month. The Annales recount the history of the construction of the monastery’s buildings, but also highlight the paintings and statuary within them: a portrait of the Jesuit Jean-François Régis done by an Indigenous artist; images of the Virgin and Saint Joseph. The artworks’ aesthetic is subordinated to devotion and to a reminder to pray for the donor. Hand-in-hand with this piety goes subtle encouragement to develop corporate know-how. Calls to pray for benefactors are also reminders to cultivate friends who might provide funds, of course, but more often those who may donate other essential services. Duplessis’s narrative repeatedly refers to “our friends” who remain unnamed but who proffered insider advice. She singled out select individuals by name, especially “our old friend” the surgeon Robert Giffard de Moncel in the early days of the hospital; Paul Dupuy, “one of our true friends” at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and, of course, “his faithful friend who became ours,” her own father, Georges Duplessis.18 Corporate know-how, Duplessis knew, meant knowing how to enlist the support of reliable friends.

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Colonial History and the Hand of God The Annales include, however, much information that is not specifically edifying. They go far beyond the call of the Règlements to consign memorable events that took place within the monastery19 and situate the community’s history in that of the colony. Financial data of all sorts are given – a general overview of the exploration and settlement of the colony and of its changing economic conditions, including a disquisition on the playing-card currency that culminates in an assessment of the community’s investments around 1720. All this is handled with the expertise one would expect from a daughter of a treasurer of the marine. A chronicle of political and economic events in the colony parallels the evolution of the house’s internal administration: the arrivals and departures of intendants and governors are noted along with the annual election of the house’s officers. Allusions to political events are not unusual in convent annals, but here they take on a special interest on several counts. First, the Annales do not hesitate to justify this historical excursus in terms of pleasure and curiosity. Thus, the introductory letter states, “I believed I would please you by relating several items that concern Canada in general,”20 and the foreword hopes that such history will “satisfy the curiosity of nuns, who, in reading this book, might wish to learn when and how this colony was established.”21 The book concludes with the hope that the future generations of nuns who read it will “find some pleasure” in reading it, as well as being edified.22 The appeal to curiosity and pleasure here echoes Duplessis’s Histoire de Ruma and Musique spirituelle. The conclusion also highlights the unusual care taken to assure the accuracy of the information about the colony. Two sorts of experts read the draft as it was being composed: individuals with long experience in Canada and others knowledgeable about previously published accounts. “They have found nothing regarding what we say about this country in general that does not conform to the truth and to what the most reliable historians relate.”23 Duplessis saw herself as an historian among historians. Although the foreword says it will not duplicate what is found in previously published histories of the colony, it gives a succinct

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overview of the exploration of Canada beginning with John Cabot’s voyages for England. Duplessis highlights how the French kings initiated trips by a parade of explorers to show the importance of royal protection for Canada. She pays special heed to the rebirth of the colony in 1632 after its three-year occupation by the Kirke brothers for the English. The arrival of the Hôtel-Dieu nuns in 1639, in fact, was part of the expansion of the missionary, agricultural, and trade efforts during the 1630s that solidified permanent French settlement. The Annales’s historical observations are more extensive than is habitually the case. Only in the last five years of the French regime did there seem to be an annalist in another Canadian monastery with such an eye for the colony’s history. The Ursulines’ Charlotte Daneau de Muy de Sainte-Hélène situated the campaigns in the French and Indian War in their military-political frame with even more detail than Duplessis had done for the earlier period.24 The extracts of Daneau de Muy’s chronicle that have been published give one the impression of reading a nationalist historian as much as a convent annalist. Duplessis, except in rare cases such as the unsuccessful attacks of William Phips in 1690 and Hovenden Walker in 1711, almost always linked political and military affairs to the history of her house and evaluated colonial administrators in terms of their overall piety and their role as benefactors. These two accounts are exceptional in their length and illustrate the strengths and limitations of Duplessis’s historical method. She could modulate a narrative around a central thesis: in both these cases, how divine protection saved the unprepared colony. For the longer 1690 account, to highlight the unexpectedness of the attack, she invokes a misogynous commonplace. When first reports of a possible invasion arrived, they were discounted, except by the nuns: “either because women are more credulous or more fearful, we began prayers and penances so that God would remove this scourge.”25 The foolish virgins proved to be wise when the invasion was confirmed, but Duplessis continued to feature the nuns’ fear by using colourful anecdotes. They buried their sacred vessels in a cache and tearfully prepared to evacuate to the countryside. The focus in the next pages shifts resolutely to the military manoeuvrings of male leaders with only brief references to their impact on the Hôtel-Dieu. Gradually, however, Duplessis includes more examples of how the entire town 160

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followed the nuns’ lead by offering intercessory prayers and doing penance. The whole account becomes an act of thanksgiving that extends to the Te Deum sung in the cathedral to celebrate the victory as a written narrative memorial. The 1711 Walker fiasco – wherein a storm destroyed a substantial portion of the British fleet in the Saint Lawrence before it reached Quebec – is again a proof of God’s intervention to protect “the true religion.”26 As the nineteenth-century Boston historian Francis Parkman – confident in the superiority of Anglo-American culture – was happy to point out, in her eagerness to see the hand of God everywhere, she displayed her own credulity. She made the bolt of lightning that destroyed a British ship an act of “the justice of God,” and she claimed that the humiliated Walker committed suicide by blowing up his boat in the Thames upon returning to London. The explosion was in fact accidental, and he was still very much alive when Duplessis was writing.27 Jamet, whose notes throughout his edition compare Duplessis’s version of events to other accounts, found that despite such lapses, she is generally reliable on a factual basis. When her evaluation of political figures might be questioned, it is generally in order to edify or because of her tendency to judge officials in terms of their contribution to the hospital’s mission.28 Duplessis intended the Annales to hand on to future generations of nuns the working knowledge they would need to maintain the community’s collective well-being – its health as a spiritual institution, of course, but also its financial stability and its internal cohesion – and for this reason she situates them in an overview of New France.

A Fallen Colony The Hôtel-Dieu had been founded as a missionary enterprise. The Jesuits counted on the nuns’ example as much as on the medical attention they could provide to convert the Indigenous peoples. Christianity’s superiority would be seen in the contrast between their care lavished on their sick and aged and “the ancient and barbarous custom” of the savages who “slew their aged to put an end to their pain.”29 But other than some Algonquians and part of the Wendats, early conversions did not match expectations. As early as 1644, when the nuns left their original site near the Jesuit mission station duplessis takes women’s history public

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at Sillery for Quebec, the focus shifted to the European population: the settlers themselves, the sailors who arrived in the port, and the soldiers sent to defend the colony. By the time of Duplessis, the small number of converts was matched by the loss of devotion among the French themselves. In the foreword’s account of Canadian history, the re-creation of the fervour of the primitive church among the first settlers went hand in hand with the conversion of the Indigenous. Louis XIII is said to have had an apostolic vision for the colony that was realized in its early days: “the savages were being converted every day and the French lived like the first Christians.”30 The Annales suggest that this exemplary life lasted into the 1680s. In 1651, “in New France at that time one only breathed devotion.”31 In 1659, “people lived there in simplicity, good faith, and union that was close to what one admired in the first Christians.”32 Describing a fire that destroyed the lower town in 1682, the annalist specifically noted the piety and probity of the city’s merchants: “People lived in an enchanting warm harmony that made New France completely delightful; all the troubles that we have since experienced and that grow daily were unknown.”33 The nuns saw themselves as part of a society where the devout outnumbered the backsliders, a society more pious than France. But as this last quotation shows, by the first years of the eighteenth century, this fervour was in decline. The annalist attributed a threatened invasion by New Englanders in 1711 to divine anger “against this poor land where, in truth, sins were on the rise daily.”34 By the second decade of the eighteenth century when the Annales were written, the nuns’ relationship to the settler society had changed. The community now more closely resembled those of France, where a convent might see itself as a beacon of piety in a fallen society. Economic prosperity did not replace the colony’s earlier fervour. According to the Annales, the colony had not realized its potential from the expansion in the 1660s. It remained poor, sustained by God, the support of the king, and gifts from French benefactors. The precarious economic situation of Canada and the Hôtel-Dieu explains the general praise for royal authorities in the Annales. Her narrative stresses how successive administrators have favoured the hospital. Jamet attributed her indulgence toward the colonial administrators, whom she refrains from criticizing, to “her pen … always guided by 162

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charity.”35 It might better be seen as instructing the community on how to deal with them to the hospital’s advantage. Duplessis realized that the ultimate authority was the king himself and maximized his devout intentions. In the foreword, she stated that if Louis XIV did not heed the colony’s detractors who “often make representations to him about the expenses he incurs there without any compensating profits,” it was because he shared the pious vision of his father.36 After recounting how the British siege in 1690 was lifted, she gave thanks that Louis did not then abandon the colony as so many advised him to do because he shared her own providentialist vision: “The sole desire to spread the faith and to see God served and adored in these lands led this great prince to sustain this country for which Heaven had so openly declared itself.”37 Writing during the Regency, the annalist praised the young Louis XV’s “fortunate predisposition to do good” and his “fine qualities.”38 For better or for worse, the hospital’s fortunes were linked to those of the colony, thus the need to maintain good working relations with its royal administrators.

Dealing with Patriarchy As much as the Annales stress the protection of the king and his administrators and profess deference to male civil and ecclesiastical authority, they highlight women’s agency. Today readers prize the entrepreneurial and managerial skills that the foundresses displayed in creating a viable institution in the wilderness. However, as Allan Greer pointed out, in the seventeenth century, nuns were praised above all for their spiritual gifts: their mystical experiences, their ability to predict the future, their mortification.39 Humility, obedience, and submission were valued qualities. Thus two long entries recount the life and spiritual gifts of Catherine de Saint-Augustin.40 The spiritual favours received by Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust, a widow and donor who retired to the Hôtel-Dieu, are recounted at even greater length.41 Their agency is not synonymous with managerial skills, but with the ability to prophecy and to convert, even from beyond the grave. The same moral and spiritual agency is singled out in the short eulogies that mark the deaths of Indigenous converts, most of them women. The French claimed that sexual promiscuity was a principal obstacle to the conversion of Indigenous peoples, and thus the chastity duplessis takes women’s history public

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of the women converts is stressed. When the Annales point to the contribution of the nuns to their conversion, agency is portrayed in terms of qualities often considered feminine: the “mildness,” “modesty,” and “charity” of the nuns encouraged such conversions.42 Even when women were actively involved in important negotiations, the Annales often prefer to highlight other aspects of their role. In his introduction, Jamet recounted in detail how the great Carmelite prioress Madeleine Du Bois de Fontaines-Marans de Saint-Joseph convinced the duchesse d’Aiguillon to take an interest in the Canadian missions and how d’Aiguillon negociated with the Dieppe hospital nuns to begin the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec. The Annales mention little of this.43 Their focus is on how fortunate the community was to have as its foundress the niece of the great Cardinal Richelieu. In a society where clientage was so central, the prayers of gratitude the nuns said daily for d’Aiguillon were a constant reminder that they had an illustrious protectress. In fact, they believed that her protection continued in heaven after her death and invoked her intercession in times of trouble.44 However, the Annales are much more than a chronicle of providential protection and extraordinary mystical gifts. Especially after the arrival in 1659 of New France’s first bishop, François de Laval, they relate how the nuns dealt with the tensions between their community and its male superiors, whose intervention at times generated internal tension or conflicts with other female communities. Since the Council of Trent, nuns had been subject to tight ecclesiastical oversight. Open defiance was not unheard of, but seldom resorted to. The Annales can be read as advice to future nuns in three areas where male interference could be felt: conserving internal unity when tensions arise within the community; defending the community’s corporate interests against domineering clerics; and maintaining good relations with other religious communities. First, the Annales model how to maintain internal unity within the community. Tension with the bishops began with Laval’s arrival in the colony in 1659, over whether to recognize his authority. Previously, the colony had been under the oversight of the bishop of Rouen, whose vicar, Gabriel Thubières de Levy de Queylus, had protected the hospital. The remark “We found ourselves fairly perplexed” indicates some internal discussion, but after consulting 164

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God and “more enlightened people,” undoubtedly the Jesuits, who supported Laval, the nuns rallied to the new arrival.45 Second, the Annales trace the direct conflicts between the community and its ecclesiastical superiors. The Annales note that from the very beginning of his episcopate, Laval attempted to modify or ignore provisions of the nuns’ constitutions. In 1660, “although there was something to the contrary in our constitutions,” he ordered the nuns to reduce the number of days they fasted.46 In 1663, elections were postponed “following the orders that his Lordship had left.”47 The Annales make the best of this intervention by attributing it to Laval’s “paternal care.”48 The Annales’ harsh assessment of the monastery’s fifth mother superior is a warning to future superiors. Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité, who was superior from 1670 to 1676, is described as “too subservient toward her superiors” – that is, too prompt to comply with Laval’s wishes. At issue was Laval’s order to the community to share bequests with the hospital. Boulic is thus accused of not defending the collective interests of the nuns with sufficient energy in the face of male authority. To be sure, the annalist mutes her criticism: when Boulic “thought she was complying with the will of the lord bishop,” she was only doing what other superiors had done. The annalist even breaks into her own voice to defend Boulic: “I do not believe, moreover, that this story detracts from the esteem owed to Mother Marie-Renée de la Nativité.”49 But even if Boulic’s compliance to the bishop was not a moral failing, and even if she was not the only offender, by mentioning it, the annalist exhorted future superiors to be more assertive. Finally, because the Hôtel-Dieu’s Annales seek to promote harmonious relations with other Canadian orders, male and female, their histories are narrated alongside its own. Indeed, the first hospital nuns arrived in 1639 in the ship with the founding Ursuline nuns, accompanied by Jesuits. At their simplest, the Annales are careful to include entries on the noteworthy leaders of these orders, on calamities such as fires that struck them, and on their holy members. However, the interference of male clerics quickly threatened good relations with other women’s communities. An early example merely required discretion on the part of the nuns. In 1658, just before the arrival of Laval, l’abbé de Queylus sent two Hôtel-Dieu nuns to duplessis takes women’s history public

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Montreal to look into the possibility of founding a second house there. But because Queylus knew that the Montreal leaders wanted to bring another order of nuns from France for the new hospital, the two emissaries had to travel on other pretexts. The Montreal leaders held firm, and the nuns returned to Quebec, but “the matter remained highly secret.”50 An event in 1671 required compromise with Laval himself. On 17 July the nuns learned that a ship in the harbour brought three new nuns from France to the community. “That surprised us all the more since we did not know that they had been requested and we did not expect them.”51 Laval, fearing that not enough Canadian vocations were forthcoming, had recruited in France. While some members opined that the three should be returned to France because the community had not requested them, the majority took a more conciliatory stance: “After examining everything, we thought that we should submit without resistance to his Lordship who had only acted out of goodness.”52 But the community insisted on having the last word, even if it was not directed at the bishop but at convents in France who heeded his appeal. The Hôtel-Dieu sent a letter to sister houses in France threatening to return any nun who arrived without an invitation from the community’s chapter.53 The most contentious issue with other communities was born out of the Hôtel-Dieu itself: the Hôpital-Général.54 In 1693, Laval’s successor Bishop Saint-Vallier announced his intention of founding an almshouse to serve the indigent and invalid, staffed by a contingent of nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu. The complicated story that the Annales recount is a lesson in damage control to future generations of nuns. The Hôtel-Dieu nuns were fearful that not enough funding was available for two communities of hospital nuns, and, above all, that the new establishment would cut into their recruitment, since the Hôpital-Général was better located and its members less exposed to contagious diseases. Unable to stop their determined bishop, they first sought to make the new community report to them, and when this failed, to limit the number of its members to twelve. They skillfully appealed to parties who might be favourable to their case. They enlisted the aid of local authorities resentful of Saint-Vallier’s other attempts to impose his vision.55 They wrote briefs to the king, who they knew opposed the establishment of new cloistered communities in New France.56 166

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This marshalling of support by Juchereau pushed Saint-Vallier to single her out as the instigator of resistance to his wishes. “He laid the blame especially on Mother Jeanne-Françoise de Saint-Ignace whom he accused of pulling all her strings and of controlling everyone in this community.”57 Juchereau thus becomes a counter-model to Boulic, whom the Annales had accused earlier of not defending the community’s interests with sufficient energy against Laval. Juchereau was, of course, also the instigator of the Annales themselves. Making sure that the account of this conflict is told from her point of view could well have pushed her toward initiating the project. After all, the Hôpital-Général had begun its own annals to record its version in 1704–05.58 By lending out its own annals in later years, the HôtelDieu insured that its version of the events was known. In this record intended for posterity, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu rein in their bitterness toward Saint-Vallier and the Hôpital-Général community. The bishop had tried to break the unity of the community by winning over individual members.59 Nonetheless, the account in the Annales, written while he was still bishop, is much more deferential than the following description of him in their letter to the Dieppe community at the time of the events: “If one points out to him that one cannot accede to his desires, he becomes furious, he thunders, he threatens, and talks of our affairs, making a terrible commotion so that all Canada is beset with rumours; that makes us give in to everything to avoid scandal … He is capable of anything when one resists him no matter how just the cause.”60 The Annales highlight the nuns’ desire to avoid the scandal of a public dispute and their compassion for the bishop: “He came here to convey to us his sorrow with such touching language and mien that he dismayed us.”61 Perhaps even more important was reducing the friction with the Hôpital-Général, a community that they would have to live alongside long after Saint-Vallier’s death. The annalist generally minimizes the agency of the Hôpital-Général nuns and presents them as being manipulated by their founder. To signal reconciliation, mutual visits by members of both communities in 1712 are narrated. If the meeting was first “fairly cold because so much had taken place that pleased neither party,” it ended with a common meal and assurances that both sides only wanted union, peace, and mutual comprehension.62 duplessis takes women’s history public

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The one point on which the Hôtel-Dieu remained adamant – its refusal to accept the members professed into the rival community63 – echoes its reluctance to accept the new members recruited by Laval in 1671. Passing the spirit of the community from one generation to the next was the fundamental goal of the Annales. Being sure that novices absorb this spirit by controlling their initiation was crucial. Throughout the conflict with Saint-Vallier over the Hôpital-Général, union was thus the watchword at the Hôtel-Dieu: “During this storm, we were strongly united among ourselves.”64

Tension Points in the Manuscript These tensions left physical traces in the Annales. At about twenty points throughout the manuscript, strips of paper containing new wording in Duplessis’s handwriting have been pasted over the original text. They vary in size from a single word to a short paragraph. In most cases they are a line or two long. The paper of both the strips and the manuscript itself is so thick that the unaided eye cannot decipher this original text underneath. It is unlikely that they are merely corrections of errors of transcription or stylistic improvements. They almost always concern a sensitive issue: claims of martyrdom for some individual,65 the state of the colony, but especially relations with male civil and ecclesiastical superiors. Jamet did not discuss these corrections in his edition, but twice he cited what he calls the “first version” in notes,66 without, however, indicating their source. The longest variant that Jamet gave tempers the assessment of the governor Augustin de Saffray de Mézy, who was in Canada from 1663 to his death in 1665.67 Another one tempers criticism of Laval himself. The original text, concerning Laval’s decision to bring new recruits from France without consulting the community, stresses the scandal that sending the unwanted nuns back would provoke: “We thought we should not inflict this affront on his Lordship and wanted to avoid the stir that their return would have caused.”68 The revised text simply stresses obedience and attributes good intentions to the bishop: “We thought that we should submit without resistance to his Lordship who had only acted out of goodness.”69 Elsewhere we can only speculate on the criticism that might have been in the original text. For example, we read with new eyes the passage cited previously 168

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excusing the submission of Marie-Renée Boulic to Laval when we know that it is a correction: “this reverend mother and other superiors believed they should comply with the will of the lord bishops.”70 The revised text attributes a laudable spirit of obedience to Boulic, who shares blame with other superiors. But it leaves open the question of whether she and the other superiors should have been so submissive. The changes were likely made sometime before October 1731, when Bertrand de La Tour, the dean of the cathedral chapter and superior of the community, returned to France. When he left, he seems to have taken a copy of the annals as part of the documentation he had gathered for his projected biography of Laval, which would only appear in print in 1761. The municipal library of Montauban, which holds his collection of books and manuscripts, owns this copy of the Annales. It has similar strips of paper bearing the same corrections as found in the Hôtel-Dieu manuscript.71 The Montauban copy itself is not in Duplessis’s hand, but she herself wrote out the corrections pasted into the copy. La Tour arrived in Canada in September 1729, with the newly appointed coadjutor bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet. In March 1730, Dosquet appointed La Tour superior of the Hôtel-Dieu and of the other two women’s communities. Duplessis’s initial impression of the new bishop and his dean was not positive. In October 1730, she wrote Hecquet, “He [Dosquet] has a grand vicar aged twenty-eight to whom he refers all the internal administration of the diocese; however well-intentioned they may be, since they have just arrived … they do not acquaint themselves with former practices but … profess to establish much wiser rules.”72 Conflict marked La Tour’s stay as both dean and superior, and he returned to France after only two years. Another circumstance suggests that the changes could well have been made during the stay of La Tour in Quebec. After Saint-Vallier’s death in late 1727, in the absence of a resident bishop, the cathedral chapter claimed the right to appoint confessors to the women’s communities. Duplessis reported in 1729 that this caused turmoil at the Hôtel-Dieu, where the nuns preferred their Jesuit confessor to the young Canadian one the chapter imposed on them.73 The conflict at the Ursulines was much graver; there, as Duplessis noted, the chapter deprived the leaders of the monastery of communion and confession. When Bishop Dosquet arrived, he put an end to these duplessis takes women’s history public

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disputes, but he also required the Ursulines to delete a section from their annals that narrated the conflict with the cathedral chapter.74 Since the Hôtel-Dieu’s annals stop around 1716 they do not treat this episode. But in the same spirit of reconciliation that guided the Ursulines’ revisions, it could well be that Duplessis found it wise, especially if she knew La Tour would be taking a copy back to France, to revise some earlier judgments. He was as ferocious a denouncer of Jansenists as Duplessis’s brother, which might have eventually softened her toward him.

Publication: A New Readership and the Eye of the Censors The Hôtel-Dieu copy of the Annales is conceived as a deluxe manuscript-book, a handsome folio to be preserved in the monastery archives and read publicly at communal events. Although such convent chronicles were normally meant to stay within the cloister, in this case, the nuns shared theirs with outsiders. In a previously cited letter to Duplessis, the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Chardon stated how much he had been edified by reading them. Another undated letter from a Jesuit, written to Duplessis before the centenary of the house, suggests that the Annales were lent out to friends of the community: “I have kept your work for almost a month now. It is time to make restitution and to thank you for the pleasure that you have given me in passing it to me a second time. I read it completely, from one end to the other, and even with eagerness.”75 However, the fact that the Annales appeared in print in 1751 is exceptional. The publication of biographies of foundresses and saintly nuns, such as the 1671 life of Catherine de Saint-Augustine by Paul Ragueneau, was common in the seventeenth century, although it had become rarer by the eighteenth. Less common, but still frequent, were spiritual writings by nuns, such as the Retraites of Marie de l’Incarnation, published by her son Claude Martin in 1682. A late 1751 letter – written in any case before the printed version arrived in Quebec – shows that the publication was part of the community’s campaign to win support in France. “Because we need protection, without relying too much on secular arm, we have written to the duc de Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon whose ancestors 170

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founded this hospital. Monsieur de La Tour, former dean of the chapter of this cathedral and presently pastor at Montaubon, out of esteem for this house, has had its annals published; he promises them to us for next year; he has dedicated them to the duc de Richelieu, who accepted them with affection.”76 When the printed copies arrived in Quebec, Duplessis would have learned that Richelieu must not have accepted the dedication, since the Annales bear instead a sort of default dedication to the current bishop of Quebec, signed by the community, but almost certainly written by La Tour, according to Jamet.77 La Tour was working at this time on his biography of Canada’s first bishop. In a 1750 letter to the Hôpital-Général, he promised, “Next year you will see two works that I am having published: the first volume of the life of Monsieur de Laval and the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.”78 Much of La Tour’s editing involved cuts, and they were made directly on the manuscript held in Montauban. Honorific titles were shortened, doublets eliminated, and whole paragraphs left out. He obviously found Duplessis’s style wordy. Yet La Tour’s transformation of the text was not limited to simply updating the style and making abridgements. He was attempting, however timidly, to move the book out of convent literature and into more mainstream accounts of Canada. The nuns had recorded the important facts of the community’s spiritual, political, and financial heritage for their internal use. La Tour sought to open the book to outsiders in France. He rewrote the first sentences of the narrative to reflect the shift from the hospital’s initial mission of nursing ill Indigenous patients to serving the French settlers and soldiers. Duplessis had given priority to service to the Indigenous: “For several years a hospital had been desired in Canada, not only for the relief of the few French people living there but much more for the relief of the savages, who were subject to severe illnesses.”79 La Tour’s revision presented the hospital as a central public institution of the colony and added an allusion to the illnesses suffered by Europeans during the Atlantic crossing: “One of the great desires of the French colony was the establishment of a hospital in Canada. Men transplanted into a very bitter climate, after a long and perilous navigation, were exposed to severe and frequent illnesses.”80 La Tour also struck passages that made the colony appear too precarious. A sentence at the end of the foreword citing “the complaints of those who did not like Canada and often made representations to duplessis takes women’s history public

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him [Louis XIV] about the expenses he incurred there without any compensating profits” disappeared, as did a whole paragraph from the entry for the year 1646 describing the nuns’ continued stay in Canada as “uncertain.”81 In other cases, La Tour excised material that might have served as useful warnings to the nuns, but was not of interest to general readers. For example, he eliminated several paragraphs describing fires that had been narrowly avoided in the period 1712–15.82 Duplessis had included a long passage on the esteem generated in France, the Caribbean colonies, and even in England by the artificial flowers the nuns skillfully manufactured. La Tour reproduced this bragging, but dropped Duplessis’s concluding exhortation to her community not to forsake such a profitable enterprise.83 More importantly, La Tour had to respond to a growing unease, even among many believers, about claims of visions and divine revelations. He eliminated, for example, a prophecy made by Paul Dupuy that the nuns would someday own the Ile-aux-oies.84 He left out a long paragraph that described a vision by a person who saw Catherine de Saint-Augustin received in heaven as a saint in glory by the Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf and Saint Augustine.85 In fact, a 1751 letter to the director of the book trade Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes shows that publication was delayed because one censor believed that La Tour’s cuts were not extensive enough.86 As director, Malesherbes oversaw the censorship process and held ultimate responsibility for granting permission for books to be printed. On 20 August 1751, one of his censors, François Greinoz, wrote him that the wife of the Montauban printer Légier had visited him and requested that he send Malesherbes a report so that an authorization to publish could be issued. Greinoz had previously reported to Maboul that cuts were needed: “I found in it some miracles worked by means of, or in virtue of, certain trifling devotional practices and several visions and apparitions that it seems to me should be cut from the book to authorize its printing.” However, in the meantime, a second censor, Louis de Cahusac, had given a favourable report: “This manuscript has been revisited by Monsieur Cahusac who approved it. I do not believe its publication should be deferred longer. I agree to it from my side and will give my official approbation, if you think that is necessary.” Cahusac is better known 172

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as the author of opera libretti for Jean-Philippe Rameau than for theological knowledge, but he had been born in Montauban and had roots there, and may have been given La Tour’s manuscript to counter Greimoz’s resistance. Under those circumstances, and since in Greinoz’s eyes the book was perfectly orthodox, Greimoz did not want to hold up publication: “I had only asked Monsieur Maboul to have something cut from the book to make it more perfect, because in itself and fundamentally this history is edifying and only radiates piety and sound behaviour. I gave this same assessment of Monsieur Gibert, who spoke to me about the manuscript.”87 In all, three censors, Greinoz, Cahusac, and Joseph-Baltasar Gibert, had been involved, and the official authorization would only be forthcoming on 8 November, almost three months after Greimoz’s letter. The text of the permission was included in the book, but not Cahusac’s approbation, as was sometimes the case when censors did not want to take public responsibility. Perhaps as a concession to Greinoz, tucked away in the introductory material of the book is a short notice to the effect that most of the miracles and visions it contains also appear in Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin. The implication is that such miracles had been approved earlier by the approbators of that work. However, the 1751 edition of the Annales contains many miracles not found in Catherine’s biography. For example, some of Mme d’Ailleboust’s visions are so extravagant that the Benedictine Jamet called them of “questionable authenticity” in his 1939 edition.88 Likewise, some reported miracles, such as the Jesuit François Crespieul finding his lost portable chapel and mass kit after invoking Catherine de Saint-Augustin,89 are telling examples of the trivial devotional practices that Greinoz had objected to. As François Moureau points out, such skittishness among censors reflected not just a growing squeamishness about miracles and visions among believers; it also showed a fear of giving Protestants and skeptics ammunition against religion. Moureau cites the case just one year later of a censor refusing to approve a perfectly orthodox pastoral letter by the archbishop of Vienna because it praised the cult of images and confidence in indulgences to the point of “superstition and extravagance.” What inspired devotion in Austria could become a source of scandal in France!90 duplessis takes women’s history public

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7.2 This copy of the printed Annales bears Duplessis’s handwritten corrections and according to the note “Ch. Supre” seems to have been kept in the room of the mother superior. The title page of some printed copies adds that the book was sold in Paris by the printer Jean-ClaudeBaptiste Hérissant, Rue Notre-Dame, aux trois vertus.

Reception with Reservations Duplessis had reservations about her book as published. She was proud of how much history of the colony she had included, but could only be dismayed by the carelessness with which the book was printed and proofread. “The Reverend Father La Tour, dean of Montauban, who was formerly vicar general in Canada, has had our annals published under the title Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec,” she wrote Hecquet. “I think you will not read them without pleasure and without being edified, although there are many printing errors. Many events concerning the founding of this country are narrated in it.”91 Indeed, proper names were frequently garbled, more likely by the printer than by the dean of Montauban himself. It is hardly likely that La Tour, who was writing a biography of Canada’s first bishop, would have changed Monseigneur de Laval to Madame Laval,92 giving the bishop a wife! The name of Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust is rendered “a barbarous name of Boulogne,” and she is referred to later as “Monsieur.”93 Any pleasure or edification Hecquet might have had in reading Duplessis’s book would also have been muted by the anti-Jansenism that pervades it. The Hôtel-Dieu holds a copy that Duplessis corrected using much the same technique she had used on the two manuscripts of the Annales: thin bands of paper have been pasted over the printed text on which the corrections are written (although some corrections in ink are made directly on the printed page).94 Most simply restore the proper spellings of names. However, Duplessis also remained sensitive to gender issues. On at least one occasion she softens a criticism of Laval that La Tour had slipped in. Describing Boulic’s willingness to sacrifice the interests of the community, Duplessis’s original text had cited Boulic’s submission to the wishes of Laval. La Tour, on the other hand, had attributed to Boulic a criticism of the bishop in the Montauban printed version: “she submitted without a rejoinder, although that did not always appear to her to be just.”95 Duplessis restored the original wording to “although that did not always appear to her to be required,”96 so that the mother superior did not appear to be accusing the bishop of injustice. The book does not seem to have attracted much attention in French publications. It was announced in the August 1752 issue of duplessis takes women’s history public

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the Journal des savants, but without any commentary.97 Even journals aligned with the Catholic establishment appear to have ignored it. It is not mentioned in the Journal de Trévoux of the Jesuits, who are given much praise in Duplessis’s book. However, in April 1755, AnneGabriel de Meusnier de Querlon’s Affiches de province reviewed it in the category of French literature. The review begins by recounting the hospital’s founding, stressing the strong financial contribution of the duchesse d’Aiguillon and the support of royal administrators in Canada. The review continues, “One might consider it a sort of necrology of the house.” But the review then rejects this view, exclaiming, “How many curious, instructive, and even amusing details are found in it!” and proceeds to give examples: the reaction of the Indigenous natives to these virgin women; the 1663 earthquake; the Walker expedition. The review concludes with Marie-André’s description of the so-called hospital rock on the Ile-aux-Oies where birds wounded by hunters found refuge and healing.98 Two further mentions of the book can be traced back to this review. Pierre Rousseau, who was the Parisian literary correspondent of the elector palatine Charles Theodore of Mannheim, summarized it in his private letters on affairs in France for his patron. Rousseau managed to garble several points. For example, in his version, “having been obliged to land at New Orleans, these courageous women went in a small boat to their destined place,” confusing the town in Louisiana with the Ile d’Orléans. However, he added favourable judgments not found in Meusnier de Quélon’s review, although one wonders if Rousseau had really consulted the book itself. “A work of this kind seems to announce great dryness. The author has found the secret of making it interesting without betraying its subject … the style is simple; it is the eloquence of the heart, always the best.”99 Eight years later, Jean-Louis Alléon-Dulac included the passage on the hospital rock that Rousseau did not quote in his Mélanges d’histoire naturelle. He cited the Affiche review as his source.100 Rousseau had stressed the religious commitment of the nuns to the elector his patron, who was close to the Jesuits. Alléon-Dulac found a curious detail of interest to the scientific community, an indication of the breadth of subjects Duplessis managed to include in her book.

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Conclusion The Annales are the first text written by a Canadian woman published during her lifetime. When Claude Martin published his mother’s letters in 1681, he divided the volume into spiritual and historical sections, even though Marie de l’Incarnation never thought of herself as an historian. The annalist of the Hôtel-Dieu, on the other hand, explicitly wove the community’s life into the history of Canada. This is done more prominently than in the annals produced by other colonial communities, such as Marie Morin’s of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal. It is done so successfully, in fact, that early readers of the manuscript in Quebec judged Duplessis competent to write a history of the colony itself: “Her ease in composing and her penetrating understanding made her able to write the history of the foundation of Canada.”101 Although she certainly possessed the necessary vision of the sweep of the colony’s history, she seemed to have had neither the inclination nor perhaps the time to undertake an overview, such as the Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale that Bacqueville de La Potherie would publish in 1722 or the Histoire et description générale de la NouvelleFrance published by Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix in 1744. Her focus was too squarely on the hospital itself, and even with that commitment, she never attempted a continuation of her Annales. Her approach is certainly closer to Charlevoix’s. Both relied on previously written documents. In her case, they were largely internal ones, while the Jesuit cast his net wider to published accounts, official reports, and personal interviews. He attempted a critical analysis of his sources, except those from his own Jesuit order, because, like Duplessis, he wrote providentialist history.102 However, the publication of the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec in 1751 meant that, for the first time, history written by, about, and for women stood alongside eighteenth-century male-authored accounts of Canadian nuns such as Charlevoix’s 1724 Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation and François-Michel Ransonnet’s 1728 Vie de la Sœur Marguerite Bourgeoys. Neither priest had known his subject and both relied on previous compilations. The publication of Duplessis’s book resulted from a campaign for support that the nuns themselves orchestrated, a campaign to enlist the aid of contemporary representatives

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of the family of their foundress, the duchesse d’Aiguillon. In the conclusion we will see that forty years after Duplessis composed the book, and ten years after its publication, her campaign bore fruit. Ironically, the hoped-for aid would come not directly from the French court, but from the new colonial British masters.

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1750–55 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Aborted Expansion, Burnout, and the Encyclopédie Seven months after being re-elected superior in March 1744 for what would become a six-year stint in office, Marie-André confided her reluctance to take on this burden. She claimed to have no liking for it, and felt inadequate: “You have your sorrows and I mine, my dear friend. The one that weighs on me today is that I see myself placed back again in the office that I have already held and for which I have neither inclination nor talent.”1 In 1750, at the end of these two three-year terms, she aspired to relief: “I am at last released from the office of mother superior, and I delight in the peace that my vocation as a hospital nun can offer because our position, particularly in this country where nothing is well-ordered, is always a bit agitated. But since the order established by God is found in this agitation … I attempt to not let it harm my peace, which seems to me to be the greatest good that we can possess in this world where this peace is never perfect, nonetheless.”2 Even though she had fallen back into the secondary position of assistant superior and secretary, with Marie-Catherine Tibierge returning as official head of the community, Duplessis would experience more agitation than peace during the next six years. The War of Austrian Succession might have ended, but Canada was on a war footing. Marie-André’s administrative talents and connections kept her in a guiding role, even though she would not be re-elected superior until March 1756.

Her second term in the 1740s had been more trying than her first in the 1730s. The last ten years would be even more so, not just because of the outbreak of hostilities in 1754, but because she increasingly experienced Canada as a site of frustration, where nothing worked as it should, and where disorder, both administrative and moral, was on the rise. As she had put it to Marie-Catherine as early as 1734, Canada was a land of “crosses and suffering.”

A Land of “Crosses and Suffering”?3 Her ambivalence toward Canada must have originated in her immigrant parents. In the 1711 “Histoire de Ruma,” she noted that they had taken care to give Geneviève a better education with more proper manners than was commonly available in this “barbarous land.”4 In November 1751, she complained to Marie-Catherine about the training of her niece: “Canadian upbringing does not cultivate enough her good qualities.”5 She had left France in 1701 for Quebec with “a reluctance … to leave her country whose attractive qualities she prized more than her sister.” 6 In October 1729, she compared herself to Geneviève: “My sister who is Canadian by birth is completely French by inclination. She often launches into invectives against her native land. She thinks she has the right to criticize its weak points and says things that I would blame myself for, if I happened to say them.”7 Her judgments on Canadian economic prospects were consistently reserved. For example, when she reported in 1744 that that diamonds had supposedly been discovered in Canada, she compared them to all Canadian productions: “Those diamonds cut glass, but like all Canada’s products do not have great soundness; they only cut one or two times, and then they become dull. That could come from the hard frosts of this climate that ruin everything.”8 The climate was also to blame for problems in exploiting a potential silver mine: “Ventures in Canada commonly have little success. The seasons are too short, so that the work of a whole year must be done in four or five months. The freezes upset all preparatory measures, so that one is always beginning anew. That wears down everyone who is involved.”9 Her equally pessimistic comments in 1741 on the iron production at Trois-Rivières pick up on this theme of expenses caused by the climate and a disheartened workforce: “There is much misapprehension 180

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between the stockholders and the workers. All is absorbed by the great expenses. In this land, work is only done at great cost. That is what causes ventures to fail in Canada. Other mines are not even spoken of; one loses heart to discover any. This colony will never be rich.”10 As brutal as this judgment may be, it is based on her assessment of Canadian realities, and shares none of the moralism of Hecquet, who, when told of potential silver mines, opined in 1740, “May God … maintain Canada in its sterility and poverty lest it lose a grain of the love it owes God alone.”11 The Canadian economy, in fact, was improving substantially during this period. Although the promise of the diamond and silver mines was illusory, the Saint-Maurice ironworks and the royal shipyards were not failures. They stimulated activity, even if they were not as successful as Gilles Hocquart hoped. Duplessis was devoid of boosterism. She viewed the economy from the treadmill of supplying her hospital. War and preparations for war brought dramatic increases in royal expenditures to the colony, which generally raised its economy, but with steep price inflation. Military expenditures replaced the fur trade as the economic motor. The male civilian population was diverted from agriculture to war construction and militia service, which heightened food shortages. The hospital’s clients were those left behind by prosperity. Although the hospital functioned more and more as a military institution, the king did not invest in it as he did in fortifications, nor even adequately reimburse the expenses of ill troops. For Duplessis, on the moral level Canada was the mirror reflection of France with all its ills, instead of a purified, improved version as its idealistic founders had envisaged. One of the most striking formulations of this judgment is found in a 1753 letter. Except for religious dissidence, Canada suffered from all the ills of France: “I consider Canada the echo of France in terms of vice, self-interest, bad faith, and libertine conduct. Luxury, fine dining, and all of the devil’s pomp are on display here.”12 This attitude is present from her first surviving letter of 1718, and over the years she gave Hecquet many examples: calumny and backbiting are especially bad in Canada; French friendships are stronger (1729); everyone complains about the situation and no one seeks remedies (1730); sexual libertinage undermines attempts to convert the Indigenous population (1740); Canadians are not as 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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willing to do favours (1750). Her distress in the 1753 formulation was heightened by her frustrations with the intendant François Bigot’s administration and the permissiveness that flourished in his social circle. Geneviève, embittered by years of dealing with petty vendors in her role as business manager of the hospital, was even more forthright on the lack of morality in Canadian business practices. Several factors temper this negative assessment of Canada. In every case, such comments are in letters to correspondents in France with whom she hopes to reaffirm her bonds. Geneviève gave a striking formulation to this topos in a letter to correspondents in France: “The only compensations that we find in this barbarous land are the few connections we have in France whose pleasures we tasted during our short stay there.”13 Disparaging comments about what Canada has to offer were often simply excuses for not being able to send more elaborate gifts of local products. Like her religiously oriented correspondents in France, Marie-André felt increasingly alienated from French society, seen as gone amiss. The letters of the Jansenist Marie-Catherine and her Jesuit brother contain even stronger condemnations of ambient corruption and godlessness in France. However, unlike her two Canadian brothers – the Jesuit François-Xavier, who chose a preaching career in France, and the soldier Charles-Denis, who refused to return to Canada after going to Paris in the mid-1750s – Marie-André was bound by her vows to Quebec. This Parisian may have always seen herself more as living in Canada than as a Canadian, but she worked her French ties relentlessly to advance the interests of a central Canadian institution. She was fully committed to this “land of crosses and suffering.” Three issues would test her during her last decade. First, the increasingly bitter dispute with the colony’s administrators, especially François Bigot, over funding daily operations that had begun in the mid-1740s continued; the disputes over funding in the early 1750s were overshadowed by the devastating food shortages during the last years of the war. Second, this ongoing conflict was the backdrop for disputes over two issues that involved major capital investments: who would pay for expanding the hospital’s physical plant to serve military patients and then for rebuilding it after the fire of 1755? Geneviève was Marie-André’s partner, when not the lead player, in these quarrels. Finally, family problems strained Marie-André’s resilience: the 182

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death of Geneviève in 1756, her Jesuit brother’s declining health, and her younger brother’s profligacy.

Hospital Expansion and a Pyrrhic Victory Pehr Kalm did not comment on the need for hospital expansion although the nuns and the government authorities both agreed on the issue since at least the early 1740s. In 1742, Duplessis wrote the pharmacist Féret in Dieppe, “our hospital [is] always more than full, that is to say, there are more patients than beds.”14 In September of that year, the newly arrived Bishop Pontbriand, after his first episcopal visitation, wrote Maurepas citing the need for a new ward.15 The next year the bishop noted that the hospital was overflowing with patients from the Rubis:16 “We have them all the way up to our attics.”17 The situation was even worse in 1750: “The king has sent 800 soldiers to Canada of whom two-thirds arrived sick, and although the intendant has rented houses to transform into hospitals, ours cannot hold them all; we had the largest share, and we fill our wards with them along with all the out-buildings and even the attics. This gives us much work and weariness, and to top it off, a cold has attacked us all at the same time so that twenty nuns are in the infirmary beds and the ones left to serve them, the wards, and the routine chores are not much better off. We have great difficulty finding two nuns each night able to serve as watch.”18 The intendant’s and governor-general’s annual letters to Maurepas in the late 1740s show that they had been actively investigating various schemes to pay for expansion. Hocquart seems to have revived his proposals, dating to the early 1730s, for appointing lay administrators for the hospital.19 Combining the funds of the hospital and the community was suggested, but rejected. Another proposal, also deemed ill-advised, was to combine the Hôtel-Dieu with the Hôpital-Général.20 With these avenues closed off, the civil authorities encouraged the nuns to borrow to pay for the expansion. In 1750, the civil authorities took action. A plan for enlarging the hospital by adding a ward for soldiers had been drawn up the previous year because the increase in the number of soldiers did not leave enough room for the civilian poor. The intendant and the governor-general asked the minister to issue orders to the nuns to 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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make the expansion. Direct orders were necessary, the two officials said, because the nuns were only concerned “with increasing the holdings of their community.”21 Duplessis, of course, saw matters differently in her description of the crisis to Hecquet in 1750: “These multitudes of patients who arrive often and for whom the king gives only six sous a day while we spend much more; in the last ten years that has caused us to go fifteen thousand francs into debt despite the representations that we do not fail to make, but which go unheard by those who should heed them. On the contrary, so as not to give us any relief, they say that we are extremely rich and that we all conspire together not to say where our money is hidden. God has reserved us for an exceedingly callous age.”22 To her mind, Bigot was merely renewing charges that his predecessor Claude-Thomas Dupuy had made in 1727, to the effect that the nuns thought only of enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and their employees.23 During the 1740s, she had been pressing the bishop to support expansion, while providing financial data about the hospital’s precarious state. Pontbriand generally seconded her efforts. In 1742, he asked Maurepas for help for the hospital in noting the need for a new ward, and in 1743, he declared that he did not believe the nuns could finance it themselves.24 In 1747, he reported that the hospital was much over capacity and that while expenses had tripled, revenues had remained the same.25 Duplessis reiterated her horror of borrowing in a summer 1748 letter to the bishop. While the topic was the short-term borrowing that the hospital had been forced into since 1740 to meet operating expenses, her words would apply as well to borrowing to meet construction costs. She was skeptical of an argument she often heard: “To encourage us to borrow, these gentlemen assure us that the king will never let down this hospital.”26 Was the hospital really too important to the king for him to allow it to fail by not covering its debts? It was a risk she did not intend to take. Even though her term as superior had ended in March 1750, that fall she organized a counterattack. On 10 October, the advisory council signed a memo of protest. Besides the standard argument that the hospital’s revenues could not support additional expense, the council rejected the suggestion to sell the hospital garden because it was already too small, and claimed that replacing the hospital bursar 184

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with lay administrators would result in expenses a third higher. They sought support in France. Prior contacts with Bertrand de La Tour resulted in the annals’ publication in 1751. Just as in 1726, a letter-writing campaign to patrons in France was launched. Maurepas had been ousted in 1749 by a palace coup engineered by the duc de Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, so a letter was written to the duke. Geneviève indicated that he had agreed to accept the dedication of the annals, adding highly placed patronage to the general publicity it was hoped that the printed book would bring.27 Marie-André wrote the dowager duchesse d’Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, on 20 October: “A short letter of recommendation to our governor and intendant for our house proving that you have the goodness to protect it … would inspire them to treat us with more accommodation.” Forcing the community to spend the endowment given it by the first duchesse d’Aiguillon, she said, would break the foundation contract. “We beg you, Madame, not to allow this expansion to absorb our endowment. If this ward is erected, it must be built, furnished, and endowed for those who will be treated in it.”28 In other words, the king should pay for his soldiers. The Duplessis sisters, in fact, were sure that Bigot had been sending negative reports about the hospital, and drafts of 1752 memos to Maurepas’s successor Antoine-Louis Rouillé show them trying to counter these reports and justify bypassing him. On this last score they shifted the blame to Bigot: “We would have indeed wished to have profited from a moment’s presence of Monsieur the Governor or Monsieur the Intendant in order to communicate to them what we have the honour to send you concerning this hospital, but the multitude of their tasks makes them unavailable to our invitations.” Instead of dealing face to face with them, Bigot sent messengers. The nuns began this draft by noting that the hospital seemed to have lost the confidence of the navy office, which they attribute squarely to “ill-founded prejudices” which “have lost us the favour of Monsieur the Intendant, who despite his benevolent attitude, has taken no interest in this hospital.”29 They ran their drafts past a sympathetic military engineer, Louis Franquet, who had visited the Quebec region in 1752–53 to inspect fortifications and who had furnished plans for siting the projected hospital expansion. He suggested that they soften 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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some of the wording about the intendant since their missives would be sent in any case by the minister to Bigot for his comments.30 By the next year, it was clear that Duplessis had won on one point: the community would not be required to go into debt for any expansion. However, Duplessis’s victory came with a cost. On 8 June 1753, Rouillé wrote them coldly: “I found rather extraordinary your refusal … to contribute to the expenses of building the new ward that it is necessary to erect in your hospital for patients on the pretext that the funds of the hospital are separate from those of the community of nuns.”31 He made short shrift of the accusation against Bigot and Duquesne and stressed the nuns’ failure to cooperate: “No one has tried to give me impressions against your community … Messieurs Duquesne and Bigot have not indicated anything to me that does not announce a predisposition favourable to your community, and you will always find in both the ready aid you will need, when your community lends itself for its part to the arrangements that are necessary for the good of the king’s service, with the zeal it has always shown and that they have not failed to acquaint me with.”32 He noted rather pointedly that requests should be routed through the intendant and governor-general rather than sent to him directly.33 The minister thus resoundingly rejected their claims, their accusations against Bigot, and their attempts to bypass the intendant. The nuns would not be forced to borrow or expend the community’s funds, but no royal subsidy was forthcoming either, and thus no expansion was possible. The Duplessis sisters might have won a battle, but had they lost the war? Bigot was self-serving and intent on profiting from his tour of duty in Canada, but he was also efficient.34 He had little patience for the Duplessis sisters’ insistence that the hospital be expanded only on terms they judged most favourable for their institution, nor for their steady stream of requests for exemptions and favours. Sensing that they would throw up delay after delay, he favoured other institutions that were more compliant. Geneviève complained in an October 1751 letter to the former governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière that Bigot gave preference to the Hôpital-Général: “His lordship the intendant does not refuse these ladies anything, which puts them in a position to be more obliging than us.”35 She reported the next year that he 186

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reimbursed that community at a higher rate for treating soldiers than her own.36 Jan Noel attributes the authorities’ favouring the Hôpital-Général to its nuns’ mastery of the politics of clientage.37 The fact that its nuns were more willing to cooperate with government initiatives was probably as important a factor. Bigot could also move expeditiously. When it became clear in 1755–56 that the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal needed expansion because of the war, Pontbriand arranged for Bigot to build two wards cheaply in wood instead of stone in that hospital’s gardens; they were called the royal wards because they were destined to serve the troops.38 The Montreal nuns had reservations about the enterprise, but they lacked the united leadership the Duplessis sisters gave the Quebec hospital. According to their chronicler, “This proposal much alarmed some members who foresaw at that very moment the crosses that it would create in the future. But nonetheless, we had to comply.”39 It was inevitable that Bigot would come into conflict with Geneviève, who saw her life’s mission as protecting the interests of the poor. He was only too happy to use the excuse of the nuns’ refusal to invest. He might have had less leverage with the minister if the nuns had been seen in Versailles as more cooperative. Had they taken the risk to expand, and even to borrow, the Duplessis sisters might have found more sympathy in the 1750s, both for adequately supplying the hospital and for its rebuilding in 1755. Were the daughters of Georges Regnard Duplessis overly cautious? According to François Rousseau, in the years between 1730 and 1755, the community (as opposed to the hospital) operated with revenue averaging 27,000 livres each year and mostly matched expenses.40 In September 1739, the chapter had agreed to borrow 4,000 livres to rebuild the kitchens and extend that wing of the monastery 60 feet. In 1755, after fire destroyed the hospital and monastery, the nuns agreed to borrow. It was initially calculated that they would need loans of between 20,000 and 25,000 livres, although the final debt turned out to be closer to 100,000 livres!41 The 1739 loan was taken out before the hospital began experiencing operating shortfalls; in the second case, the community was faced with a life and death situation. Not to borrow in 1755 to rebuild would have meant its extinction. The Duplessis sisters had overplayed their hand. This was the opinion of Pierre de la Rue, the abbé de l’Isle-Dieu, Bishop 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Pontbriand’s savvy and sympathetic liaison with the ministry at Versailles. La Rue was Pontbriand’s vicar general in France, and he reported to the bishop that the officials at the court thought the nuns had “given into fear too easily and too strongly.” La Rue never mentioned that the issue of borrowing had come up, although the ministry did want the nuns to contribute what they could afford to the expansion, leaving it up to the bishop to determine if this was feasible. Moreover, La Rue maintained that the nuns undercut their case by importuning the minister with multiple petitions written directly, and especially by asking permission to acquire a new property at the same time they were claiming they had nothing to offer for expansion. This request gave rise to “all sorts of ideas and suspicions that they might be well-to-do.”42 La Rue surely directed part of his pique against women who showed too much independence; male officials, ecclesiastical and civil, believed that they should handle such issues themselves. Nonetheless, some of La Rue’s complaints seem well-founded, and the Duplessis sisters’ strategies failed to build support for the hospital with civil authorities in Quebec and in Versailles. Their father had likewise been admonished that his memoranda on the colonial economy were no longer welcome. Throughout the conflict, the authorities accused the nuns of trying to protect their own finances by refusing to combine the funds of the hospital and community. The Duplessis sisters cast themselves above all as defenders of the poor for whom the hospital had been founded, and objected to diverting their own funds or funds destined for the poor to the troops for whom the expansion was needed. However, there was an element of self-interest as well: families would be less willing to pay profession dowries if the money might go to fund the hospital rather than their daughters’ support.43 Offhand remarks by Geneviève also suggest that she would have preferred not having soldiers as patients at all. “Serving the troops is so disheartening that it is not in our interest to seek it out,” she confided to La Galissonière.44 Whether the Duplessis sisters realized it or not, their resistance to expansion was in part a reluctance to accept the mission shift from civilian-oriented service to the military role that the war effort imposed on them.

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Isolation and Geneviève’s Burnout The difficulty of financing day-to-day operations only increased. Geneviève found all manner of expedients, some new, some old, to make ends meet, most needing administrative approval from the intendant. Could the hospital be excused from maintaining its side of the Rue des Pauvres, along the north side of its property, since it had contributed to paving the street and had furnished part of the right of way? The hospital had sold some land years ago when it had little value; could the hospital be awarded the resale taxes now that the new owner was selling it? Could the hospital again share in the proceeds of fines and confiscations and be exempted from import duties? The old issue of the hospital keeping the clothes of soldiers who died there to pay for their funeral expenses resurfaced. And, of course, there were continuing complaints from butchers about the hospital’s practice of selling off supplies that it did not need. The Duplessis sisters saw these as small items that allowed the hospital to compensate for inadequate royal funding for His Majesty’s ill troops. The Duplessis sisters continued their strategy of seeking allies and intercessors. A subsequent letter to Franquet (probably sent in 1753) is in fact a list of seven talking points he could use in defending their cause. The sixth in particular illustrates the isolation they felt: if he has friends in the navy office “who are of a disposition to share with him his kindnesses for this house,” could Franquet put them in contact with the nuns so that they could better know what “what we might ask for or obtain?”45 They corresponded with the former governor-general La Galissonière. They professed to have disabused him of his prejudices against the hospital shortly before his departure in 1749 and counted him among their allies in France.46 The Duplessis sisters were aware of the collusion between Bigot and the personnel of the navy office. In 1751, François-Xavier had warned them, “the navy office appears inflexible, and I believe that you will still have many heavy crosses to bear … there is reason to believe that the officials of the bureau have an understanding with those who are the authors of your misfortunes.”47 What they failed to realize was how high the collusion went. Arnaud de Laporte, the senior official who oversaw correspondence from the colony reaching

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the minister, was a collaborator in the intendant’s enterprises.48 In 1752, Geneviève even complained in a draft of a letter to Laporte about Bigot: “We do not know why Monsieur the intendant has become so cold toward this house about which he cannot say a good word and for which he has not given the slightest benefit ... Permit, if you please, sir, that to unburden my heart, I tell you the extent to which even the advantages that we receive are accompanied by unpleasant aspects.”49 On the local front, they also cultivated allies. Marie-André sent Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial an enthusiastic letter of congratulations on 29 June 1755, a week after his arrival in Quebec as governor-general. She reminded him that he had once said that if he returned one day to Canada “our house would be his favourite.”50 She established good relations with Louis-Joseph de Montcalm upon his arrival in 1756 and asked him to write the duc de Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon on the hospital’s behalf.51 Once Montcalm became acclimated to Canada, the general led the charge in denouncing Bigot to the minister, which could only have pleased Duplessis. However, her most common dealings for daily business were with the intendant and the bishop, not the military chiefs of the colony. With the intendant Bigot, who had veto over most of their initiatives, hostile52 and the minister in Versailles ill-disposed, the two sisters felt blocked at both the local and metropolitan levels. They began to doubt even their friends. A 1756 letter from Franquet reassured them that, to his knowledge, Bishop Pontbriand had always supported them; Franquet closed by refusing to reply directly to insinuations that had been reported to them that even he was wavering in his support: “I am not replying to the suspicions that you have been given about my way of thinking about your interests.”53 Likewise, in 1752, their Jesuit brother had informed them that they had been deceived if they had been told that he had been receiving gifts to fund dowries, as if they questioned whether he was doing all he could to help.54 The burden of day-to-day purchasing, of hiring workers, and of producing detailed financial reports fell principally on Geneviève, who felt increasingly beleaguered, and her sharp temper surfaced. For example, in 1752, she had called a baker named Maurice, who had cancelled a promised sale of wheat to the hospital, “a scoundrel” (“un coquin”). He in turn, certain of Bigot’s protection, charged her 190

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with defamation. This would have cost the hospital 300 livres had not his suit been quashed.55 Maligned, attacked, and forced to deal with an unresponsive and dishonest intendant, there is a note of acute discouragement verging on burnout in a 1755 letter to Pontbriand after the fire: “I am reaching the beginning of my eternity which preoccupies me much more than the reestablishment of this house.”56 Discouragement, however, did not mean dereliction of duty. She refused Pontbriand’s offer to reduce her duties, if it meant combining the finances of the hospital and community,57 and she remained in office until her health failed the next spring.

Duplessis Enters the Encyclopédie: Lahontan, and the Wild Girl of Châlons In October 1753, Duplessis acknowledged receipt of a manuscript narration Hecquet had sent that spring, “the account that you sent me concerning the adventures of Mademoiselle Leblanc.” It was the draft of what was to become Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans when it was published in 1755. Duplessis agreed with Hecquet’s contention concerning the wild girl’s origin. “I believe like you, my dear friend, that she is an Eskimo.”58 Without her connection to Duplessis, Hecquet would likely never have written the Histoire or identified the girl as Inuit.59 Their correspondence provides definitive proof of Hecquet’s authorship, which has sometimes been attributed to the explorer and philosophe Charles-Marie de La Condamine. Although there is nothing overtly Jansenist about the book, Hecquet’s Jansenism also played a role in its creation. Marie-Angelique Leblanc, as the wild girl came to be known, had long been shedding her savage ways since her capture in 1731 and Hecquet’s encounter with her in November 1752. However, when the wild girl emerged from the woods near Châlons-en-Champagne in 1731, her exotic wildness fascinated the public. She was completely at home in the river water and caught fish and frogs that she ate raw along with nuts and berries; she clambered up trees with the agility of a squirrel. Enlarged fingers facilitated her tree-climbing. There was much speculation about her origins, some saying she was from Norway, others from the Caribbean. Accounts appeared in the Mercure 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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8.1 The title page of the first (1755) Paris edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage.

de France and other papers. Intellectuals used the case of the feral girl to advance their own theories of human nature, for example the Jansenist Louis Racine, the atheist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and the deist Voltaire. Leblanc was protected after her capture by local authorities, and then, as her case attracted more attention, by members of the highest aristocracy, including the king’s cousin Louis d’Orléans and the queen’s mother.60 Hecquet came in contact with Leblanc in 1752 in the monastery on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris of the hospital nuns of Saint-Marcel, who belonged to the same order of Augustine sisters as Duplessis. Marie-Angelique, however, was not there to become a hospitaller, but as a boarder who was recovering from an injury that she had received in the Royal Abbey of Sainte-Perrine in Chaillot, where she had been received as a postulant in January 1751. Her stay had been cut short by an accident caused by a falling window, and she moved in June of that year to the Rue Mouffetard, in hope of a recovery that would allow her return. Leblanc relied on benefactors for her support, and was in need of new ones, since her principal protector, the duc d’Orléans, had recently died. Hecquet lived nearby on the Rue Mouffetard, and the nuns of Saint-Marcel had Jansenist ties,61 which might explain why Hecquet frequented their monastery, where she encountered Leblanc. By taking an interest in Leblanc, she was imitating her aunt Michelle Fontaine, who had often taken in unfortunates she encountered on the streets of Paris. Hecquet was greatly impressed by Leblanc’s confidence in Providence and seems to have written up Leblanc’s story to help her find new protectors. In the first part of the Histoire, Hecquet dwells on the civilizing process that changed the wild girl into a devout woman who was eager to enter a convent; in the second part she discusses various hypotheses about Leblanc’s origins. Hecquet advances the view that Leblanc was an “Eskimo.” In support of that claim, she cites information about the Inuit peoples obtained from Duplessis. Hecquet’s deep interest in Canada’s Indigenous population was, in fact, one of the threads that held together her correspondence with Duplessis. The nun’s letters contain a number of substantial reports on them (1718, 1723, 1751), all reports that Hecquet solicited, and many shorter ones. The first letter from Marie-André that Hecquet preserved is only a long 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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8.2 This page from the 1761 Paris edition introduces Hecquet’s experiment with the dolls and miniature canoe that Duplessis had sent in 1751 and the extract of the accompanying letter that would form the basis of the article “Eskimaux” in the Encyclopédie.

fragment that describes Indigenous customs. Hecquet had requested this information, and Duplessis sent along a pair of moccasins. In 1751, Duplessis sent Hecquet not just one artifact, but a whole collection of dolls, each illustrating the garb, male and female, of many different nations. Two letters with extensive descriptions of each group accompanied the dolls. Hecquet used the dolls in a sort of experiment that she organized with Leblanc that confirmed her hypothesis that Leblanc was Inuit: “I had the box of savage dolls brought along. When it was opened, I took care to examine her reactions and what would strike her eyes first. Although several dolls were more pleasing and more embellished than those of the Eskimos, which hardly look human, she reached all of a sudden for the Eskimo woman, then took up the Eskimo man, and looked at them one after the other in silence, not like people to whom a new and astonishing thing has appeared, but like a thing they have already seen, without knowing where, and which they strive to recognize.”62 In a second step, Hecquet brought out a model bark canoe Duplessis had also sent. Leblanc said it was not like the ones she knew and proceeded to describe a kayak. “As this description of the canoe was completely consistent with the one Madame Duplessis gives me of the Eskimo canoes, of which Mademoiselle Leblanc surely had no knowledge, I did not doubt any longer that she was of this nation.”63 Sure of her identification, Hecquet included Duplessis’s description of the Inuit as an appendix to the Histoire for documentation, along with extracts from Louis-Armand de Lahontan’s Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale. First published in 1703, Lahontan’s three books (Les Nouveaux voyages, Les Mémoires, and La Suite des voyages) went through multiple editions. They are based on his experiences as a military officer and explorer in Canada and the upper country between 1683 and 1693. Embedded in his compendium of information about the land’s geography, history, flora, and fauna is his portrait of its Indigenous inhabitants as virtuous and noble, living in accord with nature and reason, un-degraded by the vices and inequality of Europe. He popularized the notion of the noble savage that Enlightenment writers would promote. In 1740, Duplessis and Hecquet had an exchange about Lahontan that can serve to situate their views on Indigenous peoples of New 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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France. That year Hecquet seems to have reported to Duplessis that she had read Lahontan to increase her knowledge of Canada and its inhabitants. The surviving draft of Hecquet’s letter from that year does not mention Lahontan, but does contain an idealized portrait of Indigenous Christians praying in front of relics in the Hôtel-Dieu chapel and being unconcerned about impressing other worshippers with their dress, as French worshippers would have been.64 However, Hecquet saw the simplicity of the first Christians where Lahontan saw natural equality, and Duplessis warned against any idealized portrait, either of the domiciled Christian Indigenous groups living in one of the seven mission villages or of those not yet converted: I am happy that the baron Lahontan has allowed you to familiarize yourself a bit with Canada. He tells the truth on several subjects and also lies by exaggerating too much about what he puts forward. Even the savages who are neighbours to our towns are as filthy and have kept all the customs of former times. They consider themselves to be above all other peoples and see the French as slaves of minor polite practices that social life imposes. They are dirty gentlemen, although among them there are some fervent Christians in the missions who are instructed, because most listen to the mysteries that are preached to them as if they were legends which make no impression on them. The only fruit that missionaries in some areas have is to baptize many children who die in infancy and to give to these barbarians a fine notion of our religion by the purity of their lives.65 Despite being a cloistered nun, Duplessis had multiple sources of information on the Indigenous: some were patients in the hospital or did work for it; her mother and brother Charles-Denis each owned one as a slave, and he served among them in the upper county; she was close to the missionaries who spent their lives among them. She never varied from her initial reaction, dating to her pre-convent days, that mixed a bit of admiration for the colourfulness that they could display and for their inventiveness with an almost physical revulsion for everything she found uncivilized about them, a revulsion 196

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that she overcame out of a sense of duty: “Before I became a nun, I was occasionally at their ceremonies. I had the advantage of being pleasing to some of those people. They came toward me to present their hands in a way to make me tremble, but I touched them without a fuss because one must not refuse them. They would take that for an insult.”66 She found most of them to be as impervious to adopting French customs as to accepting Christianity. For her, they embodied fully the term which was commonly applied to them in her day, “savage.”67 The fierce cruelty that “savage” suggests in today’s usage was certainly a component; she cited their blood feuds, torture of prisoners, and scalping practices. However, that was only one facet of what she saw as the wild, undisciplined nature of these peoples who resisted European civilization. Still, she dutifully reported on the exemplary converts among them, such as Kateri Tekakwitha, and noted on occasion the discovery of a new tribe in the far west that seemed more likely prospects for lasting conversion.68 When Hecquet requested accounts in 1723 about “the lifestyle and customs of our savages,” including information about “how they are dressed, how they marry and how they are buried,”69 Duplessis dutifully complied with reports which are at times almost ethnographic. Nonetheless, such accounts have a way of turning into a catalogue of reasons why their lifestyle was an obstacle to conversion: sexual and marriage practices, collective guilt to punish killings, shamans who communicate with the devil. She concludes one such section with “they have numerous other bad characteristics such as inconstancy and fickleness; they are perfidious and very superstitious.”70 The list was almost endless in her eyes. She had written off the Indigenous, and without the solicitations of Hecquet, she would not have not have reported so fully on them. Duplessis’s own reserved attitude reflected the fallback stance of the Jesuits on the missions once they realized that converts would not come easily: the personal sanctification of the missionaries due to the hardships they endured could compensate for the paucity of conversions.71 Ironically, Duplessis’s pessimism about solid conversions aligned with seventeenth-century Jansenist skepticism about the number of conversions the early Jesuits claimed in their missions.72 To a certain extent, she was also aligned with Lahontan. He included a section 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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entitled “Beliefs of the Savages and Obstacles to Their Conversion.”73 Like her, he noted that they “listen to all that the Jesuits preach to them without contradicting them.” But the anticlerical Lahontan adds, “It is enough for them to mock among themselves the sermons these fathers preach in church.”74 While Lahontan saw the indifference of most of the Indigenous to Christian claims and their rejection of the French lifestyle as proof that they were guided by natural reason, Duplessis only saw blindness to Christian truth caused by their immorality. She was as unable to understand their beliefs as she was to comprehend Jansenism. Instead of seeing that the Indigenous groups did not convert because they viewed Christianity as irrelevant to their lives, she blamed the bad example of the French. As she put it in her 1740 letter, “The libertine life-style and self-interest of the French undermine the faith in these lands.” Brandy sales and debauching Indigenous women were the problems, in her eyes. The Jansenist Hecquet, who had no direct experience of North America’s Indigenous peoples, was more optimistic on the possibility of conversions than Duplessis. Hecquet seems to have misread Duplessis’s letters just as she did Lahontan. In 1740, the Jansenist had imagined converts who had no thought of showing off their fine clothes in church. However, in 1723, Duplessis had already noted, after describing such finery, “All that finery has its beauty among them, and they are as vain about it as the French are about their rich clothes.”75 Hecquet’s obsession with the Indigenous and her wishful thinking about their conversion had roots in her Jansenism. Eighteenth-century Jansenist exegesis of biblical prophecy postulated that the apostasy which the Catholics of France displayed in complying with Unigenitus would be compensated for by the conversion of the Jews and other unbelievers. According to Jansenist theologian Jacques-Joseph Duguet and his disciple Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Ménilles d’Étemare, the conversion of the Jews would be followed by that of all nations, even those to whom the gospel had not previously been preached.76 Hence Hecquet’s intense interest in converts in the New World. Hecquet comes the closest to expressing this belief explicitly in her 1756 letter to Duplessis. There she inquired “[i]f our holy religion does not make some progress among these idolaters whom I love, because I hope that their near or distant conversion, which is nevertheless assured according to God’s word, will console our holy mother church for 198

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all the bad Christians who now afflict it?”77 Hecquet, Duplessis, and Lahontan could only see the Indigenous through European eyes. For Hecquet, they would rejuvenate a church fallen into apostasy; for Duplessis, they were unwashed, wild, and unamenable to Christianity; for Lahontan, they were proto-philosophes.

The Jansenist and the Nun Edited by Philosophes Just as publication of Duplessis’s Annales in 1751 had been arranged by Bertrand de La Tour, who edited the manuscript heavily, a man found a publisher for Hecquet’s account after editing it. We know that La Tour intervened chiefly to abridge Duplessis’s text since her manuscript survives; however, it is not possible to ascertain the extent of La Condamine’s changes. The mathematician and explorer of South America La Condamine had begun helping Leblanc as early as 1747. He only admitted to making slight changes involving Hecquet’s speculations on Leblanc’s origins. His intervention might have been more extensive. The Histoire could have painted Leblanc in such a way that her conversion to Christianity was accompanied by a great moral revolution, a miracle of transforming Jansenist efficacious grace. Instead, it stresses Leblanc’s positive characteristics from the beginning: her compassion for her companion’s suffering; her good humour, not to mention her trust in Providence that had won over Hecquet from the start. Any negative characteristics are attributed to the instinct of self-preservation. Quite early in the Histoire, Leblanc is presented as having “a very gay temperament and a character marked by gentleness and humanity that savage and ferocious ways, necessary for the preservation of life, had not completely erased.”78 There is no allusion to original sin such as is found in the Jansenist Louis Racine’s treatment of Leblanc.79 Even more telling might be the frequent remarks that attribute Leblanc’s actions to natural instincts. To be sure, this intervention of natural instincts is not incompatible with religion. In fact, when the notion is introduced, it is attributed to divine Providence: “Providence, which has supplied all creatures with all the natural instincts and characteristics for the conservation of their species, had given to her an unimaginable mobility of eyesight.”80 Nevertheless, this view of 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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instinct stems from a view of human nature that gives short shrift to the Jansenist belief that Adam’s sin left humans with an inclination toward evil. Natural instinct is seen as more reliable than reasoning. The word “instinct” does not appear to be in Hecquet’s vocabulary. It does not occur in any of her letters, her spiritual texts, or her autobiographic accounts that have survived. Tellingly, the word “instinct” has been added to the passage from Duplessis’s letter on the Inuits that is found in as an appendix in the Histoire, where Duplessis’s “modesty”81 is expanded to “instinct of modesty.”82 It is more plausible that La Condamine made this change than Hecquet. La Condamine was a philosophe, although he did not trumpet his stance as Voltaire did. He had little use for the Jansenists and ridiculed their miracles. It is unlikely that Hecquet would collaborate closely with him. He probably took the account she had written in 1753 and made changes, before finding a publisher in late 1754. He kept his distance from the book when it appeared in early 1755 and published disclaimers limiting his involvement. In them, he described her as a widow, even though her husband did not die until 1762, a sign that he did not know her well.83 Hecquet might well have kept her distance also. She does not seem to have sent Duplessis a copy of the book, as if the manuscript she had previously sent sufficed. In fall 1755, Duplessis reported to Hecquet having seen a copy, but it was a volume that someone had carried back from France and brought to her attention.84 Whatever the level of collaboration between Hecquet and La Condamine, it worked well for Leblanc. She found new benefactors, among them the queen, and managed to live independently in Paris until her death in 1775. There was a bonus for Duplessis as well. By including part of Duplessis’s letter in the Histoire, Hecquet gained entrance for her friend into that battle horse of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie. Louis de Jaucourt made Duplessis’s remarks the core of his article “Eskimaux” in volume five of the Encyclopédie that appeared in November 1755, giving her this credit, “Extract of a letter of Saint-Helen of 30 October 1751.”85 He minimized any positive descriptions of the Inuit people in the section of Duplessis’s letter that Hecquet had published. Thus Jaucourt’s article presents them in Duplessis’s words as “the savages among the savages” (“les sauvages des sauvages”), in keeping with Enlightenment opinion that placed 200

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the Inuit in an almost subhuman category.86 In closing his article, Jaucourt mentioned Lahontan’s writing on the Inuit and the Recueil de voyages au nord (1715), published by Jean-Frédéric Bernard, but warned that they only contained “fictions.” Duplessis is thus deemed a more reliable source. Hecquet had succeeded in writing a work that found a place both in convent hagiography collections and in the libraries of philosophes. She was primed to write it because of her correspondence with Duplessis, who probably never discovered she had entered the Encyclopédie. Marie-André would have been dismayed, as might Hecquet have been, had she learned. The Jesuits were widely seen by those in the know as having been instigators of the condemnation of the Encyclopédie in February 1752 by the king’s council that almost sunk the publishing enterprise, and the Jansenist periodical the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques joined in the attack that same month.87

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chapter

9

1755–58 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Fire, Family Crosses, and War The community was in the refectory at lunch on 7 June 1755 when a nun interrupted the meal with the cry of “Fire!” Duplessis was ordinarily a quick eater, and her custom, as she told Hecquet, was to embroider chalice covers while she waited for the others to finish. For the date of the fire, one is recorded with the title “To the consuming blaze” in her log. In less than two hours, the fire wreaked its destruction. The principal building was a square around a central courtyard, with the wards in the northern section and the church and monastery occupying the other three sides. There were also a number of outbuildings, a barn, an icehouse, a chicken house, etc. The hospital wards suffered the most damage, but all the buildings and their furnishings along with stockpiled supplies were unusable. The patients numbered probably in the twenties and were evacuated. The only direct fatality was a nun who became trapped when she returned to her cell. Many of the treasures in the church were saved, as was a substantial part of the archives,1 more perhaps than in previous fires in other Canadian convents. While much past correspondence was lost, François-Xavier’s letters to his sister dating back to 1716 were rescued. The nuns’ personal effects were lost, and the forty-five nuns, one novice, and two postulants were taken in by the Ursulines.2

Fires were a constant menace in Canada. The destruction of the intendant’s palace with its records in 1713 had been a reversal for Georges Duplessis. The Quebec Jesuits’ house had burned in 1640, the Ursulines’ in 1650 and 1686, the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal in 1695, 1721, and 1734, and the house of the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières in 1752. In the annals, Duplessis noted each time fires struck other communities and recounted the close calls her own had had. She attributed her house’s good fortune to the general protection of the Virgin and Saint Joseph and the special protection of Saint Thecla. Each 23 September, the community made a general communion and sang the hymn of the thanksgiving of the youths who escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.3 That day in September was the Feast of Saint Thecla, who, when thrown into flames, had not been touched. In addition, the community invoked her special protection each day, a daily reminder to be watchful. The fire that destroyed the Ursulines’ house of Trois-Rivières on 22 May 1752 was an important recent precedent. Besides their school, they hosted a small hospital with ten beds.4 The ten professed Ursulines and their two novices were put up temporarily in the nearby Recollet house during the eighteen months of reconstruction. Bishop Pontbriand had been in Montreal at the time of the fire; he stopped briefly to survey the damage during his return to Quebec, where he began immediately soliciting funds. The following May he moved to Trois-Rivières and supervised rebuilding during the six months before the nuns could return in November 1753. The bishop described his multiple roles to his brother in France: “For the last six months I have been in Three-Rivers, housed badly in the middle of fifty workers of every sort whom I guide, spur on, and pay … You ask where I find the money? I make the nuns borrow. All my household staff works. I make requests to the court to contribute. Two thousand livres of alms have been collected. I have become a bishop, a cabinet maker, a carpenter, a labourer, a carrier of bricks and pipes.”5 This intense personal involvement is a sign of his solicitude for religious communities and probably also reflects his judgment that the small Ursuline one was not up to managing the rebuilding on its own. After losing six members in a 1749–50 epidemic, the community

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had asked the colonial officials for permission to close the hospital, but Bigot had refused.6 Pontbriand mobilized three funding sources. He collected gifts from local and French donors. 7,000 livres were obtained, not directly from the court, but from the Commission des secours,7 a government body, which made grants to deserving convents, when it was not suppressing ones deemed unneeded.8 Finally, the bishop made the Ursulines borrow. When fire struck the Quebec Hôtel-Dieu, the Duplessis sisters already had a working relationship with Pontbriand. After SaintVallier, who favoured his Hôpital-Général’s foundation, and the fourteen-year interval following his death in 1727 when bishops were seldom in residence, Marie-André was relieved to be favourably impressed by the young bishop who arrived in 1741. A year later, she reported to Hecquet, “We have a prelate who has greatly lightened my burden by the way he deals with me and by the satisfaction that he seems to have had in examining the hospital accounts entrusted to us which he is quite satisfied with. I did not experience a similar gentleness during the oversight of the reverend grand vicars. May God be praised who wounds and heals.”9 A year after the fire, Duplessis expressed effusive gratitude for the way the bishop took an intimate role in rebuilding her hospital, as he had at Trois-Rivières: “Our worthy prelate has given us notable signs of his paternal benevolence, because he wishes to take this task greatly to heart. He has made the contracts with the workers and goes to see them daily to encourage them. He has made us take on large loans for this that greatly indebt us, but necessity forces us to take them on. His lordship further aids us greatly in this effort by using his good reputation so we do not have to make payments, and although this expenditure is not made at his expense, his protection is very advantageous to us, and we can never be grateful enough for the debt we have to him.”10

Rebuilding with an Imperious Bishop If Marie-André had not had an incapacitating skin rash in the summer following the fire, this version of the reconstruction that describes a smooth working relationship with Pontbriand might stand. The 19 September 1756 letter, however, was addressed to the bishop’s sisters, 204

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Visitation nuns in France, with the expectation that they would relay Duplessis’s gratitude to their brother. During a brief period around August 1755, while Marie-André was recuperating from a case of erysipelas that left her face red, Geneviève, who was much less diplomatic, took over correspondence duties. In the draft of one letter she wrote to an unnamed priest in France, she lays out a much more fraught relationship: “His lordship our bishop who, as you may think, has great authority over us and an innate impulsiveness with which is very difficult to deal, so much so that we hardly dare say a word to him. He wants us not to get involved in anything or to write and solicit our friends. He considers things like that as shows of independence. He has tired us out more since our fire with his projects and initiatives than the fire itself distressed us.”11 Even though this assessment was written at a moment of heightened tension between Geneviève and Pontbriand over her role as bursar, it shows the Duplessis sisters’ view of the underlying dynamics of power between them and the bishop. His micromanagement in Trois-Rivières was not just a reflection of his judgment that the small Ursuline community was not up to rebuilding on its own. Dealing with the Duplessis sisters, however, would be a different matter. Even though Marie-André was second-in-command as assistant and secretary at the time of the fire, and would not become mother superior until March 1756, she was at the centre of decision-making. Her experience and fiercely protective attitude would have to come to terms with the bishop’s will to exercise his authority to supervise all aspects of the affairs of women’s communities. Pontbriand was again in Montreal at the time of the fire. On 14 June, he sent the nuns a letter of condolence12 with a memorandum that presented them his detailed plan for securing suitable housing and restoring hospital services. Taking the long view, he did not envisage their rebuilding in less than two years. In the short term, staying through the winter with the Ursulines was impractical. He would move from his palace to the Seminary so that a portion of the community could be housed in his residence, where hospital wards could be opened. In the meantime, patients would be directed to the Hôpital-Général. The other part of the community could stay in a section of the Jesuit college. He seems to have thought through every detail; he contacted the intendant and gave the nuns permission to 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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visit the ruins of their monastery as often as needed. He ends his memorandum peremptorily: “I will arrive on 7 July in Quebec. I want to find the nuns in my palace.”13 The nuns, however, found a more satisfactory arrangement. Instead of dividing the community, on 28 June, all of it moved into a portion of the Jesuit college formerly occupied by boarding students, where they welcomed patients into two wards by 16 July. That summer the bishop also had a thirteen-point plan for financial operations that the Duplessis sisters certainly found inopportune, although what exactly motivated him is not known.14 His proposal was presented as a stopgap, “for the time that the nuns stay with the Jesuit fathers.” He proposed giving many of the purchasing duties of the hospital bursar to other convent officers, including the community’s bursar. This last provision might simply have been made in hopes of avoiding Geneviève’s frequent conflicts with suppliers. She, in effect, would manage income while others would deal with expenses. Geneviève, certainly in conjunction with her sister, prepared a response. As they had done in the past, they consulted sympathetic outside advisors. Geneviève complained to Jean-Victor Varin de La Marre, the subdelegate of the intendant, about the bishop’s imperious character: “We fear all of his hasty temper; he does not want to listen to any expression of opinion.”15 She requested that Varin de La Marre intervene with Governor-General Vaudreuil and even Bigot, if necessary. The Duplessis sisters’ official response appeals to general principles instead of addressing Pontbriand’s proposals dealing with purchasing. The overall effect of the bishop’s plan, Geneviève maintained, would have been a return to the situation before 1664 when the hospital and community’s finances had been united. Worse, “It is clear that his lordship wants to have the nuns live off the revenues of the hospital.”16 They had objected to the community financing hospital expansion a few years earlier, citing the separation of the two institutions’ finances; now they defended the same principle by insisting that the hospital should not fund the community. Was the bishop’s plan simply a way of dealing with the immediate crisis? Was he using the crisis to introduce changes he had long wanted? Or was he merely dealing with a personnel issue? His plan was never implemented, although the records do not say why. François 206

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Rousseau is surely right to cite this incident to illustrate “the degree of liberty and independence that for a long while characterized the community.”17 It also illustrates the close oversight bishops could devote to the community’s affairs. The bishop objected to the nuns soliciting aid from their supporters in France. However, among Geneviève’s drafts is one written on 12 August to the duchesse d’Aiguillon asking for her protection.18 The bishop would have certainly objected to the request in another draft that its recipient lobby the navy office “before his lordship the bishop, Messieurs the general and the intendant join together to present their project and the views that they might had for this enterprise.”19 Even though the Duplessis sisters had been warned in the past about appealing over the heads of the colony’s leaders, or in this case behind their backs, the sisters seemed determined to do so. They had their own views and wanted them heard before those of the three officials reached the ministry. Their hope was that a promise of reconstruction aid would be sent that fall through Louisbourg so that it would reach Quebec in time to finance work in the spring. They also suggested that someone sympathetic to their needs, such as the engineer Louis Franquet, be placed in charge of the project. Another series of drafts reflects a campaign that probably eventually had Pontbriand’s blessing to mobilize donors in France. Shortly after the disaster, Marie-André had composed a narration that served as the “official” account of the fire.20 The monastery archives contain drafts of eight letters sent to various figures such as the archbishop of Paris, the duc de Mirepoix, and a confidant of the queen, most likely in fall 1755. Each letter appeals to some individual trait of the recipient and suggests a specific way in which that person might aid the Hôtel-Dieu. Mirepoix controlled a lottery whose proceeds went to needy convents. The nuns ask the superior of the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris to share some bit of the “immense amount of alms” that her institution received. They remind the Abbé de la Viegerie that he had already contributed to the reconstruction of the Trois-Rivières hospital. The letters are short and served as cover letters to Duplessis’s account of the fire that accompanied them.21 The nuns were impatient to leave their temporary quarters. That summer, while waiting for the nuns to decide just how to rebuild and how to finance the project, workmen began restoring the outbuildings 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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of the hospital.22 In late November, when no word from France had arrived from the ministry promising aid, more comprehensive plans could no longer be postponed. Instead of a multiple-point proposal like the ones he had presented in June offering his palace, Pontbriand merely sent the nuns a series of discussion points for and against waiting until the following year to begin reconstruction. He did not envisage rebuilding the entire hospital-monastery complex, only the northeast wing that had been most seriously damaged and that had housed the hospital wards. According to Duplessis, “he left us the freedom to choose between the two proposals he presented.”23 Borrowing money was unavoidable, and he knew the Duplessis sisters’ horror of debt; thus the sum he mentioned to be borrowed – up to 25,000 livres – was probably set deliberately low. He characterized the arguments for postponing a decision until the following year as being based only on “panicked terrors.” The record of the discussions, first by the advisory council and then by all the professed nuns, was made by Marie-André as chapter secretary, who also had a guiding voice in both bodies as assistant superior. The decisions that were reached reflect her prudent, longterm perspective. Waiting until the next year was judged impractical. The nuns went further than the bishop’s proposal. Instead of just rebuilding the northeast wing, they also proposed reframing and reroofing two additional wings to protect their masonry walls that were still standing, but needed immediate repair. For the time being, they would concentrate on stabilizing the exterior structure and would postpone interior finishing work. They noted that an offered gift of local wood that could be used for reframing might disappear if not accepted immediately. Duplessis’s record of the deliberations masked any tension between bishop and community. She was at her deferential finest. The initiative was presented as coming from Pontbriand, and the “full liberty” he left the nuns in reality amounted to adjusting his proposals. However, since all parties agreed that rebuilding and borrowing at some point was necessary and since the minister at Versailles was unresponsive, the competent leadership within the community refined the bishop’s suggestions. Whatever initial tension there was between the Duplessis sisters and the bishop, as reflected in Geneviève’s summer 1755 letters, a 208

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9.1 Richard Short’s view of Quebec after the 1759 siege from the northwest along the Saint Charles River shows the palace of the intendant (two-storey building with turret in centre) below the bluff. One of the rebuilt wings of the Hôtel-Dieu is the two-storey building with a steep pitched roof on the bluff, just left of centre. Little destruction from the bombing is visible in this view.

smooth working relationship was established. Pontbriand could be imperious, but he was not inflexible. A November 1756 letter to her friend Marie-Catherine repeats the praise of Pontbriand that MarieAndré sent the bishop’s sisters at about the same time.24 As rebuilding progressed that winter, letters show that Duplessis relied on the bishop’s constant involvement. Could he supply windowpanes for the door of their chapel (2 January 1757)? Could she take advantage of the offer of a loan without interest (21 January 1757)? He reported his negotiations for 3,000 planks of wood (22 January 1757). In discussing the possible loan, he reminded her, “finding lodging is a necessity” (4 March 1757), and reassured her that the money would be found to pay it back in a single installment (19 March 1757). The previous fall, when a formal petition to the court for rebuilding funds was being prepared, she asked his advice about how her cover letter should be headed and whether she alone should sign it, or have it signed by other nuns. Pontbriand replied that “Monseigneur” sufficed as a heading, and that she alone should sign (13 September 1756).25 Duplessis had extensive experience writing official correspondence. Did she seek advice and exaggerate her incapability to show deference to the bishop? A formal request to the court was indeed sent in fall 1756. On 11 November, Pontbriand wrote the current minister of the navy, JeanBaptiste de Machault d’Arnouville, that the nuns’ petition had been endorsed by the intendant Bigot and the governor-general Vaudreuil. It was accompanied by architectural designs for expansion from the engineer Louis Franquet.26 The bishop estimated the cost at 200,000 francs.27 With France officially at war, no such sum was forthcoming. In the last letter Marie-André received in 1759 from her Jesuit brother, François-Xavier reported having heard from Marie de Rupelmonde, an aristocrat who had become a Carmelite and was close to the queen.28 A request that Marie-André had sent this nun in 1755 to appeal to the queen was finally bearing fruit. The Carmelite had intervened with the bishops on the Commission des secours, and 4,000 livres would reportedly be forthcoming,29 3,000 livres less than the Commission had awarded the Trois-Rivières Ursulines. The community moved into the partially restored buildings on 1 August 1757, over two years after the fire. That date corresponded to the foundresses’ arrival in Quebec in 1639. 210

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Family Crosses Marie-André had been predicting Geneviève’s death for so long that it was perhaps a surprise when her sister finally succumbed on 12 May 1756 to the lung inflammation that had laid her low so often over the preceding thirty years. In her report to Marie-Catherine Hecquet that fall, Duplessis described her intimate bond with Geneviève in much the same terms as Hecquet had used many years earlier to describe her attachment to Marie-André. Duplessis wrote, “I was more bound to her by sentiment than blood.”30 Hecquet had likewise attributed her immediate attraction to Duplessis as a child to a “similarity of humours.”31 After the separation of the two childhood friends on the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marie-André had found a new soulmate in the cloister. Hecquet, on the other hand, had entered a loveless marriage and even found her attachments to her daughters tested. MarieCatherine had learned to live with what Marie-André now foresaw, a loneliness that would accompany her for the rest of her life: “She has left me in a great solitude.”32 Duplessis’s grief work, as she had affirmed in Geneviève’s circular letter to communities in France, would be to rededicate herself to the project she had shared with her sister: the defence of her community and its hospital. The mutual attachment of “les Dames Duplessis” – the Duplessis Ladies – was too well-known for her not to receive many condolences that invariably noted Geneviève’s indefatigable devotion to the hospital. One notable expression of concern was received from Vaudreuil before Geneviève’s death. If the memoirs of Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, who met the sisters around 1717 when he was housed at the hospital, are to be believed, the future governor-general had had a romantic interest in Geneviève in their youth. Montigny wrote that Geneviève “preferred to follow the fine example of her sister in taking religious vows rather than accept the hand of marriage offered to her by M. de Cavagnial, the son of M. the marquis de Vaudreuil.”33 On 29 March 1756 at the beginning of her fatal illness, his expression of sympathy to Marie-André stays within conventional formalities, but that could hardly be otherwise: “I learn with much sorrow, Madame, that Madame of the Infant Jesus is ill to the point of death. If my wishes for her are fulfilled, her health will be restored. She is important for your community and for the poor of the hospital. Please accept my 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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sincere expression of concern. I hope that when my letter reaches you, she will be in a state to receive my thousand-fold pledges of respect.”34 A second letter received a week before Geneviève’s death illustrates the esteem for the Duplessis sisters in the other Quebec women’s communities. It also suggests a connection back to the period in Geneviève’s youth around 1710–12 recounted in the Histoire de Ruma and alluded to by Dumont de Montigny. The former New England captive, current Ursuline novice mistress, and future mother superior of the Quebec Ursulines, Esther Wheelwright, wrote Marie-André to express her personal concern about her sister’s health. Wheelwright also took the occasion to congratulate Marie-André, whose community had just re-elected her superior, by citing “the good fortune and consolation that it has to be under your gracious direction.” “I hope,” she wrote, “that you will be so kind as to keep for me some small part in your dear friendship that I value more than my pen can express.” Wheelwight shared the name in religion “Infant Jesus” with Geneviève, but her description of her bond to her suggests a much stronger tie than with a person she had only come to know the previous year, when the Hôtel-Dieu nuns had taken refuge for three weeks with the Ursulines after their fire. She called Geneviève “this dear friend whom I love as tenderly as if she were a near relative to me.”35 Moreover, Wheelwright pointedly says that her affection is so strong that she feels compelled to add her personal letter to the one her community had sent (probably in response to Marie-André’s request for their prayers). Within the previous ten years, Esther had rebuffed two of her own blood relatives: her mother, who had written her from New England in 1747, and a nephew, who had visited her in Quebec in 1753–54. By rejecting their overtures, she confirmed the commitment she had made to remain in Canada as an Ursuline around 1710, when she had turned down entreaties from her family to return home. At that time, she was living in the Château Saint-Louis, under the sponsorship of Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, the father of the current governor. She could well have moved in circles that included Geneviève, who was herself trying to decide then if she should leave the world for the convent. In addition, Esther was the protégé of the Jesuit Vincent Bigot, the same priest who had preached at the ceremony in 1708, when Marie-André took the habit of a nun. There were thus multiple 212

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occasions for Esther and Geneviève to have met in the period just before both became nuns. Esther explained to her mother in 1747 that she had followed Christ’s injunction to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters behind.36 She could have seen Geneviève as a “near relative” in the new family of nuns she was entering. A year after her sister’s death, Marie-André acknowledged to Pontbriand just how irksome, if not exasperating, Geneviève could become when she thought the hospital’s interests were threatened. With the anniversary of Geneviève’s death approaching, Marie-André asked the bishop to offer mass for her sister and to forgive the trouble she had caused him: “I beg you to pardon her for the occasions of displeasure she might have given you so that she does not suffer on account of them in the other world.”37 Beginning about 1750, François-Xavier reported declining health that interfered with his preaching commitments. One hand trembled so much that he could not write or offer mass for four months, and he complained of rheumatism. As much as any identifiable disease, the Jesuit in his mid-fifties seemed worn out by the exhausting schedule of missions that kept him travelling in the provinces much of the year and by daily routines that could include three sessions in the pulpit and long hours in the confessional. Like his sister, he was frustrated to see his years of labour in jeopardy because of what he saw as the rapid increase of irreligiousness and moral decay that spread from the social elite to the general population: “However deplorable may be the state of our poor Canada, France is in a sadder and more lamentable condition before God; impiety, irreligion, disbelief, libertinage make the swiftest progress there on a daily basis.” As an example, he said that things had only degenerated in Orléans since his successful mission ten years earlier: “I found there more work to do than ever, and what distresses me, is that after having inspired the fear and love of the Lord in the people … there are so few ministers of the Lord who work to sustain these sentiments.”38 He placed the blame on the local pastors who failed to follow up on his work. He thus deflected the Jansenist critiques of his revival missions. Emotional preaching and assembly-line confessions were not likely to produce solid individual conversions, the Jansenists maintained. He never gave up on lobbying for his sisters’ community, any more than he gave up preaching. His letters of the 1750s are full of 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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accounts of his contacts with anyone who could help. However, as one person he enlisted in the effort reported to Marie-André, “everything is done here very slowly.”39 Above all, everything depended on patronage and the protection of the powerful. While Marie-André’s Jesuit brother had encouraging news about himself and his efforts for the hospital in the last letter she received from him before her death, he was distressed about the family of their younger brother Charles-Denis, who had been in Paris the last four years: “What a position for my sister-in-law and her dear daughter!” Charles-Denis had delayed returning to Quebec and had been avoiding the Jesuit for the last year: “My judgment is that he dare not appear before me.”40 No sooner had Denis obtained his commission as provost marshal in 1749 than he wrote the minister about the meagre resources allotted to the marshalsea: more horsemen were needed in both Quebec and Montreal, and he noted that his own salary of 500 livres was simply insufficient.41 In addition, he requested passage on the king’s ship to attend to family business in France; a lawsuit dealing with the Morampont estate required his presence. The following year, he reminded the minister of his requests for increased funding and for passage to France.42 Only in 1753 was he able to make the trip. Vaudreuil supported his request for a raise and told the minister that it was not possible for the provost marshal to live decently on 500 livres,43 but there is no record that the increase was granted, just as it seems that the Morampont estate was not settled in his favour. All this time, his financial and marital situation went from bad to worse. In 1752, François-Xavier had reported that the Guillimin family was so upset with Denis’s conduct that they wanted a financial separation between him and his wife to protect her interests. The Jesuit sympathized with his sister-in-law, whom he called a “virtuous and worthy wife,” and fretted that, given his brother’s irascible character, he anticipated his brother’s prospective trip to France would only cause him additional worries.44 The following year he expressed delight at Marie-André’s report that an illness that Charles-Denis had experienced had somewhat calmed him and that he appeared to show “his respectable spouse the affection and consideration she has earned,”45 and in October of that year Denis and his wife 214

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received the sacrament at the first communion of their daughter, to Marie-André’s great satisfaction.46 Any improvement was more apparent than real, however. His debts must have been substantial. In 1756, he owed 4,020 livres to his brother-in-law’s estate,47 and on 16 November of that year, a judgment was recorded against him for an unpaid obligation of 4,000 livres. The following summer, his house and a lot on the Côte de la Fabrique were seized and sold,48 as well as a property with a barn on the Petite Rivière Saint-Charles in the seigneurie of Saint-Gabriel in the vicinity of Quebec.49 In November, his wife was granted financial separation.50 In Quebec she had to face his creditors alone. Worse, Denis showed little willingness to return, to the growing frustration of his sister in Quebec and his Jesuit brother in France. François-Xavier tried to be positive in his initial reports. In August 1755, he said he had obtained the most favourable protections on his brother’s behalf at his disposal, and he saw encouraging signs that Denis was struggling to master his impulsive nature. Denis had promised to receive the sacraments frequently and the tears he shed at their last meeting seemed sincere. If Denis’s negotiations were successful, FrançoisXavier expected his brother to return to Canada that fall.51 But Denis did not return. The following April, François-Xavier again pointed to the positive, although complaining of the difficulty of reminding Denis of his family duties: “He still has his acute quick temper as soon as one gives him any advice that is not in accord with his way of thinking. Nonetheless, I thank God that he cannot be blamed for any moral dissoluteness.”52 In the fall of 1756, Marie-André must have been aware of the impending bankruptcy judgment that would come in November. When Denis did not appear on any of the boats arrived from France, she urged her correspondents there to persuade her brother to return; she received letters written in spring 1757 from four of them who reported on their efforts. François-Xavier assured her in January and March that Denis had promised to return.53 Two other priests, the Abbé de l’Isle-Dieu and François Sorbier de Villars of the Quebec Seminary, wrote that they had done their best, but had little news;54 one suspects that Denis had done his best to avoid them. A fellow officer, only thirty-five years old, at least got Denis to open up. Claude-Michel Sarrazin was the son of Michel Sarrazin, the 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Hôtel-Dieu’s distinguished long-term doctor earlier in the century. Although born in Quebec, Claude-Michel had left Canada for France, and happened to lodge quite near to Denis in Paris. In fact, they ate together frequently. Even if he acknowledged, like everyone else, Denis’s hot-tempered character, one senses in his reports a genuine sympathy that is missing in those of the older priests. In turn, Denis related to him the various pretexts that justified in his mind his reluctance to return. If he had delayed his departure, it was because he hoped for the Cross of Saint-Louis. But as Claude-Michel explained, even though Vaudreuil was disposed to recommend Denis for the honour, the governor backed off when he saw that Denis was not making prompt plans to sail.55 In his next letter, Claude-Michel reports what he considered the true reason for what he now realized was Denis’s decision never to return: “I think I have discovered that what prevents him from returning is some animosity toward the persons who are most dear to him there. Madame Duplessis, I believe, has written him too harshly; as you know, with his character, he cannot be manoeuvred by force.”56 He concluded by suggesting that Denis has been generally misunderstood, even by his sister: “You yourself, Madame, I insist, have believed falsehoods about him.” As he had previously said, Denis might have run through his money, but he was not debauched.57 Indeed, an earlier letter of François-Xavier had made it clear that Denis greatly feared his sister’s judgment: “He is so greatly apprehensive lest I criticize his impetuousness and his imprudence in the pursuit of what he proposes to obtain that he made me promise to assure you that he is doing his best.”58 As the direct witness of the consequences of Denis’s lack of responsibility toward his wife and daughter, Marie-André had little sympathy for her brother. While his property was being prepared for auction in his absence in Quebec, and his brother and family friends in Paris were urging him to return, Denis participated in a quasi-legal inquiry on the Pont Notre-Dame of Paris in April 1757. On 22 April, several art experts assembled in the studio of the painter Pierre Jauffroy at Denis’s request to determine if a portrait the artist had done of Duplessis resembled him, if it was painted in a workmanlike way, and if it was sturdy enough to be shipped to Canada. It is not surprising that the status-minded Duplessis would have commissioned a portrait. What 216

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the record does not show is why he requested the expert opinions. Did he truly believe the portrait was of inferior quality? Or was he merely trying to avoid paying for it? The experts found against Denis on all three questions. The portrait, they declared, was very much like the sitter, with fine colours, and sturdy enough to be shipped to places even more remote than Canada.59 This ineffectual attempt to officialize buyer’s remorse is typical of the youngest Duplessis’s failures that cascaded in the last years of his life. A second portrait was also in dispute, one of Pontbriand. The bishop had officiated at Duplessis’s wedding, but it is unlikely CharlesDenis would have commissioned the prelate’s portrait on his own account. His sisters had probably asked their brother to obtain it as part of their efforts to stay in Pontbriand’s good graces.60 Claude-Michel Sarrazin was correct. Denis never returned and ended badly. He was still in the French capital in December 1763 when he wrote Antoine de Sartine, the lieutenant-general of police in Paris, to request permission to visit Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan in the Bastille. Péan was imprisoned alongside Bigot, while on trial for corruption in the administration of the colony, in what was called the Affaire du Canada. Péan, like Duplessis, was a military officer, but came from a much more established family and was much more quickly promoted through the ranks, due to his organizational talents and his charm. He amassed an immense fortune as Bigot’s righthand man in various schemes to supply the army; in 1756, he had been awarded the Cross of Saint-Louis that Denis coveted. Denis had previously been granted permission to visit Péan in March of that same year. Attached to this December letter in the Archives of the Bastille is an internal note: “He talks like a crazy man. The Canadians say he is mad.”61 As family and friends had feared, Denis’s hot temper and resentment over not receiving the recognition he believed he merited had turned into a mania that made him totally ineffective.

Wartime Hardships in the Town, and Distant Providential Victories Canada was still on a war footing, as it had been since 1744, even though officially peace had come in 1748. Hostilities broke out again in North America in May 1754 when Major George Washington’s 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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forces killed and scalped Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville in what is now western Pennsylvania. The French government sent considerable reinforcements to Canada in 1755, but a declaration of war would have to wait until May 1756 when events in Europe required it. Marie-André had to face this intensification of hostilities in her partially rebuilt hospital and monastery without Geneviève. Plans for a reconstructed hospital were submitted to the ministry in Versailles in 1756, but funds now had to go to more direct military expenses. Arriving troop and supply vessels brought more contagious soldiers and sailors than even the pre-fire Hôtel-Dieu could have handled. The Hôpital-Général became a military hospital, perhaps the town’s principal one, and Pontbriand sent seven nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu to meet the increased workload there. Inflation pushed the prices of foodstuffs and supplies higher. Since able-bodied men were called to serve in the militia, finding workers for repairs or even service in the wards challenged Duplessis. She had the sympathetic ear of the bishop and the governorgeneral, but her bête noire, the intendant François Bigot, still controlled the local purse strings. He saw her nuns as uncooperative. As he put it in an April 1757 letter to Duplessis: “The ladies of the Hôtel-Dieu last winter refused to lend me a hand in finding sustenance for the people at a time when I saw the town on the verge of being short of bread.”62 In July, he accused Duplessis of not keeping the roads near Saint-Augustin in repair and threatened to have the work done at her expense.63 He did not cut the hospital off from supplies from the king’s storehouse that he controlled, but he more than once suggested that instead of running to him, they should do what he had done when they had not helped him: buy grain from habitants in the countryside. Marie-André’s marks of deference, such as New Year’s greetings and wishes on his saint’s day, were futile in the face of his belief that she controlled resources she would not commit. It was a considerable understatement when she wrote Pontbriand that Bigot “is not too well disposed toward us.”64 Life was difficult in the town, but major victories gave solace to Canadian pride during the first years of the war: Braddock’s defeat in July 1755, the fall of Oswego to Montcalm’s army in August 1756, and his win at Carillon in July 1758. She painted each as miraculous, 218

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much as in the Annales she had described the defeats of William Phips in 1690 and Hovenden Walker in 1711. They were signs that Providence intervened to protect the Catholic colony against its Protestant enemies. She attributed Jean-Daniel Dumas’s massacre of Braddock’s army squarely to the intervention of the Virgin, citing the witness of a British prisoner: “This man reported that the English saw over the French camp a lady dressed in white who extended her arms and that they fired more than four thousand musket shots at her. In truth, our soldiers came back saying that the English did not know how to aim and lost all their shots in the air.” In fact, the enemy never reached the French camp; they were surprised on a narrow forest road where the Canadians and their allies picked them off from the protection of the trees. Many of the English never saw their attackers. Her estimation of the forces on each side, however, is accurate: “2,500 English were repelled by eight hundred French and Indigenous warriors … our side killed them with the result that 1,700 were slain on the spot.”65 Duplessis called the surrenders of the garrison of Oswego (Chouaguen) and its nearby forts, which were surprised by a larger French force, miraculous because of their rapidity: “The most recent coup is completely miraculous; in four days we took three forts armed with cannons, and especially the one named Chouaguen where there was a 1,800 man garrison.” Just as she had in the case of the victory on the Monongahela, she included a detailed account of the booty taken. She noted that the day of the surrender was the Feast of the Assumption and thus linked it to the Virgin. Moreover, her account of the procession and Te Deum ceremony organized in the Quebec cathedral is almost as long as the description of the battle itself.66 She had written Montcalm to congratulate him on his first major victory, and he had replied on 27 August, “God worked a true marvel on this occasion.”67 No letter to Hecquet survives from 1757, and thus no report on Montcalm’s second victory, his capture of Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George in August of that year. As at Oswego, a great number of British were captured with little loss of French lives. The fall of the fort proved to be inconclusive because Montcalm did not press on to take Fort Edward on the Hudson, although it did prevent the enemy from advancing up Lake Champlain that year. 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Fort William Henry was also significant because of Montcalm’s consternation at what happened after the battle. Despite his pledge to the surrendered British, the Indigenous allies of the French scalped a number of them and took even more prisoner. Montcalm and his French officers were able to rescue some. The French were dismayed at how easily the Canadian officers condoned what to them was unpardonable savagery and disregard for the rules of war.68 Montcalm noted in his journal that this “detestable situation that cannot be described to those who were not there, and which makes even the victory sorrowful to the victorious.”69 Duplessis had described the treatment of prisoners in her 1756 letter to Hecquet, where she distanced the French from what she portrayed as the routine cannibalism of the nations of the upper country. “They have an implacable hatred toward the English and inflict unheard of cruelties on them. They scalp them, cut them up in pieces, boil them in their kettles, and eat them. The French officers have to put themselves between the savages and the English to save their lives.”70 In fact, Duplessis was caught between her revulsion and her recognition that the allies were an indispensable part of the war effort. In her version, the onus falls solely on them, rather than on the colonial officials such as Vaudreuil who relied on these allies. She can only pray that they might one day be converted and thus change: “I beg God to bring to the faith all those among these savages who serve us so well,” despite the fact that Catholic Wabanakis had begun the killing at Fort William Henry. While the recently arrived French officers such as Montcalm and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville were horrified by the colonial troops’ acceptance of the treatment of prisoners – as much out of a sense of aristocratic honour as morality – Duplessis was Canadian enough to take the support of “these barbarians who serve us so well”71 for granted. Her description of Montcalm’s final great victory at Carillon doubled the losses of the British army to heighten its miraculous nature: “Only 4,000 of our men had made it to this site when the English arrived numbering nearly 20,000. This disparity did not dampen the courage of the French. The battle took place on 8 July. It was violent and the firing brisk and continuous on each side. It lasted from noon until eight o’clock, when the English troops folded and retreated, leaving in place piles of their dead. Their losses are 220

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estimated at five to six thousand men and ours at five hundred. This victory appeared so marvelous that even those who won the day are astonished at it.”72 Duplessis’s figures merely echoed the inflated reports that Montcalm sent out about both the enemy’s casualties and the size of its army.73 She counted Montcalm as a supporter and was impressed with his piety. The victors, she said, “attribute all the glory to God, and the piety of the army pushed Monsieur the Marquis de Montcalm their general to plant a cross in the camp.”74 Patriotism and Providence went hand in hand in her eyes. God protected Canadian arms in these battles because of the piety of its defenders. Montcalm’s aidede-camp Bougainville also called the victory at Carillon miraculous, but for a very different reason.75 Only miracles, he implied, could save Canada because of the sorry state of its leadership under Vaudreuil and Bigot, who opposed Montcalm’s war plans. The jealousy and backbiting among the colony’s leaders hindered operations on the ground, and Montcalm’s defeatism gave officials in Versailles grounds not to fund the war effort. Duplessis might have had her favourites among the triumvirate of governor, marquis, and intendant, but she would need support from all three, even Bigot. Duplessis closed the 1758 letter that narrates the victory of Carillon with two songs celebrating French superiority over the English in lieu of the gifts she often sent. The longer of the two, entitled “The Likeness and the Difference,” is a reworking of a satirical song that circulated in France in 1756 that compared the duc de Richelieu unfavourably to the duc d’Estrées, a rival general. In the original, Richelieu is “the favourite of Louis,” the profligate monarch; his rival d’Estrées is “the favourite of Mars,” the god of war. As Jack Warwick pointed out, the Canadian version lacks the malicious barbs of the French one.76 Moreover, its stanza contrasting the treatment of prisoners glosses over Montcalm’s dismay about the actions of his Indigenous allies. The English take some prisoners We take them by the thousands That’s the likeness The French treat them well But the English treat them like dogs. That’s the difference.77 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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The same letter of Duplessis discreetly acknowledged that, despite Carillon, 1758 was a bad year for Canada. With little comment, she mentioned significant losses that tightened the British noose around the colony’s heartland in the Saint Lawrence valley. The fortress of Louisbourg that guarded the entrance to the Saint Lawrence fell on 26 July, and on 27 August, Fort Frontenac (Kingston, Ontario) at the entrance to the Great Lakes to the west was lost to the English, “which closes them in on us.”78 The three great victories buttressed morale for a garrison town that was stretched to the limits of its endurance. For Duplessis, they were consolations sent by God in a time of real distress, distress caused by penury that is amply described in the same letters to Hecquet. 1759 would test her inner reserves and capacity as a leader.

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A Woman’s Siege and Occupation: Navigating a Year of Male Military Failures “Madame, with your permission and without leaving the respect that you are due, may I have the honour to tell you that ladies must not speak of war?” Here the marquis de Montcalm recounts a November 1758 soirée during which Jeanne-Charlotte de Fleury Deschambault, wife of Governor-General Vaudreuil, intervened in a discussion of the French general’s tactics during the previous season’s campaign. Montcalm cut her off when she tried to continue: “Madame, without leaving the respect that you are due, allow me to say that if Madame Montcalm were here, and she heard us speak of war with the marquis de Vaudreuil, she would keep silent.”1 Vaudreuil’s wife might have been more open in expressing her opinion than Montcalm’s, but there is no indication the Canadian governor-general allowed women any real voice in affairs either. The voice that he, like Montcalm, requested from Duplessis (and from women in general) was simply their prayers, along with celebrating their victories and mourning the dead. In practical terms, other than women’s roles in nursing and feeding their menfolk, Vaudreuil held women out chiefly as a motivator for his colonial militia. In his proclamations in May 1759, the Canadians were enjoined to fight to defend their religion, to safeguard their wives, children, and property, and to avoid the cruel treatment suffered by the Acadians.2 Women are almost invisible in the written record of the siege of Quebec, not because they were absent or passive, but because

the accounts that have survived were written by males who envisaged war in masculine terms. The correspondence of the generals, the diaries written by civilians and soldiers during the events, and the retrospective accounts after the fact view the siege from a male perspective.3 A single narration of the siege written by a woman has been published, and it was penned six years after the event by a nun, Marie-Joseph Legardeur, the mother superior of the HôpitalGénéral, who in 1765 addressed members of her order in France with the hope that they would lobby the French crown to make good on its obligations to her institution.4 Historians have followed the lead of the eighteenth-century warriors and administrators, who largely ignored women, by not attending to how women lived the siege.5 However, the Hôtel-Dieu archives contain a wealth of letters written in 1759 by and to Duplessis. Her correspondence with the intendant, with the governor general, with the bishop, with the British occupiers, and with priests and nuns in France, as well as her two retrospective epistolary accounts, written less than a month after the fall of the town, allow us to access the war experience more immediately through a woman’s eyes. A handful of similar letters from the Ursulines and Hôpital-Général have been published. Duplessis’s extensive unpublished correspondence makes it possible to envisage the siege and occupation from a woman’s perspective. As Carol Cohn points out, war and gender relations both turn on the dynamics of power; “war hinges on disempowering one’s opponent, and gender difference encodes power.”6 War puts not just the power differential that the men claimed over women to the test, but their own masculinity. Men envisaged war in terms of their superiority: their duty was to do battle to protect a sex too weak and too fearful to defend itself. However, wars have a way of getting away from their makers. When soldiers face defeat, their rationale for their superiority as males is called into question. Furthermore, when men lose control of events, in the ensuing power vacuum, women sometimes take matters into their own hands in ways that do not necessarily please their male masters. The loss of New France was a male failure, whether one blames the abandonment of the colony by Louis XV and his ministers, the shortsightedness and rivalries of Vaudreuil and Montcalm, or the corruption of Bigot. It is no surprise that there have been efforts to 224

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feminize the defeat by invoking the influence of the king’s mistress, the marquise de Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and that of François Bigot, Angélique Renaud d’Avène Des Méloizes, the wife of Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan, who was the intendant’s middleman with suppliers.7 Duplessis’s position as head of a hospital with the mission of serving the poor put her in contact with the war experience of every sort of woman in the colony: elite, middling, and poor townswomen, the wives of habitants on the hospital’s seigneuries, and, of course, the other female religious communities. To be sure, she had advantages many of these women lacked: she counted as a “dame,” a lady, in a status-conscious society, and she headed an institution with crucial religious, civilian, and military functions. Thus, although providing bread to the hospital was her never-ending preoccupation, it would have been unthinkable, and not just impossible as a cloistered nun, for her to participate in the January bread riot of lower-class women. Likewise, her duties explain why she was not evacuated to Montreal or Trois-Rivières at the beginning of the siege, as were other elite women. This chapter will set Duplessis’s experience, as seen in her correspondence in 1759, against that of other women and the role that male authority figures envisaged for women in their accounts of the siege and their meagre reports of women’s actual activities. The generals’ military failures would push women to go beyond this role as silent helpmates whom men gallantly defend according to the civilized rules of warfare. All the facets of women’s experience that have been evoked above – the frivolity of Bigot’s circle, the food crises, evacuation, nursing the wounded, praying for divine protection, the terror of bombing, relations with the English occupier – will come into play in this chapter. It shows how Duplessis insured the survival of her community and hospital by exploiting both men’s self-image as protectors of women and the space left for female agency when men faltered.

Finding Supplies with the Intendant and Bishop: Unruly Women and Staying within the Rules Vaudreuil and Montcalm had each sent envoys to Versailles in fall 1758 to alert the minister of the urgency of the situation. No supplies a woman’s siege and occupation

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or new troops could be expected until May when shipping resumed. While Duplessis and the colony waited for relief, she was preoccupied during the cold days of winter and early spring with keeping the hospital supplied with bread, without dipping into the store of seed wheat needed to plant crops in the spring. Her dealings with the intendant and the bishop between January and May 1759, when ships from France did arrive, allow us to gauge her relations with these two key officials who would play crucial roles during the siege and occupation. Bigot controlled access to the king’s storehouse and bakery in the town and issued rules for how and under what circumstances foodstuffs could be bought and sold in the war economy. She needed Pontbriand’s approval for major decisions, and he had his own resources and network of informants across the colony. Montcalm, who scorned the intendant as much as Duplessis did, reported on 2 January that four hundred women had rioted when Bigot announced a reduction in the bread ration.8 The January 1759 riots were not the first food riots by women. Other French officers report them in Montreal in December 17579 and in April and June 1758 in Quebec.10 Although Montcalm used the word “riot” (“émeute”) here, “demonstration” might be just as appropriate.11 These gatherings might have been unruly, but they were also a familiar tactic for gaining the attention of authorities. They were was not uncommon in France and were likely encouraged by the husbands of the women involved. They usually included a presentation of complaints by representatives of the women to the authorities, who often offered some concession.12 In response to the January 1759 event, Bigot adjusted the reduction up to a half pound a day.13 Lower-class women might become unruly when authorities failed to maintain adequate food supplies, but Duplessis had established channels for dealing with Bigot. Despite her distrust of the intendant, she went beyond minimal conventional civilities like the New Year’s greetings that she sent him and to other officials. On 22 January, he thanked her for an unspecified gift she had sent that seems to have been some kind of food. On 13 April, Bigot thanked the hospital for the gift of a lamb probably sent to mark the end of the Lenten period of abstinence from meat.14 He invariably replied with administrative politeness. Still, from the start, he made clear that she was not to expect too much in return. He blamed circumstances that would prevent 226

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him from doing what he professed he wanted to do for the hospital. As he put it in his 3 January reply to her New Year’s wishes, “When I refuse, it is because I am forced to, and I have as many regrets … about it as those who obtain nothing.”15 In early February, Duplessis ran up against a similar provisioning wall as the townswomen had faced in January, and she tried to exploit the ties that she had cultivated with the intendant. She began her request to Bigot with a dramatic declaration of the initiatives she had taken: “We have sent out to the south, to the north, to the Ile d’Orléans, and even as far as to Trois-Rivières, and everywhere wheat is selling for twenty livres cash, which was impossible for us to accept since we do not have this ready money. We did obtain a few bushels paid for by warrants to extend a bit our harvest … I have waited as long as possible to interrupt you to make known our needs, but I do not believe I should wait for the last sheaf of the little wheat we have remaining to mill to beg you to have pity on our community … You can relieve our shortage by releasing the ration for the hospital … that would allow us to hold back a few bushels to sow, because if we do not plant, our destitution will grow, and we will become more of a burden.”16 With her usual foresight, Duplessis had been planning ahead for the crucial spring planting and feared coming up short. If the intendant would cover the patients’ ration of bread, enough wheat could be put aside for seed. Her closing plea suggests that her tendency to brood on future disasters might have triggered her request: “that you relieve me from the deadly anxiety that such a sad situation puts me in.” Bigot replied immediately on 9 February with a refusal: “I find it impossible to see to the feeding of sixty individuals in your house. I flatter myself that I can continue to obtain for the town people the bread that I am making available to them. I advise you to try again in the nearby countryside and to promise to pay for wheat in cash and even to sign contracts for it.” Try again with cash, he said, and if sellers refuse the paper warrants, report them to me.17 However, Bigot did not cut the hospital off completely. Several days later, on 12 February, he responded to a request from the hospital bursar by sending two small barrels of flour (quarts de farine). He noted that her need must have been exceptional, “persuaded that it could only be straitened circumstances that makes you undertake a woman’s siege and occupation

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this request to me.” This was the same amount he had sent occasionally the previous summer, and he continued sending this amount periodically during the next months as the town awaited the arrival of the resupply ships. His distrust is indicated in remarks in his next letter that show he kept a tight watch on the hospital’s affairs: he has heard the patient load has dropped; he suspects that some patients are being given too large a ration.18 Staying within the rules with the intendant seems to have won Duplessis no special treatment for her hospital, no increase in the daily ration such as the townswomen had obtained by taking to the streets. Bigot could not write the hospital off, although it was low in his priorities, and while he made sure it had enough to function, Duplessis’s gestures of civility and her pleas did not budge him. She continued to press him in firm but civil letters. On the other hand, mutual confidence had become the foundation of Duplessis’s relationship with the bishop. Upon receiving Bigot’s February refusal, she sent it and her letter off to Bishop Pontbriand for his reaction: “I have a bit of reluctance to follow the advice he is giving me and beg your lordship to indicate to me what I must do.” She saw Bigot’s recommendation to pay cash as confirmation of her longstanding assertion that everyone thought the hospital had more resources than it actually did: “Although we are poor, we are thought to pay well.” The bishop’s advice was brief; he did not approve Bigot’s proposal, and suggested that to raise any needed money she look for bills of exchange on the royal treasury (lettres de change) that had a higher credit rating than the warrants.19 She would probably have rejected the same proposal if it had come from Bigot. On 2 April, a few weeks after she had been re-elected mother superior on 12 March, the bishop gave her a blanket dispensation from clausura to allow carpenters, masons, surgeons, etc. to enter the monastery as necessary for her entire three-year term. She needed Pontbriand’s ecclesiastical authorizations, of course, but she also turned to him for practical advice and reassurance when she was anxious or uncertain, even when he could not provide solutions. Although he addressed her as “my dearest daughter,” in some ways, he was more like a fond son on whom an elderly parent relies in emergencies.20 On 18 April, Pontbriand issued a pastoral letter in which he called for prayers and repentance to avert God’s wrath on Canada. Two of 228

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the scandalous examples he cites of the colony’s sins contrast the positions of elite and low-status women. He cited “impious costumes that mock, or to speak more clearly, display hatred of religion.”21 In his journal, Montcalm criticized the bishop for damaging morale by revealing the sins of the elite and the weakness of the colony; the marquis also made explicit what Pontbriand veiled in paraphrase. During the pre-Lent carnival, Montcalm noted, “Entertainments, despite the extreme destitution … have been very animated. There have never been as many balls, games of chance … The governor-general, the intendant authorized them.”22 These soirées included participants masquerading in nuns’ and bishops’ garb,23 thus mocking, at least indirectly, Duplessis and her community. In his letter, Pontbriand also denounced in veiled terms a way in which non-elite women were drawn into the war economy: “houses devoted publically, as it were, to crime.”24 Montcalm again made this reference explicit: brothels set up near the town’s ramparts,25 likely to service the troops. Ladies such as Madame Péan were hostesses at soirées where they partied freely with military officers and administrative officials. At the other end of the social ladder, destitution pushed women into sex work for soldiers. In her cloister, Duplessis would have only heard about these events. She responded to the bishop’s directive by organizing a novena, nine days of intense prayer, the expected contribution of women, and especially nuns, to the war effort.26

Disorganized Evacuation and Orderly Retreat When the fleet of French cargo ships arrived at Quebec in May, they brought welcome supplies and news. They came with enough foodstuffs to feed the troops through July, although not enough to increase the hospital’s ration. Duplessis must have requested more flour from the king’s warehouses, because on 26 May, Bigot wrote to her (rather than to the bursar) bluntly, “We do not have sufficient quantities to give to the soldiers and militiamen who will fight for the defence of the colony, and it is only they who will have any. You must eat the livestock.”27 The boats also brought letters from France, an 18 February one from François Sorbier de Villars, the director of the Missions étrangères, and at least one from her Jesuit brother dated 25 February. a woman’s siege and occupation

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Villars informed Duplessis of the welcome news that La Porte’s successor in the ministry of the marine looked favourably on her three requests of the previous fall and that the Commission des secours had awarded the community 4,000 livres.28 However, François-Xavier’s letter brooded about the danger to Canada, where he saw God’s “holy religion on the verge of being destroyed,” and the danger to which his sister would be personally exposed, if the English took the city.29 This threat was made concrete by a third letter from a Congrégation de Notre-Dame nun, then in La Rochelle, that could only have fuelled Duplessis’s apprehension. Sister Saint-Arsène had survived James Wolfe’s siege and bombardment of Louisbourg in July 1758, but had been deported to France, where she languished: “Never has such a cruel siege been seen as the one we have come out of; I cannot think about it without being terrified, and what increases our suffering, is the thought of how much our dear Canada is in danger of being subjected to the same fate.”30 Siege, exile, and the rule of heretics could be the future that also awaited the Quebec nuns. This was the last shipment of letters from France that Duplessis likely received that year. Montcalm’s emissary Bougainville also returned on the ships with news of the impending English invasion up the Saint Lawrence. Before the end of May, word reached Quebec that Vaudreuil and Montcalm’s confidence that the river would be an obstacle to Wolfe’s fleet, as it had been for Admiral Hovenden Walker in 1711, was misplaced. As Duplessis put it in a letter written after the fall of Quebec, “By 24 May we learned that a huge English fleet was in our river with a favourable wind; it made its way and avoided with success all the dangers of the Saint Lawrence and came quite close to our harbour without entering it.”31 Vaudreuil and Montcalm had envisaged a staged evacuation of women and children, but their mistaken confidence in the difficulty the English would have navigating the river meant that their plans were implemented with great haste and disorder.32 On 23 May, Vaudreuil issued orders that able-bodied men on the northern and southern shores of the river above Quebec and the Ile d’Orléans report to the town for militia duty; their unprotected wives and children should retreat several miles into the forest with their livestock.33 Troops were sent to enforce this order. In the town itself, at the beginning of June, Montcalm issued a proclamation that all those who could not 230

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contribute to the defence of the capital or were susceptible to fear should withdraw to Trois-Rivières or Montreal.34 Being the prey of fear, of course, was traditionally attributed to women. On 5 June, the schooner Minerve left Quebec for Montreal with ladies and young women of the upper classes.35 On 24 June, the inhabitants of the lower town were instructed to move their belongings to the upper town or farther away as soon as the British ships were sighted off the port.36 Although the town’s fortifications were inadequate, Montcalm complained that supplies and wagons were diverted from the walls in order to build a bomb shelter at the home of Madame Péan on the Rue Saint-Louis.37 On the other hand, women and children, especially lower-class ones, suffered from the hastily implemented measures. Families of tradesmen found it difficult to evacuate the town, and many remained. The generals’ idea that the families from the farms along the river could wait for a French victory in makeshift cabins in the woods was ill-conceived. Compliance with Vaudreuil’s orders was sluggish at best. On the Ile d’Orléans, women and children died because supplies had not been stocked to feed them as they awaited evacuation to the north shore.38 It proved impossible to move all the livestock when the families were evacuated, and the cattle that the Indigenous allies of the French did not pillage39 remained along the coast to feed the English when they landed.40 Bishop Pontbriand, who prided himself on giving detailed instructions, as he had done after the 1755 fire, had in mind a more orderly evacuation for the three Quebec communities of nuns than the civil authorities had managed for the lay population. Although he was planning to leave the town himself along with Bigot and Vaudreuil, he tried to reassure Duplessis on 13 June: “Be calm, our very dear daughter; I will only leave Quebec when all arrangements have been made. I will see you several times.”41 By 26 June, Wolfe’s ships arrived at the Ile d’Orléans, and the next day English soldiers began disembarking. The siege was now imminent. Before the bishop left the town to take up residence in its outskirts at Charlesbourg near the French line of defence at Beauport, he sent a list of provisional confessors to the mother superiors of the three communities on 27 June, and two days later he sent them a circular letter of instructions. In the absence of his deputy, he authorized them to allow entry as needed into their monasteries, to choose confessors a woman’s siege and occupation

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10.1 This contemporary British map shows the bombardment which began from the heights of the former Duplessis seigneurie at Lauzon on 12 June and which destroyed the cathedral and former Duplessis residence on the Rue de la Fabrique on 22 July; the site of the Hôpital-Général where the Hôtel-Dieu nuns took refuge on 13 June; the battle of the Falls of Montmorency on 31 July; and the battle of the Plains of Abraham on 13 September.

from an approved list, and to borrow money if necessary, and he forbade taking novices or allowing novices to profess, among other provisions. Without giving the superiors carte blanche, the bishop allowed great discretion on their part: “On all these points as well as on several others that may come up, the mother superior will act according to the requirements of the case.”42 He probably saw his detailed instructions as reassurance, since they took into account many eventualities. However, they did not calm Duplessis, who the same day wrote back a letter that began “On the eve of the terrible siege that we await.” She informed the bishop of plans she had made for sending their barnyard animals to the country in the care of a few nuns for safekeeping. She added, “We will see them leave with sorrow, but we will have many others before we join them. We will have much baggage to be carted. We begin today.” In her mind, the nuns who would accompany the barnyard animals were an advance guard for the rest of the community. Pontbriand replied with ridicule: “Do you want to make a fool of yourself? Is this grounds to leave? What is the benefit? I was talking lightly when I said that I consented. My circular letter requires stronger grounds. I do not want you to envisage this eventuality, and I am surprised that you are thinking about it.”43 Indeed, in his circular letter, he had envisaged the possibility of one community taking refuge with another or even dispersing into private homes in the city or countryside, but did not authorize plans for wholesale evacuation. What for him was one of many eventualities was for Duplessis license to leave the threatened town. She had obviously already been thinking in terms of an orderly evacuation. What neither Portbriand nor Duplessis foresaw at this point – and for that matter, nor did the military men Vaudreuil or Montcalm – was that they were not just on the eve of a “terrible siege” that would blockade the city. Over the next few days, Wolfe’s troops easily took control of the heights at Pointe Lévy across from the city that Montcalm and Vaudreuil had left undefended and from which Quebec could be bombarded. Wolfe mounted his cannons on the cliffs of Georges Duplessis’s former seigneurie of Lauzon, which his daughter had likely visited in her youth. The townspeople were dismayed that their military leaders were doing nothing and demanded action. Finally, on the night of 12 July, a woman’s siege and occupation

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a party of about a thousand militia and local men, including boys from the Jesuit college, led by Jean-Daniel Dumas, crossed the river to storm the cannons. The bombing started that same evening, and the pastor of the town’s parish described in his journal how women and children gathered and waited for their attacking men to put an end to it. He portrayed them in terms of the roles typically reserved for women in times of war: fear, weeping, and prayer: “By two o’clock in the morning, people were waiting in the town with impatience for the party of Monsieur Dumas to put an end to the cannonade and the bombardment of the English that held the whole town in the grip of fear and especially the women with their children, who were in large number near the citadel, in tears, lamentations and prayer, which were unceasing among them, and they grouped themselves in clusters to say the rosary.”44 The British immediately demonstrated that their cannon range extended to the entire city, upper as well as lower. One bomb fell within fifty feet of the Saint-Jean gate, in the neighbourhood of the hospital.45 Meanwhile, the inexperienced and poorly led party that had crossed the river returned in failure, never having fired on the English. The next morning, women, finding their menfolk unable to defend them, fled with their children to the suburbs and countryside as soon as the town gates opened.46 Duplessis and her community experienced the same fear. She wrote the mother superior of the Hôpital-Général that same day.47 In her account written after the siege to communities in France, Duplessis said that the English “began to bombard the city and did it with a sharpness that much terrified us and which obliged us to ask his lordship our bishop permission to take refuge at the HôpitalGénéral.”48 Pontbriand’s initial reaction was a stern rebuke, and he tried to shame Duplessis by accusing her of unseemly fear. The authorities, in fact, were trying to reassure the terrified population that day. Montcalm visited the city, and the bishop wanted the nuns to set an example by not giving in to the panic. In his 13 July letter he minimized the danger and made light of the possibility of casualties, even deaths – at the most two nuns might die, he said – and asked pointedly who would care for the poor and sick. “Your sisters are not yet hardened to war. Even if a few bombs fell on your establishment, they would not set it afire. They would only make a hole in

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the floors, and I am persuaded that not even two nuns will be killed in the whole bombardment. Your dispersal will be too rushed. You must summon up your courage, and who will care for the patients and the poor? The Ursulines will soon be in the same situation. All the priests would desert.” Duplessis had often asked the bishop to shore up her courage when committing to loans over the course of the last few years. Now he accused her of giving in to fear rather than strengthening her community for the ordeal: “Strengthen your sisters and for that, I beg the Lord to fortify you. Because to speak frankly, I think you are a bit of a coward.”49 Still, a postscript acknowledged that he did not expect to persuade her and authorized her to follow her inclination: “There is no cure for fear; do what you wish. The mother superior of the Hôpital-Général indicates to me that she will gladly share with you.”50 He as much as admitted now that his June circular letter had been largely irrelevant; it was based on the supposition that he would be far from Quebec. However, since he remained in the vicinity, and could visit the Hôpital-Général easily, he expected to be consulted. In fact, he came there almost daily since Charlesbourg was nearby.51 Later that day, twenty-eight nuns from the hospital made their way down to the Hôpital-Général on the Saint-Charles River, out of cannon range. They brought with them their bedding and a food supply – bread, eggs, meat, and peas – so as to be as little a burden as possible. They were joined that evening by the Ursulines, whose monastery had actually been damaged by the bombing. The next day a smaller contingent of seven hospital nuns arrived. Five converse sisters had been left behind to protect against looting.52 On 13 July, the town’s lower-class women took matters into their own hands, just as they had demonstrated in January, when Bigot had reduced the food ration. They had to fend for themselves by fleeing out the gates when military leaders failed to protect them. Fear was certainly a factor, but it was a reasonable one. Duplessis reacted to the same male failures with equal determination in the deliberate way that was her trademark. Her foresight allowed her negotiations with administrators, whether the intendant or the bishop, to lead to outcomes that she had a hand in designing. Unlike Vaudreuil, Montcalm, and Pontbriand, Duplessis organized an orderly retreat.

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Women and the Rules of War Conditions at the Hôpital-Général were already crowded. Since the 1755 fire, it had served as the primary military hospital where soldiers who arrived sick from France were treated. Family members of the nuns and refugees of all sorts now packed its halls and outbuildings. Its nuns gave their sisters from the Hôtel-Dieu their own cells. The church was turned into a ward for the sick and wounded, and all three communities gathered in the adjoining choir area, separated by a grille from the main church, for their religious offices throughout the day. The Ursulines were on one side facing the two Augustinian hospital communities on the other.53 The communities had visited each other separately in the past, and the Ursulines had housed the Hôtel-Dieu community briefly after the 1755 fire, but never had the three been together. In her report to Pontbriand written the day after their arrival, Duplessis asked his permission for two items. The authorities wanted to set up a first aid station just outside the Saint-Jean gate using furniture and supplies from the Hôtel-Dieu and staffed in part by its nuns. Patients would then be directed to the Hôpital-Général. Would he permit this exception to clausura?54 Second, to reduce crowding there, Duplessis suggested that several sisters be lodged with family members in the area or at Saint-Augustin. Pontbriand replied enthusiastically to the first request, and refused the second. He wanted the nuns to maintain community life as much as possible: “I do not grant permission to visit or lodge with relatives. Stay where you are in a prayful attitude. That is what you have to do. Ready yourself to rise higher if you can.”55 This immediate experience of Duplessis and her community must be situated in the context of how the opposing generals viewed the campaign. Montcalm and Wolfe were agreed at least on one thing: it should be fought according to the standards of war prevalent in Europe. In fact, the British and French governments had signed an agreement for how prisoners of war in military hospitals would be treated. The two generals saw battles as staged affairs between uniformed soldiers; non-combatants, certainly women and children, and even civilian males, were not to be molested.56

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10.2 This view by Richard Short shows the destruction caused by the bombing in the neighbourhood of the Duplessis home. On the right is the Jesuit college. In the centre, where the Rue de la Fabrique (on the right leading to the cathedral) meets the Rue Saint-Joseph (to the left), is the home (with a porch) of Jacques Imbert, the current treasurer of the marine, the post once held by Georges Duplessis.

Wolfe could be accused of ignoring these gentlemanly rules of war early on. While the bombardment of a besieged town was not unprecedented in Europe, Wolfe’s destruction of Quebec went far beyond trying to silence its defenders’ batteries that hampered his access upriver. Very early in the bombing, shots coming from the seigneurie de Lauzon damaged sites in the upper city dear to Duplessis. On 18 July, the English directed their bombs to the neighbourhood of the Hôtel-Dieu. One destroyed a room of the building. Munitions had been stored in other rooms that fortunately did not explode.57 On 22 July, the cathedral burned along with the entire block of houses on the Côte de la Fabrique that included the former Duplessis family home.58 After the siege, Duplessis summed up the effects of the two months of daily bombing on the hospital and monastery in her letter to communities in France: “Fifteen bombs that did astonishing damage fell on our buildings, and a quantity of others around the house. So many bombs fell around our property that heaps of them have been piled up there. They broke down the trees in the garden, ploughed up the vegetable plots, and ruined all our hope for this year. Thieves pillaged the rest.”59 Despite her having left converse sisters to watch over the property, and despite the hanging of pillagers by the authorities, much property was lost to looters throughout the city. Wolfe was attacking civilian morale as much as the town’s military defences. He said as much in an episode that featured women and that involved playing loose with the rules of war. On 21 July, his forces succeeded in landing at Pointe-aux-Trembles above the town, where they made prisoner two hundred women who had sought refuge there. He took pride in treating them well, especially the elite ladies among them, and they were allowed to return to Quebec in a prisoner exchange after a few days. But as the French officers complained to him at the time, taking women prisoners needlessly contravened the rules of war. Montcalm noted in his journal that Wolfe only wanted to receive the prettiest ones of the group.60 Wolfe’s subordinate officer George Townshend drew caricatures that targeted Wolfe in the same vein. “Send me fifty beautiful virgins,” one of his cartoons has Wolfe saying.61 Wolfe seems to have had a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, by treating the women well, even permitting a priest captured 238

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10.3 George Townsend’s satirical cartoon evokes Wolfe’s interview with elite women after their capture on 21 July at Pointe-auxTrembles and Townsend’s disapproval. The petitioning women ask if Wolfe will spare the town. He replies using French, “that depends … more petitions … Send me quickly fifty beautiful virgins and we will see.”

with them to give spiritual comfort, he demonstrated his gentlemanly conduct. He also used the women to send back a message. As one Canadian account puts it, “He advised them strongly not to return to the town that in a few days would be reduced to ashes.”62 Duplessis, although at the Hôpital-Général, would have heard echoes of this event.63 At the end of July, a second episode in the campaign engaged the nuns’ nursing skills directly and had lasting consequences for the hospital. Previous wars in North America had been frontier ones that featured raids by Canadians deep into British territory or into contested areas. In the heart of Canada, European-style battles were possible. However, Wolfe found it difficult to identify a suitable site for the decisive battle he envisaged; Montcalm’s tactic was simply to wait him out, hoping the English would be forced to leave when cold weather arrived. On 31 July, Wolfe finally mounted a large attack against the French fortifications near the Montmorency Falls, the only major battle of his campaign until the Plains of Abraham six weeks later. Casualties at Montmorency were much higher on the British side than the French, and a few wounded British soldiers, at least those who were saved from being scalped by Vaudreuil’s Indigenous allies, were brought to the hospital. Among them was a Captain David Ochterlony who was rescued by French soldiers and who wrote to Wolfe praising the good care that he was receiving.64 Although Ochterlony died at the hospital on 14 August, Wolfe expressed his gratitude, first to his rescuers and later to the nuns who had cared for him: “In one of the letters of this same general, he indicated all his gratitude for the consideration that the lady hospitallers who cared for this officer showed. He declared that if fortune favoured his arms, he would order their house be honoured and respected.”65 Wolfe’s first letters had complained bitterly to Vaudreuil about French complicity with the scalping of wounded or captured soldiers. However, this episode showed the British officers that papist French nuns could be trusted to give equal treatment to their wounded compatriots and to enemy prisoners of war. At the same time, Wolfe’s gratitude signalled to the nuns that good relations were possible even with Anglican heretics. The British had their own military hospitals situated on the Ile

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d’Orléans, but they recognized the superiority of the ones directed by Canadian nuns. Duplessis does not mention this incident in her surviving writings, but Hôtel-Dieu nuns were certainly part of the care given Ochterlony. Many Hôtel-Dieu nuns already had experience at the Hôpital-Général. In 1757, while the Hôtel-Dieu was recovering from its fire, arriving soldiers with contagious diseases had been directed to the Hôpital-Général. Ten nuns of that community had died caring for them, and Pontbriand had sent temporary replacements from the Hôtel-Dieu. Legardeur says, in fact, that gratitude for this past aid made the Hôpital-Général nuns eager to welcome their sisters fleeing the bombardment of the town in 1759.66 Duplessis was uncharacteristically optimistic about how long the stay at the Hôpital-Général would last. In her 14 July letter she had talked about arrangements “for only a little time because I hope the battle will soon occur.” However, Vaudreuil and Montcalm continued their defensive strategy of waiting Wolfe out. Wolfe himself could not decide on another major encounter but added to his destruction of the besieged town by bombs a brutal campaign of burning the farms and crops of the habitants in the territory he controlled from Baie Saint-Paul to the Chaudière River on both sides of the Saint Lawrence. Wolfe justified this destruction on two accounts. His troops were harassed by Canadian militiamen defending their homes. All ablebodied Canadian men formed this militia; they were poorly uniformed, if uniformed at all, making the distinction between combatant and non-combatant hard to draw for the British soldiers. Second, the scalping practices of Vaudreuil’s allies that shocked Montcalm as much as they did Wolfe were advanced as justification. Matthew C. Ward has thoroughly assessed Wolfe’s scorched-earth campaign in the light of eighteenth-century standards of warfare. He concluded that while they were not “necessarily outside the established ‘rules of war,’” they were of “dubious morality,” and that even Wolfe’s immediate subordinates were troubled by them.67 The property damage Wolfe’s New England Rangers inflicted was enormous, and there were incidents of killing and even scalping civilians. However, the depredations were chiefly to property, and did not come close to the terrorizing tactics, which routinely included killing, scalping, and

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taking prisoners for ransom, that the allies of the French inflicted on New England settlements.68 As late as 1757, Vaudreuil had authorized such an attack on three hundred Palatine settlers at German Flats in the Mohawk River valley. Duplessis had no time to reflect on the rules of war during her stay at the Hôpital-Général, if one judges by her surviving correspondence. It shows her preoccupied with finding supplies for her charges. The food supplies that Duplessis had brought ran out, and her community could not count on the supplies of the HôpitalGénéral nuns. She turned to the colony’s three leaders, who now had their headquarters at Charlesbourg. On 7 August, Bigot wrote: “I am in despair about not being able to obtain foodstuffs for you … Meat must replace bread. Have some bought. Saving money is not at issue to preserve life. I have my hands more than full, and despite all my best efforts, cannot supply all needs.”69 Bigot’s advice to spend money on meat purchases reflects his longstanding assessment that Duplessis had resources she hesitated to commit. Three days later, Vaudreuil could do no better.70 Always thinking ahead, Duplessis realized that with all ablebodied men serving in the militia, it would be difficult to harvest the wheat crop that had just ripened. In fact, army officers reported major incidents of desertion as militiamen returned to the Montreal area for the harvest. To remedy the situation, Vaudreuil and Montcalm released some of their troops for the task, and Duplessis must have requested her share, because on 26 August, Vaudreuil asked her to furnish a list of names and their companies before he would authorize this help.71 The hospital’s major agricultural holdings were at Saint-Augustin, behind French lines. She had reported to Hecquet the previous year that women had had to join in the harvest,72 and again they likely joined any soldiers Duplessis was able to obtain in 1759. Likewise, women replaced able-bodied men by helping to ferry supply wagons. At the end of the month, her situation must have been worse, because Pontbriand reported on 26 August that despite his strongest efforts, he could obtain nothing for the two refugee communities at the Hôpital-Général: “I have found everything unrelenting in trying to obtain bread for you and the Ursulines.” His advice was characteristically both practical and spiritual: “You must do like the Poor 242

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Clares and hope to be able to gather a hundred pounds of flour in the country parishes. I do not see any other solution.” They should imitate the Franciscan nuns who lived by begging daily alms. Of the three leaders to whom Duplessis turned, the bishop was the one who was eventually able to purchase food. Two months later he wrote Duplessis that the supplies which he sent her and the Ursulines from Charlesbourg could be considered a gift that they need not repay.73

Women Deal with Their Generals’ Defeat While there were skirmishes that brought wounded French and English soldiers to the hospital during August and the first weeks of September, Thursday 13 September was an entirely different matter. Retrospectively, the battle on the Plains of Abraham has come to symbolize the fall of New France, but none of the participants on either side saw the colony’s defeat as irreversible. The actual battle began about ten a.m. and was over in half an hour. The English pursued the retreating French troops but did not prevent many, like the wounded Montcalm, from taking shelter within the town walls. Other French soldiers made their way back down the escarpment toward Beauport. A contingent of colonial militia troops covered their escape by defending access to the pontoon bridge across the Saint Charles River. This action was near enough to the Hôpital-Général for the nuns to observe. According to Legardeur, “Several Canadian officers with large families met the same fate [as Montcalm]. We saw this slaughter from our windows.”74 By about noon, the British decided to regroup on the battlefield and this allowed the retreating French to make their way back to Beauport. Wounded soldiers began to arrive en masse at the hospital, some of them relatives of the nuns. “We were surrounded by the dead and dying who were being brought to us by the hundreds all together, of whom some were closely related to us. We had to hide our legitimate sorrow and seek out where to put them … imagine our perplexity and our terror.”75 The French still controlled the town itself and Beauport, but had retreated to the east side of the Saint Charles River, leaving the hospital in a sort of no man’s land. “The enemy was master of the countryside and at our doorstep; at risk from the fury of the soldiers, we had everything to dread.”76 a woman’s siege and occupation

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That evening about six o’clock, Vaudreuil called a council at which it was decided to evacuate the army immediately to positions on the Jacques Cartier River, further up the Saint Lawrence. The evacuation went on all night, unnoticed by the British. The Hôpital-Général, like the town, where only a small garrison remained with the townspeople, had been abandoned by the French army. That night, those nuns who were not caring for the wounded gathered for prayer. “The three communities … prostrated themselves at the foot of the altars to beg divine mercy – like Moses, we only prayed with our hearts.” Between ten p.m. and midnight, their prayers were interrupted. Legardeur continues her account: “The silence and consternation that reigned among us allowed us to hear the loud and repeated knocks at our doors. Two young nuns who carried soup to the patients could not avoid being there when the portal was opened. The pallor and terror that had overcome them touched the officer, and he prevented the whole guard from entering.” The officer had been sent by Brigadier-General George Townshend, who had taken charge after Wolfe’s death. Legardeur noted, “He ordered the three mother superiors to come to him. He knew that the others had found refuge with us. He told the three of us that we should all be reassured, that a part of their army would encircle and take over our house so that the French army, which he knew was not far away, could not take their entrenchments by force.”77 Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay, who held the post of king’s lieutenant, was in charge of the beleaguered town. He was a military officer from a distinguished family of Canadian nobility. His older sister, Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay de Saint-Claude de la Croix, had just stepped down as mother superior of the Hôpital-Général earlier that year, and had reassumed the position of bursar. Since mid-August he had been a patient in his sister’s hospital, and was there, in fact, when the battle took place on the Plains of Abraham. He left immediately, however, to retake command of the town upon hearing of Montcalm’s defeat, despite his ill health. In deciding to withdraw his army from Beauport, Vaudreuil had sent directions to Ramezay to hold out only as long as food supplies allowed. Vaudreuil also sent a draft of articles of surrender. By 17 September, when Ramezay received some food and, more importantly, news that Lévis had rallied the soldiers upriver at the Jacques Cartier 244

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and had arrived at Saint-Augustin, less than a day’s march from the city, it was too late: Ramezay had already agreed to surrender. The articles were signed the next day, and the British entered the city. Women figured prominently in the reasons given for the town’s surrender. One witness calculated their number at four thousand.78 Ramezay himself cited two thousand six hundred women and children.79 On 15 September, the town’s remaining principal merchants and bourgeois drafted a request to Ramezay that urged surrender. They begged that their wives and children be spared the rage of the English: “What a spectacle for this small remaining group to see their wives and children immolated to their fury.”80 They asserted that the military officials should not sacrifice the few remaining men in the town; these husbands were needed to provide for their families: “Endeavour to preserve them for their wives and children.”81 In May, Vaudreuil had urged Canadians to fight to defend their property, women, and children. In September, the Canadians cited their families as a reason for saving what was left of their possessions in the town by surrendering it. While property damage had been high because of the bombardment and subsequent looting, there had been few civilian deaths. Wolfe had succeeded in breaking Canadian morale.82 Having failed to defend their women and children from the British, Canadian males attributed their surrender to this same duty to protect their wives and offspring. The sixth article of capitulation dealt with religion and gave protections to religious orders as part of permitting the practice of Catholicism: “The free exercise of the Roman religion is granted, likewise safe-guards to all religious persons.”83 The favourable experiences of the British at the Hôpital-Général must have aided Wolfe’s temporary successor, George Townshend, to accept this clause. The Hôtel-Dieu community returned to the upper city on 21 September. Legardeur of the Hôpital-Général recorded that “[t]he reverend mother Sainte-Hélène … touched when she saw us weighed down under the burden of work that increased daily, left twelve of her dear daughters who stayed until autumn and who were a great help to us.”84 Jérôme de Foligné described the very real uncertainties that awaited the town women when they returned after the surrender with rhetorical flourish: “It was on this day that we saw our unfortunate women come out of the woods dragging behind them their small a woman’s siege and occupation

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children, devoured by flies, without clothes, bewailing their hunger. What dagger blows for the poor women who did not know if they still had husbands and where their men would take them and with what aid they would give their poor children, at the beginning of a season during which it is difficult to protect oneself when one is in one’s household.”85 Like the Hôtel-Dieu nuns, they returned to bombed quarters needing repair, unsure where they would find food and firewood to survive the winter. However, the nuns discovered upon their return an advantage that ordinary women lacked. On 22 September, patients were admitted to the Hôtel-Dieu, but only a few. The daily register for admissions for that date notes: “The English, having reserved and taken our house for their sick troops, and having forbidden us from admitting any others without their orders or consent.”86 For the next two decades there would be few civilian patients.87 The Duplessis sisters had spent the last ten years fighting off attempts to turn the Hôtel-Dieu into a de facto military hospital. It would now be one until 1784, but changed circumstances meant that its repurposing as a British military hospital would contribute to its salvation. The regular payments from the British to the Hôtel-Dieu over twenty-five years aided its eventual solvency and assured that immediate necessities would be secured.88

A Mother Superior Navigates Occupation Whatever her dismay might have been, Duplessis attacked the crisis with her habitual determination and sense of practicalities. Repairing the monastery for the winter and securing foodstuffs and firewood were the most immediate needs. She wrote Robert Monckton, the British commander at the time, to describe how the state of the building threatened his officers: “Our house was neither burned nor flattened by the bombs and cannons, but it is so much in disrepair and it has rained so excessively in it that in the room where your sick officers are located, one can scarcely find a spot to place their beds because the ceiling is so full of holes. There are several chimneys damaged by cannonballs that put us in danger of a fire.” Roof and chimney repairs were urgent. She requested permission to bring lime and sand from Beauport. The condition of their farms and garden showed that they could not provide food to their patients or 246

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themselves: “Our fields have been ruined by the armies and cattle so that we haven’t gotten a blade of straw, and our garden plots were pillaged by all sorts of people who took away what the artillery did not destroy.” She added that the French cavalry had confiscated their livestock.89 She closed her letter, in much the same way she closed letters to French authorities, by mentioning the 1755 fire from which the hospital had not yet recovered. Duplessis’s request was effective. The British supplied food from their stores and paid 956 livres for their officers and soldiers cared for at the hospital that autumn.90 Duplessis was attentive to the family needs of sisters in the community. Two nuns wrote Monckton immediately after the capitulation to ask that their brothers, who had been captured at Carillon by the British in 1758, be freed. The first was a choir nun, Marie-Madeleine Trudel de Saint-Paul. When she was successful, a converse sister, Marie-Madeleine Rocheron de Sainte-Apolline, requested the same favour for her brother on 21 September. It is likely that Duplessis wrote this letter, and she may have written the first.91 During this period, Duplessis’s sister-in-law Geneviève Guillimin found her way to Montreal, where she and her daughter became boarders in November 1759 with Marguerite d’Youville’s Grey Sisters.92 Duplessis was able to send off short letters to supporters in France. These are particularly valuable since no letters written by lay women in the aftermath of the defeat have been published. Duplessis was frank but prudent in her judgments. Her letter to Villars of the Missions étrangères in Paris is noteworthy for its defence of Montcalm. Vaudreuil tried to shift the blame for the defeat to the French general.93 Duplessis’s summary, written a month later, probably for Villars, stresses the piety with which Montcalm died and his high reputation at court before it tries to attenuate the circumstances of his defeat: “They made a landing on the thirteenth of the same month at a poorly guarded spot and their attack was so sudden, that although they were indeed fewer in numbers than our army, they had the advantage, being sited on a rise and the French in a valley. This battle was bloody. Our forces retreated in disorder. The English general was killed. Monsieur the marquis de Montcalm was wounded and died the next day, 14 September, on the eve of receiving from the king new and greater favours, by which he was honoured. He received the favour of dying in a most Christian way, very submissive a woman’s siege and occupation

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to God’s commands, and of receiving the last sacraments with great presence of mind.”94 However, the Anse au Foulon was poorly guarded because of Montcalm’s obsession that the English attack would come at Beauport, and he ordered his troops to charge on the Plains without waiting for nearby reinforcements. Duplessis’s claim that the French lines were disadvantaged because they were formed up in a valley is only partially true. Montcalm positioned his troops on the Buttes-à-Neveu, higher than the English lines, but, as his second-in-command FrançoisGaston de Lévis noted, the English were positioned initially behind a rise among the fields on the plain.95 As the French descended the Buttes, their ranks became somewhat disorganized, and they fired their first volley too soon against the English, who had advanced to the top of the rise. Duplessis was on excellent terms with Montcalm, and she downplays the general’s responsibility. The second part of her letter to Villars deals with business. Duplessis maintains that her hospital has been poorly treated by Bigot and company: “We were quite deprived of favours during the preceding regime, despite the need that we had to be helped.” Thus she simply asks that Villars continue to lobby for the three favours that she had requested the previous year: expansion of the hospital, a loan of 30,000 livres, and relief from certain taxes. Her second letter can be compared to Legardeur’s 1765 account in that it is a circular one addressed to houses of their order in France.96 Although she is writing to women, Duplessis’s succinct account does not describe the nuns’ reaction to events in terms of emotions commonly attributed to women such as apprehension, tears, terror, and consternation, as Legardeur would do. Furthermore, there is little of Pontbriand’s doloristic providentialism found in his pastoral letter of 28 October, which saw the sins of the Canadians as the cause of the disaster and which Legardeur also used in her account. According to the bishop, only the conversion of each Canadian heart could reverse the military defeat, which he attributed to the just and avenging arm of the Lord: “If each individual does not reform completely his conduct, can we reasonably hope that God will cease to punish us?”97 Duplessis had herself used similar language of a God of Justice when she had commiserated with Hecquet over the sins of France and Canada. However, here she limits herself to the need to submit to 248

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the divine will: “God has permitted this sad turn of events, and one must indeed accept it.” Without saying it explicitly, she seems guided by a corollary she had often expressed to her friend Marie-Catherine: even when God permits the elect to suffer, he sends consolations to lighten the burden. She does not scrimp on details of their plight that might encourage alms from France, but she tempers them with compensatory facts. The five converse nuns who rode out the siege might not have saved the garden from pillage, but they did successfully guard the building’s contents. Compared to her condemnation of the hospital’s treatment under Bigot in her letter to Villars, Duplessis is effusive in her praise for the English. The hospital’s needs are being met: “They exercise their victory properly and make one hope for gentleness in their manner of government … We have received many courtesies from them since our return to our house where they call often … The English are the ones buying us the things we need.” Of course, she knew her letter would likely be read by English officials. The hospital, as well as the town, was fortunate that James Murray, rather than Wolfe, directed the occupation. Like Townshend, he had voiced objections to Wolfe’s campaign of destruction in August and September.98 Duplessis probably also wrote the duchesse d’Aiguillon. William Pitt’s 5 January 1760 letter to the duchess that will be quoted in the concluding chapter shows that, with Quebec in English hands, Duplessis realized the importance of lobbying the London authorities as she had once lobbied the French court.99 Nonetheless, there seem to have been periods when the British did not meet her requests. A 19 January 1760 letter from Murray’s secretary implies that moving the community during that difficult winter had been considered. After regretting that the general was “mortified” that he could not provide supplies that Duplessis requested, his secretary Hector Théophilus Cramahé wrote: “If the difficulty of finding means of subsistence makes you decide to leave this town, the general has ordered me to assure you that he will take every sort of arrangement to facilitate your obtaining the means to go to the place you choose for your refuge and that of your community.”100 The letter’s tone is cordial and helpful, and rather than tension with Murray, it leads one to believe the British general regretted not being able to offer more help, rather than being an example of the a woman’s siege and occupation

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administrative courtesy of refusal Bigot excelled in. The letter was written the day Duplessis fell ill from the attack that would leave her dead five days later. Article six of the surrender had guaranteed to the bishop the “liberty to come and exercise freely and with decency the functions of his office.”101 However, Pontbriand did not avail himself of this provision. He left Quebec with Vaudreuil and Bigot for Montreal, where supplies were more plentiful and where the French administrative team was based. He named Jean-Olivier Briand as his vicar. Duplessis corresponded with the bishop, who congratulated her on her good relations with the English: “I note with pleasure that the government under which you are presently looks favorably on you.” But aware of the proselytizing tendencies she had shown ten years earlier with Pehr Kalm, he recommended discretion in regard to her British patients: “I advise you not to talk to them much about religion. That could antagonize them. The piety and modesty of your comportment will have more effect, if God so wills.” He justified disregarding the religious ministry that had always accompanied the nuns’ medical care on the principle that the defeated owe obedience to their masters: “The Christian religion demands for victorious rulers who have conquered the obedience and respect that one owes to the others; thus you and all your sisters can have the same merit as when you serve the French.” The merit the nuns accrued for heaven would be no less, he assured her.102 The reversal of policy in regard to Protestants must have been particularly hard for Duplessis to accept, since Pontbriand had never shown the slightest tolerance for them. In 1747, and again as recently as 1757, the bishop had complained to the minister in Versailles that Huguenots were in the colony despite regulations against their presence. The 1747 letter mentions seven or eight merchants, but that modest number was too large for Pontbriand, and he wanted them expelled.103 In December 1759, in addition to the nuns’ not witnessing to Protestants, the bishop specified that Catholic soldiers among the British wounded were off limits as well. Even on their deathbeds, a discreet anointing and general absolution would have to do.104 In the name of prudence, he reassured a troubled Duplessis on this point on 31 December: “You must not exhort them, even the ones who

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10.4 Geneviève Duplessis was buried in May 1756 in the vaults of the Jesuit church, shown in this Richard Short view. After the bombing in 1759, the only church edifice intact enough to hold services was the Ursuline chapel, which the town’s Catholic parish and the Anglican occupiers shared.

might be Catholic because the government is opposed to that.”105 The institutional survival of his church was this bishop’s priority.106 One first-hand account of a visit by a British officer to the HôtelDieu during the beginning of the occupation gives indirect praise of Duplessis, although it does not mention her by name. John Knox recounted his visit, during which he was shown the collections of paintings that survived the bombing.107 He visited all three monasteries and even spent a week posted at the Hôpital-Général, where he was impressed by the breeding, elegance, and politeness of the nuns, who invited him to a breakfast tea, and by the good care given to the English wounded.108 His assessment of the Hôtel-Dieu Augustinians is much briefer: “The sisters of this convent are, in general, elderly women, less polite and complaisant than in the other two nunneries; which I impute to their remarkable austerity.”109 Duplessis, whom Knox surely met, was seventy-two. She must have been more reserved and businesslike than her Hôpital-Général and Ursuline counterparts and less willing to hide her displeasure. She would have been, however, pleased that her house’s austerity had been recognized. Duplessis’s dealings with the bishop and British chiefs concerned coping with the coming severe winter under occupation. All parties realized, however, that the seizure of the colony’s capital might not be definitive. Many of the articles of surrender ended with “until the possession of Canada shall have been decided between their Britannic and most Christian Majesties.”110 Both the Canadians and the French left in Quebec, like Duplessis and the English occupiers, knew that a French army under Lévis was gathering strength for a spring offensive to retake the town. Canada was only one theatre of a world war, and the overall peace settlement might leave Canada in French hands.

Conclusion The year 1759 produced no maiden warriors for Canada such as MarieMadeleine Jarret de Verchères, who held off Iroquois assailants in 1692 in the absence of her father, as her mother had already done in 1690. War at times occasions such a reworking of gender roles. However, during the Quebec campaign, women are not even described as helping improve the town’s fortifications, as was sometimes the 252

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case in Europe. Their only practical contribution mentioned is pitching in with the harvest and supply trains. Nonetheless, 1759 did see women administrators such as Duplessis, working within their normal gender roles, assure survival for their institutions, despite the failures of the colony’s military leadership. During warfare it is common for women’s roles to coalesce around the traditional ones they know best.111 Over the years, Duplessis had learned to clothe a forthright demand that the hospital’s needs be met in the deferential tone thought appropriate for women. This skill allowed her to exploit French and British notions of the civilized rules of war in order to salvage as much as possible for her hospital and community during her most trying year. When even her bishop could not envisage the needed evacuation from the town, she was ready with her own plan of action.

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Epilogue and Conclusion: Bride of an Unworthy Spouse: Femme forte or femme tendre? Death according to the Rule Duplessis had reported health problems as far back as 1730 at age fortythree, but in comparison with Geneviève, whose health was always worse and whose imminent death Marie-André prophesied as early as 1733, she minimized her own maladies. “People have predicted to me that I would bury my entire family … My health is better than ever, although I am not without much pain,” she reported in 1735.1 Both sisters suffered from lung problems; coughing up blood, accompanied by weakness, was the major symptom. While Geneviève had to be relieved of her duties as bursar several times, notably in 1747, it was only in 1754, at age sixty-seven, that Marie-André reported the need for a prolonged convalescence, although as usual, she played down her condition, citing her strong “French constitution”: “I indeed thought I was leaving for the other world six months ago. In our community, they are surprised to see me back on my feet. The milk that they had me drink did me much good. Nonetheless, my cough, which announces that my end is near, returned a few weeks ago, despite the measures of care that they oblige me to take. Even though I am speaking like this, do not think that I am at the point of death. One languishes sometimes for a long time. It was once predicted to

me that I would bury all my family, and that having a French body, it would be necessary to bludgeon me to death.”2 Then, in the summer of 1755, Marie-André was sidelined by a skin problem. When she became mother superior again in 1756, she was troubled by the example such exemptions from the rule gave to the community. They must have included being excused from her turn at night watch in the wards, since Bishop Pontbriand reassured her in a 1757 letter not to be disturbed on that score.3 The next year she was again minimizing her condition to Marie-Catherine, equating it simply with the gradual decline of old age: “Our age brings with it infirmities. Since God sees my spirit harried by worries, he graciously spares my body. I am doing well enough, and except for my weight, I would not consider myself old. Time passes very quickly and leads us to eternity.”4  She did not linger months between life and death as her mother and sister had done, and no unseemly outbursts, as in the first stages of their last illnesses, were reported. On 19 January 1760, she was attacked by a violent pain in the side. A French doctor was called, and General James Murray sent one of his own, but neither could save her. She remained lucid, and on the third day of her illness JeanOlivier Briand, who had been left as administrator of the Quebec church when Bishop Pontbriand left for Montreal, gave her the last sacraments, assisted by a Jesuit. Two days later, on 23 January, she died, a few months before her seventy-third birthday. As was the custom in monasteries when death could be predicted, she died surrounded by the entire community, which assembled to recite the prayers for the dying and to catch any last words and instructions. None, however, are reported in her death notice.5 The frankest report on her state of mind and on her legacy is not found in that notice, but in a letter written the following summer by the community’s assistant superior: “She died … with her heart pierced with sorrow, leaving a community without bread and other necessities of life, weighted down with debts caused by our fire; although she was not able to provide for our temporal needs because of the circumstances of the day, it is not the same on the spiritual side where she left us virtuous examples, whose memory will live eternally in our house.”6 She closed by requesting prayers for a principle dear

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to Duplessis’s heart: “that observance of the rule be practised as it has been up to the current moment.” Briand convened the community on 2 February to elect a successor. It chose Marie-Ursule Chéron des Anges. In congratulating her, Pontbriand reminded her that borrowing would be unavoidable in the circumstances, as if he wanted to warn her against Duplessis’s obsession: “It will indeed be necessary for you to take on debt, fortunate if you can find what it will take to keep your house afloat.”7 Chéron was an ailing caretaker and died in office in October 1762. Her successor, Marie-Louise Curot de Saint-Martin, whom Briand had named hospital bursar in 1760, proved to be the competent administrator Duplessis had been and eventually served six terms. The debt was practically eliminated. She would be superior when the community was able to reopen the hospital to civilians in 1784, after the British troops evacuated it. Duplessis’s manoeuvring in the 1750s to obtain patronage at court by trying to dedicate the annals to the duc de Richelieu played a role in this success. Letters from the marquis de Montcalm to Duplessis indicate that efforts to gain Richelieu’s support continued. On 12 November 1756, Montcalm noted that he had written to both Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon “to commend to them the interest of a house founded by their forebears and whose nuns serve so well God and the state.”8 The next year, he noted a letter from the duchesse stating she had solicited on the Hôtel-Dieu’s behalf.9 The dowager duchess Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac corresponded, in fact, with William Pitt, who promised protection for the hospital. The British leader wrote in early 1760, “Monsieur Pitt is deeply impressed by the flattering sign of kindly sentiments with which Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon has deigned to honor him. He is happy to be able to direct his attentions to a goal that is of value to humanity and gives him at the same time the honor of obeying the order of Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon.”10 Pitt contacted the military governor James Murray, who took steps to put the hospital on better financial footing by cancelling taxes Bigot had insisted the hospital owed.11 Duplessis might have been more astute to attempt to dedicate the annals to the duchess, rather than to Richelieu. The duchess continued her intervention in 1761 by asking Pierre de La Rue, who handled the affairs of the Quebec diocese in France, 256

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to intercede with both the French authorities and Pitt.12 Hans Stanley, whom Pitt had sent to Paris in late May 1761 to begin negotiations to end the war,13 wrote Pitt on 9 June: “The Duchess d’Aiguillon is most grateful for his Majesty’s gracious condescensions in favor of the convent founded by her ancestors at Quebec. She has recommended to my care some holy oils, to be used in the sacraments at Canada. If they reach you, I do not doubt of their being treated with that respect which she deserves, and which even a mistaken religion has a right to claim.”14 Whether or not these oils made their way to Quebec is less important than this proof of the nuns’ skill at setting in motion client-patron relations at the highest levels of state. The cosmopolitan solidarity of the British and French aristocracies trumped differences of religion and nationality. The Hôtel-Dieu found financial stability by becoming exactly what Duplessis had always opposed: a military hospital, and a British one at that. The Hôpital-Général, which had sought out a military role, faced bankruptcy after the fall of Quebec because of unreimbursed expenses for care that it had given to injured French troops and for wartime depredations to its estates. It saved itself by selling its most advantageous seigneurie in 1767.15 The reputation for solid piety and observance that the Hôtel-Dieu enjoyed under Duplessis’s leadership largely continued after her death. This is confirmed by three Protestant visitors to the Quebec convents: Pehr Kalm in 1749, John Knox in late 1759, and Frances Brooke between 1763 and 1767. All three were more struck by the noble manners of the Hôpital-Général nuns than by their piety. Knox noted what he called the “remarkable austerity” of the Hôtel-Dieu, although Kalm and Brooke suggested that the Ursulines had the greatest reputation for piety. None of the three found fault with the Hôtel-Dieu.16 There was no breakdown of religious discipline there, as was apparently the case at the Hôpital-Général in the aftermath of the war. In a secret instruction to the mother superior of that house that Micheline D’Allaire dates to about 1766, Briand, then bishop of Quebec, who knew that community well because he had made it his residence, taxed it with multiple offenses against poverty, obedience, and communal living.17 Despite the prediction that she would outlive her siblings, Marie-André was survived by her two brothers and by her friend Marie-Catherine Hecquet. The Jesuit lived another decade after bride of an unworthy spouse

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her. Just as Louis XV abandoned Canada to its unrelenting English enemies, the king acquiesced in 1764 to the suppression of the Society of Jesus, which had long been under fire from the philosophes and Jansenists. After the order was abolished, Jesuits were eligible for a pension, and François-Xavier, whose health had deteriorated, found refuge with the bishop of Langres. He died somewhere near Paris in December 1771.18 The only family member not in the Hôtel-Dieu’s orbit, CharlesDenis, ended badly, dying in Versailles on 14 August 1765.19 However, his wife seems to have managed to remake her life, many years after her husband’s death. After losing her home in 1757 in Quebec, Geneviève Guillimin eventually found her way to Montreal, where she and her daughter became boarders in November 1759 with Marguerite d’Youville’s Grey Sisters.20 The daughter, Marie-JosepheAndré Duplessis de Morampont, who bore the names of her two aunts in religion, signed a marriage contract with a young officer from France, Pierre-Louis de Rastel de Rocheblave, on 20 September 1760 in Montreal, just weeks after the surrender of that city to General Jeffery Amherst’s army.21 She and her mother seem to have still been in Montreal in 1762, but on 8 July 1766, the governor of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon wrote the minister in France that Madame Duplessis, having lost everything in the siege of Quebec, had been forced to spend the previous year on the islands, which remained French possessions, and that her husband had just died. Her request for relief was refused.22 She managed to reach France, probably with the help of her son-in-law, who continued his military service in other French colonies. On 25 May 1779 she married an officer in the coast guard, Antoine-Mathieu Jourjon, himself a widower, at the colonial port of La Rochelle.23 Upon his death, she finally received the royal pension she had sought; but not for the services of her first husband, rather for those of the second one!24 Marie-Catherine Hecquet died in her Parisian home on 7 July 1764, aged seventy-eight, in the presence of two Parisian in-laws with Jansenist sympathies. Burial was in her parish church of SaintHippolyte.25 Duplessis’s letters addressed to her eventually made their way to the French national archives because descendants with Jansenist ties preserved among family papers these marks of friendship from the sister of a Jesuit. 258

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Femme forte / femme tendre: The Managerial Femme forte When Duplessis died in 1760, she was eulogized for her devotion to observance of the rule, her talents as a writer, her prudence, and her gentleness. Only one eulogy mentions her force of character.26 H.R. Casgrain, in summing up Duplessis’s career in his history of the Hôtel-Dieu, contrasted her gentleness with the strength of her mentor Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. One was the “femme forte,” the strong woman, characterized by energy; the other the “femme tendre,” the gentle woman, characterized by mildness.27 However, Duplesssis’s gentleness, affability, and calm exterior belied both a steely tenacity and a tendency to brood over disasters she foresaw. Both character traits were present in her 1719 protest against the acquiescence of the advisory council to Saint-Vallier’s decision to build a house for ill priests at the hospital highlighted in this book’s introduction. Her reputed mildness was to some extent crafted, despite the contrast that she herself drew between her calmness and her sister’s impulsiveness. As one early business supplier learned, Marie-André could react “with a touch of fire,”28 but she moderated the tendency more successfully than Geneviève. In fact, Casgrain’s stark contrast between la femme forte and la femme tendre is misplaced and has contributed to an underestimation of Duplessis’s impact. Casgrain was working within the French hagiographic tradition that celebrated the cardinal virtue of fortitude in seventeenth-century holy women such as Jeanne de Chantal and Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation.29 This tradition took its inspiration from the Vulgate’s translation of the “capable wife” in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs as mulierem fortem. When rendered in French as femme forte, the title could apply to any woman as well as wives. In his history of the Hôtel-Dieu, Casgrain labelled Guyart, Juchereau, Catherine de Longpré de SaintAugustin, and even Marie-Catherine Tibierge de Saint-Joachim as femmes fortes, but not Duplessis. Casgrain was also implicitly invoking a second tradition of the femme forte, the warrior or amazon, since he compared Juchereau to Judith, who saved Israel by decapitating the Assyrian king Holofernes. These femmes fortes were celebrated during the regency of Anne d’Autriche when aristocratic women took up arms in the civil strife bride of an unworthy spouse

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called the Fronde. As Ian Maclean explained, such femmes fortes retained attributes usually ascribed to women – for example, beauty and compassion – but added masculine traits that invert misogynistic views of female nature: women are capricious and fickle; the femme forte is resolute and unswerving. Women are soft; the femme forte is energetic and courageous.30 If Casgrain had looked beyond received hagiographic stereotypes, he could have located a version of the femme forte that appeared toward in the second half of the seventeenth century and that allows for a more accurate assessment of Duplessis’s career. In reaction to amazon women who took political stands or participated in military action, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon used the praise of the good wife in Proverbs 31 to encourage aristocratic women to leave the temptations of city and court life and become efficient managers of their husbands’ rural estates.31 In his 1687 treatise on women’s education, De l’Éducation des filles, the future archbishop of Cambrai limited girls’ access to humanist learning,32 but proposed that they acquire the basic accounting, legal, and other skills needed for prudent stewardship of their families’ properties. Fénelon substituted an enhanced supervisory role for warrior qualities so that the new femme forte’s activities centred on domestic economy. Two decades before Fénelon, a woman, in fact a Benedictine abbess famous for her humanist learning and ties to Parisian salon circles, Marie-Éléonor de Rohan, had published a paraphrase of this last chapter of Proverbs centred on the same managerial role that is even more relevant for assessing Duplessis. Rohan’s paraphrase does not translate the Latin text of the Vulgate literally. It inserts features not found in the biblical text. For example, Rohan’s praise of the femme forte explicitly adds tenderness to the model: “All of her words are lessons of wisdom, and they are accompanied by a sweetness that is never interrupted by bursts of anger.”33 Even more importantly, Rohan’s version highlights the subordination of women inherent in this model. First, she emphasizes the silence expected of women by stating that the femme forte “only” speaks to console and instruct.34 In addition, her femme forte is not only the wife who manages her husband’s estates as competently as her husband might. Rohan adds that this wife multiplies her spouse’s wealth and advances his career: “She obtains for him the highest positions and makes him celebrated in the eyes of men.”35 260

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Duplessis found herself in the fraught position of this managerial femme forte. The model incorporates a grave gender imbalance that puts high expectations on the wife while prescribing limits on her speech and allowing her husband to reap the rewards of her foresight and industry. Duplessis was a supremely competent and resourceful wife married to an unstable, unreliable spouse. Nuns were, of course, seen as wedded to Christ, but Christ was not the unworthy husband here. The unreliable spouse was the colonial state that the hospital served, and its male administrators. Theirs was not the irresponsibility of her brother Charles-Denis who abandoned wife and daughter. Because the king chronically underfunded his colony, even the best of officials such as Gilles Hocquart were more like heads of a large harem, unable to provide for all their wives. The seraglio analogy can even be stretched to apply to Bishops Saint-Vallier and Pontbriand, who favoured the Hôpital-Général over the Duplessis sisters’ Hôtel-Dieu. Years of royal underinvestment and administrators who routinely put family advancement over service to the king came to a head in the military miscalculations of Montcalm, Vaudreuil, and Ramezay in the 1759 defeat. Women such as Duplessis were forced to cope with this colonial system that compounded the failings of the patriarchal French state and church. And unlike Marie-Catherine Hecquet and Duplessis’s sister-in-law Geneviève Guillimin, she could not file for a financial separation from an irresponsible spouse. The situation of the managerial femme forte caught in this colonial gender imbalance is crucial to assessing Duplessis’s accomplishments and impact in a Canada undergoing rapid change. Her career as an administrator was not without its disappointments. Her surest coup was the purchase of the Saint-Augustin seigneurie, which delivered steady income and supplies over the years. Her apparent failure was not engineering a major enlargement of the hospital. However, her legacy stands up well in comparison with other leaders of women’s communities, and indeed with other Canadian women of the period. Moreover, because we have the wide-ranging correspondence of Marie-André and her sister Geneviève – the sort of business and personal letters largely missing in the case of other mother superiors of her generation (or laywomen) – a much more rounded assessment has been possible.36 We have an inside view of how Duplessis worked the various networks of administrators, suppliers, and supporters in a bride of an unworthy spouse

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society where clientage was so important, and of how she mobilized her family to support the hospital. Bishops and intendants might grumble about the “independence” shown by the Duplessis sisters, but they tolerated it. Fifty years later, as François Rousseau noted, Canadian ecclesiastical authorities would judge such an independent attitude inadmissible.37 She seems to have sensed that her fears at times could paralyze her. On 15 July 1758, at a time of food shortages for everyone in the town, when the hospital was having difficulty feeding its patients and staff, Duplessis wrote Pontbriand asking him to give her courage. Flour was available, but at such an inflated price that she feared not being able to repay debts in the fall: “A word of reply from you will make me more courageous, and I will act boldly.” Pontbriand replied briskly and imperatively: “My dear daughter, one must insure that one has what is required to live. It is better to borrow than put life at risk. Buy the flour.” Sometimes she needed to have her back up against a wall. When the 1755 catastrophe made borrowing necessary to rebuild, Duplessis was more than up to the task. Despite her fears and need for occasional reassurance, she guided her twin institutions, the community and the hospital through the siege and beginning of the occupation.

Writing Her Community / Writing New France Duplessis’s firsts as a Canadian writer argue for a place for her among New France’s notable authors. Her earliest texts show an innovative spirit found nowhere else in the literature of the French regime. The fictional frame of her Histoire de Ruma could have been the product of a Parisian salon and seems to have no precedent in convent writing. Likewise, the structure of her Musique spirituelle, based on parallels between monastic life and Baroque music, stretches the conventions of convent texts. Although a nun, she had no qualms about declaring that one goal of her writing was to please and amuse and even to satisfy the curiosity of her readers. This is particularly prominent in her early texts, the Histoire de Ruma and the Musique spirituelle, and plays a role in the Annales. In wrapping up her encomium of Louis XIV in that book, she declared that she took pleasure in writing it, just as she expected her nun readers to enjoy it: “They will have as 262

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much pleasure in hearing this great king talked about, as I have in writing something regarding him.”38 In 1730, she addressed the issue head-on when she maintained to Hecquet that pleasure and edification could go hand in hand: “Although my state as a nun commits me to mortify myself in all things, I do not find fault with the pleasure that I experience in seeing your letters because they edify me while gladdening me.”39 However, by 1730, she had largely forgone the wit that marks her first two texts. The shift likely took place during the redaction of the Annales. Their dedicatory letter asserts that the entire book will be written in the “simple and naïve” style of the accounts of the early days of the hospital composed by the founding nuns that are quoted extensively in the first pages. In a 1720 letter to Hecquet, Duplessis roundly criticized the airs of a woman who had recently returned from aristocratic circles in France: “Nevertheless she has much wit. She is knowledgeable about numerous subjects. She has read all the tales, and her conversation is quite amusing, but I prefer less sparkle and a more natural tone. Affectation has always been odious to me.”40 Marie-André could well be accusing herself of similar failings. At the end of this letter she bemoaned her spiritual tepidness just at the time when her brother was exhorting her to aspire to a higher level of commitment to her vocation. No other eighteenth-century Canadian nun can rival Duplessis. Devotional texts, such as the many that Duplessis wrote for her community, do not seem to have survived from other convents. At the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal, Marie-Anne-Véronique Cuillerier and Catherine Porlier left short chronicles that mix coverage of the wars with events at their hospital and monastery. Their texts have nothing of the polish of Duplessis’s Annales and little of the verve of their predecessor, Marie Morin. Morin’s substantial annals are entitled, like Duplessis’s, a history of the “establishment” of her hospital, but their make-up is quite different. Morin composed hers over a twentyeight-year period from 1697 to 1725 and never attempted to blend its disparate parts into a smooth, coherent volume as Duplessis did. When Morin cited her “inability” and her “meagre” talent as an historian, or apologized for a lack of skill,41 she was not invoking the kind of exaggerated modesty that Duplessis used when she apologized that as a woman writer she could not summon the needed eloquence to bride of an unworthy spouse

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compose a proper encomium for Jean Talon.42 Although Morin had spent a few years as a pupil of the Ursulines of Quebec, she did not have Duplessis’s intellectual fibre. The “simple and naïve” style proclaimed in the dedicatory letter of the Quebec annals is not nearly as down-to-earth as the style of Morin’s Simple and True History that gives the Montreal annals their warm appeal and makes them compelling on their terms. Duplessis had been forced to hide her voice behind the official author of her history, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. Morin spoke directly with the authority of an eyewitness who had joined her community in 1662, just three years after its founding, and who had served as bursar and mother superior. Morin’s eye is focused pointedly on Montreal, unlike Duplessis, who situated her hospital in the entire sweep of the colony’s development. Morin felt obliged to include accounts of the Phips and Walker invasions, but hers are paltry in comparison with Duplessis’s lengthy reports. Both Morin and Duplessis seek to edify their communities, but Duplessis also aims to provide hers with practical information. The Ursulines had an annalist with a flair for eloquence, MarieCharlotte Daneau de Muy, who covered the military operations of the war leading up to the fall of Quebec with considerable detail, to judge by the many extracts included in the nineteenth-century history of that monastery.43 However, in late May 1759, she stopped including military events in her chronicle to concentrate on convent affairs, and she died the day after the battle of the Plains of Abraham. Also capable of rivalling Duplessis might have been Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny, whose account of the 1759 siege of Quebec viewed from the angle of the Hôpital-Général is somewhat longer and has more scope than any of Duplessis’s short later pieces. Like Duplessis, whose account of the 1755 hospital fire was a plea for help to rebuild, Legardeur shaped her narrative as a lobbying effort to convince the French court to pay its debt to her institution, but she left no other substantial texts. The Annales themselves may be a patchwork of shorter pieces, but they were conceived as a unified book covering eighty years of history. Duplessis’s own vision pervades her book. She takes pride in the spiritual valour of the foundresses and their successors, in the level of care the nuns provide, and in their prudent administration of the hospital. However, the colony’s precarious financial situation 264

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constantly jeopardizes their achievement. Canada did subsequently enjoy economic expansion after 1720, but Duplessis’s constant scramble to finance hospital operations meant that she always saw the colony as disadvantaged. Despite this overarching vision, the book is not meant to be read straight though. It summarizes conveniently various documents of record preserved in chapter meeting minutes, registers of professions, account books, etc. Thus, its most inviting sections – at least for modern readers – are the longer narrative set pieces that sometimes seem lost amid the routine chronicling of yearly elections and the entrances and deaths of minor members of the community. After the Annales were completed, Duplessis appears not to have undertaken any further texts of substantial length. When she announced their publication to Hecquet, she did not mention plans for a sequel. Shorter texts, in fact, became her comfort zone, either by talent or because she wrote when she could fit in time between other tasks. She had settled into the established genres of convent writing, which she executed with a sure hand. Although her community and its hospital were always her focus, she knew that she was writing a Canadian chronicle as well. From her perch in the upper town near the ramparts overlooking the Saint Charles and Saint Lawrence Rivers, she had a bird’s-eye view of the colony. Its religious, economic, and political affairs had a daily impact on her institution. However, Duplessis wrote New France quite differently from two other major women writers of the colony, Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon. Guyart’s and Bégon’s letters have been seen as giving Canadian literature worthy examples of famous European models. Already at the time of her death, Guyart was saluted as a second Teresa of Avila, “the Teresa of Canada.” Bégon’s reports of the life of Montreal’s high society have the allure of the court gossip that Madame de Sévigné sent her daughter, and her unrequited obsession with her son-in-law Honoré Michel de Villebois has the flavour of the passion that Julie de Lespinasse would have for Jacques-Hippolyte de Guibert later in the eighteenth century. Guyart’s correspondence with her son and Bégon’s with her son-in-law had largely unavowed compulsions as their subtext: the nun’s guilt for her abandonment of her adolescent son Claude to become an Ursuline and Bégon’s one-sided solicitude for Michel de Villebois. bride of an unworthy spouse

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New France was the site of Guyart’s mystical and apostolic epic. She never abandoned the utopic vision of a church in New France modelled on the early Christians that drove her initial missionary impulse. Her letters recounting the successes and challenges of the missions can be seen as part of the Jesuit publicity machine that produced the yearly published accounts known as the Jesuit Relations. The Jesuit editors, in fact, at times solicited texts from her. She saw the missions in terms of miracles of grace and martyrdom. At the end of her life, she did acknowledge that her early dream of “civilizing” the Indigenous population was illusory, but she did not give up her hope of Christianizing them on a large scale.44 Duplessis was disabused from the start on both scores. Her administrative letters to secure scarce resources give Duplessis’s correspondence a dimension missing in Guyart’s. Of Guyart’s two hundred seventy-eight surviving letters, only about three – routine letters to the governor and French financial agents – represent what must have been an extensive business and administrative correspondence. On the other hand, at least half of Duplessis’s remaining letters deal with hospital operations. If they were merely a dry suite of orders placed and accounts paid, this correspondence would have little resonance. However, she engaged colonial officials and patrons in France on many levels. She strategized with Ruette d’Auteuil over how to address the intendant Dupuy, fretted through multiple drafts of a petition to the minister of the marine Rouillé, and orchestrated campaigns to win support from French donors in the 1720s and 1750s. Her administrative correspondence – from routine letters dealing with the appointment of confessors with Pontbriand or flour supplies with Bigot to the formal bureaucratic eloquence of her requests to the minister in Versailles – is her passionate defence of “the poor,” that is the Hôtel-Dieu, poorly treated by French colonial administrators. Like Duplessis, Guyart wrote annual letters back to France each fall, but the Ursuline focuses more on the progress of “this new church” than on political and economic development. Duplessis’s letters to Hecquet span four decades from 1718 until 1758 and thus take up where the Annales end. They share the same vision of the colony’s precarious state found in that book. She organized them as chronicles like the Annales, as snapshots of the notable events in 266

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the colony and hospital of the year. Duplessis’s crisp style in these letters and the quality of the information she presented was evident to readers of two extracts from them published during her lifetime – her account of the Inuit in Hecquet’s book and her description of the “hospital rock” in the Annales. The first attracted the attention of Louis de Jaucourt, who used it in the Encyclopédie. Duplessis’s longest text is an institutional chronicle written for her sister nuns. Guyart’s is an account of her interior life written for her son, the Relation de 1654. It is a chronicle of sorts, in which time is not measured by years but by successive “states of prayer,” thirteen in all. This second thread of Guyart’s writing in Canada – her spiritual advice to her Benedictine son – met with more success than her missionary enterprise. Claude Martin became a pillar of his Congregation of Saint-Maur. By publishing her writings and her biography, he opened the cause that led to his mother’s canonization in 2014. Duplessis only focused incidentally on herself. Managing a poor hospital in a needy New France, she wrote to secure resources for her “poor,” and to maintain the quality of community spiritual life that she had found at the Hôtel-Dieu. Élisabeth Bégon was a close contemporary of Duplessis – only nine years younger – and she too could talk about her “poor country.”45 Canada might have been Bégon’s “dear fatherland,”46 but family loyalty propelled her. New France was the family’s stage. The only Canadian by birth of these three women, Bégon left her native land behind when prospects in France seemed brighter. She recounted the foibles and corruption of the Montreal elite for her son-in-law Michel de Villebois, who held a post in the colonial administration in New Orleans, between November 1748 and autumn of the next year, when she left for France. Once in Rochefort, she reported to him the news she received from correspondents in Canada and her contacts in the French colonial administration until his death in late 1752. Because she was unable to send letters regularly, Bégon recorded her daily routine as an intense, concentrated diary, written not just for herself, but with the hope of engaging her seemingly indifferent son-in-law. Her style has a gossipy sparkle that delights readers today. Bégon’s outlook was worldly and her piety conventional. She was chiefly motivated by advancing the prospects of her family, unlike Guyart and Duplessis, who were committed to Canadian institutions. bride of an unworthy spouse

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Bégon sent gossip not just to entertain Michel de Villebois, but also to further his career. Once in Louisiana, he began accusing his superiors, including Vaudreuil – whom Duplessis would later count as a protector – of corruption. Bégon, who had managed to rent her Montreal house to Bigot on advantageous terms, scolded her sonin-law for not grasping, as others had, how the colonial system was exploited by royal officials for their own benefit and for not grabbing his share of the bounty: “Thus take advantage, my dear son, of their lessons and work accordingly.”47 This corruption, clientism, and inefficiency that were the lifeblood of the colonial regime frustrated Duplessis at every turn. However, there is much more to Bégon’s letters than this socialite chronicle of New France’s elite. They are gripping because they reveal the intensity of her emotional life: her obsession with her son-in-law, and her devotion to the education of his daughter. They are infused with an immense, but largely unarticulated, frustration that goes beyond Michel de Villebois’s failure to reciprocate her solicitude. Colonial society could offer a laywoman like Bégon no social role to match her talents. She spotted the hypocrisies and contradictions of her world, but, trapped within them, had little urge to analyze them. What began in Bégon’s early diary entries as tittle-tattle about the colonial elite took a turn worthy of a sentimental novel in the final letters, when her son-in-law refused her career advice and withdrew guardianship of his daughter from her. Duplessis is the most wide-ranging and versatile writer of eighteenth-century New France, even though after her early innovative texts she stayed within the conventions of convent writing. She worked in many genres: devotional texts, lengthy and brief historical narratives, private and administrative correspondence. The difficulty of accessing her writings other than the Annales, her ambivalence about Canada (although she devoted fifty years to a key institution in Quebec), and her status as a nun have worked against the recognition she deserves. She excelled at narrative texts, but lacked an autobiographic flair. Personal effusions are spare in her writings. She preferred to chronicle the colony’s affairs, her community’s life, or her family’s activities. She wrote most of her texts for the HôtelDieu community with little thought of reaching a larger public. Still, she thought of some of them – especially early ones – as books. 268

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She gave the manuscripts of the Musique spirituelle and the Annales the layout of printed books.48 Toward the end of her career, she went further. By securing publication of the Annales in 1751, she recognized that she had indeed authored a book, a book that told a Canadian success story of the establishment of her hospital against great obstacles. The wrongheaded policies of colonial administrators now endangered that success, thus her need to reach an audience in France. Duplessis is the first Canadian woman to arrange publication of her own book. She is in fact one of the rare residents of French colonial Canada to do so. Most books about New France, such as those of Lahontan and Charlevoix, were published by men upon their return to Europe after a stint in the colony.49 Few writers of New France can match Duplessis’s legacy.

Force Allied with Mildness Duplessis spent her entire life, except for the short interlude in her father’s home in Quebec, in environments controlled by women. She was raised by two women in Paris who shaped her head for business and her devotion. At age twenty, she entered the convent, where she was joined shortly by Geneviève. Her defence of the nuns’ financial management of the hospital can be seen as an effort to maintain female control of an institution that women staffed. However, episcopal oversight and the need for public subsidies meant that males were not just looking over the nuns’ shoulders, but had the final word when they cared to assert themselves. Early on, at least, she showed uneasiness with this gender hierarchy by venting her displeasure with male authority figures onto other women. In 1719, it was her sisters on the advisory council who accepted Saint-Vallier’s house for ill priests. The next year, she displayed her scorn of male Jansenist leaders by mocking nuns who dared to take theological stands and join the appeal of Unigenitus: “Their names have the honour of being below several bishops and above several scribblers and tract writers whose signatures were bought to add to the total.”50 Although Duplessis was perhaps the closest thing to an intellectual woman that could be found in the colony, and perhaps the only one who might have read the papal bride of an unworthy spouse

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document, she was not troubled by the fact that the eighty-third of the 101 propositions condemned by the bull defended women’s right of access to scripture. It was the indiscreet Geneviève, not MarieAndré, who chafed in the 1750s against the restraints placed on nuns acting as businesswomen who could not leave their cloister to attend to affairs in person. Duplessis learned how to work with bishops, and sometimes around them. She learned how to prepare her proposals for chapter meetings so that the community inevitably adopted them. The model of the managerial femme forte who allied strength and gentleness allows us to understand how Duplessis used the rhetoric of humility and obedience expected from nuns. She instructed Ruette d’Auteuil in 1727 to work within its confines: “Keep in mind, if you please, that nuns are speaking, and consequently they must always be mild, without however sacrificing anything of the vigour that is needed.”51 Her recommendation to Ruette d’Auteuil to clothe force with gentleness points to how she negotiated the tensions inherent in this gender model. Douceur here is not so much mildness, sweetness, or softness, to judge by the drafts of letters sent in the Dupuy affair, as it is sensitivity to conventional social and gender hierarchies. Her force or amazon spirit was unswerving – and sometimes counterproductive – in standing up for the rights of the hospital. She combined this grit with a savvy about social conventions and an air of affability as she managed the hospital and community. Her success in guiding the Augustinian sisters for thirty years was made possible because behind her shield of “tenderness” this manager had the tenacity of a warrior femme forte. Writing this biography has been possible because two women can indeed be fast friends. Duplessis often chided Hecquet for not always being faithful to their annual rendezvous. However, of all the personal exchanges she maintained, this one has survived because her friend treasured her letters. Duplessis often closed them with some variant of the expression “our tender and constant friendship.” Despite separation, the Jansenist and the Jesuit’s sister used forbearance to refashion a version of their childhood bond under the banner of Christian friendship. In her 1755 Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, Hecquet conspicuously declared Marie-André to be “my intimate friend,”52 even though she seems to have hidden her fervent allegiance to Jansenism. On the 270

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other hand, complete intimacy did mark Marie-André’s particular friendship with her nun sister, and reading Geneviève’s frank letters against her sister’s has proved revealing. Their administrative collaboration brought them together, and they created for themselves a nest of security where they exchanged confidences about their spiritual ambitions and strategized for the hospital. They could let slip the mask of deference and decorum they had to display with male outsiders and even to some extent with other community members. The praise Geneviève made of her sister’s friendship with Hecquet applies better to her own with Marie-André: “one relishes the sweet pleasantness (douceur) of having solid and constant friends.”53 The sister-confidants had all the more fortitude to fight for their hospital because they could withdraw to this intimacy.

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notes Introduction 1 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, Actes capitulaires, 7 August 1719. 2 Ibid. 3 hdq-f1-k1, 3/3: 5, 20 May 1730 letter of Dupas, apothecary at La Rochelle. 4 See Choquette, “‘Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu.’” Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 81–92, shows how the concept was used by the Jesuits to attract female benefactors in France to finance the nun and lay “amazons in Canada.” 5 Gray’s The Congrégation de Notre-Dame deals with three mother superiors: Marie Barbier, who antedates Duplessis, and MarieJosèphe Maugue-Garreau and Marie Raizenne at the end of the eighteenth century. Noel has focused on the Hôpital-Général and stresses its aristocratic tendencies; she discusses the RamezayDuchesnay duo in “Besieged but Connected,” “Caste and Clientage,” and “Decoding the Eighteenth-Century Convent,” in Along a River, 182–204. This book synthesizes the last forty years of research on Canadian convents within a powerful interpretation of women’s roles in Canada into the 1830s. Noel generally focuses more on the official correspondence of governors and intendants than on internal documents that give the nuns’ perspective. 6 Wheelwright entered the Ursulines in 1713. Her documentary record as an Ursuline before she became mother superior is thin, and Little has to rely on generic descriptions of convent practices to reconstruct much of her life as a nun in The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Julie Wheelwright’s Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright makes excellent use of surviving

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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Ursuline documents and is a more conventional biography, although it includes chapters that narrate the author’s research journey. Carr, “Une ‘histoire véritable’ littéraire,” 171–90. Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle (1718),” 50–9. At the 1945 colloquium in honour of the centenary of FrançoisXavier Garneau’s Histoire du Canada, Gustave Lanctot, the Dominion Archivist, regretted the absence of a paper on Duplessis in his plenary lecture: “A surprising thing that has not yet been pointed out is that the first Canadian to attempt historical work is a woman named Marie-Andrée Duplessis, whose Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec might well have deserved to have a place on the program of this centenary” (Centenaire de l’Histoire du Canada, 18). Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, ed. Ghislaine Legendre. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” ed. Verreau. Duplessis “is perhaps not inferior to her” (41). Casgrain, Histoire, 434. Ibid., 331. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, ed. J.-Edmond Roy. G. Duplessis, “La Manne de Jésus”; M.-A. Duplessis, “La Plaie du cœur divin.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” ed. A.-L. Leymarie. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, ed. Albert Jamet. Gies, “Mère Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, annaliste et épistolière.” Rémillard, “Mère Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène,” 388–408. Ibid., 388. LeBlanc, Anthologie, 226. Rousseau’s three books, based on an intimate knowledge of the Hôtel-Dieu’s archives, give a more balanced and authoritative treatment than any of the three colonial Quebec monasteries have received. Although his revised thesis, L’Œuvre de chère, focuses on food practices, it contains much detail about other aspects of the hospital’s operations. His two-volume history of the Augustinian sisters and their hospital, La Croix et le scalpel, combines an insightful account of the evolving spirituality that inspired the

notes to pages 7–10

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

nuns with institutional practices. His La Passion de servir focuses on key figures in the pre-Duplessis history of the house. Melançon and Dubois, “Les Amitiés féminines,” 97–113. Simon, “Intérêt pharmaceutique des lettres adressées à l’apothicaire Féret.” J. Roy, “Stratégies épistolaires”; “Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre.” J. Roy, “Femmes et littérature … au-delà de la Sainte-Trinité.” Fino, L’Hospitalité, figure sociale de la charité. Théry, in De plumes et d’audace, makes use of the annals, but gives little attention to Duplessis as their author. Smart, in De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan, devotes a chapter to Élisabeth Bégon’s correspondence, but only mentions Duplessis’s in passing (97–8). Piché discusses the project in “‘Ma très chère mère du Canada.’”  Ursule-Marie des Anges in F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, ed. Roy, appendix, xiv. On the importance of transatlantic families, see Hardwick et al., “Introduction,” 205–24. The only work to shed new light on François-Xavier since J.Edmond Roy is Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis.” Hecquet, Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel. It was republished as an appendix by Lyon-Caen, who traced Hecquet’s entire family over several generations in Un Roman bourgeois.

Chapter One 1 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. Lyon-Caen’s Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV exploits a wealth of archival material about the Homassel family and to a lesser extent about the Leroys. 2 See Langer, Perfect Friendship, 14–39, for an overview that begins with antiquity and an analysis of the paradoxes of the standard canons of friendship. Hayes shows how two female moralists in the eighteenth century, the marquise de Lambert and Mme d’Arconville, doubted the possibility of friendship between women, just as previous male writers had (“Friendship and the Female Moralist,” 171–89). 3 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 48.

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4 For information on this monastery, see Houth, “Les Couvents du tiers ordre,” 459–62. 5 This information about Marie Leroy’s family comes from the wedding contract of her brother Denis Leroy (anf, Minutier central, 21 April 1686, Étude X, 210), and the 6 November 1694 inventory after the death of Pierre Josse (Minutier central, Étude XXXIII, 381), supplemented by information from Pasquier, Relevé des naissances, mariages. Le Peletier might have played a role in Georges Duplessis’s posting to Canada since he signed the wedding contract of Georges’s brother-in-law, Denis Leroy, in 1686. 6 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 42. 7 Angot, Dictionnaire historique, 3: 517–18. He died in his parish on 13 January 1724 (Archives de la Mayenne, parish register). In 1728, the parishioners sued the sons of his brother Denis Leroy, his heir, trying to reclaiming 3,000 livres they said their pastor owed the church (20 July 1728 judgment, Archives de la Mayenne, B 631). 8 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 144. 9 Ibid., 42. 10 anf, Minutier central, 31 March 1686, Étude CII, 134. 11 16 December 1701 burial according to the parish registers of SaintMartin de Chevreuse, Archives des Yvelines. She had died the previous day at age sixty-eight. Her son Denis Leroy was there, but Marie Leroy is not listed as present. 12 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 26, 107–10. 13 Ibid., 41–2. For more information on this guild, see Crowston, Fabricating Women, 74–6. 14 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. 15 Matthew 5:44. 16 John 15:13. 17 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 114. 18 Ibid., 127–8. 19 Ibid., 114. 20 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182. 21 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 111. 22 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 50. 23 Ibid., NF 4: 48. 24 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 194–5. 25 Ibid., appendix, xii.

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26 On this institution, see Coüard, “Contribution à l’histoire de l’instruction publique.” 27 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 143. 28 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 194. 29 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 300–1. 30 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 118. 31 hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, Dissection spirituelle, twenty-first day. 32 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 114. 33 Ibid., 123–4. 34 Ibid., 127. 35 Ibid., 125. 36 The year 1702 is sometimes given as the date of her departure because Ursule-Marie des Anges said in her obituary letter that Duplessis’s mother came for her when she was fifteen. However, it is likely to have occurred in 1701, since Duplessis wrote Hecquet on 21 October 1720 that her mother had come for her in 1700, and Hecquet stated that Leroy cut short her visit because of her quarrel with her sister when Marie-André was about thirteen. In the Histoire de Ruma, Duplessis said she regretted leaving behind her grandmother who died in December 1701. Her departure must have predated this death. The intendant Jean Brochart de Champigny wrote the minister on 15 October 1700, “Madame Duplessis is travelling to France on the ship the Seine in order to bring back the rest of her family,” and requested that she be granted passage on the king’s ship for the return (anf anom col c11a 18/fol. 92–108v). 37 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182. 38 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 75. 39 Ibid., NF 3: 306. 40 Ibid., NF 3: 300–1. 41 On Jacques Homassel’s dealings with Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, see Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 91. A sample of Georges Duplessis’s dealings with his son, Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, is discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter Two 1 anf, Minutier central, 31 March 1686, Étude CII, 134. 2 Son of Georges Regnard and Jeanne Fournier, he was baptized on

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Easter day 1657 in the parish church of Saint-Utin. His godfather was Monsieur de Saint-Léger le jeune, and his godmother Mademoiselle de Meix-Tiercelin. His mother Jeanne Fournier died in 1680 and his father in 1682, according to parish registers (Archives de la Marne). Georges’s wedding contract lists both him and his deceased father as “sieur de Morampont,” but this honorific does not imply nobility or even possession of a seigneurie. Morampont is a manor house just outside of Saint-Utin. Georges might have taken the appellation “du Plessis” from a family property to distinguish himself from other brothers. His son Charles-Denis used the “de Morampont” appellation consistently. According to a letter of François-Xavier, his younger brother Charles-Denis was involved in the 1750s in a lawsuit involving a Morampont inheritance (11 April 1751 letter of F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 277). The fief of Morampont changed hands frequently, to judge by the number of persons holding the title of seigneur in the parish registers, and it is not certain when the Regnards acquired it. 3 Not present were two surviving brothers of her father, who lived in relative comfort. The best situated was Jacques Leroy (1638–1710), who died at Versailles, where he was an officer in the household of the duchess of Bourgogne. (Burial at Saint-Martin de Chevreuse, 10 February 1710, Archives des Yvelines.) For his will and inventory see anf, Minutier Central, 11 February 1710, Étude XXIII, 401. His post as serdeau involved clearing the table in the elaborate ceremonial of meals at the palace. One of four gentlemen holding this title, he served three months of the year, from January through March (Trabouillet, Etat de France, 2: 66). Another brother, Charles Leroy, who lived on the Rue de la Huchette, is listed as a “bourgeois de Paris” in his renunciation after the death of his brother Jacques (anf, Minutier central, 24 February 1710, Rénunciation, Étude XXIII, 401). 4 In addition to Gédéon Berbier du Metz, we find his brother Louis Berbier du Metz, commendatory abbot of the abbey of SaintMartin de Huiron near Vitry-Le-François. Their sister Marguerite was also present, along with her husband Antoine Le Ménestrel, treasurer of the king’s buildings (trésorier des bâtiments du roi). On the Berbier du Metz clan, see Castelluccio, Le Garde-Meuble de la couronne, 77–98. Jacques Fournier (not listed as a relative

278

notes to pages 30–1

5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

despite bearing the name of Georges’s mother) was captain-colonel of the three companies of guards and archers of Paris (capitainecolonel des trois compagnies des gardes et archers de Paris), a sort of bourgeois militia. anf, Minutier central, 21 April 1686, Étude X, 210. Georges Duplessis and Marie Leroy are not among the witnesses of her brother Denis’s contract, signed three weeks after theirs. Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances, 35–8, 50–5. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 138. Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: 89n. Pierre-Georges Roy notes that although in hundreds of documents Duplessis is called the treasurer of the marine in Quebec, he most likely only occupied that post on an interim basis and served rather as a deputy or associate to the official representative of the treasurer general (La Ville de Québec, 1: 474). On the overall functioning of the institution, see Legohérel, Les Trésoriers généraux; see Shortt, ed., Documents, for its functioning in Canada, e.g. 1: 49n. Keyes gives more information in “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux.” Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux,” 184–5. This category of financier, who held and dispersed monies, was distinct from the two other major groups of financiers during the Bourbon regime: the farmers general of taxes, who collected customs and excise taxes, and the receivers general of finances, who collected taxes on property, persons, and income such as the taille (Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 85–6). Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: 75n. Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 295–6. Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: xli. Ibid., 1: li. Ibid., 1: 87. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, i; notice biographique, xiv. 25 October 1696 letter of Champigny to the minister, anom col c11a 14/fol. 196–207v. 27 October 1698 letter of Champigny to the minister, anom col c11a 16/fol. 130.  4 November 1740 letter of G. Duplessis to Féret, in M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 95–6.

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20 19 October 1705 letter of Jacques Raudot to the minister, anom col c11a 22/fol. 297–319v. 21 On Dupuy’s piety, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 389–90. 22 Cliche, Les Pratiques de dévotion, 197. 23 J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 57. 24 anom col c11a 113/fol. 262–262v, 9 October 1721, “Balance des fonds remis, recettes extraordinaires et des dépenses de l’année 1711.” This salary had not increased in 1730. That year, the intendant Gilles Hocquart wrote concerning the current representative of the treasurer, Nicolas Lanoullier de Boisclerc, “How, with the 1,200 livres that is given Lanoullier by the treasurers of the Marine can they expect that the duties be well carried out? It is not possible that a man so poorly paid not to look for and find resources in his official funds” (16 October 1730, cited by Keyes, “Un Commis,” 199). 25 Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 97–9; on the business activities of Jean Petit, who held the office from 1702 until 1720 and with whom Duplessis worked, see Bosher, Business and Religion, 292–5. 26 Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 46. 27 J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 5. 28 Ibid., 2: 20–1. 29 Ibid., 2: 53. 30 4 November 1701 summary of letter of Duplessis to the minister, anom col c11a 19/fol. 73v–74f. 31 8 November 1704 memorandum of Duplessis, anom col c11a 22/ fol. 145–154v. 32 Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 185–6. 33 6 November 1701 letter of Levasseur de Neré to the minister, anom col c11a 19/fol. 89–90v. 34 Miquelon’s account in New France 1701–1744, 55–71, is followed here. Frégault’s more extensive and detailed account is critical of Duplessis (Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle canadien, 242–88). 35 Ruette d’Auteuil, who had previously helped Duplessis in the purchase of Lauzon by allowing his name instead of Duplessis’s to be used on the contract, led the first charge against him. Ruette d’Auteuil’s protest may have been correct in strict legal terms, but was untimely, according to D’Allaire, Montée et déclin d’une famille noble, 111.

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notes to pages 34–7

36 2 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister in ibid., 118. 37 See the 11 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister, anom col c11g 3/fol. 110–28. 38 11 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister, anom col c11g 3/fol. 128–9. 39 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 383. 40 18 June 1708 letter of Pontchartrain to Raudot, anom col c11g 21/ fol. 198–198v. 41 anom col c11A 29/fol. 354–7. The letter was probably written in 1709 since it mentions the 22 October 1708 agreement made at Quebec. 42 6 July 1709 letter of king to Vaudreuil and Raudot, anom col c11g 4/fol. 3–17; rapq (1942–43), 413. 43 Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle canadien, 274. 44 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 45 Marcel Moussette compares the other three accounts, all written by administrators, to Marie-André’s. Besides giving more details of the disaster, she emphasizes the moral qualities of the victims and their pious deaths according to the conventions of the annals genre. The annals relate the loss of her father’s papers impersonally, with no mention of its consequences for her family (Moussette, “Québec 1713,” 69–100). 46 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 382. 47 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 48 Roy, Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 58. 49 7 November 1711 summary of letter of Vaudreuil and Raudot, anom col c11a 32/fol. 195–204. 50 8 November 1711 letter of Vaudreuil, anom col c11a 32/fol. 65–81. 51 5 November 1712 letter of Nicolas Pinaud to the minister, anom col c11a 33/fol. 300–301v. 52 12 November 1712 letter of Vaudreuil and Bégon to the minister, anom col c11a 33/fol. 15–37. 53 Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances, 124. 54 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 55 1 June 1714 letter of the minister to Denis Leroy, anom col b36 fol. 195v. 56 12 November 1714 letter of Bégon to the minister, anom col c11a 34/fol. 303–320v.

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57 Legohérel, Les Trésoriers généraux, 294–8. 58 Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux,” 188–90. 59 J.-Edmond Roy is defensive in his account of Duplessis’s troubles and stresses his honesty: “Monsieur Duplessis could have, like so many finance officers, speculated with the king’s funds and have enriched himself, but he preferred to maintain the reputation of an honest honorable man that he had painstakingly acquired … The courts could have justified him from a strictly business point of view, but he wanted total vindication from the people who had confided in him their trust.” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, notice biographique, xi–xii.) 60 Brun. “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 40. 61 The contract lists Georges’s inheritance from his parents as his lineage property, without specifying what this inheritance consisted of. 62 anf, Minutier Central, 15 May 1700, Étude XVI, 621. 63 See J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 58, for a list of most of these. 64 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, i–ii. 65 hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 24, undated draft of letter of G. Duplessis to Maurepas, “Si je n’avais que mes intérêts.” 66 On these matrilineal networks, see Chapman, “Patronage as Family Economy,” 11–35. 67 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136. According to Philippe-Baby Casgrain, the site was later occupied by a commercial building constructed in 1900 by the widow of Samuel Fisher. That building is located at 8–12 Côte de la Fabrique, “Le Kent House,” 13. 68 Lafontaine, Recensements annotés, 19. 69 Boisclair, Catalogue des œuvres peintes, 74–7; banq, Étude Henry Hiché 220. Her Jesuit son had sent the painting of Saint Helen. In 1722, he mentioned the portrait of the Franciscan as being in his mother’s home (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 94). 70 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, ii. 71 Ibid., 74. 72 Ibid., 101. 73 Ibid., 108–9. 74 banq, 3 July 1719 donation of Marie Leroy, Étude Pierre Rivet Chevalier.

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75 banq, Étude Hiché, number 220, 10 September 1731 will of Marie Leroy, widow of Georges Regnard Duplessis. 76 hdq-f1-h4, 4/7: 11; Pierre André de Leigne, the officer of the prévôté court, approved their request on 3 August 1736. 77 banq, 15 June 1715, sale of a lot, Étude Barbel. 78 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136. 79 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 74. 80 On the family, see Pierre-Georges Roy, La Famille Lanoullier. 81 Marie Leroy signed the marriage contracts of Jean-Eustache in 1719 and of Nicolas in 1720 as a cousin, but when Nicolas signed Charles-Denis Duplessis’s contract in 1742, Nicolas listed his relationship as “allié,” that is, someone related by marriage rather than blood. The father of Nicolas and Jean-Eustache, Jean Lanoullier, came from Rungis and his 1681 contract was written by a notary named Josse in Monthléry, according to Macouin, Les Familles pionnières, 115. Marie Leroy’s grandmother was Andrée Josse of Limours. Monthléry is about 20 km from Limours, both in the modern Essonne department. 82 3 November 1719, anom col c11a fol. 332–332v. 83 4 November 1719 request of Marie Leroy, anom col c11a fol. 158–158v. 84 10 November 1719 accounting of card money by Pierre Peire, anom col c11a fol. 218–218v. 85 17 April 1731 letter of Maurepas to Hocquart, anom col c11a 56/fol. 53–57v; 17 October 1731 letter of Hocquart to Maurepas, anom col c11a fol. 217–222v. 86 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136–7. 87 Ibid., NF 2: 135. J.-Edmond Roy’s paraphrase and commentary, first in his edition of François-Xavier’s letters (“Notice biographique,” xxvi–xxvii) and then in his Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, has led historians to believe that she paid this sum, not accounted for it, as her daughter’s letter states. “His widow, who had always served as guarantor in all of his offices, had to account for a quarter-century administrative period. How could one verify so complicated a management when all the relevant documents had been destroyed? She was held responsible for 1,200,000 livres. All was paid.” Pierre-Georges Roy thus said she paid over a million livres in his entry on Marie Le Roy in A travers l’Histoire

notes to pages 43–5

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de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 135. Voisine writes in his dcb entry on Georges Duplessis: “In January 1713 all the treasury papers were destroyed when the intendant’s palace in Quebec burned. Duplessis was held responsible for the loss of the card money, treasury bonds, bills in hand, and vouchers for expenditures – all the treasury papers – and he was obliged to make reimbursement. He died on 30 Oct. 1714, before he had finished payment, and his widow had to pay more than a million livres.” Such an amount would have been impossible for an individual to reimburse. As a cumulative sum of money handled by the treasurer’s office over numerous years that had to be accounted for, it is plausible. Lafontaine, Recensements annotés, 129. banq, 16 July 1757 Seizure, TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P60. Brun, “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 44. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 97. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 163–4. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 105–6. Brun, “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 42. Brun does not discuss Leroy in her survey of widowhood, and Leroy, by exploiting a variety of ad-hoc strategies, seems to have fared better than most of the cases Brun cites. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 390. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 174.

Chapter Three 1 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. 2 See listings in the prdh database (“Programme de recherche en démographie historique”), nos. 62337, 62318, 62444, 62501, 62577, 62652. 3 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 44. 4 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xii. 5 Simpson, Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 127. 6 Coüard, “Contribution à l’histoire de l’instruction publique,” 184. 7 31 October 1701 letter of Sister Saint-Ignace, cited by Gosselin, L’Instruction au Canada, 192. 8 For the founding of the Hôpital-Général and its conflicts with the

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15 16

17

18 19

Hôtel-Dieu, see Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres. O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 186. J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 57. Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 1: 526. For this description of Georges Duplessis, written by his daughter, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 390–1. D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 69. D’Allaire divides the recruits whose family status can be identified into four groups: the elite of governmental function or dignity; entrepreneurs; craftsmen; rural dwellers subject to a quit-rent. The first two comprise the upper strata of society (ibid., 53–6). Ibid., 68–9. According to Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 135, on 31 December 1708, a week before Marie-André’s profession, the community had forty-three members, including four postulants and novices, and he calculates that in the decade 1699–1708, twenty-four recruits joined the community. Her brother says that in 1728 he met a Flemish Jesuit who had a copy of the sermon from papers he inherited from Bigot (Lettres, 152). There were two Bigot Jesuits in Quebec at this time, the brothers Jacques (1651–1711) and Vincent (1649–1720). Most likely the preacher was Vincent, who took an interest in the HôtelDieu. The previous year François-Xavier had reminded his sister that Bigot had preached on the cross: “I still keep in mind what the saintly Father Bigot said about it to my sister Sainte-Hélène the day that she had the happiness of being admitted among the spouses of Jesus-Christ. We have wed the cross; do not be surprised if Jesus Christ, who loves us in a special way, does not let a day pass without making us feel its weight. Let us love it despite our resistance and let us kiss with respect our chains despite nature’s revolt. Let us adore in silence and humility the Providence that permits many things that annoy and keep us busy from uniting ourselves interiorly to God … In a word, let us love the cross.” (Lettres, 139.) F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xii–xiii. Ragueneau, La Vie de la Mère Catherine, 196–7. In a political analysis of the biography, Lignereux, “Catherine de Saint-Augustin: une héroïcité sans héroïsme?” shows how Ragueneau exploited

notes to pages 52–7

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Catherine’s spirituality to defend the Jesuit’s own largely theocratic vision of the colony; Pearson, “‘I willingly speak to you about her virtues,’” points out the extent to which Catherine’s private ascetic and mystical performance had public repercussions. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218–19. Ibid., 427. Ibid., 426–9. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiii. Ibid., 52. The text was completed by November 1718, the date of the approbation by Joseph de la Colombière found in the manuscript (M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55). Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle,” 51. On music at the Hôtel-Dieu, see Schwandt, “Le petit motet,” 231–54, and Pinson, “Les Communauté féminines,” 109–42, in GallatMorin and Pinson, La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France. M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 58. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 55. Recueil tiré des Constitutions, traité III (1, 2), 91. On monastic particular friendships, condemned by the patristic founders, rehabilitated to some extent in the Middle Ages, but again denounced after the Council of Trent, see Wright, Bonds of Perfection, 102–58, and McGoldrick, The Sweet and Gentle Struggle, 475–93. Quoted in Wright, Bonds of Perfection, 115. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 383. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181–5. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 105, undated circular death notice in MarieAndré’s hand beginning “Ce n’est pas sans une vive douleur.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 73. Ibid., NF 2: 77–8. Ibid., NF 3: 176. Marie Irwin de la Conception was “very much a friend” of Catherine Le Contre de Sainte-Agnès, “our Lord being the bond of their union.” So great was their friendship that they died within a week of each other (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 231).

notes to pages 57–62

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Catherine Longpré de Saint-Augustin was likewise “very much the friend” of Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité. They admonished each other on their hidden faults, and thus “both made great strides on the path toward perfection” (307–8). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 41. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 33. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 49. Recueil tiré des Constitutions, 4–5. The classic reference is to the two sisters in Luke 10:38–42. While Martha busies herself preparing for Jesus’s visit, Mary sits at his feet without helping and absorbs his teaching. When Martha complains, Jesus replies that Mary has chosen the better part. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 21. hdq-f1-d6/6-f1-e2, “Sermon prêché à la vêture de Geneviève Duplessis,” by an unnamed priest. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 22. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 90–1. Fino, L’Hospitalité, 201–2. F.-X Duplessis, Lettres, 67. Ibid., 35–6. Teresa of Avila, La Vie de Sainte Thérèse, ch. 7.21, p. 100; ch. 22.11, p. 347; ch. 24.6, p. 388. For a comprehensive analysis of Teresa’s view of friendship, see Soughers, “Friendship with the Saints,” 81–144. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 5. The text, written in her hand, begins by citing John 15:15, on which it is a commentary. “Je ne vous appellerai plus serviteurs mais amis parce qu’un serviteur ne sait pas les desseins de son maître, mais il communique tous ses secrets à ses amis”: “I will no longer call you servants but friends because a servant does not know the intentions of his master, but he communicates all his secrets to his friends.” F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 36. Ibid., 48. Fino analyzes the Dissection as a theological treatise. She situates it in terms of seventeenth-century spiritual authors to whose

notes to pages 63–7

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writings Duplessis had access, such as Jean Eudes and Jean de Bernières-Louvigny. Fino’s discussion of how the tension between contemplation and action is worked out on the theological level is particularly rich. My emphasis is more on how the Dissection shows Duplessis working out this tension in her personal spiritual life (L’Hospitalité, 195–209). hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, Dissection spirituelle. I give the number of the meditation in which the citations are found. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 48. Ibid., 56. Fino, L’Hôspitalité, 185–95. Ragueneau, Vie de la Mère Catherine, 62, 55. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 146–7. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 49. Ibid., NF 3: 50. Ibid., NF 3: 49–50. Ibid., NF 3: 97. Ibid., NF 3: 290. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, La Manne de Bethléem. In dedicating this devotional text to the Carmelites she made explicit her attraction to them and her frustration as a hospitaller. She says that Providence did not allow her to enter the Carmelites’ holy retreat, despite her inclination to their life. Instead she finds herself “called for, badgered, tired out by the large number of patients” in the hospital, which requires her to function in a position that prevents her from attaining the composure needed for contemplation. She writes the devotional text to overcome the distractions of her work. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, circular letter in Marie-André’s hand beginning “Ce n’est pas sans une vive douleur.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 44. Ibid., NF 3: 306.

Chapter Four 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. 2 Hecquet recounts this period of her life between leaving Paris and her marriage in an unpublished memoir, “Account of the vexations undergone on account of the formulary” (“Relation des vexations

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4 5 6

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essuyées au sujet du formulaire”). A sequel up to about age fifty is entitled “Continuation including the vexations undergone on account of the Constitution Unigenitus” (“Suite comprenant les vexations au sujet de la Constitution Unigenitus”). The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (SJ Ms 8/558), the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris (Ms 5356), and the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Paris (BO 875), hold copies. I quote from the Port-Royal manuscript. I discuss her journey into Jansenism at greater length in “Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction.” For a lucid analysis of why the bull was a theological and tactical disaster, unfair to Quesnel and bordering on intellectual dishonesty, see the account by McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2: 353–5, 370–7. He acknowledges that the bull condemns nine propositions that he deems indefensible, but adds that many more did not deserve anathemas (2: 354). He gives a detailed, theologically informed account of the Jesuits’ role and the ensuing controversies. Ibid., 2: 387. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 27. Ibid., 79. In this June 1721 letter Duplessis alludes to a letter missing from the published collection in which he described his uncle in more detail. Jean Leroy appears in the parish registers of SaintCénéré as pastor in 1692, although for most of the decade a vicar signs them; Leroy begins to appear regularly around 1699. Before coming to the diocese of Le Mans, Jean Leroy was a priest of the diocese of Paris, which was a Jansenist stronghold. He is not listed in Nivelle’s catalogue of clergy who registered a public appeal against Unigenitus, although the chapter of the cathedral of his diocese in Le Mans did (La Constitution Unigenitus déférée à l’Eglise universelle, ou recueil général des actes d’appel interjetés au futur concile). He was buried in the parish church on 20 January 1724 (Parish records, Archives de la Mayenne). On 31 January 1724, François-Xavier sent his sisters a report he had received of the death from relatives in Paris (Lettres, 116). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 97–8. On the early quarrels concerning Jansenism in the seventeenth century see Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France, 14–74, and McManners, Church and Society, 2: 345–52. Sedgwick’s

notes to pages 76–7

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chapter answering the question “What Was Jansenism?” (193–207) is a short, classic assessment of the nature of the movement highlighting its contradictions and situating it in terms of other currents in the church. Quantin, in Le Rigorisme chrétien (12), points out that rigorism was equated with excessive rigour and was a label no one desired. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 15. McManners, Church and Society, 2: 349. This view of Jansenism is elaborated by Chédozeau, “Port-Royal et le jansénisme.” See also McManners, Church and Society, 2: 422–34, on this point and on the changing face of Jansenism, noting that the Jansenists were no more tolerant than their persecutors. McManners, Church and Society, 2: 394. Upon returning to France in 1718, he wrote an account of his Canadian experiences contrasting his harsh treatment by the bishop, egged on by the Jesuits, with more sympathetic treatment by most others (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada”). His version is complemented by one that Duplessis included in the Annales based on information she received from the Jesuits and her own contact with him as a patient at the hospital. She stressed how the Jansenist temptation represented by Poulet was overcome (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’HôtelDieu, 404–8). Hurtubise, “Ni janséniste, ni gallican, ni ultramontain,” 10–11. The cathedral canons noted this fact when Bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet required them to sign the formulary in November 1730. For their text, see Têtu, “Le Chapitre de la cathédrale de Québec,” 358. La Charité, “Les Deux Éditions du Rituel du diocèse de Québec.” La Charité uses a looser definition of Jansenism (82–3) than I use. I see Saint-Vallier as a rigorist on contrition who was distrustful of the Jesuits, but not as a Jansenist in terms of the theology of grace. “My Lord the bishop of Quebec has written me that he cannot take any measures about the acceptance of the pope’s bull that condemns the book of Quesnel because the gentlemen [?] of the Clergy have not written him about it, and to bring him to a decision it appears to me necessary to act with him in the same way as has been done with the other bishops who do not belong

notes to pages 78–82

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to the Clergy of France. He only awaits that to issue his pastoral letter when you will have sent the necessary dispatches on this subject.” (3 July 1715 letter of Pontchartrain to l’abbé de Maupeou, Archives publiques du Canada, B, 37, 125–125v, as cited by Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle, 153.) “I first expressed my surprise about the special treatment he reserved for me by requiring that I accept the bull, which he had not yet done from any of his other clergy” (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 217). The printed version of SaintValier’s “Mandement promulgant la constitution Unigenitus” in the Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires des Evêques de Québec, 1: 486–7, gives no date, although it appears in the collection between a text of 1713 and one of 1716. A note indicates that the text is truncated and thus without a date in the copies preserved in the diocesan archives, the archives of the Seminary, and the Hôpital-Général. Was the date eliminated on all three copies to conceal the bishop’s delay? See the testimony of the Jesuit superior in Canada in Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: 142. La Charité, “Les Deux Éditions du Rituel du diocèse de Québec,” 80–1. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 404. Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: 142. The Jesuit was so vociferous with secular officials that he had to be replaced, according to a sympathizer of Poulet’s at the Seminary, Joachim Fornel. See his 13 November 1719 letter to Poulet appended to Poulet’s relation of events, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 226–7. Indeed, Duparc, not d’Heu, is listed as confessor by the next year in Hôtel-Dieu records. Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 223. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 406. Ibid., 408. Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 218–19. On the Rioux brothers, see Grenier, “Jean Rioux: émigrant breton, seigneur canadien,” 73–88. Grenier does not mention this episode. Mandements des Evêques de Québec, 1: 496–8.

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31 Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 222. 32 The first is a Port-Royalist critique of Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 236–7). Jamet does not provide documentation in support of this claim of a Jansenist critique, and I have been unable to locate any. The second concerned André de Merlac, whom SaintVallier had installed as superior of the Hôtel-Dieu. He was accused of Jansenism and attempting to seduce some of the nuns with his ideas (279–80). The affair was treated with so much secrecy that it is difficult to verify the accusations. 33 Ibid., 408. 34 The Jesuit historian Lucien Campeau, who distinguished Jansenism clearly from rigorism, cited Duplessis in minimizing the penetration of Jansenism in the Canadian church (“Le Jansénisme en Nouvelle-France,” 309–10). 35 Thiboult was the pastor of the town parish and an officer in the local ecclesiastical tribunal. According to Poulet (“Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 224), “As for the ecclesiastical tribunal, M. Thiboult was the only one who could listen to reason. I do not know if his interests would have allowed him to do me justice. He had told me several times that everything I would do would be useless.” On Thiboult and Fornel, see Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle, 155; on Leclair, see note 38 below. 36 Fornel’s letter to Poulet makes these two points. The hypocritical Jesuits “have not been so scrupulous when they had to follow the pope in condemning their Chinese superstitions” (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 226). According to Fornel (227), the probabilism that the Jesuits teach allows for a “method that makes it easy in the confessional to hardly ever have to refuse absolution to the unworthy and thus drawing to themselves large numbers of people.” 37 “The council of Quebec is only made up of merchants, all ignorant of the fundamental laws of the kingdom and of what takes place in France, and most are devoted to the Jesuits” (ibid., 224). 38 This fact is made explicit in a memorandum to Cardinal de Noailles on behalf of Pierre Leclair, found in the bnf manuscript with papers addressed to the cardinal, that contains Poulet’s account. Leclair is described as “very full of zeal for the truth,”

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the code expression for Jansenism among its supporters. “He noted that several of his colleagues are disposed to join with him in declaring themselves openly in favour of truth, but for that to happen, he would need tenure … The bishop of Quebec only has his parishes served by Canadian clerics as missionaries, who being revocable at pleasure, find themselves unable to support themselves and defend themselves in different affairs” (lac, mg 7, I, A2, vol. 20973, p. 60). Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 212–13. At least one priest who served in Canada did appeal Unigenitus, but only after his return to relative safety in France. Abel Maudoux (1652–1736), priest of the Foreign Missions, arrived in Canada in 1688 and served at Trois-Rivières and in Acadia. He left Canada in 1702 for the diocese of Le Mans where he signed the appeal in 1717 and 1721 (Nivelle, La Constitution Unigenitus, Suite du tome second, 196–9). Poulet’s stay overlapped with that of the future schismatic Jansenist bishop Dominique-Marie Varlet, who was in Quebec for thirteen months between September 1717 and October 1718. Varlet, a priest of the Foreign Missions, had left France before Unigenitus to be a missionary, first around Mobile and then at Cahokia. He left the Illinois Country for Quebec in 1717 to obtain recruits for his mission there. While he must have stayed at the Seminary and had contacts with devout circles, no traces of his Quebec stay have been found. Poulet does not cite him. Pierre Hurtubise expressed surprise that so few traces of this stay remain: “Did certain pious hands, desirous of maintaining the good reputation of the church of New France, learning later that Varlet became schismatic, take care to erase most of the traces of his stay in Canada? We will never know, perhaps” (Hurtubise, “Varlet,” 31–2). See his series of letters in the Utrecht Jansenist collection to Dom Thierry de Viaixnes, a Jansenist monk of the Benedictine Congregation of Vannes, exiled in Holland. On 26 April 1722, Poulet wrote that he had been busy with “much writing for Canada.” On 14 September, he said he had been able to send books by way of La Rochelle. A note included in an April/May 1723 letter gave an update: “Isn’t Monsieur Desprez in contact with some people in Quebec? I received two or three letters from there this

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year. They send no news of importance. The package of good books that I sent there last year arrived safely. I am sending another. It is a pity that I am missing the best texts” (Utrecht State Archive, PortRoyal Collection PR 3903). We do not know who these contacts were, but Fornel and Leclair are strong candidates, given their appearance in the same bnf manuscript that contains Poulet’s account. Rocher notes how this “non-Jansenist, rigorist tradition” came to dominate the Quebec church between 1850 and 1950 in his lecture “History and Social Change,” 362–3. Gauvreau shows that toward the end of this period, progressive Catholics in Quebec denounced this puritanical, clerical attitude, especially in regard to sexuality and marriage issues, as “Jansenistic” (The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 75, 88–9). This is especially ironic when one considers how proud the clerical establishment between 1850 and 1950 was that Canada had been kept uncontaminated by Jansenism. In the Annales, she said that the Port-Royalists measured God’s mercy according to the narrowness of their own hearts (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 236). See Fino on these points, especially her discussion of Duplessis’s “Dissection spirituelle” in L’Hospitalité, 200–2, 212–14. It is likely that Duplessis had direct or indirect access during this period to the Gazette d’Amsterdam, known commonly as the Gazette de Hollande. She alluded to the fact that Poulet published an account of his Canadian stay in it (Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 407); see the edition of 4 April 1719. The appeal of the Abbeville Cordelières, which she cited in her 1720 letter to Hecquet, is quoted in the 11 November 1718 edition of the paper, after an item on the appeal of the Sorbonne. She seems to have been given access to a 1729 anti-Jansenist tract, Quatrième Mémoire sur les projets jansénistes, as indicated by a note on a copy held by the Sulpician library in Montreal, according to Julie Roy and Michel Brisebois, La Bibliothèque de “Ces Messieurs,” 50–1. She recounts these trials in “Continuation including the vexations undergone on account of the Constitution Unigenitus,” the sequel to the account of her persecutions because of the formulary, found in the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, ms. 338bis.

notes to pages 86–7

48 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 98. 49 Ibid., NF 3: 177–8. 50 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 161. See also his letter of 21 May 1729 where he announced the decision (157). 51 See Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis et l’imagerie du calvaire d’Arras,” for details and illustrations. 52 François-Xavier’s misogyny is typical of Jesuit anti-Jansenist polemics. For other examples see Carr, “Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction.” Three editions of the Nouvelles contain accounts of the 1736 Abbeville mission: 17 November (182–3); 24 November (185–6); 1 December (192). François-Xavier is singled out as one of the most aggressive anti-Jansenist preachers there. He is ridiculed for repeating the frequent Jesuit accusation that the Jansenists had women priests, “women who reciting the canon of the mass imagine themselves consecrating” (183). The Jansenists maintained that the priest should pronounce the canon of the mass audibly so that those attending it could hear the words of consecration, and that the laity, even women, should have access to a French translation of the Latin text of the mass. The possibility that twelve to fifteen thousand attendees could have been adequately confessed in two to three weeks is ridiculed (185). The account of an earlier 1736 mission at Saint-Germain-en-Laye says that he mocked Jansenist women as “women theologians” (29 September 1736, 154). 53 30 May 1736 letter of Hecquet to Jean Soanen, State Archive Utrecht, Fonds Port-Royal, 6614. 54 Hecquet, “Suite comprenant les vexations,” 267. 55 Ibid., 258. The 14 July 1736 edition of the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, in its account of the Amiens mission of the previous year, identified François-Xavier in the same way as a “native of Canada” (109). 56 I discuss this episode from a slightly different perspective in “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist.” 57 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 230. 58 Ibid., NF 3: 283. 59 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 98. 60 Some new characters become partners in the exchange: Geneviève sent Hecquet a brief note in 1720, and Hecquet’s oldest daughter Marie-Catherine, whom she nicknamed Manon

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after Marie-André, seems to have written at least two letters to Duplessis. The two friends used an uncle-by-marriage of Hecquet, Jean-Baptiste Demus, to exchange gifts, and later one of Hecquet’s sons-in-law, Pierre Bourdeau, to exchange letters. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 54. Ibid., NF 3: 171. Ibid., NF 4: 53–4. Ibid., NF 4: 57. Ibid., NF 3: 288. Ibid., NF 2: 77. Ibid., NF 3: 303. Ibid., NF 3: 306. Ibid., NF 3: 228. Ibid., NF 4: 43–4. Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 361. The indication of his alcoholism is found in the periodic reports that the supervisor of the prisoners on La Désirade was required to make. In 1765, he reported, “Antoine Philippe Duhecquet has always behaved well. His only failing is drink, which happens to him seldom, however.” Philippe seems to have reformed, but too late (anf, Colonies, C/10d/2). On 31 August 1755, she bought a house on the Rue de l’Oursine along the Bièvre River, not far from her house on the Rue Mouffetard. Her husband was required by law to give his authorization for such a transaction by his wife. The notary duly collected it, not in Paris, but in a parloir of the asylum run by the Frères de la Charité in Charenton, where Jacques Hecquet was interned “by order of his Majesty” (anf, Minutier central, Étude CXV, 689, 31 August 1755). She had evidently obtained a lettre de cachet against him. The Charenton hospital, where the marquis de Sade would be lodged from 1801 to 1814, catered to well-off individuals of the bourgeoisie or lower nobility thought to be insane. anf, Minutier central, Étude LXXVII, 297, 7 July 1764. Melançon and Dubois, “Les Amitiés féminines,” 104, point to how this tension ultimately reinforces their friendship.

notes to pages 91–4

77 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 227. 78 Ibid., NF 3: 232. 79 1740 draft in NF 3: 278–83; 1751 fragment of draft in NF 3: 359–61; 1756 letter in Carr, “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist,” 101–5. 80 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 58. 81 See Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 7–8, for the mechanics of the survival of Homassel family documents held in the anf, T 77. 82 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 98. 83 See Piché, “‘Ma très chère mère du Canada,’” for examples and an analysis of how they reflect the French view of Canada. A handful of post-1755 replies received from these convents survive, but none of hers. 84 On these material questions see Harrison, Until Next Year, 65. 85 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 56. 86 Ibid., NF 3: 179. 87 Ibid., NF 5: 371. 88 Ibid., NF 4: 47. 89 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 261–2. 90 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 134. 91 Her letter to the duchess is quoted in a note to a 25 February 1753 letter of her brother (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 284–5). 92 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 117–18. 93 Ibid., NF 4: 242. 94 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1:7, draft of a 20 October 1751 letter to La Galissonière by Geneviève Duplessis beginning “Nous numes pas lhonneur de recevoir des marques de votre souvenir.” 95 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 361. 96 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 12, This undated draft by Geneviève beginning “Je ne doute pas quil ny est des simpathies” can be dated to fall 1753 and identified as addressed to Franquet. It mentions that the Recollet priest Simple Bocquet, who returned to Quebec from his missions in the Gaspé area at that time to become pastor at TroisRivières, had crossed in the Saint Lawrence the ship in which the addressee was returning to France. Franquet sailed for France in autumn 1753. Of course, this is a draft and might not represent the letter actually sent.

notes to pages 94–100

297

Chapter Five 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 164. 2 Kalm’s report is analyzed at the end of this chapter. The Philadelphia hospital was modelled on voluntary hospitals that were founded in Britain earlier in the eighteenth century (Williams, America’s First Hospital, 1–15). Colonial Mexico was more densely populated and had a network of as many as 128 hospitals by the early seventeenth century (Risse, “Medicine in New Spain,” 41). 3 Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 223. A 7 October 1731 letter from the intendant and governor to the minister repeats that the bourgeois and well-off habitants use the hospital and are charged for services received (anom col c11a 54/fol. 91– 96v). Hospitals in the British thirteen colonies evolved alongside of, or out of, almshouses. French and Canadian almshouses, hôpitaux généraux, were founded as a supplement to the already existing hôtels-Dieu. 4 Rousseau gives statistics on admissions, staffing, medical practice, and financing at the hospital in his indispensable history of the institution, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 55–84. 5 For Duplessis’s account of this separation and the nuns’ rationale for requesting it, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 137, 184–5. 6 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 104–5. 7 Other women’s communities in Canada managed somewhat comparable portfolios. For comparison, revenues at the HôtelDieu of Montreal in the period between 1723 and the early 1750s usually ranged between 12,000 and 15,000 livres according to Ducharme, “Les Revenus des Hospitalières de Montréal,” 223. At the Hôpital-Général in Quebec, revenues were somewhat higher: 20,026 livres in 1723 and 38,669 livres in 1752, although in the 1730s, the average income only ranged between 14,000 and 25,000 livres. Like the Hôtel-Dieu, it consistently showed a deficit between 1723 and 1752, according to D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 231–2. Moreover, all the houses had similar revenue sources, even if the percentage that each source contributed to the total varied from community to community: a royal subsidy; rentes from

298

notes to pages 102–4

8

9

10 11

12

13

investments in France; produce and the sale of produce from land holdings in the colony; sale of goods made by the nuns; gifts and payments from patients or boarders. Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the hospital’s finances (45–142). No other Canadian community has received such scrutiny, although D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, does provide some statistics. Noel, Along a River, points to several exceptions. The three single Desaunier sisters ran what she calls a “notorious smuggling ring” operating between Montreal and Albany (99–102). Noel notes that while the single Louise de Ramezay managed a series of enterprises, other women of her aristocratic clan were also involved in business (160). See the first five chapters of Noel’s Along a River for an overview of the economic position of women. Other articles and books I have found useful include Plamondon, “Une Femme d’affaires: MarieAnne Barbel”; Young, “‘… sauf les périls et fortunes de la mer’”; her Kin, Commerce, Community; and Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, veuve et seigneuresse. See Parent, “Entre le Juridique et le social,” 38–40, on the separation des biens. A notable exception of a widow directing seigneurial property is the mother of Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay of the HôpitalGénéral. Marie-Catherine Peuvret (1667–1739) became seigneuresse of Beauport just outside of Quebec in 1715 at age forty-eight upon the death of her husband. She did have a son who could have assumed management of the estate in 1715, and other sons who attained legal majority later, but they seemed not to have been interested in or capable of the duties, and she directed it until her death (Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, 120–3). See Grenier, “Réflexion sur le pouvoir féminin, Marie-Catherine Peuvret,” 306–7, and his detailed study of twenty-nine widows in his Seigneurs campagnards, 185–93; only two of the twenty-nine managed the seigneurie when a son of legal age was available. Dinet-Lecomte, Les Sœurs hospitalières en France, 297. Her book is a comprehensive examination of all aspects of nuns’ engagement with hospital work in the Ancien Régime based on archival work with many orders.

notes to pages 104–6

299

14 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 3, 31 September 1749 draft of letter by G. Duplessis to La Galissonière. 15 Noel gives multiple examples of how the two Hôpital-Général nuns worked their noble connections to promote their house (185–95). See also O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 368–70, and the dcb articles on them. 16 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 5, “État de la situation de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec et de l‘administration du bien des pauvres depuis le 10e juillet 1724 jusqu’au 15e de mars 1747.” 17 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 10, “Observations sur ce que Monseigneur a souhaité qu’on éclaircit, et sur les causes de dépense extraordinaire de cet hôpital dans l’année 1747.” 18 Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, 81 CD SS. Hosp. H.-D, 1: 4. Undated memo in Marie-André’s hand to Pontbriand that seems related to the 1747 reports cited in the previous two notes. 19 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 85. 20 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” fol. 15–17. Besides her 21 October 1720 letter to Hecquet (NF 2: 76), Duplessis also takes up this case in the Annales, 403–4, which in part simply incorporates text from the chapter minutes. 21 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. 22 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 90. 23 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 404. 24 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 5, “État de la situation de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec et de l‘administration du bien des pauvres depuis le 10e juillet 1724 jusqu’au 15e de mars 1747.” 25 Dubé gives the best blow-by-blow overview of the affair in his biography, Claude-Thomas Dupuy, 281–6. D’Allaire discusses it briefly in her study of the D’Auteuil family, Montée et déclin d’une famille noble, 238–9. Also see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 398n.  26 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 1, 9 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 27 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 2, 11 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 28 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 1, 9 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 29 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 7, 21 June 1727 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Ruette d’Auteuil.

300

notes to pages 106–10

30 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 8, 1 July 1727 letter of Ruette d’Auteuil to M.-A. Duplessis. 31 hdq-f1-h4, 4/11: 2, “Récit de ce qui s’est passé entre Mr Dupuy intendant et les religieuses de l’Hôtel-Dieu.” This four-page account is the sort of narrative that she would have incorporated into a second installment of the Annales. 32 Dinet-Lecomte in Les Sœurs hospitalières identifies several methods of hospital organization, with lay administrators being both the most widespread and giving the nuns the least independence, while the arrangement at the Hôtel-Dieu, where the nuns were in complete control of day-to-day operations, was rarer (284–308). 33 hdq- f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” 5 September 1732 minutes. 34 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 104. 35 2,000 livres of Marie-Geneviève Lefebvre’s 1732 dowry were used toward paying off the wall’s construction (D’Allaire, Les Dots des religieuses, 155n31). 36 14 October 1733 letter of Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, anom col c11a 59/fol. 161–162v. 37 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 112–14. 38 Ibid., 114–17. 39 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 393–6. 40 1727, a two-week visit by the mother superior and her assistant (letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil, 11 June 1727, hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 2); 1729, a stay of six weeks on the island (Actes capitulaires, note for the chapter meeting of 21 May 1729, written by MarieAndré, hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1). 41 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” chapter meeting of 25 July 1733. 42 hdq-f5-d44/13: 7, 4 July 1736 legal brief on behalf of de la Lande de Gayon accusing the nuns of “using the veil of the poor to despoil her and her children of their property” (“Répliques pour Dame Marie-Thérèse de La Lande Gayon”). 43 See Rousseau’s summary of her prospectus, L’Œuvre de chère, 117. He provides a detailed overview of the property (117–30). 44 Blais, “La ‘seigneurie des pauvres,’” 180. His thesis adds details not found in Rousseau’s L’Œuvre de chère and comparisons with other religious communities. 45 These improvements are discussed in Blais, “La ‘seigneurie des pauvres,’” 114–20.

notes to pages 111–15

301

46 Ibid., 182–4. Barthe’s “Du manoir au parloir,” 156–77, does not isolate the period of the Duplessis administration to permit comparisons with the Ursulines’ management or rural holdings. 47 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 127, cites documents of the nuns in 1747 and 1750 that make this argument. 48 See Rousseau’s overall assessment of Saint-Augustin’s contribution, L’Œuvre de chère, 127, and Blais’s conclusion. 49 Recueil tiré des Constitutions, 250–6. 50 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 6, June 1727 letter of Duplessis to Thomas-Jacques Taschereau. 51 hdq-f1-a6, 1/: 14, 1748, “Éclaircissements sur les usages de l’hôpital.” 52 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 14, draft of 1748 letter by G. Duplessis to Bigot. 53 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 15, 1748 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 54 The letters in the hdq date from 1747 and 1749. 55 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 290–1, 370–1. 56 Ibid., NF 5: 312. 57 Ibid., NF 3: 104–5. 58 Ibid., NF 3: 171. 59 Ibid., NF 3: 181. 60 Casgrain says that the relics were finally obtained through Charlevoix’s auspices (Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 363). 61 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 229–30. 62 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 371. 63 Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis et l’imagerie du calvaire,” 11–37. 64 Ibid., 31. 65 hdq-f1-b1, 8/1, “Observations de S. M.-André Duplessis dite SainteHélène sur plusieurs articles de nos règlements, 3.” 66 Another brother, Paul-Antoine-François Lanoullier des Granges, arrived in Canada in 1730 and became a royal notary in Quebec in 1748. In 1750, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu appointed him judge of their seigneurie of Saint-Bernard near Charlesbourg (GeorgesPierre Roy, La Famille Lanoullier, 24), an appointment that probably owed something to the Duplessis sisters. 67 31 October 1735 letter of Jean-Eustache Lanoullier to the minister, anom col c11a 64/fol. 263–6.

302

notes to pages 115–23

68 25 November 1750 request of Geneviève to J.-E. Lanoullier, banq, TL5, D2749. 69 On Nicolas see Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux de la marine.” Around 1734, Marie-André made inquiries on Nicolas’s behalf to Hecquet about importing fabric to Canada, probably one of his attempts to supplement his income. 70 “The only relative we have in this country is a brother who will apparently be married this winter” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 96). 71 The contract had been signed the previous day in the presence of Hocquart, who had supported her father in his difficulties. The bride came to the marriage with a dower of 6,000 livres, but how much of this was cash is uncertain since she only received 3,000 livres when her father’s modest estate was settled in 1744. For details, see Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, 68–9; banq-q, Greffe de Bardolet, 31 October 1744. On Guillimin, see Pierre-Georges Roy, La Famille Guillimin. 72 He gives an account of his military career in a complaint addressed to the minister dated 10 November 1748. He was distressed to see more junior officers advanced ahead of him in the last list of promotions (anom col e 160, “Duplessis de Morampont, prévôt des maréchaux de France au Canada, sa veuve Geneviève Guillemin, réfugiée aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon [1748/1766]”). Duplessis’s role is not mentioned in Dunning Idle’s detailed history of the Saint Joseph post, The Post of the St Joseph River. 73 In 1743, Marie-André professed to be delighted with her niece, who shared her name and reportedly shared her looks: “My young brother … has a small daughter that one says looks like us and whose mother and father are crazy about; she’s so sharp and good that she is a little jewel” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 292). 74 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 246–7. 75 Ibid., 265–6. 76 Ibid., 277. 77 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 443. The French edition, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada en 1749, has useful notes, but does not contain all of Kalm’s text available in English. 78 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 446.

notes to pages 123–6

303

79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

304

Ibid., 2: 445. Ibid., 2: 445. Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 135. Miquelon, New France, 223. In his Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 560–85, Casgrain lists all the choir and converse nuns by date of entrance, dates of profession and death, and years as nuns. Pelletier adds the profession of the fathers (Le Clergé en Nouvelle France, 247–58). In addition to his thorough analysis of multiple aspects of recruitment, Rousseau includes a chart that gives the total number of members including postulants by decade beginning with 1648 (La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 129–40). D’Allaire’s study of dowries in all the Canadian communities, Les Dots, is indispensable. Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 138. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 567–8. 30 October 1744 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 82/fol. 326–327v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 302. 8 October 1747 letter of Pontbriand to Maurepas, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. 8 October 1747 letter of Hocquart and La Galissonière to the minister, anom col c11a 107/fol. 56–8. According to the Recette et emploi des dots des religieuses professes, hdq-f1-a5, 6/1: 3, one of the four was received gratis; two paid 1,500 livres and the fourth paid 3,000 livres. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 305. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 569. D’Allaire discusses this episode, although not in these terms (Les Dots, 24). Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 446. Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 27. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 90, 96–7. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 356. See Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 93–6, on this per diem. 1733: anom col c11a 60/fol. 359–361v; 1737: col c11a 67/fol. 37–38v; 1742: col c11a 77/fol. 11–13v; 1749: col c11a 93/fol. 309–310v.

notes to pages 126–9

100 27 October 1749 letter of Bigot to the minister, anom col c11a 93/ fol. 309–310v. 101 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 445.

Chapter Six 1 Gallat-Morin and Pinson, La Vie musicale en Nouvelle France, 381–2. 2 Noel, Along a River, 295–6n. 3 Carr, “From the Cloister to the World,” 18. 4 Rowan, “Between Salon and Convent.” 5 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 187. 6 Carr, “Une ‘histoire véritable’ littéraire à l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.” 7 Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle (1718): Canada’s First Music Theory Manual.” 8 M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55. 9 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181. 10 M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55. 11 See Julie Roy, “Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre.” 12 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 185. 13 Biblia sacra: Vulgatæ editionis Sixti V. & Clementis VIII. Pont. Max. auctoritate recognita; La Sainte Bible traduite en françois, le latin de la Vulgate à côté. This last volume published in 1702 is now housed in the Jesuit library in Montreal. 14 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 184. 15 Ibid., 183–5. 16 Ibid., 185. 17 See Andrès, Histoires littéraires des Canadiens, 175–82, for an analysis of this short text and the controversies it provoked. 18 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 358. These letters are lost, but in a letter of 2 March 1709 to her sister Louise, the princess mentioned Charles Le Moyne (Charlotte-Élisabeth d’Orléans, Correspondance, 2: 16–18). 19 Van der Cruysse, Madame Palatine, 483–4. 20 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 369. 21 For examples of these poems, most of which are found in a manuscript of the Hôtel-Dieu, see Lemay, Échos héroï-comiques.

notes to pages 129–40

305

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43

306

Arnauld d’Andilly, “Sur la conformité,” 1: 250–6. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 4. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 6. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, p. 74. In a note in his edition of her brother’s letters, J.-Edmond Roy lists several other short devotional texts by Duplessis that I have not been able to identify in the Hôtel-Dieu archives: “Méditations sur l’eucharistie et la communion, sur la manière d’offrir à Dieu toutes les actions de sa journée” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 192). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. Cited in Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 433. hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 1. hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 2. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 21. Dedication letter, hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 1. Guyart, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 2: 415–21. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 379. “I have hardly been able to glance for several moments at your meditations on the mysteries of the blessed childhood of our Lord which were given to me several days ago. If I can have them published, you will indeed receive copies” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 192). M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 370. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 177. See Pouliot’s article that situates Duplessis’s account among other contemporary ones, “Une primeur québécoise: la fête et l’office de la Sainte Famille” (hdq-a-5, c 8). M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 220. Casgrain prints her account of the statue in Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 363–70. “Relation au sujet de notre incendie,” hdq-a5, 3/1: 15t, 16t; cover letters, hdq-f1-a6, 1/4: 5 and hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 56. “I would go beyond the limits of a letter if I said here all the good that she did; but since I hope in time to have her life written, one will see there in more detail her wonderful and striking deeds” (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 428). The 1666

notes to pages 140–7

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

Recueil tiré des Constitutions charges the secretary with composing circular letters for deceased nuns (368–9), even though the superior signed them. It is very likely that Duplessis wrote the letter for her beloved mentor at the request of Geneviève Dupuy and thus announced her plan to compose a biography. Fournier, “La Bibliothèque des Augustines,” item 297. Rousseau gives the text of the seventeenth-century letters in La Passion de servir. For analysis of how shifts in the spirituality of the Augustines from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth are reflected in the death notices, see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 337–53. Rapley, “‘Un Trésor enfoui,’” 157. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 102. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 103. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 104. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 105. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 295–6.

Chapter Seven 1 Marie Morin’s chronicle of the Montreal Hôtel-Dieu received a critical edition by Ghislaine Legendre in 1979, Histoire simple et véritable. Legendre also edited the much shorter continuations of Morin’s annals by Marie-Anne-Véronique Cuillerier, “Relation de sœur Cuillerier,” and by Catherine Porlier, “Relation de la sœur Porlier.” Substantial extracts of the Quebec Ursuline annals are quoted in Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, just as extracts of the annals of the Quebec Hôpital-Général are found in O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général. Likewise, those of the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières are quoted in Les Ursulines des Trois-Rivières. No such annals seem to exist for the fire-plagued Montreal Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Marguerite Bourgeoys. 2 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliv. Jamet discusses approximate dates of composition (xliii). For studies of the annals, besides Jamet’s introduction, see Gies, “Mère Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène.” 3 hdq-f1-a5, 1/1: 1. 4 Despite the title given by the nuns, Jamet published the book under

notes to pages 147–53

307

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

308

the title Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec 1636–1716. The book is not referred to as “annales” in the text itself, where “histoire” is used in the dedication to the Virgin. However, Duplessis uses the term “annales” in her 3 November 1753 letter to Hecquet announcing the book’s publication (“Lettres,” NF 4: 48), and it was used in her death notice. For example, the Coustumier et Directoire pour les sœurs religieuses de la Visitation goes into great detail on how “the one who will have charge of documents” should safeguard the convent’s records (159–63). For an overview of convent writing in French, see Carr, “From the Cloister to the World.” Cited in F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xviii. The entire letter held in the Hôtel-Dieu archives does not seem to have been published (hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of J.-B. Chardon to M.-A. Duplessis, tentatively dated to 11 April 1732). This quotation is printed in Roy’s edition and Jamet cites other extracts in his edition of the Annales. Ursule-Marie Chéron confirmed this statement in the circular letter she wrote after Duplessis’s death: “Our reverend mother J. F. de Saint Ignace, first Canadian mother superior, judged that she was capable of doing the annals of your house from its foundation. She proposed it to her, and she did it out of obedience and with so much success that this work was the admiration of everyone with taste who agreed that her facility in writing and her deep judgment made her capable of writing the history of the establishment of Canada.” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv.) M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliii. Ibid., 85, 236, 280, 404–8. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 401–3. François Rousseau notes how the revenues from the rentes, chiefly on the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, diminished by half between 1713 and 1720 (La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 111). M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xxxii–xxxiii. hdq-f1-b1, 2/1, Règlements des Religieuses hospitalières de la miséricorde de Jésus … établi à Dieppe, 159.

notes to pages 155–7

15 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, unpaginated pages in the dedication to the mother of God. 16 Ibid., unpaginated pages. 17 hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of J.-B. Chardon to M.-A. Duplessis, tentatively dated to 11 April 1732. 18 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 75, 374, 389. 19 According to the Règlements of the Hôtel-Dieu (hdq-f1-b1, 2/1), the secretary should record the following in the annals: “The first book will be that of the annals of the monastery in which will be told the beginnings and progress of the house; the names of its founders, of the first ecclesiastical superior, of the first mother superior and of the other nuns who accompanied her in its founding, of other persons who gave the most aid; the memorable events that happened there; the diverse monasteries from which they came; the deceased nuns of the house or its foundations who have excelled in virtue and sanctity of life, indicating the day, month and year of their death; the place of their burial and other items worthy of passing to posterity” (169–70). 20 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, unpaginated letter. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Ibid., 424. 23 Ibid., 424. 24 Daneau de Muy (1694–1759) became annalist around 1755, according to Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 322. Her detailed account of the war is quoted extensively in volume 2. Her perspective is as providentialist as Duplessis’s; Canada’s woes are a warning and punishment for the sins of its people. This compensates perhaps for the fact that she cannot always link military events to the affairs of her house. 25 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 246. 26 Ibid., 361. 27 Parkman, France and England in North America, 2: 456–7; M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 366–8. 28 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xl–xliii. 29 Ibid., 8. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 82.

notes to pages 158–62

309

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

310

Ibid., 104. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 361. Ibid., xli. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 421. Greer, “Colonial Saints,” 336–8. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 66–9, 236–42. Ibid., 210–20. Ibid., 132, 135. Ibid., x–xix, 8. Ibid., 10, 298. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 103–7. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166–7. For the Hôpital-Général’s view of the affair see O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 103–76, which includes extracts of their annals and other documents. For a more impartial view, see D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général, 23–30, and Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 296. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 292–3. Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres, 111–12. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 292. Cited by D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général, 25. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 297. Ibid., 378. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 44, for a note Jamet gives (hdq manuscript, p. 23): “[Isaac

notes to pages 162–8

66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

Jogues] found a death that one could consider that of a martyr.” Ibid., 142, 166. Ibid., 142, p. 78 of the hdq manuscript. Ibid., 166n3. Ibid., 166, p. 90 of the hdq manuscript. Ibid., 218, p. 118 of the hdq manuscript. Médiathèque Montauban, ms. 18. Although Jamet does not mention the Montauban manuscript in his edition, it might be the source of his variants. This manuscript’s paper is thinner than that of the Quebec one. In one of the cases where Jamet gives the original text, this text can be deciphered. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 55. “They removed our confessor, gave us a young Canadian one to whom several cannot adapt; these perturbations cause unfortunate biases that separate people” (ibid., NF 3: 49). Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 165–6. hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of Louis Gérard to M.-A. Duplessis. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xix. See also an undated draft of this letter, hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 25, from Geneviève to an unknown correspondent, beginning “Monsieur le danger que vous avez courut qui a conduit monsieur votre pere.” J.-Edmond Roy dates the letter to 8 November 1751. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliv. O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 297. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 7. M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 56. Ibid., 414–15. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 374; M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 492. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 238–9. This episode is discussed in Suire’s Sainteté et lumières, 367, and in Moureau, La Plume et le plomb, 246. Pearson discusses it from the Canadian angle in “Becoming Holy,” 323. 10 August 1751 letter of Abbé Geinoz to Malesherbes, lac, microfilm reel C-9193, vol. 22137. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218n.

notes to pages 168–73

311

89 Ibid., 224; Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada, 141–2. 90 Moureau, La Plume et le plomb, 246–7. According to Moureau (251–2), the censor, Alexandre-François Cotterel, was often charged with dealing with such difficult cases. 91 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 49. 92 M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 279. 93 Ibid., 267, 279. La Tour made most of these changes directly on the Montauban manuscript, crossing out passages and writing new connecting text between the lines. Such changes can be found on practically every page of the manuscript. 94 On the back of the title page an early archivist has written “Writing of Mother Saint-Helen” (“Écriture de Mère Ste-Hélène”). The copy seems to have been the one reserved for the mother superior since another notation on the title page itself specifies “superior’s room” (“ch. Supre 1811”). 95 M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 279. 96 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218. 97 Journal des savants, August 1752, 574. 98 Meusnier de Querlon, Annonces, affiches, et avis divers, known as the Affiches de province, 2 April 1755, 53–4. 99 Pierre Rousseau, Correspondance littéraire, 364–5. The book was also announced as selling for two livres ten sous, but without a review, in the 7 April 1755 issue of the Parisian Annonces, affiches et avis divers, known as the Affiches de Paris to distinguish it from Meusnier de Querlon’s paper with the same title (214). 100 Alléon-Dulac, Mélanges, 2: 436. 101 Ursule-Marie Chéron in her 1760 circular letter, in F.-X. Duplesssis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. 102 Berthiaume, “1744: François-Xavier de Charlevoix.”

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M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 295–6. Ibid., NF 3: 357. Ibid., NF 3: 175. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 45. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182.

notes to pages 173–80

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 51. Ibid., NF 6: 42. Ibid., NF 3: 285–6. Ibid., NF 5: 363–4. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 282. Ibid., NF 4: 51. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, lxxxiii. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 367. 28 September 1742 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 78/fol. 423–428v. 20 October 1743 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 80/fol. 349–353v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 292. Ibid., NF 3: 255–6. 1747 letter of Pontbriand to Maurepas, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. 25 September 1748 letter of Bigot and La Galissonière, anom col c11a 91/fol. 32–35v; 4 October 1748 letter of same, anom col c11a 107/fol. 51–2. 16 October 1750 letter of Bigot and Jonquière to the minister, anom col c11a 95/fol. 70–72v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 256. “1727 Rapport ou feuille au roi,” anom c11a 106/fol. 120–36. 28 September 1742 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 78/fol. 423–428v; 20 October 1743 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom c11a 80/fol. 349–353v. 1747 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 15, 20 January 1748 letter of Duplessis to Pontbriand. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 25, 1751 draft of letter by Geneviève to unknown correspondent, “Le danger que vous avez couru qui a conduit monsieur votre père.” hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 16, 20 October 1750 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to d’Aiguillon. hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 7, draft of 1752 memorandum by Geneviève beginning “Nous nous sommes tenues dans le silence depuis plusieurs années.”

notes to pages 180–5

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30 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 5, 28 October 1752 letter of Louis Franquet to one of the Duplessis sisters. 31 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 10, letter of Antoine-Louis Rouillé of 8 June 1753 to the mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Poussou, “Les Débats entre historiens,” 32–3. 35 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 7, 20 October 1751 letter of Geneviève to La Galissonière, beginning “Nous numes pas lhonneur de recevoir des marques de votre souvenir.” In fact, favouring the HôpitalGénéral was a longstanding policy of the colony’s administrators. Hocquart wrote the minister in October 1744 of his intention to favour that institution (col c11a 81/fol. 400–401v). The nuns of the Hôpital-Général believed that Pontbriand favoured them over the other two Quebec communities, as Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny noted in her relation on the siege of the city: “Monseigneur [Pontbriand] … since his arrival in this country has always protected, I could even say, preferred us” (Hébert, Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 20). 36 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 11, 1752 draft of letter by Geneviève to La Galissonière beginning “quelque precotion qune religieuse doive prendre.” She adds that though they are reimbursed at a higher rate, “[t]hey have sometimes in a month more than this hospital has in a year … I think that the policy of several persons is to discredit this house to raise up and sustain the other.” 37 Noel, Along a River, 194–5. 38 See Vaudreuil to the minister, 22 October 1756, col c11a 101/ fol. 127–8, and Allard, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 42. Faillon cites Vaudreuil’s letter including these remarks about Pontbriand: “This prelate is indefatigable … He has made a trip to Montreal just to hurry the workers hired to build the two wards of the hospital” (Vie de Mlle Mance, 2: 256). 39 Porlier, “Relation de la sœur Porlier,” 171–2. 40 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 150–3. 41 Ibid., 1: 158–60. 42 La Rue, “Lettres,” 327, 367, 387. 43 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 6, draft of 1751 letter by Geneviève to unknown correspondent (perhaps Franquet) beginning “Monsieur, le respect

314

notes to pages 186–8

et la confiance combattent un peu le penchant.” 44 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 11, 1752 draft of letter of Geneviève Duplessis to La Galissonière beginning “quelque precotion qune religieuse doive prendre.” 45 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 7, “Notes des articles sur lesquels on peut se rendre service à cet hôtel-Dieu de Québec.” 46 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 3A, draft of 16 July 1752 letter by Geneviève, probably destined for Franquet. 47 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 276–7. 48 On La Porte, see Frégault, François Bigot, 1: 289–93. 49 hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 23, 1752 letter of Geneviève Duplessis to Arnaud de Laporte beginning “Jay assez de matiere pr avoir l’honneur de vous entretenir.” 50 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 16, draft of a 29 June 1755 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to welcome Vaudreuil. Vaudreuil had arrived in Quebec on 23 June, and the letter is written on his saint’s day. 51 hdq-f1-g18/14: 43, 12 November 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 52 Two memos in 1751 and 1752 lay out in detail her charges of neglect and active hostility by Bigot (hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 2, and hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 1A). 53 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 20, 17 April 1756 letter from Franquet to M.-A. Duplessis. 54 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 281. 55 The affair left traces in the court records. See banq TL1,S11,SS1,D99,P896, 21 March 1752, default to Maurice Jean Boulanger; see hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 17. 56 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 18B, “Exposition qui peut apprendre la vérité à ceux qui pensent qu’on fait un grand tort aux pauvres.” 57 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161–3. 58 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52. 59 I cite the 1755 first edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage with my own translations. Aroles’s extensive archival work in Marie-Angélique: Haut Mississippi, 1712 – Paris, 1775 documented the wild girl’s life from her discovery in 1731 to her death and set forth an account of her prior life as a member of the Fox nation in Wisconsin who became a French slave. It is fundamental to a study of the case, but only available in a few

notes to pages 188–91

315

60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

316

French libraries. Because it lacks academic annotation, scholars have not fully exploited its richness. For more details, see two academic studies which situate the case in Enlightenment debates and complement each other: Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster, and Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children. Benzaquén does not take into account Aroles’s findings. Douthwaite’s book is chiefly useful as an examination of the eighteenth-century writers who discuss the case. She seems not to have consulted Duplessis’s letters published in Nova Francia around 1930 that confirm Hecquet’s authorship, thus missing the opportunity to explore how Hecquet’s Jansenist allegiance shaped the Histoire, both in its genesis and in its point of view (41–4). A subsequent update, “La jeune Fille sauvage mise à jour,” which brings into play European attitudes toward North American Indigenous peoples, also is a lost opportunity because it does not take into account Hecquet’s longstanding interest in them. On the other hand, Scholl, “La Correspondance de MarieAndrée Regnard Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène et la réception de son image des Esquimaux,” does consider them. A graphic biography by Gaëlle Hersent, loosely based on Aroles’s reconstruction, was published in 2015: Sauvage, biographie de Marie-Angélique. It presents Hecquet and La Condamine collaborating closely in producing the Histoire, which is unlikely given his anti-Jansenism (123–5, 144–8). The classic account is by the historian of Jansenism Gazier, Une Suite à l’histoire de Port-Royal. Hecquet, Histoire, 60–1. Ibid., 63–4. Hecquet compares the Indigenous to the first Christians: “I therefore in imagination saw your poor savages only paying attention to how they could acquire the favour of their new intercessors before God without being distracted by the display of their own finery or by considering that of others in the places where they found themselves” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 280). Ibid., NF 4: 52. Ibid., NF 3: 44. For an overview of relations between the French and Indigenous

notes to pages 193–7

68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79

peoples, see the chapter of Moogk, “Europeans and ‘the Wild People’: French-Amerindian Relations,” in La Nouvelle France, 17–50, especially 47–50 on Lahontan. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52–3. Ibid., NF 2: 39, 42. Ibid., NF 2: 40. “All the fruit that the missionaries have in some areas is to baptize many infants who die quite young and to give these barbarians an idea of our religion by the purity of their lives. The missionaries usually sanctify themselves greatly there, and we have known several who, when coming back from their work completely broken, were so united to God that hearing and seeing them, we were entirely edified and burned with the desire for virtue” (25 October 1740 letter of M.-A. Duplessis, NF 3: 285). Goddard notes that some Jesuits who sought to work in the foreign missions – he cites Louis Lallemant in the early seventeenth century – sought posts in Canada in the belief that the crosses and travails they expected to experience there would purify them, no matter their success in winning Native souls (“Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought,” 189). See Arnauld’s 1691 La Morale pratique des Jésuites. Canada is discussed, including a reference to Ragueneau’s biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, Œuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld, 34: 714. Lahontan, Œuvres complètes, 1: 653–68. Ibid., 1: 655. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 43. Catherine Maire explicates this scenario in a number of her works. One of the most explicit on the conversion of the pagans is “La Date du ‘retour’ d’Israël,” 218. The basis for this exegesis is found in Le Sesne d’Étemare’s transcription of lectures by Duguet in Explication de quelques prophéties touchant la conversion future des Juifs, 4; for the failures of the missions to the pagans, see 23. Carr, “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist,” 105. Hecquet, Histoire, 20. Racine, “L’Epître II sur l’homme,” in Poésies nouvelles, 2: 28–33, where he speaks of “Le penchant où conduit la coupable nature / The propensity to which guilty nature leads.”

notes to pages 197–9

317

80 81 82 83

84 85 86

87

Hecquet, Histoire, 40. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 37. Hecquet, Histoire, 66. “The only role I had in this production is to have made some changes in the manuscript, whose original I still possess, and to have cut some facts which were only founded on hearsay and without any plausibility, and to have added, especially at the end, some conjectures to those of Madame H. on the way that the young savage and her companion might have been transported to France” (“Lettre à M. de Boissy,” Année littéraire, 20 January 1755, 215–16). “I recognized myself in the place where you cite me; I only told you the truth” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 57). Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5: 949. On this point see Bruna, “Les Esquimaux des Lumières.” She presents a detailed analysis of Enlightenment attitudes toward the Inuit. Wilson gives a blow-by-blow account of the manoeuvrings in Diderot, 150–72.

Chapter Nine 1 Casgrain lists four sets of documents that were lost: the deeds to the Saint Augustin holdings; contracts for property holdings in the city and records of donations; various contracts of the hospital; and the chapter proceedings dealing with the hospital (Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 385). 2 For an account of the fire, see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 156–63. 3 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 412–15. 4 For this episode, see Les Ursulines de Trois-Rivières, 1: 269–87, and Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 182–98. 5 Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 189–90. 6 Séguin, Atlas historique du Québec, 15. 7 Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 198. 8 See Rapley’s 1994 article “The Shaping of Things to Come.” She gives an excellent overview of the financial difficulties of female

318

notes to pages 199–204

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

communities, which were largely caused by royal policies, and how royal authorities acted to suppress the monasteries. See 435–6 on patronage. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 290. Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 202. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, undated draft of Geneviève Duplessis to unnamed correspondent, “Ma soeur avait l’honneur de vous écrire quelquefois.” Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 397–8. hdq-f1-g2/1: 42, “Mémoire de Monseigneur l’évêque de Québec à l’occasion de l’incendie de l’Hôtel-Dieu.” hdq-f1-g1/1: 45, “Projet pour l’administration des biens des pauvres pendant le temps que les dames hospitalières demeurent chez les révérends pères jésuites.” See Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161–2, on this episode. hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 17, 10 August 1755 letter of G. Duplessis to Victor Varin de La Marre. hdq-f1-g2/1: 46, “Réplique au projet de Monseigneur.” Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 162, 331. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, 12 August 1755 draft of Geneviève Duplessis to the duchesse d’Aiguillon. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, draft of letter of Geneviève to unnamed correspondent that begins, “Vous recevrez par M votre secrétaire une lettre.” hdq-f1-a5, 3/1: 15, “Relation de la mère Ste-Hélène au sujet de notre incendie 1755.” hdq-f1-a6, 1: 45, “Brouillons de lettres à diverses personnes après 1755 demandant secours.” Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 157. The minutes of the 23 November 1755 chapter meeting contain the bishop’s memorandum followed by the nuns’ discussion and response (hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1). Rousseau discusses the choices in La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 157–61. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 113. See hdq, correspondence of Duplessis with Pontbriand, for these letters. 11 November 1756 letter of Pontbriand, anom col c11a 107/fol. 36–7.

notes to pages 204–10

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27 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161. 28 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 302. On de Rupelmonde, see Villermont, La Société au XVIIIe siècle, 289–331. 29 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 302n1. 30 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 111. 31 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. 32 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 111. 33 Dumont de Montigny, The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 77. According to the Registre journalier des malades, Montigny began his stay at the hospital as a patient on 22 September 1717. After his recovery, he stayed on as a military boarder, listed as a “canonnier” or gunner. He left the hospital on 13 November 1718. hdq-f5-g1, 2/1:3. 34 hdq-t30, Vaudreuil, 2, 29 March 1756 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. 35 hdq-f1-g9/95: 1, 5 May 1756 letter of Esther Wheelwright to M.-A. Duplessis. Neither Julie Wheelwright, Esther: The Remarkable True Story, nor Little, The Many Captivities of Esther, discusses this letter. See Little, 79–125, for Wheelwright’s life between her arrival in Quebec in 1708 and her entry into the Ursulines in 1713. 36 Esther’s letter to her mother is cited by Little, The Many Captivities of Esther, 183–6. 37 hdq-f1-g2/1: 74, 9 May 1757 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 38 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 283–4. 39 Ibid., 297n1, 18 February 1757 letter of Villars. 40 Ibid., 301–3. 41 7 November 1749 letter to the minister in his personnel file, lac mg1-e, Microfilm reel no. F-614, F-828. 42 7 October 1750 letter to the minister in his personnel file, lac mg1-e, Microfilm reel no. F-614, F-828. 43 4 November 1756 letter of Vaudreuil, anom col c11a 101/fol. 143–143v. 44 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 280–1. 45 Ibid., 284. 46 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52. 47 Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, 242. 48 13 July 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P61. 49 19 July 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P62.

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notes to pages 210–15

50 12 November 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D108,P19. 51 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 288–9. 52 Ibid., 292. 53 Ibid., 297, 299–300. 54 hdq-f1-k1, 3/5: 6, 12 March 1757 letter of l’abbé de l’Isle-Dieu to M.-A. Duplessis and 18 February 1757 letter of François Sorbier de Villars to Duplessis. 55 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 13, 11 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 56 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 9, 25 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 57 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 13, 11 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 58 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 289. 59 Wildenstein, Rapports d’experts, 60–3; anf, Y 1901. Charles-Denis’s address is listed as “la rue des Grès, l’hostel Chaumont.” This street was located near the present Place du Panthéon. 60 The portrait had been painted from a profile of Pontbriand, and the experts opined that it was as faithful as could be expected when turning a profile into a full-face portrait. The portrait must have included the bishop’s coat of arms, reproduced with slight variation, according to the experts, from a silver seal that they were shown (Wildenstein, Rapports d’experts, 59–61). Jouffroy was at the beginning of his career (Geyssant, “Pierre Jouffroy,” 62–73). The Musée de la civilization in Quebec holds a portrait of the bishop, attributed to an Ursuline said to have painted it for the cathedral chapter in 1749 (accession number 1991.3874). It has the awkwardness of a portrait done from a profile view. 61 31 December 1763 letter of Charles-Denis Duplessis to Antoine de Sartine, bnf, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Archives de la Bastille, Prisonniers vol. 12146; lac, Reel F-1542. 62 hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 22, 19 April 1757 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. 63 hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 29, 8 July 1757 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. 64 hdq-f1-g2/1: 96, 8 September 1758 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 65 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 113. 66 Ibid., NF 4: 113–14.

notes to pages 215–19

321

67 hdq-f1-g18/14: 39, 27 August 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 68 According to Stanley, perhaps thirty were killed and two hundred taken captive (New France: The Last Phase, 161, 289n24). Frégault points out that “the massacre at Fort William Henry was one more atrocity – a spectacular one – in a long series of atrocities. Bands of Indians, sometimes led by Canadian officers, had spread terror and destruction along the British frontiers” (Canada: The War of the Conquest, 154). Crouch highlights that the junior French officers were particularly aghast at William Henry and stresses that their allies felt betrayed when Montcalm deprived them of the reward they expected (Nobility Lost, 85–9). 69 Montcalm, Journal, 7: 292–3. 70 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 114. Bougainville expressed his horror in 1757 at several episodes of eating British prisoners in his journal (Écrits sur le Canada: 12 June, 206; 24 July, 228; 15 August at Montreal, 256). 71 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 114. 72 Ibid., NF 4: 115–16. 73 Frégault debunks this inflation (Canada: The War of the Conquest, 221–2). 74 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 115–16. 75 Bougainville, Écrits sur le Canada, 314. 76 Warwick, “Littérature de la Nouvelle France,” 261. 77 “L’Anglais fait des prisonniers / Nous en faisons à milliers / Voilà la ressemblance / Le Français les traite bien / Mais l’Anglais les traite en chien / Voilà la différence” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 117–18). 78 Ibid., NF 4: 116.

Chapter Ten 1 Montcalm, Journal, 7: 285. 2 Cited in Courville, Mémoires, 126. 3 Andrès and Willemin-Andrès give a useful bibliography of such accounts in their edition of Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 229–34. 4 Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 11–31. Legardeur’s retrospective account is a circular letter ostensibly addressed to the order’s

322

notes to pages 219–24

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12

communities in France designed to encourage them to lobby for funds owed the Hôpital-Général by Versailles. See Julie Roy’s analysis of this text that skillfully links its rhetorical strategies to the emergence of a Canadian identity, “Marie-Joseph Legardeur.” Charlotte Daneau de Muy de Sainte-Hélène, the Ursuline annalist, included the military situation in her chronicle until late May 1759, when she began concentrating on convent events alone (Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 380–90). Noel focuses on the role of the noble nuns at the Hôpital-Général, not women in general, in her vivid account of how the colony’s women’s religious communities weathered the British victory, Along A River, 197–202. Dechêne gives examples concerning women, but focuses on the male militia in Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 408–18. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, includes the most complete account that I have found of the experience of Canadian women, including Indigenous ones, and even discusses the women camp followers of Wolfe’s forces. MacLeod’s short “Women of War” singles out Legardeur as the only woman to have written about the siege, but surveys the multiple aspects of women’s participation that are elaborated on in this chapter. Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 58–79, discusses examples of the participation of elite and non-elite women as combatants in Canada and Acadia during the seventeenth century. Cohn, “Women and Wars,” 10. My thinking on this issue has been informed by her essay (1–35). A classic example is Pepper’s chapter “The Two Pompadours or Women in the Downfall of New France,” in Maids and Matrons of New France, 269–86. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 492. Lévis, Journal, 1: 119. Bougainville, Écrits sur le Canada, 277, 286. Other French officers use the word “attroupement,” an unruly, unauthorized gathering, for previous similar events. While such events in France could involve violence and property damage and thus merit the term “riot,” this is not reported in the Canadian ones I have found described. See Bouton, The Flour War. Bouton noted that women led 93.5 percent of such riots in France where the gender of participants

notes to pages 224–6

323

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

324

is known. Authorities tended to excuse women’s participation in these events by attributing it to their maternal role, and punished female participants much less harshly than male ones (224–33). Dechêne dismissed these demonstrations by women in 1757 and 1758 (she does not mention the 1759 one) as “weak” because they did not lead to violence (Le Partage des subsistances, 171). Montcalm, Journal, 7: 492. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 51, 22 January 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis; hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 58, 13 April 1759 letter of Bigot to the bursar. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 50, 3 January 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 54, early February 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Bigot. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 52, 9 February 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 53, 12 February 1759 letter of Bigot and undated one of Bigot to the bursar. hdq-f1-g2/1: 101, 10 February 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand with his reply at the foot of the letter. hdq-f1-g2/1: 98, 2 April 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires, 2: 135.  Montcalm, Journal, 7: 495. Ibid., 7: 510–11. Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires, 2: 135. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 511. hdq-f1-g2/1: 102, 27 April 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 61, 26 May 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-t2-c336/2, 18 February 1759 letter of Villars to M.-A. Duplessis. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 301. Marie-Marguerite-Daniel Saint-Arnaud de Saint-Arsène to Duplessis on 12 February 1759, in Lemire-Marsolais, Histoire de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 5: 93–4. Original in hdq-f1-g9/22: 1. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. This

notes to pages 226–30

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

undated copy of a fall 1759 circular letter of Duplessis to convents of the order in France begins “Je ne doute point que les nouvelles publiques ne vous aient informées de la prise de Québec.” It is not in her hand. Deschênes gives abundant examples of the poor implementation of the evacuation on the south shore (L’Année des Anglais, 29–44). Dechêne includes examples from the north shore (Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 402–6). Montcalm, Journal, 7: 524. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 4: 168. Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 65. Ibid., 78. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 542; Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 75. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, 65–6. Panet, Journal du siège de Québec, 5. Joannès, Mémoire sur la campagne de 1759, 4: 221. hdq-f1-g2/1: 103, 13 June 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq- f1-g2/1: 105, 27 June 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g2/1: 106, 29 June 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand with his reply at bottom of page. Récher, Journal du Siège de Québec, 17–18. Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 94. Hébert, ed., Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 84. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 13. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. hdq-f1-g2/1: 107, 13 June letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g2/1: 108. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 14. hdq-f1-g2/1: 109, 14 July 1759 letter to Pontbriand from M.-A. Duplessis. These details come from Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 13–14. hdq-f1-g2/1: 109, 14 July 1759 letter to Pontbriand from M.-A. Duplessis. French soldiers did not always respect the nuns working in these mobile hospital stations. O’Reilly tells how a Hôpital-Général nun, Marie-Thérèse de Lantagnac de

notes to pages 230–6

325

55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64

65

326

Sainte-Élisabeth, was more than once insulted by soldiers. On one occasion, a soldier put his sword to her throat and snatched away food she had prepared for the wounded (Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 627). hdq-f1-g2/1: 109; his replies are written on Duplessis’s 14 July letter. For a thoughtful and full assessment of the standards of war as applied to Wolfe’s Quebec campaign, see Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 44–68. He takes into account British, French, Canadian, and Indigenous views and practice. Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 98–9. Panet, Journal du siège de Québec, 14. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 580–1. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, illustration 42. Illustration 43 shows a second Townshend caricature that has this dialogue between Wolfe and a subordinate: Wolfe: “We will not let any of them escape my dear Isaac, the pretty ones will be furnished at Headquarters.” The subordinate replies: “I understand you completely General. Strike ‘em in their weakest part Egad!” Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 101. One of the elite women taken prisoner, Marie-Françoise Chartier de Lotbinière, was the sister-in-law of the mother superior of the Hôpital-Général and the wife of the man whom Duplessis’s brother Charles-Denis had bested for the position of provost marshal in 1749, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay. Récher says the captain wrote on 2 August (Journal du siège, 28). See also the notes of Andrès and Willemin-Andrès in their edition of Fauteux, Journal du siege, 201, 206. O’Reilly recounts a similar rescue at the vestibule of the Hôpital-Général. A warrior entered the hospital’s vestibule with a bound captive British officer whom he intended to torture. Sister Marguerite-Françoise Hiché de Saint-Henri had the presence of mind to cut the prisoner’s bonds so that he could escape inside, while other nuns distracted his captor (Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 617–18). Hébert, ed., Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 98. Montcalm confirms the tenor of this last letter without giving its contents. In his Journal for 24 August, he noted, “Monsieur le marquis de Vaudreuil, pressured

notes to pages 236–40

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

by Monsieur le marquis de Montcalm, wrote General Wolfe, to inform him of the death of the captain of the Royal Americans wounded in the battle of 31 August. We send back at the same time his trunk and silver. Reply of Monsieur Wolfe that was very polite, unlike his ordinary practice” (7: 597). See Doughty’s note on this incident in Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 20–1. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 12. Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 34. See also his chapter “The Distasteful War” in The Battle for Quebec, 113–70. Dechêne is particularly vigorous in exposing how eighteenthcentury Canadians and French-Canadian historiography turned a blind eye to these depredations (Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 167–87). hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 64, 7 August 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 1/2: 14, 10 August 1759 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 1/2: 15, 26 August 1759 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 116. hdq-f1-g2/1: 111, 12 October 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 18. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 18–19. The three mother superiors were Duplessis, MarieJoseph Duchesnay de l’Enfant-Jésus of the Hôpital-Général, and the Ursuline Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat de la Nativité. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 4: 208. Ramazay, “Conseil de guerre,” Mémoire du sieur de Ramezay, 28. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 27. Poussou points out in his review of the performance of each of the male leaders in the campaign that the Canadian Ramezay’s surrender of the town without a struggle was as much responsible for the overall defeat in 1759 as the tactical errors of the Frenchman Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham (“Les Débats entre historiens,” 30–1).

notes to pages 241–5

327

83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102

328

Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 129–30. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 21. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 214. Trudel, L’Église canadienne sous le régime anglais, 2: 258. His book offers detailed comparisons of the female and male communities based on their archives. Ibid., 2: 258. Ibid., 2: 302–16, 269–84. Duplessis’s letter of 14 October 1759 to Monckton (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 256–7). These figures come from Trudel, whose sub-chapter, “The Presence of the English Becomes Lucrative,” sums up his evaluation (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 263–74. The letters are summarized in the calendar of letters for The Northcliffe Collection, 273–4. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Guillimin, 17. While Poussou approves Montcalm’s overall strategy, he faults his tactical errors on 13 September (“Les Débats entre historiens”).  hdq-f1-k1, 3/10: 3a, draft of letter of M.-A. Duplessis probably to Villars beginning “Je vs ay une double obligation de mavoir fait lhonneur de mécrire cette année.” This draft seems to be answered by a 10 February one written by Villars who says he is replying to a letter she wrote on 16 October 1759 (hdq-f1-k1, 3/10: 4). Lévis, Journal des Campagnes, 1: 209. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. Mandements, lettres pastorales, 2: 141. Dechêne notes that the first pastoral letter of Pontbriand that speaks in terms of calamity and guilt only dates from January 1758. She suggests a reading of his pastoral letters in which it is not France that abandoned Canada, but God (Dechêne, Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 451–3). Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 54–5. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 438. 19 January 1760 letter Hector Theophilus Cramahé to M.-A. Duplessis (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 266). Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 130. hdq-f1-g2/1: 111, 12 October 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis.

notes to pages 245–50

103 col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. His 30 October 1757 letter that mentions this issue is addressed to Pierre de La Rue, his representative in France. As much as Duplessis respected honorable Protestant merchants in town, such as the member of the Mounier family who brought her Marie-Catherine’s letters, she supported the bishop’s policy. Mounier was “one of the most obstinate of his sect,” despite being a “very honest gentleman” (“très honnête homme”). “If there are a few Huguenots in the town,” she wrote Hecquet in 1753, “they are abhorred and not allowed to dogmatize” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 51). Two Mounier merchants signed the declaration requesting that Ramezay surrender the town in September 1759 (Ramezay, Mémoire, 27). 104 Trudel cites his 9 December 1759 letter to his vicar general Briand on this point (L’Église canadienne, 1: 72–3). 105 hdq-f1-g2/1: 113, 31 December 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. 106 Galland, writing fifty-seven years after Trudel’s study, confirms that loyalism to the new regime characterized the stance of the clergy (“In tempore tribulationis,” 60–2). 107 “The Hotel de Dieu is a spacious fair building, with an Attic story; and seems as if intended, in process of time, to be enlarged in the form of a square; but at present, it consists of two wings only, making a saliant angle. By an inscription, I perceived it was constructed in the year 1639, at the sole expense of Mary de Vignerot, duchess of Aiguillon; of whom I saw a tolerable portrait, on her knees in a praying posture: her Grace dedicated this house to St Joseph, who is also the Patron of Canada. I had a view of many other paintings of angels, saints, &c. but they are too indifferent to deserve any notice.” (Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 224–5.) 108 Ibid., 2: 233–8. 109 Ibid., 2: 225. Trudel compares the composition of the communities in September 1760. He notes that the Hôpital-Général community was also the youngest. The average age at the Hôtel-Dieu was 45.6 and 35.1 at the Hôpital-Général (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 260–3). 110 Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 130. 111 Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 119, notes that with

notes to pages 250–3

329

the end of the Iroquois wars and the militarization of Canadian society, “the need for women’s physical participation in the wars of the eighteenth century” was largely eliminated.

Epilogue and Conclusion 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 178. 2 Ibid., 4: 54. 3 hdq-f1-g2/1: 80, 14 September 1757 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. 4 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 116. 5 In addition to her circular letter written by her successor UrsuleMarie Chéron (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xi–xvi), Briand wrote a letter of consolation to the community two days after her death (Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 432–4). Auguste Gosselin cites a fragment of the letter sent by Pontbriand on 2 March 1760 in L’Église du Canada, 3: 204. Briand’s letter is useful for its list of her attributes – “her gentleness, her good nature, her prudence, her modesty, her humility, her poverty, her love of prayer, her mortification, her observance of the rule, and complete fidelity in everything, even in the smallest points, by which she climbed to this intimate union with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that is the delight of saints” – on which the circular letter elaborates. 6 hdq-f1-a6, 2/6: 1, letter of the assistant, Marie-Jeanne Tibierge de Sainte-Agnès, to houses in France, written in the summer of 1760. 7 hdq-f1-g2/1: 115, 2 March 1760 letter of Pontbriand to Chéron. 8 hdq-f1-g18/14: 43, 12 November 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 9 hdq-f1-g18/14: 44, 3 September 1757 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 10 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 437. 11 Ibid., 4: 438. 12 hdq-f1-g18/14: 21a, 18 April 1761 letter of the abbé de l’Isle-Dieu to the duchess. 13 Pitt, Correspondence of William Pitt, 2: 119. 14 Ibid., 2: 127. 15 O’Reilly, Monsieur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 393.

330

notes to pages 254–7

16 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 443–6 on the Hôtel-Dieu, 2: 453–5 on the Hôpital-Général, and 2: 470–1 for the Ursulines; Knox, An Historical Journal, 212–25; Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 14–16. 17 D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 184–6. 18 Ibid., lxx–lxxiii, for an account of his last years. 19 Archives des Yvelines, état civil, registre paroissial Notre-Dame, 15 July 1765. 20 P.-G. Roy, La famille Guillimin, 17. 21 Would Charles-Denis, who aspired to a noble lifestyle that was beyond his means, have taken satisfaction from the fact that his granddaughter, Marie-Geneviève, was certified in May 1772 to Louis XV as having two centuries of noble linage? The girl had been born on 21 August 1761 in Montreal where Charles-Denis’s wife and daughter had taken refuge. Two facts, however, might have blunted his delight. His granddaughter’s noble status was not based on Denis’s Morampont lineage, but on that of her father, Louis de Rastel. The Rastel de Rocheblave family could document its ancestry back to nobility in Dauphiné in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the certification was only done to allow the girl entry into the Maison Royale de l’Enfant-Jésus. This academy resembled the more famous Saint-Cyr, founded by Madame de Maintenon, in that it educated children of impoverished nobility. But it served a clientele of more reduced means and of lower status (Armelin, Preuves de noblesse, 2). 22 In 1774 a similar request for a 200-livre pension, this time with the support of the archbishop of Paris, was refused. The minister explained that unlike refugees from Ile Royale, the inhabitants of Quebec had been at liberty to sell their property with the advent of the British regime, and thus no compensation would be made (anom col e 160, “Duplessis de Morampont, prévôt des maréchaux de France au Canada, sa veuve Geneviève Guillemin, réfugiée aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon [1748/1766]”). 23 Hebert, Acadians in Exile, 174. 24 A 1791 list of pensioners has her down for 200 livres, the amount she had requested in 1774 (État nominatif des pensions, 3: 427). 25 Archives de Paris, V3E/D 746, fichiers de l’état civil reconstitué de Paris, 7 July 1764.

notes to pages 257–8

331

26 Chéron included it among other virtues: “her strength, her equanimity, her perfect resignation to the will of God” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv). 27 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 434. 28 hdq-f1-k1, 3/3: 5, 20 May 1730 letter of Dupas, apothecary at La Rochelle. 29 Lencquesaing analyzes this tradition that emphasizes valour in the context of nuns and hagiography in terms of gender theory and Jeanne de Chantal in “Confisquer l’exceptionnel féminin.” Gagnon shows how this tradition was adapted by Casgrain and other nineteenth-century Quebec clerical hagiographers in his chapter on them in Le Québec et ses historiens, 71–121. They used the femme forte tradition to attribute reputedly masculine traits to Canadian holy women (76–7). 30 See Maclean’s chapter “The New Feminism and the Femme Forte, 1630–1650,” in Woman Triumphant, 64–87, especially 86–7. 31 Fénelon, Œuvres, 1: 153–66, ch. 11–12. See Stanton, The Dynamics of Gender, 103–11, on Fénelon. The femme forte model was alive at the Hôtel-Dieu for superiors well into the nineteenth century. François Rousseau notes that Julie-Élisabeth Gibson de Saint-Henry was eulogized as a femme forte in her 1888 circular letter (La Croix et le scapel, 1: 347). 32 Nonetheless, Fénelon made room for belle-lettristic reading – ancient and modern history, poetry, and eloquence – in ch. 12. 33 Rohan published the first edition of La Morale du Sage in 1667. I cite the 1681 edition, 252. The Douai-Rheims translation based on the Vulgate and used by English Catholics in the seventeenth century gives for verse 26 “She hath opened her mouth to wisdom, and the law of clemency is on her tongue.” 34 Rohan’s paraphrase (252) of verse 26 adds a sentence that has no basis in the Vulgate: “She only opens her mouth to instruct and console those who need it.” 35 Ibid., 251. For verse 23, Douai-Rheims gives “Her husband is honourable in the gates, when he sitteth among the senators of the land.” 36 D’Allaire, in the conclusion to her history of the Hôpital-Général, bewailed the dearth of such letters for that institution (L’HôpitalGénéral de Québec, 228).

332

notes to pages 259–61

37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 332. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 420. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 54. Ibid., NF 2: 74. The woman in question was Anne-Catherine André de Leigne, the oldest daughter of Pierre André de Leigne; she married Nicolas Lanoullier de Boisclerc in January 1721. Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, 8, 17, 184. “He deserves to be praised by persons more eloquent than we, who being simple women, confine all our gratefulness to praying that God reward our benefactors” (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 180). See Julie Roy, “Des Femmes de lettres avant la lettre,” for an analysis of another lengthy work by her, the l’Abrégé de la vie de la comtesse de Pontbriand. 1 September 1668 letter to Claude Martin on the difficulty of “civilizing” them (Guyart, Correspondance, 809). She expressed great hopes for miraculous large-scale conversions in her 1 October 1669 letter to Cécile de Saint-Joseph in the wake of the pacification of the Iroquois in the late 1660s when Jesuit missionaries could be more active (854–5). See Deslandres, “L’Utopie mystique et les tracas,” 113–30, for an overview of this issue. Cowan, “Education, Francisation, and Shifting Colonial Priorities,” sorts out the various strands in the evolving Ursuline attitude. Bégon, Lettres au cher fils, 356 (10 April 1751), 378 (2 January 1752). Ibid., 369 (23 July 1751). Ibid., 330 (10 December 1750). See Julie Roy, “Des Femmes de lettres avant la lettre,” on the manuscript book. The list of authors who published their books and died in Canada is short. It includes Nicolas Denys, Bishop Saint-Vallier, and Pierre Boucher. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 7, 21 June 1727 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Ruette d’Auteuil. Hecquet, Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 59–60. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 77.

notes to pages 262–71

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bibliography Abbreviations anf anom banq hdq lac nf rapq

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index Abbeville, 17, 20, 27, 75, 89, 90, 92–3 Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, duchesse d’: solicitation of, 99, 101, 170, 177–8, 185, 190, 207, 249–50; intervention of, 256–7 Aiguillon, Marie-Madeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’, foundress, 99, 153, 164, 176, 178, 185 Alléon-Dulac, Jean-Louis: Mélanges d’histoire naturelle, 176 André de Leigne, Anne-Catherine, 263, 333n40 Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu: antiJansenism in, 156, 175; appeal to pleasure and curiosity in, 159; censorship of, 172–3; colony’s history in, 4, 159–61; composite nature of, 153–5; Duplessis’s authorship of, 114, 155–6; Duplessis’s corrections to manuscript of, 168–70; Duplessis’s corrections of printed book of, 175; Duplessis’s point of view in, 156–7, 161–3;

edition and publication in 1751 by La Tour, 131, 171–3, 185; evaluation of, 177–8, 263–5; financial information in, 159; on Hôpital-Général’s founding, 166–8; Jamet’s edition of, 9, 131, 171, 173; Juchereau’s role in, 155– 7, 264; never-written sequel to, 132, 145–7, 177, 265; promotion of community’s spiritual life in, 157–8; providentialist history in, 159–63, 177; published reviews of, 175–6; reliability of, 159, 161; title of, 307n4. See also Augustinian Sisters; Duplessis, Marie-André (writings); HôtelDieu de Québec Arnauld, Antoine, 78–9, 317n72 Arnauld, d’Andilly, Angélique de Saint-Jean de, 140, 155 Assembly of Clergy of France, 81–2 Augustine of Hippo, 77–9 Augustinian Sisters of Mercy: action/prayer tension, 60, 64–6, 141; chapter meetings, role of, 108, 116; dowry system and recruiting, 54, 61, 126–7, 166, 168, 188; monastery, 54,

58; moderate monastic life, 59–60, 74; musical culture, 59; separation of finances from hospital, 103, 191, 206; warning against particular friendships, 60. See also Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Ayen, duchesse d’, 99 Bacqueville de La Potherie, Claude-Charles Le Roy de: Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale, 177 Barbier, Marie, 7 Bavière, Charlotte-Élisabeth de, 139 Beauharnois de la Boische, Charles, 110, 124 Bégon, Élisabeth, 7, 11–12, 96, 265, 267–8, 275n28 Bégon, Michel de la Picardière, 38–40, 45 Berbier du Metz, Gédéon, 31 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric: Recueil de voyages au nord, 201 Bigot, François, 16, 96, 129, 132, 190, 204, 210, 217, 221, 226, 268; corruption of, 182, 189–90, 217, 224–5; and Duplessis’s efforts to woo, 101, 118, 218, 226–7, 228; efficiency of, 187; hostility to hospital of, 183–6, 190, 218, 226–9, 242, 249, 256 Bigot, Vincent, 55, 63, 212, 285n17 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 220–1, 230 Boulic, Marie-Renée de la Nativité, 57, 132, 287n40; criticism of, 132, 165–9, 175

358

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Boullongne d’Ailleboust, MarieBarbe de, 145, 163, 173, 175 Bourdeau, Pierre, 92–3, 296n60 Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 6, 51, 54 Braddock’s defeat, 218–19 Branssat, Marie-Anne Migeon de, 7, 327n77 Brébeuf, Jean de, 57, 172 Briand, Jean-Olivier, 143, 250, 255 Brooke, Frances, 257 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe de, 44 Cahusac, Louis de, 172–3 Campra, André, 59 capillaire, syrup of, 99 Carillon, battle of, 220–1 Carmelites, 51, 61, 64, 73, 80, 96, 144–5, 147 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond, 8–9, 16, 259–60 Catalogne, Gédéon, 35 Catherine de Saint-Augustin. See Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine de Saint-Augustin Champigny, Jean Brochart de, 32, 33–4, 139 Chantal, Jeanne de, 259 Chapter of cathedral of Quebec, 169–70, 290n17, 321n60 Chardon, Jean-Baptiste, 155–6, 158, 170 Charest, Étienne, 38 Charlevoix, Pierre-FrançoisXavier de, 302n60; Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 177; Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 147, 177

Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 59 Chartier de Lotbinière, RenéLouis, 37 Chéron, Ursule-Marie, 50, 143, 256, 275n30, 277n36, 308n7 Chevreuse, 19, 23–4, 30 Cohn, Carol, 224 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 19, 31 Commission des secours, 204, 210, 230 Company of the Colony, 36–41, 45, 55, 110 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 7, 51–2, 54, 230, 307n1 Congregation of Saint-Maur, 81, 267 Congregation of the Virgin, 34 convent writing, 14, 94, 151, 262, 265, 268; annals, 131; obituary letters, 51, 139, 140, 147–8; précieuses abbesses, 132; recordkeeping, 155 Coste, Hilarion de: Éloges et Vies des reynes, princesses, 138 Council of Trent, 80, 164 Cramahé, Hector Théophilus, 249–50 Crespieul, François, 173 Cuillerier, Marie-Anne-Véronique: Relations, 263, 307n1 Curot, Marie-Louise de SaintMartin, 256 D’Allaire, Micheline, 257 Daine, François, 118 Daneau de Muy, Charlotte, 160, 264 Demus, Jean-Baptiste, 91, 296n60 Desprez (correspondent of Poulet), 293n42

Diefendorf, Barbara, 66 Dosquet, Pierre-Herman, 81, 86, 169–70 Douin, Andrée: family background, 18–19; as wife, 17– 19; as mother, 19, 21, 26, 30–1; as pious grandmother, 17, 18, 23–4, 28–9, 137; death of, 276n11 Douin, Louis-François, 19, 43 dressmakers’ guild (linen-drapers, lingères), 19, 20, 24 Dubois, Paul-André, 10 Duguet, Jacques-Joseph, 198 Dumas, Jean-Daniel, 219, 234 Dumont de Montigny, JeanFrançois-Benjamin, 211–12 Duparc, Jean-Baptiste, 82, 291n25 Dupas (apothecary), 4, 332n28 Duplessis, Charles-Denis: birth, 41, education, 5, 43; Morampont name of, 278n2; marriage, 12, 47, 123–4; military career, 43, 48–9, 123–4; as provost marshal, 214; last trip to Paris, 214–17; abandonment of family and bankruptcy, 74, 214–16; dispute over portraits, 216–17; last years and death, 217, 258 Duplessis, François-Xavier, 12, 23, 99, 230; birth, 33, 41; Jesuit novitiate, 5, 43, 63–6, 76–7; spiritual advice to sisters, 58–9, 62–7, 69; on the cross, 87, 121, 285n17; lobbying for family, 124–5; lobbying for hospital, 12, 125, 189–90, 210, 213–14, 230; as mission preacher, 14, 87, 93; mission at Abbeville, 76, 87–90;

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anti-Jansenist polemics and misogyny, 77, 87–9, 90; and publishing Geneviève’s texts, 145; on Geneviève’s death, 150–1; on Charles-Denis’s marital problems, 214–16; declining heath and death, 99, 213, 258 Duplessis, Geneviève: birth, 41; Paris trip and education, 28, 41, 136, 180; attachment to her sister, 13, 28, 61–2, 66, 72, 211, 271; vivacity, 62, 67, 117–18, 151; vocation as nun, 5, 43, 61–2, 64, 136–8; Carmelite contemplative “temptation,” 64–7, 73, 144–5, 150–1, 288n72; as bursar, 12, 114, 116–19, 206; as part of administrative team, 12, 106, 110, 182, 205; on clausura, 107, 270; hopes for publication, 145; burnout, 81–2, 117–18, 189–91; in 1755 fire, 146; health and death, 74, 149–51, 211–13, 254; La Manne de Bethléem, 9, 73, 143–5; Réflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension, 144–5 Duplessis, Georges Regnard: baptism, 278n1; family background and name, 30–1, 278n2; marriage, 19, 30–2; posting to Canada, 5, 17, 32, 276n5; as father, 27, 137; as treasurer of the marine office, 32–3, 39, 279n8; business activities, 9, 33–7; as friend of hospital, 158; friendship with Dupuy, 34, 52; Jesuit piety, 34, 48, 54, 76; relations with

360

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Canadian authorities, 33–4, 37–9; financial decline, 38–40; death and posthumous debts, 40, 44–6, 283n87; evaluation, 47–8, 282n59 Duplessis, Joseph, 40; birth, 41; death, 43 Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character): spelling of name, 16; birth, 5; devotion to grandmother, 18, 23–4; education and business apprenticeship in Paris, 23–6; as a Parisian, 28, 93, 95, 182; ambivalence toward Canada, 180–2, 268; attachment to Hecquet, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 26–7, 76, 90–5, 101, 121, 270–1; as motive force of correspondence with Hecquet, 91–2; departure from France, 26–8, 277n36; attachment to Geneviève, 13, 28, 61–2, 66, 72, 211, 271; adolescence in Quebec, 5, 51–4; family home in Quebec, 41; novitiate, 54–5, 113; on detachment, 67–74; on flexibility concerning the rule, 59, 74, 122; on inner peace, 69–74; on Jansenism, 75–6, 83–6, 156; on mental prayer, 72, 142; oral instructions to community, 122, 143; and proselytizing Protestants, 129, 250; calm disposition, 50, 62, 67, 129, 142, 259; foresight, 117, 227; fearfulness, 3–4, 102, 208, 227, 234–5, 262; touch of fire, 4,

55, 111, 259; death, 6, 205, 254–6. See also Augustinian Sisters; Duplessis, Geneviève; Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel; Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Duplessis, Marie-André (managerial career): administrative correspondence, 11, 95–101, 266; on borrowing, 118, 184, 208, 256, 261; and clausura, 107, 115, 125, 228, 236, 270; and conflicts over purchasing practices, 117–18; evacuation plans in 1759, 233–5; and independence, 107–8, 113, 188, 205, 207, 262; leading role when not mother superior, 110–11, 121, 125, 208; letterwriting campaigns, 111, 123, 185, 207; managerial philosophy, 115–16; and managerial team with Geneviève, 12, 106, 110, 114, 116, 182, 205; mentoring by Juchereau, 5, 14, 58; minor trade, 118–19; as managerial femme forte, 259–62, 270; as femme tendre, 9, 259, 270; as novice mistress, 58–60; and popular piety, 119–21; and protest over priests’ house, 3–6; reaction to Pontbriand’s rebuilding plans (1755), 204–10; and rebuke by Rouillé, 186–8; and rhetorical tone of nuns, 110, 253, 270; and secrecy, 108, 120. See also Augustinian sisters; Duplessis, Geneviève; Dupuy, Claude-Thomas; Hôtel-Dieu de

Québec; Pontbriand, HenriMarie Dubreil de; siege of Quebec Duplessis, Marie-André (writings): Canadian firsts, 7, 10, 177, 262, 269, 274n9; circular death notices, 147–51; and epistolary conventions, 97; as historian, 4, 7, 159, 177, 308n7; and manuscript-books, 136, 153, 170, 269; pleasure in, 59, 135, 141, 159, 262–3; short devotional texts, 142–3; short narrative texts, 145–6; and wit (esprit), 131–3, 140–2, 263; Dissection spirituelle, 67–9, 72, 74, 133, 140–3; Histoire de Ruma, 7, 11, 15, 27, 61, 133–9, 150, 159, 262; Musique spirituelle, 7, 10, 13, 15, 58–60, 62, 67, 74, 133–6, 140–2, 159, 262, 269. See also Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu; Hecquet, Marie-Catherine; New France; salons; women Duplessis, Marie-Joseph-André, 124, 215, 247, 258 Dupuy, Claude-Thomas, 71, 96, 99, 100, 109–13, 117, 123, 184, 270 Dupuy, Geneviève de la Croix, 34, 58 Dupuy, Marie-Madeleine de la Nativité, 59 Dupuy de Lisloye, Paul, 34, 48, 52, 54, 113, 137, 158, 172 Duquesne de Menneville, Ange, 186 Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 15, 200–1, 267

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Étemare, Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Ménilles de, 198 femme forte, 9, 16; as amazon, 252, 259–60; biblical origins of, 259–60; in hagiography, 6, 259–60; as manager, 260–1 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-: De l’Éducation des filles, 260 Féret, Jacques Tranquillain, 11, 95, 97, 99–100, 118, 145 Ferland, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 8 Fiducie du patrimoine culturel des Augustines, 11 Filles de la Croix, 24, 28 Fino, Catherine, 11, 66, 69 Fleury Deschambault, JeanneCharlotte de, 223 Foligné, Jérôme de, 245 Fontaine, Guillaume, 19–20 Fontaines-Marans, Madeleine Du Bois de Saint-Joseph de, 164 Forestier, Marie, 147, 153 Fornel, Joachim, 83, 85, 291n25, 292n36 Fort William Henry, 219–20 Fox nation, 315n59 Franciscan sisters of Abbeville, 75, 80, 269 Franquet, Louis, 100–1, 185–6, 189, 190, 207, 210 Frégault, Guy, 35–7, 322n68 friendship, 10, 13–14; Christian, 22, 62, 94–5, 100–1; classical notions of, 21, 22; epistolary, 90–5; friends of the hospital, 96–101, 158, 170, 190, 205;

362

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with God, 66; friends as supporters, 31, 139; friends as work colleagues, 31; and instrumental friends, 95; particular friendships at the Hôtel-Dieu, 62, 68; between women, scepticism about, 18, 21, 275n1; warning against particular friends in the religious life, 50, 60–2, 94. See also Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character) Frontenac, Louis de Buade de, 33 Gaultier, Jean-François, 117–18, 125 Gauvreau, Michael, 294n43 Gérard, Louis, 170, 311n75 Gies, Loretto, 10 Giffard, Marie-Françoise de SaintIgnace, 55 Giffard de Moncel, Robert, 158 Greer, Allan, 163 Greinoz, François, 172–3 Groulx, Lionel, 10 Guenet, Marie, 147 Guigues, Louis, 36 Guillimin, Charles, 44, 123 Guillimin, Geneviève-Élisabeth, 123, 214–16, 247, 258 Guillimin, Guillaume, 123–4 Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation, 6, 8, 10, 12, 96, 259; as historian, 177, 265–7; Relation de 1654, 267; Retraites, 144, 170 Hardy, Claire, 24 Havard de Beaufort, FrançoisCharles, 121

Hecquet, Jacques, 75, 93, 94; at Charenton asylum, 296n74 Hecquet, Marie-Catherine (Manon, daughter of MarieCatherine Homassel Hecquet), 63, 295n60 Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel: and father, 18, 26–7, 93; education under Michelle Homassel, 20–3; on MarieAnne Leroy, 22; friendship with Duplessis, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 26–7, 76, 90–5, 101, 121, 270–1; and Jansenism, 29, 75–6, 80, 87–90, 198–9, 201; as closet Jansenist, 89–90, 94–5, 97, 175, 270; marriage and financial separation, 75, 90, 94; as mother, 63, 90, 93–4; as unreliable correspondent of Duplessis, 91–3, 95; and gift exchanges with Duplessis, 95, 97, 99, 119, 221; Paris home, 93, 193; obsession with Indigenous peoples and ties to wild girl, 15, 191–9; and La Condamine, 200; death, 257–8; preservation of correspondence by descendants, 8, 95, 258; Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 13, 15, 191–201, 270; Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel, 13, 18. See also Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character); Jansenism Hecquet, Philippe (doctor), 28–9, 90 Hecquet, Philippe (son of MarieCatherine Hecquet), 94

Heu, Jacques d’, 83–4, 291n25 Hocquart, Gilles, 45, 113, 117, 123–4, 127, 181, 183, 261, 303n71 Homassel, Jacques: as businessman, 17, 26–7, 29, 93; as father, 17, 26–8, 90–1 Homassel, Marie-Catherine. See Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel Homassel, Michelle Fontaine, 13, 17–18, 28–9, 89, 94; charity, 193; educational practices, 22–3; as partner of Marie-Anne Leroy, 21–2, 26; as wife and mother, 19–20; spiritual practices, 20 Hôpital-Général, 7, 8, 34, 107, 119, 122, 125–6, 205, 298n7; annals of, 167, 307n1; favoured by administrators, 186–7, 204, 261; opposition to its establishment, 52–4, 57, 166–8; novices, 54; as military hospital, 218, 257; during 1759 siege, 234–45; postsiege, 252, 257 hospitality, ix, 64 Hôtel de Ville de Paris investments, 44, 108–9 Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 7, 166, 203, 298n7; annals, 263–4, 307n1; construction of royal wing, 187 Hôtel-Dieu de Québec (hospital): agricultural holdings of, 113–15; as British military hospital, 246–7, 256–7; bursar’s role in, 103, 106; clientele, 103, 161–2; damage during siege, 238, 246–8; finances, 103–4,

index

363

108–9, 187; and 1755 fire, 146, 148–9, 202–4; and health care in Quebec, 102–3; as French military hospital, 128–9, 181, 188; operating plant, 125–8; patient care, 103, 128; patient load, 116–17, 128; paying for expansion, 183–8, 261; priests’ house in, 3–4, 102, 109, 259, 269; rebuilding after fire, 204–10; royal support, 128–9, 181, 184; urban holdings of, 109–13. See also Augustinian Sisters Huguenots, 77, 250–1 Ile-aux-oies, 58, 113–14, 172, 176 Indigenous peoples: as allies of French, 32, 220; as converts, 163–4, 161, 181, 194–7, 266; exoticism of, 41, 99, 119; as noble savages, 193–4; Duplessis’s opinion of, 51, 196–9, 220; Hecquet’s interest in, 15, 193–9; as patients at hospital, 103, 161– 2, 171; as slaves, 47, 196, 315n56; war practices of, 220, 241–2 indulgences, 119, 121, 173 Innocent X, 79 Jacquelin (Quebec merchant), 92 Jamet, Albert, 9, 144, 152–3, 156, 161–2, 164, 168, 171, 173 Jansen, Cornelius: Augustinus, 77, 78 Jansenism and Jansenists, 10, 12; in Canada, 14, 81–6, 156, 294n43; components of, 77–9, 200; and conversion of unbelievers, 198–9;

364

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and criticism of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 201; and fact/ doctrine distinction, 79; and formularies against, 81–2, 86; and Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 87, 201; as opponents of the Jesuits, 76–80, 197, 213, 258; and scepticism about Jesuit missions, 88–9, 197, 213; and women, 75, 80. See also Jesuits; Poulet; rigorism; Unigenitus Jaucourt, Louis de, 200–1, 207 Jauffroy, Pierre, 216–17 Jesuits, 71, 258; Canadian land holdings, 115; Canadian missions, 161, 197–8, 266; as critics of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 201; as friends of Duplessis family, 29, 34, 49, 55, 76, 93, 212; and misogyny, 76, 89; as opponents of Jansenism, 76–7, 82–6; as supporters of HôtelDieu, 71, 146, 149–50, 161–2, 176, 206. See also Jansenism Josse, Guy, 19 Josse, Pierre, 19, 31–2 Jourjon, Antoine-Mathieu, 258 Journal de Trévoux, 176 Juchereau de la Ferté, Jean, 114 Juchereau de la Ferté, JeanneFrançoise, 3, 5, 7–9, 54–8, 82, 147, 157–8, 264; and conflict with Saint-Vallier, 57, 167–8; as femme forte, 9, 259; as mentor of Duplessis, 14, 57–8, 114. See also Annales Juchereau Duchesnay, MarieJoseph, 7, 107, 299n11

Kalm, Pehr, 14, 102, 125–9, 183, 250, 257 Knox, John, 252, 257 La Colombière, Joseph de, 54, 135, 286n25 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de, 191; as editor of Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 199–200 La Galissonière, Roland-Michel Barrin de, 100–1, 106, 125, 127, 186, 188–9 La Guirlande de Julie, 136 La Jonquière, Jacques-Pierre de, 124 La Lande Gayon, Marie-Thérèse de, 114 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 193 La Motte, Louis-François-Gabriel d’Orléans de, 90 La Porte, Arnaud de, 189–90 La Rochefoucauld-Roye, Éléonore de, 41 La Rue, Pierre de, abbé de l’IsleDieu, 187–8, 215, 256–7 La Tour, Bertrand de, 9, 15; Duplessis on, 169; as editor of Annales, 169–73, 175, 185, 199 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de: Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale, 195–9, 201 Lajoüe, Marie-Anne, 148 Lanctot, Gustave, 274n9 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, JeanEustache, 44–5, 122–3, 283n81 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, Nicolas, 44, 122–4, 280n24, 283n81 Lanoullier des Granges,

Paul-Antoine-François, 302n66 Lauzon, 35, 38–9, 41, 51, 109–10, 116, 233, 280n35 Laval, François de, 57, 81, 103, 164–9, 171, 175 Law, John (bank and Mississippi company), 44, 108, 157 laxism. See rigorism Le Cointre, Anne, 147 Le Moyne, Pierre: La Galerie des femmes fortes, 138 Le Peletier, Claude, 19, 31–2, 276n5 LeBlanc, Léopold, 10 Leblanc, Marie-Angélique: benefactors of, 193, 200; death, 200; discovery of, 191–2; Duplessis on, 191, 299; meeting with Hecquet, 193–5; speculation over origins, 192–5, 199 Leclair, Pierre, 81, 85, 292n38, 294n42 Legardeur de Repentigny, MarieJoseph: Relation du siège de Québec, 224, 241, 243–5, 248, 264 Leroy, Denis, 19, 31, 39, 43, 45, 276n5, 276n7 Leroy, Jacques, 139, 278n3 Leroy, Jean (husband of Andrée Douin), 19 Leroy, Jean (son of Andrée Douin), 19, 43, 99; Jansenism, 29, 77, 90; death, 276n7, 289n6 Leroy, Marie, 151, 279n5; marriage contract, 19, 30–2, 137; as mother, 26–7, 41–4; trips to Paris, 26–7, 37, 41, 55, 276n11;

index

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financial dealings as wife, 37, 40–1; as widow, 40–7, 77, 119, 122, 283n87, 284n94; allowances for religious children, 43; illness and death, 47; evaluation of, 48, 137 Leroy, Marie-Anne: as business woman, 13, 19–20, 24–6, 104, 139; Duplessis’s opinion of, 22, 28; Hecquet’s opinion of, 22; as partner of Michelle Homassel, 21–2 Lespinasse, Julie de, 265 Levasseur de Neré, Jacques, 36 Lévis, François-Gaston de, 244, 248, 252 Leymarie, A.-L., 9 Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne de (1626–1685), 139 Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne de (1656–1729), 139 Longueuil, Marie-Élisabeth Lemoyne de, 61–2, 135, 138–9 Louis XIII, 162 Louis XIV, 19, 39, 76, 79, 81, 139, 163, 172, 262 Louis XV, 123, 157, 163, 221, 224, 257–8 Louis-le-Grand (Jesuit college, Paris), 43, 93 Lubert, Louis de, 32 Lyon-Caen, Nicolas, 93, 275n1, 275n33 Maboul (book censor), 172–3 Machault D’Arnouville, JeanBaptiste de, 210 Maclean, Ian, 260 Maillou, Marie-Joseph, 149 Malesherbes, Guillaume de

366

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Lamoignon de, 172 Malidor, Pierre, 33 Mance, Jeanne, 6 Marie de l’Incarnation. See Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation Martin, Claude, 144, 147, 170, 177, 265, 267 Maudoux, Abel, 293n40 Maupeou, Charles-Guillaume de, 82 Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de, 6, 41, 107, 124, 126–7, 183–5 Maurice (baker), 190–1 Melançon, François, 10–11 Mercier, Marie-Madeleine, 123 Merlac, André de, 292n32 Meusnier de Querlon, Gabriel de, Affiches de province, 176 Mézy, Augustin de Saffray de, 168 Miquelon, Dale, 126, 280n34 Molinism, 77. See also Jesuits Monckton, Robert, 246–7 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de: criticism of Bigot, 229, 231; criticism of Vaudreuil, 224, 229; dismay at Indigenous allies, 220–1; Duplessis on his death, 247–8; Duplessis on his victories, 217–21; as friend of hospital, 190, 221, 256; on women, 223. See also siege of Quebec Montigny, François de, 95, 97, 119 Moogk, Peter N., 32 Morin, Marie, 7, 11; Histoire simple et véritable, 7, 177, 263–4, 307n1 mortification, 20, 51, 60, 68–9, 74, 163, 330n5. See also Simon

de Longpré, Catherine de Saint-Augustin Mounier (Protestant merchants), 93, 329n103 Moureau, François, 173 Murray, James, 249, 255–6 music: and Baroque ornaments, 140–1; and monastic spirituality, 59–60, 140–1; naughty songs, 24, 68; plainchant, 59, 140; and pleasure, 60, 135; songs celebrating French victories, 99, 221 mutilated crucifix, 121, 145–6 New France: Élisabeth Bégon’s perspective on, 265, 267–8; Duplessis’s perspective on, 4, 7, 12, 97, 157, 161, 265–9; Guyart’s perspective on, 265–7; literature of, 7, 10–11, 131–2, 262, 269 Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, 77, 79, 292n38 Noel, Jan, 132, 187, 273n5 Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces, 119–20, 145–6 Ochterlony, David, 240–1 Oratorians, 20, 22, 29 Oswego (Chouaguen), 218–19 palls, 97, 202 Pâris, François de, 93 Parkman, Francis, 161 Pascal, Blaise, 78 patriarchal colonial state, 16, 162, 261, 268–9

Péan, Michel-Jean-Hugues, 217, 225 Pearson, Timothy G., 286n19, 311n86 Petit de Verneuil, Jacques, 32–3, 39–40, 51 Petit, Jean, 39–40, 51, 280n25 Philippe d’Orléans, 76–7 philosophes, 12, 191, 199–201, 258 Phips, William: 1690 attack, 160–1, 163, 219, 264 Pinaud, Nicolas, 38–9 Pitt, William, 249, 256–7 playing-card money, 33, 40, 157, 159 Poisson, Jeanne-Antoinette, marquise de Pompadour, 225 Pontbriand, Henri-Marie Dubreil de, 11, 96, 108, 117, 123, 188, 191, 241; Duplessis’s relation with, 204, 226, 228, 255, 262; and 1759 evacuation, 231–6; pastoral letters, 228–9, 248; portrait, 217; and Protestants, 250–1; role after 1755 fire, 15, 204–10; support for hospital, 121, 126–7, 145, 183–4, 190, 226, 228, 242–3, 256; role after Trois-Rivières Ursuline fire, 203–4 Pontchartrain, Jérôme Phélypeaux de, 34–9, 41, 45, 82 Pontchartrain, Louis Phélypeaux de, 32, 277n41 Poor Board, 34, 48, 52 Porlier, Catherine, 263 Portneuf (widow), 118 Port-Royal, 20, 29, 79, 84, 140, 155, 292n32, 294n44. See also Jansenism Potawatomi nation, 124

index

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Poulet, Georges-François, 14, 76, 81–6, 103. See also Jansenism; Jesuits; Saint-Vallier Puritanism, 78. See also rigorism Quesnel, Pasquier, Réflexions morales, 76–7, 79–80 Queylus, Gabriel Thubières de Levy de, 164–6 Racine, Louis, 193 Ragueneau, Paul: Vie de la Mère Catherine, 147, 170, 173, 285n19, 292n32, 317n72 Ramezay, Jean-Baptiste-NicolasRoch de, 244–5, 261, 327n82 Ramezay, Marie-Charlotte de Sainte Claude de, 7, 107, 244 Rapley, Elizabeth, 148 Rastel de Rocheblave, Pierre-Louis de, 258 Raudot, Antoine-Denis, 34, 36–7, 39, 132, 139 Raudot, Jacques, 34, 36–7, 39, 132, 139 Recollets, 52, 85, 203 relics, 57, 119, 196 Rémillard, Juliette, 10 Renaud d’Avène Des Méloizes, Angélique, 225, 229, 231 Richelieu, Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal de, 99, 164, 170–1 Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, 6, 99, 111, 170–1, 185, 190, 221, 256 Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Pierre de, 216, 231, 261, 268; as suitor of Geneviève, 211–12;

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attitude to women in wartime, 223–4, 245; and practices of Indigenous allies, 220, 240–2; as ally of hospital, 190, 206, 210, 242. See also siege of Quebec Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Philippe de, 38, 212 rigorism, 78, 86, 294n43. See also Jansenism Rioux, Marie-Madeleine, 83–4 Rioux, Nicolas, 81, 83–4 Rocher, Guy, 294n43 Rocheron, Marie-Madeleine de Sainte-Apolline, 247 Roches, Marie-Marthe des, 149 Rohan, Marie-Éléonor de, 132, 260 Rouillé, Antoine-Louis, 185–6, 266 Rousseau, François, 10, 187, 207, 262 Rousseau, Pierre: Correspondance littéraire, 176 Rowan, Mary M., 132 Roy, J.-Edmond, 9, 12, 43, 282n59, 283n87 Roy, Julie, 11 Ruette d’Auteuil, FrançoisMadeleine-Fortuné, 270; conflict with Dupuy, 110–11, 266; purchase of Lauzon, 110, 280n35 rules of war, 220, 225, 236–42. See also Indigenous peoples; siege of Quebec; Wolfe, James Rupelmonde, Marie de, 210 Sabatier, Pierre, 82, 90 Saint-Arnaud, Marie-MargueriteDaniel de Saint-Arsène, 230

Saint-Augustin (seigneurie), 113–15, 121, 123, 218, 236, 242, 245, 261 Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne de, 78 Saint-Marcel hospital nuns, 193 Saint-Utin (Marne), 30–1, 124 Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix-Chevières de, 3–4, 71, 102, 106, 110–11, 169, 269; and Hôpital-Général, 51–4, 57, 166–8, 261; and Jansenism, 81–6, 110, 111, 290n18, 292n31; and Rituel de Québec, 82 salons, 10; in Canada, 132, 139; conventions of salon writing, 133–8, 141; in France, 136, 138, 260, 262; and nuns as précieuses, 132; and worldly wit, 131–3, 139–40 Sarrazin, Claude-Martin, 215–16 Sartine, Antoine de, 217 Schwandt, Erich, 10 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 136; Les Femmes illustres, 138 seamstress’s guild (couturières), 20 Seminary of Foreign Missions, Paris, 82, 85, 93, 119, 229, 247 Seminary of Quebec, 71, 82–3, 85, 115, 205 siege of Quebec: bombardment during, 234–5, 238, 246; and bread riots, 226; destruction on south shore during, 241–2; elite women during, 225, 226, 229, 231; failed evacuation of countryside during, 230–1; and generals’ strategic failures,

224, 230, 231, 248, 261; at Hôpital-Général, 243–4; lower-class women during, 225, 226, 229, 230–1, 234, 242; and Montmorency Falls battle, 240–1; and women at town’s surrender, 245–6 Simon, Lorène, 10 Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine de Saint-Augustin, 155; and Duplessis, 72, 74; as femme forte, 259; miracles and visions, 55–7, 72, 74, 163, 172–3; and mortification, 69, 74; spiritual friendships, 62; Ragueneau’s life of, 147, 170, 173. See also mortification Soanen, Jean 20, 22, 89 Soumande, Louise de SaintAugustin, 52 Sovereign/Superior Council, 35–6, 85, 123–4 Stanley, Hans, 257 Sulpicians, 85, 115 Surin, Jean-Joseph, 67, 71 Talon, Jean, 132, 157, 264 Taschereau, Thomas-Jacques, 100, 117 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 197 Teresa of Avila, 60–1, 62–6, 265; Life, 66–7; Way of Perfection, 60 Thiboult, Thomas, 83, 85 Thierry de Viaixnes, 293n42 Thomas à Kempis: Imitation of Christ, 71 Tibierge, Catherine de SaintJoachim, 61, 106, 111, 179, 259

index

369

Townshend, George, 238, 244, 245, 249 Treasury of the Marine, 18, 32–3, 39–40, 44, 48, 123, 279n9, 279n10, 280n24 Trudel, Marie-Madeleine de SaintPaul, 247 Unigenitus (Clement XI), 14, 75–7, 79–82, 85–6, 289n3, 293n40. See also Jansenism; Poulet Ursulines, 8, 51, 54, 58, 71, 80, 119, 126, 125–6, 257; annals of, 160, 264, 307n1; conflict over their annals, 169–70; fire in TroisRivières, 203–4, 210; hospitality after 1755 fire, 149, 202–3, 212; during 1755 siege, 235–6 Varin de La Marre, Jean-Victor de, 206 Varlet, Dominique-Marie, 293n41 Vaudreuil, Louise-Élisabeth de Joybert de, 33, 132 Verchères, Marie-Madeleine Jarret de, 252 Verreau, H.-A., 8, 10 Villars, François Sorbier de, 215, 229–30, 247–8 Villebois, Honoré Michel de, 265, 267–8 Visitation nuns, 80, 96, 147 Vitré, Antoine, 137 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 138, 193, 200

370

index

Walker, Hovenden: 1711 expedition of, 45, 139–40, 160–1, 162, 176, 219, 230, 264 Ward, Matthew C., 241 Warwick, Jack, 221 Wheelwright, Esther, 7; friendship with Geneviève, 212–13 Wolfe, James, 230–3, 244–5; and rules of war, 236–41, 249; and women, 238–40 women: and brothels, 229; and family mentality, 61, 104–6, 267; financial and legal status, 104–6; financial separation from husband, 40, 94, 105, 261; lobbying by, 41; and male oversight, 105–6, 164, 204, 207, 269; misogynous commonplaces used by Duplessis, 75–6, 108, 160, 269; as motivator in war, 223, 245–6; spiritual agency, 163–4; wartime role, 223, 229, 242, 252–3. See also friendship

a touch of fire

mcgill-queen’s studies in early canada / avant le canada Series editors / directeurs de la collection : Allan Greer and Carolyn Podruchny This series features studies of the history of the northern half of North America – a vast expanse that would eventually be known as Canada – in the era before extensive European settlement and extending into the nineteenth century. Long neglected, Canada-before-Canada is a fascinating area of study experiencing an intellectual renaissance as researchers in a range of disciplines, including history, geography, archeology, anthropology, literary studies, and law, contribute to a new and enriched understanding of the distant past. The editors welcome manuscripts in English or French on all aspects of the period, including work on Indigenous history, the Atlantic fisheries, the fur trade, exploration, French or British imperial expansion, colonial life, culture, language, law, science, religion, and the environment. Cette série de monographies est consacrée à l’histoire de la partie septentrionale du continent de l’Amérique du nord, autrement dit le grand espace qui deviendra le Canada, dans les siècles qui s’étendent jusqu’au début du 19e. Longtemps négligé par les chercheurs, ce Canada-avant-le-Canada suscite beaucoup d’intérêt de la part de spécialistes dans plusieurs disciplines, entre autres, l’histoire, la géographie, l’archéologie, l’anthropologie, les études littéraires et le droit. Nous assistons à une renaissance intellectuelle dans ce champ d’étude axé sur l’interaction de premières nations, d’empires européens et de colonies. Les directeurs de cette série sollicitent des manuscrits, en français ou en anglais, qui portent sur tout aspect de cette période, y compris l’histoire des autochtones, celle des pêcheries de l’atlantique, de la traite des fourrures, de l’exploration, de l’expansion de l’empire français ou britannique, de la vie coloniale (Nouvelle-France, l’Acadie, Terre-Neuve, les provinces maritimes, etc.), de la culture, la langue, le droit, les sciences, la religion ou l’environnement.

1 A Touch of Fire Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France Thomas M. Carr, Jr

a touch of fire Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France

thomas m. carr, jr

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 isbn 978-0-2280-0094-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0095-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0234-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0235-2 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from the Maude E. Wisherd Fund of the Emeriti and Retirees Association of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: A touch of fire : Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the writing of New France / Thomas M. Carr, Jr. Names: Carr, Thomas M., 1944- author. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in early Canada = Avant le Canada ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200214667 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200214764 | isbn 9780228000952 (softcover) | isbn 9780228000945 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228002345 (pdf) | isbn 9780228002352 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Duplessis, Marie-Andrée, 1687-1760. | lcsh: Duplessis, MarieAndrée, 1687-1760— Correspondence. | lcsh: Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. | lcsh: Nuns—Québec (Province)—Québec—Biography. | lcsh: Hospitalers—Québec (Province)—Québec—Biography. | lcsh: Hospitals—Québec (Province)— Québec— History—18th century. | lcsh: Canada—History—To 1763 (New France) | lcgft: Biographies. Classification: lcc fc351.D87 C37 2020 | ddc 971.4/014092—dc23

contents Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

1

Two Girls’ Friendship on the Rue Saint-Honoré in the Orbit of Independent Women 17

2

The Networks of an Enterprising Father and a Resilient Mother 30

3

Spiritual Mothers and Friends: Seeking the Peace of the Lord in Hospitality 50

4

Friend of a Jansenist, Sister of a Jesuit: The 1718 Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu and Fashioning Epistolary Friendships 7 5

5

A Sister Team Managing the Oldest Hospital North of Mexico: Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Mother Superior (1732–38; 1744–50) 102

6

Writing the Spiritual Life at the Hôtel-Dieu 131

7

Duplessis Takes Women’s History Public: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec 152

8

1750–55 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Aborted Expansion, Burnout, and the Encyclopédie 179

9

1755–58 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Fire, Family Crosses, and War 202

10

A Woman’s Siege and Occupation: Navigating a Year of Male Military Failures 223

11

Epilogue and Conclusion: Bride of an Unworthy Spouse: Femme forte or femme tendre? 254

Notes 273 Bibliography 335 Index 357

vi

contents

figures 1.1 Lingère, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1784. Special collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, photo by Laura Weakly. 25 1.2 Couturière, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1784. Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, photo by Laura Weakly. 25 2.1 Anonymous, Sainte Hélène impératrice, late seventeenth / early eighteenth century. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2249. 42 2.2 Richard Short, A View of the Jesuits College and Church. McCord Museum M2485. 46 3.1 Adaptation by Robert Nickel of the 1776 Plan of the City of Quebec by T. Bowen. 53 3.2 Anonymous, Mère Juchereau de Saint-Ignace. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2214. 56 3.3 Claude François, known as Frère Luc, Hospitalière soignant le Seigneur dans la personne d’un malade. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2018.51. 65 3.4 Frontispiece of Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Archives du monastère des Augustines, hdq. 70 4.1 François-Xavier Duplessis at cross of Arras, Avis et pratiques pour profiter de la mission, 1742, photo by Laura Weakly. 88 4.2 Pall embroidered by Duplessis with pelican. Collection du Monastère des Augustines, nac: 2010.2198.2. 98 5.1 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Hotel Dieu, Quebec. McCord Museum, M338. 112

5.2 Statue of Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces, first half of eighteenth century. Collection du Monastère des Augustines. 120 6.1 Title page of manuscript of the Musique spirituelle. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 1. 134 7.1 Title page of manuscript of the Annales, Histoire de l’HôtelDieu de Québec, 1720. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq. 154 7.2 Title page of printed Annales, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1751. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, hdq. 174 8.1 Title page of Hecquet’s 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage, photo by Laura Weakly. 192 8.2 Page in 1761 edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage, photo by Laura Weakly. 194 9.1 Richard Short, A View of the North West Part of the City of Quebec, Taken From St. Charles’s River. McCord Museum, M2482. 209 10.1 Plan of the River St. Lawrence from Sillery to the Fall of Montmorency with the Operations of the Siege of Quebec, 1759 (Compagnie de lithographie Burland-Desbarats, 1881). Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. 232 10.2 Richard Short, A View of the Treasury, and Jesuits College. McCord Museum, M2484. 237 10.3 George Townshend, General James Wolfe, at Quebec 1759. McCord Museum, M1791. 239 10.4 Richard Short, A View of the Inside of the Jesuits Church. McCord Museum, M2486. 251

viii

figures

acknowledgments My gratitude to the many people who have helped me year after year is heartfelt. Sister Claire Gagnon and François Rousseau welcomed me to the Hôtel-Dieu archives when I only envisaged a very limited project. They directed me to documents that transformed my view of Duplessis and aided me repeatedly as an article project became a biography. I have returned repeatedly to François Rousseau’s books for their authoritative treatment of the Hôtel-Dieu. They are exemplars of the best historical writing. Their successors, Chantal Lacombe and Sara Bélanger, have continued their tradition of hospitality on which the Hôtel-Dieu was founded in 1639. Chantal’s knowledge of the archives has been invaluable during the last stages of my research and the selection of illustrations. In France, the librarians of the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, Valérie Guittienne-Mürger and Fabien Vandermarcq, introduced me to Bernard Homassel whose extensive repository of documents dealing with all branches of the Homassel family has been crucial. The archival work of Nicolas Lyon-Caen on the Homassels has proven an essential resource. Two student assistants were especially helpful: Elizabeth Stacey Khalil with Duplessis’s correspondence and Rebecca Ankenbrand with her Musique spirituelle. Senior editor Kyla Madden and readers at McGillQueen’s University Press gave nuanced suggestions, which resulted in fruitful revisions. Josh Caster and Laura Weakly of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries helped with illustrations. Kay and Bob Nickel also contributed to the illustrations and in innumerable other ways. Sylvie Robert shared her familiarity with Saint-Utin and deciphered a crucial document. Early grants from the Québec Ministère de relations internationales and the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec were

crucial. Further funding came from the University of NebraskaLincoln’s Research Council, its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the Wisherd Fund of the Emeriti and Retirees Association of un-l.

x

acknowledgments

a touch of fire

introduction

In August 1719, Marie-André Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, the secretary of the advisory council to the mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, entered into the minutes a solemn personal protest against an action the group had taken: “I will never repent of having refused my consent to it because I followed without passion the insight God gave me and the movement of my conscience.”1 Their bishop, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix-Chevières de Saint-Vallier, had imposed construction of a separate house where ill priests would be cared for within the hospital grounds. The proposal had not been debated properly either by the council or by the community as a whole at a chapter meeting. The failing matriarch of the community, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace, who was assistant mother superior at the time, had only agreed to it after a change in wording; the secretary Duplessis had to sign for her because of her paralysis. Duplessis’s objection was that the priests would expect special attention, strain the community’s limited resources, and detract from its core mission, the care of the poor. Her protest was directed at her sister nuns, whom she accused of bad faith in ignoring future problems: “In the hope that they would no longer be present when that would trouble us, they agreed grudgingly, expecting that they would not be committing themselves personally to anything.”2 Marie-André was the only one of the seven to refuse her signature.

At thirty-two, she was the youngest member of the council, and her written protest is unique in the monastery’s records of that period. While the bishop’s imposition of his will occasioned it, the protest was directed as much at her sisters’ acquiescence to male authority as to that authority itself. It was born of her frustration at not winning the other nuns over to her view. Two things emerge from a reading of subsequent chapter minutes. The priests’ house never was mentioned again as a problem, which suggests that Duplessis had overreacted. Repeatedly in later years, the chapter approved proposals she brought before it when she became mother superior. What did not change was her fiery reaction when she perceived a threat to her hospital, as a supplier with whom she was unhappy learned to his chagrin. He noted in replying to one of her letters, “I had the honour of your letter written with a touch of fire.”3 In 1719, Duplessis was already well into the preparation of her best-known work, the annals of her community and its hospital. Although all her writings have their source in her commitment to those two institutions, the development of New France is omnipresent in all but the most spiritual of them. The foreword of the annals evokes the exploration of New France, beginning not with Jacques Cartier or even Giovanni da Verrazzano, but with John Cabot, whose voyages were authorized by Henry VII of England in the late 1490s. Her texts, in fact, encompass two hundred and fifty years of Canadian history, since her last letters recount the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the beginning of the British occupation of Quebec in 1759. The annals anchor the history of the hospital in the history of the colony. Her surviving writings are extensive, and all are shaped by her experience of directing Canada’s first hospital from her vantage point in the upper town, high above the Saint Lawrence and Saint Charles Rivers.

1718: The Hinge in a Versatile Career Her outspoken protest at the beginning of what would be a long administrative and writing career is a useful hinge for a biography of Duplessis. How was her protest a product of her family background and early experience as a nun? What more productive ways to channel her resolute energy did she find when she moved into a leadership 4

a touch of fire

role? Two early texts, one written in 1712 and the other in 1718, have a more playful aspect than later ones. How did her outlook change as she moved into higher positions of responsibility? A sketch of her life can be divided conveniently into five periods: childhood in Paris (1687–1701); adolescence in Quebec (1701–07); early years as a nun (1707–18); increasing involvement in community affairs (1718–32); full-time administrator (1732–60). She grew up in Paris, where she was born on 28 March 1687, under the tutelage of her maternal grandmother, to whom her parents confided her at age two when they left for Quebec in 1689. Her father had been named to a post in the office of the treasurer of the navy (Trésorier de la Marine) in Quebec. On the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, she met Marie-Catherine Homassel, who was being raised by an aunt. Homassel’s aunt was a business associate of one of Marie-André’s own aunts. Marie-André’s mother retrieved her in 1701, and she spent her years between the ages of fourteen and twenty in her father’s household in Quebec’s upper town. Georges Regnard Duplessis had solidified his position in the treasurer’s office, acquired a seigneurie, and taken advantage of the business opportunities his post afforded. With a father well respected by the colony’s chief military and civilian administrators, Marie-André had access to the elite of Canada’s society. Although her talents attracted suitors, in 1707 she entered the Hôtel-Dieu. She convinced her younger sister Geneviève to join her in 1713; the next year her father died in trying financial straits. Her brother François-Xavier left for France in 1716 to become a Jesuit, and her youngest brother Charles-Denis sailed to study at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in 1719. The year 1718 marked her coming of age both as a key member of the Hôtel-Dieu administrative team and as a writer. She had previously been singled out as the personal secretary of the mother superior, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. In 1718, she was elected novice mistress, which made her automatically a member of the advisory council. She also became the recording secretary of the chapter about this time. 1718 marked as well the beginning of the drafting of her major text, the annals of her house, in collaboration with Juchereau. In the fourteen years between 1718 and 1732, she gradually increased her administrative involvement, serving one year as assistant superior, and then was named bursar of the hospital (économe des pauvres) by introduction

5

the bishop in 1725. This post put her in charge of hospital finances. During the period 1732–60, she was elected superior six times and served sixteen years in the office. When she was not superior herself, she was almost always the vice-superior, known as the assistant, and thus no less involved in the affairs of the community and hospital. As the head of a mature institution, her first challenge was to maintain adequate financing and insure a steady stream of supplies. The colony’s economy had come out of the doldrums of the first two decades of the century, but it was on a war footing after 1744. In fact, the hospital began to take on a military role, making its expansion all the more necessary; but who would pay for it, the nuns or the king? The 1755 fire that destroyed hospital and monastery made this question moot. Rebuilding mobilized Duplessis’s energies during the last years of her life, a period that culminated in the 1759 siege and capture of Quebec. She died in January 1760, while there was still hope that the town could be retaken and that the colony could be saved for France.

A Woman of Canadian Firsts It would be difficult to identify a laywoman in New France during the four decades before the Conquest who had the sustained administrative and financial responsibilities of Duplessis. She was the powerhouse of a central colonial institution. Her position put her in contact with all the major figures in the ecclesiastical, civil, and military establishments. Her reach extended into France, where she corresponded with colonial authorities such as minister of the navy Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas and cultivated patrons such as the third duc de Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis. Her success as an administrator depended on being able to adapt her institution to the evolution of the colony’s fortunes when economic development resumed in the 1720s and when, beginning in the 1740s, military expenses increasingly dominated. The heroic “Amazones du grand Dieu,” the French foundresses of the seventeenth century who had been inspired by the fervour of the Catholic revival, such as Marie Guyart, Jeanne Mance, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, have been amply studied.4 Duplessis represents not this first generation, nor even the Canadian-born second one 6

a touch of fire

that consolidated their work, such as Marie Morin of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal, Marie Barbier of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, or Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté at Duplessis’s own institution. Duplessis figures in the third wave of religious superiors active in the eighteenth century whom historians have only begun to examine. Her terms in office corresponded almost exactly with those of her contemporary, Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat, mother superior of the Ursulines. Although Duplessis was ten years older, she is comparable in some ways to an aristocratic duo of nuns who governed the Hôpital-Général during the same period, Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay and Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay.5 The Ursuline Esther Wheelwright, a New England girl, who joined that order after having been a captive of the Wabanakis for five years, belongs to their generation, but she only became mother superior in 1760 after Duplessis’s death.6 Besides this administrative career, no other eighteenth-century nun in New France – nor any woman of that time and place, for that matter – can equal the range and quality of Duplessis’s writings. The list of firsts that have been claimed for her as a Canadian writer is lengthy: first literary narrative, the Histoire de Ruma;7 first musical treatise, the Musique spirituelle;8 first Canadian to attempt an historical work, the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.9 This book was not the first such convent chronicle in Canada; Marie Morin had begun the annals of her Montreal Hôtel-Dieu in 1697.10 However, Duplessis’s book, when printed in 1751 as the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, was the first book published by a Canadian woman during her lifetime. The historical current runs deep in her writing, even if she is not primarily an historian. She was ever attentive to the impact of New France’s past on current conditions in the colony and her hospital. She would find multiple ways of writing New France, in addition to the Histoire: annual letters, business correspondence, administrative reports. Her earliest known work, the Histoire de Ruma, embodies a playful spirit that is rare in Canadian writing of the period. Duplessis’s letters to her friend Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet stand as one of the major surviving private correspondences of eighteenthcentury Canada. Only Élisabeth Bégon’s rivals hers. An intellectual drive that led her to seek out information from books, gazettes, introduction

7

and informants nourished her writing. She had her biases, but her network of correspondents in France kept her always well informed. She merits sustained attention simply as an author.

A Corpus Rediscovered Duplessis was almost unknown in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Little wonder, since the 1751 edition of the annals printed in Montauban had attributed its authorship exclusively to JeanneFrançoise Juchereau, and her correspondence with Hecquet was unpublished. It took over eighty years before a sufficient portion of her writings became accessible so that her accomplishment could be appreciated. The process began after the discovery in 1856–57 of her letters to Hecquet in Paris archives by Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. Her providentialist view of Canadian history appealed to the clerically minded savants who introduced her to nineteenth-century readers. A selection of her letters to Hecquet was serialized in the Revue canadienne in 1875 by H.-A. Verreau, who planned to write her biography. To promote the letters, Verreau presented them as a continuation of those of Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation. He noted that the Ursuline’s correspondence stops in 1671 and covers the first part of the French regime; Duplessis’s takes up its last four decades. Verreau is almost willing to place her as the equal of Marie de l’Incarnation: Duplessis “is perhaps not inferior to her.”11 A fuller picture of Duplessis began to emerge three years later in 1878, when Henri-Raymond Casgrain made her the centrepiece of the eighteenth-century section of his Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu. All three Quebec City historic women’s monasteries published their histories at this time, but while the Ursulines and Hôpital-Général turned to their own members, the Hôtel-Dieu commissioned a professional author who was furnished documents from their archives. In Casgrain they had a priest-writer at the heart of Quebec’s literary ferment and an experienced nationalist historian. His history makes ample use of Duplessis’s annals for the period up to about 1718; for the era of her administration, he extensively quotes or paraphrases her short historical pieces. Since Casgrain was writing an institutional history, he discusses her challenges, successes, and disappointments as an administrator. His point of comparison is not with foundresses such as Marie de 8

a touch of fire

l’Incarnation, but with Duplessis’s mentor Juchereau: “Before her Mother Juchereau de Saint-Ignace had been the model of the strong woman (la femme forte); Mother Sainte-Hélène was the model of the tender, gentle woman (la femme tendre).”12 While Juchereau “reigned by a forceful spirit,” Duplessis “governed with a mild touch.”13 Although regional historian J.-Edmond Roy published no additional writings by Duplessis, his books in the 1890s added substantially to knowledge about her. In 1892, Roy brought out an edition of her Jesuit brother’s letters to her and her sister Geneviève.14 Much information about Marie-André can be surmised from FrançoisXavier’s allusions to shared concerns. Like Casgrain, Roy had access to the monastery’s archives, and he used his expertise as a notary to supplement them with documents from the public record. In the introduction and apparatus to François-Xavier’s letters and again in his 1897 Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, he gives an ample account of her parents’ land dealings and short accounts of the lives of her brothers and sister. Extracts of two devotional texts, one by Geneviève and another by Marie-André, appeared in a pious newsletter in 1902 and 1905.15 A.-L. Leymarie’s publication between 1927 and 1931 in the journal Nova Francia of the entire holdings in the French National Archives of Duplessis’s letters to Hecquet made her candid observations on colonial affairs available to historians, who gradually began to mine them. He also expanded the corpus by locating her letters, mixing business and personal remarks, to an apothecary in Dieppe and to a business agent in Paris.16 Albert Jamet’s 1939 authoritative edition of the annals, commissioned for the third centenary of the hospital, did much more than make the book as Duplessis wrote it widely available for the first time;17 the Benedictine scholar also clarified the role she and Juchereau played in the elaboration of the annals. Jamet established that if Juchereau supplied the material for the early history of the house, she left its organization and redaction to the younger nun. His extensive annotations added context about the personages and events that Duplessis discussed, and confirmed her reliability as an historian. The publication of this critical edition of the annals restored her original text that Bertrand de La Tour had modified in 1751. The first round of discovery of her achievement as a writer was complete. introduction

9

Toward Recognition Once Duplessis’s core corpus had been established, scholars turned to its analysis. Sister Mary Loretto Gies’s 1949 Laval University doctoral dissertation on Duplessis as a letter writer and annalist was squarely in the clerical tradition dating from Verreau,18 as was the overview for the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française by Juliette Rémillard, niece and secretary of the nationalist historian Lionel Groulx, who founded that journal.19 Gies was the first critic to confront the militant Jansenism of Duplessis’s friend, and it clearly troubled her. Duplessis did not profit when the secular-minded proponents of a Quebec national literature during the Quiet Revolution looked back for antecedents in their colonial past. Her status as a nun and her Parisian birth worked against her. Even Rémillard, in her 1962 article, which is in many ways a last hurrah for the older clerical tradition, felt the need to reassure on that last score: Duplessis is “a Canadian at heart although French by birth.”20 When Léopold LeBlanc included an extract from Duplessis’s annals in his 1978 anthology of Quebec literature from the New France era, he introduced her as the first example of a Quebec-France collaboration. He did perceive the worldly current that underlies much of her style, noting that she “is closer to the salons and to the polished society of the eighteenth century” than Marie de l’Incarnation.21 Slowly, beginning in the late 1980s, fresh approaches gave new perspectives on Duplessis’s basic corpus established between 1873 and 1939. Erich Schwandt published her Musique spirituelle in 1988, calling it “Canada’s First Music Theory Manual.” Just as importantly, perhaps, Schwandt pointed toward the inventiveness behind the lighter tone that Leblanc had noted but could not explain. François Rousseau gave many examples of the managerial prowess of the Duplessis sisters in his 1989 history of the hospital, La Croix et le scalpel, and drew on their administrative correspondence held in the archives. He was attentive to women’s agency and underscored the Duplessis sisters’ maneuvers to circumvent male ecclesiastical authority.22 François Melançon and Paul-André Dubois recognized the importance of her published correspondence and situated it in terms of exchanges based on friendship and learned curiosity. Their article mapped out the key features of her approach to friendship, 10

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which can be explored now that more of her letters are available and more is known about her correspondents.23 In a more specialized vein, Lorène Simon’s doctoral dissertation on Duplessis’s letters written to the Dieppe apothecary Féret between 1733 and 1752 showed how rich they are in information about eighteenth-century pharmaceutical practices in France and Canada.24 In a series of insightful articles that stem from her doctoral dissertation, Julie Roy began the process of giving Duplessis her due as a woman author without singling her out.25 Roy showed that the field of women writers in New France goes well beyond the “trinity” – consisting of Marie de l’Incarnation, Marie Morin, and Élisabeth Bégon – canonized by literary historians.26 Catherine Fino examined Duplessis for the first time as a spiritual author and situated her among the writers of the French School of Spirituality whom Duplessis mentioned in her own works.27 I expanded her corpus by locating the previously unknown Histoire de Ruma in a library in Montauban. However, Duplessis has not figured prominently in the burgeoning studies focusing on female religious communities during the French regime, and she is largely absent from overviews of women writers of that period.28 The absence of a convenient edition of Duplessis’s correspondence has been a significant impediment to the recognition of her stature. The letters in the French archives were serialized in a long-defunct journal, Nova Francia. However, the Fiducie du patrimoine culturel des Augustines is transforming access to her writings. Established in 2009 by the sisters, the Fiducie holds in trust the archives and collections of eleven Augustine communities with a central depository in the Hôtel-Dieu. It has embarked on an ambitious plan to digitize documents from its holdings and post them online.29 As I write in 2019, Duplessis’s correspondence with Bishop Pontbriand is already accessible.

Shaping a Biography of Duplessis According to Duplessis’s death notice, her contemporaries of “good taste” who read her Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec judged that her “ease of composing and penetration” made her “capable of writing the history of the founding of Canada.”30 Despite my title, The Writing introduction

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of New France, this cannot be exclusively a literary biography of an historian of New France. The biography also analyzes the managerial career of the woman who administered the first hospital built north of Mexico for almost thirty years. Duplessis wrote extensively and well, and more than the duties of her office required. However, like two other major women writers of New France, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon, she never thought of herself as a writer. Except for her letters to Hecquet, all her surviving texts stem from her convent responsibilities. Thus, although New France is omnipresent in her writing, she always viewed Canada from the Hôtel-Dieu. This overarching commitment to the hospital pervades her writings and this biography. Biographies of eighteenth-century women are invariably portraits of their families.31 Their trajectory toward marriage or the convent was set in motion by their parents’ circumstances and desires, and once they were established as a mother or a mother superior, this new family became their preoccupation. Moreover, Marie-André worked in tandem with her sister Geneviève, who took over duties as hospital bursar when Duplessis was elected mother superior. Her Jesuit brother in France, François-Xavier, lobbied relentlessly for it. She worried over the undistinguished military career and failed marriage of her quarrelsome younger brother Charles-Denis. Neither Geneviève nor François-Xavier has received the biographical treatment they merit. J.-Edmond Roy’s account of the Jesuit’s life in his 1892 edition of his letters is hagiographic and slights the hostile reactions to his preaching by Jansenists and philosophes alike.32 Neither party had any more use for the Jesuit than he had for them. Geneviève, who oversaw hospital finances for years, was much more than the junior partner of her older sister. She was more outspoken than Marie-André, and her frank letters have often proved to be more revealing. She was also an active spiritual author who envisaged publishing in France. Room must also be made for Marie-André’s childhood friend, Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet. Duplessis first came to attention in the nineteenth century when her letters to Hecquet were discovered in the French National Archives. Marie-André revealed herself in a more unguarded way in these letters than in any of her other writings. In addition, most of what we know of Duplessis’s childhood 12

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comes by way of Hecquet’s biography of her aunt Michelle Homassel Fontaine. It was first published in 1862 but seems to have remained unknown to scholars in Canada.33 Marie-Catherine became a militant Jansenist, while Duplessis adopted her Jesuit brother’s hostility to what the church considered a heresy. Their forty-year correspondence impacted Marie-Catherine’s life at a crucial juncture in 1736, and it triggered the one book Hecquet published during her lifetime, the 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois. A rigid chronological approach hardly does justice to a figure such as Duplessis, whose impact touched so many domains. Her skill as a writer, her managerial expertise, and her spiritual development all merit attention. Thus, the spine of this biography is her life from her family’s origins, through her childhood and early convent years, to her long period of administrative service, ending with the British seizure of Quebec. However, chapters on her spirituality, spiritual writing, redaction of the annals, and friendship with Hecquet are inserted within this frame. Although this approach entails placing some material out of chronological order and considering it from different angles in successive chapters, it allows for a more focused analysis of her accomplishments. This arrangement disperses a key period in her life: her creative years between 1717 and 1720. These years mark her entry into the community’s leadership. They are years of intense spiritual enthusiasm, as can be seen in her Jesuit brother’s letters to his two sisters. She wrote her major work, the Annales, and one of her most original minor texts, the Musique spirituelle, during them. Chapters 1 and 2 examine Duplessis’s childhood years in Paris and the relatives who shaped her life. Chapter 1 looks at the influence of three independent women in whose households Marie-André was raised in Paris: her grandmother, an aunt, and a friend of her aunt. Their business savvy and religious devotion were central to her upbringing. In the household of her aunt Marie-Anne Leroy she became fast friends with Marie-Catherine Homassel. Leroy recognized her niece’s potential as a manager and groomed her to take over her fashionable dressmaking business. This chapter also begins the analysis of the tensions that surrounded her key friendships, treated in subsequent chapters: her “particular” convent friendship with her sister nun Geneviève and her anti-Jansenist barbs in her introduction

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letters to Marie-Catherine. The second chapter traces the career of her enterprising parents, Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy, who re-entered her life when she arrived in Quebec in 1701. Marie Leroy’s trajectory shows how a wife could second a husband who had to create his own network in the colony and how a widow could maintain a measure of independence. Chapter 3 treats Duplessis’s path into the Hôtel-Dieu and her spirituality. There she encountered remarkable women such as Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau who recognized her gifts. Her Jesuit brother’s letters to her give a glimpse into her early spiritual ambitions. However, the evidence about her spiritual experience in the last decades of her life is much sketchier. Chapter 4 focuses on the threat to Duplessis’s friendship with Hecquet after Marie-Catherine became an intransigent Jansenist, while Duplessis’s brother François-Xavier made his career in France as an anti-Jansenist preacher. Duplessis’s correspondence with MarieCatherine may now be the most engaging and accessible part of her oeuvre, but nothing assured the continuation of their friendship. Their first surviving letter dates from 1718, just when New France underwent a Jansenist scare and when Marie-Catherine in Abbeville experienced a bout of persecution for her refusal to adhere to the papal bull Unigenitus condemning Jansenism. The outing of the Jansenist monk Georges Poulet, who was briefly a patient at the hospital in 1718, illustrates why Jansenism never had the impact in Canada that it had in France. The chapter examines how, despite these tensions, Duplessis refashioned their friendship through letters. It concludes by situating her exchange with Hecquet within her other epistolary networks. Chapter 5 is the first of four that examine how Duplessis met the challenges of administering a hospital and large religious community. Beginning with her appointment as hospital bursar in 1725, it analyzes the achievements of her first two six-year terms as mother superior. The naturalist Pehr Kalm’s account of his visit in 1748 offers a vantage point for assessing the generally favourable state of the hospital at the end of this period of economic expansion for the colony. However, Duplessis’s defensive management style limited her ability to maneuver in the new climate dominated by war. The next two chapters focus on Duplessis as a woman author who stretched the conventions of convent writing. Chapter 6 examines 14

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the short texts that she wrote, first as a newly professed nun, then as novice mistress, and finally as mother superior. Particularly innovative are the early Histoire de Ruma and the Musique spirituelle. Her spirited vignettes often enliven even the more conventional monastic texts that she later produced in her role as mother superior – meditations, short accounts of notable events in the life of the convent, and circular letters commemorating deceased nuns. Chapter 7 presents the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec as a unique example of women publishing their history. Duplessis wrote it around 1720, before she became mother superior. She had it published in 1751 in France by a former ecclesiastical superior of the house, Bertrand de La Tour. Revisions that she had previously made, seemingly to smooth over relations with male church officials, are examined, as are her reactions to changes that La Tour introduced into her text when he adapted an in-house history for a wider public. The eighth and ninth chapters assess how gender impacted her negotiations with colonial officials during her trying last decade in what she termed “a land of crosses and suffering.” They analyze her attempts to fend off demands that she fund the hospital’s expansion to serve royal troops. After the 1755 fire that left the monastery and hospital unusable, Bishop Pontbriand tried to impose his own vision of reconstruction. Her multiple exchanges with Hecquet about Indigenous peoples led to the publication of her friend’s 1755 Histoire d’une fille sauvage and Duplessis’s own entrance into Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The death of her sister and administrative partner Geneviève in 1756 left her isolated just as the war intensified. The final chapter focuses on 1759, the last year of her life, in terms of women’s experience of the British siege and occupation of Quebec. Eighteenth-century accounts of the campaign largely ignored the role of women, which hardly fared better in the commemorations 250 years later in 2009. The defeat of the Canadians and French was a male failure, and women coped with this failure of their supposed protectors according to their social status. Duplessis did not need to participate in the January 1759 street protests by women to make her need for food supplies known to officials. Likewise, the rules of “civilized” warfare worked to the advantage of her hospital, while poorer townswomen and country wives fared much worse. The chapter uses her extensive and often conflictual correspondence with introduction

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the intendant François Bigot, Bishop Pontbriand, and the British occupiers. It sets her letters alongside the accounts of the campaign by male participants, both French and British, who hardly took into account women’s experience of the events. The conclusion begins with her death in January 1760, four months into the British occupation and two months short of her seventythird birthday. The 1759 defeat is emblematic of a failed patriarchal colonial state with which resourceful women like Duplessis had to contend. Indeed, the conclusion argues that despite H.-R. Casgrain’s characterization of her as a “gentle woman” instead of as a femme forte, her skills as an administrator align better with a model of the femme forte that dates to the last third of the seventeenth century. Finally, no other eighteenth-century woman in New France, and perhaps no man, left a corpus written with such versatility, verve, and range. The conclusion proposes Duplessis as a major figure of colonial Canadian letters. A note on names: I have tried to conform to the spellings of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The chief exception is the subject of this book, which the Dictionary gives as Marie-Andrée Regnard Duplessis. However, she generally signed her name on documents and letters as Marie André Duplessis, without the second ‘e’ that her grandmother Andrée Douin used, and without her father’s name Regnard. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

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chapter

1

Two Girls’ Friendship on the Rue Saint-Honoré in the Orbit of Independent Women In spring 1693, two young “orphaned” girls in Paris began a friendship that would last almost seventy years. Marie-Catherine Homassel described the meeting as love at first sight: “Seeing each other and loving each other was the same thing. The similarity of our ages and perhaps of our temperaments created in us a union that even a separation of fifteen hundred leagues and an absence of more than twenty years have not yet been able to change.”1 Marie-Catherine was seven and Marie-André six. They would share six years of close proximity, often living under the same roof, until their parents reclaimed them. The two girls, of course, were not orphans at all, but, as so often happened in an age when spouses died prematurely or parents had to travel, they had been confided to close relatives. Marie-André had been entrusted to Andrée Douin, her maternal grandmother, when her father Georges Regnard Duplessis was named to a post in the treasury of the marine’s office in Quebec in 1689. Jacques Homassel, owner of a luxury fabric manufactory in Abbeville, had asked his sister Michelle Homassel to care for Marie-Catherine after the death of her mother in childbirth in 1691. The girls’ formative years were spent under the aegis of women who had found the measure of independence from male domination that society offered to lay women of their rank. Andrée Douin was an older widow of some means.

Michelle Homassel was a younger, poorer widow who had not remarried, even though this meant living in much reduced straits. A third woman must be added to the mix, an unmarried but legally emancipated daughter of Andrée Douin, Marie-Anne Leroy. The two girls met when Leroy, an enterprising dressmaker who ran a successful business on the fashionable Rue Saint-Honoré, took her niece to visit her friend Michelle Homassel. Little of Marie-André’s childhood would be known without the biography of her own aunt Michelle Homassel that Marie-Catherine wrote for her children. The friendships that are described in this chapter both belie and confirm the opinion of most male writers on friendship from Antiquity to the Renaissance – from Aristotle to Montaigne. These philosophers and moralists held that if true friendship between two men is difficult to achieve, friendship between a man and a woman is unlikely, and friendship between women is all but impossible. They cited the list of commonplaces that were used to justify the subordination of women and separate them from each other: women’s fickleness, their lack of resolve, their intellectual weakness, etc.2 Despite this misogynistic view, the friendship of the two girls would last a lifetime. However, the tight bond between Marie-André and Marie-Catherine would also be used to undermine the independence of one member of the trio of adult women, Michelle Homassel. Women’s friendship could indeed have its perils.

A Trio of Independent Women Andrée Douin, the most independent of the trio, was about fiftysix when her two-year-old granddaughter was entrusted to her. All her life, Marie-André would remain grateful for the affection and upbringing she received from this grandmother to whom she was closer in many ways than to her mother. As she wrote Hecquet in 1752, “a grandmother’s tenderness is greater than a mother’s; I experienced this, as you know, having been raised by a saintly grandmother. The stronger my reason becomes, the more I recognize the debt I owe her.”3 These emotional bonds were reinforced by the financial security and solid community ties that her grandmother’s family enjoyed. Andrée Douin came from a well-connected administrative family in Limours-en-Hurepois (Essonne), a town thirty-one kilometres 18

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southwest of Paris. Her father, Anne Douin, had been king’s attorney (procureur du roi au baillage) for Limours. A brother, Louis, was the superior of a small local Franciscan monastery there that belonged to the order of Picpus, named for its headquarters in that Parisian suburb.4 Marie-André would eventually inherit his portrait, which is now held by the Hôtel-Dieu. A sister, Anne Douin, was married to Guy Josse, an attorney (procureur) in the local court at Limours. One of their sons, Pierre, became a clerk (greffier) at the Châtelet of Paris and a secretary to Claude Le Peletier, who succeeded Jean-Baptiste Colbert as general controller of finance for Louis XIV in 1683.5 Douin’s husband, Jean Leroy, had been a tanner-merchant in Chevreuse, situated about seven kilometres north of Limours. His was one of the many tanneries along the Yvette that flows through the town. After becoming a widow, Andrée Douin lived at times in Paris and in Chevreuse. Jean Leroy left his twenty-nine-year-old widow in 1662 in a comfortable enough situation that she did not have to remarry while she raised and established four children. The oldest daughter, Marie-Anne Leroy, was received as a mistress in the dressmakers’ guild in January 1675 and set up in business.6 Jean Leroy, originally a priest of the diocese of Paris, was pastor of SaintCéneré (Mayenne), a village seventeen kilometres east of Laval that had 174 households in 1696.7 He is described as having “a benefice with a considerable income” in a 1702 will of Anne-Marie Leroy.8 In spring 1686 Douin saw her remaining son and daughter married. Denis Leroy was an attorney at the Châtelet in Paris. This position would have cost his mother around 8,000 livres,9 and she gave him 6,000 livres at the time of his wedding in April 1686. A month before Denis’s marriage, Andrée Douin had established her other daughter Marie Leroy by marrying her to Georges Regnard Duplessis with a dowry of 7,000 livres.10 In addition, when she died at Chevreuse in December 1701,11 Douin left a farm to her daughter Marie Leroy at Villevert, a kilometre or so west of Limours. The least independent of the trio was Michelle Homassel, whose social and financial position was much less secure than Andrée Douin’s or that of any of the Leroy children. She had made an unpromising marriage at age twenty-one in 1676 to a young man from near Alençon, Guillaume Fontaine. He did not bring financial security, good health, or even a stable character to the altar. Shortly after the wedding, he two girls’ friendship

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had to flee Paris because he had participated in a duel. His refuge was Valenciennes, where he held a modest position collecting excise taxes.12 After her husband’s death around 1677, Michelle returned to Paris, and rather than remarry, she devoted herself to the education of their daughter. When the child died at age two, Michelle turned to the retired life of prayer and asceticism of a devout widow, while supplementing the modest income that her husband had left her by working as a seamstress. She was unconcerned with material acquisition. She was thirty-six when she brought the five-and-a-halfyear-old Marie-Catherine to Paris from Abbeville in October 1691, and immediately turned her attention to raising the girl according to the standards of unostentatious piety by which she had lived during the twelve years since her daughter’s death. This meant sessions of prayer upon arising and before going to bed, daily mass, reading scripture and devotional books. A regimen of fasting and bodily mortification supplemented this regime. She hid her devotional life and mortifications from others, and did not seek or report mystical raptures or visions, or align herself with any party such as that of Port-Royal. Her one spiritual “luxury” was that she had placed herself under the direction of the Oratorian Jean Soanen, who became famous as a court preacher in the 1680s, but she hid her identity from him for many years, preferring the status of an anonymous penitent in his confessional. Funded by her mother’s capital, Marie-Anne Leroy created a growing business in one of the few fields where women could operate independently of men. Her linen-drapers’ (lingères) guild was smaller, more prestigious, and older than the newer seamstresses’ (couturières) guild that had been established in 1675. Both were among the rare exclusively female guilds. Fees to become a mistress were 200 livres for Leroy’s linen-drapers, but only 50 for the seamstresses.13 Although the linen-drapers’ original function had been to sell linen cloth and finished goods such as aprons, shirts, and sheets, its members quickly moved into dressmaking. With a shop situated in the stylish Rue Saint-Honoré neighbourhood near the Louvre, Marie-Anne’s clients included women of quality whom she might visit in their residences. In the early 1690s, she envisaged expansion by taking in young needy women to make her clients’ dresses in her shop, rather than hiring out the work. 20

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Inseparable Friends and the Perils of Devout Friendship Accounts of childhood friendships in this period are rare, which makes situating Marie-André and Marie-Catherine’s bond among typical friendships between girls difficult. However, as Marie-Catherine presents her tie to the young Duplessis, it encompasses a number of the standard commonplaces of friendship. In addition to the conformity of character highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, she stresses its extraordinary nature: true friendship is a privileged relationship that is not often achieved. The classical theorists of friendship also stressed its voluntary nature, unlike most family relationships. When Marie-Anne Leroy took her niece for her first visit to Marie-Catherine in Michelle’s lodgings in 1693, Marie-André was so taken by the other girl that she refused to leave. According to Marie-Catherine, “It was not possible to wrest this little one from my side, and her aunt was forced to leave her there for a time.”14 While Marie-André’s attraction to Michelle’s niece was perhaps too immediate to be a deliberate choice, her willful attachment to the older girl and demand to stay by her side is the first recorded instance of the determination she would show all her life. The girls’ refusal to separate poised a problem for their adult guardians: how to persuade Marie-André to return to her aunt’s shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré? Marie-Anne Leroy had a solution that would satisfy the girls’ desire to be together and make possible the expansion she wanted. Michelle Homassel would leave her own lodgings and move with Marie-Catherine to Leroy’s shop. Andrée Douin would also take quarters there. All three adults and both girls would be housed under the same roof. However, this was also a business proposition. Leroy wanted to staff her shop with young seamstresses, but she could not both supervise them and deal with her client base. Michelle would oversee the seamstresses, leaving Leroy free to handle the front end of the enterprise. Michelle’s sense of duty would ensure order among the seamstresses, upon whom she would impose her own disciplined piety. According to her niece, Michelle had reservations about the arrangement from the start. It put her in a very unequal position in relation to Leroy, who controlled the capital. She would be less a two girls’ friendship

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partner than an employee and would be housed on her employer’s premises. Furthermore, what was uppermost in her mind was the education of Marie-Catherine, and she foresaw that the tight control that she had been able to maintain by secluding her niece would not be possible in the shop, given the intrusions of worldly clients and the proximity of the young seamstresses. Her devout friendship, however, led her to accept Leroy’s offer. The two women had several things in common. They were both single women of about the same age earning their living in the clothing trade. Above all, they shared the same pious outlook that proposed that devout women lead as retired a life as possible, devoted to prayer, church services, and works of mercy. Moreover, they shared the same director, Jean Soanen, and moved in the same Oratorian circuit. Aristotle had posited that the most perfect form of friendship was based on virtue. When his concepts were Christianized, virtue became conflated with the theological virtue of charity. This involved a certain amount of tension since Christian charity was not conceived as reserved for friends, but had a universal character. Had not Christ said, “Love your enemies”?15 Christian charity also claimed a sacrificial orientation, modelled on Jesus’s death on the cross: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”16 This sacrificial ethos no doubt motivated Michelle, but she was also following the directive of their common advisor Soanen, who thought that Michelle’s even temper would moderate the impetuosity and imperious personality of Leroy.17 The fundamental compatibility between the two girls produced an enduring friendship. However, Michelle radically misjudged Leroy and thus entered into a relationship of self-sacrifice that she interpreted as submission to divine Providence. According to her niece, she became the “victim of friendship” of this “false friend.”18 It would be a purgatory in this life for her. Marie-Catherine flatly accused Leroy of being a hypocrite whose ostentatious piety was a masquerade. “Devotion does not always drive out selfish motives,” as she put it.19 Her friend Marie-André echoed this judgment in a softer, ironic register, describing her aunt as being “in a lofty devotion.”20

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Education and Business Apprenticeship Although Andrée Douin continued to alternate with her granddaughter between Chevreuse and Paris, when she was in the capital, the two girls were in close proximity and shared exposure to Parisian life, devotional practices, and an informal apprenticeship in a thriving business. However, there were many differences in their upbringing. Michelle sought total control over her niece’s education, which she handled herself according to a strict daily schedule of prayer, reading of scripture, and recitation of lessons learned. Rather than send her charge to the parish school, she was Marie-Catherine’s primary instructor, and she only brought in a tutor to teach writing. “She decided that no one but she would teach me anything she could teach me herself.”21 Even when Marie-Catherine was prepared for her first communion, her aunt gained permission from the pastor of Saint-Eustache to do the instruction herself, rather than send the girl to the classes organized by the parish. We know less about the specifics of Marie-André’s upbringing under Andrée Douin. Writing in 1753 to Marie-Catherine, whose eldest daughter had just died, leaving an orphan girl, Marie-André consoled her friend by proposing that a grandmother can have more affection than a mother: “Grandmothers commonly raise maternal tenderness to a higher level. I remember with much joy and gratitude the great kindnesses that my grandmother, whom you met, had for me. Everything that she said for my wellbeing is so deeply engraved in my soul that I remember it with pleasure.”22 More than tender affection, her grandmother instilled in her abiding religious principles, as she said the preceding year.23 Douin’s holiness was recognized by those who knew her grandmother in Chevreuse. Marie-André’s Jesuit brother François-Xavier tells how as late as 1738, parishioners still held her in veneration, as he discovered when he visited the parish church of Saint Martin and read his breviary in the pew near the spot where she was buried.24 Marie-André must have shared her gratitude to her grandmother with her community of nuns because her successor Ursule-Marie des Anges featured it as well in her obituary letter: “This virtuous lady spared nothing to raise her in piety and innocence,” and the young girl considered her grandmother’s

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teaching and advice “a divine command.”25 While Marie-Catherine’s religious upbringing was shaped almost entirely by her aunt’s orientation, Marie-André was exposed to multiple influences: for example, parish life in Chevreuse and her Franciscan uncle Louis-François. She could have attended the parish school for girls in Chevreuse that had been founded in 1683.26 The teachers were local single women who banded together in a community under the supervision of the pastor without the formality of vows. The women were well-regarded by the Leroy family. Marie-Anne Leroy bequeathed a thousand livres to them in her 1702 will.27 Claire Hardy had been named mistress in 1687 and might well have been Marie-André’s teacher. Her Jesuit brother reported during his 1738 stay in Chevreuse that Marie-André’s memory was still alive when he visited the community: “I was invited by the pastor who has a special regard for you. I steal away every day for a few minutes to go to the community where I hear them speak of the favours that God has given my dear sister Sainte-Hélène.”28 Instruction in Chevreuse would have been rudimentary: reading, writing, and strong doses of catechism. In theory, the school was destined for poor girls of the parish. At some point, Marie-André’s grandmother boarded with the Filles de la Croix on the Rue SaintAntoine near the Place des Vosges. Besides accepting women boarders, they also ran a school that Marie-André could have attended, but she made no explicit mention of their classes when she alluded to her grandmother’s stay there in a letter to Hecquet in 1747.29 Marie-Catherine was explicit that her friend was not under Michelle Homassel’s direction at the Rue Saint-Honoré, but the two girls did see each other after lunch and supper for periods of about an hour that Marie-Catherine remembers as being devoted more to pleasure than to instruction.30 This might have included song sessions, because Marie-Catherine accused herself of having sung “naughty,” “bad” songs in the company of the young seamstresses. In a later devotional text, Marie-André would similarly, but without giving any specifics, accuse herself of having misused her voice by singing “songs and words that displeased and offended you [i.e. God].”31 Rather than just sell cloth and accessories made off-premises, as many members of her linen-drapers’ guild did, Leroy ran what might be seen as an embryonic fashion house. As Marie-Catherine reported, “Because her trade was extensive, she could not have managed it all, 24

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1.1 and 1.2 Although these plates of the Encyclopédie méthodique (1784) appeared almost hundred years after Duplessis worked in Marie-Anne Leroy’s shop, they evoke the atmosphere of the female guilds. Leroy was a linen-draper (lingère) who sold fabric, but who also employed seamstresses (couturières) to make apparel on-site.

if she had not found a person like my aunt to watch over the interior of her premises while she was doing business outside.”32 Rich clients came to the shop, and they were sometimes so taken by the young Marie-Catherine Homassel that they insisted she accompany them home for a visit. At other times Marie-Anne Leroy might ask the girl to come along when she called on clients in their homes. Her own niece Marie-André certainly participated in these activities, because Leroy eventually aspired to retire to a life of prayer and to leave her business to her niece. Andrée Douin would operate the business in the transition period until Marie-André was old enough to take charge.33 Leroy must have noted the young Duplessis’s potential as a businesswoman. The project collapsed when Marie-Anne Leroy quarrelled with her mother Andrée Douin, who apparently was much less acquiescing than Michelle Homassel. Leroy’s affection for her own niece Marie-André cooled, and in a surprising reversal, she decided to groom Marie-Catherine to take over the business. Michelle realized the inherent impossibility of such a scheme immediately. Jacques Homassel would certainly have other designs for his daughter. Moreover, the plan would not only increase tensions within the Leroy family, but would create problems between them and herself. True to her character, Michelle temporized instead of giving Leroy a flat refusal. Although she did not tell her niece about the plan, the girls might well have noted the shift in Leroy’s attentions, thus causing competition that could have endangered their friendship. Relations between Leroy and her mother became so inflamed that Andrée Douin left Paris for a country house she owned. Her other daughter, Marie Leroy, the mother of Marie-André, who had arrived in 1700 from Quebec, cut short her stay in France and returned with MarieAndré earlier than planned.34

Separation and Return to Parents It was not the quarrel over Leroy’s business that precipitated the girls’ separation, but the desire of their parents to reclaim them. Jacques Homassel had remarried for the third time in early 1697. He had two surviving children from his first marriage, Marie-Catherine herself and a boy who had been born a year after her. Marie-Catherine attributed 26

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her return to Abbeville in late 1699 at age thirteen to her father’s new wife, who wanted Jacques’s children restored to their father’s household.35 The fact that it was almost three years after the marriage that Jacques Homassel reclaimed his daughter suggests another reason. His business had prospered and he was thinking seriously about associating his children in the enterprise. His son was probably sickly, since he died in June 1700. His death left the adolescent Marie-Catherine as Jacques’s sole living child. She could provide a son-in-law. Marie-André would only leave for Canada in 1701.36 Jacques Homassel did not allow his daughter to return to Paris, so the girls probably did not see each other during the year and a half that Marie-André was still in the Paris area, although they may have corresponded. Nor do we know exactly what motivated the decision of Marie-André’s parents to reclaim her. Had they planned all along to bring her over to Canada, or had they concurred in MarieAnne Leroy’s project to pass her business to her niece and only changed their mind after the linen-draper quarrelled with the family? They might have not thought of their stay in Canada as permanent, and might have envisaged rejoining their daughter in France. Leaving their guardians behind was difficult for both girls, but especially traumatic for Marie-Catherine. Marie-Catherine did not return to a welcoming family, and she left a surrogate mother. Since Michelle had kept her isolated from other children, Marie-Catherine likely had an especially strong attachment to Marie-André, the one girl her age with whom she had had prolonged contact. This might have led her to idealize their friendship in retrospect. She records no other female friendships upon her return to Abbeville, nor, for that matter, during the course of her life. In Marie-André’s earliest known writing, the Histoire de Ruma, she described the pain of leaving her grandmother “who had raised her tenderly.” Leaving Paris for Canada also meant leaving behind “her country,” a country to whose “attractive features” she said she had become very much attached. However, she made a determined effort to hide her strong reluctance, aided by gratitude to her mother for the difficult trip that Marie Leroy had undertaken to come for her and the hope of seeing her father of whom she had heard so many good things. two girls’ friendship

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Not only did she regain loving parents, but she discovered a new soul mate. Her mother had brought along on the trip to France MarieAndré’s eight-year-old sister Geneviève, whom she had never seen. Marie-André said she was quickly linked in a “tight friendship” with her sister that she attributed to their sharing “a kind disposition,”37 just as Marie-Catherine had attributed her friendship with Duplessis to a harmony of temperaments. Their bond must have been strengthened by the close quarters they shared on the voyage across the Atlantic. Both sisters would eventually enter the Hôtel-Dieu, where they developed bonds of intimacy and collaboration such as Marie-André and Marie-Catherine might have done, had they not been separated.

Conclusion The years Marie-André and Marie-Catherine shared gave them a common store of memories and experiences that united them the rest of their lives. Each met the other’s family. In 1720, Marie-André specifically mentioned Jacques Homassel, his younger sister Élisabeth who lived for a time in Marie-Anne Leroy’s household, and Philippe Hecquet, a cousin of Marie-Catherine’s mother who was making a name for himself as a doctor in the 1690s.38 Their shared years made them both Parisians, even if MarieAndré spent the rest of her life in Quebec, and Marie-Catherine almost forty years raising a family in Abbeville before establishing herself definitively in Paris. As late as 1749, Marie-André could evoke her intimate knowledge of the city in trying to visualize where her friend had finally settled in the capital. “I seek you out in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in Saint-Germain, and in Saint-Honoré.”39 All her life she assiduously cultivated ties with her home country by maintaining multiple exchanges of letters and by engaging with travellers arrived from France. Her own family connections there, especially her Jesuit brother’s long residence in France, facilitated this access. Both rejected the ostentatious piety of Marie-Anne Leroy for the less showy devotion of their guardians, although Michelle’s brand was certainly more austere that that of Andrée Douin. MarieAndre’s description in 1747 of the comforts her grandmother had known while boarding at the Filles de la Croix would have seemed too soft for Michelle. “There were a number of well off ladies of all 28

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the better classes, even duchesses, who lived there, as if it was a tiny paradise. They visited each other as much as they wished; they prayed as much as their piety inclined them.”40 In neither case do the very divergent future religious affiliations of each girl stand out clearly. The Oratorians who directed Michelle steered clear of the Jansenist Port-Royal, and the connections Marie-Catherine had with Jansenistleaning individuals, such as her cousin Philippe Hecquet, were more familial than doctrinal. Likewise, there is no sign that Andrée Douin had any privileged connections with the Jesuits; her priest son Jean Leroy, in fact, became an outspoken Jansenist. Both girls were tapped in turn to take on the responsibility of Marie-Anne Leroy’s dress business on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Both observed closely how the enterprise was managed, and both had contact with the milieu of its wealthy customers. This supplemented the introduction to the ruling administrative elites that they had through their parents’ business affairs. Both fathers, for example, had dealings with ministers of the powerful Pontchartrain family who had authority over the colonies and internal trade.41 The tenacity, the financial acumen, and the spirituality that Marie-André and MarieCatherine would both display as adults owe much to the example of this trio of independent women.

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chapter

2

The Networks of an Enterprising Father and a Resilient Mother

Friends and Family In late March 1686, a year before Marie-André’s birth, about twenty friends and relatives gathered in the quarters of Andrée Douin on the Rue Saint-Honoré to sign the marriage contract of MarieAndré’s parents, Georges Regnard Duplessis (1657–1714) and Marie Leroy (1662–1732).1 The composition of the assembled guests and the stipulations of the contract reveal much about the networks that Georges and Marie would use to create for their children a comfortable situation among the bourgeois merchants and functionaries in Quebec during twenty-five years of stressful economic times in the colony, before their affairs began to unravel around 1710. None of the witnesses at the signing on the husband’s side was a family member, while all of Marie Leroy’s were. This is not surprising, since Georges Regnard came from Saint-Utin (Marne), a village in the Champagne region about twenty-three kilometres south of Vitry-le-François and two hundred kilometres east of Paris.2 He was a younger son, and his brothers and sisters remained in that region. Coming from Chevreuse, just south of Paris, Marie Leroy already had a sister and brother living in the capital who were present, along with an uncle and cousins.3

All of Georges’s witnesses are listed as “friends,” not intimate ones in the sense used in the last chapter, but in another meaning of the word common in this period. Such friends could include non-related supporters such as patrons and other allies, or working companions. Listed first among Georges’s “friends” was a major royal official, Gédéon Berbier du Metz, steward and general controller of the crown furniture and treasurer of the royal treasury.4 The Berbier du Metz family dominated the area of Champagne where Saint-Utin is located, and a younger brother of Gédéon seems to have held the title of seigneur de Saint-Utin. The wife or mother-inlaw of this younger brother was Georges’s godmother, in fact. The Regnards likely came from the group of prosperous farmers called “laboureurs” who had moved into minor, local administrative offices and were thus clients of the Berbier du Metz clan. Although Georges is not listed as such in the contract, he was probably a clerk in the royal treasury controlled by Gédéon, since the last two “friends” on the list of witnesses are identified as clerks there. Such patron-client networks, often overlapping with baptismal ties, oiled Ancien Régime society. The only witness on Marie Leroy’s side who approached the spheres of royal power was a cousin, Pierre Josse, who was secretary to Claude Le Peletier, the successor to Jean-Baptiste Colbert as controller-general of finances. The bride’s family brought greater financial capital to the union than the groom’s. Georges’s parents were deceased, and whatever his inheritance as a younger son might have been, the contract only specifies that he provided 200 livres of dower. The dower was an annuity promised to a widow if the husband died first. In comparison, his future brother-in-law Denis Leroy would promise 300 livres at his marriage a month later and indicated that the capital behind the annuity could be recuperated.5 As noted in the previous chapter, Andrée Douin also furnished a dowry of 7,000 livres and the promise of the farm near Limours. Moreover, no matter how close to royal power Georges’s witness friends might have been, surviving documents and letters do not indicate that they aided him once he was in Canada, while his wife’s matrilineal networks proved to be a resource for them there. In fact, if indeed Georges held a position in the royal treasury thanks to the Berbier du Metz connection, Pierre Josse likely

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played a role in his posting in 1689 to Canada. The patron of Pierre Josse was the controller-general Claude Le Peletier, who in turn was mentor and patron of Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, who became controller-general himself in 1689 and minister of the navy and colonies the next year.6 This made for a rather modest tie to the three generations of Pontchartrains who would have responsibility for New France between 1690 and 1748. However, in what Peter N. Moogk called “a society built upon networks of kinship and patronage,”7 Georges Duplessis’s family exploited this tie to the maximum.

A Father on the Make Georges Regnard sieur Duplessis arrived in Quebec in 1689 at age thirty-two, apparently as temporary agent of the treasurer general of the marine (the royal navy).8 The department of the marine had responsibility for the general administration of the colony, and its treasurer general for its finances.9 However, the treasurer general and his agents in the colonies were not government officials. The treasurer was a financier who bought his post from the king and served as something of a private banker to the state. The treasurer received funds from the government and disbursed them for authorized expenses, but during the interval, the funds were under his private control.10 At the time of Duplessis’s arrival in Canada, Jacques Petit de Verneuil occupied the position of representative or agent (commis) in Canada of the treasurer general in France, Louis de Lubert,11 and Duplessis likely served as Petit de Verneuil’s associate or deputy. Disbursals had to be authorized by the intendant, who was charged with the civil administration of the colony, and so the treasurer’s representative worked closely with this government official. Jean Bochart de Champigny was intendant during Duplessis’s first decade in the colony. The monies handled by the treasurer’s office in Quebec were substantial. The funds included those destined for the administration of the colony under the heading of the état du roi, for such expenses as building and maintaining fortifications, salaries of workers, soldiers, and government officials, purchase of supplies, and gifts to Indigenous allies. These sums averaged half a million livres a year around 1700.12

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Among the duties that fell to treasurer’s office in Quebec was issuing the so-called “playing-card money.” Specie was in short supply in the colony; very little coin made its way west across the Atlantic. The main source of hard currency was funds sent by the navy department for government expenditures. Not enough specie was available to the residents of Canada for purchasing supplies from France or for internal commerce. A first expedient was to increase arbitrarily the value of the coins in circulation in Canada by a quarter, creating a difference between the currency of France (monnaie de France) and currency of Canada (monnaie du pays).13 In the years just before Duplessis arrived, this shortage was compounded by delays in the arrival of government funds, and by funding that was insufficient to meet expenditures. This was particularly the case during wartime, and Duplessis’s arrival coincided with the beginning of the War of the League of Augsburg, which would last until 1697. Officials resorted to a second expedient: issuing promissory notes written on playing cards, signed by the agent of the treasurer of the marine and countersigned by the intendant and governor. Cards had to be used since there were no printing presses in Canada. The first cards were promptly redeemed when funds arrived from France, but as early as 1690, it became the practice to leave some cards in circulation without redeeming them, thus effectively increasing the money supply.14 In March 1690, a certain Pierre Malidor was sentenced to flogging for forging the signatures of Duplessis and Petit on counterfeit cards.15 Duplessis must have shown the business competence and diplomatic skills needed to please his superiors, because successive governors and intendants protected and promoted him. In 1693, the governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac served as godfather to his son Louis. The following year, the future governor’s wife, LouiseÉlisabeth de Joybert de Vaudreuil, stood as the godmother of his son François-Xavier.16 In 1696, Champigny proposed naming Duplessis superintendant of forests (grand maître des eaux et forêts).17 The same year, Frontenac granted him a seigneurial concession in Acadia, near the mouth of the Cocagne River on the Northumberland Strait, across from Prince Edward Island in present-day New Brunswick. In 1698, Champigny named him receiver of funds owed to the Admiralty in the case of two English vessels that had been captured.18

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Champigny’s successors as intendant, the father-and-son team of Jacques and Antoine-Denis Raudot, took a special liking to Duplessis and the whole family. Geneviève Duplessis reported in 1740, “We were especially close to Monsieur [Antoine-Denis] Raudot while he was in this country … He was intendant at Quebec and in this country with his father who had a great liking for our family and who could not spend a day without his coming to our home or our coming to his.”19 Jacques Raudot described Georges in 1705 as “very skilled and a good accountant” in a report to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, the minister of the marine.20 At the same time, Duplessis cultivated ties in devout circles. Duplessis’s “faithful friend” was Paul Dupuy de Lisloye.21 Because of his reputation for integrity and devotion, Champigny lured this pious military officer, who had come to Canada with the CarignanSalière regiment and married a descendent of the first colonist, from his manor on an island in the Saint Lawrence to become the king’s attorney in the provost’s court in Quebec. Once in Quebec, Dupuy was active in the Jesuits’ Congregation of the Virgin that attracted the colony’s pious elite, and served on the Poor Board (bureau des pauvres) that administered money gathered for beggars and the indigent. Duplessis moved in the same circles. He was chosen vice-prefect of the Jesuits’ Congregation in 1695,22 and in March 1698 he was named treasurer of the Poor Board, which also served as the administrators of the newly founded almshouse, the Hôpital-Général.23 Dupuy was admired for his integrity and impartiality in administering justice. However, Duplessis would not imitate his sacrifice of worldly affairs to piety. Dupuy died impoverished in 1713, having been forced to sell his holding on the Ile-aux-oies to settle his debts, including the 3,000-livre dowry of a daughter, Geneviève de la Croix, at the Hôtel-Dieu. His 500-livre annual salary from the king was simply not sufficient. There was nothing unusual about his situation. No official in the colonial service of the king could live on his government salary, and Dupuy seems to have been one of the few such officers who did not take advantage of their post to supplement their salary with private trading of some sort. Duplessis faced this challenge because his salary in 1711 only amounted to 1,200 livres.24 However, enterprise was directly embedded in his post, since he was not a government functionary but 34

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the representative of a private banker. Despite his piety, he did not remain aloof from the colony’s commercial networks. It was normal, in fact, for agents of the treasurers general in Quebec to be part-time merchants.25 Duplessis had a gift for seizing opportunities and for self-promotion that led him to take advantage of a number of business opportunities. Hence Guy Frégault’s assessment: “This bourgeois seigneur is ambitious.”26 Although the grant of the domain he had been given in Acadia in 1696 was revoked, three years later in 1699, he had amassed 5,500 livres, enough to buy the settled seigneurie of Lauzon across the Saint Lawrence from Quebec City.27 Lauzon was, in fact, the oldest seigneurie on the South Shore, and Duplessis immediately set out improving its management. In a litigious society, this meant lawsuits against tenants and the seller’s family, but he seems to have been an energetic and successful landholder. He had surveys done and built two mills, and defended his right as seigneur to have the pew of honour in the parish church of Saint Joseph. In 1706, the domain had 431 inhabitants.28 The 1712 description by the engineer and surveyor Gédéon Catalogne says that because of its proximity to Quebec, the parish’s residents were quite well off, and mentions the production of lime, as well as the harvest of grain, vegetables, eels, and salmon.29 Duplessis also was a partner in various ventures. In 1704, he invested in a group that sent privateers to pick off English shipping near Newfoundland; in 1712, he partnered with a businessman building a thirty-six-cannon warship in Quebec’s harbour. He began envisaging a role for himself in governing circles. Not shy about putting himself forward, in 1701, he proposed himself to the minister of the navy for one of two vacant seats on the Sovereign Council.30 That same year, when his fortune seemed on the rise, he also began sending lengthy proposals to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain for the economic development of the colony. At least four of them survive (1701, 1704, 1705, 1707) in whole or as summaries. The most revealing, according to Guy Frégault, suggested in 1704 changes in the colony’s political structure that would give greater voice to its residents. Duplessis proposed an assembly of notables that would meet weekly; one section would generate general policy and a second chamber would decide particular issues. He presented himself as spokesman for those who believed that only the colony’s an enterprising father and a resilient mother

35

own inhabitants could properly insure the smooth flow of commerce: “Sustaining the commerce of this colony is impossible as long as it is not handled directly by the persons who make it up, because of the colony’s paucity of resources.” His dream was that such an assembly would go beyond the narrow self-interest of individuals and form “together a single body, a single spirit, and have the same views to maintain among themselves a community of peace, union, and understanding.”31 Duplessis proposed himself as a member of a threeperson committee charged with executing the assembly’s decisions in conjunction with the intendant and governor. Beyond his personal ambition, according to Frégault, Duplessis was really speaking for the members of the upper classes, especially the bourgeois, who were engaged in international commerce and government administration, and who were dissatisfied with their relative lack of influence on the Superior Council.32 Around 1701, when fortune smiled on Duplessis, complaints arose that he was profiting personally from his position. The king’s engineer Levasseur de Neré wrote Pontchartrain that Duplessis was in collusion with merchants (to whom he was loaning the treasury’s funds at 8 or 9 percent) to defraud workers who were forced to take part of their wages in goods instead of cash from these same merchants.33 It was also in 1701 that the hapless Company of the Colony that would eventually cause Duplessis much grief was organized.34 The fur trade was in disarray because of overproduction. Louis Guigues, the Parisian holder of the monopoly since 1697, was required to buy all fur that Canadians presented to him at a fixed price, but his warehouses in France were full of beaver that could not be sold to hatters. Canadian merchants were confident they could do a better job of managing the market than financiers in distant France, and they created the Company of the Colony. However, lack of access to capital, mismanagement, corruption, and, above all, continued poor market conditions led them to bankruptcy. In September 1705, to salvage the situation, the newly arrived intendants Jacques and Antoine-Denis Raudot took control of the company, installing their own choices as directors, one of whom was Duplessis. This new arrangement only lasted a year at the most, because a new syndicate based in France bought out the Company the following spring. Duplessis’s appointment crowned

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fifteen years of successive promotions and increasing responsibility in the financial and administrative circles of the colony due to his ability to make the networks of colonial governance work to his advantage. However, coping with the debts of the Company went on for decades and would lead to Duplessis’s undoing. Duplessis came under attack on two fronts in the affair. The first was the manner in which the Raudot team imposed him and his fellow director René-Louis Chartier de Lotbinière on the company.35 The second charge, the accusation that Duplessis used his position to cover certain personal debts, would long haunt him. In November 1706, the Raudots wrote that Duplessis “wanted to make the company responsible for a bankruptcy that had been inflicted on him by a merchant of this country.”36 When the Company’s books were examined, it was determined that he owed it 20,950 livres, which Jacques Raudot ordered Duplessis to pay.37 Duplessis, in turn, appealed to the king’s council in France, using his wife’s funds as security, and claimed that the Company owed him 14,000 livres.38 It may have been too late in the sailing season to gather all the documents to send to France for a speedy judgment, but Duplessis did have time to send Marie Leroy that November to lobby on his behalf before the papers’ arrival in France. She seems to have spent three years there.39 Whether or not it was due to her efforts, in June 1708 the minister wrote suspending the sentence for a year to allow for examination of the documents.40 During that time, Duplessis was able to reach an accommodation with the Company by which the counterclaims were cancelled, as Raudot announced to Pontchartrain in October 1708. Marie Leroy, who was in France at that time, wrote the minister asking him to confirm this compromise.41 It was accepted, grudgingly it seems, since the 6 July 1709 letter written in the name of the king stipulates that Duplessis “should think himself fortunate to get out of this business with the Company on such good terms.”42 Guy Frégault in his summary of the affair flatly accused Duplessis of “underhanded practices.”43 The accounts of the Company would be a matter of contention for many years, and this episode marks the turning point in Duplessis’s career, although he remained in the good graces of the Raudots and continued to be appointed an agent of the treasurer of the marine and the Western Domain.

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Duplessis’s Affairs Unravel In her second surviving letter to her friend Marie-Catherine Hecquet, Duplessis’s daughter dated the decline of the family fortunes to the fire on a frigid windy January night in 1713 that destroyed the palace of the intendant, located below the hospital in the lower town: “The unforeseen disaster of the palace created a huge breach in the wealth of our family.”44 Thus, it is hardly surprising that, of the four surviving accounts of the fire, Marie-André’s in the Annales is the longest and most vivid.45 The flames spread quickly, and although the intendant Michel de la Picardière Bégon and his pregnant wife escaped, three servants and the intendant’s secretary perished. Fifteen hundred livres of card money belonging to Bégon were destroyed, as well as records of the treasurer.46 As a consequence, Marie-André said that her father “believed himself obligated to sell a seigneurial domain that contained two parishes that he had in Canada to repay his Majesty.”47 Indeed, he sold the Lauzon seigneurie that included the parishes of Saint Joseph and Saint Nicolas to Etienne Charest fourteen months later on 28 March of the following year for 40,000 livres.48 The correspondence between the colonial authorities and the minister in France clearly shows that Duplessis’s situation had begun to unravel before the fire. In 1711, the minister sent word that further memoranda from Duplessis about the affairs of the Company of the Colony would be most unwelcome.49 In order to shore up his position with authorities in France, Duplessis requested a testimonial, which Vaudreuil duly sent Pontchartrain: “Duplessis has asked me to give you a report on his management. I can tell you that he fulfills his duties here in a way that satisfies everyone.”50 Nonetheless, that winter, auditors in France examined the accounts Duplessis had submitted covering the years 1707 through 1710. In November 1712, Nicolas Pinaud, who had the responsibility of cleaning up the Company of the Colony’s affairs, complained that Duplessis was resorting to obfuscation and delaying tactics. Instead of replying to the specific points that the auditors raised, Duplessis had written six long pages of “verbiage” that did not deal with the facts.51 The newly arrived intendant, Michel Bégon, wrote Pontchartrain that getting to the bottom of Duplessis’s accounts would be his priority for the coming

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months.52 Pontchartrain had had a warm relationship with Bégon and his father since 1696, and Bégon’s wife was related to the minister.53 Bégon, who was none too scrupulous, had just arrived in Quebec in the fall of 1712, and likely saw in Duplessis an easy mark. The treasurer had no powerful protector in France, and the Raudots, who had befriended him, had just left the colony. Marie-André certainly suggested as much when she said in 1720 that her mother “had to deal with a pitiless intendant, who, while piling on outward flattery, treated her in fact without humanity.”54 The correspondence between Bégon and the minister during 1713, after the fire, does not indicate that the fire itself impacted Duplessis’s status in any substantial way. In February 1714, Duplessis’s brother-in-law Denis Leroy, a lawyer in the Châtelet de Paris, wrote Pontchartrain on Duplessis’s behalf. According to the minister’s June 1714 reply, the intervention seems to have concerned funds that Duplessis claimed were due him from 1704 and 1707, but that Duplessis had not documented. The minister’s letter does not suggest that the missing records were lost in the fire.55 By June 1714, Duplessis himself had fallen so ill that he was unable to transact business with Bégon.56 The official record does not contain documents indicating that Duplessis had been ordered to make a reimbursement prior to the sale of Lauzon in March 1713. It could be that, with his health declining and having no adult male children, he wanted to liquidate his estate in advance of his death. Duplessis had always been in an untenable situation. 1690, the year after he was named to the post, marked the beginning of a period of permanent instability throughout the entire institution of the treasury of the marine caused by Louis XIV’s wars.57 Although an annual reconciliation of the books of the colonial treasurer was done each fall, truly balancing them was always impossible in a system where the treasurer general never sent enough money from France to cover expenses, where payments were made in merchandise instead of specie, where advances had to be made on funds that were never sent, and where the intendant put pressure on the agent to disburse money not authorized by the minister, not to mention the private dealings of the agent.58 A complete accounting was only possible at the death of an office-holder, and such accountings were always undertaken. When Jean Petit arrived in Quebec in 1701, he

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successfully sued the widow of his uncle, whom he replaced, for 30,000 livres that he claimed were missing. When he died in 1720, his own widow in turn would be held responsible for missing money. Duplessis died on 30 October 1714, and with his death, the ineluctable final examination of his books began. In Bégon’s letter of 12 November 1714 that announced Duplessis’s death to the minister, the intendant stated that he had not been able to do any business with Duplessis during the last five months of his life because of his illness. Duplessis had raised continual objections, instead of handing over the papers he held dealing with the bankrupt company and the playing-card money.59 Defending the estate and coping with any debts for which it might be held responsible fell to Marie Leroy.

A Resilient Widow At fifty-two, Marie Leroy found herself a widow. Besides fending off the investigation into her husband’s dealings, she had three sons to provide for, despite her reduced circumstances. François-Xavier was twenty, Joseph seventeen, and Charles-Denis ten. It was rare for widows in their fifties to remarry in Quebec at this time,60 and she had no network of blood relatives in Canada to rely on, as many widows had. Fortunately, she came from a family with a commercial and legal background in France that had enabled her to second her husband’s enterprises during his life. After his death, she used many of his strategies to fight off claims against his estate and see to the needs of her family. Marie Leroy’s marriage contract had given her substantial economic independence. Although she married according to the common regime of community property under which the husband managed the wife’s dowry, the farm that had come from her mother and 5,000 livres of the dowry funds are listed in the contract as lineage property (propres) of the bride. Lineage property did not enter into the marital community, and while the husband could administer it, he could not sell it without his wife’s permission.61 As early as 1700, a document indicates that Marie Leroy had gained even more control, since she is described as “séparée des biens.”62 This financial separation status allowed her to administer this property, although her husband’s agreement was needed to sell it. It also allowed her to 40

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serve as co-signer (caution) for her husband in his position in the treasurer’s office, which she did at least five times between 1706 and 1711 and during the investigation into the affairs of the Company of the Colony in 1707.63 Childrearing during her first decade in Quebec probably gave Marie Leroy little time to exercise her business sense. Pregnancies marked Leroy’s life in the interval between her arrival in Quebec in 1689 and her return to France in 1700 to retrieve Marie-André. Three of the six children born in quick succession during that period survived into adolescence: Marie-Joseph-Geneviève (7 February 1692), François-Xavier, the future Jesuit (13 January 1694), and Joseph (6 April 1697). Three died within months of their birth: Louis (1693), Nicolas-Joseph (1695), and Antoine-Louis (1699). Her last child, the prodigal Charles-Denis, was born on 22 June 1704, following her return from France.64 Georges Duplessis had had the good sense to use his wife’s lobbying skills. Her letter to Pontchartrain in 1709, when her husband was accused of wrongdoing, has already been mentioned. Apparently, she also lobbied him during her earlier 1700–01 trip to France. In a draft of a 1747/48 letter to Jean-Frédéric de Maurepas, the son and successor of Pontchartrain, Geneviève recounted how her mother had taken her to perform Indigenous dances for Madame Pontchartrain’s amusement. “This virtuous lady took pleasure at her dressing table having me sing and dance like a savage … Canadians were at that time considered something strange in France.”65 Marie Leroy had no qualms about using her daughter as bait in her lobbying. More importantly, she recognized the usefulness of wife-to-wife lobbying. Éléonore de La Rochefoucauld-Roye often advised her husband Jérôme de Pontchartrain on appointments, and, in fact, the women of the Pontchartrain clan played an active role in the networking that made that family so powerful.66 With the seigneurie of Lauzon lost even before Georges Duplessis’s death, Marie Leroy and her three surviving boys found themselves in much reduced straits in 1714, but not impoverished. In fact, her husband left Marie Leroy a comfortable home in the upper city that Marie-André described in 1720 as “one of the most beautiful houses in Quebec.” Situated on the Côte de la Fabrique near the cathedral, it had a fine garden, and there was a nearby orchard,67 and the 1716 census lists Marie Leroy as having a twenty-two-year-old servant.68 an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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2.1 Anonymous portrait of “Saint Helena, Empress,” the wife of Constantine the Great. Marie Leroy declared in her will that her Jesuit son had sent this portrait, and she requested that it go to Marie-André, who bore the saint’s name as a nun.

Her two oldest children, Marie-André and Marie-Joseph-Geneviève, were safely established as nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu. Geneviève had just professed, in fact, in July 1714. Marie Leroy’s 1731 will mentions two family paintings she owned that passed to her daughter MarieAndré after her death. One is a portrait of her Franciscan great-uncle Louis-François. The other depicts Saint Helen the Empress, an allusion to the name in religion of her elder daughter.69 The oldest boy, François-Xavier, who sailed for France in October 1716 to enter a Jesuit novitiate, is not listed in the census. He would never return to Canada. The middle son, Joseph, was present with his mother in the 1716 census, but is mentioned nowhere else after that date. J.-Edmond Roy surmises that he died shortly thereafter, since he does not figure in his siblings’ letters.70 Only Charles-Denis remained to be provided for. He left for France in 1719 to study at the Jesuit college at La Flèche. Paying for his studies was an issue. Shortly after his arrival, his Jesuit brother in 1721 reassured his mother than the investment in her son’s education was sound.71 Two years later, he reassured her that the expenses had only amounted to 400 livres a year, even though his priest uncle Jean Leroy had used saving money as an excuse to have Denis move to Paris where he could be an extern at Louis-le-Grand while living with his Parisian uncle, Denis Leroy.72 Charles-Denis would insist on a military career despite the reservations of his brother, who argued in 1723 that Charles-Denis did not have the financial resources for a profession that paid so little. The Jesuit hoped that a more bureaucratic job, such as their father had held, could be found for him in Quebec.73 In 1719, probably anticipating her youngest son’s return from France, Marie Leroy established allowances to provide petty expenses for her three remaining children in religion: 100 livres for the Jesuit and 75 each for the two nuns, “in order to provide for their urgent needs without anything being required by the superiors or other religious members of their convents or monasteries.”74 She renewed these funds as bequests in her 1731 will.75 In August 1736, after her death, her daughters initiated legal action against those who held the funds in trust because payments were not being made regularly.76 To raise money, Marie Leroy began selling off lots that her husband had left in the upper town on Saint Joseph, Saint Joachim, and an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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Saint Flavien Streets as early as 1715, in some cases taking annual payments instead of the full purchase price. The sales were approved by Charles Guillimin, a wealthy merchant, who was named to safeguard the interests of her minor children.77 In addition, she had a small income from annuities (rentes) on the Paris Hôtel de Ville that had been left her by her sister and an uncle. The value of such investments would be reduced by the devaluation of currency after the bankruptcy of John Law’s bank and the Mississippi Company. Finally, she inherited property in Limours that her daughter reports brought her next to nothing. This income would not have been sufficient to live on, according to Marie-André in 1720, but her mother supplemented it by selling items she had sent each year from France. This kind of small-scale resourcefulness permitted her to live in a certain modest comfort.78 While Marie Leroy was providing for her children, the investigation into her husband’s finances proceeded. By 1719, she had to deal with claims that were being made against his estate. Her Jesuit son, looking back on this period two years later, went so far as to call the family’s situation at this time “desperate.”79 However, she was aided by the fact that around 1712, the Lanoullier de Boisclerc brothers, first Nicolas and then Jean-Eustache, who had loose ties to her family, arrived to take posts in the same financial circles in which Georges Duplessis had operated.80 In 1720, Nicolas would be named to the same position, clerk of the treasurer of the marine, that Georges had held, and Jean-Eustache was early on a controller of the marine. They were probably related to Marie Leroy as cousins-by-marriage in some degree.81 Their tie to the Duplessis family was thus rather weak, but the Lanoulliers were their only family of any sort in Canada. In November 1719, by request of Jean-Eustache Lanoullier de Boisclerc, Marie Leroy’s husband’s estate was ordered to surrender 10,339 livres in card money that was owed the king.82 The next day she appealed, countering that her husband had never been reimbursed for an advance of 9,455 livres that he had made to Antoine Laumet de La Mothe de Cadillac in the early 1700s for the post the adventurer had founded at Detroit.83 An accounting made a few days later credits Duplessis’s estate with having reimbursed 18,567 livres.84 The next month, on 21 December, she signed Jean-Eustache’s marriage

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contract as a cousin. There is thus likely some connivance between the two in the matter of the 10,339 livres. These manoeuvres show her using the same strategies to delay a reckoning that her husband had used and that she had seconded – claims and counterclaims and the cooperation of relatives. As was the case in the response of Pontchartrain to her brother Denis Leroy’s 1714 letter on behalf of her husband, often her claims were not backed up with documentation. A year and a half before her death, she appealed to the minister for payment for arms saved from the Walker shipwreck back in 1711 that she said the departing intendant Dupuy had promised her in 1728. When the current intendant Gilles Hocquart looked into the matter, he reported that he would gladly pay her, even though the weapons were useless, if she could produce a proper written agreement for the sale.85 And just as she and her husband had always done, she tried to win the protection of the powerful, even the intendant Bégon, who according to Marie-André was pitiless toward her mother. Her daughter narrated her mother’s brush with death in July 1720 when she drove out in a carriage about two kilometres outside the capital in a welcoming party to greet the intendant and his wife, who were returning from Montreal. The horse pulling her carriage became winded on a steep hill, and the widow threw herself out of the door just in time. She rolled 250 feet down the embankment, but without serious injury.86 For the nun, a miracle had saved her mother from death, but the incident also shows Marie Leroy’s efforts to court the intendant by participating in the welcoming cavalcade. Marie-André provides the best overall view of her finances in an October 1720 letter to Hecquet: “Since the death of my father my mother has accounted for 1,200,000 livres to the king.”87 This sum would represent card money and finances of the Company of the Colony over many years. Marie-André totalled the payments made by her mother at that date at 45,000 livres, a substantial sum, but not the million livres that is sometimes cited by historians, who take the total sum accounted for as the amount paid by the estate. Her Jesuit brother, all the while rejoicing that as religious he and his sisters were protected from such worldly concerns, attributed his mother’s escape from complete bankruptcy to divine protection. She held on to the

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2.2 The Duplessis residence was near the corner of the present Rue de la Fabrique and Rue Sainte-Famille. It looked out across this square toward the Jesuit college with its attached church. Richard Short made this view in the wake of the 1759 shelling of the town, but it evokes the urban landscape the Duplessis family knew well.

family house itself and passed it on to Charles-Denis. The 1744 census lists him residing there with his wife, daughter, and Indigenous slave.88 The house would remain in his possession until 1757.89 Marie Leroy’s last years were marked by declining health. In a 1720 letter Marie-André describes her mother as becoming so infirm that she postponed a projected trip to France where her two sons were studying and where she wanted to attend to her holdings. By mid-June 1731, she could no longer live at home, even with the help of three attendants. It was common for widows to turn to their lay daughters and sons-in-law in such circumstances,90 and she did so in a sense when her daughters placed her in a room in their hospital that was usually reserved for military officers. An enslaved Indigenous woman who had been in her service for some time accompanied her. As far back as 1720, her daughter had reported that neither her age nor her illness had dampened her feisty temper. At the beginning of her stay at the Hôtel-Dieu, her pains were so intense that her outbursts were frequent. She suffered from asthma that resulted in uncontrollable fits of coughing, insomnia, legs so swollen from fluid that they burst, and rheumatism that prevented her from using her hands.91 Her Jesuit son urged her to offer her pain up as if she were a martyr: “Let us suffer submissively, in the spirit of patient endurance; let us live and die, as God wills, as martyrs of patience.”92 Several months before her death in April 1732, after ten months of hospitalization, the unedifying outbursts ceased. According to her daughter, she did eventually accept her suffering as submission to Providence.93 Like many pious residents of Quebec, Marie Leroy requested burial in the cemetery of the poor of the hospital as a sign of humility. In an era when most widows had to turn to some male,94 Marie Leroy had maintained her independence on her own terms.

Conclusion The success of a family’s head in mobilizing all the capital available, human and financial, can have far-reaching consequences for his children. Georges Regnard Duplessis started with modest resources at the disposal of his considerable ambition. Superiors quickly recognized his diligence and competence and offered him promotions, and he an enterprising father and a resilient mother

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was skillful in seeking out the ear and protection of government authorities. Yet, when he died in 1714, his widow Marie Leroy spent the rest of her life dealing with his creditors. When he accepted the position with the treasury of the marine in 1689, he could not have known that the institution would shortly lose its stability. Moreover, the Canadian colonial economy dominated by one industry – an industry in decline because of oversupply – offered limited potential for enrichment. Only the largest outfitters in the fur trade operating out of Montreal could hope for riches. Duplessis had to cast about for investment opportunities. Not that he would have been better off to be fully in the king’s service, as were military officers or the intendant. They too had to supplement their salaries with expedients. Duplessis’s multiple business ventures were made in hope of striking it rich. However, this dispersal of his attention may have played a part in their mediocre results. Duplessis sought out pious friends such as Paul Dupuy, willingly took on responsibilities such as the Poor Board, and used his office to aid the Hôtel-Dieu. His daughter Marie-André reserved this high praise for him in the annals: Georges Duplessis declared that “he had never tasted a more perfect joy in this world than when he brought relief to someone.”95 Did she want to excuse his lack of financial success? In sum, what is surprising is not that Duplessis left his widow in difficult financial straits, given Canada’s hostile economic climate, but that he had such a good run over twenty-five years. Marie Leroy did not seem to share her husband’s intense piety, but she was an able partner in his affairs. Having independent income that she could control allowed her to serve as a guarantor of Georges’s position with the treasury of the marine, and she lobbied for him in France. After his death, she managed the urban property and unresolved claims on his accounts with all the skill with which other widows managed seigneuries or business ventures left by more prosperous husbands. Nonetheless, she died with debts that her executor and principal heir, her son Charles-Denis, was slow to pay, according to his Jesuit brother.96 The legacy of Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy was multiple. All four surviving children were tightly loyal to each other. This was particularly necessary since they had no family clan in Canada to provide support. The youngest son, Charles-Denis, had 48

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his father’s ambition to enter the seignieurial class, but not his work ethic. Of the four, the two daughters especially inherited their parents’ entrepreneurial spirit and networking skills. While Charles-Denis seems to have had no more than the rather conventional piety of his mother, the two daughters and oldest son shared their father’s Jesuit spirituality with its strain of service to others.

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chapter

3

Spiritual Mothers and Friends: Seeking the Peace of the Lord in Hospitality After Marie-André Duplessis’s death in January 1760, her successor, Ursule-Marie Chéron des Anges, highlighted her sustained calm, despite the multitude of challenges of her last decade: “All these various trials only served to enhance her strength, her equanimity, and her perfect resignation to the will of God.”1 Death notices, such as the one Chéron wrote, highlight the ideal, and Duplessis’s correspondence during the 1759 siege of Quebec shows her prey to anxiety and fear. Her equanimity was always fragile, and this chapter traces Duplessis’s search for the peace of the Lord. It begins with the women who served as her models at the Hôtel-Dieu, her own days as a novice, and how she guided novices when she became a spiritual mother in her own right. Her early “temptation” was to seek peace in a form of the religious life that was incompatible with her status as a hospitaller. Her friendship with her sister could provide a refuge from the tension between her quest for peace and the incessant demands of her role as a hospital administrator, but this required dealing with her order’s strictures against having particular friends.

The Father’s Path into the Hôtel-Dieu When Marie-André arrived in Quebec in 1701 with her sister Geneviève and mother Marie Leroy, she met her two brothers, four-year-old Joseph

and seven-year-old François-Xavier, along with her father. Georges Regnard Duplessis was in many ways at the height of his career during the six years between his daughter’s arrival from Paris and her entry into the Hôtel-Dieu in July 1707. He had recently purchased the seigneurie of Lauzon, enjoyed the favour of the intendants, and had been named as agent of the Company of the Colony, although signs of his fall were already appearing. Through him, his daughter had access to the highest administrative circles in the capital. She signed the parish registry at baptisms as godmother along with members of the elite: in 1704 with the son of the governor, and in 1705 with Jean Petit, the treasurer of the marine.2 She attended ceremonies for visiting Indigenous dignitaries.3 According to her 1760 death notice, none of these worldly activities, nor the flattering attention that she drew, deflected her from a path into the Hôtel-Dieu: “She was admired by everyone in this town because of her distinguished look, her modesty, and her piety. God had given her the advantages of physical beauty and great intelligence. She served as a model to all the young ladies who felt themselves fortunate to be in her company. Having so many rare traits, she was sought out by several individuals of standing, but her love of God led her to refuse these offers. Never was her heart divided or attached to any creature.”4 In the Quebec of 1707, what Marie-André could not do was enter a contemplative order devoted exclusively to prayer and mortification, such as the Carmelites or Feuillantines. The king only authorized orders with a service mission in Canada. However, four groups of women religious were available in the colony’s capital, three of them cloistered. The Congrégation Notre-Dame had been present in the capital only since 1686, when Marguerite Bourgeoys had established a Providence of the Holy Family in a house in the upper city at the invitation of future Bishop Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrière de Saint-Vallier. It was a school for girls too poor for the Ursulines, where they received rudimentary elementary education, religious instruction, and training in household skills over the course of a year.5 Several years later Saint-Vallier tried to add the care of invalids to these duties of the Congrégation, but he soon realized that the two responsibilities were incompatible. Marguerite Bourgeoys’s Congrégation was much like a group of religious Marie-André had known in France, those who taught spiritual mothers and friends

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in the parish school in Chevreuse: uncloistered, taking only simple vows, linked to service in a particular parish.6 While it would not have been impossible for the daughter of the seigneur of Lauzon to become a “daughter of the parish” as a Congrégation member, it would have required a singular attraction to a teaching vocation to join a group that recruited largely among habitant and artisan families. The Congrégation’s base was Montreal, and its outpost in Quebec was not a monastery but a house that sheltered a small group of members. In 1701, the head of the Quebec group wrote that there were ordinarily five or six sisters teaching more than a hundred girls.7 The nuns of the Hôpital-Général formed the newest group. Nothing could deter Saint-Vallier from his dream of an almshouse under his direction. When the sisters of the Congrégation could not manage the care of invalids in addition to their teaching duties, he requested a detachment of hospital nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu. After much resistance, a contingent of four nuns was sent in 1693 to the new house that he founded just outside the town along the Saint Charles River in buildings he had purchased from the Recollets. Until 1701, these nuns remained under the nominal control of the Hôtel-Dieu, but as it became clearer that more nuns would be needed in the new establishment, Saint-Vallier forced the hand of the Hôtel-Dieu community as well as the civil authorities in France by organizing elections and taking in novices. A royal order officially separated the two communities. In 1707, only three of the nuns who had come from the Hôtel-Dieu were still alive, including their guiding spirit, Louise Soumande de Saint-Augustin. The others, including novices, were young recruits who had joined the community in the preceding nine years.8 Initially there had been great opposition among decision-makers in Quebec to Saint-Vallier’s vision, although by 1707 much of it had dissipated, according to the annals of the Hôpital-Général.9 Numerous city leaders would have preferred that the Poor Board, composed of laymen under the direction of a priest, continue to provide for indigents without building an institution, or that, if such an institution were created, it would remain under lay control. Furthermore, support for the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in their quarrel with the bishop was strong. It is likely that Georges Duplessis shared these views. His friend Paul Dupuy had two daughters at the Hôtel-Dieu, and he had relinquished his post as treasurer of the Poor Board to Duplessis 52

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3.1 Map of city showing major religious institutions and Duplessis residence: (1) the Hôtel-Dieu, (2) the Hôpital-Général, (3) the Ursulines, (4) the Jesuit college and church, (5) the approximate site of the Duplessis home, (6) the Seminary, (7) the Palace of the Intendant.

in 1698.10 If Marie-André had entered the Hôpital-Général in 1707, she would have found her tasks as a hospital nun much the same as those at the Hôtel-Dieu. However, it would have been a much smaller, younger group, under the controlling hand of its bishop founder. The Ursulines would have provided a suitable fit for a woman of Marie-André’s talent and background. Although devoted to teaching like the Congrégation, they were quite different. Whereas Bourgeoys’s group had only been approved in 1669 and had fought off attempts by Saint-Vallier to impose solemn vows as late as 1698, the Ursulines had been in their cloister in Quebec since 1639. Their school catered to the better-off segments of society, and their recruits included girls from the governmental and economic elite. In 1700, there had been around twenty-nine professed nuns and novices in the cloister, sixty or so boarders, and more day students.11 If Marie-André turned toward the Hôtel-Dieu instead of the Ursulines, it is likely because of ties that her father already had with that house. Paul Dupuy had introduced Georges Duplessis to the hospital, and for twenty-five years Duplessis “never let a chance to do us a favour pass without throwing himself into it whole heartedly,” according to the annals. His pleasure was to aid the nuns: he gave them advances on money owed by the king, facilitated drafts on accounts in France, and loaned them money without interest.12 Marie-André entered the Hôtel-Dieu during a glory period for its novitiate in terms of recruitment. Between 1703 and 1712, the Hôpital-Général received nine postulants, the Ursulines thirteen, and the Hôtel-Dieu thirty-one.13 Nine of these recruits belonged to the upper classes,14 a slightly higher percentage than either at the Ursulines or at Saint-Vallier’s almshouse.15 A new monastery wing had just been added to the Hôtel-Dieu in 1695–98 so that the community was comfortably lodged. When Marie-André entered it, the community of the Hôtel-Dieu was the largest, numbering about forty-five, including novices.16 Marie-André began her novitiate on 2 July 1707. Her parents promised a 3,000-livre dowry, payable before profession. Five months later, on 9 December, the chapter voted unanimously to receive her as a choir nun, and she was clothed on 3 January 1708 by Joseph de La Colombière, canon of the cathedral and vicar general of the diocese, and took the name Sainte-Hélène. Her mother could not 54

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have attended this second ceremony. She had left for France in November to support her husband’s appeal against the order that he repay the Company of the Colony. The head of Jesuit missions in Canada, Vincent Bigot, preached and reminded the novice that since a nun is wed to the cross, she should not be surprised if it weighed down on her.17

Spiritual Mothers Unlike those novices who might have had trouble adapting to their new state, Marie-André found satisfaction in conforming to convent life. Her death notice declared that obedience was a pleasure for her, as were all the observances prescribed by the rule. Her many talents came to the fore, among them her skill in making liturgical ornaments. There was nothing acerbic in her manners; her conversation was pleasing, and she was considerate of others. Although the preceding assessment of her time as a novice comes from her 1760 obituary letter, written fifty years after her novitiate, its author is Marie-Ursule Chéron, who joined her there as a novice and succeeded her as mother superior.18 Perhaps her only character trait that the letter does not mention is her tenacity, which could include, when needed, a touch of defiance. However, Marie-André encountered no obstacles during her probationary period to awaken this spirit, and obedience is a more fitting virtue in any case to highlight in a novice. On 1 December 1708, the chapter voted to accept her into the community, and she made her profession on 8 January 1709. The woman who had the deepest impact on Duplessis’s formation during her first twenty years at the Hôtel-Dieu was its grande dame. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté de Saint-Ignace came from one of the oldest Canadian families on both her mother’s and father’s sides. She was a link between the Hôtel-Dieu’s French foundresses and their New World successors. She entered the community with a precocious vocation at the age of twelve as a boarder under the influence of her aunt, Marie-Françoise Giffard de Saint-Ignace, the first Canadian hospitaller. Unlike Marie-André, she had to overcome the resistance of her mother, who would have preferred to see her eldest daughter marry. Her novice mistress had been Marie-Catherine Simon de Longpré de Saint-Augustin, who reported fighting off the demons spiritual mothers and friends

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3.2 This anonymous portrait of Duplessis’s mentor, JeanneFrançoise Juchereau de la Ferté de Saint-Ignace, was perhaps made during her last terms as mother superior from 1711–17. She died in 1723 at age seventy-two.

who were tempting her charge to abandon her vocation. Longpré illustrates a mystical spirituality marked by the extraordinary: apparitions, personal revelations of future events, physical objects set in motion by demons, etc. Jeanne-Françoise’s aunt, mother, and the Jesuit martyr Jean de Brébeuf all appeared to Longpré at JeanneFrançoise’s profession in 1666, according to Longpré’s own reports.19 Jeanne-Françoise herself never claimed to have experienced Catherine’s intense mystical connection with the divine, or to have been visited by visions. However, she did share the belief that God reveals the future to chosen souls and that divine forces can manifest themselves physically. Catherine de Saint-Augustin had inhabited a private world of saints and martyrs who appeared to her in visions, but whom she mentioned only to her confessor. Jeanne-Françoise’s stress was on external community devotions. She introduced ceremonies into the annual life of the community in honour of the Sacred Heart of Mary and Saint Joseph, devotions that were being popularized in France at this time. Likewise, Marie-André would be concerned with the same sort of institutionalized piety: gaining indulgences for the hospital chapel or properly displaying relics sent from Rome. Juchereau was also the first Canadian mother superior of the house, and she passed on to Marie-André her robust defence of its interests. She would be elected seven times beginning at age thirtythree and serve twenty-four years. She was first named vice-superior at twenty-six in 1676 to aid Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité, who would later be accused of having given in too readily to the demands of Bishop Laval.20 Such a charge could never be brought against Jeanne-Françoise, who opposed Bishop Saint-Vallier’s plans to staff the Hôpital-Général with nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu in the 1690s with so much effectiveness that he forbade the community to elect her vice-superior in 1699. Her strategy was multi-pronged. She made respectful but firm representations of her views to the bishop. She marshalled support among the elite of Quebec, including the intendant and former bishop François de Laval, sent her own memoranda to the minister in Versailles to counter those of Saint-Vallier, and attempted to win the sympathy of other houses of the order in France. Finally, she strove to maintain the internal cohesion of her community, since Saint-Vallier had won over some of the sisters to his plans. Her obituary letter stresses her “admirable equanimity.”21 spiritual mothers and friends

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Her concern for the community was global. She maintained an extensive correspondence with monasteries in France and cordial relations with the Ursulines fifteen minutes away. She undertook the construction of the new monastery in the late 1690s. In 1711, seeing the need for a property near Quebec that could produce income and farm supplies, she bought the Ile-aux-oies in the Saint Lawrence north of the Ile d’Orléans and invested dowry money to upgrade facilities there. Juchereau’s talents had been recognized early, and she had been initiated into administrative responsibilities while only in her twenties. In her old age, Juchereau singled out Marie-André, whom she appointed her secretary within a few years of her profession. In this post, the young Marie-André would have been an administrative assistant who learned firsthand the affairs of the community. She also entrusted to Marie-André the task of redacting the Annales to insure that the spiritual fervour she had known in the foundresses would live on in her younger charges. The intense affection and respect that the young nun felt for Juchereau come through in the obituary letter that Marie-André likely wrote about her mentor,22 even though the letter was signed by the superior of that time, MarieGeneviève Dupuy de la Croix. Marie-André’s own career is in many ways a transposition of Jeanne-Françoise’s piety and defence of the Hôtel-Dieu into new circumstances.

Cantate Domino canticum novum: The Musique spirituelle of the New Novice Mistress Juchereau had been elected novice mistress at age thirty. Duplessis became a spiritual mother in her own right when she was selected for the same post at thirty-one in March 1718. The choice is not surprising, since she is said to have been a model for other novices when she was one herself.23 Six postulants and novices either began or finished their probation period during her three years in office. They ranged in age from fourteen and a half to twenty at the time of their entrance. In spring 1719, her brother François-Xavier scolded her because he had learned of her new responsibility from a third party, and offered stern advice on how she should handle her new charges: 58

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“They are spouses who must be shaped for Jesus Christ; thus nothing terrestrial or unworthy of this divine union must be allowed in the formation that they are given … let us beware particularly of human prudence.”24 His tone is heavy-handed, if not patronizing, coming from someone seven years younger and less than three years into his own training as a Jesuit. In fact, by the time he had written his letter, his sister had composed a short text that was likely intended at least in part for her charges and that mixes the secular and the religious in a way that her brother might have found frivolous.25 The Musique spirituelle is an allegory that finds equivalents for monastic spirituality in various points of contemporary music theory and practice. A musicologist has called it “the first treatise on the theory and practice of music to have been undertaken in North America,”26 but it treats music as only a means to a spiritual end. The music in question is not monastic plainchant, but is written in the worldly vein of composers such as André Campra and Marc-Antoine Charpentier, whose motets the nuns adapted and performed. The Hôtel-Dieu’s lively and informed musical culture allowed Duplessis to find spiritual parallels for such fundamental notions as keys, scales, and notes, but also for more sophisticated Baroque vocal ornaments, such as glides, trills, and syncopation.27 Pleasure is her self-avowed method. In the dedicatory letter to Marie-Madeleine Dupuy de la Nativité, she praises the young nun for having already mastered the substance of the treatise, leaving the author with only the hope to entertain her. In the preface, she asserts that since music is a pleasing art, she trusts that those in the religious life will joyfully assimilate the “spiritual music” she proposes. The spiritual music that she describes surveys the whole range of monastic life, with more stress on spiritual development than on rules and regulations. Yes, it is necessary to study normative documents such as the order’s rule and constitutions, but that is because these texts promote virtue. She notes the need for regularity (observance of the rule) and obedience to superiors throughout, but she lauds flexibility as well: “Just as vocal flexibility is admired and greatly pleases the ear, in the same way, in this music, faithfulness in following up on inspirations and taking advantage of all opportunities to make progress is enchanting and is so profitable that with that one can become holy in very little time.”28 Monastic civility, the need to spiritual mothers and friends

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cultivate harmonious relations among sisters, is promoted: “sweet and kind words that sustain charity.”29 The particular institute of the hospitallers is a leitmotif: the five vows (enclosure and hospital service, in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience); the mixed life that combines active service and contemplation; and the stress created by night watches in the hospital wards. The vision emerges of a religious life that does not shirk from the ascetic – mortification, contempt for the world, penitence, etc. – but promises “the solid, uninterrupted joy that one enjoys by fulfilling all one’s duties, joy that makes virtue easy, giving it a lustre and a brilliance that makes one love it.” She adeptly compares this lustre to “a sustained closing trill.”30 The Musique spirituelle is proposed for the community generally, not just for the novices, but it would be especially appropriate for them. By using music as a springboard for monastic instruction, it combines the training the novices were receiving in singing religious texts with spiritual growth. It summarizes the key points the novices should master about life in the convent, from advice on how to behave at recreation and in the parlour to the primordial importance of developing a fervent prayer life. Beginning with the premise that in itself “music is a very pleasing thing,” so pleasing in fact that many learn it despite its difficulties,31 this short work presents the spiritual life in the monastic world as a superior form of music that is especially inviting and attractive. It lives up to its epigraph: “Cantate Domino canticum novum” – “Sing to the Lord a new song.”

A Particular Friendship: Sisters Bound More by Inclination than by Blood The Constitutions of the Augustinian sisters, like those of all female orders, contained a solemn warning against particular friendships with other members of the community, especially relatives.32 Teresa of Avila’s strictures in the Way of Perfection are typical: “For the love of the Lord, refrain from making individual friendships, however holy, for even among brothers and sisters such things are apt to be poisonous and I can see no advantage in them.”33 Attachments to humans interfered with the goal of uniting with Christ. On a more practical level, besides the unspoken fear of homosexual relationships, close ties between individuals could lead to cabals against the 60

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superiors and cliques that divided the community. Teresa had limited, in fact, the number of nuns in each convent of reformed Carmelites to around a dozen in the hope of forestalling such problems. Large communities with a limited recruiting pool, such as the Hôtel-Dieu, however, often included many family members. In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, when Marie-André and Geneviève joined the community, two sisters apiece from the Chéron, Tibierge, Fornel, and Corriveau families also entered. Marie-André herself was close to several members of her generation. In fact, she seems to have allied herself with one particular friend to coax an even closer one into the monastery. The other novice, who entered the monastery in 1707 with Duplessis, was Marie-Élisabeth Lemoyne de Longueuil, born in 1684 to an illustrious Montreal family. In 1711, she joined Marie-André to send Geneviève Duplessis a short text designed to encourage her to become a hospitaller with them. Marie-André and her sister had bonded during their passage together from France, and Geneviève had spent three years as a boarder in the monastery in 1707–10 during her mother’s trip to France.34 Entitled the Histoire de Ruma, the text is written out in MarieAndré’s hand, and she was likely its principal author. It recounts Geneviève’s life using biblical names in place of family ones to show that everything destined her for life as a nun. Not only is Geneviève’s piety exemplary, her temperament is even-handed, and she has mastered Latin so well that she has translated the New Testament. Somewhat of a tomboy, she enjoyed horseback riding and shooting guns. After her three-year stay as a boarder in the convent, which strengthened her bond with her older sister, Geneviève continued to practise the devotions she had learned there, despite being accused of hypocrisy.35 Her talents and charms attracted suitors, according to the death notice Marie-André composed in 1756: “She had natural charms that made her stand out in society; she was sought after and pursued with such persistence that people of virtue feared that she would give in to it. However, this made her resolve to leave the world behind.”36 The 1711 appeal of Marie-André and Marie-Élisabeth was not immediately successful, but Geneviève did enter the Hôtel-Dieu as a novice in January 1713. She could not join Marie-Élisabeth there, as that nun had died in December 1711, one of seven nuns who spiritual mothers and friends

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died while nursing victims of an epidemic. Geneviève replaced her in a sense, since she took Marie-Élisabeth’s name in religion, “de l’Enfant-Jésus.” When Geneviève died in May 1756, her sister described them as being more united “by inclination than by blood” in the obituary letter that she wrote. As she had explained to Hecquet in 1720, “We have a great affinity, and we are very united by sharing the same feelings. We look so much alike that often we are taken for each other. She is younger than I am, ruddier, and a bit heavier.”37 Geneviève added in a letter written the same day that they were often taken for one another both in appearance and in handwriting.38 The striking difference was temperament; Geneviève had inherited Marie Leroy’s testiness, while her older sister was calmer. Marie-André admits to her French correspondent in 1734 that this sometimes caused problems: “That doesn’t fail to tax our harmony from time to time, but without harming our bond.”39 Monastic warnings about particular friendships often denounced such bonds based on affinities, where natural affection could be mistaken for Christian charity. However, Marie-André’s openness in admitting her tie to Geneviève, both publically in a circular letter addressed to her whole order and privately to Hecquet, indicates that she did not see this bond as falling within the particular friendships proscribed by her order’s Constitutions. In fact, in the annals she described two such seventeenth-century friendships at the Hôtel-Dieu that could serve as authorizing precedents; one involved its candidate for sainthood, Catherine de Saint-Augustin.40 In their shared spiritual ambitions the Duplessis sisters found a way to reconcile their attachment to each other and their commitment to seek first of all union with the divine.

“Be Teresas”: Between Mary and Martha While Marie-André was forming future nuns as novice mistress and was praising the joy that makes doing one’s duty as a hospitaller easy in the Musique spirituelle, she was questioning her own spiritual progress. In June 1718, her Jesuit brother wrote to his sisters, “You seem, judging by your language, nevertheless to have degenerated and to have forgotten the goal you had to work toward perfecting 62

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yourselves.”41 In October 1720, writing to Hecquet, Marie-André complained of “a great cause of embarrassment,” her frustration that she was not meeting her spiritual goals. Hecquet wanted her eldest daughter, Marie-Catherine, to become a nun like Duplessis, but Marie-André admitted that she found herself an unworthy model for the girl who shared her nickname Manon. She thus requested prayers from her friend: “Pray, my dear friend, that God give me the grace to become what he wants me to be; in truth, you see me as completely different from what I am, since you say that you desire that this dear child who bears my nickname imitate me and commit herself to God’s service as a nun like me. However, may God preserve her from living as tepid a life as the one I lead, despite all the holy desires that he gives me.”42 She complains of a chronic tepidness in the face of her aspiration to live for God that should be the mark of her state as a nun vowed to strive for religious perfection. François-Xavier’s letters to his sisters make it clear that this was not just a moment of self-deprecating humility. His letters describe an ongoing period of uncertainty about how their vocations were playing out. He did not save their letters, but his counsel in his replies allows us to reconstruct much of the situation. Marie-André’s questioning of her spiritual state seems to date back at least to discussions in the monastery parlour, often in Father Bigot’s presence, when François-Xavier was preparing to leave for France to become a Jesuit in the fall of 1716. In May 1718, he alluded to a pact that he had made then with his sisters to increase the number of fervently committed religious: “Let us strive with courage to increase their number. We often discussed this goal, but the time has come now to work together to achieve it.”43 As religious, the three siblings were committed to aiming for the highest states of Christian perfection. In a letter of April 1717, he enthusiastically described his novitiate in Paris as a paradise filled with prayer and self-examination: “A more pleasing life than the one we lead cannot be imagined … what can satisfy more a soul that strives to unite itself to God.”44 A year later, in answer to their letter of fall 1717, he thanked them for their expression of pleasure in his “happiness” and gave an extended praise of the religious life, which, he contended, few people living in the world are able to comprehend: “They pity our fate; they claim compassion for us because they see spiritual mothers and friends

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what we have left behind and do not see what we have found.”45 He did not hesitate to propose ambitious models both for them and for himself. When he exclaimed, “Be Teresas and may I be a Xavier!”46 he reminded them of their initial ambition: Teresa of Avila, the Spanish foundress of the Carmelites, and Francis Xavier, the companion of Ignatius Loyola and missionary to the Indies. Teresa of Avila, the great mystic, might seem a strange model for two hospital nuns. The Hospitallers of the Mercy of Jesus saw their distinctive institute, or purpose, not primarily in terms of prayer, as did Teresa’s Carmelite order, but as the union of action and prayer. As the first chapter of their 1666 Constitutions puts it, “The distinguishing feature of our vocation is to join Martha and Mary, action and contemplation in unity, to seek out the love of God in its purity and the love of neighbor in its perfection.”47 The Constitutions, of course, present as a given what was, in fact, a point of great tension for all the Counter-Reformation active orders. If union with God in contemplation is taken as the most perfect form of the spiritual life, then caring for patients and managing a hospital were not only a source of endless distractions, but also reduced the time that could be allotted to prayer. How in these circumstances could FrançoisXavier propose that his sisters become new Teresas? His first letter about his novitiate had diagnosed their problem more explicitly: his sisters’ aspiration to a solely contemplative life. As he put it in 1717, the devil tempts us with the idea “that in a more secluded order we would become great saints.” “I saw you impeded sometimes,” he says, “by the same idea: you imagined that you would have been great contemplatives.”48 The devotional climate at the HôtelDieu might well have encouraged this attitude. The sermon preached at Geneviève’s clothing ceremony in 1713 makes no reference to service to the poor or ill; the sermon would be perfectly suited to a Carmelite novice. In fact, the preacher alludes to Teresa’s motto, “to suffer or die” for Christ.49 The remedy to what François-Xavier labels “this temptation” is to learn to love their vocation as hospitallers, which consists of welcoming Christ in each of the poor they serve. Without explicitly doing so, he is reminding them that the word “hospital” originally conveyed the connotation of hospitality or welcome. He further maintains that this loving service to the poor will produce in

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3.3 Claude François, “An Augustinian sister Caring of Christ in the Guise of a Patient” (1670–71). It depicts a nun in her white habit and black veil at the bed of a patient. The nuns belonged to the Hospital Sisters of the Mercy of Jesus of the Order of Saint Augustine and were encouraged to see Christ in each patient. The painting hung in the men’s ward.

them effects similar to the ones attributed to Teresa in her ecstasies: “If you had this spirit you would taste as pleasure and consolation to serve an ill person as Saint Teresa tasted in her ecstasies.”50 Here the young Jesuit is repeating a commonplace of the early seventeenth-century Catholic revival in France, that of “leaving God for God.” It is found in the letters of François de Sales, in Vincent de Paul’s exhortations to his Sisters of Charity, and in Barbe Acarie’s spirituality. When duty requires leaving prayer to serve neighbours, God is not left behind at all. Barbara Diefendorf described this engagement with God in the midst of mundane activities as “active mysticism” in her account of Barbe Acarie.51 Catherine Fino called it “the mysticism of action” and “the dynamics of contemplation in action” in her discussion of the Quebec Hôtel-Dieu.52 François-Xavier’s repeated invocations of Teresa in 1720 are to be taken in this light. “God wants to make you two Teresas. Be courageous my dear sisters; raise yourselves by an heroic effort above all that is not God … The age of Teresas is not over.”53 In 1717, the Duplessis sisters recommended to their brother a translation of Teresa of Avila’s autobiography.54 In it, they could have found a defence of the kind of spiritual friendship they saw themselves engaged in. In her Life, Teresa defended the usefulness of having friends who can be supportive comrades, particularly in the early stages of developing a life of prayer.55 She saw union with God in mental prayer, in fact, as an intimate sharing between friends, and human friends who shared this goal of uniting in friendship with Christ were valued as a gift of God.56 Thus Marie-André could see herself linked to Geneviève as companions in a common pursuit of friendship with God. Duplessis wrote a short text, probably destined as an oral instruction to her community, on the theme of friendship with Christ. “God wants to establish a particular friendship with each religious,” she insisted. She highlighted some of the features of particular friendships she considered important: intimate communication, equality, a willingness to sacrifice. She presented the life of a nun as a particular friendship with Christ. However, the text makes no mention of particular friendships among nuns either as an aid or as an obstacle to this friendship with God.57

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Detachment and Reorienting Oneself toward God: The Dissection spirituelle François-Xavier’s advice turned less on the prayer/activity tension implicit in the slogan “leave God for God” than on the need for detachment from the world in order to free up his sisters for God. When they recommended to him the translation of Teresa’s autobiography by Martial Chanut, he countered in 1718 that the works of Jean-Joseph Surin would teach them detachment: “There you will learn the methods to clear away all the obstacles that prevent you from becoming Teresas.”58 His sisters must not have reported progress, because in March 1719, he reiterated the counsel to read Surin: “That is where, with the grace of God, you will learn the way to demolish everything that serves as a roadblock to this noble and divine transformation into your spouse Jesus-Christ to which you are called.”59 Without Marie-André’s letters to her brother or any autobiographical accounts, the most extensive portrait of her struggle to free herself for union with God is found in her undated manuscript Dissection spirituelle. Its title suggests that it was written in the wake of the Musique spirituelle of 1718. It is composed of a series of thirty-one paragraph-length meditations – one for every day of a month – on how the physical, mental, and spiritual faculties can be re-oriented toward God. These meditations show her prayer life in action.60 On the one hand, they contain a sort of examination of conscience in which she enumerates her sins; on the other, her formulation of prayers to overcome her failings points to how she sought to make spiritual progress. These meditations offer special insight into how Duplessis saw her own situation, since they are tailored to a person of exactly her psychological make-up: someone, as she says in the ninth meditation, with “a peaceful temperament, a docile nature, and inclinations toward virtue.”61 This is her own calm disposition that Marie-André often contrasted to her sister’s impetuous vivacity. Attaining spiritual perfection is not as easy as it might appear, Duplessis went on to suggest in the ninth meditation, even for a person inclined by temperament to virtue as she is, although “the work is half done.” Complacency is one danger for such a soul, what she calls “virtue defined by one’s tastes.” She was likely more troubled,

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however, by the fact that she did not fit the classic model of heroic sainthood that called for conflict and battle: “One must do violence to oneself to merit heaven. Everything that is done out of temperament is not virtue, and the great diligent work of the saints is to continually fight against their natural disposition.” Here she echoed her brother’s dictum of 1719: “A heroic courage is necessary in order to sacrifice small attachments.”62 To be sure, contrition for a sinful past appears early and reoccurs frequently. On the third day, she laments, “How embarrassed I am to have spent so many years only concerning myself with evil, vain, and useless things and with filling my memory with so many matters unworthy of recall.” On the seventeenth day, she regretted “evil pleasures” and “vain praises;” on the twenty-first, the “songs and lyrics that displeased and offended you.” She also mentioned many issues that continued to trouble her: on the first day, impatience; on the eighth, jealousy and envy; on the ninth, discouragement. In the twenty-fifth meditation, she tried to cast herself as Mary Magdalen, but the past sins of which she accuses herself seem slight rather than grievous offenses, and these current failures are hardly major temptations. Particular friendships or human attachments do not figure on this list of temptations. What is striking in her approach is less her confessions of past failings than her effort to re-orient each of her faculties to God. She presents detachment as avoiding any ill use of her faculties, but this detachment is also clearly a prelude to positive action. Her brother’s only practical advice in 1719 was the general recommendation to renounce any natural pleasures that come one’s way and accept disagreeable things with resignation.63 The Dissection describes a systematic reorientation. She shows how a heightened attention can redirect each faculty to God. However, she does not offer specific techniques about how to accomplish this re-ordering. They would be out of place in a meditative work, wherein she casts her reflections as prayers that each faculty be put to higher service. For example, in the sixteenth meditation, on the eyes: “Let me lower my proud eyes to my own misery to humble myself and … raise them sometimes toward the holy mountains whence I await help.” It is noteworthy that her treatment of the body and mortification marks a movement away from the penitential asceticism of Catherine 68

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de Saint-Augustin and the community’s foundresses. To be sure, Duplessis repeats the traditional warning about the body being an obstacle to holiness. In her fifteenth meditation, the body is “like a weighty and clumsy burden that drags the soul into the precipice.” The saints “persecuted it, punished and reduced it to slavery.” However, after declaring that the body is a “great enemy,” she concludes, “It is a very fragile vase, but such as it is, one can sanctify it by making it obey.” Likewise, she grants in the tenth meditation that “our very passions can serve as steps of a ladder to rise to heaven.” This requires that the body as well as the mental faculties be re-oriented toward virtue. Her eyes should focus both on her sins and on her heavenly goal, according to the sixteenth meditation. The mortification she describes does not emphasize searching out extreme ways to subdue the body. Duplessis is content with the ordinary asceticism of monastery life, what she calls “mortification suitable to my position” in the nineteenth meditation: i.e. the simple fare at meals, the routine fasts and abstinence, and the restrictions of clausura, to which are added the burdens and dangers of caring for patients. This contrasts with what Catherine Fino called Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s “mystical martyrdom” that cultivated extraordinary self-mortification, both to fight temptation and to expiate the sins of others.64 Catherine scourged herself, slept with pointed bracelets, and embraced austere fasts; she mortified her sense of taste by eating the phlegm of patients.65

Detachment, Interior Peace, and the Will of God How effective was their brother’s encouragement that his sisters strive to become Teresas by integrating hospital duties into their spiritual lives and by cultivating detachment? In 1726, the two Duplessis sisters must have still been reporting difficulties to their Jesuit brother, to judge by a 1727 letter from François-Xavier that speaks of “contradictions and crosses from every direction on the exterior, a universal desolation within, and with all that, an ever stronger determination to move toward God.”66 After that date, we must largely rely on Marie-André’s comments to Hecquet. In 1729, Marie-André gave Hecquet an overall assessment of her spiritual state, which marks her progress over the 1720s. The previous spiritual mothers and friends

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3.4 The frontispiece of Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint Augustin, published three years after her death, shows her guided by two angels toward her heavenly reward. Her Jesuit director Jean de Brébeuf awaits her there, souls in purgatory implore her intercession, and a demon is vanquished.

couple of years had been particularly contentious in Quebec, full of quarrels with the intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy in 1727 and with the cathedral chapter after Bishop Saint-Vallier’s death in 1728. Canadian-born priests of the Seminary of Quebec then dominated the chapter. They took advantage of the absence of a bishop to replace the French-born Jesuits that Saint-Vallier had named as confessors to the Hôtel-Dieu and Ursulines with priests of their number. Duplessis reported to Hecquet in 1729 that neither community was happy with the new confessors: “Our confessor was taken away from us, and they gave us a young Canadian to whom several of us cannot adapt. These disturbances cause unfortunate biases that divide us.”67 Duplessis claimed to have weathered the turmoil around her by cultivating a spirit of detachment. She did not turn to Surin, whom her brother had recommended, but to Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ for inspiration. “I often blame myself that even though I am not attached to anything, I am not united to God as I should be, but that is explained by the author of the Imitation, who says that after we have left behind everything, we have still not yet left ourselves.” As difficult as it might be to detach oneself from oneself, in the last analysis, she was satisfied with the inner peace she experienced: “I don’t fail to enjoy great interior peace.”68 She also admitted to a practical strategy of refusing to choose sides that served her well: “I will admit to you in confidence that since I have been a nun, I have remained aloof from all partisanship. That has frequently been at a price, because to hold myself upright between two opposing tendencies, I have felt myself pulled in all directions, and people thought me to be opposed to everything that I didn’t embrace. Nonetheless, after the storm, I was found to be holding to my initial stance and my conduct was commended.” This required a delicate balancing act, as she points out to Hecquet, because the cloister was no shield from the world for a hospital nun. Contacts with patients, suppliers, and local administrators insured that she heard every rumour and bit of gossip in the town: “My suffering is to hear many complaints that one cannot agree with. That makes it awkward to respect charity. Charity does not blind us, and to console those who suffer, one must at times agree that they are in the right … Our vocation exposes us to a multitude of contacts with others so that, despite our status as nuns, few of the town’s rumours are spiritual mothers and friends

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unknown to us. This is a great trial for persons who scorn worldly affairs, for even if one does not dwell on these matters, one always hears too much.” Of course, the presence of a confidant within the community facilitated this strategy of expressing sympathy, without actually taking sides. “My sister and I have the small advantage of being employed together at the same post. Since our points of view are similar, we withdraw as often as possible from all ties and find ourselves better off for it.”69 She could air her true feelings with Geneviève. Their administrative duties gave these particular friends the excuse to confer in private. Marie-André maintained in 1731 to Hecquet that she had achieved a satisfactory prayer life. In the twenty-fourth meditation of the Dissection dealing with prayer, Duplessis had requested the attention, confidence, and respect that she said could result in the pure joy of union with God in prayer. Although she never reported mystical states, visions, or the intense spiritual consolations of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, she did find strength in the practice of mental prayer. “I feel more than ever the advantage of being experienced in mental prayer,” she wrote Hécquet, “because in this exercise one learns incentives that can aid us in taking advantage of the evils in this life to gain heaven. These great truths are engraved in the soul, and the memory of what they teach us gives us support in the periods of dejection to which our afflictions reduce us.”70 Some of the tepidness she accused herself of was likely less complacency than simply the absence of the great interior struggle that she was told she should be engaged in. The Dissection is not the work of someone trying to shake off a lukewarm period, but of a spiritually insightful person who is able to chart a strategic roadmap because she knows well her own temperament. It envisages a methodical re-orientation of her faculties rather than violence against them. Nonetheless, Marie-André admitted that the slogan “leave God for God” was not as easy to live as some might have it. Writing to MarieCatherine in 1742, she stressed how difficult this is even for a cloistered nun: “You see, my dear friend, how a nun must harmonize that with the peace of her status as a nun. It is rather difficult, and I do not succeed very well. I complain about it to people who have no sympathy at all. It is claimed that leaving God for God and that doing his will are more valuable than the most peaceful contemplative states. I do not 72

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cease to be fearful and to moan because I see danger everywhere and even more in the distractions generated by contacts with others than in the engagements that develop in the sequestered life.”71 In the case of Geneviève, one senses that the equilibrium she achieved was less an integration of the two than an intense prayer life that compensated for the distractions of her post as the hospital’s business manager. In the 1732 dedicatory letter of the manuscript La Manne de Bethléem, she said that she would have liked to become a Carmelite and noted all the impediments to contemplation her hospital activities created.72 To judge by her death notice, rather than transform her duties into a form of prayer, she offset the daytime distractions by nighttime prayer: “She discharged her hospital duties without detriment to her spiritual ones, so that when she had been diverted from the spiritual ones during the day, she spent her evenings fulfilling them and only found repose in prayer.”73 In 1751, nine years before her death, Marie-André assessed her spiritual state with satisfaction for the degree of detachment she had achieved, even if she attributed it more to the discipline of the religious life than to her own efforts: All stations have their crosses, but those of people in the world are heavier than those of the clergy. Providence saw me as being too weak to bear such great troubles. It has guided me by easy paths commensurate with my slight virtue, which nonetheless can rise to the highest perfection in the holy station I have embraced. I have been a nun for almost forty-five years, and this period has passed me by like a flash of lightening. If in this favoured vocation there had only been the release from worldly affairs, I would consider this to be of inestimable value, but my calling comes with so many other advantages that, in addition to those that I am aware of, I am convinced that we will only see the value of this grace in eternity.74 Likewise, she saw herself as having attained the union with God for which this detachment was the prelude. This union did not take the form of mystical experiences, or even a quest for inner peace, but instead resulted from the conformity of her will to God’s spiritual mothers and friends

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for her. She told Marie-Catherine in 1749 that once she had been ashamed of her lack of enthusiasm in pursuing detachment. Now she had come to appreciate how the religious life freed her from many concerns. More importantly, she had come to believe that the secret of holiness is accepting what God sends, rather than the quest for inner peace. “When I saw you completely occupied with the desire for withdrawal from the world, I was ashamed that, while being a nun, I didn’t find in myself this ardour for disengagement with the things of the world, even though I have always disliked temporal affairs. And now that you appear to be troubled in your solitude by the encumbrance of worldly things, I enjoy even more the fortune of my state that does not tie me to anything at all and that imposes on me the agreeable duty of belonging to God alone. The secret of holiness, my dear friend, is neither in peace, nor in agitation, but in accomplishing the will of God.”75 Peace was a byproduct, not the goal. To be sure, this declaration of inner peace based on trust in Providence was made well before the trials of her last decade of life, which would test her capacity for detachment: her brother Charles-Denis’s abandonment of his family, the fire that destroyed the hospital, Geneviève’s death, and the war and siege of Quebec. She may be exaggerating this peace to provide a model for Hecquet. Although Duplessis honoured the heroic asceticism and the visionary experience of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, her own Musique spirituelle, written when she was novice mistress, promotes a more moderate monasticism. Likewise, in her Dissection spirituelle, she takes the measure of how she could calmly and systematically reorient herself to meet her spiritual goals. Her letters to Hecquet offer reassurance to her friend, whose spiritual suffering and sense of guilt were greater than her own. The model that she proposed to Hecquet, in which acceptance of the will of God leads to peace, suggests that she would enter this troubled period claiming deep reserves.

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Friend of a Jansenist, Sister of a Jesuit: The 1718 Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu and Fashioning Epistolary Friendships In a 1720 letter, Duplessis ridiculed nuns in Marie-Catherine’s hometown of Abbeville who were so foolish that they signed an appeal against the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus, which condemned Jansenism: If I held the opinions of the new theologians, I assure you that I would find myself greatly relieved to be able to say that I lacked the grace to accomplish my good intentions, but it is clear to me that it is my own fault. Concerning these novelties, I will tell you that I could not prevent myself from laughing when I saw the Franciscan sisters of Abbeville on the list of those appealing to a future council. It seems to me that it is hardly appropriate for women to involve themselves in this sort of issue and that a party must feel itself very weak when it accepts and searches out such support. Their names have the honour of being below several bishops and above several scribblers and tract writers whose signatures were purchased to add to the total. This is the only misery, I mean error, that does not afflict Canada.1 Marie-André must not have known that her childhood friend, who had since married Jacques Hecquet, had become a committed

Jansenist herself, that she had been threatened with excommunication, and that her pastor had tried to confiscate her copy of Pasquier Quesnel’s Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament that Clement XI’s bull proscribes.2 Duplessis’s scorn for Jansenist women reflects the misogyny of Jesuit anti-Jansenist polemics and is so flippant that Hecquet could well have broken off relations. But she did not abandon their correspondence at this juncture. Nor did she break it off in 1736, when François-Xavier Duplessis preached a mission in Abbeville and Duplessis chided her friend for not attending. Nonetheless, the friendship and the correspondence that undergirded it would have to be refashioned. As a prelude, it will be useful to situate Marie-André’s hostility to Jansenism in relation to the evolution of the movement from its beginnings in the seventeenth century. The 1717–18 Georges-François Poulet affair that Duplessis recorded in her annals and that led in part to her sarcasm to Hecquet in 1720 offers a window into historical debates about the penetration of Jansenism into Canada and shows why Jansenism, which was such a divisive movement in France, never “afflicted” Canada – to use Duplessis’s expression – to the same degree.

Sister of a Jesuit, Niece of a Jansenist, and Jansenism’s Renewed Attraction Duplessis’s own opposition to Jansenism crystallized when a Jansenist scare hit Quebec and its convents around 1717. Her stance was as untroubled as Hecquet’s Jansenism was born of anguish and persecution. It had its roots in the Jesuit circles frequented by Georges Duplessis and owed even more to her brother’s decision to become a Jesuit, which matured in the years just after Clement XI’s Unigenitus was promulgated in 1713. The bull was widely seen, and not just by Jansenists, as the product of Jesuit manipulation of Louis XIV and the pope.3 To enter the Jesuits in the second decade of the century, as François-Xavier did, or to be aligned with the Society of Jesus, as his sister was, was to be a warrior against Jansenism. The two years between the promulgation of the papal bull in September 1713 and Louis XIV’s death on 1 September 1715 were marked by determined enforcement of Unigenitus by royal authorities. However, after the king’s death, the regent Philippe d’Orléans relaxed 76

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this policy and released imprisoned Jansenists. Opponents of the bull who had once been cowed dared speak their minds. François-Xavier arrived in France to begin his novitiate in late 1716, just as the movement toward an appeal of the bull to a general council of the church was gathering steam and as the Jesuits were coming under attack. The archbishop of Paris banned them from preaching in his diocese.4 Once in France, the young Jesuit Duplessis had to deal with an intransigent Jansenist in his own family. Jean Leroy, a brother of his mother, was pastor of Saint-Cénéré, a village east of Laval in the diocese of Le Mans. On 28 April 1717, François-Xavier reported to his sisters that Leroy had written him a cordial letter without commenting on his decision to enter the Jesuits.5 Duplessis’s visit to Leroy in October 1720 only confirmed reports that Jesuits had received regarding his uncle’s allegiance: “Several times we have heard rumours concerning his opinions, about which he is so stubborn that he will not listen to reason.”6 Jean Leroy handled his sister Marie Leroy’s business affairs in France and evidently used his letters to her as a forum for his rancour. However, in 1722, François-Xavier refuted his uncle’s invectives against the Jesuits as groundless: “Those with whom I have the honour to live are not as hard as he thinks … he sees all the blows against the unfortunate party he belongs to as coming from us … He only swears by his C[ornelius Jansen]… There are three portraits in his bedchamber, and the one of Quesnel is placed with honour. His book collection quite resembles his paintings.”7 What particularly frustrated anti-Jansenists, such as the Duplessis siblings, was that their uncle and “his party” refused to see themselves as heretics. Unlike the Huguenots who left the church, Jansenists claimed to hold fast to the authentic teaching of the early church fathers. Jansenists maintained this tradition was being replaced by an optimistic Counter-Reformation theology sponsored by the Jesuits, known as Molinism, that minimized the consequences of original sin. Anti-Jansenists had long been devising tests to oblige their enemies to self-identify as heretics in order to ferret out such wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unigenitus was only the latest example. Jansenism had many currents – moral severity, an ideal of informed devotional life, distrust of what many French Catholics saw as papal overreach and of the Jesuits – in addition to its interpretation of Augustine’s theology of grace, on which it was judged heretical.8 friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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The key currents were no doubt its penitential moral stance and its theory of efficacious grace, but no single current is adequate to define its attractiveness. The Duplessis brother and sister were distressed by Jansenism’s seemingly ever-expanding reach, but they were unable to see beyond the caricatures their party used in its invective and to understand why Jansenism attracted many devout Catholics. Penitential severity was the initial impulse that motivated Jean Duvergier de Hauranne de Saint-Cyran and Antoine Arnauld, his protégé and successor, the founders of the movement that would be called Jansenism by its enemies. Labelled “rigorism” by those who saw its severity as excessive, this pastoral stance required believers to align themselves with the strictest standards of behaviour and demanded proofs of deep repentance before absolution in the confessional.9 Saint-Cyran defended the need for contrition (sorrow for sin grounded in love of God who has been offended), rather than attrition (fear of God’s punishment for sin). Arnauld and his associates, such as Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters, accused the Jesuits of allowing their penitents to choose the easiest interpretation of a moral requirement, i.e. of laxism. Opponents retorted that Arnauld pitched moral standards so high that most Christians were discouraged about ever being able to live up to them. The Jansenist campaign against laxism was largely successful and pushed the French church, even some Jesuits, toward rigorism. One widely shared feature of this severity can be attributed to Augustine’s influence: a deep suspicion about sexual pleasure, whose danger was heightened by the original sin of Adam and Eve.10 When excessive severity – rigorism – became associated exclusively with the Jansenists,11 they were blamed for this widespread distrust of sexuality. However, it pervaded Ancien-Régime Catholicism, and it is found in other Christian traditions that took inspiration from Augustine, such as the Puritans in England. In a sense, the Jansenists’ victory over laxism ultimately worked against them, since they were held responsible for this “Catholic Puritanism.” By moving the dispute from penitential discipline to the theology of grace, the enemies of Arnauld found the objective tool they needed to force Arnauld and his allies to take a stand that would justify excluding them.12 They attacked the Augustinus, a Latin treatise on Augustine’s theology by Saint-Cyran’s friend Cornelius Jansen. They 78

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claimed that Jansen exaggerated Augustine’s pessimism about fallen human nature and the need for divine grace. Jansen taught a Calvinist brand of predestination that denied free will, his enemies said. The papal condemnations of Jansen, first in the 1650s and then in 1713, instead of quashing the movement, only fanned existing distrust of Rome. In 1653, Innocent X condemned five propositions on grace, predestination, and sin without specifically attributing them at first to Jansen’s 1640 Augustinus. The condemned propositions were ambiguous enough that Arnauld and his supporters could subscribe to the condemnation and thus affirm the church’s teaching authority. However, when the pope maintained that the condemned propositions indeed represented Jansen’s teaching, Jansenists maintained that papal infallibility did not extent to such questions of fact. Indeed, only one of the propositions could be found textually in Jansen’s book. Arnauld denied that the propositions adequately represented Jansen’s views. The pope refused this distinction between fact and doctrine, and all clergy were required to sign a formulary that condemned the five propositions and also affirmed that they came from Jansen. Louis XIV cooperated in enforcing the formulary because he saw the Jansenists as an obstacle to his goal of subordinating domestic and foreign policy to his absolutist state. Priests who refused to sign faced the loss of their church position, but they could go into hiding or escape into exile. The cloistered nuns of the abbey of Port-Royal, dominated by the Arnauld family, could do neither and were deprived of the sacraments. Unigenitus in 1713 sought to avoid the earlier fact/doctrine controversy by condemning not five abstract propositions, but one hundred and one direct quotations from a devotional text by Pasquier Quesnel, the Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament. Quesnel was considered Arnauld’s successor, and his widely used study guide for reading the New Testament had first been published in 1672 and had seen multiple editions and revisions. It had been approved by the cardinal-archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles, who was no friend of the Jesuits. However, in their zeal to finish off Jansenism for good, the Roman censors included among the condemned passages a number that were hardly unorthodox. Many Catholics who accepted the bull did so more out of submission to authority than from intellectual conviction. Unigenitus simply gave new life to Jansenism rather than extinguishing it. friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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Women such as Hecquet had good reason to be incensed by the bull. Quesnel had defended the right of women to read the Bible in French, and his eighty-third condemned quotation had disputed the assertion that the “simplicity of women” was a major cause of heresy. Hecquet’s aunt had raised her on frequent reading of scripture, and Hecquet found only edification in Quesnel’s book. On the devotional level, Jansenists encouraged an informed spirituality that appealed to women. The Jansenist ideal was to narrow the two-tiered system that had one level of spirituality for the clergy and a lower level for the laity.13 They sought to raise the laity to the devotional level of the clergy, something quite different from the Protestant priesthood of all believers. Thus, they believed all the faithful should have access to key texts that were generally reserved for the clergy after the Council of Trent. The Jansenists were among those active in translating the Bible, at a time when Rome insisted that it should be read in Latin and only by those certified by their pastor to be capable of understanding it. Likewise, they supported translating the missal so that the faithful could follow the words of the mass, instead of uniting themselves with the spirit of each section of the mass, the recommended practice for attending mass at that time. Although Jansenist leaders shared the general clerical misogyny of the era, these policies were especially attractive to women, who were generally not schooled in Latin. Aristocratic ladies had been key defenders of Jansenism early on, and by the eighteenth century female support was more broadly based, such as we find with Hecquet, who followed the controversies avidly. Unlike with Jansen’s Latin treatise, a wide public of both sexes was able to judge whether Quesnel’s book deserved the papal anathemas. Resistance was broader and took the form of an appeal to a general council of the whole church. In March 1717, four bishops signed their appeal and were shortly joined by about a dozen others. Numerous clerics in the lower clergy signed on as well. Refusal among nuns was not centred in a single convent, dominated by the Arnauld family. Ursulines, Carmelites, and Visitation nuns, as well as the Franciscan nuns of Abbeville, registered individual or collective opposition. However, the appeal was a desperate tactic, leading to a dead end. Although many clergy in the Paris region signed, less than 3 percent of the clergy of France joined the appeal,14 and the 80

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bishops of other countries were indifferent to the condemnation of a devotional text written in French.

Georges-François Poulet and the Jansenist Scare at the Hôtel-Dieu Duplessis’s assertion to Hecquet in 1720 that Jansenism “does not afflict Canada” is a local victory cry of sorts. It came at the conclusion of a Jansenist scare in Quebec that she narrates in the Annales. In 1716 or 1717, authorities there realized that a stranger in his late twenties, who had arrived in 1715, was really a Benedictine monk fleeing Unigenitus. Georges-François Poulet was a member of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, an alliance of Benedictine abbeys in which support for Jansenism was strong.15 He had arrived in Canada dressed as a layman and had declared that his intention was to live the isolated life of a hermit in a remote location. After a short stay in Quebec – according to Duplessis in the best inn in the town – he headed downriver along the south shore to locate a suitable site. He spent his first winter near Cap Saint-Ignace, where he was befriended by its pastor, Pierre Leclair. In 1716, apprehensive that he was attracting too much attention, he relocated further downriver to Trois-Pistoles, with the help of its seigneur, Nicolas Rioux. It was apparently sometime during his stay there that his identity was discovered. He returned to Quebec in early 1718 to justify himself to Bishop Saint-Vallier and again in the fall of that year when pressure on him to leave from the bishop was mounting. He went back to France in November 1718. When Poulet had left La Rochelle in late spring 1715, Louis XIV was still alive and repression still unrelenting. Royal authorities were trying to arrest Poulet for a text he had written against the bull, but not published. His choice of Canada as a refuge might not have been as impractical as it seems. True, Canada’s first bishop, François de Laval, owed his bishopric to the Jesuits. However, administratively New France was not technically part of the French Church. Its bishop had no seat in the Assembly of the Clergy of France, through which the formularies against Jansenism were enforced in France.16 In fact, Laval had never required them of his clergy in Canada, and the 1665 formulary would not be required in Canada until 1730 under Bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet.17 Laval’s successor Bishop Saint-Vallier, while friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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no Jansenist, had strict views on confession and contrition which overlapped with Jansenist ones. He was a mercurial and abrasive leader who antagonized everyone, including the Jesuits. The Jesuit superior in Canada denounced his 1703 Rituel – a handbook of church practices – as having Jansenist tendencies.18 A July 1715 letter from the minister of the navy Jérôme de Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain to Charles-Guillaume de Maupeou, the general agent of the Clergy of France, shows that Saint-Vallier was not nearly as energetic in requiring prompt adherence to Unigenitus as Hecquet’s own bishop Pierre Sabatier had been.19 Thus, in 1715, Poulet might have had good reason to think he would not be troubled in Canada, and claimed he told the bishop himself as much in an interview in the winter of 1718.20 However, Saint-Vallier’s return to his diocese in 1713, after a thirteen-year absence in Europe, had been marked by a tactical rapprochement with the Jesuits.21 That year, before leaving France, he revised his 1703 handbook on ritual to conform to criticisms of the Quebec Jesuit superior.22 Once back in Quebec, he took the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Duparc as confessor in 1714. Protecting a declared Jansenist would not be opportune for the bishop. Both Poulet’s and Duplessis’s accounts show that the Benedictine found many sympathetic ears in the colony. He was young, charming, and seemingly well-funded, and attracted a following in devout circles. Among priests, the contacts he claimed were chiefly connected with the Seminary of Quebec. This institution was affiliated with the Seminary of Foreign Missions of Paris, which had been involved in a running dispute with the Jesuits about some accommodations to Chinese customs that the Jesuits had made in their Far Eastern missions. These accommodations had been condemned by Rome in what is called “the quarrel over Chinese rites.” Poulet must have gained a hearing in the town’s convents, although details are sketchy. Duplessis reports that his initial overtures at the Hôtel-Dieu were rebuffed: “Several individuals encouraged our mother superior [Juchereau de Saint-Ignace] to become acquainted with him with the thought that he was a very rich man who would make large gifts to our house, but she refused to take any steps about it.”23 Fear that the nuns might be contaminated was sufficiently strong that the bishop installed Jesuit confessors in all three convents, as the 82

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head of the Jesuits in Quebec reported with satisfaction in October 1717 to his superior in Rome. He noted that before Saint-Vallier became bishop, the Hôtel-Dieu and Ursulines had always had Jesuit confessors, but that Saint-Vallier had replaced them with priests of the Seminary in the 1690s. His letter makes it clear that the danger of false doctrine was not coming from just one man: “I am certain it was feared that the female religious orders might be imbued with harmful opinions by those of doubtful faith who came here from France and many among the churchmen seemed to be drawn into it.”24 He must have had in mind the priests of the Seminary. On 17 March 1717, Saint-Vallier named Jacques d’Heu as the Hôtel-Dieu’s confessor. Poulet cited d’Heu as the most vociferous of the Quebec Jesuits in denouncing the Jansenist menace.25 In October 1718, just when Saint-Vallier thought he had succeeded in forcing Poulet to leave his diocese, Poulet fell ill and was hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu in danger of death. Duplessis now had a ringside view of the denouement of the affair. According to Poulet, the nuns, although fearful of having an excommunicated priest die on their premises, did their best not to cause him new worries. “They were not unaware of my sad business; they were moved to the bottom of their hearts; out of their sympathy, they felt the repercussions of all the penalties against me, taking it upon themselves to soften them and to diminish everything in their power that might give me new ones.”26 Duplessis’s version of events includes none of this. She claimed that all efforts by priests to dissuade Poulet only redoubled the “fever” of his obstinacy.27 Saint-Vallier had instructed the town’s pastor Thomas Thiboult not to hear Poulet’s confession unless he accepted Unigenitus. However, while the two Duplessis sisters would have had little sympathy for the Jansenist, others in the community might have felt otherwise. Joachim Fornel, a seminarian at the Seminary of Quebec, whose warm November 1719 letter to Poulet shows he supported the Benedictine, had two sisters at the Hôtel-Dieu who had taken final vows in 1717 and 1718. Duplessis points explicitly to another community member with ties to Poulet, Marie-Madeleine Rioux, the sister of the seigneur of Trois-Pistoles, who had aided Poulet. She had just entered as a novice on 17 September. When Poulet was leaving the hospital, he offered her friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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a book in gratitude for her family’s hospitality. The mother superior demanded to see the book, and when she recognized it as a translation by the Jansenist Port-Royal solitaries, handed it back to him, saying, “Here we do not read the books of those gentlemen.” For Duplessis, this marked a triumphal rejection of “their pernicious doctrine.”28 Poulet’s account of Saint-Vallier’s dealings with Rioux shows a pattern of intimidation by the bishop and Father d’Heu. According to Poulet, when he met with the bishop during Lent of 1718, SaintVallier declared that if the Rioux brothers continued to help the erstwhile hermit, their sister would certainly not be received at the Hôtel-Dieu, where they were negotiating her entry. In response to Poulet’s retort that it was unfair to punish an innocent young girl, Saint-Vallier relented, but threatened to raise her dowry by a third.29 On 15 September, two days before she did finally enter as a novice, he issued a pastoral ordinance which declared that anyone who helped Poulet return to his hermitage would be guilty of mortal sin.30 To drive home his message of the danger that Poulet represented for the nuns, the bishop summoned the novice. “He had Mademoiselle Rioux brought to him to hear her out and to inspire horror for me in her. This poor girl was completely paralyzed with fear. Father d’Heu and another Jesuit Father Davaugour had exerted themselves hard so that my lord the bishop would press his zeal to this extent.”31

Assessing Jansenism’s Impact on the Canadian Church Duplessis was writing the Annales in 1720 when she included the disparaging allusion to Jansenist women in her letter to Hecquet. In fact, Duplessis was so determined to root out the Jansenist menace to the Hôtel-Dieu that she included accounts of two earlier incidents to underscore its tradition of anti-Jansenism.32 She concluded her version of the Poulet affair with a solemn prayer that Canada and the Hôtel-Dieu remain undefiled: “We cannot beg God enough that he continue to preserve Canada from the poison of heresy so that this church preserves the purity of the faith and that our attachment and respect for the vicar of Jesus Christ brings to us in this world and the next the blessings that are promised to truly faithful souls.”33 Clerical historians echoed her triumphal victory cry for two hundred years.34 84

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The Poulet episode does illustrate why Jansenism never impacted the Canadian church as it did the French church, but not necessarily for the reasons often given. Historians have looked chiefly at the theological stance of individuals suspected of Jansenism to assess their adherence to the movement. Three clerics who showed Poulet sympathy have sometimes been labelled as possible Jansenists: Pierre Leclair, Joachim Fornel, and Thomas Thiboult.35 However much these three and others may have railed against Unigenitus in private, though, they never took the kind of determined stand Poulet did. Rather than focus on individuals, it is perhaps more productive to analyze why New France lacked the institutional framework that facilitated Jansenism in France. First, corporate safe havens for declared Jansenists did not exist in Canada as they did in France. The Jesuits and the Sulpicians in Montreal were firmly in the anti-Jansenist camp, and the Recollet order of Franciscans, although smarting from the Jesuits having evicted it in 1629, was not pro-Jansenist. The Seminary in Quebec, allied to the Foreign Missions Seminary in Paris, had the potential to harbour Jansenist sympathizers, but the defining dogmatic quarrels over grace did not motivate the priests of the Quebec Seminary. They saw the Jesuits as too accommodating, both in their Chinese and North American missions and in confessionals in Quebec.36 In many ways, theirs was a quarrel with a rival organization. Second, in eighteenth-century France, the law courts became the venue of choice for Jansenists to press their claims, and many lawyers and judges were sympathizers. However, as Poulet pointed out, the members of the Canadian legal establishment had little of the training or intellectual depth of their French counterparts.37 The Superior Council had less jurisdiction than the French appeals tribunals, such as the Paris Parlement. In France, Jansenist priests, when disciplined by their bishop, appealed successfully to the civil courts in a process known as appel comme d’abus. Finally, Saint-Vallier had resisted giving tenure to parish pastors. Instead, he appointed many as missionaries, so that they served at his pleasure. Taking a stand as a Jansenist could mean losing one’s living.38 Clerical historians have cited Saint-Vallier’s harsh measures against Poulet as an example of how Canada was preserved from Jansenism. However, his expulsion of Poulet was the product of friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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special circumstances. With his local clergy, the bishop exhibited a forbearance which, combined with the lack of institutional support, is probably more responsible for Jansenism not taking root. Pressured by the Jesuits, whom he could hardly ignore, Saint-Vallier had no choice except to expel the Benedictine when Poulet persisted in refusing to submit to the papal bull, although Poulet stated that Saint-Vallier had no other objections to giving him faculties as a priest.39 Saint-Vallier did publish a pastoral letter (with some delay) accepting Unigenitus, but he did not require his priests to sign a formulary. Had he imposed subscribing to the bull on his clergy, reluctant priests would have found little institutional support. Few if any would have been likely to follow Poulet’s lead. But by not forcing them to declare themselves, the bishop preserved peace, and no Jansenist group coalesced.40 By the time Bishop Dosquet required a signature in 1730, the generation of priests that had sympathized with Poulet had lost its vigour or turned to other battles. Poulet repeatedly mentioned “my friends,” friends who remain unnamed and who offered advice and insider information about Quebec local politics.41 He remained in contact with them after his return to France until his death in September 1723, to judge by a series of letters showing that an audience for Jansenist writings existed in Canada at least until this date.42 However, whatever “Jansenism” remained in Canada after 1730 was the severe pastoral approach shared by most of the clergy of the period or distrust of the Jesuits, not the theological Jansenism condemned by successive popes.43 Thus, Duplessis’s treatment of Jansenism exaggerates the danger. Her accounts show that she rejected Jansenism out of hand and never went beyond the shibboleths current among its opponents.44 The core of her opposition was the ultramontane loyalty to the pope promoted by the Jesuits, but it also stemmed from her spiritual outlook. Like the Jesuits, she was more attuned to God’s mercy than to divine justice, and she was inclined to see how human faculties could be put to the service of charity, rather than stressing the effects of original sin on human nature, as Jansenists did.45 She followed the quarrels over Jansenism with great interest in a partisan way the rest of her life, with utter confidence in her duty to do whatever necessary to oppose it.46 The embarrassing fact that she had a Jansenist uncle might well have redoubled her zeal. 86

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François-Xavier’s 1736 Abbeville Mission Duplessis would not have couched her scorn for Jansenism in such brutal terms in her 1720 letter to Hecquet if she had known the religious evolution of her childhood friend. Only a few subsequent letters written in the 1720s to Hecquet survive, and they suggest that Hecquet must have decided that her friendship was too important to jeopardize by revealing her hand. She lived in fear of dying without the last sacraments and she had difficulty finding a priest at all, even in times of health, who would hear her confession. Such troubles surfaced in 1722, 1729, 1731, and 1732.47 Duplessis would never have flattered a Jansenist as she does Hecquet in October 1731: “All ladies of society are not learned as you are, my dear friend, who could teach the paths of virtue even to those who are charged with teaching it to others; one of the things that attaches me the most to you is to think that you are truly Christian.”48 She must still not have known Hecquet’s stance in 1735 when she heartily recommended a mission that her brother François-Xavier was to preach in nearby Amiens.49 He had abandoned thoughts of returning to Canada as a missionary and had become a prominent member of the teams of Jesuit preachers who sought to revive religious practice in towns and villages in France with month-long campaigns of sermons and services called “missions.” As he told his sisters who approved his choice in 1730, “I would find more to do in France than in Canada.”50 Two themes were dear to him: the cross and anti-Jansenist polemics. Through the 1730s, Marie-André included enthusiastic reports about her brother’s success as a preacher in her letters to Marie-Catherine. His fame grew immensely after 1738 when two cripples were healed in the northern French city of Arras after invoking the monumental cross he had erected there. Holy cards depicting the first miracle or the cross were widely distributed in France and Canada, and a book of devotions for people following his missions went through several editions in the 1740s.51 Hecquet would have also followed the critical articles on his missions in the clandestine Jansenist weekly, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques. There Hecquet found accounts that mocked his dramatic preaching style, refuted his attacks on Jansenism, and, above all, condemned the ease with which he was said to give absolution friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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4.1 Jesuit missions often included the erection of monumental crosses. The bishop of Arras in northern France attested that two cripples were healed in 1738 after invoking a cross raised there by François-Xavier Duplessis. This image, depicting the healed crippled woman at the foot of the cross where he is preaching, is the frontispiece of a 1742 edition of devotions for those following his missions.

in the confessional. For the Jansenists, the Jesuit missions were empty religious spectacle that only produced superficial conversions. François-Xavier also seldom missed an opportunity in his sermons to make fun of Jansenist women like Hecquet who dared think they had the right to be informed on religious issues. The Jesuit mocked them as “women theologians” and “priestesses.”52 A 1736 mission he preached in Abbeville compounded a personal crisis Hecquet was undergoing that year. In May 1736, she wrote a long letter of confession to Jean Soanen, her aunt Michelle Fontaine’s confessor, accompanied by a profession of faith.53 François-Xavier’s Abbeville mission began at the end of June, and Hecquet soon had to go to Paris to care for her husband. Before leaving, she instructed her servants to confess not to the Jesuit missionaries, but to their local parish priest. When she returned two months later, her pastor paid her a menacing call. Word had gotten back to him about her instructions, and the servants had been heard referring to Duplessis as the “Buffoon of God” (“Arlequin du Bon Dieu”).54 A long debate with the pastor ensued. She blamed the bull on the Jesuits. In the account she wrote that includes this episode, she only identifies Marie-André’s brother as “a native of Quebec.”55 Her family knew of her friendship with the Canadian nun, so there was no need to hide her connection to him from them. Hecquet must have intended for her account to circulate in her Jansenist networks, and she evidently did not want to advertise her cordial relations with the sister of the notorious Jesuit. She was a closet Jansenist in her relation to Duplessis and seems to have been equally secretive about her friendship with the sister of the Jesuit in her Jansenist circles.56 Hecquet never wrote her friend about the mission either. The next year Marie-André sent these gentle reproaches: “People inform me that there was a mission in Abbeville where my brother Father Duplessis was with his lordship the bishop of Amiens. I can hardly believe it because you do not say anything about it, and it seems to me, my dear friend, that if it had taken place, you are too Christian not to have participated and too civil not to have written me anything about it. Nonetheless, I will not let it come between us. Your busy activities could have made you forget it. People write us about the marvels of this dear brother. He is a man wholly filled with God who

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lives and breathes the salvation of souls and whose efforts heaven blesses wonderfully.”57 If Duplessis learned that Hecquet was a Jansenist it was probably after 1740, the year that she told Marie-Catherine of her hope that the then bishop of Amiens, Louis-François-Gabriel d’Orléans de La Motte, would become the bishop of Quebec.58 La Motte was a more intransigent tracker of Jansenists than even Sabatier. He was a friend of François-Xavier, but if the bishop informed the Jesuit of Hecquet’s stance, there is no indication in François-Xavier’s published letters to his sisters. Nonetheless, after 1740, Duplessis does not mention her brother’s missions to Hecquet. If indeed Marie-André did learn of her friend’s Jansenism, the nun seems to have displayed the tact with which François-Xavier reported his relations with his Jansenist uncle in 1722: “He is much to be pitied; I was greatly pained when I visited him, although I did not let it show.”59

Refashioning a Long-Distance Friendship through Letters Read retrospectively from the vantage point of the last letter of the exchange in 1758, the letters chronicle two women who separately weathered many storms. Read incrementally, letter by letter, the exchange is about reshaping a friendship that could easily have ended in 1699, when Marie-Catherine’s father took her back to Abbeville. Marie-André was twelve and Marie-Catherine thirteen when their shared experience ended. Only letters could refashion a bond that would be tested not just by physical separation, but also by new commitments. During the nineteen-year interval between that separation and the 1718 letter that is the first surviving one of the exchange, Duplessis had become novice mistress and was beginning her administrative career. Hecquet, a reluctant bride, was the mother of four children with two more to be born shortly. Duplessis was by then the sister of a Jesuit and Hecquet a persecuted Jansenist. Nothing guaranteed the continuation of the friendship. Duplessis’s 1720 letter appears to be an effort to catch up on news of common acquaintances: she inquires about Hecquet’s father, an aunt, and the doctor Philippe Hecquet, and gives news of Canadians 90

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whom Hecquet had encountered through her. However, their correspondence would have to be propelled by more than memories of a shared childhood and the people they knew in Paris. This familiar cast of characters would gradually be replaced by new ones who existed for each correspondent only in letters. Except for Hecquet’s father Jacques Homassel, who died in 1747, most news that each friend reported concerned people whom the other had never met. On Duplessis’s side, the list was short: her mother, two brothers, sister, and niece. As a mother of six, Hecquet’s cast of characters was much larger and constantly expanding.60 News of these new family members generated momentum for the exchange and was supplemented by general news of the colony or the mother country. In addition, the mechanics of the correspondence were a frequent topic, and Duplessis often hinted at the fragility of the exchange. Duplessis, in fact, complained in thirteen of the extant letters that she had not received one from Hecquet. She wrote even when Hecquet did not, and became the motive force of the correspondence. She had to perfect the art of scolding, sometimes in a playful way, sometimes with reproaches, so much so that complaints about no letters from Hecquet became a standard part of hers. In 1730, she mixed flattery with urgings to improve: “Whom will I blame this year so as not to hold you responsible for the offense that I have received none of your dear news. Because I tend to flatter myself in regard to you, my very dear friend, I imagined that because the vessels left France later than usual, your letter arrived too late to Monsieur Demus for him to send it on to me. I entreat you to take better steps next year, since I endure with difficulty being deprived of one of the sweetest satisfactions that I enjoy when I receive proofs of your ongoing friendship.”61 In 1733, Hecquet’s missing letter became first a pretext for worrying that Marie-Catherine had experienced some misfortune that prevented her from writing and then a pretext for claiming to find reassurance, before scolding Hecquet roundly for neglecting her obligation to console her Canadian friend whose mother had died. “I had no news from you this year, and Monsieur Demus wrote succinctly because he sent us nothing, and said not a word about you. That partly reassures me, my dear friend, because if something bad had happened to you, he would not have failed to inform me, since friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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he knows how I cherish you … My dear friend, it seems to me that you are especially obliged to demonstrate this mark of friendship because I wrote you news of my mother’s death, and surviving as an orphan in Canada, don’t I have the right to expect that you will soften the pain of my remoteness by the signs that you could give me of your affection?”62 In 1754, conversing with a recently returned visitor to France who had dined with Hecquet at her son-in-law’s home in Paris had to substitute for a letter: “I waited until the departure of the vessels to have the honour to write you, expecting some of your dear letters, but I have received no other news of you except from Monsieur Jacquelin, a merchant in this land, who came back from France this year and who assured me that he had dined with you, Madame, at Monsieur Bourdeau’s home, where you appeared to him to be happy to see someone who knows me. This is a proof of your friendship for which I thank you.”63 However, this vicarious face-to-face meeting cannot replace a letter actually written by her friend. Thus in 1755, Duplessis is politely blunt: “You owe me arrears. Pay your full due by giving me an ample accounting of your dear news.”64 Duplessis’s creativeness in varying the topos of the missing letter shows the inventive spark of the texts of her youth. In every case, she signalled the strength of her friendship by highlighting how much Hecquet’s letters meant to her, even when they did not make it across the Atlantic. Hecquet had described the love-at-first-sight bond between her and Marie-André in her biography of Michelle Fontaine. Duplessis told Hecquet herself as much in her 1742 letter, where she invoked “the tender friendship that I have pledged to you from my childhood days.”65 In 1720, Geneviève had described to Hecquet the “palpable” pleasure with which her sister received Hecquet’s letters: “We reread your letters in a festive mood, finding in them a certain piquancy that pleases us and allows one to easily judge your piety.”66 These frequent discussions of the mechanics of the correspondence reveal the relationship’s unstable dynamics. In the years before Hecquet moved to Paris after her father’s death in 1747, Duplessis routinely addressed the letters to Hecquet’s home in Abbeville. But once in the capital, Hecquet seems to have refused to give her address. Duplessis complained in 1748, “Where are you, and where will I address my letters in the future?”67 The next year, Duplessis renewed 92

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her complaint: “I seek you out in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in SaintGermain, and in Saint-Honoré, and I am not sure of finding you in whatever place you may be.”68 Hecquet had, in fact, found a house on the Rue Mouffetard, in the neighbourhood of the Saint-Médard church, a pilgrimage site for Jansenists, because one of their saintly heroes, the deacon François de Pâris, had been buried its cemetery. Her address might have revealed her hand. Duplessis had to send her letters via Hecquet’s son-in-law, the merchant Pierre Bourdeau, who lived on the right bank, or via the Mounier merchants, a Protestant family with branches in Quebec and France. According to Duplessis, there was a much easier method for getting letters to Canada: “I do not understand how you can find it difficult to get them to me. Nothing is easier today.” She suggested using the Jesuit headquarters at their college Louis-le-Grand or the Missions Étrangères.69 In 1751, she reiterated the suggestion: “I entreat you, my dear friend, give me your address since you dwell in Paris. That will make it much easier for me to get you my letters, and I would have yours sooner if you would send them to the father procurator of the Canadian missions at the college of Louis-le-Grand.”70 However, Hecquet wanted nothing to do with the Society of Jesus. Perhaps Duplessis still did not know of Hecquet’s Jansenist ties. The family news that Duplessis reported was generally more upbeat than Hecquet’s. While Marie-André did report Geneviève’s chronic respiratory problems and their mother’s death, for the most part, she relayed successes: the crowds at François-Xavier’s missions; Charles-Denis’s charm with the ladies, his marriage, and his promotion. To judge by Duplessis’s comments on the family news Hecquet sent, it was increasingly filled with disappointments and pain. Nicolas Lyon-Caen’s book on Hecquet’s family background allows readers now to know more about Marie-Catherine’s trials than she herself probably ever revealed to the nun.71 Hecquet’s father Jacques Homassel was a domineering industrialist who sacrificed family to business. Her husband was chronically depressed and perhaps alcoholic. The three children who married in Abbeville led calm lives, but the other three were sources of worry. The two daughters who married Parisian merchant brothers in 1736 died early, as did some of their children and one of the husbands, leaving Marie-Catherine as a grandchild’s guardian. Judging by her 1751 letter, where Hecquet alluded to some of friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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these problems, she only reported them to Duplessis in veiled terms: “I see all my children, of whom the oldest is about thirty-eight, with such weak constitutions and impaired lungs that I worry daily that they are about to take leave of the numerous children that they all have. One of them [Philippe], without dying, has weighed me down with six, not to mention himself.”72 In fact, her son Philippe in Amiens was a drunkard who accumulated business debts, and whose children she had to support. She had him condemned for debts in 1749 and kept him interned in a series of asylums and prisons until he was eventually deported to Guadeloupe, where he died in 1770.73 To protect the interests of her children, Hecquet obtained a property separation from her husband in 1741. She had him interned in asylums several times, at least once by lettre de cachet around 1755.74 She was no patsy, as her long-suffering aunt Michelle Fontaine, who raised her, had been. In her will, Hecquet deducted all the money she had spent on Philippe and his children from their portion of her estate.75 In 1736 and again in 1738, Duplessis confessed rather sheepishly that Hecquet might find her expressions of “tender friendship” unbecoming of a nun.76 “But don’t you find, Madame, that for a nun, I speak very much according to nature? Shouldn’t one mortify somewhat one’s inclinations?” Duplessis quickly justified herself: “I don’t blame myself because I esteem you as much as I love you, and our bond has edified me more that it can harm me.”77 As she put it two years later, “I admit to you that the senses still have so much power over me that I enjoy a great pleasure in cultivating my virtuous friends here on earth.”78 She ignored the seventeenth-century strictures in her order’s constitutions that discouraged such friendships for nuns. Instead, she cited the more general commonplace of Christian friendship based on mutual esteem for virtue and edification. When Duplessis confessed to going beyond the conventions of convent writing for Marie-Catherine, she affirmed the unique character of her friendship, which she frequently described as “steadfast.” The persecuted Jansenist Hecquet could only be delighted to receive Duplessis’s esteem for her as a true Christian. The unspoken subtext of the exchange between the two childhood friends Marie-André and Marie-Catherine is Hecquet’s closet Jansenism. Since only three examples of Hecquet’s letters to Canada 94

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survive – two drafts (1740 and 1751) kept by Hecquet and a 1756 letter received by Duplessis79 – the evidence of how much she revealed is inconclusive. This beleaguered Jansenist woman, who felt persecuted by the official church in France, sought the nun’s affirmation of her piety and true Christian spirit. Marie-André was happy to affirm a tie to the city of her birth and childhood and to have another person to turn to for needed supplies from France. After the 1755 fire, she implored Hecquet to send glasses: “I even lost my glasses. I can hardly either read or do needlework. Have pity on me, my dear friend.”80 Duplessis countered what might have been Hecquet’s attempts at withdrawal by writing even when Hecquet did not. Her childhood friendship with Hecquet overlapped with an instrumental one where mutual benefit mixed with nostalgia and generic Christian values. Each partner wrote for different reasons, but their letters generated a friendship that was stronger than theological differences and geographic separation.

Fashioning Networks of Friends of the Hospital The annual letters of Duplessis to Hecquet over the course of forty years form the tightest ensemble within her correspondence and are the only part of her intimate correspondence written by her to have survived. Thirty-three remain because Marie-Catherine preserved many of her friend’s missives written between 1718 and 1758,81 just as the Duplessis sisters saved the letters they received from their Jesuit brother in France. Two sets of business letters in French archives have been published alongside those to Hecquet: ten letters by MarieAndré and Geneviève to their representative in Paris, François de Montigny, and forty-eight by both sisters to the apothecary Jacques Tranquillain Féret in Dieppe. In addition to the sixty published letters by Marie-André, at least another sixty have been identified in the Hôtel-Dieu archives. To her letters must be added the many drafts of letters by her sister and administrative partner Geneviève, particularly from the late 1740s, in the monastery archives. Because of Duplessis’s desire to maintain links with the country of her birth and her managerial roles, she had multiple networks of correspondents in France. Indeed, as Marie-André wrote Hecquet in 1731, “We are in contact with a great number of people … who send friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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us a thousand proofs of very pure affection.”82 She had exchanges with suppliers and financial representatives in France, as well as officials of the ministry of the navy. The record contains formal petitions to ministers as well as letters to prominent figures in France who might lobby for her hospital. She exchanged letters with many convents in France, not just with those of her own order such as the one at Dieppe that founded her own, but with Visitandines, Carmelites, and Cistercians, among others. She seems to have sent them annual letters each fall, much as she did to Hecquet and her relatives.83 Autumn was letter-writing season in Canada because the colony was cut off from direct contact with Europe between the departure in November of the last ships and May when the earliest ships from France arrived.84 As she reminded Hecquet in 1730, “Fall is a crushing season in Canada because all business is transacted then. Letters from France are received; we reply to them promptly; we lay in supplies; debts are paid … so much negotiation is required to come to terms that twice the amount of time that one has would scarcely suffice.”85 Within the colony, she had frequent dealings by letter with local authorities and suppliers. Although one of the most revealing series of letters dates from her conflict with the intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy in 1727, the record is strongest starting in the late 1740s. Many letters must have been lost in the 1755 fire. The two most complete administrative exchanges are some thirty letters with the intendant François Bigot during the last decade of the colony and sixty letters between her and Bishop Pontbriand beginning in 1747. Since these administrative letters will be extensively cited in subsequent chapters, it is useful here to establish that they are much more than straightforward business correspondence. Even as relatively dry financial exchanges, they would be rare. The other major sets of letters by colonial women of New France, those of Marie Guyart in the seventeenth century and Duplessis’s contemporary Élisabeth Bégon, consist mostly of reportage – news of the colony and family or of their interior lives – and lack such seemingly routine managerial letters. However, beyond what these business letters reveal about the financial dealings of the Duplessis sisters, they also show how the Duplessis sisters used correspondence to fashion friendships, in this case to make friends of the hospital. They sought to acquire 96

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donors, lobbyists, functionaries, and suppliers who would go the extra mile for their institution, who would give funds or favours. They recognized the difficulty of creating these necessary relationships. As Marie-André put it to Montigny, their business agent in Paris, “It is rare to find people who wish to take up the interests of those far away.”86 Their strategies build on the conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing, which the sisters were careful to observe in official correspondence, including greetings at New Year’s and on saints’ days to local authorities, the exchange of gifts, and, in some cases, professions of personal friendship. Exchanges of gifts accompanied the exchange of letters. As Geneviève explained to Féret in 1743, “When we receive some service or token of friendship, we are pleased to give something in return.”87 Tokens of esteem designed to keep the hospital in the thoughts of their correspondents were the simplest form of these gifts, such as the two hundred or more palls that Marie-André embroidered during spare moments in the refectory. These square rigid pieces of cloth cover the chalice during the mass, and thus the priests to whom she gave them would likely remember her in their prayers during the service. As she explained to Hecquet in 1752, “Our parish pastors to whom I give them receive them with great pleasure and tell me that this is a fine way for them to remember me at the holy sacrifice of the mass. I keep a small catalogue of the ones that I distribute. I do this in wasted moments in the refectory. Since I eat rather fast and am among the first to be served, I always finish before the others, and while waiting for the signal to fold the napkins, I take a little bag out of my pocket with everything I need for needlework. Sometimes I do few stitches, other times more, and little by little, I make six or seven of them a year, and I give them away as they are done.”88 She wrote short prayers of paragraph length to accompany palls and sent them to priests throughout New France from the Illinois Country in the west to Acadia along the Atlantic, and even some to France. One went to Hecquet with the request that Marie-Catherine identify the recipient so she could enter the name in her catalogue. Duplessis’s log and text of her prayers survive, but no entry in it corresponds to this request. Was Hecquet reluctant to admit that she had given the pall to a Jansenist priest? friend of a jansenist, sister of a jesuit

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4.2 This embroidery measuring 16 x 17 cm on linen fabric is for a pall that covers the chalice during mass. It depicts a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young with its blood, a traditional allegory of Christ’s death on the cross. Duplessis’s catalogue of 220 palls records one for 24 December 1737 with this theme. The Hôtel-Dieu preserves nine palls embroidered by Duplessis.

The sisters’ staple present to correspondents in France was syrup of capillaire. This concoction, made by boiling the fronds of maidenhead ferns, was a remedy for chest ills. It was usually drunk as an infusion, but could also be applied as a balm directly on the skin. Duplessis’s first surviving letter in 1718 to Hecquet mentions having already sent it several times because Hecquet reported that it gave her relief. She sent it to her Jesuit brother in the late 1740s when he began suffering from lung problems. François-Xavier found it so effective that he even used the recipe of his Jansenist uncle!89 It was a particularly apt gift because the syrup from Canadian ferns was reputed to be especially potent, and Duplessis tried to send local products. Finding appropriate Canadian gifts was not easy, given Marie-André’s low estimation of Canada’s riches. She reiterated a similar apology as this one found in her 1720 letter to Hecquet to correspondent after correspondent: “We can only send wretched trinkets from this land, but you give magnificent presents.”90 Indigenous items were another frequent present with a local flavour. Around 1752, for example, she sent “a little item of native handiwork” to a potential benefactor she hoped to woo, the duchesse d’Ayen.91 Duplessis’s hope was that the exoticism of such gifts would mitigate their modest nature. Her last “gift” to Hecquet in 1758 was two songs celebrating French victories in the Seven Years War.92 For the Dieppe apothecary Féret, she and Geneviève scoured the colony for rare specimens from the natural world that he could include in his cabinet of curiosities, and when those were lacking, Geneviève sent her devotional texts.93 The sisters sometimes addressed letters to potential benefactors with whom they had tenuous links. The seventeenth-century foundress of the hospital had been the duchesse d’Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. In 1751, they did not hesitate to contact the current holder of the titles, even though the blood relationship was weak, in hope of awakening an interest in the hospital. The sisters included syrup of capillaire with their letter to the duchess. The stable of their regular correspondents could expand overnight in moments of crisis such as the Dupuy affair in the late 1720s or after the 1755 fire, when they mounted letter-writing campaigns of appeals. Many of these letters also appear to have been written cold. In each, they

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introduce their plea with an attempt to establish some link between the correspondent and the hospital. When the Duplessis sisters detected a sympathetic ear, they sought to exploit this goodwill, especially when such an individual had the ear of powerful figures they thought hostile or indifferent. In June 1727, during their conflict with Dupuy, they wrote his secretary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau to explain their side of the quarrel, saying they were much impressed by the courtesy and civility with which he had received their memoranda, and included the proviso that he should only show their letter to the intendant if he deemed it helpful to their cause. In the 1750s, during their battle with Bigot over paying for the hospital’s expansion, they courted Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, who had briefly served as governor of the colony. They confided to him that in his exit interview in 1750 before returning to France, he had inspired “a secret intuition” that he would be “very useful and favourable to the hospital since he knew its true situation.”94 They continued to write him hoping that he would lobby the naval ministry. Their most potent strategy, and one reserved for a privileged few, was to add private friendship to friendship for the hospital. This can be seen developing in the series of letters to Féret that span 1733 to 1752, where the sisters begin by sharing family news and gradually add more personal details. In 1741, Geneviève hoped that the apothecary would “continue to be among our friends, and that beyond the ties of self-interest that we share because of our hospital, we will be more united by esteem and the affection of Christian charity.”95 Perhaps the most striking example is found in Geneviève’s letters to the military engineer Louis Franquet, who had drawn up plans for the proposed hospital expansion. In a 1753 declaration of friendship that is almost unseemly in a nun, the spiritual friendship that Geneviève professed for him might well be bested by a natural one: “I do not doubt that spiritual sympathies exist, as do natural ones, and I feel it in respect to you, sir, because when I have the honour to write you, my pen proceeds on its own and anticipates my thoughts … I desire your happiness so much that mine own would not be complete if yours fell short in any respect.”96 The sisters felt he had understood their point of view during their discussions with him and counted on the engineer to report back to La Galissonière.

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These hospital friendships had uneven success. Some correspondents, such as Bigot, would never be won over despite persistent overtures, while others would prove to be influential supporters. It is not clear that either Franquet or La Galissonière, who had both impressed the sisters in person, helped the hospital substantially, but the duchesse d’Aiguillon, whom they had never met, eventually did. The Duplessis sisters’ concept of Christian friendship based on esteem for virtue, on charity, and on shared spiritual goals was capacious enough to justify an attachment to a woman Marie-André likely learned was a heretic, and it had found room for the particular friendship between the two nun sisters. It readily encouraged them to enlist supporters as friends of the hospital.

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chapter

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A Sister Team Managing the Oldest Hospital North of Mexico: Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Mother Superior (1732–38; 1744–50) “I am only beginning to become knowledgeable about the house’s business,” Marie-André wrote her business correspondent in France in October 1732, six months after having been elected mother superior.1 This, of course, is a flagrant understatement. Her protest in 1719 against Bishop Saint-Vallier’s unilateral decision to build a separate building to care for sick priests shows that she had been well-informed about hospital financing very early on. She sounded an alarm that would become a leitmotif for the next forty years: the fear that the hospital might not survive. These concerns are emblematic of her long administration of the hospital’s affairs: juggling income to meet the institution’s day-to-day needs while protecting its current assets and assuring that expansion be put on solid footing. In 1719, her determination to defend the interests of the community took the form of a solemn protest. When she was appointed hospital bursar in 1725, she began channelling this same spirit into the management of the hospital. Visitors from the British colonies to the south and from France would have been surprised by the important role the Hôtel-Dieu played in the medical life of the town. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm, who visited the British middle colonies before travelling to Canada in 1749 and who left the most complete existing description of the Hôtel-Dieu, could not have reported on such an institution in

Philadelphia or New York. A hospital along the lines of the Hôtel-Dieu would only open in Philadelphia in 1752.2 In British America, medical care was the province of the family. The Reformation had destroyed the tradition of hospitals often staffed by religious orders in England. Such hospitals remained a fixture in every French town of some size, but they were reserved for the poor who could not count on home support. Thus a well-off patient from France at the Hôtel-Dieu in 1718 (Georges Poulet, in fact), when writing for a French public, felt obliged to explain, “The custom in that land is that everyone sick is brought there – the great, the rich, and all the clergy – because of the easy access to doctors and medicine and the special care the nuns have for the patients.”3 While the local poor and a floating population of transient soldiers and sailors were the primary clientele of the forty beds of the hospital’s two wards, unlike in France, the Canadian upper classes did not disdain using its services. They were free for the poor, but more well-off patients were expected to pay, and the king paid a per diem for soldiers. Unlike twenty-first-century ones, eighteenth-century hospitals were usually marginal in the delivery of health care across society and served a marginal clientele. This was not the case at the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec.4 Initially, the finances of the community and the hospital had not been distinguished. However, by the 1660s, the nuns felt the need to separate the two. They knew they risked being accused of living at the expense of the hospital, and they feared being asked to use dowry funds intended for their living expenses for hospital purposes. In 1676, the property and investments were divided with the agreement of Bishop Laval. The nuns held the hospital in trust, with the hospital bursar, appointed by the bishop, administering its finances. The bursar’s title in French, dépositaire des pauvres, came from the fact that the hospital’s intended clientele (besides the Indigenous people) was the worthy poor. From the beginning of this separation, the nuns insisted that the bursar only had to open her books to the community’s ecclesiastical superior, appointed by the bishop, rather than to civil officials.5 The sums that the hospital handled were substantial during the thirty-seven years Duplessis was at the helm. Yearly income when she entered office in 1732 was around 8,000 livres; revenues ranged between 10,000 and 12,000 livres until 1737, when they began a climb managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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that reached 22,000 just before the beginning of the Seven Years War.6 The pressure on the hospital’s administrators was intense because in twenty-one of the thirty years between 1723 and 1752, the institution operated at a deficit.7 The colonial economy presented a manager such as Duplessis with multiple challenges, whether the lack of specie, the reliance on military expenditure, the tiny local manufacturing base, or the endemic administrative corruption. After the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the colony gradually entered a period of relative economic expansion and even prosperity, in comparison with the dark first decade of the century during which Georges Duplessis’s affairs had floundered. During the thirty or so prosperous years before the wars with Britain resumed in 1744 and even beyond, the nuns’ goal was to invest wisely with an eye toward expanding or upgrading their hospital plant. However, the hospital’s growing military role stressed its finances to the breaking point.

Women, Business, and Family Ties Few women in Canada managed as much money over such a long period or had business dealings that ranged as widely. The participation of women, whether lay or nuns, in the colony’s economy is best understood as a function of their family. The family acted as a unit that strove to advance its social position. The absence of the guild system in Canada made it difficult for an unmarried woman to operate her own enterprise, as Marie-Anne Leroy had in France.8 Canadian women functioned as extensions of their husbands, often collaborating in their professional activity. The wives of craftsmen and shopkeepers participated in the production and sale of goods. The wives of seigneurs were responsible for running at least a large household, if not aspects of the estate. Administrators’ wives cultivated contacts who could promote their husband’s career. When merchants or military officers left home on business or for war, they gave their wives an authorization to act in their name. Widows could continue their husband’s business in the name of minor children. At all levels of society, a family’s network of relatives, friends, and patrons was cultivated to further its interests.9 In theory, a nun’s solemn vows signalled a civil death that cut ties to her family. She could neither inherit nor pass on family property. 104

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But the family mentality penetrated the monastery as it did life outside. Nuns advanced the interests of the house, just as their relatives in the world sought to consolidate family fortunes, and individual nuns made use of their network of family members to lobby for their community with all the skill they would have devoted to establishing their children had they married. In terms of managerial autonomy, their status as brides of Christ situated them somewhere between a widow and a married woman who had been granted a financial separation from her husband (séparée des biens). The Coutume de Paris, the French customary law that governed civil matters in Canada, entrusted the entire management of the community property as well as any property a wife brought into the marriage to her husband. The courts sometimes granted a wife a financial separation, usually when the husband’s misconduct threatened the family. Hecquet had obtained a separation for this reason in 1741. Such separations gave wives the ability to manage their finances, but they still could not sell property without their husband’s consent.10 Marie Leroy had also obtained this status, not because of any family disorder, but to protect the property that her mother had reserved to her in her 1686 marriage contract as “propres,” property reserved to the wife. A widow could administer the community property on behalf of minor children without any immediate oversight, but not sell it. The Coutume de Paris conceived her power as transitional; she assured the family’s well-being in the interim between her husband’s death and a son’s accession.11 In most cases, a widow did not take on her husband’s active role if an adult son was available, or she surrendered it when a son reached majority.12 A religious community had a corporate identity and system of internal self-government that allowed the nuns great latitude to manage their affairs. While, in theory, major decisions concerning property were to be discussed and approved in chapter meetings or by the advisory council, in normal circumstances such meetings simply ratified the proposals of the community’s leaders. In legal documents, the nuns are often accorded the same honorifics as laywomen; both Marie-André and Geneviève are referred to as “Dame Duplessis.” Male clerical oversight was built into the system. The bishop appointed a priest as superior with the responsibility of approving all decisions. The nuns submitted financial accounts to managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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the bishop each year, he or his representative presided at the election of officers, and he appointed directly the hospital bursar. This episcopal supervision paralleled the authority of a husband over his wife – even one with a financial separation – but the corporate nature of the religious community and the complexity of its affairs gave the nuns a standing more like that of a widow. When relations were smooth, the nuns managed day-to-day operations independently, and the bishop approved their larger initiatives, much as the chapter meetings ratified the proposals of the mother superior. However, the potential for tension, if not conflict, was always just below the surface. The bishop could intervene in elections, as he had in 1699 when Saint-Vallier prevented the community from electing Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau to any post, and he could impose his own initiatives such as the Hôpital-Général. Moreover, this immediate oversight existed within a larger framework, in which even decisions that would seem local, such as vacating hospital property to extend a street, had to be ratified by the ministry of the navy in Versailles. Multiple layers of oversight delayed action, but also multiplied the possibilities for negotiation of disputes.

A Sister Team and “Independence” The Hôtel-Dieu was unique among Canadian communities in that Marie-André’s sister Geneviève seconded her during much of her career. When Marie-André began alternating as mother superior and assistant with Catherine Tibierge de Saint-Joachim in 1732, Geneviève took over the job of hospital bursar – “the linch-pin” office in convent hospitals, according to an historian of the institution in France.13 The younger sister would hold the office with only a few breaks until her death in 1756. The two seem to have collaborated so closely that they were seen by outsiders as a team. One sister, writing to the former governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, recalled that he had chided them for their reputation of opposition to the expansion of the hospital: “I recall a slight criticism that you made of us one day in the convent parlour when you told us that the Duplessis Ladies didn’t have the reputation of being inclined to expand the hospital.”14 “Les Dames Duplessis” were a joint force in the colony to be reckoned with. 106

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The closest to this team in other convents during Duplessis’s life might be Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay and Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay at the Hôpital-Général. However, their collaboration is more an example of how competent nuns rotated in administrative posts. Like Geneviève, Ramezay was a longtime bursar, holding the office for twenty-six years, but she held higher positions as well, and was mother superior for six years. Juchereau Duchesnay was superior for nineteen years, and energetically defended her institution’s interests. She arranged with the court for the hospital to house invalid soldiers, appealed successfully to Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas in 1737 in the quarrel over the hospital’s claims to ownership of the episcopal palace, and expanded the hospital buildings in 1736. Daughters of the military and seigneurial elite, Ramezay and Juchereau Duchesnay could count on aristocratic connections the bourgeois Duplessis sisters lacked.15 The Duplessis sisters knew that their initiatives were often attacked and that they were accused of “independence,” of bypassing male supervision. They retorted that they never acted without the approval of the community’s chapter and the bishop.16 In a colonial economy, where successful management meant a knack for finding expedients when events thwarted even careful planning, they were worldly-wise. It was a man’s world in which they competed ably, given the limitations of clausura which prevented them from visiting the hospital’s rural properties and forced them to deal through male intermediaries. Only in moments of extreme frustration did they invoke their handicap as women. Geneviève did so in 1747, when their bookkeeping methods were challenged: “If the accounts do not appear clear to people who would wish that they adhered to the practices of governmental administrative offices or of merchants, that is not possible for women, and above all for nuns, who only leave the world so that they don’t have to know its rules.”17 As always, they invoked their good faith, their devotion to the cause of the poor, and what they saw as the miraculous way in which the hospital managed to survive under their keeping, as guarantees of their accounting practices. The Duplessis sisters might have rejected the condescending attitude of male civil and ecclesiastical officials who considered the sisters’ determination to manage the hospital’s affairs themselves unseemly managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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female “independence,” but they could display a similar condescension toward the members of their own community. In a memo to Bishop Pontbriand, Marie-André requested that he not reveal to the other nuns the permission that he was giving the bursar to make minor discretionary expenditures: “I know by experience that we have never had peace except when these things are done secretly; as soon as they are known, they become a source of murmurs and disturbance.” Underlying this request for secrecy is the misogynistic commonplace that women are given to quarrelsome gossip. She could boast in the same memo, “There have been more deliberations of the chapter and advisory committee since we became bursars than since the founding of the house,”18 but that was perhaps because she had learned how to manage her community to ratify her formal proposals. The Duplessis sisters’ “independence” from someone looking over their shoulders worked in two directions.

Managing Investments during Thirty Years of Peace: Fixed Income, Urban, and Agricultural In 1720, the community faced a difficult choice in the wake of the bankruptcy of John Law’s Mississippi Company, which had merged with his royal bank. Interest rates were reduced drastically and paper currency issued by the bank became all but worthless. Much of the initial endowment of the Hôtel-Dieu, as well as subsequent dowry funds, like those of most religious communities, had been invested in the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. These rentes, which functioned somewhat as bonds, had been paying interest at a rate of 5 percent before 1713.19 The royal authorities offered the choice of accepting only 2 percent or repatriating the capital to Canada, and suggested that the repatriated funds be used to purchase land in the colony that could become income-producing. When on 7 October 1720 the nuns assembled in chapter to deliberate this proposal, they had already discussed the matter with knowledgeable advisors, as was their custom. The minutes written by Duplessis foresaw catastrophe: the cost of developing virgin land would reduce the house to beggary and force its closure, just as the lower interest rate would “ruin them completely.” The chapter therefore stated that it would prefer to use the funds to develop more fully the farm property it already held.20 Duplessis was only the chapter 108

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secretary at this time, but one senses her hand in the outcome. The dire prediction is similar to the one she made in her protest of 1719. She knew from her father’s experience as the enterprising seigneur of Lauzon how difficult it was to make agricultural lands productive. She was equally well acquainted with the working of rentes on the Hôtel de Ville from her mother’s finances. Indeed, the hospital counted on such income in hard currency to buy supplies in France that could not be obtained locally. Writing to Hecquet two weeks after the chapter meeting, Marie-André probably underestimated the impact the measure would have on the community: “Having something in France and being able to withdraw a certain amount every year for the small needs of the house is very agreeable.”21 In reality, the income loss was sorely felt: during the ten years between 1704 and 1713, such rentes had accounted for 15.7 percent of the hospital’s revenue; in 1724–33 they fell to 6.1 percent.22 As in the 1719 affair of separate quarters for priests, Duplessis’s worst fears were not realized. By the time the community’s agent in France received its instructions in 1720, he had already decided to leave the funds invested there at an interest rate that turned out to be 2.5 percent instead of 2 percent.23 In 1724, when the government ordered a one-third devaluation of money, Duplessis, to protect the 13,758 livres that the hospital held in cash, arranged to lend out this amount on favourable terms with the bishop’s consent.24

Urban Property Management A conflict that began in 1727 over the community’s administration with the recently arrived intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy illustrates how Duplessis could mobilize allies to support her defensive policies.25 The initial issue at stake might seem minor: Dupuy halted construction of a stone wall between the hospital’s garden and the adjoining street, the Rue des Pauvres, now the Côte du Palais. This escalated into demands from the intendant to inspect the hospital’s financial records and a demand that the hospital sell off part of its holdings as building lots. It is tempting to reduce the dispute to the clash of two strong-willed individuals. However, two visions of the hospital’s role in the colony were also in play. The intendant, charged with the civil administration of Canada, and imbued with the ideal of the service du roi, the king’s managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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service, somewhat akin to the notion of public service, envisaged the needs of the entire colony. Duplessis, as hospital bursar, largely limited her view to the service of the hospital’s primary clients, the poor, and in a lesser measure the king’s soldiers. An exchange of correspondence between the two sisters with François-Madeleine-Fortuné Ruette d’Auteuil in June 1727 offers a rare inside look into the sisters’ strategizing. Although quarrelsome by nature and out of favour with the authorities, the elderly former royal attorney general was in many ways an understandable choice as a confidant. In 1699, he had acted in their father’s behalf as a secret go-between in the purchase of Lauzon. But he had protested energetically in 1705 against the way in which Georges Duplessis had been named a director of the Company of the Colony. His obsession with precedent and procedures was useful here, since the hospital would assert that the intendant’s demand that it make a financial accounting to him violated its established privileges. The sisters acted as a team. Geneviève wrote the first letter on 9 June on behalf of her older sister, who was isolated in a retreat. Even though Geneviève held no office, she was clearly in the know. Yet secrecy was deemed essential. The sisters did not want their consultation with Ruette d’Auteuil revealed to the outside public, and likewise they did not divulge their negotiations to the community at large.26 Knowledge thereof remained within the convent’s leadership. They discussed tactics for winning the support of Saint-Vallier, whom they saw as unreliable and as conniving with the intendant.27 They saw the governor Charles de Beauharnois de la Boische as a potential ally because he had quarrelled with Dupuy, but wanted to hold him in reserve.28 Marie-André showed a keen awareness of rhetorical tone. She told Ruette d’Auteuil that when he composed briefs to be given the authorities on behalf of the hospital, he must remember to speak with the humility expected of nuns: “Keep in mind, if you please, that nuns are speaking, and consequently they must always be mild, without however sacrificing anything of the vigour that is needed.”29 Duplessis no longer acted alone as she had in her 1719 protest. Although the current mother superior signed the official protests, it is clear that Duplessis’s hand was behind them. The thirty-year period during which Marie-André guided the community, even 110

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when Marie-Catherine Tibierge was officially mother superior, had already begun in 1727. Ruette d’Auteuil counselled carefully limiting the hospital’s appeals in order not to diffuse their impact: “I am glad that you are not taking too many procedural steps.”30 This was difficult for Marie-André, who could react in intemperate ways herself. For example, when Dupuy had suggested selling off lots during his visit to the construction in May, she had riposted that they would only do this if ordered by the king. But she later seemed to have learned to follow Ruette d’Auteuil’s advice to never react on the spur of the moment. Eventually, in the fall, after consulting Ruette d’Auteuil further, she mounted an elaborate appeal that included a formal request to the minister of the navy, and letters requesting the support of the queen, the prime minister, and the duc de Richelieu, among others. Duplessis attributed Dupuy’s escalating demands to ill will caused when one of his servants, whom his wife accused of theft, had been protected in the hospital in December 1726.31 According to Duplessis, the intendant then began giving credence to every hostile accusation against the nuns’ administration of the hospital that circulated in the town. Previously, early that fall, he had apparently visited the wall and had expressed no complaints. At some point, however, his attention turned to the hospital. The nuns’ opposition activated his ambitious urbanization plans for the town and his concept of proper civil administration. Selling off lots from the hospital’s properties would be a more efficient use of urban space, and hospital finances in France were often in the hands of lay administrators who contracted with nuns for their services.32 Whatever merit his ideas may have had, he proposed them as threats. Duplessis’s tactics delayed a reckoning until a larger controversy engulfed the intendant. His demands were forgotten when he was recalled in the fall of 1728 because of widespread complaints over his divisive, impulsive management style. His role in the unseemly disputes over Saint-Vallier’s funeral in early 1728 was the primary occasion for his disgrace, but the hostile petition Duplessis had sent the court the previous fall likely did him no good. However, the three issues he raised persisted. The first to be resolved was the wall. At the second chapter meeting in 1732 at which she presided after her election as mother managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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5.1 This 1886 painting by Henry Richard S. Bunnett depicts the two wings of the monastery originally built in 1695–98 and rebuilt in 1756–57, after the 1755 fire. The wings formed two sides of a square. The street between the ramparts overlooking the Saint Charles River and the monastery’s wall is visible.

superior, Duplessis stressed her reluctance to see the community take on debt, but she found a way to continue the construction and also to enclose the community’s garden that bordered on the escarpment and ramparts.33 The bone of contention was less the wall itself than its placement, and from Duplessis’s point of view, paying for it. The royal authorities insisted that it be far enough from the escarpment to facilitate traffic by the public; the nuns saw this as an expansion of the right of way they had already granted that would diminish their garden with no compensation.34 In the end, at least forty feet were reserved for public passage between the bluff and the nuns’ stone wall, as the authorities wished, and without any compensation to the hospital.35 The nuns also began making building lots available, not as outright sales, but in return for annual payments. They seem to have conceded on these points. The second demand, that the nuns be accountable for their financial administration of the hospital to royal officials, not just to the bishop, was dropped for the moment. However, since the hospital relied on public subsidies, this issue would resurface periodically. Even the intendant Gilles Hocquart, a much more able and moderate administrator than Dupuy, whom he replaced in 1729, reported to the minister in October 1733 that it was good to be on one’s guard against the enterprises of the nuns, “which are not always congruent with the common good.”36

Rural Property Management Duplessis’s most striking initiative was agricultural: the purchase and development of the seigneurie at Saint-Augustin, upriver from Quebec. It was not the Hôtel-Dieu’s first land holding, but was by far the most successful. The earliest was Grondines between TroisRivières and Quebec, sold in 1683 because its revenue was modest.37 A second, much smaller property, Argentenay, was sold in 1700.38 Duplessis would have been much more familiar with the purchase of the Ile-aux-oies, just downriver from the Ile d’Orléans, which the hospital bought from Paul Dupuy in 1711. In fact, her dowry paid for it. She might very well have been among the eight nuns who made a nine-day visit to inspect the small island in the summer of 1714. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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The description in the Annales has the vividness of a first-person account and is made with an eye to the economic potential of the property’s hay meadows and woodlands. The account in the Annales updates the island’s status since its purchase by describing how a boat was subsequently bought to transport its produce and how hay was bartered for improvements to the farm.39 The hospital administration kept a watchful eye on the farm, and further inspection visits by the mother superior are mentioned in 1727 and 1729 in various documents.40 The island had the advantage of being closer to the town than Girondines, but it was too small to provide enough income, and its produce had to be transported by boat. In 1733, the opportunity to acquire a larger, more favourably situated property at Saint-Augustin, just upriver from Quebec, arose, and the chapter accepted Duplessis’s proposition as recently elected mother superior that the hospital bursar, now her sister Geneviève, place a bid in the hospital’s name.41 Opportunity to purchase the property is an understatement. The seigneurie was in debt, and the hospital was its principal creditor. While no record seems to exist that the Duplessis sisters visited the site prior to the purchase, they must have been well acquainted with it. Jean Juchereau de la Ferté, the grandfather of Marie-André’s mentor, Jeanne-Françoise de SaintIgnace, had established it. The holder of the indebted estate in 1733 was Marie-Thérèse de La Lande Gayon, the widow of the nephew of Duplessis’s mentor. The hospital, under the Duplessis sisters’ leadership, demanded the seizure and sale of the seigneurie to assure payment of its debt of 10,000 livres. The sisters might have planned all along not just to reclaim their debt by having the seigneurie put up for auction, but to purchase it for the hospital.42 For the chapter meeting at which the transaction was discussed, Geneviève prepared a detailed prospectus listing the advantages of the purchase and means for paying for it. The seigneurie was close to the town, was accessible at all times by either land or boat, had a mill and over two hundred concessions worked by habitants, and would allow the hospital to raise its own livestock, instead of using the services of various farmers in the area. She envisaged the acquisition in terms of the hospital’s larger financial situation. It would provide a source of stable income at a time when other sources of revenue could not be counted on consistently.43 114

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The Duplessis sisters directed the development of the seigneurie, which had about eight hundred inhabitants living on around two hundred forty tracts of land that had been granted to tenant farmers.44 Rural Canada was developed using the seigneurial landholding system, under which royal authorities assigned large tracts of land (seigneuries) to individuals or religious institutions, who were expected to recruit settlers. These tenant farmers or copyholders cleared the land and paid dues and rents to the owner of the seigneurie, who were in turn expected to provide certain services, such as building a mill. The Duplessis sisters’ first order of business was a thorough survey in 1735, followed by a detailed cadastral register drawn up in 1743–47 that recorded the fees owed the hospital by the copyholders who farmed on the seigneurie. The gristmill was improved in 1737 and a sawmill added in 1740. In 1744–45 a canal was constructed to assure the area an adequate supply of water. During the twenty-five-year period of Duplessis management, from roughly 1734 to 1759, about sixty new concessions were granted to copyholders, which greatly expanded the land used for productive crops.45 As cloistered nuns, the Duplessis sisters could not visit the hospital’s holding and relied on agents for business that they could not conduct in the convent parlour. Overall, the Hôtel-Dieu seems to have managed its seigneurie as competently as the male orders in Canada – the Jesuits, Sulpicians, and Seminary of Quebec – managed theirs. This good management did not prevent the nuns from showing more clemency to copyholders who were in arrears with their payments than did similar male ecclesiastical administrators.46 Although the nuns frequently claimed that they had to invest more in Saint-Augustin than the property produced,47 the seigneurie more than lived up to its proponents’ initial enthusiasm. It did require the expenditure of capital, for example to improve the mill in 1737, but it also provided stable income, and besides any cash payments, it was a source of produce for the hospital’s kitchens and stables. Quebec merchants as well as inhabitants of the seigneurie paid to use its mill. Most of all, because the various forms of income the property produced arrived throughout the year, it stabilized revenue for the hospital and provided a solid base of capital.48 The unsentimental weighing of the pros and cons for every business decision is typical of Duplessis’s careful management style. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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Whenever a repair or new construction was required, the short- and long-term consequences were always considered: could the cost of an immediate repair be recuperated? Or would it be better to sell the asset without further investment? The minutes of chapter meetings record such deliberations over the next twenty-seven years until Marie-André’s death in 1760. Even when Marie-André was listed as assistant, or vice-superior, she usually presented the proposal for major initiatives. Likewise, her recognition of the need for careful record-keeping and respect for procedures is everywhere evident. When she was not herself superior, she often served as chapter secretary, as well as assistant; thus, she retained control of the community’s memory of its business. She even added notes about the disposition of decisions made, especially to explain why, occasionally, they were not executed. In all cases, the minutes of meetings record that after her proposals were presented and deliberated, they were unanimously accepted by the voting sisters. If there were reservations, such as the ones she had expressed so energetically in 1719, they did not find their way into the minutes Duplessis wrote. The consultations themselves show her respect for chapter ten of the second part of the Constitutions, which specifies a long list of topics that must be brought before the voting nuns at chapter meetings.49 The Saint-Augustin purchase also illustrates the tight collaboration between the Duplessis sisters. As bursar, Geneviève had a much closer hand in the various necessary legal transactions and in the seigneurie’s operation than Marie-André. However, both shared a management philosophy that certainly owed much to their father’s experience as seigneur of Lauzon. At the back of their minds, the hospital’s eventual expansion was always envisaged; but expansion should not occur without long-term financial security, preferably some kind of investment income.

Managing Daily Supplies in Peace and War Two facts made supplying the hospital’s needs taxing for its administrators: the fluctuations in patient load and supplying patient needs in a cash-short economy. The hospital’s nominal capacity of thirty-two to fifty beds had changed little since the seventeenth century. Patient 116

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load varied considerably over the course of a year. The winter months could be slow, with mostly local patients, giving the caregivers four or five months to catch their breath. Usage spiked in late summer and the fall – September was the peak month – when ships arrived from France with their contingent of sick and vermin-infested passengers. However, as the city grew, as the economy included manufacturing enterprises such as the royal shipyards, and especially as war became ever-present, the hospital was often over capacity by the 1740s. A day-to-day account of the nuns’ purchases over the decades is not as important as how they defended themselves when their business practices came under fire from intendants. Their defence reveals their personalities and how they conceived their duties. Two periods are particularly well documented. The first is the Dupuy affair during Marie-André’s tenure as bursar; the second, in the late 1740s when Geneviève held the reins under Hocquart and Pontbriand, who had become bishop in 1741. At issue was what Marie-André described in a June 1727 letter to Dupuy’s secretary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau as the “minor methods” that the hospital used in its local purchases. She lined up providers in advance and bought in bulk when prices were lowest: “We do not wait until we need things to buy them because when they become required, one must pay the going price. As long as the hospital could only supply itself when items were needed, it went greatly into debt. This experience has led us to store in our heavy supplies when we find them cheap.”50 If it turned out that more supplies had been purchased than needed, the surplus was sold. For example, meat would be sold while it was still frozen near the end of Lent to butchers, who could then resell it once the forty days of abstinence were over. What she saw as “a wise measure of precaution,” others saw as profiteering and market manipulation. She was proud to stretch the hospital’s inadequate income in a way that avoided going into debt as the hospital had in the past. Only once does she allow herself a jab at those who use the hospital’s services and then reward it with “the calumnies that they broadcast against us.” Her very real pride in her resourcefulness does not overpower her larger argument that any reasonable person in her position would employ the same methods. Geneviève had trouble maintaining Marie-André’s moderation when similar charges were renewed in 1748. Jean-François Gaultier, managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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the royal physician, reported to her that someone had complained to the intendant that she had farm suppliers lined up who provided her with produce she could resell for a profit. She wrote the newly arrived intendant François Bigot directly and claimed to be “accustomed to the exaggerations that are made concerning her simple and plain management,” but hoped to disabuse Bigot at the start of his term. She noted that the previous year similar charges had been lodged with the lieutenant-general of the police, François Daine, who after investigation dropped the affair. Her exasperation surfaced throughout the letter. After summarizing the same purchasing methods in more detail that her sister had done in 1727, she could not resist a touch of irony: “The mighty trade of the Hôtel-Dieu that provokes jealousy consists of this.” She closed with an apology for her tone and asked Bigot to excuse “a few slight barbs that he might find too straightforward; when one is weary of an issue over a long period of time, the choice of words is not too refined.”51 Two issues fired her irritation. After so many years as bursar, she was fed up with what she saw as the growing bad faith of many Canadians. In fact, she declared to Bigot that she had offered her resignation to the bishop the previous year. Financial pressures caused by increases in the hospital’s patient load since the 1720s magnified her exasperation. Her sister had used this same purchasing scheme to avoid borrowing. Now, expenses to meet the needs of ill soldiers were so high, the king’s repayment so slow, and his administrators so unresponsive that the hospital could only feed its patients by resorting to short-term borrowing. Geneviève does not mention these loans in her letter to Bigot,52 but her sister does in a letter written earlier in 1748 to Pontbriand.53 This kind of borrowing had always been anathema to “the Duplessis Ladies.” One form of petty commerce that the Duplessis sisters engaged in does not seem to have aroused hostility. They received and placed items for retail sale with their suppliers, both in France and Canada, probably as a strategy for offsetting the cost of their purchases. Letters in the late 1740s to Geneviève from a certain widow Portneuf, who bought food products for them in the Montreal area, mention shirts the nuns had made that Portneuf hoped to retail to voyageurs headed to the upper country.54 Correspondence in 1737–38 with the apothecary Féret in Dieppe discusses ivory devotional items sent to Canada for 118

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sale55 and Indigenous belts that the Duplessis sisters sent to France for him to sell.56 Letters usually discuss these transactions in terms of the difficulty of finding buyers, which probably explains why these sales did not result in complaints. The Duplessis sisters traded in minor articles imported from France much as their mother Marie Leroy had done to supplement her income during her widowhood.

Managing Popular Piety and Community Observance Marie-André saw attracting the faithful to the hospital chapel as part of her responsibility to build support for the institution. When she surveyed her tasks as newly elected superior in 1732, she realized that its indulgences were expiring. That October, she wrote François de Montigny at the Foreign Missions in Paris for advice about renewing them in Rome.57 The next year, while noting that the papal bulls needed to reauthorize them had not yet been obtained, she added a question about how to obtain relics for the chapel.58 In 1735, she became even more insistent: “It seems to me that since you know the ways of Rome and have connections there, it would not be too difficult for you to obtain for us [some relics] for our church which is quite bare. I am sending you a list of the bulls for our indulgences that need to be renewed since they were given to us for ten years in 1726.”59 When the relics did arrive,60 she cajoled her friend MarieCatherine, whose family dealt in the luxury fabric trade, to donate crimson silk that could be used to line the reliquaries. She had written to the pope to obtain them, Duplessis said, and she was sure they would become a centrepiece of the chapel.61 The mother superior was undoubtedly thinking ahead to the festivities in August 1739 that would mark the centenary of the hospital’s founding. Duplessis was superior in 1737 when an anonymous letter arrived that offered an ex-voto statue of the Virgin. The letter was from a sailor who had made a vow to the Virgin when he had faced shipwreck on a voyage out of Quebec at the end of the previous century. Duplessis immediately recognized the potential of the votive statue to attract other miracle-seekers. She was no longer superior when the statue was delivered the following year, but must have had a hand organizing its ceremonial visit to the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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5.2 Although the initial miracle that led to the gift of this statue in 1738 was only attested in the anonymous letter offering the statue, Duplessis skillfully turned the statue into an object of veneration for miracle seekers, and it still resides on a lateral altar of the Hôtel-Dieu.

and in placing it in a prominent position in the church in 1739, where it became a site of pilgrimage for sailors and the ill. Indeed, at the August 1739 centenary celebrations, the statue and reliquaries were central attractions of the chapel, along with the plenary indulgence that had finally been obtained.62 She was once again mother superior in 1744 when Bishop Pontbriand announced that a small crucifix that had been desecrated in Montreal in 1742 would be entrusted to the Hôtel-Dieu. A trickster, François-Charles Havard de Beaufort, had used the crucifix in a case of alleged sorcery in June 1742 in Montreal. The culprit was arrested, tried, and sentenced to the galleys by mid-August of that year. In September 1742, the bishop issued a pastoral letter ordering that the profaned crucifix be publically venerated in churches in Montreal in reparation for the sacrilege. To give it a permanent home, he assigned it in March 1744 to the Hôtel-Dieu. At the chapter meeting on 24 April 1744, Duplessis noted that Pontbriand had chosen their church over others that had solicited the honour, a modest way of announcing that she had submitted the successful bid. It could well be that she had a personal interest in seeing it housed in her community’s church because preaching the cross was the specialty of her brother François-Xavier in France. The monumental cross he had erected at Arras in France in 1738 at the close of a mission there had already become a pilgrimage site, famous for miracles attributed to it.63 The crucifix was displayed in a reliquary and became the site of yearly ceremonies of reparation, just as novenas were made invoking Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces. Duplessis wrote short accounts of the statue and crucifix in which she highlighted miraculous favours attributed to them, including the cure of a nun’s urinary retention after invoking the crucifix and the preservation of sailors from shipwreck. Her hospital’s chapel could now attract its share of miracle-seekers. In September 1747, the hospital contributed funds to the erection of an outdoor calvary at a crossroads on its seigneurie at SaintAugustin. Geneviève’s account of the dedication ceremony attributed the initiative to the domain’s inhabitants,64 but the Duplessis sisters, as mother superior and bursar, were surely the real motive force for this wayside cross, built in the spirit of the ones their brother inspired across France. managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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Strict in her personal observance of the rule – for example, she would welcome the bishop’s dispensation when illness prevented her from duties in the wards – Marie-André maintained discipline and devotion by instructing the community regularly, as was expected of superiors who took their duties seriously. The zeal for observing the rule of Saint Augustine for which she would be praised in her death notices was animated by a spirit of flexibility rather than one of mechanical punctiliousness. This comes through most clearly in notes she wrote concerning differences between the letter of the order’s governing documents and slight variations in their observance in her house. The circumstances that motivated the notes are unclear. It might have been at a time when male superiors tried to enforce stricter conformity with the rule, or it might have been an in-house attempt to update practice. Duplessis makes it clear that what counts for her is the spirit of the law, not its letter: “an honest liberty is more suitable to encouraging nuns to do nothing against their duty than establishing new regulations that are different from those that have been observed here up to this time.”65

Harnessing Family Bonds The Duplessis sisters were a formidable duo within the Hôtel-Dieu. However, they were distinctly disadvantaged in terms of family connections in comparison with the more aristocratic nuns of the Hôpital-Général. The Duplessis sisters seem to have had no family members in Canada, until the very end of their father’s career when the Lanoullier de Boisclerc brothers, Nicolas and Jean-Eustache, arrived around 1712. Of the two, Jean-Eustache had a more successful career and may have aided the hospital sisters at times, just as he had helped Marie Leroy in November 1719. He was appointed royal road commissioner by Hocquart in 1730, and he energetically improved roadways throughout the colony. His major accomplishment was the king’s road linking Quebec and Montreal. The respect he enjoyed likely made him a useful ally for Marie-André and Geneviève; however, his position in itself had minor impact on the hospital.66 He may have been involved in settling the dispute about widening the street next

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to the hospital garden in the 1730s,67 and in improving road access at Saint-Augustin.68 In 1720, Nicolas took on the same post Georges Duplessis had held as agent of the treasurer of the marine. His trajectory only followed the downward cycle of Georges. He too dabbled in various enterprises on the side, and his were even less successful.69 He kept somewhat afloat by means of various royal posts that the intendant Hocquart gave him: member of the Superior Council, keeper of its seal, and controller of the royal domain. He died greatly in debt in 1756. There is no record of his aiding the hospital in any appreciable way, but during the Dupuy crisis, among the many letters the sisters sent to France in 1727 to important personages seeking support, one went to Nicolas’s sister-in-law, Marie-Madeleine Mercier, who had been Louis XV’s wet nurse and who held a position in the royal household. The modest Lanoullier connection was useful to the extent that the brothers enjoyed the respect of Hocquart, but it could not substitute for having blood relatives in high positions of influence. As Geneviève noted in 1740, the only real family member they had in the colony was their brother Charles-Denis.70 Charles-Denis had been a junior officer since 1724 following his return from France. He was posted at Fort Frontenac in 1726, and in 1727 at Fort Niagara where the stone fort that was then being constructed still stands. As the only lay sibling, he inherited his mother’s small estate in 1732. In fall 1733, he made a trip to France to clear up matters from his father’s accounts with the treasurer of the marine. Upon his return the next fall, he was named aide-major for the Quebec garrison, where he served from 1734 until 1744. He only married on 29 May 1742, when he and twenty-one-yearold Geneviève-Élisabeth Guillimin were wed by Bishop Pontbriand. She came from a prominent merchant family of the lower town that had fallen on bad times. Her father had been one of Quebec’s most prosperous traders in the first decades of the century and had become a member of the Superior Council in 1721. He had represented the interests of Georges Duplessis’s minor children, including CharlesDenis, when Marie Leroy was selling lots from her husband’s estate in 1715. However, he died a poor man in 1739, and the bride’s brother Guillaume, who was also her guardian, represented her family at

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the wedding. Thanks to Hocquart’s support, Guillaume was named in 1744 to the Superior Council, where Nicolas Lanoullier was also serving. It was probably as good a marriage as Charles-Denis could expect, given his own rather modest prospects.71 When hostilities broke out in 1744, Charles-Denis was posted to the upper country to command a fort on Lake Superior. In his account of his service, he touted an episode in 1746–47 when he convinced a group of Potawatomi along the Saint Joseph River near presentday Niles, Michigan, who were wavering in their support for the French, to send warriors to Montreal as they had done in the past.72 He does not seem to have been able to translate his posting in fur country into profits in the fur trade as many military commanders managed to do, and he aspired to a promotion that would take him back to Quebec. In May 1749, he was successful when he was named grand provost marshal of the mounted constabulary for Canada. This position involved supervising a small constabulary force and allowed Charles-Denis to live in Quebec with his wife and daughter Marie-Joseph-André, who had been born in February 1743.73 Charles-Denis owed his new position to the one family connection with real influence, his older brother François-Xavier, whose career as a mission preacher had taken off in France. More and more bishops solicited his services, especially in the north of France, and his success gave him access to devout circles at the court. In the case of his brother, François-Xavier’s lobbying in Versailles had more impact than the recommendation of the intendant and governor-general, who had nominated another person for the constabulary post. The Jesuit listed the personages he had contacted in 1745 – the king’s confessor, the duc de Penthièvre, the comtesse de Toulouse – but reported that the minister of the navy, Maurepas, was ill-disposed.74 In 1749, he added that he had lobbied Canadian administrators Jacques-Pierre de la Jonquière and Charles de Beauharnois.75 The preacher found such lobbying distasteful, and he had reservations about his brother’s unstable character and modest level of religious practice. Nonetheless, family loyalty impelled him. Just the same, he said he derived more pleasure from using his connections to help a Morampont cousin from Saint-Utin in Champagne settle a lawsuit than from working for Charles-Denis.76 The new provost marshal

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only piled up debts once he returned to Quebec. On the other hand, in the 1750s, François-Xavier became a privileged channel for his sisters’ lobbying efforts for the hospital.

Taking Stock of Duplessis’s First Two Terms as Superior: Pehr Kalm’s Report of His 1749 Visit “This morning I visited the largest nunnery in Quebec. Men are prohibited from visiting under very heavy punishments, except in some rooms, divided by iron rails, where the men and women that do not belong to the convent stand without and the nuns within the rails and converse with each other. But to increase the many favors which the French nation heaped upon me as a Swede, the governorgeneral got the bishop’s leave for me to enter the convent and see its construction.”77 So begins the botanist Pehr Kalm’s account of his visit on 8 August 1749, a visit that was not limited to the convent parlour grill. The governor-general La Galissonière had assigned the royal physician, Jean-François Gaultier, as Kalm’s guide, and Gaultier, who practised at the Hôtel-Dieu, knew the institution well. Kalm was a sympathetic and informed outsider, and he received similar access to the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, and could thus make comparisons. He took an interest in the lives of the nuns as well as the operation of the hospital. In March 1750, Duplessis completed her second stint as mother superior (1744–50, her first term having been 1732–38). For much of the intervening six years (1738–44), she had been either assistant superior or hospital bursar. Assessing Kalm’s observations on the state of the buildings, finances, recruitment, patient care, the routines of the nuns, etc. facilitates taking stock of these eighteen years when Duplessis was the community’s chief guiding force. His commentary reflects his personal observations as well as his contacts with the colonial elite, and it does not always tally with Duplessis’s views, nor with convent records. Kalm’s description of the Hôtel-Dieu and the interior of the monastery is the most extensive we have from the eighteenth century, about 2,000 words in the English translation. He gives a privileged view of the institution.

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Recruiting Kalm remarked that in all three convents the nuns seemed old.78 “I was told by several people here, some of which were ladies, that none of the nuns went into a convent till she had attained an age in which she had small hopes of ever getting a husband.”79 As for the HôtelDieu, “This convent, they say, contains about fifty nuns, most of them advanced in years, scarcely any being under forty years of age. At this time there were two young ladies among them who were being instructed in those things which belong to the knowledge of nuns.”80 While Kalm was correct in his estimation of the size of the community (forty-seven instead of his fifty),81 he was wrong in implying women entered it when beyond the age for marriage. Dale Miquelon lists 22.4 as the average age of women in Canada at the time of their first marriage in the eighteenth century.82 The average age of the four women accepted as postulants in 1747 who would take their final vows in April 1749, four months before Kalm’s visit, was 22, and the average for the four who entered between 1740 and 1747 was 21.83 The Hôtel-Dieu did not have boarding students from whom to recruit, as did the Ursulines and the Hôpital-Général, and the chance of early death among the choir nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu, who served patients with contagious diseases, was much higher than at the Hôpital-Général’s almshouse, which served the infirm. The Hôtel-Dieu’s converse nuns had less direct contact with the ill and lived seven years longer on average than its choir nuns.84 Kalm does not mention the one factor that hampered recruitment over which civil authorities had control: the dowry system. Only two nuns entered during the period between 1722, when royal authorities raised the required amount from 3,000 to 5,000 livres, and the early 1730s. Even when they lowered the amount back to 3,000, recruitment was slow; only six entered in the rest of the 1730s.85 In 1744, Pontbriand noted that families in Canada could not pay the required 3,000 livres in cash; convents would die out for lack of new members, he wrote Maurepas.86 At the Hôtel-Dieu, where Duplessis was superior, the situation was becoming a crisis by 1747, when three more nuns had died serving contagious patients. But as she told Hecquet in October, “It seems that God wishes to compensate us by the vocations that are making 126

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themselves known. We already have five postulants and several others ask to be received. If we had the means to take them for nothing, we would not be lacking nuns.”87 Duplessis had already acted when she wrote her friend. She had convinced the bishop to receive four postulants without paying the required sum. Three of the four had already been received in September 1747 when Pontbriand wrote Maurepas in October that he had granted the superior’s request.88 The same day La Galissonière and Hocquart added their approval in their letter to the minister.89 Maurepas yielded, but without much grace. He realized that the need for hospital nuns to treat the troops trumped the long-standing royal policy aimed at assuring that convents were properly endowed.90 The following October, Duplessis could report to her friend, “We have a novitiate that merits our affection despite the corruption of the age. A few girls present themselves. We do not admit them too easily, and yet some enter here or in other convents.”91 The two nuns in training that Kalm mentioned are not the four who had entered in 1747, some of whom had taken solemn vows in April. Kalm most likely referred to two postulants who entered officially two weeks after his visit.92 He seemed unaware of how successfully Duplessis had manoeuvred the bishop, intendant, and governor-general into renewing the community on her terms.93

Hospital Facilities and Financing The hospital “consists of two large halls, and some rooms near the apothecary’s shop. In the halls are two rows of beds on each side. The beds next to the wall are furnished with curtains, the outward ones are without them. In each bed are fine bedclothes with clean double sheets. As soon as a sick person has left his bed, it is made again to keep the hospital in cleanliness and order. The beds are two or three yards distant, and near each is a small table. There are good iron stoves, and fine windows in this hall. The nuns attend the sick people, and bring them food and other necessaries. Besides them, there are some men who attend, and a surgeon. The royal physician is likewise obliged to come hither once or twice every day, look after everything and give prescriptions.”94 Kalm’s description of the hospital wards is accurate. He even includes the small rooms just managing the oldest hospital north of mexico

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off the main wards that had been added in 1733 at the beginning of Duplessis’s first term.95 In an era when medical care was impotent in the face of most disease, simply providing wholesome meals that usually included meat at least once a day was probably the most effective treatment the hospital provided. Three times daily, at 6:30 a.m., 10 a.m., and 4:30 p.m., choir nuns entered the wards in procession to feed the patients. The mother superior ladled out the portions for each patient from a central table. Kalm does not allude to the fifteen minutes the choir nuns spent each afternoon in the wards instructing the patients; they saw caring for the soul as a corollary to healing the body. Duplessis certainly would not have agreed with Kalm’s suggestion that troops were the primary clientele of the hospital, nor with his description of its royal financing: “They commonly receive sick soldiers into this hospital, who are very numerous in July and August, when the king’s ships arrive, and in time of war. But at other times, when no great number of soldiers are sick, other poor people can take their places, as far as the number of empty beds will reach. The king provides everything here that is requisite for the sick persons, viz. provisions, medicines, fuel, etc. Those who are very ill are put into separate rooms, in order that the noise in the great hall may not be troublesome to them.” Admissions did rise sharply in July and August; September and October, in fact, were peak months. However, Duplessis would have pointed out that Kalm inverted the hospital’s mission by implying that civilian patients could be admitted when soldiers left vacant space. The nuns saw service to their poor clients as their first duty. To emphasize that the poor were the hospital’s raison d’être, when the community celebrated its centenary on 1 August 1739, the nuns organized a special supper for the patients that was served by the capital’s leading citizens.96 Kalm could only have gotten this mistaken judgment that the king paid all the hospital’s expenses from the civil authorities who organized his visit. Duplessis had been pointing out their inadequate funding to them for years. While the yearly royal subsidy was an important component of its financing – between 1744 and 1753 it accounted for 25 percent of the hospital’s funding – in fact, the percentage had

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been declining over the century.97 As she pointed out to Hecquet, the additional six sous per diem the king paid for soldiers’ rations did not cover costs.98 The nuns looked for expedients where they could. Since at least the early 1730s, they were in a running battle with intendants over their practice of keeping the clothing of soldiers who died in their care.99 In October 1749, the new intendant François Bigot proposed that by way of compensation, the king pay three livres for the coffins and funeral masses of dead soldiers, as was done at Louisbourg.100

A Closing Exchange “Upon my leaving, the abbess asked me if I was satisfied with their institution, whereupon I told them that their convent was beautiful enough, though their mode of living was much circumscribed. Thereupon she told me that she and her sisters would heartily ask God to make me a good Roman Catholic. I answered her that I was far more anxious to be and remain a good Christian, and that as a recompense for their honors and prayers I would not fail earnestly to ask God that they too might remain good Christians, because that would be the highest degree of a true religion that a mortal could find. Thereupon she smilingly bade me farewell.”101 At the close of his visit, Kalm reports this final good-natured conversation with Duplessis, the only such personal interchange he mentions in the three convents he inspected. Kalm was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and died one himself. His reference to the restricted nature of the nuns’ lives is a standard Protestant criticism of the cloistered life, although he tempered it with praise of the monastery. It is characteristic of Duplessis’s well-bred politeness that her response was an expression of concern for his spiritual welfare. She managed to be faithful to her duty to proselytize, without turning the exchange into a debate. She cut it off with an amiable smile. Her calm demeanour with Kalm belies her running battle with the civil authorities over hospital expansion and reimbursements during the final years of her second term. She could take pride in the acquisition of Saint-Augustin and in having added new members to the community, but her last decade would not be easy. The War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s strained the community that she

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had so successfully headed during her first term in office in the 1730s. The Hôtel-Dieu’s situation would become even more precarious amid the struggle to control North America in the 1750s, during her last period as superior.

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chapter

6 Writing the Spiritual Life at the Hôtel-Dieu

This chapter and the next on the Annales, along with the section in chapter 4 on her correspondence, point toward the claim in the concluding chapter that Marie-André Duplessis counts among the major women writers of New France. Indeed, because of the range and quality of her writing, she merits recognition as among the premier authors of the colony. New France does not figure prominently in this chapter, as it does in her Histoire and her letters. Rather, her versatility and innovative streak are more in play in these texts dominated by spiritual goals. This chapter first shows how her early innovative texts embody a worldly wit that is unique in Canadian writing of the period. Her brief, more conventional devotional texts are then compared to Geneviève’s more substantial works. Finally, Marie-André’s short narrative texts that she might have eventually incorporated into a sequel to the Annales are analyzed. The emphasis here is on literary features; other chapters also treat many of these texts with an eye to what they reveal about her career and values.

Playing with Worldly Wit Worldly wit, the kind of esprit mondain that denotes playfulness, a taste for the surprising, for a clever turn of thought, is not usually associated with the literature of New France. Instead, accounts of

adventure and discovery, whether the travel narratives of explorers or the spiritual relations of the missionaries, both often cast in the heroic mode, are pervasive. Duplessis’s own best-known text, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, is written largely in the vein of official reporting that characterizes most texts from Canada. In France, the esprit mondain was nurtured at the court and in the salons, and some of it found its way to Quebec in administrative circles. Jean Talon is said to have written poems and epigrams, and the Raudots, father and son, gave regular concerts in the early eighteenth century.1 An incipient salon culture was slow to develop in Canada. Jan Noel, in her history of French Canadian women, attributes a salon to LouiseÉlisabeth Joybert de Vaudreuil, wife of the governor-general, in the first part of the eighteenth century, and in the last two decades of French rule, the circles around the intendant François Bigot featured regular gatherings hosted by women.2 However, literary activities were not as prominent at these latter events as fine food, gambling, and dancing. Worldly wit sometimes found its way into women’s monasteries in seventeenth-century France. At least five seventeenth-century French nuns have been labelled as précieuses.3 Mary M. Rowan, who pioneered the study of relations between convent and salon, has analyzed the writings of perhaps the most accomplished of these five, MarieÉléonor de Rohan, Benedictine abbess in Caen, Malnoue, and Paris, where she participated in salon life.4 In Canada, there are antecedents for this sort of conventual worldly writing. A seventeenth-century superior of the Hôtel-Dieu, Marie-Renée Boulic, mother superior from 1670 to 1676, cultivated it. According to her death notice in the Annales, she possessed “an admirable facility for expressing herself and for writing, whether in prose or poetry. The intendant Monsieur Talon, who dabbled in poetry, sometimes sent her madrigals and epigrams to which she replied on the spot, very wittily, in the same style, and her compositions were esteemed by all who saw them and who were connoisseurs of this sort of writing.”5 Duplessis, who wrote this passage and who did not hesitate to criticize Boulic for being too subservient to the bishop elsewhere in the Annales, reported Boulic’s literary accomplishments with pride. Boulic was witty, articulate, and able to improvise, like salon women in France.

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Three of Duplessis’s texts share this tendency. The first, the 1711 Histoire de Ruma, written only a few years after her own profession as a nun, is her earliest known text.6 The second, the Musique spirituelle, has been edited by a musicologist as a musical treatise.7 Both are short, about 1,500 to 2,000 words long. To these two, a third can be attached, the Dissection spirituelle. It is more extensive – about 9,000 words – and undated, but seems by its title related to the Musique spirituelle, and was likely written soon after. These early texts put worldly wit (esprit) to the service of a religious mission. They are spirituel in the two seemingly contradictory meanings of the word in French as defined in Antoine Furetière’s 1690 Dictionnaire universel: spiritual in the sense of devout, to be sure, but also written “in an ingenious way, full of wit.” This second meaning is the mental subtlety associated with the English word “wit,” that of “a well-informed lively mind that thinks in a pleasing way.” We have seen these texts in other contexts. The Histoire de Ruma could be entitled the “Histoire de Geneviève Duplessis,” because it narrates the life of the younger sister of Marie-André from birth to about age nineteen. Although all the characters certainly existed, they are given names that for the most part come from the Old Testament in the manner of the romans à clef that were so popular in the salons. The Musique spirituelle is not really a music manual, but a treatise on the convent life that finds monastic equivalents for some forty musical terms or practices. The third text, the Dissection spirituelle, is much more straightforward. It earns the name “dissection” because it inventories body parts as well as the faculties of the mind and soul. The goal of the Dissection is to show how each mental or corporal component can be harnessed to contribute to the devout life. It is less focused on the monastic experience than the Musique spirituelle, and much of it is suitable for anyone trying to live as an eighteenth-century Catholic. All three texts treat some aspect of a nun’s vocation: the Histoire tries to recruit Geneviève; the Musique spirituelle stresses the specifics of life in a convent; the Dissection focuses on broader aspects of spirituality. The worldly wit or esprit mondain that makes this spirituality (spiritualité) witty (spirituelle) is not so much style, but the organizing principle of each text. Duplessis’s style has none of

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6.1 The title page of the manuscript of the Musique spirituelle imitates a printed book. The reference to “first edition” adds a playful note. Title pages of books by religious often mentioned that the volume was printed by “permission” of civil or religious authorities, with the permission’s text included in the book. The manuscript contains an approbation by La Colombière, but no permission.

the prominent features commonly attributed to the précieuses: no superlatives, no wordplay, no striking images, no pithy maxims. However, in other fundamental ways, these texts incorporate features that give them a playful cast that echoes salon writing. Collaboration was often a mark of salon literature. The Histoire is, in fact, signed by two authors, although Duplessis is certainly the principal one. She figures as a character in the story under the name Tharsis and would have been privy to details about her sister’s life. However, Marie-Élisabeth Le Moyne de Longueuil, who entered the Hôtel-Dieu about the same time as Marie-André, appears on the title page as an author and in the story as Ariste. The Musique spirituelle is signed by Duplessis alone, but it contains an approbation signed by the monastery’s male superior that is written in the same playful vein as the body of the text. “Having read a work entitled Spiritual Music … we have found nothing in it contrary to the rules and charms of the art of singing.”8 All books dealing with religion published at this time contained such approbations by ecclesiastical censors, but one would have to search long to find another that verges so closely on parody. If Joseph de La Colombière truly wrote it, he entered into the same witty spirit as Duplessis. It could well be that this approbation is a sort of fictional collaboration written by Duplessis herself, instead of the priest. Likewise, these first two texts are placed under the auspices of a key principle of salon literature: pleasure (plaire) and the delightful (agréer). The pleasures of the body and society are not rejected out of hand. The “veracious story” (histoire véritable) is embedded in a preface/letter that presents itself as a link in a continuing exchange of letters between Geneviève that the two nuns have placed under the sign of pleasure: “We have no keener joy than to think of you and to maintain contact with our letters.”9 They claim, first of all, to amuse Geneviève, and the word plaisir  appears nine times and forms of agréable five times. The Musique spirituelle also takes as its premise that the pleasure of secular music is legitimate: “Since music is a very pleasing thing and numerous people learn it with pleasure despite its difficulties, I believe that there exist a good number of religious who will apply themselves with joy to the study of a kind of music that is much more advantageous to know than the ordinary sort.”10 These texts strive to elevate their intended reader to the higher pleasure of writing the spiritual life

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divine love. Geneviève moves through the pleasures of friendship and of physical exercise like horseback riding to those of study, and eventually, study of scripture. The Histoire and the Musique spirituelle are presented as miniature books with all the characteristics of printed ones except the use of type: a title page, numbered pages, and, in the case of the Musique spirituelle, a dedication letter, an approbation, a preface, a table of contents, and even running titles at the top of each page. The production of manuscript books as gifts was a feature, of course, of salon life, the most famous example being La Guirlande de Julie (1641), an anthology of poetry given to the daughter of the hostess of the Rambouillet salon. Utilitarian manuscript copies of texts were often made in convents to save printing costs, but these two manuscripts have the characteristics of presentation copies.11

The Histoire de Ruma The Histoire is said to be a “true story” (histoire véritable), found by chance in a manuscript, that narrates the life of a young girl using largely biblical names. It is really a sort of biographie à clé of Geneviève’s life from her birth in 1692 until 1711: her early education in Quebec; her trip to France in 1700 at age eight when her mother went to Paris to retrieve Marie-André; her three-year stay as a boarder at the Hôtel-Dieu; and her more serious life after leaving the monastery in 1710. The geography of the tale is vague. Geneviève is said to be born in an unnamed “barbarous land” to parents from Europe who remain attached to their “fatherland.” Neither Canada nor France is identified by name. The found manuscript was a frequent convention in early modern fiction to lend an air of authenticity. Likewise, the notion of a fictional story as an “histoire véritable” was a common device. What is unique here is that the story is indeed “veracious,” although presented with all the markers of fiction used in this period. Enough of the details given about Geneviève’s life can be corroborated from other sources to suggest that those details that are only found here are equally true. Like the romans à clé of Madeleine de Scudéry, real people are disguised with assumed names, here mostly from the Bible.

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The biblical names chosen might puzzle readers who are not immersed in scripture as Geneviève is said to have become.12 Why would the dear grandmother of the two Duplessis sisters be given the name Athalie, the murderess made famous by Jean Racine’s tragedy? Other names, such as Ruma, are obscure place names. It is likely that Duplessis had access to an edition of the Bible published by Antoine Vitré in the mid-seventeenth century that included in its appendices an “Explanation of Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek Names.” The Jesuit college in Quebec owned a 1702 Latin edition that could have been lent to her (translations from a 1701 edition are cited here).13 Ruma means “elevated,” probably a reference to Geneviève’s aspiration to higher forms of the devout life. Her father Georges Duplessis appears as Abinadab, the name of at least two minor figures in the first book of Samuel. The name means “father of good will.” His wife Marie Leroy appears as Attalia, a city mentioned in the book of Acts, which means “one who augments or nourishes.” The name Athalie, given to the Duplessis sisters’ pious grandmother Andrée Douin, means “Time of the Lord.” There is only one close parallel between a name in the Histoire and a biblical figure. The friend of the father of Ruma – probably the pious Paul Dupuy – who taught her Latin is named Jérobaal, another name for Gideon. The authors of the Histoire explain the choice in this one case: “The historian names him Jerobaal and notes that this name suited him very well since he always quarrelled with the idols of the world.”14 The game for Geneviève would be trying to use her biblical knowledge to understand the choice of names. The Histoire includes features of another salon genre: the portrait. We learn that Geneviève had a high forehead, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and wore a hat “with the best grace in the world.” Her character is of course more important than these physical traits: her good disposition that pleases everyone, her serious temperament, and her vivacity. Her intelligence made her a quick learner who was able to rapidly pick up enough Latin to translate the New Testament. Although she spent her childhood enjoying all the pleasures a good upbringing entails, she was never tempted by “false worldly lustre.” She was never prey to coquetry or to the “innocent passions” that she awoke in young men.

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As her character matured, Geneviève became more serious and devout and thus, according to her sister, was destined to enter the convent. To sum up, because of “her wisdom, her piety, and her learning,” Geneviève could be counted among “the illustrious women of her century.”15 In other words, she was worthy to figure in one of the many books that came out of the salons celebrating notable ladies, such as the Galerie des femmes fortes (1647) of the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne or Les Femmes illustres (1642) of Madeleine de Scudéry. The HôtelDieu, in fact, owns a copy of one such collection of biographies that the two Duplessis sisters could well have been familiar with, Hilarion de Coste’s Éloges et Vies des reynes, princesses, dames et damoiselles illustres en piété, courage et doctrine, first published in 1630. Hilarion de Coste specifically singled out in his table of contents women like Geneviève who displayed a love of learning and letters, in addition to the queens and princesses he featured. The Histoire incorporates one final element of salon writing: an invitation to participate in the act of writing, in this case by completing the story of Ruma. We are told that the last pages, which contain the end of Ruma’s story, have been ripped out of the manuscript. “We believe, my dear sister, that you will have as much regret as we do about not knowing the ending; we have reason to believe it to be happy after such a beautiful start.”16 The happy ending, of course, would be for Geneviève to join her sister and Longueuil as nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu, which she indeed did two years later in 1713. She took the name in religion held by Marie-Élisabeth de Longueuil de l’Enfant-Jésus, who had died in December 1711 in a typhus epidemic that killed six hospitallers, becoming Geneviève de l’Enfant-Jésus. The Histoire de Ruma might well be considered Canada’s first literary fiction. An even shorter oriental tale, “Zélim,” signed only by a “Canadien curieux,” which appeared in Gazette littéraire de Montréal in late 1778, has long been the contender for this honour. Written in the vein of Voltaire’s early contes philosophiques, Zadig and Memnon, “Zélim” tells the story of a poor gardener who bewails his humble state. Only when he happens upon the sultan who also is lamenting his misfortunes does he realize that wealth and power do not insure happiness.17 A reader unaware that Duplessis’s “histoire véritable” has a factual basis would take it for fiction, since it uses multiple conventions of the novel of the period. By purporting to be fiction, 138

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the Histoire is fiction and not biography. After her sister’s death in 1756, Duplessis did write a biographical account of her sister’s life in the obituary notice that she circulated to convents of the order. It follows the conventions of this genre of convent writing and will be examined to conclude this chapter. How to account for this early worldly wit? The young co-authors of the Histoire de Ruma were unique among their cohort of nuns because they had been exposed to fine society in Paris before entering the convent. Longueuil was the granddaughter of the richest man in Montreal, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil (1626–85). Her father, likewise named Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil (1656–1729), was the only Canadian to be named a baron by Louis XIV, in recognition of his service in the wars against the Iroquois, and at the time of the Histoire de Ruma’s composition was the king’s lieutenant in Montreal. In 1691, at the age of seven, his daughter followed him to France, where she lived in the household of the Princess Palatine, Charlotte-Élisabeth de Bavière, the king’s sister-in-law, who corresponded with her after her return to Canada in the late 1690s. According to the Annales, “This princess always honoured her with a singular friendship and herself gave assurances of it by means of her letters and gifts that she sent after her profession.”18 The Princess Palatine held the title of “Madame” as the wife of “Monsieur,” the king’s brother, and lived between the Palais-Royal in Paris, an estate at Saint-Cloud, and apartments at the château of Versailles. She devoured French novels and possessed an extensive collection of French fiction in her personal library.19 Duplessis’s family connections were much less illustrious, but still positioned her to observe polite society. She had spent much time in Marie-Anne Leroy’s dressmaking shop on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Like Marie-Catherine, she would have had contact with the elegant customers, some of whom likely invited her to their homes as they invited Marie-Catherine. Her maternal great-uncle held a minor position in the household of the duchesse de Bourgogne, wife of the heir to the throne, and she might have visited Versailles through him. Once in Canada after 1701, she had contact through her father with the intendants Champigny and Raudot, whose households were local centres of culture. In addition, Duplessis described what might be called a season of wit in fall 1711, after the shipwreck in the Saint Lawrence of an English fleet poised to attack Quebec. When the writing the spiritual life

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news of Walker’s disaster arrived, according to Duplessis, “Parnassus became accessible to everyone.” Even women, priests, and religious entered into the poetic spirit to “exercise their wit and their pen on this subject.”20 The whole town became poets and composed verse and songs to celebrate Canada’s deliverance.21 It may be that the next year this contagious spirit inspired Duplessis to direct her wit to attracting her sister into the Hôtel-Dieu, and vocal music, in fact, is at the centre of the second text that embodies this playful wit.

The Musique spirituelle and Dissection spirituelle If the Histoire uses such salon genres as the roman à clé and the portrait, the ingenuity at the heart of the Musique spirituelle is in the parallels between music and monasticism. Indeed, the organizing principle of the Musique and the Dissection is not narrative as in the Histoire, but conceptual. Seeking out parallels is a staple of convent writing which was encouraged by the figurative exegesis that was pervasive in devotional writing. However, the parallels were commonly between two spiritual elements. For example, Angélique de SaintJean d’Arnauld d’Andilly listed ways in which the situation of her persecuted Port-Royal nuns echoed that of Christ in the Eucharist in her “On the Conformity of the State to which Port-Royal is Reduced to the State of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.”22 Duplessis innovates by making something secular her starting point for the analogies. She organized her text as an orderly progression through the basics of music, such as was found in many handbooks of the period. It starts with scales, keys, sharps, and flats and the conventions of musical notation. It goes on to consider a number of sophisticated vocal ornaments prized by Baroque performers, before turning to rests, accompaniments, and tempos. While plainchant was only found in religious music, such ornaments were used by composers in both secular works and sacred motets, the latter of which the nuns sang in simplified versions in their church. The concluding section presents a synthesis in which the mother superior harmonizes the entire musical enterprise. Duplessis showed considerable mental dexterity in proposing her forty or so parallels. Some of the comparisons are obvious and rather facile: the mother superior is the director; the scales are the rule and constitutions. Some are 140

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particularly inspired: being in tune is when one is at peace with God, one’s self, and one’s neighbour. Despite the description by its editor as a music manual, the Musique spirituelle is truly a manual of monastic life that aims at reminding the nuns of community practices. There is little or no explanation of the highly technical musical terms the Musique spirituelle uses. It takes for granted that the nuns are familiar with such ornaments of Baroque vocal performance as mordents, vibratos, legatos, trills, and quarter rests. Moreover, many of the parallels it draws are not as obvious as the one between the mother superior and the director of an orchestra, and this is Duplessis’s further innovation. Most of her parallels assume that the nuns have enough technical expertise to recognize the parallels. Just as the Histoire de Ruma proposed to Geneviève the intellectual pleasure of recognizing the appropriateness of the biblical names given to members of her family and friends, the Musique invites the nuns to grasp the aptness of the musical-monastic parallels, and indeed to take pleasure in the process. Some of the less obvious ones might even elicit a touch of admiration for the ingenuity of the author. B flat is the contemplative life of a nun given over to prayer because it requires a singer to lower the voice a half tone. B sharp, which raises the voice a half tone, is equated with the active life, that is to say with service in the hospital wards. B natural is the mixed life, both contemplative and active, i.e. the life of a cloistered hospital nun of the Hôtel-Dieu, who spends time both in the choir and in the hospital. Such a taste for the surprising, for the unusual, is typical of salon conceits. Nonetheless, one wonders if it does not distract from Duplessis’s expectation that the parallels will also lead her readers to reflect on their monastic vocation. The third text that seems to belong to this series, the unpublished Dissection spirituelle, incorporates worldly wit only in its title and marks a step away from the intellectual pleasure that the first two texts offer.23 The anatomical terminology of the title is justified by a listing of some thirty faculties – corporal (eyes, ears, tongue, etc.), mental (memory, understanding, imagination, etc.), and spiritual (soul, conscience, free will, etc.) – much as the Musique spirituelle is structured around a themed list of musical features. However, there is no striving after surprising conceits and unexpected parallels. writing the spiritual life

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Instead, one finds insightful ascetic comments on how each faculty can be offered to God in order to live a holy life. The Dissection sets out to be both a work of thanksgiving for the physical, mental, and spiritual gifts that God has given and a work of reparation, since these gifts have been misdirected to worldly pleasures. It is a discreetly personal text. Unlike the Musique spirituelle, whose parallels are set out impersonally, the Dissection is written in the first person. The “I” is clearly identifiable with Duplessis herself for those familiar with her calm level-headed temperament, and with what she identified as her own failings. While most of the suggestions for reform are suitable to any pious person, lay or religious, the Dissection’s power comes from the urgency with which Duplessis prays for assistance in redressing her personal faults such as impatience and discouragement. Occasionally some aspect of her own life as a hospital nun’s life is evoked. For example, in discussing the sense of smell, Duplessis states, “I, who am a sinner, search you out while passing by the putrid odors of a hospital and after having been so unfortunate to have breathed with pleasure the poisoned air of the world, I am punished for my past sensuality by the bad odor that the poor patients give off.” Although structured around parallels just as the Histoire and the Musique are, the Dissection signals a move away from an early aesthetic of playful wit that takes pleasure in recognizing subtle parallels. It corresponds to the spiritual maturation suggested by her correspondence with her brother during his first years as a Jesuit. The Musique spirituelle merely notes the parallel between music and the monastic life, leaving the reader to work out the rationale for the link in her mind; the Dissection devotes a paragraph to each faculty, spelling out explicitly how each can be harnessed for the spiritual life. Duplessis designed it as a systematic aid to mental prayer, much like her other shorter devotional texts that have been preserved in the Hôtel-Dieu archives, texts that are thoroughly conventional. Thus, while the Dissection lists thirty faculties, one for each day of a month, the Retreat on the Chief Important Truths of Our Holy Life as Religious (Retraite sur les principales et grandes verités de notre sainte religion) has three short meditations for each day of a weeklong retreat.24 A typical retreat with meditations on sin, death, hell, and judgment, it uses Ignatian features such as reflections 142

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on the two standards from Loyola’s spiritual exercises. A shorter text has twelve meditations on the virtues of the Virgin Mary for Saturdays, the day reserved for Marian devotions.25 Another text is for Mondays, the Devotion to the Holy Spirit for the Seven Mondays between Easter and Pentecost (Dévotion au Saint-Esprit pour les sept lundis qui se trouvent entre Pâques et la Pentecôte);26 each day is given over to one of the seven traditional gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, fortitude, etc.27 According to the 1760 circular letter written after her death by Ursule-Marie Chéron, Duplessis wrote such devotional texts for her private use, but they were quickly shared within the community.28 She must have also had in mind her duty to guide the spiritual life of her community as novice director and later as mother superior. The texts could have become the basis of talks delivered in chapter meetings or been given to nuns making retreats as aids to their meditations. In his letter of condolences the same year, Jean-Olivier Briand praised these oral presentations that were part of the duties of every conscientious head of a women’s community. They are “words full of unction and the spirit of God by which she tried either to console you, to lead you to virtue, or to inspire in you the zest for the things of God with which she was so imbued.”29

Devotional Writing by Geneviève de l’Enfant-Jésus Much more substantial than these texts by Marie-André that consist of short paragraph-length reflections are two longer manuscripts by her sister Geneviève, The Manna of Bethlehem (La Manne de Bethléem),30 dated 1732, and the 1745 Reflection on the Mystery of the Ascension of Our Lord (Réflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension de notre Seigneur).31 La Manne de Bethléem is structured, like her sister’s Dissection, as a day-by-day meditation guide, with forty meditation topics, instead of the thirty of the Dissection. However, it has a different dynamic. Reflections in the mind are designed to activate the imagination, the physical senses, and the emotions, and lead them to an affective response that relies on what Geneviève calls the interior senses of the soul, as opposed to the exterior bodily ones. The movement that she envisages here is typical of eighteenth-century spirituality. It begins in the body and mind and goes to the soul that ideally goes writing the spiritual life

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on to experience the spiritual effusions found in contemplation. The silent eloquence of the Infant Jesus that Geneviève seeks to promote is heart-to-heart communication in contemplative prayer. It is a very personal text in that it focuses on the Christ child, Geneviève’s name as a nun. Geneviève’s Reflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension, dated thirteen years later, likewise deals with the union of the divine and human nature in Christ – she even uses the technical theological term, the hypostatic union – but in a more intense register. Rather than a series of considerations proposed for meditation, it is a colloquy in which the meditant converses with God, who replies, not directly in dialogue, but in the form of scriptural passages that address her concerns. The Réflexion illustrates the best conventions of spiritual writing of the day: it is grounded in theology, uses citations of scripture and liturgical texts, not as illustration, but as part of the dialogue, and generates emotional involvement by use of an elevated rhetorical style. What did this devotional writing mean to the sisters? Both had complained as early as 1716 to their brother about their frustration that their duties as hospitallers interfered with their aspirations to become “great contemplatives.”32 In dedicating La Manne to the Carmelites of France, Geneviève regretted that Providence did not allow her to fulfill her aspiration to a purely contemplative life such as theirs. Indeed, the French crown only allowed service-oriented religious orders in the colony. Writing her devotional texts was a sort of compensation. “It is, therefore, to temper the annoyances that arrive to slow my fervour in the midst of subhuman duties that I applied myself to draw up forty holy points that will only inspire feelings of tenderness and supernatural love in me, while I fulfill the duties of an office that is as much the opposite of meditation as it is distracting in itself, since I have been long entrusted with the temporal business of a hospital.”33 “Inspire” is the key word here. Her writing is not a report of spiritual experiences she has had, as are the texts of the Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnation published under the title Retraites by her son, which her modern editor Albert Jamet says are more accounts of her prayer life than a retreat manual.34 Geneviève instead claimed to write to stimulate her own devotions to greater heights. She did share her texts with the community, as did her older sister, but the 144

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initial impulse was personal. It was the method she used to further what she called in a moment of self-depreciation in 1741 “the little spiritual space that I cultivate.”35 What is perhaps the most noteworthy is that she not only sent copies to France, as well as sharing them with her sister nuns, but envisaged their publication. La Manne, dedicated to the Carmelites of Paris, must have been sent to them soon after its composition in 1732. Six years later, her brother reported receiving a text from her on “the meditations of the mysteries of the blessed childhood of our Lord” – probably La Manne – that he would try to have printed.36 He does not, however, seem to have been successful. Although in the heyday of convent expansion in the seventeenth century, devotional texts by nuns had been published, there was little market for this sort of spiritual literature by the 1730s. Geneviève would have to be content with circulating her manuscript versions through convent channels. As she wrote her apothecary correspondent Jacques Féret in Dieppe when she sent him another text in 1743, “It is a small work by a nun which may edify a lay person a bit. You will show it to our hospitallers if you judge that it will please them.”37

Storytelling and Devotion Many of Marie-André’s own writings from her time in administration relate events connected with the community. One series deals with the inception of three devotional practices in the community. The first, On the Devotion to the Holy Family (De la dévotion à la sainte famille), dated to the early 1730s, narrates the establishment of the confraternity devoted to the Holy Family in the colony. These events took place in the seventeenth century, and the Hôtel-Dieu is not mentioned in Duplessis’s account, although one of its benefactresses, Marie-Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust, was an early promoter of the devotion.38 She donated a painting of the Holy Family that was displayed in the monastery’s chapel until the 1755 fire destroyed it.39 Two others relate the establishment of devotions within the monastery in which Duplessis played a direct role: the statue of Notre-Dame de Toute-Grâce, which the community received in 1738, and the account of the Profaned Crucifix that Bishop Pontbriand entrusted to it in 1744.40 These texts institutionalize the memory writing the spiritual life

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of new devotions being added to the community’s repertoire. The Annales themselves are studded with such accounts of the origin of similar earlier devotions introduced into community life. A crucial text that would have eventually found its way into the Annales is Duplessis’s account of the 1755 fire that destroyed the hospital. It had, of course, a more immediate goal than the long-term memory of the community: securing the aid of friends and protectors to meet urgent needs and finance reconstruction. Duplessis crafted a narrative of the fire that was sent with a personalized appeal to potential donors in France.41 Just as these cover letters show Duplessis’s mastery of the rhetoric of supplication, her account displays the best of her narrative talents. The prose is spare and thus echoes the rapidity with which the fire destroyed the hospital complex, one building after the next, in less than an hour. She highlights three dramatic episodes: the rescue of a dying nun carried from the infirmary in a blanket; the death of the only victim, a nun who perished inside the building when she returned to her room; the escape of a nun trapped on the fourth floor who courageously made her way down a ladder that brave rescuers had to lift with their arms because it was too short to reach her. In this last vignette, she lingers over the multiple obstacles that the nun had to overcome: the first ladder used fell apart; the second was too short; the nun had to slide down part of it when steps were missing; she clung to it with one hand while brushing away embers with the other, etc. It occupies about 20 percent of the 1,500-word account. In itself, it is a gripping story that sums up the resilience of all the nuns in this disaster. Duplessis did not reveal in this official version that the nun in question was her sister Geneviève. Only in the version she gave to Marie-Catherine Hecquet did she express her own fear: “Judge my distress on her account since the fire cut me off from going to rescue her.”42 In the official account, she evokes pity by stressing how the community lost everything to the conflagration. She concludes by describing the generosity with which the Ursulines and Jesuits shared their quarters and supplies with the homeless hospitallers, a generosity Duplessis hoped her correspondents would imitate. She ends laconically by noting that six weeks after the fire, the nuns reopened hospital wards in their temporary lodgings, all the better to underline their social utility. 146

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Biographical Death Notices When she finished the Musique spirituelle in late 1718, she was already embarked upon the book that would be her legacy, the Annales. She did not indicate if she envisaged someday writing a sequel when she finished them around 1720. A book that she likely did plan a few years later, but also never wrote, was a life of her mentor Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace. Geneviève Dupuy de la Croix, the mother superior at that time, signed the circular letter after Juchereau’s death in 1723. It promises a biography, perhaps along the lines of the one Claude Martin wrote of his Ursuline mother or the one the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau wrote for Catherine de Saint-Augustin.43 The following year, the Jesuit explorer Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix sent a presentation copy of his 1724 biography of Marie de l’Incarnation to “les dames Duplessis,” whom he had no doubt met during his stay in Quebec.44 But the vogue for lives of foundresses and mystic nuns, so popular in the seventeenth century, had passed, and Duplessis would have had difficulty finding a publisher in France for a biography of a superior whose talents were chiefly those of an administrator, just as Geneviève found no publisher for her devotional texts. A final series of texts written after the 1755 fire shows Duplessis’s skill in adapting a biographical genre of convent writing, the circular letter requesting the prayer of houses of her order throughout France for the souls of deceased members. Such letters were customary in the new orders founded in the seventeenth century that had many convents dispersed across France, such as the Carmelites, Ursulines, and Visitandines. Sometimes called “summaries of the life and virtues” (abrégés de la vie et des vertus), they conform to a template that first shows how the deceased came to discover her vocation and enter the convent, and ends with an edifying account of her death. The deceased’s life itself was not necessarily narrated chronologically, but was often organized around the chief virtues she embodied, her particular devotions, and her quest for monastic perfection. In its first decades, the Hôtel-Dieu produced many excellent examples of the genre that include the circular letters for the three foundresses who arrived from Dieppe in 1639, Marie Guenet, Anne Le Cointre, and Marie Forestier.45 Duplessis adapted such letters as the basis of the biographical account that the Annales devotes to every nun upon writing the spiritual life

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her death. None that she wrote as mother superior prior to the 1755 fire has survived. If the first goal of the letters was to shorten the deceased’s time in purgatory by means of the solicited prayers, the second was to reinforce the order’s value system by holding the dead nun up as much as possible as a model of the collective identity. Elizabeth Rapley warns against taking circular letters at face value: “As accurate portrayals of real people they must be taken with a large pinch of salt … It was not the true character of the deceased that counted, but rather the way in which it could be used to personify the [order’s] institute.”46 Although circular letters were officially designed to solicit prayers, Duplessis turned them into a tool for soliciting aid from monasteries in France by informing them of the needs of her house. Eleven circular letters written by Duplessis in her hand after the fire survive in the Hôtel-Dieu archives. The first three narrate the deaths of the two nuns who died at the time of the fire and of a third who died caring for the sick during that summer when the hospital reopened in the Jesuit college. Duplessis was assistant and secretary at this time; at the bottom of the first one, her signature has been crossed out and the superior’s written below it, as if Duplessis’s first impulse had been to send it out over her name. They are dated 10 September and would have been dispatched at the same time as her “official” account of the fire in the vessels departing for France that fall. The first account, which narrates the death of Marie-Anne de Lajoüe, who died when she returned to her room, begins, not with any statement about her, but with a paragraph describing the total ruin of the monastery and hospital and the nuns’ distress. The paragraph concludes, “we had to sacrifice not only our monastery, but also furniture, house linen, clothing, beds, etc. which could only happen, my reverend mother, with much bitterness, although we submit to the harsh decrees of divine Providence.” Only after this very unusual preface does Duplessis launch into “the tragic death” of the nun. She says little of her life, perhaps because there was little to say. Lajoüe had been received out of gratitude to her father, the architect of the 1695 wing of the hospital, despite the fact that she limped. Instead, in a more traditional way, the letter tells how Lajoüe had had premonitions of an imminent death and had recently made a retreat that prepared her well.47

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The second letter capitalizes on the dramatic circumstances of the death of a nun who was dying in the infirmary when the fire broke out. It adds details not in the “official” account about how she was carried from house to house outside the convent as one after the other caught fire. Her identity, Marie-Joseph Maillou, is only revealed halfway through the account, as if the fire is the true subject of the letter. To show the solidarity of the nuns in Quebec, her funeral at the Ursuline convent is described as the most imposing ever held for any nun in the colony; the ceremony featured ninety-two Ursuline and Hôtel-Dieu nuns, each holding a candle. Again, little is said of her life, which is not surprising since she spent thirteen of her nineteen years as a nun in the infirmary suffering from lung disease. The chief virtue attributed to her is her “endurance in continually suffering,” but she too had prepared well for death.48 The third is the most conventional. It quickly gives an account of the unusual way in which Marie-Marthe des Roches entered the religious life when she claimed a dowry that a younger sister had hoped to use. The letter ends as part of the campaign of solicitation for the Hôtel-Dieu by noting soberly that her death was from smallpox contracted from patients at the newly reopened hospital. The liturgical pomp at her funeral, “this lugubrious ceremony,” is likewise narrated in detail. Duplessis shows the Jesuits to be as welcoming as the Ursulines described in the previous letter, another example of solidarity among religious orders.49 Duplessis, who had become superior once again in March 1756, wrote and signed the fourth and last letter of the series.50 It is the only one of the four which follows the traditional template. What makes it unique is that Marie-André was writing about “my sole sister,” Geneviève, who died on 12 May of that year. She opened the letter by acknowledging her personal “sharp sorrow” and closed with an expression of gratitude for the support her sister nuns had shown: “I cannot tell you, my dear mother, how much all our nuns give her signs of sincere affection, as well as to me in a such a painful circumstance since this separation could only be extremely painful to two sisters more united by inclination than blood. This redoubles my attachment to a house to which I owe so much, and it commits me to spare nothing in proving my gratitude to it.”

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Beyond this poignant expression of rare emotion in Duplessis, the letter offers a unique opportunity. In the case of Geneviève, there are multiple controls to assess her circular letter. The Histoire de Ruma, written when Geneviève was nineteen, in hope of persuading her to become a nun, can be compared to this retrospective on her career forty-five years later, and although Marie-André’s report to her Jesuit brother of their sister’s death is missing, François-Xavier’s response survives. The circular letter slights details about Geneviève’s youth, to make room for her years as a nun: the same early qualities that show up in the Histoire are listed – innocence, good nature, and talents – but without illustrations. The letter does not even mention her trip to France in 1700. Instead, it highlights her reaction to the death of two nuns during her three-year stay as a boarder. This event is not mentioned in the Histoire, even though, according to the circular letter, it was the seed of her vocation. Its importance was evidently not recognized by Marie-André at the time she tried to convince Geneviève to enter the convent in the Histoire. Geneviève’s twentyeight years of indefatigable service as hospital business manager are the pivot of her life as a nun in the circular letter. She did not let the thirty years she suffered from the lung disease that finally killed her prevent her from her duty. Nor did she allow the incessant worries over the hospital’s funding to keep her from developing a deep prayer life: “When she had been kept away from prayer during the day, she spent her evenings satisfying her desire for it, and only found respite in prayer.” However, the letter does not refer to the devotional texts she wrote that grew out of these meditations. She was buried in the vaults of the Jesuit church because the nuns were still housed in a wing of their college after the fire. She died a “gentle death” that conforms to the ideal of the good convent death, according to the circular letter. Fortified with the last sacraments, she was surrounded by part of the community. No mention, however, is made of the pious resignation that often features in such accounts. In fact, François-Xavier’s reply in 1757 to Marie-André’s private report of their sister’s death in a letter to him suggests that at some point in Geneviève’s two-month final illness, her disposition was not entirely peaceful: “Given this abandonment in which the superior faculties remain entirely submissive and attached 150

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to the holy will of God, the complaints that our dear sister expressed at that time were only the effects of her desire in the last moments of her life to be more intimately united than ever with her divine spouse.”51 He excused Geneviève’s outbursts as involuntary reactions of the body, despite her mind and soul’s submission to God’s will. Like her mother Marie Leroy, Geneviève was quick-tempered and impatient (vive), and as with her mother in 1732, these traits did not disappear in her last days. Marie-André could have included similar pious comments in the circular letter, but preferred that Geneviève’s death be entirely peaceful in the public record. She presents Geneviève’s model death in the circular letter as a release from the fundamental tension that troubled her during her entire life, the tension between the active and contemplative life that was at the heart of the hospital nun’s vocation. Geneviève had constantly complained that her duties as business manager prevented her from attaining her spiritual aspirations. Her reward was to achieve them in death, thus confirming the order’s institute that combined the life of prayer of Mary and the service of Martha. The circular letters are far removed from the wit that gave Marie-André’s early writing a unique flavour. When she became an administrator, the institutional needs that shape the conventions of convent writing dominated her texts. However, her skill as a storyteller and her personal involvement with the subject at hand give even these official texts, especially the ones written in the years after the 1755 fire, an edge that sets them apart from those written by her seventeenth-century predecessors.

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chapter

7 Duplessis Takes Women’s History Public: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec

The Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, written between 1717 and 1721, are a unique example of an extremely common monastic genre. Most convents produced such histories of their houses, and, indeed, chronicles survive from five of the six women’s communities founded in Canada in the seventeenth century.1 But the 1751 publication in Montauban of the Hôtel-Dieu’s annals makes them the only Canadian ones to appear in print during the French regime. In fact, they seem to be the only annals of any French-speaking community of nuns published before the Revolution. The Benedictine Albert Jamet published a monumental critical edition in 1939 in honour of the tercentenary of the hospital. Dom Jamet promoted the Annales as “one of the most precious sources for the history of New France.”2 The focus here is on women writing their own history and what happens when this history written for themselves is shared with others. The Annales are, in fact, the effort of a largely Canadian-born group of women to protect and further their collective interests within colonial strictures. Sorting out Duplessis’s role in the communal writing practices that produced the Annales is a first step. Her view of Canada’s current spiritual and political situation as a struggling colony shaped how she traced the Hôtel-Dieu’s history from its founding. Nor did she shrink from tackling the gender tensions between the nuns and their ecclesiastical superiors. Finally, the circumstances

that led Duplessis to seek publication of this in-house document point to how a male editor adapted the Annales for a wider public.

Duplessis’s Composite Text The manuscript of the Annales in the archives of the Hôtel-Dieu, written in Duplessis’s hand, consists of 229 numbered folios arranged much as a printed book.3 A title page gives the title in large characters – Histoire abrégée de l’Établissement de l’hôtel-Dieu de Quebec, fondé par l’illustre Dame Marie de Vignerot, Duchesse d’Aiguillon, en l’année 1636 – and the name of the author – Par la Rde Mère Jeanne-françoise Juchereau de St-Ignace, ancienne Religieuse de ce Monastere.4 Three short texts on unnumbered folios pages precede the annals proper: a dedication to the Virgin, a letter to current and future nuns of the house that Juchereau herself signed in the manuscript, and a short history of the colony called a foreword. An index and biography of Juchereau follow the historical account, again on unnumbered folios. The annals themselves proceed in strict chronological fashion, year by year, with no chapter divisions. The only divisions in the text are subtitles in the pages’ margins that give the dates of events and briefly summarize them. However, what presents itself as a unified book with Juchereau as its author is really a composite text, compiled and largely written by Duplessis. Juchereau points to one aspect of the collective composition of the Annales in her letter. She takes pride in having persuaded Marie Forestier de Saint-Bonaventure-de-Jésus, the last surviving of the three founding nuns who arrived from France in 1639, to recount the beginning of the house before Forestier slipped into senility. The Annales thus begin, after a brief introduction, with Forestier’s account, which Jamet signalled by adding quotation marks not found in the manuscript for thirteen pages. Although the typographical marks that signal direct quotation fade away, the narration continues seamlessly with the same voice in the first person plural throughout the book (with occasional first-person-singular asides). In her prefatory letter, Juchereau describes the technique: “We preserve and cherish the little notebooks in which Mother Bonaventure de Jésus wrote what happened during her time. Her style is simple and naïve. I have tried to imitate it by continuing as she had begun, that duplessis takes women’s history public

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7.1 The title page of the manuscript of the Annales features the arms of the Hôtel-Dieu’s foundress, Marie de Vignerot, duchesse d’Aiguillon. Duplessis dates the duchess’s decision to finance the hospital to 1636, although the contact was only signed in 1637, and the nuns arrived on 1 August 1639. It includes the Jesuit motto, “To the Greater Glory of God.”

is to say that I have related the events that preceded me as those who saw them might have.” In addition, Juchereau located accounts made by several other members, including Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Such an effort to document the early days of a convent by collecting the founders’ recollections was common practice in early modern convents. Perhaps the best known were gathered by the seventeenth-century abbess of Port-Royal in Paris, Angélique de Saint-Jean d’Arnauld d’Andilly. She never turned this raw material into a single narrative account, though, and the documents were eventually published in three volumes in 1742 by supporters of the destroyed monastery under the title Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal. However, the composite nature of the Annales goes well beyond the incorporation of such accounts. Part of the great reform movement that reorganized French convent life in the first half of the seventeenth century was the expectation that monasteries keep careful records.5 Well-managed communities kept registers of entrances, professions, and deaths of members; minutes of deliberations recorded chapter meetings; necrologies recounted the lives of deceased members and benefactors; circular letters were sent to other houses on such occasions. The Annales are based on such documentation, noting for example the results of elections, the entrance of members, and important business decisions. The Annales provide a short account of the principal virtues of each deceased member based on the necrologies; these can vary in length from a single line for young members to several pages for prominent ones. Other convent documents, most of them written by the nuns, are incorporated directly into the narrative: contracts, alliances with other communities, supplications to the Virgin Mary, an amende honorable (a sort of ceremonial judicial penance) addressed to Saint Joseph in reparation for blasphemies. The Annales are thus a compendium of many of the genres of writing practised by nuns.6 Juchereau largely concealed a second aspect of the Annales’s collaborative nature. In her letter to her fellow sisters that serves as preface, Juchereau described her role in terms that would lead one to believe that she also wrote it: “I begin this narrative … I note briefly … I have tried to imitate it.” However, although she oversaw the project, she left its execution to her secretary Duplessis de SainteHélène. The Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Chardon wrote Duplessis, “Mother duplessis takes women’s history public

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Saint-Ignace gave you all the information for this history. She selected you to execute her project and to give form to the substance that she furnished you, by relying on you for its style, its ordering, its structure and piety, as she testified to me.”7 Duplessis was thirty when the sixty-seven-year-old Juchereau, who had just finished her last term as superior, singled her out for this task around 1717. The humility so prized by nuns makes it appropriate that there is no indication in the Annales themselves of Duplessis’s role. Although the ten years since Duplessis’s entrance in 1707 account for only 13 percent of the eighty-year span that her Annales chronicle, she devoted 23 percent of the text in Jamet’s edition to the years she knew personally. At first glance, readers may have difficulty discerning any overarching point of view on the eighty years of the community’s history narrated in the Annales. Events are recounted on a year-by-year basis, with only an occasional glance at what is to come, as if the Annales had been composed incrementally, like many convent journals, by annually adding a summary of the year’s events. However, the book was composed in a relatively short period between 1717 and 1721 according to Jamet,8 and one can detect an assessment of the community’s situation around 1720 that is projected retrospectively back to 1636. The community itself is spiritually sound and functions in an efficient, harmonious manner; yet its financial underpinnings are uncertain, due not to any imprudence of the nuns, but to the colony’s poor economic climate. This view echoes Duplessis’s stance in her opposition to Saint-Vallier’s plans in August 1719. From its first pages, the Annales cite examples of the sanctity and dedication of the nuns and of their impact on those that they serve. Furthermore, there is no hint of scandal or lack of orthodoxy. The annalist repeatedly takes pride that no Jansenism taints the house, reflecting Duplessis’s ties to her Jesuit brother.9 This worthiness has been rewarded. By 1720, the three French nuns who arrived in 1639 had multiplied into sixty, almost all of whom were Canadian-born. In 1698, the community and hospital had moved into expanded quarters. Thus, the Annales are not an appeal to recover some lost spiritual ideal of the foundresses. Rather, future nuns are enjoined to remain worthy of a treasure they still possess by assuring that only worthy novices be received as members. 156

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The threats in the late 1710s were seen as chiefly due to the degradation of the colony’s economy. For the year 1671, in the wake of the expansion of the population under Jean Talon’s leadership, the annalist had seen signs for great hope: “God having given his blessing to his works by its great success, Canada in little time saw itself in the midst of abundance that gave reason to hope that it would be one day a very fine land.”10 But by the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was clear that such expectations had not been fulfilled. Witness the annalist’s plea for help that closes the foreword: “May God grant that Louis XV take into his affection this poor colony that … finds itself reduced to desperate straits so that under his reign we rise up again from the miseries that are heaped upon us.”11 In fact, “this poor land” becomes a leitmotif to describe New France. Writing during the Regency, in the wake of both the bankruptcy of John Law’s bank that reduced the value of the community’s investments and the devaluation of the colonial playing-card money,12 the annalist found herself a member of a struggling community in a struggling colony. This pessimistic view of Canada’s situation is probably closer to Duplessis’s than Juchereau’s. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau was the quintessential Canadian. Linked by both her father and mother to the earliest and most distinguished inhabitants of New France,13 she represented the transition in the community from a French foundation to a truly Canadian institution. On the other hand, Duplessis’s colonial roots were more recent. Moreover, during the years she was composing the Annales, her mother was struggling with the debts left by her father.

Corporate Pietas / Corporate Know-How The importance of the Annales to the community is signalled by the fact that the order’s Règlements list a monastery’s annals as the first of many books and registers that the secretary must keep.14 The corporate interests that shape the Annales are explicit in its three introductory texts and in its closing pages. Instruction and edification go hand in hand in furthering the ultimate goal of the Annales proposed in the book’s dedication to the Virgin: the continued spiritual health of the community. “May this house that is so especially dedicated to you be a school of virtue and perfection duplessis takes women’s history public

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in which your servants grow in holiness; may fervour, charity, and observance of the rule grow there every day.”15 In the letter to current and future members that follows this invocation, Juchereau states that learning the community’s history should first encourage gratitude, both to God and to the hospital’s many benefactors for whom the nuns should offer prayer. In addition, the edifying stories of the founding nuns and their successors – their “tireless zeal” and “sublime virtue” – are proposed as models for imitation. Both virtues are singled out in these nuns: “a profound humility and a sincere obedience” foster harmonious community life, “a great peace,” which is proposed as an ideal.16 Little wonder that Chardon’s letter reiterates a recommendation that the Annales be read out loud “when the community is gathered at table,” that is, included in the public readings during meals in the refectory.17 The Annales inspire a communal pietas by reminding its members of the traditions behind its unique devotional practices – why the Salve Regina is sung daily before matins; kissing the feet of the statue of the Virgin before saluting the newly elected mother superiors; offering the Virgin a meal that will be given to the poor once a month. The Annales recount the history of the construction of the monastery’s buildings, but also highlight the paintings and statuary within them: a portrait of the Jesuit Jean-François Régis done by an Indigenous artist; images of the Virgin and Saint Joseph. The artworks’ aesthetic is subordinated to devotion and to a reminder to pray for the donor. Hand-in-hand with this piety goes subtle encouragement to develop corporate know-how. Calls to pray for benefactors are also reminders to cultivate friends who might provide funds, of course, but more often those who may donate other essential services. Duplessis’s narrative repeatedly refers to “our friends” who remain unnamed but who proffered insider advice. She singled out select individuals by name, especially “our old friend” the surgeon Robert Giffard de Moncel in the early days of the hospital; Paul Dupuy, “one of our true friends” at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and, of course, “his faithful friend who became ours,” her own father, Georges Duplessis.18 Corporate know-how, Duplessis knew, meant knowing how to enlist the support of reliable friends.

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Colonial History and the Hand of God The Annales include, however, much information that is not specifically edifying. They go far beyond the call of the Règlements to consign memorable events that took place within the monastery19 and situate the community’s history in that of the colony. Financial data of all sorts are given – a general overview of the exploration and settlement of the colony and of its changing economic conditions, including a disquisition on the playing-card currency that culminates in an assessment of the community’s investments around 1720. All this is handled with the expertise one would expect from a daughter of a treasurer of the marine. A chronicle of political and economic events in the colony parallels the evolution of the house’s internal administration: the arrivals and departures of intendants and governors are noted along with the annual election of the house’s officers. Allusions to political events are not unusual in convent annals, but here they take on a special interest on several counts. First, the Annales do not hesitate to justify this historical excursus in terms of pleasure and curiosity. Thus, the introductory letter states, “I believed I would please you by relating several items that concern Canada in general,”20 and the foreword hopes that such history will “satisfy the curiosity of nuns, who, in reading this book, might wish to learn when and how this colony was established.”21 The book concludes with the hope that the future generations of nuns who read it will “find some pleasure” in reading it, as well as being edified.22 The appeal to curiosity and pleasure here echoes Duplessis’s Histoire de Ruma and Musique spirituelle. The conclusion also highlights the unusual care taken to assure the accuracy of the information about the colony. Two sorts of experts read the draft as it was being composed: individuals with long experience in Canada and others knowledgeable about previously published accounts. “They have found nothing regarding what we say about this country in general that does not conform to the truth and to what the most reliable historians relate.”23 Duplessis saw herself as an historian among historians. Although the foreword says it will not duplicate what is found in previously published histories of the colony, it gives a succinct

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overview of the exploration of Canada beginning with John Cabot’s voyages for England. Duplessis highlights how the French kings initiated trips by a parade of explorers to show the importance of royal protection for Canada. She pays special heed to the rebirth of the colony in 1632 after its three-year occupation by the Kirke brothers for the English. The arrival of the Hôtel-Dieu nuns in 1639, in fact, was part of the expansion of the missionary, agricultural, and trade efforts during the 1630s that solidified permanent French settlement. The Annales’s historical observations are more extensive than is habitually the case. Only in the last five years of the French regime did there seem to be an annalist in another Canadian monastery with such an eye for the colony’s history. The Ursulines’ Charlotte Daneau de Muy de Sainte-Hélène situated the campaigns in the French and Indian War in their military-political frame with even more detail than Duplessis had done for the earlier period.24 The extracts of Daneau de Muy’s chronicle that have been published give one the impression of reading a nationalist historian as much as a convent annalist. Duplessis, except in rare cases such as the unsuccessful attacks of William Phips in 1690 and Hovenden Walker in 1711, almost always linked political and military affairs to the history of her house and evaluated colonial administrators in terms of their overall piety and their role as benefactors. These two accounts are exceptional in their length and illustrate the strengths and limitations of Duplessis’s historical method. She could modulate a narrative around a central thesis: in both these cases, how divine protection saved the unprepared colony. For the longer 1690 account, to highlight the unexpectedness of the attack, she invokes a misogynous commonplace. When first reports of a possible invasion arrived, they were discounted, except by the nuns: “either because women are more credulous or more fearful, we began prayers and penances so that God would remove this scourge.”25 The foolish virgins proved to be wise when the invasion was confirmed, but Duplessis continued to feature the nuns’ fear by using colourful anecdotes. They buried their sacred vessels in a cache and tearfully prepared to evacuate to the countryside. The focus in the next pages shifts resolutely to the military manoeuvrings of male leaders with only brief references to their impact on the Hôtel-Dieu. Gradually, however, Duplessis includes more examples of how the entire town 160

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followed the nuns’ lead by offering intercessory prayers and doing penance. The whole account becomes an act of thanksgiving that extends to the Te Deum sung in the cathedral to celebrate the victory as a written narrative memorial. The 1711 Walker fiasco – wherein a storm destroyed a substantial portion of the British fleet in the Saint Lawrence before it reached Quebec – is again a proof of God’s intervention to protect “the true religion.”26 As the nineteenth-century Boston historian Francis Parkman – confident in the superiority of Anglo-American culture – was happy to point out, in her eagerness to see the hand of God everywhere, she displayed her own credulity. She made the bolt of lightning that destroyed a British ship an act of “the justice of God,” and she claimed that the humiliated Walker committed suicide by blowing up his boat in the Thames upon returning to London. The explosion was in fact accidental, and he was still very much alive when Duplessis was writing.27 Jamet, whose notes throughout his edition compare Duplessis’s version of events to other accounts, found that despite such lapses, she is generally reliable on a factual basis. When her evaluation of political figures might be questioned, it is generally in order to edify or because of her tendency to judge officials in terms of their contribution to the hospital’s mission.28 Duplessis intended the Annales to hand on to future generations of nuns the working knowledge they would need to maintain the community’s collective well-being – its health as a spiritual institution, of course, but also its financial stability and its internal cohesion – and for this reason she situates them in an overview of New France.

A Fallen Colony The Hôtel-Dieu had been founded as a missionary enterprise. The Jesuits counted on the nuns’ example as much as on the medical attention they could provide to convert the Indigenous peoples. Christianity’s superiority would be seen in the contrast between their care lavished on their sick and aged and “the ancient and barbarous custom” of the savages who “slew their aged to put an end to their pain.”29 But other than some Algonquians and part of the Wendats, early conversions did not match expectations. As early as 1644, when the nuns left their original site near the Jesuit mission station duplessis takes women’s history public

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at Sillery for Quebec, the focus shifted to the European population: the settlers themselves, the sailors who arrived in the port, and the soldiers sent to defend the colony. By the time of Duplessis, the small number of converts was matched by the loss of devotion among the French themselves. In the foreword’s account of Canadian history, the re-creation of the fervour of the primitive church among the first settlers went hand in hand with the conversion of the Indigenous. Louis XIII is said to have had an apostolic vision for the colony that was realized in its early days: “the savages were being converted every day and the French lived like the first Christians.”30 The Annales suggest that this exemplary life lasted into the 1680s. In 1651, “in New France at that time one only breathed devotion.”31 In 1659, “people lived there in simplicity, good faith, and union that was close to what one admired in the first Christians.”32 Describing a fire that destroyed the lower town in 1682, the annalist specifically noted the piety and probity of the city’s merchants: “People lived in an enchanting warm harmony that made New France completely delightful; all the troubles that we have since experienced and that grow daily were unknown.”33 The nuns saw themselves as part of a society where the devout outnumbered the backsliders, a society more pious than France. But as this last quotation shows, by the first years of the eighteenth century, this fervour was in decline. The annalist attributed a threatened invasion by New Englanders in 1711 to divine anger “against this poor land where, in truth, sins were on the rise daily.”34 By the second decade of the eighteenth century when the Annales were written, the nuns’ relationship to the settler society had changed. The community now more closely resembled those of France, where a convent might see itself as a beacon of piety in a fallen society. Economic prosperity did not replace the colony’s earlier fervour. According to the Annales, the colony had not realized its potential from the expansion in the 1660s. It remained poor, sustained by God, the support of the king, and gifts from French benefactors. The precarious economic situation of Canada and the Hôtel-Dieu explains the general praise for royal authorities in the Annales. Her narrative stresses how successive administrators have favoured the hospital. Jamet attributed her indulgence toward the colonial administrators, whom she refrains from criticizing, to “her pen … always guided by 162

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charity.”35 It might better be seen as instructing the community on how to deal with them to the hospital’s advantage. Duplessis realized that the ultimate authority was the king himself and maximized his devout intentions. In the foreword, she stated that if Louis XIV did not heed the colony’s detractors who “often make representations to him about the expenses he incurs there without any compensating profits,” it was because he shared the pious vision of his father.36 After recounting how the British siege in 1690 was lifted, she gave thanks that Louis did not then abandon the colony as so many advised him to do because he shared her own providentialist vision: “The sole desire to spread the faith and to see God served and adored in these lands led this great prince to sustain this country for which Heaven had so openly declared itself.”37 Writing during the Regency, the annalist praised the young Louis XV’s “fortunate predisposition to do good” and his “fine qualities.”38 For better or for worse, the hospital’s fortunes were linked to those of the colony, thus the need to maintain good working relations with its royal administrators.

Dealing with Patriarchy As much as the Annales stress the protection of the king and his administrators and profess deference to male civil and ecclesiastical authority, they highlight women’s agency. Today readers prize the entrepreneurial and managerial skills that the foundresses displayed in creating a viable institution in the wilderness. However, as Allan Greer pointed out, in the seventeenth century, nuns were praised above all for their spiritual gifts: their mystical experiences, their ability to predict the future, their mortification.39 Humility, obedience, and submission were valued qualities. Thus two long entries recount the life and spiritual gifts of Catherine de Saint-Augustin.40 The spiritual favours received by Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust, a widow and donor who retired to the Hôtel-Dieu, are recounted at even greater length.41 Their agency is not synonymous with managerial skills, but with the ability to prophecy and to convert, even from beyond the grave. The same moral and spiritual agency is singled out in the short eulogies that mark the deaths of Indigenous converts, most of them women. The French claimed that sexual promiscuity was a principal obstacle to the conversion of Indigenous peoples, and thus the chastity duplessis takes women’s history public

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of the women converts is stressed. When the Annales point to the contribution of the nuns to their conversion, agency is portrayed in terms of qualities often considered feminine: the “mildness,” “modesty,” and “charity” of the nuns encouraged such conversions.42 Even when women were actively involved in important negotiations, the Annales often prefer to highlight other aspects of their role. In his introduction, Jamet recounted in detail how the great Carmelite prioress Madeleine Du Bois de Fontaines-Marans de Saint-Joseph convinced the duchesse d’Aiguillon to take an interest in the Canadian missions and how d’Aiguillon negociated with the Dieppe hospital nuns to begin the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec. The Annales mention little of this.43 Their focus is on how fortunate the community was to have as its foundress the niece of the great Cardinal Richelieu. In a society where clientage was so central, the prayers of gratitude the nuns said daily for d’Aiguillon were a constant reminder that they had an illustrious protectress. In fact, they believed that her protection continued in heaven after her death and invoked her intercession in times of trouble.44 However, the Annales are much more than a chronicle of providential protection and extraordinary mystical gifts. Especially after the arrival in 1659 of New France’s first bishop, François de Laval, they relate how the nuns dealt with the tensions between their community and its male superiors, whose intervention at times generated internal tension or conflicts with other female communities. Since the Council of Trent, nuns had been subject to tight ecclesiastical oversight. Open defiance was not unheard of, but seldom resorted to. The Annales can be read as advice to future nuns in three areas where male interference could be felt: conserving internal unity when tensions arise within the community; defending the community’s corporate interests against domineering clerics; and maintaining good relations with other religious communities. First, the Annales model how to maintain internal unity within the community. Tension with the bishops began with Laval’s arrival in the colony in 1659, over whether to recognize his authority. Previously, the colony had been under the oversight of the bishop of Rouen, whose vicar, Gabriel Thubières de Levy de Queylus, had protected the hospital. The remark “We found ourselves fairly perplexed” indicates some internal discussion, but after consulting 164

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God and “more enlightened people,” undoubtedly the Jesuits, who supported Laval, the nuns rallied to the new arrival.45 Second, the Annales trace the direct conflicts between the community and its ecclesiastical superiors. The Annales note that from the very beginning of his episcopate, Laval attempted to modify or ignore provisions of the nuns’ constitutions. In 1660, “although there was something to the contrary in our constitutions,” he ordered the nuns to reduce the number of days they fasted.46 In 1663, elections were postponed “following the orders that his Lordship had left.”47 The Annales make the best of this intervention by attributing it to Laval’s “paternal care.”48 The Annales’ harsh assessment of the monastery’s fifth mother superior is a warning to future superiors. Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité, who was superior from 1670 to 1676, is described as “too subservient toward her superiors” – that is, too prompt to comply with Laval’s wishes. At issue was Laval’s order to the community to share bequests with the hospital. Boulic is thus accused of not defending the collective interests of the nuns with sufficient energy in the face of male authority. To be sure, the annalist mutes her criticism: when Boulic “thought she was complying with the will of the lord bishop,” she was only doing what other superiors had done. The annalist even breaks into her own voice to defend Boulic: “I do not believe, moreover, that this story detracts from the esteem owed to Mother Marie-Renée de la Nativité.”49 But even if Boulic’s compliance to the bishop was not a moral failing, and even if she was not the only offender, by mentioning it, the annalist exhorted future superiors to be more assertive. Finally, because the Hôtel-Dieu’s Annales seek to promote harmonious relations with other Canadian orders, male and female, their histories are narrated alongside its own. Indeed, the first hospital nuns arrived in 1639 in the ship with the founding Ursuline nuns, accompanied by Jesuits. At their simplest, the Annales are careful to include entries on the noteworthy leaders of these orders, on calamities such as fires that struck them, and on their holy members. However, the interference of male clerics quickly threatened good relations with other women’s communities. An early example merely required discretion on the part of the nuns. In 1658, just before the arrival of Laval, l’abbé de Queylus sent two Hôtel-Dieu nuns to duplessis takes women’s history public

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Montreal to look into the possibility of founding a second house there. But because Queylus knew that the Montreal leaders wanted to bring another order of nuns from France for the new hospital, the two emissaries had to travel on other pretexts. The Montreal leaders held firm, and the nuns returned to Quebec, but “the matter remained highly secret.”50 An event in 1671 required compromise with Laval himself. On 17 July the nuns learned that a ship in the harbour brought three new nuns from France to the community. “That surprised us all the more since we did not know that they had been requested and we did not expect them.”51 Laval, fearing that not enough Canadian vocations were forthcoming, had recruited in France. While some members opined that the three should be returned to France because the community had not requested them, the majority took a more conciliatory stance: “After examining everything, we thought that we should submit without resistance to his Lordship who had only acted out of goodness.”52 But the community insisted on having the last word, even if it was not directed at the bishop but at convents in France who heeded his appeal. The Hôtel-Dieu sent a letter to sister houses in France threatening to return any nun who arrived without an invitation from the community’s chapter.53 The most contentious issue with other communities was born out of the Hôtel-Dieu itself: the Hôpital-Général.54 In 1693, Laval’s successor Bishop Saint-Vallier announced his intention of founding an almshouse to serve the indigent and invalid, staffed by a contingent of nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu. The complicated story that the Annales recount is a lesson in damage control to future generations of nuns. The Hôtel-Dieu nuns were fearful that not enough funding was available for two communities of hospital nuns, and, above all, that the new establishment would cut into their recruitment, since the Hôpital-Général was better located and its members less exposed to contagious diseases. Unable to stop their determined bishop, they first sought to make the new community report to them, and when this failed, to limit the number of its members to twelve. They skillfully appealed to parties who might be favourable to their case. They enlisted the aid of local authorities resentful of Saint-Vallier’s other attempts to impose his vision.55 They wrote briefs to the king, who they knew opposed the establishment of new cloistered communities in New France.56 166

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This marshalling of support by Juchereau pushed Saint-Vallier to single her out as the instigator of resistance to his wishes. “He laid the blame especially on Mother Jeanne-Françoise de Saint-Ignace whom he accused of pulling all her strings and of controlling everyone in this community.”57 Juchereau thus becomes a counter-model to Boulic, whom the Annales had accused earlier of not defending the community’s interests with sufficient energy against Laval. Juchereau was, of course, also the instigator of the Annales themselves. Making sure that the account of this conflict is told from her point of view could well have pushed her toward initiating the project. After all, the Hôpital-Général had begun its own annals to record its version in 1704–05.58 By lending out its own annals in later years, the HôtelDieu insured that its version of the events was known. In this record intended for posterity, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu rein in their bitterness toward Saint-Vallier and the Hôpital-Général community. The bishop had tried to break the unity of the community by winning over individual members.59 Nonetheless, the account in the Annales, written while he was still bishop, is much more deferential than the following description of him in their letter to the Dieppe community at the time of the events: “If one points out to him that one cannot accede to his desires, he becomes furious, he thunders, he threatens, and talks of our affairs, making a terrible commotion so that all Canada is beset with rumours; that makes us give in to everything to avoid scandal … He is capable of anything when one resists him no matter how just the cause.”60 The Annales highlight the nuns’ desire to avoid the scandal of a public dispute and their compassion for the bishop: “He came here to convey to us his sorrow with such touching language and mien that he dismayed us.”61 Perhaps even more important was reducing the friction with the Hôpital-Général, a community that they would have to live alongside long after Saint-Vallier’s death. The annalist generally minimizes the agency of the Hôpital-Général nuns and presents them as being manipulated by their founder. To signal reconciliation, mutual visits by members of both communities in 1712 are narrated. If the meeting was first “fairly cold because so much had taken place that pleased neither party,” it ended with a common meal and assurances that both sides only wanted union, peace, and mutual comprehension.62 duplessis takes women’s history public

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The one point on which the Hôtel-Dieu remained adamant – its refusal to accept the members professed into the rival community63 – echoes its reluctance to accept the new members recruited by Laval in 1671. Passing the spirit of the community from one generation to the next was the fundamental goal of the Annales. Being sure that novices absorb this spirit by controlling their initiation was crucial. Throughout the conflict with Saint-Vallier over the Hôpital-Général, union was thus the watchword at the Hôtel-Dieu: “During this storm, we were strongly united among ourselves.”64

Tension Points in the Manuscript These tensions left physical traces in the Annales. At about twenty points throughout the manuscript, strips of paper containing new wording in Duplessis’s handwriting have been pasted over the original text. They vary in size from a single word to a short paragraph. In most cases they are a line or two long. The paper of both the strips and the manuscript itself is so thick that the unaided eye cannot decipher this original text underneath. It is unlikely that they are merely corrections of errors of transcription or stylistic improvements. They almost always concern a sensitive issue: claims of martyrdom for some individual,65 the state of the colony, but especially relations with male civil and ecclesiastical superiors. Jamet did not discuss these corrections in his edition, but twice he cited what he calls the “first version” in notes,66 without, however, indicating their source. The longest variant that Jamet gave tempers the assessment of the governor Augustin de Saffray de Mézy, who was in Canada from 1663 to his death in 1665.67 Another one tempers criticism of Laval himself. The original text, concerning Laval’s decision to bring new recruits from France without consulting the community, stresses the scandal that sending the unwanted nuns back would provoke: “We thought we should not inflict this affront on his Lordship and wanted to avoid the stir that their return would have caused.”68 The revised text simply stresses obedience and attributes good intentions to the bishop: “We thought that we should submit without resistance to his Lordship who had only acted out of goodness.”69 Elsewhere we can only speculate on the criticism that might have been in the original text. For example, we read with new eyes the passage cited previously 168

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excusing the submission of Marie-Renée Boulic to Laval when we know that it is a correction: “this reverend mother and other superiors believed they should comply with the will of the lord bishops.”70 The revised text attributes a laudable spirit of obedience to Boulic, who shares blame with other superiors. But it leaves open the question of whether she and the other superiors should have been so submissive. The changes were likely made sometime before October 1731, when Bertrand de La Tour, the dean of the cathedral chapter and superior of the community, returned to France. When he left, he seems to have taken a copy of the annals as part of the documentation he had gathered for his projected biography of Laval, which would only appear in print in 1761. The municipal library of Montauban, which holds his collection of books and manuscripts, owns this copy of the Annales. It has similar strips of paper bearing the same corrections as found in the Hôtel-Dieu manuscript.71 The Montauban copy itself is not in Duplessis’s hand, but she herself wrote out the corrections pasted into the copy. La Tour arrived in Canada in September 1729, with the newly appointed coadjutor bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet. In March 1730, Dosquet appointed La Tour superior of the Hôtel-Dieu and of the other two women’s communities. Duplessis’s initial impression of the new bishop and his dean was not positive. In October 1730, she wrote Hecquet, “He [Dosquet] has a grand vicar aged twenty-eight to whom he refers all the internal administration of the diocese; however well-intentioned they may be, since they have just arrived … they do not acquaint themselves with former practices but … profess to establish much wiser rules.”72 Conflict marked La Tour’s stay as both dean and superior, and he returned to France after only two years. Another circumstance suggests that the changes could well have been made during the stay of La Tour in Quebec. After Saint-Vallier’s death in late 1727, in the absence of a resident bishop, the cathedral chapter claimed the right to appoint confessors to the women’s communities. Duplessis reported in 1729 that this caused turmoil at the Hôtel-Dieu, where the nuns preferred their Jesuit confessor to the young Canadian one the chapter imposed on them.73 The conflict at the Ursulines was much graver; there, as Duplessis noted, the chapter deprived the leaders of the monastery of communion and confession. When Bishop Dosquet arrived, he put an end to these duplessis takes women’s history public

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disputes, but he also required the Ursulines to delete a section from their annals that narrated the conflict with the cathedral chapter.74 Since the Hôtel-Dieu’s annals stop around 1716 they do not treat this episode. But in the same spirit of reconciliation that guided the Ursulines’ revisions, it could well be that Duplessis found it wise, especially if she knew La Tour would be taking a copy back to France, to revise some earlier judgments. He was as ferocious a denouncer of Jansenists as Duplessis’s brother, which might have eventually softened her toward him.

Publication: A New Readership and the Eye of the Censors The Hôtel-Dieu copy of the Annales is conceived as a deluxe manuscript-book, a handsome folio to be preserved in the monastery archives and read publicly at communal events. Although such convent chronicles were normally meant to stay within the cloister, in this case, the nuns shared theirs with outsiders. In a previously cited letter to Duplessis, the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Chardon stated how much he had been edified by reading them. Another undated letter from a Jesuit, written to Duplessis before the centenary of the house, suggests that the Annales were lent out to friends of the community: “I have kept your work for almost a month now. It is time to make restitution and to thank you for the pleasure that you have given me in passing it to me a second time. I read it completely, from one end to the other, and even with eagerness.”75 However, the fact that the Annales appeared in print in 1751 is exceptional. The publication of biographies of foundresses and saintly nuns, such as the 1671 life of Catherine de Saint-Augustine by Paul Ragueneau, was common in the seventeenth century, although it had become rarer by the eighteenth. Less common, but still frequent, were spiritual writings by nuns, such as the Retraites of Marie de l’Incarnation, published by her son Claude Martin in 1682. A late 1751 letter – written in any case before the printed version arrived in Quebec – shows that the publication was part of the community’s campaign to win support in France. “Because we need protection, without relying too much on secular arm, we have written to the duc de Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon whose ancestors 170

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founded this hospital. Monsieur de La Tour, former dean of the chapter of this cathedral and presently pastor at Montaubon, out of esteem for this house, has had its annals published; he promises them to us for next year; he has dedicated them to the duc de Richelieu, who accepted them with affection.”76 When the printed copies arrived in Quebec, Duplessis would have learned that Richelieu must not have accepted the dedication, since the Annales bear instead a sort of default dedication to the current bishop of Quebec, signed by the community, but almost certainly written by La Tour, according to Jamet.77 La Tour was working at this time on his biography of Canada’s first bishop. In a 1750 letter to the Hôpital-Général, he promised, “Next year you will see two works that I am having published: the first volume of the life of Monsieur de Laval and the annals of the Hôtel-Dieu.”78 Much of La Tour’s editing involved cuts, and they were made directly on the manuscript held in Montauban. Honorific titles were shortened, doublets eliminated, and whole paragraphs left out. He obviously found Duplessis’s style wordy. Yet La Tour’s transformation of the text was not limited to simply updating the style and making abridgements. He was attempting, however timidly, to move the book out of convent literature and into more mainstream accounts of Canada. The nuns had recorded the important facts of the community’s spiritual, political, and financial heritage for their internal use. La Tour sought to open the book to outsiders in France. He rewrote the first sentences of the narrative to reflect the shift from the hospital’s initial mission of nursing ill Indigenous patients to serving the French settlers and soldiers. Duplessis had given priority to service to the Indigenous: “For several years a hospital had been desired in Canada, not only for the relief of the few French people living there but much more for the relief of the savages, who were subject to severe illnesses.”79 La Tour’s revision presented the hospital as a central public institution of the colony and added an allusion to the illnesses suffered by Europeans during the Atlantic crossing: “One of the great desires of the French colony was the establishment of a hospital in Canada. Men transplanted into a very bitter climate, after a long and perilous navigation, were exposed to severe and frequent illnesses.”80 La Tour also struck passages that made the colony appear too precarious. A sentence at the end of the foreword citing “the complaints of those who did not like Canada and often made representations to duplessis takes women’s history public

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him [Louis XIV] about the expenses he incurred there without any compensating profits” disappeared, as did a whole paragraph from the entry for the year 1646 describing the nuns’ continued stay in Canada as “uncertain.”81 In other cases, La Tour excised material that might have served as useful warnings to the nuns, but was not of interest to general readers. For example, he eliminated several paragraphs describing fires that had been narrowly avoided in the period 1712–15.82 Duplessis had included a long passage on the esteem generated in France, the Caribbean colonies, and even in England by the artificial flowers the nuns skillfully manufactured. La Tour reproduced this bragging, but dropped Duplessis’s concluding exhortation to her community not to forsake such a profitable enterprise.83 More importantly, La Tour had to respond to a growing unease, even among many believers, about claims of visions and divine revelations. He eliminated, for example, a prophecy made by Paul Dupuy that the nuns would someday own the Ile-aux-oies.84 He left out a long paragraph that described a vision by a person who saw Catherine de Saint-Augustin received in heaven as a saint in glory by the Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf and Saint Augustine.85 In fact, a 1751 letter to the director of the book trade Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes shows that publication was delayed because one censor believed that La Tour’s cuts were not extensive enough.86 As director, Malesherbes oversaw the censorship process and held ultimate responsibility for granting permission for books to be printed. On 20 August 1751, one of his censors, François Greinoz, wrote him that the wife of the Montauban printer Légier had visited him and requested that he send Malesherbes a report so that an authorization to publish could be issued. Greinoz had previously reported to Maboul that cuts were needed: “I found in it some miracles worked by means of, or in virtue of, certain trifling devotional practices and several visions and apparitions that it seems to me should be cut from the book to authorize its printing.” However, in the meantime, a second censor, Louis de Cahusac, had given a favourable report: “This manuscript has been revisited by Monsieur Cahusac who approved it. I do not believe its publication should be deferred longer. I agree to it from my side and will give my official approbation, if you think that is necessary.” Cahusac is better known 172

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as the author of opera libretti for Jean-Philippe Rameau than for theological knowledge, but he had been born in Montauban and had roots there, and may have been given La Tour’s manuscript to counter Greimoz’s resistance. Under those circumstances, and since in Greinoz’s eyes the book was perfectly orthodox, Greimoz did not want to hold up publication: “I had only asked Monsieur Maboul to have something cut from the book to make it more perfect, because in itself and fundamentally this history is edifying and only radiates piety and sound behaviour. I gave this same assessment of Monsieur Gibert, who spoke to me about the manuscript.”87 In all, three censors, Greinoz, Cahusac, and Joseph-Baltasar Gibert, had been involved, and the official authorization would only be forthcoming on 8 November, almost three months after Greimoz’s letter. The text of the permission was included in the book, but not Cahusac’s approbation, as was sometimes the case when censors did not want to take public responsibility. Perhaps as a concession to Greinoz, tucked away in the introductory material of the book is a short notice to the effect that most of the miracles and visions it contains also appear in Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin. The implication is that such miracles had been approved earlier by the approbators of that work. However, the 1751 edition of the Annales contains many miracles not found in Catherine’s biography. For example, some of Mme d’Ailleboust’s visions are so extravagant that the Benedictine Jamet called them of “questionable authenticity” in his 1939 edition.88 Likewise, some reported miracles, such as the Jesuit François Crespieul finding his lost portable chapel and mass kit after invoking Catherine de Saint-Augustin,89 are telling examples of the trivial devotional practices that Greinoz had objected to. As François Moureau points out, such skittishness among censors reflected not just a growing squeamishness about miracles and visions among believers; it also showed a fear of giving Protestants and skeptics ammunition against religion. Moureau cites the case just one year later of a censor refusing to approve a perfectly orthodox pastoral letter by the archbishop of Vienna because it praised the cult of images and confidence in indulgences to the point of “superstition and extravagance.” What inspired devotion in Austria could become a source of scandal in France!90 duplessis takes women’s history public

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7.2 This copy of the printed Annales bears Duplessis’s handwritten corrections and according to the note “Ch. Supre” seems to have been kept in the room of the mother superior. The title page of some printed copies adds that the book was sold in Paris by the printer Jean-ClaudeBaptiste Hérissant, Rue Notre-Dame, aux trois vertus.

Reception with Reservations Duplessis had reservations about her book as published. She was proud of how much history of the colony she had included, but could only be dismayed by the carelessness with which the book was printed and proofread. “The Reverend Father La Tour, dean of Montauban, who was formerly vicar general in Canada, has had our annals published under the title Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec,” she wrote Hecquet. “I think you will not read them without pleasure and without being edified, although there are many printing errors. Many events concerning the founding of this country are narrated in it.”91 Indeed, proper names were frequently garbled, more likely by the printer than by the dean of Montauban himself. It is hardly likely that La Tour, who was writing a biography of Canada’s first bishop, would have changed Monseigneur de Laval to Madame Laval,92 giving the bishop a wife! The name of Barbe de Boullongne d’Ailleboust is rendered “a barbarous name of Boulogne,” and she is referred to later as “Monsieur.”93 Any pleasure or edification Hecquet might have had in reading Duplessis’s book would also have been muted by the anti-Jansenism that pervades it. The Hôtel-Dieu holds a copy that Duplessis corrected using much the same technique she had used on the two manuscripts of the Annales: thin bands of paper have been pasted over the printed text on which the corrections are written (although some corrections in ink are made directly on the printed page).94 Most simply restore the proper spellings of names. However, Duplessis also remained sensitive to gender issues. On at least one occasion she softens a criticism of Laval that La Tour had slipped in. Describing Boulic’s willingness to sacrifice the interests of the community, Duplessis’s original text had cited Boulic’s submission to the wishes of Laval. La Tour, on the other hand, had attributed to Boulic a criticism of the bishop in the Montauban printed version: “she submitted without a rejoinder, although that did not always appear to her to be just.”95 Duplessis restored the original wording to “although that did not always appear to her to be required,”96 so that the mother superior did not appear to be accusing the bishop of injustice. The book does not seem to have attracted much attention in French publications. It was announced in the August 1752 issue of duplessis takes women’s history public

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the Journal des savants, but without any commentary.97 Even journals aligned with the Catholic establishment appear to have ignored it. It is not mentioned in the Journal de Trévoux of the Jesuits, who are given much praise in Duplessis’s book. However, in April 1755, AnneGabriel de Meusnier de Querlon’s Affiches de province reviewed it in the category of French literature. The review begins by recounting the hospital’s founding, stressing the strong financial contribution of the duchesse d’Aiguillon and the support of royal administrators in Canada. The review continues, “One might consider it a sort of necrology of the house.” But the review then rejects this view, exclaiming, “How many curious, instructive, and even amusing details are found in it!” and proceeds to give examples: the reaction of the Indigenous natives to these virgin women; the 1663 earthquake; the Walker expedition. The review concludes with Marie-André’s description of the so-called hospital rock on the Ile-aux-Oies where birds wounded by hunters found refuge and healing.98 Two further mentions of the book can be traced back to this review. Pierre Rousseau, who was the Parisian literary correspondent of the elector palatine Charles Theodore of Mannheim, summarized it in his private letters on affairs in France for his patron. Rousseau managed to garble several points. For example, in his version, “having been obliged to land at New Orleans, these courageous women went in a small boat to their destined place,” confusing the town in Louisiana with the Ile d’Orléans. However, he added favourable judgments not found in Meusnier de Quélon’s review, although one wonders if Rousseau had really consulted the book itself. “A work of this kind seems to announce great dryness. The author has found the secret of making it interesting without betraying its subject … the style is simple; it is the eloquence of the heart, always the best.”99 Eight years later, Jean-Louis Alléon-Dulac included the passage on the hospital rock that Rousseau did not quote in his Mélanges d’histoire naturelle. He cited the Affiche review as his source.100 Rousseau had stressed the religious commitment of the nuns to the elector his patron, who was close to the Jesuits. Alléon-Dulac found a curious detail of interest to the scientific community, an indication of the breadth of subjects Duplessis managed to include in her book.

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Conclusion The Annales are the first text written by a Canadian woman published during her lifetime. When Claude Martin published his mother’s letters in 1681, he divided the volume into spiritual and historical sections, even though Marie de l’Incarnation never thought of herself as an historian. The annalist of the Hôtel-Dieu, on the other hand, explicitly wove the community’s life into the history of Canada. This is done more prominently than in the annals produced by other colonial communities, such as Marie Morin’s of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal. It is done so successfully, in fact, that early readers of the manuscript in Quebec judged Duplessis competent to write a history of the colony itself: “Her ease in composing and her penetrating understanding made her able to write the history of the foundation of Canada.”101 Although she certainly possessed the necessary vision of the sweep of the colony’s history, she seemed to have had neither the inclination nor perhaps the time to undertake an overview, such as the Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale that Bacqueville de La Potherie would publish in 1722 or the Histoire et description générale de la NouvelleFrance published by Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix in 1744. Her focus was too squarely on the hospital itself, and even with that commitment, she never attempted a continuation of her Annales. Her approach is certainly closer to Charlevoix’s. Both relied on previously written documents. In her case, they were largely internal ones, while the Jesuit cast his net wider to published accounts, official reports, and personal interviews. He attempted a critical analysis of his sources, except those from his own Jesuit order, because, like Duplessis, he wrote providentialist history.102 However, the publication of the Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec in 1751 meant that, for the first time, history written by, about, and for women stood alongside eighteenth-century male-authored accounts of Canadian nuns such as Charlevoix’s 1724 Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation and François-Michel Ransonnet’s 1728 Vie de la Sœur Marguerite Bourgeoys. Neither priest had known his subject and both relied on previous compilations. The publication of Duplessis’s book resulted from a campaign for support that the nuns themselves orchestrated, a campaign to enlist the aid of contemporary representatives

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of the family of their foundress, the duchesse d’Aiguillon. In the conclusion we will see that forty years after Duplessis composed the book, and ten years after its publication, her campaign bore fruit. Ironically, the hoped-for aid would come not directly from the French court, but from the new colonial British masters.

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1750–55 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Aborted Expansion, Burnout, and the Encyclopédie Seven months after being re-elected superior in March 1744 for what would become a six-year stint in office, Marie-André confided her reluctance to take on this burden. She claimed to have no liking for it, and felt inadequate: “You have your sorrows and I mine, my dear friend. The one that weighs on me today is that I see myself placed back again in the office that I have already held and for which I have neither inclination nor talent.”1 In 1750, at the end of these two three-year terms, she aspired to relief: “I am at last released from the office of mother superior, and I delight in the peace that my vocation as a hospital nun can offer because our position, particularly in this country where nothing is well-ordered, is always a bit agitated. But since the order established by God is found in this agitation … I attempt to not let it harm my peace, which seems to me to be the greatest good that we can possess in this world where this peace is never perfect, nonetheless.”2 Even though she had fallen back into the secondary position of assistant superior and secretary, with Marie-Catherine Tibierge returning as official head of the community, Duplessis would experience more agitation than peace during the next six years. The War of Austrian Succession might have ended, but Canada was on a war footing. Marie-André’s administrative talents and connections kept her in a guiding role, even though she would not be re-elected superior until March 1756.

Her second term in the 1740s had been more trying than her first in the 1730s. The last ten years would be even more so, not just because of the outbreak of hostilities in 1754, but because she increasingly experienced Canada as a site of frustration, where nothing worked as it should, and where disorder, both administrative and moral, was on the rise. As she had put it to Marie-Catherine as early as 1734, Canada was a land of “crosses and suffering.”

A Land of “Crosses and Suffering”?3 Her ambivalence toward Canada must have originated in her immigrant parents. In the 1711 “Histoire de Ruma,” she noted that they had taken care to give Geneviève a better education with more proper manners than was commonly available in this “barbarous land.”4 In November 1751, she complained to Marie-Catherine about the training of her niece: “Canadian upbringing does not cultivate enough her good qualities.”5 She had left France in 1701 for Quebec with “a reluctance … to leave her country whose attractive qualities she prized more than her sister.” 6 In October 1729, she compared herself to Geneviève: “My sister who is Canadian by birth is completely French by inclination. She often launches into invectives against her native land. She thinks she has the right to criticize its weak points and says things that I would blame myself for, if I happened to say them.”7 Her judgments on Canadian economic prospects were consistently reserved. For example, when she reported in 1744 that that diamonds had supposedly been discovered in Canada, she compared them to all Canadian productions: “Those diamonds cut glass, but like all Canada’s products do not have great soundness; they only cut one or two times, and then they become dull. That could come from the hard frosts of this climate that ruin everything.”8 The climate was also to blame for problems in exploiting a potential silver mine: “Ventures in Canada commonly have little success. The seasons are too short, so that the work of a whole year must be done in four or five months. The freezes upset all preparatory measures, so that one is always beginning anew. That wears down everyone who is involved.”9 Her equally pessimistic comments in 1741 on the iron production at Trois-Rivières pick up on this theme of expenses caused by the climate and a disheartened workforce: “There is much misapprehension 180

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between the stockholders and the workers. All is absorbed by the great expenses. In this land, work is only done at great cost. That is what causes ventures to fail in Canada. Other mines are not even spoken of; one loses heart to discover any. This colony will never be rich.”10 As brutal as this judgment may be, it is based on her assessment of Canadian realities, and shares none of the moralism of Hecquet, who, when told of potential silver mines, opined in 1740, “May God … maintain Canada in its sterility and poverty lest it lose a grain of the love it owes God alone.”11 The Canadian economy, in fact, was improving substantially during this period. Although the promise of the diamond and silver mines was illusory, the Saint-Maurice ironworks and the royal shipyards were not failures. They stimulated activity, even if they were not as successful as Gilles Hocquart hoped. Duplessis was devoid of boosterism. She viewed the economy from the treadmill of supplying her hospital. War and preparations for war brought dramatic increases in royal expenditures to the colony, which generally raised its economy, but with steep price inflation. Military expenditures replaced the fur trade as the economic motor. The male civilian population was diverted from agriculture to war construction and militia service, which heightened food shortages. The hospital’s clients were those left behind by prosperity. Although the hospital functioned more and more as a military institution, the king did not invest in it as he did in fortifications, nor even adequately reimburse the expenses of ill troops. For Duplessis, on the moral level Canada was the mirror reflection of France with all its ills, instead of a purified, improved version as its idealistic founders had envisaged. One of the most striking formulations of this judgment is found in a 1753 letter. Except for religious dissidence, Canada suffered from all the ills of France: “I consider Canada the echo of France in terms of vice, self-interest, bad faith, and libertine conduct. Luxury, fine dining, and all of the devil’s pomp are on display here.”12 This attitude is present from her first surviving letter of 1718, and over the years she gave Hecquet many examples: calumny and backbiting are especially bad in Canada; French friendships are stronger (1729); everyone complains about the situation and no one seeks remedies (1730); sexual libertinage undermines attempts to convert the Indigenous population (1740); Canadians are not as 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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willing to do favours (1750). Her distress in the 1753 formulation was heightened by her frustrations with the intendant François Bigot’s administration and the permissiveness that flourished in his social circle. Geneviève, embittered by years of dealing with petty vendors in her role as business manager of the hospital, was even more forthright on the lack of morality in Canadian business practices. Several factors temper this negative assessment of Canada. In every case, such comments are in letters to correspondents in France with whom she hopes to reaffirm her bonds. Geneviève gave a striking formulation to this topos in a letter to correspondents in France: “The only compensations that we find in this barbarous land are the few connections we have in France whose pleasures we tasted during our short stay there.”13 Disparaging comments about what Canada has to offer were often simply excuses for not being able to send more elaborate gifts of local products. Like her religiously oriented correspondents in France, Marie-André felt increasingly alienated from French society, seen as gone amiss. The letters of the Jansenist Marie-Catherine and her Jesuit brother contain even stronger condemnations of ambient corruption and godlessness in France. However, unlike her two Canadian brothers – the Jesuit François-Xavier, who chose a preaching career in France, and the soldier Charles-Denis, who refused to return to Canada after going to Paris in the mid-1750s – Marie-André was bound by her vows to Quebec. This Parisian may have always seen herself more as living in Canada than as a Canadian, but she worked her French ties relentlessly to advance the interests of a central Canadian institution. She was fully committed to this “land of crosses and suffering.” Three issues would test her during her last decade. First, the increasingly bitter dispute with the colony’s administrators, especially François Bigot, over funding daily operations that had begun in the mid-1740s continued; the disputes over funding in the early 1750s were overshadowed by the devastating food shortages during the last years of the war. Second, this ongoing conflict was the backdrop for disputes over two issues that involved major capital investments: who would pay for expanding the hospital’s physical plant to serve military patients and then for rebuilding it after the fire of 1755? Geneviève was Marie-André’s partner, when not the lead player, in these quarrels. Finally, family problems strained Marie-André’s resilience: the 182

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death of Geneviève in 1756, her Jesuit brother’s declining health, and her younger brother’s profligacy.

Hospital Expansion and a Pyrrhic Victory Pehr Kalm did not comment on the need for hospital expansion although the nuns and the government authorities both agreed on the issue since at least the early 1740s. In 1742, Duplessis wrote the pharmacist Féret in Dieppe, “our hospital [is] always more than full, that is to say, there are more patients than beds.”14 In September of that year, the newly arrived Bishop Pontbriand, after his first episcopal visitation, wrote Maurepas citing the need for a new ward.15 The next year the bishop noted that the hospital was overflowing with patients from the Rubis:16 “We have them all the way up to our attics.”17 The situation was even worse in 1750: “The king has sent 800 soldiers to Canada of whom two-thirds arrived sick, and although the intendant has rented houses to transform into hospitals, ours cannot hold them all; we had the largest share, and we fill our wards with them along with all the out-buildings and even the attics. This gives us much work and weariness, and to top it off, a cold has attacked us all at the same time so that twenty nuns are in the infirmary beds and the ones left to serve them, the wards, and the routine chores are not much better off. We have great difficulty finding two nuns each night able to serve as watch.”18 The intendant’s and governor-general’s annual letters to Maurepas in the late 1740s show that they had been actively investigating various schemes to pay for expansion. Hocquart seems to have revived his proposals, dating to the early 1730s, for appointing lay administrators for the hospital.19 Combining the funds of the hospital and the community was suggested, but rejected. Another proposal, also deemed ill-advised, was to combine the Hôtel-Dieu with the Hôpital-Général.20 With these avenues closed off, the civil authorities encouraged the nuns to borrow to pay for the expansion. In 1750, the civil authorities took action. A plan for enlarging the hospital by adding a ward for soldiers had been drawn up the previous year because the increase in the number of soldiers did not leave enough room for the civilian poor. The intendant and the governor-general asked the minister to issue orders to the nuns to 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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make the expansion. Direct orders were necessary, the two officials said, because the nuns were only concerned “with increasing the holdings of their community.”21 Duplessis, of course, saw matters differently in her description of the crisis to Hecquet in 1750: “These multitudes of patients who arrive often and for whom the king gives only six sous a day while we spend much more; in the last ten years that has caused us to go fifteen thousand francs into debt despite the representations that we do not fail to make, but which go unheard by those who should heed them. On the contrary, so as not to give us any relief, they say that we are extremely rich and that we all conspire together not to say where our money is hidden. God has reserved us for an exceedingly callous age.”22 To her mind, Bigot was merely renewing charges that his predecessor Claude-Thomas Dupuy had made in 1727, to the effect that the nuns thought only of enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and their employees.23 During the 1740s, she had been pressing the bishop to support expansion, while providing financial data about the hospital’s precarious state. Pontbriand generally seconded her efforts. In 1742, he asked Maurepas for help for the hospital in noting the need for a new ward, and in 1743, he declared that he did not believe the nuns could finance it themselves.24 In 1747, he reported that the hospital was much over capacity and that while expenses had tripled, revenues had remained the same.25 Duplessis reiterated her horror of borrowing in a summer 1748 letter to the bishop. While the topic was the short-term borrowing that the hospital had been forced into since 1740 to meet operating expenses, her words would apply as well to borrowing to meet construction costs. She was skeptical of an argument she often heard: “To encourage us to borrow, these gentlemen assure us that the king will never let down this hospital.”26 Was the hospital really too important to the king for him to allow it to fail by not covering its debts? It was a risk she did not intend to take. Even though her term as superior had ended in March 1750, that fall she organized a counterattack. On 10 October, the advisory council signed a memo of protest. Besides the standard argument that the hospital’s revenues could not support additional expense, the council rejected the suggestion to sell the hospital garden because it was already too small, and claimed that replacing the hospital bursar 184

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with lay administrators would result in expenses a third higher. They sought support in France. Prior contacts with Bertrand de La Tour resulted in the annals’ publication in 1751. Just as in 1726, a letter-writing campaign to patrons in France was launched. Maurepas had been ousted in 1749 by a palace coup engineered by the duc de Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, so a letter was written to the duke. Geneviève indicated that he had agreed to accept the dedication of the annals, adding highly placed patronage to the general publicity it was hoped that the printed book would bring.27 Marie-André wrote the dowager duchesse d’Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, on 20 October: “A short letter of recommendation to our governor and intendant for our house proving that you have the goodness to protect it … would inspire them to treat us with more accommodation.” Forcing the community to spend the endowment given it by the first duchesse d’Aiguillon, she said, would break the foundation contract. “We beg you, Madame, not to allow this expansion to absorb our endowment. If this ward is erected, it must be built, furnished, and endowed for those who will be treated in it.”28 In other words, the king should pay for his soldiers. The Duplessis sisters, in fact, were sure that Bigot had been sending negative reports about the hospital, and drafts of 1752 memos to Maurepas’s successor Antoine-Louis Rouillé show them trying to counter these reports and justify bypassing him. On this last score they shifted the blame to Bigot: “We would have indeed wished to have profited from a moment’s presence of Monsieur the Governor or Monsieur the Intendant in order to communicate to them what we have the honour to send you concerning this hospital, but the multitude of their tasks makes them unavailable to our invitations.” Instead of dealing face to face with them, Bigot sent messengers. The nuns began this draft by noting that the hospital seemed to have lost the confidence of the navy office, which they attribute squarely to “ill-founded prejudices” which “have lost us the favour of Monsieur the Intendant, who despite his benevolent attitude, has taken no interest in this hospital.”29 They ran their drafts past a sympathetic military engineer, Louis Franquet, who had visited the Quebec region in 1752–53 to inspect fortifications and who had furnished plans for siting the projected hospital expansion. He suggested that they soften 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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some of the wording about the intendant since their missives would be sent in any case by the minister to Bigot for his comments.30 By the next year, it was clear that Duplessis had won on one point: the community would not be required to go into debt for any expansion. However, Duplessis’s victory came with a cost. On 8 June 1753, Rouillé wrote them coldly: “I found rather extraordinary your refusal … to contribute to the expenses of building the new ward that it is necessary to erect in your hospital for patients on the pretext that the funds of the hospital are separate from those of the community of nuns.”31 He made short shrift of the accusation against Bigot and Duquesne and stressed the nuns’ failure to cooperate: “No one has tried to give me impressions against your community … Messieurs Duquesne and Bigot have not indicated anything to me that does not announce a predisposition favourable to your community, and you will always find in both the ready aid you will need, when your community lends itself for its part to the arrangements that are necessary for the good of the king’s service, with the zeal it has always shown and that they have not failed to acquaint me with.”32 He noted rather pointedly that requests should be routed through the intendant and governor-general rather than sent to him directly.33 The minister thus resoundingly rejected their claims, their accusations against Bigot, and their attempts to bypass the intendant. The nuns would not be forced to borrow or expend the community’s funds, but no royal subsidy was forthcoming either, and thus no expansion was possible. The Duplessis sisters might have won a battle, but had they lost the war? Bigot was self-serving and intent on profiting from his tour of duty in Canada, but he was also efficient.34 He had little patience for the Duplessis sisters’ insistence that the hospital be expanded only on terms they judged most favourable for their institution, nor for their steady stream of requests for exemptions and favours. Sensing that they would throw up delay after delay, he favoured other institutions that were more compliant. Geneviève complained in an October 1751 letter to the former governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière that Bigot gave preference to the Hôpital-Général: “His lordship the intendant does not refuse these ladies anything, which puts them in a position to be more obliging than us.”35 She reported the next year that he 186

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reimbursed that community at a higher rate for treating soldiers than her own.36 Jan Noel attributes the authorities’ favouring the Hôpital-Général to its nuns’ mastery of the politics of clientage.37 The fact that its nuns were more willing to cooperate with government initiatives was probably as important a factor. Bigot could also move expeditiously. When it became clear in 1755–56 that the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal needed expansion because of the war, Pontbriand arranged for Bigot to build two wards cheaply in wood instead of stone in that hospital’s gardens; they were called the royal wards because they were destined to serve the troops.38 The Montreal nuns had reservations about the enterprise, but they lacked the united leadership the Duplessis sisters gave the Quebec hospital. According to their chronicler, “This proposal much alarmed some members who foresaw at that very moment the crosses that it would create in the future. But nonetheless, we had to comply.”39 It was inevitable that Bigot would come into conflict with Geneviève, who saw her life’s mission as protecting the interests of the poor. He was only too happy to use the excuse of the nuns’ refusal to invest. He might have had less leverage with the minister if the nuns had been seen in Versailles as more cooperative. Had they taken the risk to expand, and even to borrow, the Duplessis sisters might have found more sympathy in the 1750s, both for adequately supplying the hospital and for its rebuilding in 1755. Were the daughters of Georges Regnard Duplessis overly cautious? According to François Rousseau, in the years between 1730 and 1755, the community (as opposed to the hospital) operated with revenue averaging 27,000 livres each year and mostly matched expenses.40 In September 1739, the chapter had agreed to borrow 4,000 livres to rebuild the kitchens and extend that wing of the monastery 60 feet. In 1755, after fire destroyed the hospital and monastery, the nuns agreed to borrow. It was initially calculated that they would need loans of between 20,000 and 25,000 livres, although the final debt turned out to be closer to 100,000 livres!41 The 1739 loan was taken out before the hospital began experiencing operating shortfalls; in the second case, the community was faced with a life and death situation. Not to borrow in 1755 to rebuild would have meant its extinction. The Duplessis sisters had overplayed their hand. This was the opinion of Pierre de la Rue, the abbé de l’Isle-Dieu, Bishop 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Pontbriand’s savvy and sympathetic liaison with the ministry at Versailles. La Rue was Pontbriand’s vicar general in France, and he reported to the bishop that the officials at the court thought the nuns had “given into fear too easily and too strongly.” La Rue never mentioned that the issue of borrowing had come up, although the ministry did want the nuns to contribute what they could afford to the expansion, leaving it up to the bishop to determine if this was feasible. Moreover, La Rue maintained that the nuns undercut their case by importuning the minister with multiple petitions written directly, and especially by asking permission to acquire a new property at the same time they were claiming they had nothing to offer for expansion. This request gave rise to “all sorts of ideas and suspicions that they might be well-to-do.”42 La Rue surely directed part of his pique against women who showed too much independence; male officials, ecclesiastical and civil, believed that they should handle such issues themselves. Nonetheless, some of La Rue’s complaints seem well-founded, and the Duplessis sisters’ strategies failed to build support for the hospital with civil authorities in Quebec and in Versailles. Their father had likewise been admonished that his memoranda on the colonial economy were no longer welcome. Throughout the conflict, the authorities accused the nuns of trying to protect their own finances by refusing to combine the funds of the hospital and community. The Duplessis sisters cast themselves above all as defenders of the poor for whom the hospital had been founded, and objected to diverting their own funds or funds destined for the poor to the troops for whom the expansion was needed. However, there was an element of self-interest as well: families would be less willing to pay profession dowries if the money might go to fund the hospital rather than their daughters’ support.43 Offhand remarks by Geneviève also suggest that she would have preferred not having soldiers as patients at all. “Serving the troops is so disheartening that it is not in our interest to seek it out,” she confided to La Galissonière.44 Whether the Duplessis sisters realized it or not, their resistance to expansion was in part a reluctance to accept the mission shift from civilian-oriented service to the military role that the war effort imposed on them.

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Isolation and Geneviève’s Burnout The difficulty of financing day-to-day operations only increased. Geneviève found all manner of expedients, some new, some old, to make ends meet, most needing administrative approval from the intendant. Could the hospital be excused from maintaining its side of the Rue des Pauvres, along the north side of its property, since it had contributed to paving the street and had furnished part of the right of way? The hospital had sold some land years ago when it had little value; could the hospital be awarded the resale taxes now that the new owner was selling it? Could the hospital again share in the proceeds of fines and confiscations and be exempted from import duties? The old issue of the hospital keeping the clothes of soldiers who died there to pay for their funeral expenses resurfaced. And, of course, there were continuing complaints from butchers about the hospital’s practice of selling off supplies that it did not need. The Duplessis sisters saw these as small items that allowed the hospital to compensate for inadequate royal funding for His Majesty’s ill troops. The Duplessis sisters continued their strategy of seeking allies and intercessors. A subsequent letter to Franquet (probably sent in 1753) is in fact a list of seven talking points he could use in defending their cause. The sixth in particular illustrates the isolation they felt: if he has friends in the navy office “who are of a disposition to share with him his kindnesses for this house,” could Franquet put them in contact with the nuns so that they could better know what “what we might ask for or obtain?”45 They corresponded with the former governor-general La Galissonière. They professed to have disabused him of his prejudices against the hospital shortly before his departure in 1749 and counted him among their allies in France.46 The Duplessis sisters were aware of the collusion between Bigot and the personnel of the navy office. In 1751, François-Xavier had warned them, “the navy office appears inflexible, and I believe that you will still have many heavy crosses to bear … there is reason to believe that the officials of the bureau have an understanding with those who are the authors of your misfortunes.”47 What they failed to realize was how high the collusion went. Arnaud de Laporte, the senior official who oversaw correspondence from the colony reaching

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the minister, was a collaborator in the intendant’s enterprises.48 In 1752, Geneviève even complained in a draft of a letter to Laporte about Bigot: “We do not know why Monsieur the intendant has become so cold toward this house about which he cannot say a good word and for which he has not given the slightest benefit ... Permit, if you please, sir, that to unburden my heart, I tell you the extent to which even the advantages that we receive are accompanied by unpleasant aspects.”49 On the local front, they also cultivated allies. Marie-André sent Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial an enthusiastic letter of congratulations on 29 June 1755, a week after his arrival in Quebec as governor-general. She reminded him that he had once said that if he returned one day to Canada “our house would be his favourite.”50 She established good relations with Louis-Joseph de Montcalm upon his arrival in 1756 and asked him to write the duc de Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon on the hospital’s behalf.51 Once Montcalm became acclimated to Canada, the general led the charge in denouncing Bigot to the minister, which could only have pleased Duplessis. However, her most common dealings for daily business were with the intendant and the bishop, not the military chiefs of the colony. With the intendant Bigot, who had veto over most of their initiatives, hostile52 and the minister in Versailles ill-disposed, the two sisters felt blocked at both the local and metropolitan levels. They began to doubt even their friends. A 1756 letter from Franquet reassured them that, to his knowledge, Bishop Pontbriand had always supported them; Franquet closed by refusing to reply directly to insinuations that had been reported to them that even he was wavering in his support: “I am not replying to the suspicions that you have been given about my way of thinking about your interests.”53 Likewise, in 1752, their Jesuit brother had informed them that they had been deceived if they had been told that he had been receiving gifts to fund dowries, as if they questioned whether he was doing all he could to help.54 The burden of day-to-day purchasing, of hiring workers, and of producing detailed financial reports fell principally on Geneviève, who felt increasingly beleaguered, and her sharp temper surfaced. For example, in 1752, she had called a baker named Maurice, who had cancelled a promised sale of wheat to the hospital, “a scoundrel” (“un coquin”). He in turn, certain of Bigot’s protection, charged her 190

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with defamation. This would have cost the hospital 300 livres had not his suit been quashed.55 Maligned, attacked, and forced to deal with an unresponsive and dishonest intendant, there is a note of acute discouragement verging on burnout in a 1755 letter to Pontbriand after the fire: “I am reaching the beginning of my eternity which preoccupies me much more than the reestablishment of this house.”56 Discouragement, however, did not mean dereliction of duty. She refused Pontbriand’s offer to reduce her duties, if it meant combining the finances of the hospital and community,57 and she remained in office until her health failed the next spring.

Duplessis Enters the Encyclopédie: Lahontan, and the Wild Girl of Châlons In October 1753, Duplessis acknowledged receipt of a manuscript narration Hecquet had sent that spring, “the account that you sent me concerning the adventures of Mademoiselle Leblanc.” It was the draft of what was to become Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans when it was published in 1755. Duplessis agreed with Hecquet’s contention concerning the wild girl’s origin. “I believe like you, my dear friend, that she is an Eskimo.”58 Without her connection to Duplessis, Hecquet would likely never have written the Histoire or identified the girl as Inuit.59 Their correspondence provides definitive proof of Hecquet’s authorship, which has sometimes been attributed to the explorer and philosophe Charles-Marie de La Condamine. Although there is nothing overtly Jansenist about the book, Hecquet’s Jansenism also played a role in its creation. Marie-Angelique Leblanc, as the wild girl came to be known, had long been shedding her savage ways since her capture in 1731 and Hecquet’s encounter with her in November 1752. However, when the wild girl emerged from the woods near Châlons-en-Champagne in 1731, her exotic wildness fascinated the public. She was completely at home in the river water and caught fish and frogs that she ate raw along with nuts and berries; she clambered up trees with the agility of a squirrel. Enlarged fingers facilitated her tree-climbing. There was much speculation about her origins, some saying she was from Norway, others from the Caribbean. Accounts appeared in the Mercure 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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8.1 The title page of the first (1755) Paris edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une fille sauvage.

de France and other papers. Intellectuals used the case of the feral girl to advance their own theories of human nature, for example the Jansenist Louis Racine, the atheist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and the deist Voltaire. Leblanc was protected after her capture by local authorities, and then, as her case attracted more attention, by members of the highest aristocracy, including the king’s cousin Louis d’Orléans and the queen’s mother.60 Hecquet came in contact with Leblanc in 1752 in the monastery on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris of the hospital nuns of Saint-Marcel, who belonged to the same order of Augustine sisters as Duplessis. Marie-Angelique, however, was not there to become a hospitaller, but as a boarder who was recovering from an injury that she had received in the Royal Abbey of Sainte-Perrine in Chaillot, where she had been received as a postulant in January 1751. Her stay had been cut short by an accident caused by a falling window, and she moved in June of that year to the Rue Mouffetard, in hope of a recovery that would allow her return. Leblanc relied on benefactors for her support, and was in need of new ones, since her principal protector, the duc d’Orléans, had recently died. Hecquet lived nearby on the Rue Mouffetard, and the nuns of Saint-Marcel had Jansenist ties,61 which might explain why Hecquet frequented their monastery, where she encountered Leblanc. By taking an interest in Leblanc, she was imitating her aunt Michelle Fontaine, who had often taken in unfortunates she encountered on the streets of Paris. Hecquet was greatly impressed by Leblanc’s confidence in Providence and seems to have written up Leblanc’s story to help her find new protectors. In the first part of the Histoire, Hecquet dwells on the civilizing process that changed the wild girl into a devout woman who was eager to enter a convent; in the second part she discusses various hypotheses about Leblanc’s origins. Hecquet advances the view that Leblanc was an “Eskimo.” In support of that claim, she cites information about the Inuit peoples obtained from Duplessis. Hecquet’s deep interest in Canada’s Indigenous population was, in fact, one of the threads that held together her correspondence with Duplessis. The nun’s letters contain a number of substantial reports on them (1718, 1723, 1751), all reports that Hecquet solicited, and many shorter ones. The first letter from Marie-André that Hecquet preserved is only a long 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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8.2 This page from the 1761 Paris edition introduces Hecquet’s experiment with the dolls and miniature canoe that Duplessis had sent in 1751 and the extract of the accompanying letter that would form the basis of the article “Eskimaux” in the Encyclopédie.

fragment that describes Indigenous customs. Hecquet had requested this information, and Duplessis sent along a pair of moccasins. In 1751, Duplessis sent Hecquet not just one artifact, but a whole collection of dolls, each illustrating the garb, male and female, of many different nations. Two letters with extensive descriptions of each group accompanied the dolls. Hecquet used the dolls in a sort of experiment that she organized with Leblanc that confirmed her hypothesis that Leblanc was Inuit: “I had the box of savage dolls brought along. When it was opened, I took care to examine her reactions and what would strike her eyes first. Although several dolls were more pleasing and more embellished than those of the Eskimos, which hardly look human, she reached all of a sudden for the Eskimo woman, then took up the Eskimo man, and looked at them one after the other in silence, not like people to whom a new and astonishing thing has appeared, but like a thing they have already seen, without knowing where, and which they strive to recognize.”62 In a second step, Hecquet brought out a model bark canoe Duplessis had also sent. Leblanc said it was not like the ones she knew and proceeded to describe a kayak. “As this description of the canoe was completely consistent with the one Madame Duplessis gives me of the Eskimo canoes, of which Mademoiselle Leblanc surely had no knowledge, I did not doubt any longer that she was of this nation.”63 Sure of her identification, Hecquet included Duplessis’s description of the Inuit as an appendix to the Histoire for documentation, along with extracts from Louis-Armand de Lahontan’s Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale. First published in 1703, Lahontan’s three books (Les Nouveaux voyages, Les Mémoires, and La Suite des voyages) went through multiple editions. They are based on his experiences as a military officer and explorer in Canada and the upper country between 1683 and 1693. Embedded in his compendium of information about the land’s geography, history, flora, and fauna is his portrait of its Indigenous inhabitants as virtuous and noble, living in accord with nature and reason, un-degraded by the vices and inequality of Europe. He popularized the notion of the noble savage that Enlightenment writers would promote. In 1740, Duplessis and Hecquet had an exchange about Lahontan that can serve to situate their views on Indigenous peoples of New 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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France. That year Hecquet seems to have reported to Duplessis that she had read Lahontan to increase her knowledge of Canada and its inhabitants. The surviving draft of Hecquet’s letter from that year does not mention Lahontan, but does contain an idealized portrait of Indigenous Christians praying in front of relics in the Hôtel-Dieu chapel and being unconcerned about impressing other worshippers with their dress, as French worshippers would have been.64 However, Hecquet saw the simplicity of the first Christians where Lahontan saw natural equality, and Duplessis warned against any idealized portrait, either of the domiciled Christian Indigenous groups living in one of the seven mission villages or of those not yet converted: I am happy that the baron Lahontan has allowed you to familiarize yourself a bit with Canada. He tells the truth on several subjects and also lies by exaggerating too much about what he puts forward. Even the savages who are neighbours to our towns are as filthy and have kept all the customs of former times. They consider themselves to be above all other peoples and see the French as slaves of minor polite practices that social life imposes. They are dirty gentlemen, although among them there are some fervent Christians in the missions who are instructed, because most listen to the mysteries that are preached to them as if they were legends which make no impression on them. The only fruit that missionaries in some areas have is to baptize many children who die in infancy and to give to these barbarians a fine notion of our religion by the purity of their lives.65 Despite being a cloistered nun, Duplessis had multiple sources of information on the Indigenous: some were patients in the hospital or did work for it; her mother and brother Charles-Denis each owned one as a slave, and he served among them in the upper county; she was close to the missionaries who spent their lives among them. She never varied from her initial reaction, dating to her pre-convent days, that mixed a bit of admiration for the colourfulness that they could display and for their inventiveness with an almost physical revulsion for everything she found uncivilized about them, a revulsion 196

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that she overcame out of a sense of duty: “Before I became a nun, I was occasionally at their ceremonies. I had the advantage of being pleasing to some of those people. They came toward me to present their hands in a way to make me tremble, but I touched them without a fuss because one must not refuse them. They would take that for an insult.”66 She found most of them to be as impervious to adopting French customs as to accepting Christianity. For her, they embodied fully the term which was commonly applied to them in her day, “savage.”67 The fierce cruelty that “savage” suggests in today’s usage was certainly a component; she cited their blood feuds, torture of prisoners, and scalping practices. However, that was only one facet of what she saw as the wild, undisciplined nature of these peoples who resisted European civilization. Still, she dutifully reported on the exemplary converts among them, such as Kateri Tekakwitha, and noted on occasion the discovery of a new tribe in the far west that seemed more likely prospects for lasting conversion.68 When Hecquet requested accounts in 1723 about “the lifestyle and customs of our savages,” including information about “how they are dressed, how they marry and how they are buried,”69 Duplessis dutifully complied with reports which are at times almost ethnographic. Nonetheless, such accounts have a way of turning into a catalogue of reasons why their lifestyle was an obstacle to conversion: sexual and marriage practices, collective guilt to punish killings, shamans who communicate with the devil. She concludes one such section with “they have numerous other bad characteristics such as inconstancy and fickleness; they are perfidious and very superstitious.”70 The list was almost endless in her eyes. She had written off the Indigenous, and without the solicitations of Hecquet, she would not have not have reported so fully on them. Duplessis’s own reserved attitude reflected the fallback stance of the Jesuits on the missions once they realized that converts would not come easily: the personal sanctification of the missionaries due to the hardships they endured could compensate for the paucity of conversions.71 Ironically, Duplessis’s pessimism about solid conversions aligned with seventeenth-century Jansenist skepticism about the number of conversions the early Jesuits claimed in their missions.72 To a certain extent, she was also aligned with Lahontan. He included a section 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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entitled “Beliefs of the Savages and Obstacles to Their Conversion.”73 Like her, he noted that they “listen to all that the Jesuits preach to them without contradicting them.” But the anticlerical Lahontan adds, “It is enough for them to mock among themselves the sermons these fathers preach in church.”74 While Lahontan saw the indifference of most of the Indigenous to Christian claims and their rejection of the French lifestyle as proof that they were guided by natural reason, Duplessis only saw blindness to Christian truth caused by their immorality. She was as unable to understand their beliefs as she was to comprehend Jansenism. Instead of seeing that the Indigenous groups did not convert because they viewed Christianity as irrelevant to their lives, she blamed the bad example of the French. As she put it in her 1740 letter, “The libertine life-style and self-interest of the French undermine the faith in these lands.” Brandy sales and debauching Indigenous women were the problems, in her eyes. The Jansenist Hecquet, who had no direct experience of North America’s Indigenous peoples, was more optimistic on the possibility of conversions than Duplessis. Hecquet seems to have misread Duplessis’s letters just as she did Lahontan. In 1740, the Jansenist had imagined converts who had no thought of showing off their fine clothes in church. However, in 1723, Duplessis had already noted, after describing such finery, “All that finery has its beauty among them, and they are as vain about it as the French are about their rich clothes.”75 Hecquet’s obsession with the Indigenous and her wishful thinking about their conversion had roots in her Jansenism. Eighteenth-century Jansenist exegesis of biblical prophecy postulated that the apostasy which the Catholics of France displayed in complying with Unigenitus would be compensated for by the conversion of the Jews and other unbelievers. According to Jansenist theologian Jacques-Joseph Duguet and his disciple Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Ménilles d’Étemare, the conversion of the Jews would be followed by that of all nations, even those to whom the gospel had not previously been preached.76 Hence Hecquet’s intense interest in converts in the New World. Hecquet comes the closest to expressing this belief explicitly in her 1756 letter to Duplessis. There she inquired “[i]f our holy religion does not make some progress among these idolaters whom I love, because I hope that their near or distant conversion, which is nevertheless assured according to God’s word, will console our holy mother church for 198

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all the bad Christians who now afflict it?”77 Hecquet, Duplessis, and Lahontan could only see the Indigenous through European eyes. For Hecquet, they would rejuvenate a church fallen into apostasy; for Duplessis, they were unwashed, wild, and unamenable to Christianity; for Lahontan, they were proto-philosophes.

The Jansenist and the Nun Edited by Philosophes Just as publication of Duplessis’s Annales in 1751 had been arranged by Bertrand de La Tour, who edited the manuscript heavily, a man found a publisher for Hecquet’s account after editing it. We know that La Tour intervened chiefly to abridge Duplessis’s text since her manuscript survives; however, it is not possible to ascertain the extent of La Condamine’s changes. The mathematician and explorer of South America La Condamine had begun helping Leblanc as early as 1747. He only admitted to making slight changes involving Hecquet’s speculations on Leblanc’s origins. His intervention might have been more extensive. The Histoire could have painted Leblanc in such a way that her conversion to Christianity was accompanied by a great moral revolution, a miracle of transforming Jansenist efficacious grace. Instead, it stresses Leblanc’s positive characteristics from the beginning: her compassion for her companion’s suffering; her good humour, not to mention her trust in Providence that had won over Hecquet from the start. Any negative characteristics are attributed to the instinct of self-preservation. Quite early in the Histoire, Leblanc is presented as having “a very gay temperament and a character marked by gentleness and humanity that savage and ferocious ways, necessary for the preservation of life, had not completely erased.”78 There is no allusion to original sin such as is found in the Jansenist Louis Racine’s treatment of Leblanc.79 Even more telling might be the frequent remarks that attribute Leblanc’s actions to natural instincts. To be sure, this intervention of natural instincts is not incompatible with religion. In fact, when the notion is introduced, it is attributed to divine Providence: “Providence, which has supplied all creatures with all the natural instincts and characteristics for the conservation of their species, had given to her an unimaginable mobility of eyesight.”80 Nevertheless, this view of 1750–55 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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instinct stems from a view of human nature that gives short shrift to the Jansenist belief that Adam’s sin left humans with an inclination toward evil. Natural instinct is seen as more reliable than reasoning. The word “instinct” does not appear to be in Hecquet’s vocabulary. It does not occur in any of her letters, her spiritual texts, or her autobiographic accounts that have survived. Tellingly, the word “instinct” has been added to the passage from Duplessis’s letter on the Inuits that is found in as an appendix in the Histoire, where Duplessis’s “modesty”81 is expanded to “instinct of modesty.”82 It is more plausible that La Condamine made this change than Hecquet. La Condamine was a philosophe, although he did not trumpet his stance as Voltaire did. He had little use for the Jansenists and ridiculed their miracles. It is unlikely that Hecquet would collaborate closely with him. He probably took the account she had written in 1753 and made changes, before finding a publisher in late 1754. He kept his distance from the book when it appeared in early 1755 and published disclaimers limiting his involvement. In them, he described her as a widow, even though her husband did not die until 1762, a sign that he did not know her well.83 Hecquet might well have kept her distance also. She does not seem to have sent Duplessis a copy of the book, as if the manuscript she had previously sent sufficed. In fall 1755, Duplessis reported to Hecquet having seen a copy, but it was a volume that someone had carried back from France and brought to her attention.84 Whatever the level of collaboration between Hecquet and La Condamine, it worked well for Leblanc. She found new benefactors, among them the queen, and managed to live independently in Paris until her death in 1775. There was a bonus for Duplessis as well. By including part of Duplessis’s letter in the Histoire, Hecquet gained entrance for her friend into that battle horse of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie. Louis de Jaucourt made Duplessis’s remarks the core of his article “Eskimaux” in volume five of the Encyclopédie that appeared in November 1755, giving her this credit, “Extract of a letter of Saint-Helen of 30 October 1751.”85 He minimized any positive descriptions of the Inuit people in the section of Duplessis’s letter that Hecquet had published. Thus Jaucourt’s article presents them in Duplessis’s words as “the savages among the savages” (“les sauvages des sauvages”), in keeping with Enlightenment opinion that placed 200

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the Inuit in an almost subhuman category.86 In closing his article, Jaucourt mentioned Lahontan’s writing on the Inuit and the Recueil de voyages au nord (1715), published by Jean-Frédéric Bernard, but warned that they only contained “fictions.” Duplessis is thus deemed a more reliable source. Hecquet had succeeded in writing a work that found a place both in convent hagiography collections and in the libraries of philosophes. She was primed to write it because of her correspondence with Duplessis, who probably never discovered she had entered the Encyclopédie. Marie-André would have been dismayed, as might Hecquet have been, had she learned. The Jesuits were widely seen by those in the know as having been instigators of the condemnation of the Encyclopédie in February 1752 by the king’s council that almost sunk the publishing enterprise, and the Jansenist periodical the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques joined in the attack that same month.87

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chapter

9

1755–58 in a “Land of Crosses and Suffering”: Fire, Family Crosses, and War The community was in the refectory at lunch on 7 June 1755 when a nun interrupted the meal with the cry of “Fire!” Duplessis was ordinarily a quick eater, and her custom, as she told Hecquet, was to embroider chalice covers while she waited for the others to finish. For the date of the fire, one is recorded with the title “To the consuming blaze” in her log. In less than two hours, the fire wreaked its destruction. The principal building was a square around a central courtyard, with the wards in the northern section and the church and monastery occupying the other three sides. There were also a number of outbuildings, a barn, an icehouse, a chicken house, etc. The hospital wards suffered the most damage, but all the buildings and their furnishings along with stockpiled supplies were unusable. The patients numbered probably in the twenties and were evacuated. The only direct fatality was a nun who became trapped when she returned to her cell. Many of the treasures in the church were saved, as was a substantial part of the archives,1 more perhaps than in previous fires in other Canadian convents. While much past correspondence was lost, François-Xavier’s letters to his sister dating back to 1716 were rescued. The nuns’ personal effects were lost, and the forty-five nuns, one novice, and two postulants were taken in by the Ursulines.2

Fires were a constant menace in Canada. The destruction of the intendant’s palace with its records in 1713 had been a reversal for Georges Duplessis. The Quebec Jesuits’ house had burned in 1640, the Ursulines’ in 1650 and 1686, the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal in 1695, 1721, and 1734, and the house of the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières in 1752. In the annals, Duplessis noted each time fires struck other communities and recounted the close calls her own had had. She attributed her house’s good fortune to the general protection of the Virgin and Saint Joseph and the special protection of Saint Thecla. Each 23 September, the community made a general communion and sang the hymn of the thanksgiving of the youths who escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.3 That day in September was the Feast of Saint Thecla, who, when thrown into flames, had not been touched. In addition, the community invoked her special protection each day, a daily reminder to be watchful. The fire that destroyed the Ursulines’ house of Trois-Rivières on 22 May 1752 was an important recent precedent. Besides their school, they hosted a small hospital with ten beds.4 The ten professed Ursulines and their two novices were put up temporarily in the nearby Recollet house during the eighteen months of reconstruction. Bishop Pontbriand had been in Montreal at the time of the fire; he stopped briefly to survey the damage during his return to Quebec, where he began immediately soliciting funds. The following May he moved to Trois-Rivières and supervised rebuilding during the six months before the nuns could return in November 1753. The bishop described his multiple roles to his brother in France: “For the last six months I have been in Three-Rivers, housed badly in the middle of fifty workers of every sort whom I guide, spur on, and pay … You ask where I find the money? I make the nuns borrow. All my household staff works. I make requests to the court to contribute. Two thousand livres of alms have been collected. I have become a bishop, a cabinet maker, a carpenter, a labourer, a carrier of bricks and pipes.”5 This intense personal involvement is a sign of his solicitude for religious communities and probably also reflects his judgment that the small Ursuline one was not up to managing the rebuilding on its own. After losing six members in a 1749–50 epidemic, the community

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had asked the colonial officials for permission to close the hospital, but Bigot had refused.6 Pontbriand mobilized three funding sources. He collected gifts from local and French donors. 7,000 livres were obtained, not directly from the court, but from the Commission des secours,7 a government body, which made grants to deserving convents, when it was not suppressing ones deemed unneeded.8 Finally, the bishop made the Ursulines borrow. When fire struck the Quebec Hôtel-Dieu, the Duplessis sisters already had a working relationship with Pontbriand. After SaintVallier, who favoured his Hôpital-Général’s foundation, and the fourteen-year interval following his death in 1727 when bishops were seldom in residence, Marie-André was relieved to be favourably impressed by the young bishop who arrived in 1741. A year later, she reported to Hecquet, “We have a prelate who has greatly lightened my burden by the way he deals with me and by the satisfaction that he seems to have had in examining the hospital accounts entrusted to us which he is quite satisfied with. I did not experience a similar gentleness during the oversight of the reverend grand vicars. May God be praised who wounds and heals.”9 A year after the fire, Duplessis expressed effusive gratitude for the way the bishop took an intimate role in rebuilding her hospital, as he had at Trois-Rivières: “Our worthy prelate has given us notable signs of his paternal benevolence, because he wishes to take this task greatly to heart. He has made the contracts with the workers and goes to see them daily to encourage them. He has made us take on large loans for this that greatly indebt us, but necessity forces us to take them on. His lordship further aids us greatly in this effort by using his good reputation so we do not have to make payments, and although this expenditure is not made at his expense, his protection is very advantageous to us, and we can never be grateful enough for the debt we have to him.”10

Rebuilding with an Imperious Bishop If Marie-André had not had an incapacitating skin rash in the summer following the fire, this version of the reconstruction that describes a smooth working relationship with Pontbriand might stand. The 19 September 1756 letter, however, was addressed to the bishop’s sisters, 204

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Visitation nuns in France, with the expectation that they would relay Duplessis’s gratitude to their brother. During a brief period around August 1755, while Marie-André was recuperating from a case of erysipelas that left her face red, Geneviève, who was much less diplomatic, took over correspondence duties. In the draft of one letter she wrote to an unnamed priest in France, she lays out a much more fraught relationship: “His lordship our bishop who, as you may think, has great authority over us and an innate impulsiveness with which is very difficult to deal, so much so that we hardly dare say a word to him. He wants us not to get involved in anything or to write and solicit our friends. He considers things like that as shows of independence. He has tired us out more since our fire with his projects and initiatives than the fire itself distressed us.”11 Even though this assessment was written at a moment of heightened tension between Geneviève and Pontbriand over her role as bursar, it shows the Duplessis sisters’ view of the underlying dynamics of power between them and the bishop. His micromanagement in Trois-Rivières was not just a reflection of his judgment that the small Ursuline community was not up to rebuilding on its own. Dealing with the Duplessis sisters, however, would be a different matter. Even though Marie-André was second-in-command as assistant and secretary at the time of the fire, and would not become mother superior until March 1756, she was at the centre of decision-making. Her experience and fiercely protective attitude would have to come to terms with the bishop’s will to exercise his authority to supervise all aspects of the affairs of women’s communities. Pontbriand was again in Montreal at the time of the fire. On 14 June, he sent the nuns a letter of condolence12 with a memorandum that presented them his detailed plan for securing suitable housing and restoring hospital services. Taking the long view, he did not envisage their rebuilding in less than two years. In the short term, staying through the winter with the Ursulines was impractical. He would move from his palace to the Seminary so that a portion of the community could be housed in his residence, where hospital wards could be opened. In the meantime, patients would be directed to the Hôpital-Général. The other part of the community could stay in a section of the Jesuit college. He seems to have thought through every detail; he contacted the intendant and gave the nuns permission to 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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visit the ruins of their monastery as often as needed. He ends his memorandum peremptorily: “I will arrive on 7 July in Quebec. I want to find the nuns in my palace.”13 The nuns, however, found a more satisfactory arrangement. Instead of dividing the community, on 28 June, all of it moved into a portion of the Jesuit college formerly occupied by boarding students, where they welcomed patients into two wards by 16 July. That summer the bishop also had a thirteen-point plan for financial operations that the Duplessis sisters certainly found inopportune, although what exactly motivated him is not known.14 His proposal was presented as a stopgap, “for the time that the nuns stay with the Jesuit fathers.” He proposed giving many of the purchasing duties of the hospital bursar to other convent officers, including the community’s bursar. This last provision might simply have been made in hopes of avoiding Geneviève’s frequent conflicts with suppliers. She, in effect, would manage income while others would deal with expenses. Geneviève, certainly in conjunction with her sister, prepared a response. As they had done in the past, they consulted sympathetic outside advisors. Geneviève complained to Jean-Victor Varin de La Marre, the subdelegate of the intendant, about the bishop’s imperious character: “We fear all of his hasty temper; he does not want to listen to any expression of opinion.”15 She requested that Varin de La Marre intervene with Governor-General Vaudreuil and even Bigot, if necessary. The Duplessis sisters’ official response appeals to general principles instead of addressing Pontbriand’s proposals dealing with purchasing. The overall effect of the bishop’s plan, Geneviève maintained, would have been a return to the situation before 1664 when the hospital and community’s finances had been united. Worse, “It is clear that his lordship wants to have the nuns live off the revenues of the hospital.”16 They had objected to the community financing hospital expansion a few years earlier, citing the separation of the two institutions’ finances; now they defended the same principle by insisting that the hospital should not fund the community. Was the bishop’s plan simply a way of dealing with the immediate crisis? Was he using the crisis to introduce changes he had long wanted? Or was he merely dealing with a personnel issue? His plan was never implemented, although the records do not say why. François 206

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Rousseau is surely right to cite this incident to illustrate “the degree of liberty and independence that for a long while characterized the community.”17 It also illustrates the close oversight bishops could devote to the community’s affairs. The bishop objected to the nuns soliciting aid from their supporters in France. However, among Geneviève’s drafts is one written on 12 August to the duchesse d’Aiguillon asking for her protection.18 The bishop would have certainly objected to the request in another draft that its recipient lobby the navy office “before his lordship the bishop, Messieurs the general and the intendant join together to present their project and the views that they might had for this enterprise.”19 Even though the Duplessis sisters had been warned in the past about appealing over the heads of the colony’s leaders, or in this case behind their backs, the sisters seemed determined to do so. They had their own views and wanted them heard before those of the three officials reached the ministry. Their hope was that a promise of reconstruction aid would be sent that fall through Louisbourg so that it would reach Quebec in time to finance work in the spring. They also suggested that someone sympathetic to their needs, such as the engineer Louis Franquet, be placed in charge of the project. Another series of drafts reflects a campaign that probably eventually had Pontbriand’s blessing to mobilize donors in France. Shortly after the disaster, Marie-André had composed a narration that served as the “official” account of the fire.20 The monastery archives contain drafts of eight letters sent to various figures such as the archbishop of Paris, the duc de Mirepoix, and a confidant of the queen, most likely in fall 1755. Each letter appeals to some individual trait of the recipient and suggests a specific way in which that person might aid the Hôtel-Dieu. Mirepoix controlled a lottery whose proceeds went to needy convents. The nuns ask the superior of the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris to share some bit of the “immense amount of alms” that her institution received. They remind the Abbé de la Viegerie that he had already contributed to the reconstruction of the Trois-Rivières hospital. The letters are short and served as cover letters to Duplessis’s account of the fire that accompanied them.21 The nuns were impatient to leave their temporary quarters. That summer, while waiting for the nuns to decide just how to rebuild and how to finance the project, workmen began restoring the outbuildings 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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of the hospital.22 In late November, when no word from France had arrived from the ministry promising aid, more comprehensive plans could no longer be postponed. Instead of a multiple-point proposal like the ones he had presented in June offering his palace, Pontbriand merely sent the nuns a series of discussion points for and against waiting until the following year to begin reconstruction. He did not envisage rebuilding the entire hospital-monastery complex, only the northeast wing that had been most seriously damaged and that had housed the hospital wards. According to Duplessis, “he left us the freedom to choose between the two proposals he presented.”23 Borrowing money was unavoidable, and he knew the Duplessis sisters’ horror of debt; thus the sum he mentioned to be borrowed – up to 25,000 livres – was probably set deliberately low. He characterized the arguments for postponing a decision until the following year as being based only on “panicked terrors.” The record of the discussions, first by the advisory council and then by all the professed nuns, was made by Marie-André as chapter secretary, who also had a guiding voice in both bodies as assistant superior. The decisions that were reached reflect her prudent, longterm perspective. Waiting until the next year was judged impractical. The nuns went further than the bishop’s proposal. Instead of just rebuilding the northeast wing, they also proposed reframing and reroofing two additional wings to protect their masonry walls that were still standing, but needed immediate repair. For the time being, they would concentrate on stabilizing the exterior structure and would postpone interior finishing work. They noted that an offered gift of local wood that could be used for reframing might disappear if not accepted immediately. Duplessis’s record of the deliberations masked any tension between bishop and community. She was at her deferential finest. The initiative was presented as coming from Pontbriand, and the “full liberty” he left the nuns in reality amounted to adjusting his proposals. However, since all parties agreed that rebuilding and borrowing at some point was necessary and since the minister at Versailles was unresponsive, the competent leadership within the community refined the bishop’s suggestions. Whatever initial tension there was between the Duplessis sisters and the bishop, as reflected in Geneviève’s summer 1755 letters, a 208

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9.1 Richard Short’s view of Quebec after the 1759 siege from the northwest along the Saint Charles River shows the palace of the intendant (two-storey building with turret in centre) below the bluff. One of the rebuilt wings of the Hôtel-Dieu is the two-storey building with a steep pitched roof on the bluff, just left of centre. Little destruction from the bombing is visible in this view.

smooth working relationship was established. Pontbriand could be imperious, but he was not inflexible. A November 1756 letter to her friend Marie-Catherine repeats the praise of Pontbriand that MarieAndré sent the bishop’s sisters at about the same time.24 As rebuilding progressed that winter, letters show that Duplessis relied on the bishop’s constant involvement. Could he supply windowpanes for the door of their chapel (2 January 1757)? Could she take advantage of the offer of a loan without interest (21 January 1757)? He reported his negotiations for 3,000 planks of wood (22 January 1757). In discussing the possible loan, he reminded her, “finding lodging is a necessity” (4 March 1757), and reassured her that the money would be found to pay it back in a single installment (19 March 1757). The previous fall, when a formal petition to the court for rebuilding funds was being prepared, she asked his advice about how her cover letter should be headed and whether she alone should sign it, or have it signed by other nuns. Pontbriand replied that “Monseigneur” sufficed as a heading, and that she alone should sign (13 September 1756).25 Duplessis had extensive experience writing official correspondence. Did she seek advice and exaggerate her incapability to show deference to the bishop? A formal request to the court was indeed sent in fall 1756. On 11 November, Pontbriand wrote the current minister of the navy, JeanBaptiste de Machault d’Arnouville, that the nuns’ petition had been endorsed by the intendant Bigot and the governor-general Vaudreuil. It was accompanied by architectural designs for expansion from the engineer Louis Franquet.26 The bishop estimated the cost at 200,000 francs.27 With France officially at war, no such sum was forthcoming. In the last letter Marie-André received in 1759 from her Jesuit brother, François-Xavier reported having heard from Marie de Rupelmonde, an aristocrat who had become a Carmelite and was close to the queen.28 A request that Marie-André had sent this nun in 1755 to appeal to the queen was finally bearing fruit. The Carmelite had intervened with the bishops on the Commission des secours, and 4,000 livres would reportedly be forthcoming,29 3,000 livres less than the Commission had awarded the Trois-Rivières Ursulines. The community moved into the partially restored buildings on 1 August 1757, over two years after the fire. That date corresponded to the foundresses’ arrival in Quebec in 1639. 210

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Family Crosses Marie-André had been predicting Geneviève’s death for so long that it was perhaps a surprise when her sister finally succumbed on 12 May 1756 to the lung inflammation that had laid her low so often over the preceding thirty years. In her report to Marie-Catherine Hecquet that fall, Duplessis described her intimate bond with Geneviève in much the same terms as Hecquet had used many years earlier to describe her attachment to Marie-André. Duplessis wrote, “I was more bound to her by sentiment than blood.”30 Hecquet had likewise attributed her immediate attraction to Duplessis as a child to a “similarity of humours.”31 After the separation of the two childhood friends on the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marie-André had found a new soulmate in the cloister. Hecquet, on the other hand, had entered a loveless marriage and even found her attachments to her daughters tested. MarieCatherine had learned to live with what Marie-André now foresaw, a loneliness that would accompany her for the rest of her life: “She has left me in a great solitude.”32 Duplessis’s grief work, as she had affirmed in Geneviève’s circular letter to communities in France, would be to rededicate herself to the project she had shared with her sister: the defence of her community and its hospital. The mutual attachment of “les Dames Duplessis” – the Duplessis Ladies – was too well-known for her not to receive many condolences that invariably noted Geneviève’s indefatigable devotion to the hospital. One notable expression of concern was received from Vaudreuil before Geneviève’s death. If the memoirs of Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, who met the sisters around 1717 when he was housed at the hospital, are to be believed, the future governor-general had had a romantic interest in Geneviève in their youth. Montigny wrote that Geneviève “preferred to follow the fine example of her sister in taking religious vows rather than accept the hand of marriage offered to her by M. de Cavagnial, the son of M. the marquis de Vaudreuil.”33 On 29 March 1756 at the beginning of her fatal illness, his expression of sympathy to Marie-André stays within conventional formalities, but that could hardly be otherwise: “I learn with much sorrow, Madame, that Madame of the Infant Jesus is ill to the point of death. If my wishes for her are fulfilled, her health will be restored. She is important for your community and for the poor of the hospital. Please accept my 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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sincere expression of concern. I hope that when my letter reaches you, she will be in a state to receive my thousand-fold pledges of respect.”34 A second letter received a week before Geneviève’s death illustrates the esteem for the Duplessis sisters in the other Quebec women’s communities. It also suggests a connection back to the period in Geneviève’s youth around 1710–12 recounted in the Histoire de Ruma and alluded to by Dumont de Montigny. The former New England captive, current Ursuline novice mistress, and future mother superior of the Quebec Ursulines, Esther Wheelwright, wrote Marie-André to express her personal concern about her sister’s health. Wheelwright also took the occasion to congratulate Marie-André, whose community had just re-elected her superior, by citing “the good fortune and consolation that it has to be under your gracious direction.” “I hope,” she wrote, “that you will be so kind as to keep for me some small part in your dear friendship that I value more than my pen can express.” Wheelwight shared the name in religion “Infant Jesus” with Geneviève, but her description of her bond to her suggests a much stronger tie than with a person she had only come to know the previous year, when the Hôtel-Dieu nuns had taken refuge for three weeks with the Ursulines after their fire. She called Geneviève “this dear friend whom I love as tenderly as if she were a near relative to me.”35 Moreover, Wheelwright pointedly says that her affection is so strong that she feels compelled to add her personal letter to the one her community had sent (probably in response to Marie-André’s request for their prayers). Within the previous ten years, Esther had rebuffed two of her own blood relatives: her mother, who had written her from New England in 1747, and a nephew, who had visited her in Quebec in 1753–54. By rejecting their overtures, she confirmed the commitment she had made to remain in Canada as an Ursuline around 1710, when she had turned down entreaties from her family to return home. At that time, she was living in the Château Saint-Louis, under the sponsorship of Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, the father of the current governor. She could well have moved in circles that included Geneviève, who was herself trying to decide then if she should leave the world for the convent. In addition, Esther was the protégé of the Jesuit Vincent Bigot, the same priest who had preached at the ceremony in 1708, when Marie-André took the habit of a nun. There were thus multiple 212

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occasions for Esther and Geneviève to have met in the period just before both became nuns. Esther explained to her mother in 1747 that she had followed Christ’s injunction to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters behind.36 She could have seen Geneviève as a “near relative” in the new family of nuns she was entering. A year after her sister’s death, Marie-André acknowledged to Pontbriand just how irksome, if not exasperating, Geneviève could become when she thought the hospital’s interests were threatened. With the anniversary of Geneviève’s death approaching, Marie-André asked the bishop to offer mass for her sister and to forgive the trouble she had caused him: “I beg you to pardon her for the occasions of displeasure she might have given you so that she does not suffer on account of them in the other world.”37 Beginning about 1750, François-Xavier reported declining health that interfered with his preaching commitments. One hand trembled so much that he could not write or offer mass for four months, and he complained of rheumatism. As much as any identifiable disease, the Jesuit in his mid-fifties seemed worn out by the exhausting schedule of missions that kept him travelling in the provinces much of the year and by daily routines that could include three sessions in the pulpit and long hours in the confessional. Like his sister, he was frustrated to see his years of labour in jeopardy because of what he saw as the rapid increase of irreligiousness and moral decay that spread from the social elite to the general population: “However deplorable may be the state of our poor Canada, France is in a sadder and more lamentable condition before God; impiety, irreligion, disbelief, libertinage make the swiftest progress there on a daily basis.” As an example, he said that things had only degenerated in Orléans since his successful mission ten years earlier: “I found there more work to do than ever, and what distresses me, is that after having inspired the fear and love of the Lord in the people … there are so few ministers of the Lord who work to sustain these sentiments.”38 He placed the blame on the local pastors who failed to follow up on his work. He thus deflected the Jansenist critiques of his revival missions. Emotional preaching and assembly-line confessions were not likely to produce solid individual conversions, the Jansenists maintained. He never gave up on lobbying for his sisters’ community, any more than he gave up preaching. His letters of the 1750s are full of 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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accounts of his contacts with anyone who could help. However, as one person he enlisted in the effort reported to Marie-André, “everything is done here very slowly.”39 Above all, everything depended on patronage and the protection of the powerful. While Marie-André’s Jesuit brother had encouraging news about himself and his efforts for the hospital in the last letter she received from him before her death, he was distressed about the family of their younger brother Charles-Denis, who had been in Paris the last four years: “What a position for my sister-in-law and her dear daughter!” Charles-Denis had delayed returning to Quebec and had been avoiding the Jesuit for the last year: “My judgment is that he dare not appear before me.”40 No sooner had Denis obtained his commission as provost marshal in 1749 than he wrote the minister about the meagre resources allotted to the marshalsea: more horsemen were needed in both Quebec and Montreal, and he noted that his own salary of 500 livres was simply insufficient.41 In addition, he requested passage on the king’s ship to attend to family business in France; a lawsuit dealing with the Morampont estate required his presence. The following year, he reminded the minister of his requests for increased funding and for passage to France.42 Only in 1753 was he able to make the trip. Vaudreuil supported his request for a raise and told the minister that it was not possible for the provost marshal to live decently on 500 livres,43 but there is no record that the increase was granted, just as it seems that the Morampont estate was not settled in his favour. All this time, his financial and marital situation went from bad to worse. In 1752, François-Xavier had reported that the Guillimin family was so upset with Denis’s conduct that they wanted a financial separation between him and his wife to protect her interests. The Jesuit sympathized with his sister-in-law, whom he called a “virtuous and worthy wife,” and fretted that, given his brother’s irascible character, he anticipated his brother’s prospective trip to France would only cause him additional worries.44 The following year he expressed delight at Marie-André’s report that an illness that Charles-Denis had experienced had somewhat calmed him and that he appeared to show “his respectable spouse the affection and consideration she has earned,”45 and in October of that year Denis and his wife 214

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received the sacrament at the first communion of their daughter, to Marie-André’s great satisfaction.46 Any improvement was more apparent than real, however. His debts must have been substantial. In 1756, he owed 4,020 livres to his brother-in-law’s estate,47 and on 16 November of that year, a judgment was recorded against him for an unpaid obligation of 4,000 livres. The following summer, his house and a lot on the Côte de la Fabrique were seized and sold,48 as well as a property with a barn on the Petite Rivière Saint-Charles in the seigneurie of Saint-Gabriel in the vicinity of Quebec.49 In November, his wife was granted financial separation.50 In Quebec she had to face his creditors alone. Worse, Denis showed little willingness to return, to the growing frustration of his sister in Quebec and his Jesuit brother in France. François-Xavier tried to be positive in his initial reports. In August 1755, he said he had obtained the most favourable protections on his brother’s behalf at his disposal, and he saw encouraging signs that Denis was struggling to master his impulsive nature. Denis had promised to receive the sacraments frequently and the tears he shed at their last meeting seemed sincere. If Denis’s negotiations were successful, FrançoisXavier expected his brother to return to Canada that fall.51 But Denis did not return. The following April, François-Xavier again pointed to the positive, although complaining of the difficulty of reminding Denis of his family duties: “He still has his acute quick temper as soon as one gives him any advice that is not in accord with his way of thinking. Nonetheless, I thank God that he cannot be blamed for any moral dissoluteness.”52 In the fall of 1756, Marie-André must have been aware of the impending bankruptcy judgment that would come in November. When Denis did not appear on any of the boats arrived from France, she urged her correspondents there to persuade her brother to return; she received letters written in spring 1757 from four of them who reported on their efforts. François-Xavier assured her in January and March that Denis had promised to return.53 Two other priests, the Abbé de l’Isle-Dieu and François Sorbier de Villars of the Quebec Seminary, wrote that they had done their best, but had little news;54 one suspects that Denis had done his best to avoid them. A fellow officer, only thirty-five years old, at least got Denis to open up. Claude-Michel Sarrazin was the son of Michel Sarrazin, the 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Hôtel-Dieu’s distinguished long-term doctor earlier in the century. Although born in Quebec, Claude-Michel had left Canada for France, and happened to lodge quite near to Denis in Paris. In fact, they ate together frequently. Even if he acknowledged, like everyone else, Denis’s hot-tempered character, one senses in his reports a genuine sympathy that is missing in those of the older priests. In turn, Denis related to him the various pretexts that justified in his mind his reluctance to return. If he had delayed his departure, it was because he hoped for the Cross of Saint-Louis. But as Claude-Michel explained, even though Vaudreuil was disposed to recommend Denis for the honour, the governor backed off when he saw that Denis was not making prompt plans to sail.55 In his next letter, Claude-Michel reports what he considered the true reason for what he now realized was Denis’s decision never to return: “I think I have discovered that what prevents him from returning is some animosity toward the persons who are most dear to him there. Madame Duplessis, I believe, has written him too harshly; as you know, with his character, he cannot be manoeuvred by force.”56 He concluded by suggesting that Denis has been generally misunderstood, even by his sister: “You yourself, Madame, I insist, have believed falsehoods about him.” As he had previously said, Denis might have run through his money, but he was not debauched.57 Indeed, an earlier letter of François-Xavier had made it clear that Denis greatly feared his sister’s judgment: “He is so greatly apprehensive lest I criticize his impetuousness and his imprudence in the pursuit of what he proposes to obtain that he made me promise to assure you that he is doing his best.”58 As the direct witness of the consequences of Denis’s lack of responsibility toward his wife and daughter, Marie-André had little sympathy for her brother. While his property was being prepared for auction in his absence in Quebec, and his brother and family friends in Paris were urging him to return, Denis participated in a quasi-legal inquiry on the Pont Notre-Dame of Paris in April 1757. On 22 April, several art experts assembled in the studio of the painter Pierre Jauffroy at Denis’s request to determine if a portrait the artist had done of Duplessis resembled him, if it was painted in a workmanlike way, and if it was sturdy enough to be shipped to Canada. It is not surprising that the status-minded Duplessis would have commissioned a portrait. What 216

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the record does not show is why he requested the expert opinions. Did he truly believe the portrait was of inferior quality? Or was he merely trying to avoid paying for it? The experts found against Denis on all three questions. The portrait, they declared, was very much like the sitter, with fine colours, and sturdy enough to be shipped to places even more remote than Canada.59 This ineffectual attempt to officialize buyer’s remorse is typical of the youngest Duplessis’s failures that cascaded in the last years of his life. A second portrait was also in dispute, one of Pontbriand. The bishop had officiated at Duplessis’s wedding, but it is unlikely CharlesDenis would have commissioned the prelate’s portrait on his own account. His sisters had probably asked their brother to obtain it as part of their efforts to stay in Pontbriand’s good graces.60 Claude-Michel Sarrazin was correct. Denis never returned and ended badly. He was still in the French capital in December 1763 when he wrote Antoine de Sartine, the lieutenant-general of police in Paris, to request permission to visit Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan in the Bastille. Péan was imprisoned alongside Bigot, while on trial for corruption in the administration of the colony, in what was called the Affaire du Canada. Péan, like Duplessis, was a military officer, but came from a much more established family and was much more quickly promoted through the ranks, due to his organizational talents and his charm. He amassed an immense fortune as Bigot’s righthand man in various schemes to supply the army; in 1756, he had been awarded the Cross of Saint-Louis that Denis coveted. Denis had previously been granted permission to visit Péan in March of that same year. Attached to this December letter in the Archives of the Bastille is an internal note: “He talks like a crazy man. The Canadians say he is mad.”61 As family and friends had feared, Denis’s hot temper and resentment over not receiving the recognition he believed he merited had turned into a mania that made him totally ineffective.

Wartime Hardships in the Town, and Distant Providential Victories Canada was still on a war footing, as it had been since 1744, even though officially peace had come in 1748. Hostilities broke out again in North America in May 1754 when Major George Washington’s 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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forces killed and scalped Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville in what is now western Pennsylvania. The French government sent considerable reinforcements to Canada in 1755, but a declaration of war would have to wait until May 1756 when events in Europe required it. Marie-André had to face this intensification of hostilities in her partially rebuilt hospital and monastery without Geneviève. Plans for a reconstructed hospital were submitted to the ministry in Versailles in 1756, but funds now had to go to more direct military expenses. Arriving troop and supply vessels brought more contagious soldiers and sailors than even the pre-fire Hôtel-Dieu could have handled. The Hôpital-Général became a military hospital, perhaps the town’s principal one, and Pontbriand sent seven nuns from the Hôtel-Dieu to meet the increased workload there. Inflation pushed the prices of foodstuffs and supplies higher. Since able-bodied men were called to serve in the militia, finding workers for repairs or even service in the wards challenged Duplessis. She had the sympathetic ear of the bishop and the governorgeneral, but her bête noire, the intendant François Bigot, still controlled the local purse strings. He saw her nuns as uncooperative. As he put it in an April 1757 letter to Duplessis: “The ladies of the Hôtel-Dieu last winter refused to lend me a hand in finding sustenance for the people at a time when I saw the town on the verge of being short of bread.”62 In July, he accused Duplessis of not keeping the roads near Saint-Augustin in repair and threatened to have the work done at her expense.63 He did not cut the hospital off from supplies from the king’s storehouse that he controlled, but he more than once suggested that instead of running to him, they should do what he had done when they had not helped him: buy grain from habitants in the countryside. Marie-André’s marks of deference, such as New Year’s greetings and wishes on his saint’s day, were futile in the face of his belief that she controlled resources she would not commit. It was a considerable understatement when she wrote Pontbriand that Bigot “is not too well disposed toward us.”64 Life was difficult in the town, but major victories gave solace to Canadian pride during the first years of the war: Braddock’s defeat in July 1755, the fall of Oswego to Montcalm’s army in August 1756, and his win at Carillon in July 1758. She painted each as miraculous, 218

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much as in the Annales she had described the defeats of William Phips in 1690 and Hovenden Walker in 1711. They were signs that Providence intervened to protect the Catholic colony against its Protestant enemies. She attributed Jean-Daniel Dumas’s massacre of Braddock’s army squarely to the intervention of the Virgin, citing the witness of a British prisoner: “This man reported that the English saw over the French camp a lady dressed in white who extended her arms and that they fired more than four thousand musket shots at her. In truth, our soldiers came back saying that the English did not know how to aim and lost all their shots in the air.” In fact, the enemy never reached the French camp; they were surprised on a narrow forest road where the Canadians and their allies picked them off from the protection of the trees. Many of the English never saw their attackers. Her estimation of the forces on each side, however, is accurate: “2,500 English were repelled by eight hundred French and Indigenous warriors … our side killed them with the result that 1,700 were slain on the spot.”65 Duplessis called the surrenders of the garrison of Oswego (Chouaguen) and its nearby forts, which were surprised by a larger French force, miraculous because of their rapidity: “The most recent coup is completely miraculous; in four days we took three forts armed with cannons, and especially the one named Chouaguen where there was a 1,800 man garrison.” Just as she had in the case of the victory on the Monongahela, she included a detailed account of the booty taken. She noted that the day of the surrender was the Feast of the Assumption and thus linked it to the Virgin. Moreover, her account of the procession and Te Deum ceremony organized in the Quebec cathedral is almost as long as the description of the battle itself.66 She had written Montcalm to congratulate him on his first major victory, and he had replied on 27 August, “God worked a true marvel on this occasion.”67 No letter to Hecquet survives from 1757, and thus no report on Montcalm’s second victory, his capture of Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George in August of that year. As at Oswego, a great number of British were captured with little loss of French lives. The fall of the fort proved to be inconclusive because Montcalm did not press on to take Fort Edward on the Hudson, although it did prevent the enemy from advancing up Lake Champlain that year. 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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Fort William Henry was also significant because of Montcalm’s consternation at what happened after the battle. Despite his pledge to the surrendered British, the Indigenous allies of the French scalped a number of them and took even more prisoner. Montcalm and his French officers were able to rescue some. The French were dismayed at how easily the Canadian officers condoned what to them was unpardonable savagery and disregard for the rules of war.68 Montcalm noted in his journal that this “detestable situation that cannot be described to those who were not there, and which makes even the victory sorrowful to the victorious.”69 Duplessis had described the treatment of prisoners in her 1756 letter to Hecquet, where she distanced the French from what she portrayed as the routine cannibalism of the nations of the upper country. “They have an implacable hatred toward the English and inflict unheard of cruelties on them. They scalp them, cut them up in pieces, boil them in their kettles, and eat them. The French officers have to put themselves between the savages and the English to save their lives.”70 In fact, Duplessis was caught between her revulsion and her recognition that the allies were an indispensable part of the war effort. In her version, the onus falls solely on them, rather than on the colonial officials such as Vaudreuil who relied on these allies. She can only pray that they might one day be converted and thus change: “I beg God to bring to the faith all those among these savages who serve us so well,” despite the fact that Catholic Wabanakis had begun the killing at Fort William Henry. While the recently arrived French officers such as Montcalm and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville were horrified by the colonial troops’ acceptance of the treatment of prisoners – as much out of a sense of aristocratic honour as morality – Duplessis was Canadian enough to take the support of “these barbarians who serve us so well”71 for granted. Her description of Montcalm’s final great victory at Carillon doubled the losses of the British army to heighten its miraculous nature: “Only 4,000 of our men had made it to this site when the English arrived numbering nearly 20,000. This disparity did not dampen the courage of the French. The battle took place on 8 July. It was violent and the firing brisk and continuous on each side. It lasted from noon until eight o’clock, when the English troops folded and retreated, leaving in place piles of their dead. Their losses are 220

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estimated at five to six thousand men and ours at five hundred. This victory appeared so marvelous that even those who won the day are astonished at it.”72 Duplessis’s figures merely echoed the inflated reports that Montcalm sent out about both the enemy’s casualties and the size of its army.73 She counted Montcalm as a supporter and was impressed with his piety. The victors, she said, “attribute all the glory to God, and the piety of the army pushed Monsieur the Marquis de Montcalm their general to plant a cross in the camp.”74 Patriotism and Providence went hand in hand in her eyes. God protected Canadian arms in these battles because of the piety of its defenders. Montcalm’s aidede-camp Bougainville also called the victory at Carillon miraculous, but for a very different reason.75 Only miracles, he implied, could save Canada because of the sorry state of its leadership under Vaudreuil and Bigot, who opposed Montcalm’s war plans. The jealousy and backbiting among the colony’s leaders hindered operations on the ground, and Montcalm’s defeatism gave officials in Versailles grounds not to fund the war effort. Duplessis might have had her favourites among the triumvirate of governor, marquis, and intendant, but she would need support from all three, even Bigot. Duplessis closed the 1758 letter that narrates the victory of Carillon with two songs celebrating French superiority over the English in lieu of the gifts she often sent. The longer of the two, entitled “The Likeness and the Difference,” is a reworking of a satirical song that circulated in France in 1756 that compared the duc de Richelieu unfavourably to the duc d’Estrées, a rival general. In the original, Richelieu is “the favourite of Louis,” the profligate monarch; his rival d’Estrées is “the favourite of Mars,” the god of war. As Jack Warwick pointed out, the Canadian version lacks the malicious barbs of the French one.76 Moreover, its stanza contrasting the treatment of prisoners glosses over Montcalm’s dismay about the actions of his Indigenous allies. The English take some prisoners We take them by the thousands That’s the likeness The French treat them well But the English treat them like dogs. That’s the difference.77 1755–58 in a “land of crosses and suffering”

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The same letter of Duplessis discreetly acknowledged that, despite Carillon, 1758 was a bad year for Canada. With little comment, she mentioned significant losses that tightened the British noose around the colony’s heartland in the Saint Lawrence valley. The fortress of Louisbourg that guarded the entrance to the Saint Lawrence fell on 26 July, and on 27 August, Fort Frontenac (Kingston, Ontario) at the entrance to the Great Lakes to the west was lost to the English, “which closes them in on us.”78 The three great victories buttressed morale for a garrison town that was stretched to the limits of its endurance. For Duplessis, they were consolations sent by God in a time of real distress, distress caused by penury that is amply described in the same letters to Hecquet. 1759 would test her inner reserves and capacity as a leader.

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A Woman’s Siege and Occupation: Navigating a Year of Male Military Failures “Madame, with your permission and without leaving the respect that you are due, may I have the honour to tell you that ladies must not speak of war?” Here the marquis de Montcalm recounts a November 1758 soirée during which Jeanne-Charlotte de Fleury Deschambault, wife of Governor-General Vaudreuil, intervened in a discussion of the French general’s tactics during the previous season’s campaign. Montcalm cut her off when she tried to continue: “Madame, without leaving the respect that you are due, allow me to say that if Madame Montcalm were here, and she heard us speak of war with the marquis de Vaudreuil, she would keep silent.”1 Vaudreuil’s wife might have been more open in expressing her opinion than Montcalm’s, but there is no indication the Canadian governor-general allowed women any real voice in affairs either. The voice that he, like Montcalm, requested from Duplessis (and from women in general) was simply their prayers, along with celebrating their victories and mourning the dead. In practical terms, other than women’s roles in nursing and feeding their menfolk, Vaudreuil held women out chiefly as a motivator for his colonial militia. In his proclamations in May 1759, the Canadians were enjoined to fight to defend their religion, to safeguard their wives, children, and property, and to avoid the cruel treatment suffered by the Acadians.2 Women are almost invisible in the written record of the siege of Quebec, not because they were absent or passive, but because

the accounts that have survived were written by males who envisaged war in masculine terms. The correspondence of the generals, the diaries written by civilians and soldiers during the events, and the retrospective accounts after the fact view the siege from a male perspective.3 A single narration of the siege written by a woman has been published, and it was penned six years after the event by a nun, Marie-Joseph Legardeur, the mother superior of the HôpitalGénéral, who in 1765 addressed members of her order in France with the hope that they would lobby the French crown to make good on its obligations to her institution.4 Historians have followed the lead of the eighteenth-century warriors and administrators, who largely ignored women, by not attending to how women lived the siege.5 However, the Hôtel-Dieu archives contain a wealth of letters written in 1759 by and to Duplessis. Her correspondence with the intendant, with the governor general, with the bishop, with the British occupiers, and with priests and nuns in France, as well as her two retrospective epistolary accounts, written less than a month after the fall of the town, allow us to access the war experience more immediately through a woman’s eyes. A handful of similar letters from the Ursulines and Hôpital-Général have been published. Duplessis’s extensive unpublished correspondence makes it possible to envisage the siege and occupation from a woman’s perspective. As Carol Cohn points out, war and gender relations both turn on the dynamics of power; “war hinges on disempowering one’s opponent, and gender difference encodes power.”6 War puts not just the power differential that the men claimed over women to the test, but their own masculinity. Men envisaged war in terms of their superiority: their duty was to do battle to protect a sex too weak and too fearful to defend itself. However, wars have a way of getting away from their makers. When soldiers face defeat, their rationale for their superiority as males is called into question. Furthermore, when men lose control of events, in the ensuing power vacuum, women sometimes take matters into their own hands in ways that do not necessarily please their male masters. The loss of New France was a male failure, whether one blames the abandonment of the colony by Louis XV and his ministers, the shortsightedness and rivalries of Vaudreuil and Montcalm, or the corruption of Bigot. It is no surprise that there have been efforts to 224

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feminize the defeat by invoking the influence of the king’s mistress, the marquise de Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and that of François Bigot, Angélique Renaud d’Avène Des Méloizes, the wife of Michel-Jean-Hugues Péan, who was the intendant’s middleman with suppliers.7 Duplessis’s position as head of a hospital with the mission of serving the poor put her in contact with the war experience of every sort of woman in the colony: elite, middling, and poor townswomen, the wives of habitants on the hospital’s seigneuries, and, of course, the other female religious communities. To be sure, she had advantages many of these women lacked: she counted as a “dame,” a lady, in a status-conscious society, and she headed an institution with crucial religious, civilian, and military functions. Thus, although providing bread to the hospital was her never-ending preoccupation, it would have been unthinkable, and not just impossible as a cloistered nun, for her to participate in the January bread riot of lower-class women. Likewise, her duties explain why she was not evacuated to Montreal or Trois-Rivières at the beginning of the siege, as were other elite women. This chapter will set Duplessis’s experience, as seen in her correspondence in 1759, against that of other women and the role that male authority figures envisaged for women in their accounts of the siege and their meagre reports of women’s actual activities. The generals’ military failures would push women to go beyond this role as silent helpmates whom men gallantly defend according to the civilized rules of warfare. All the facets of women’s experience that have been evoked above – the frivolity of Bigot’s circle, the food crises, evacuation, nursing the wounded, praying for divine protection, the terror of bombing, relations with the English occupier – will come into play in this chapter. It shows how Duplessis insured the survival of her community and hospital by exploiting both men’s self-image as protectors of women and the space left for female agency when men faltered.

Finding Supplies with the Intendant and Bishop: Unruly Women and Staying within the Rules Vaudreuil and Montcalm had each sent envoys to Versailles in fall 1758 to alert the minister of the urgency of the situation. No supplies a woman’s siege and occupation

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or new troops could be expected until May when shipping resumed. While Duplessis and the colony waited for relief, she was preoccupied during the cold days of winter and early spring with keeping the hospital supplied with bread, without dipping into the store of seed wheat needed to plant crops in the spring. Her dealings with the intendant and the bishop between January and May 1759, when ships from France did arrive, allow us to gauge her relations with these two key officials who would play crucial roles during the siege and occupation. Bigot controlled access to the king’s storehouse and bakery in the town and issued rules for how and under what circumstances foodstuffs could be bought and sold in the war economy. She needed Pontbriand’s approval for major decisions, and he had his own resources and network of informants across the colony. Montcalm, who scorned the intendant as much as Duplessis did, reported on 2 January that four hundred women had rioted when Bigot announced a reduction in the bread ration.8 The January 1759 riots were not the first food riots by women. Other French officers report them in Montreal in December 17579 and in April and June 1758 in Quebec.10 Although Montcalm used the word “riot” (“émeute”) here, “demonstration” might be just as appropriate.11 These gatherings might have been unruly, but they were also a familiar tactic for gaining the attention of authorities. They were was not uncommon in France and were likely encouraged by the husbands of the women involved. They usually included a presentation of complaints by representatives of the women to the authorities, who often offered some concession.12 In response to the January 1759 event, Bigot adjusted the reduction up to a half pound a day.13 Lower-class women might become unruly when authorities failed to maintain adequate food supplies, but Duplessis had established channels for dealing with Bigot. Despite her distrust of the intendant, she went beyond minimal conventional civilities like the New Year’s greetings that she sent him and to other officials. On 22 January, he thanked her for an unspecified gift she had sent that seems to have been some kind of food. On 13 April, Bigot thanked the hospital for the gift of a lamb probably sent to mark the end of the Lenten period of abstinence from meat.14 He invariably replied with administrative politeness. Still, from the start, he made clear that she was not to expect too much in return. He blamed circumstances that would prevent 226

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him from doing what he professed he wanted to do for the hospital. As he put it in his 3 January reply to her New Year’s wishes, “When I refuse, it is because I am forced to, and I have as many regrets … about it as those who obtain nothing.”15 In early February, Duplessis ran up against a similar provisioning wall as the townswomen had faced in January, and she tried to exploit the ties that she had cultivated with the intendant. She began her request to Bigot with a dramatic declaration of the initiatives she had taken: “We have sent out to the south, to the north, to the Ile d’Orléans, and even as far as to Trois-Rivières, and everywhere wheat is selling for twenty livres cash, which was impossible for us to accept since we do not have this ready money. We did obtain a few bushels paid for by warrants to extend a bit our harvest … I have waited as long as possible to interrupt you to make known our needs, but I do not believe I should wait for the last sheaf of the little wheat we have remaining to mill to beg you to have pity on our community … You can relieve our shortage by releasing the ration for the hospital … that would allow us to hold back a few bushels to sow, because if we do not plant, our destitution will grow, and we will become more of a burden.”16 With her usual foresight, Duplessis had been planning ahead for the crucial spring planting and feared coming up short. If the intendant would cover the patients’ ration of bread, enough wheat could be put aside for seed. Her closing plea suggests that her tendency to brood on future disasters might have triggered her request: “that you relieve me from the deadly anxiety that such a sad situation puts me in.” Bigot replied immediately on 9 February with a refusal: “I find it impossible to see to the feeding of sixty individuals in your house. I flatter myself that I can continue to obtain for the town people the bread that I am making available to them. I advise you to try again in the nearby countryside and to promise to pay for wheat in cash and even to sign contracts for it.” Try again with cash, he said, and if sellers refuse the paper warrants, report them to me.17 However, Bigot did not cut the hospital off completely. Several days later, on 12 February, he responded to a request from the hospital bursar by sending two small barrels of flour (quarts de farine). He noted that her need must have been exceptional, “persuaded that it could only be straitened circumstances that makes you undertake a woman’s siege and occupation

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this request to me.” This was the same amount he had sent occasionally the previous summer, and he continued sending this amount periodically during the next months as the town awaited the arrival of the resupply ships. His distrust is indicated in remarks in his next letter that show he kept a tight watch on the hospital’s affairs: he has heard the patient load has dropped; he suspects that some patients are being given too large a ration.18 Staying within the rules with the intendant seems to have won Duplessis no special treatment for her hospital, no increase in the daily ration such as the townswomen had obtained by taking to the streets. Bigot could not write the hospital off, although it was low in his priorities, and while he made sure it had enough to function, Duplessis’s gestures of civility and her pleas did not budge him. She continued to press him in firm but civil letters. On the other hand, mutual confidence had become the foundation of Duplessis’s relationship with the bishop. Upon receiving Bigot’s February refusal, she sent it and her letter off to Bishop Pontbriand for his reaction: “I have a bit of reluctance to follow the advice he is giving me and beg your lordship to indicate to me what I must do.” She saw Bigot’s recommendation to pay cash as confirmation of her longstanding assertion that everyone thought the hospital had more resources than it actually did: “Although we are poor, we are thought to pay well.” The bishop’s advice was brief; he did not approve Bigot’s proposal, and suggested that to raise any needed money she look for bills of exchange on the royal treasury (lettres de change) that had a higher credit rating than the warrants.19 She would probably have rejected the same proposal if it had come from Bigot. On 2 April, a few weeks after she had been re-elected mother superior on 12 March, the bishop gave her a blanket dispensation from clausura to allow carpenters, masons, surgeons, etc. to enter the monastery as necessary for her entire three-year term. She needed Pontbriand’s ecclesiastical authorizations, of course, but she also turned to him for practical advice and reassurance when she was anxious or uncertain, even when he could not provide solutions. Although he addressed her as “my dearest daughter,” in some ways, he was more like a fond son on whom an elderly parent relies in emergencies.20 On 18 April, Pontbriand issued a pastoral letter in which he called for prayers and repentance to avert God’s wrath on Canada. Two of 228

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the scandalous examples he cites of the colony’s sins contrast the positions of elite and low-status women. He cited “impious costumes that mock, or to speak more clearly, display hatred of religion.”21 In his journal, Montcalm criticized the bishop for damaging morale by revealing the sins of the elite and the weakness of the colony; the marquis also made explicit what Pontbriand veiled in paraphrase. During the pre-Lent carnival, Montcalm noted, “Entertainments, despite the extreme destitution … have been very animated. There have never been as many balls, games of chance … The governor-general, the intendant authorized them.”22 These soirées included participants masquerading in nuns’ and bishops’ garb,23 thus mocking, at least indirectly, Duplessis and her community. In his letter, Pontbriand also denounced in veiled terms a way in which non-elite women were drawn into the war economy: “houses devoted publically, as it were, to crime.”24 Montcalm again made this reference explicit: brothels set up near the town’s ramparts,25 likely to service the troops. Ladies such as Madame Péan were hostesses at soirées where they partied freely with military officers and administrative officials. At the other end of the social ladder, destitution pushed women into sex work for soldiers. In her cloister, Duplessis would have only heard about these events. She responded to the bishop’s directive by organizing a novena, nine days of intense prayer, the expected contribution of women, and especially nuns, to the war effort.26

Disorganized Evacuation and Orderly Retreat When the fleet of French cargo ships arrived at Quebec in May, they brought welcome supplies and news. They came with enough foodstuffs to feed the troops through July, although not enough to increase the hospital’s ration. Duplessis must have requested more flour from the king’s warehouses, because on 26 May, Bigot wrote to her (rather than to the bursar) bluntly, “We do not have sufficient quantities to give to the soldiers and militiamen who will fight for the defence of the colony, and it is only they who will have any. You must eat the livestock.”27 The boats also brought letters from France, an 18 February one from François Sorbier de Villars, the director of the Missions étrangères, and at least one from her Jesuit brother dated 25 February. a woman’s siege and occupation

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Villars informed Duplessis of the welcome news that La Porte’s successor in the ministry of the marine looked favourably on her three requests of the previous fall and that the Commission des secours had awarded the community 4,000 livres.28 However, François-Xavier’s letter brooded about the danger to Canada, where he saw God’s “holy religion on the verge of being destroyed,” and the danger to which his sister would be personally exposed, if the English took the city.29 This threat was made concrete by a third letter from a Congrégation de Notre-Dame nun, then in La Rochelle, that could only have fuelled Duplessis’s apprehension. Sister Saint-Arsène had survived James Wolfe’s siege and bombardment of Louisbourg in July 1758, but had been deported to France, where she languished: “Never has such a cruel siege been seen as the one we have come out of; I cannot think about it without being terrified, and what increases our suffering, is the thought of how much our dear Canada is in danger of being subjected to the same fate.”30 Siege, exile, and the rule of heretics could be the future that also awaited the Quebec nuns. This was the last shipment of letters from France that Duplessis likely received that year. Montcalm’s emissary Bougainville also returned on the ships with news of the impending English invasion up the Saint Lawrence. Before the end of May, word reached Quebec that Vaudreuil and Montcalm’s confidence that the river would be an obstacle to Wolfe’s fleet, as it had been for Admiral Hovenden Walker in 1711, was misplaced. As Duplessis put it in a letter written after the fall of Quebec, “By 24 May we learned that a huge English fleet was in our river with a favourable wind; it made its way and avoided with success all the dangers of the Saint Lawrence and came quite close to our harbour without entering it.”31 Vaudreuil and Montcalm had envisaged a staged evacuation of women and children, but their mistaken confidence in the difficulty the English would have navigating the river meant that their plans were implemented with great haste and disorder.32 On 23 May, Vaudreuil issued orders that able-bodied men on the northern and southern shores of the river above Quebec and the Ile d’Orléans report to the town for militia duty; their unprotected wives and children should retreat several miles into the forest with their livestock.33 Troops were sent to enforce this order. In the town itself, at the beginning of June, Montcalm issued a proclamation that all those who could not 230

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contribute to the defence of the capital or were susceptible to fear should withdraw to Trois-Rivières or Montreal.34 Being the prey of fear, of course, was traditionally attributed to women. On 5 June, the schooner Minerve left Quebec for Montreal with ladies and young women of the upper classes.35 On 24 June, the inhabitants of the lower town were instructed to move their belongings to the upper town or farther away as soon as the British ships were sighted off the port.36 Although the town’s fortifications were inadequate, Montcalm complained that supplies and wagons were diverted from the walls in order to build a bomb shelter at the home of Madame Péan on the Rue Saint-Louis.37 On the other hand, women and children, especially lower-class ones, suffered from the hastily implemented measures. Families of tradesmen found it difficult to evacuate the town, and many remained. The generals’ idea that the families from the farms along the river could wait for a French victory in makeshift cabins in the woods was ill-conceived. Compliance with Vaudreuil’s orders was sluggish at best. On the Ile d’Orléans, women and children died because supplies had not been stocked to feed them as they awaited evacuation to the north shore.38 It proved impossible to move all the livestock when the families were evacuated, and the cattle that the Indigenous allies of the French did not pillage39 remained along the coast to feed the English when they landed.40 Bishop Pontbriand, who prided himself on giving detailed instructions, as he had done after the 1755 fire, had in mind a more orderly evacuation for the three Quebec communities of nuns than the civil authorities had managed for the lay population. Although he was planning to leave the town himself along with Bigot and Vaudreuil, he tried to reassure Duplessis on 13 June: “Be calm, our very dear daughter; I will only leave Quebec when all arrangements have been made. I will see you several times.”41 By 26 June, Wolfe’s ships arrived at the Ile d’Orléans, and the next day English soldiers began disembarking. The siege was now imminent. Before the bishop left the town to take up residence in its outskirts at Charlesbourg near the French line of defence at Beauport, he sent a list of provisional confessors to the mother superiors of the three communities on 27 June, and two days later he sent them a circular letter of instructions. In the absence of his deputy, he authorized them to allow entry as needed into their monasteries, to choose confessors a woman’s siege and occupation

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10.1 This contemporary British map shows the bombardment which began from the heights of the former Duplessis seigneurie at Lauzon on 12 June and which destroyed the cathedral and former Duplessis residence on the Rue de la Fabrique on 22 July; the site of the Hôpital-Général where the Hôtel-Dieu nuns took refuge on 13 June; the battle of the Falls of Montmorency on 31 July; and the battle of the Plains of Abraham on 13 September.

from an approved list, and to borrow money if necessary, and he forbade taking novices or allowing novices to profess, among other provisions. Without giving the superiors carte blanche, the bishop allowed great discretion on their part: “On all these points as well as on several others that may come up, the mother superior will act according to the requirements of the case.”42 He probably saw his detailed instructions as reassurance, since they took into account many eventualities. However, they did not calm Duplessis, who the same day wrote back a letter that began “On the eve of the terrible siege that we await.” She informed the bishop of plans she had made for sending their barnyard animals to the country in the care of a few nuns for safekeeping. She added, “We will see them leave with sorrow, but we will have many others before we join them. We will have much baggage to be carted. We begin today.” In her mind, the nuns who would accompany the barnyard animals were an advance guard for the rest of the community. Pontbriand replied with ridicule: “Do you want to make a fool of yourself? Is this grounds to leave? What is the benefit? I was talking lightly when I said that I consented. My circular letter requires stronger grounds. I do not want you to envisage this eventuality, and I am surprised that you are thinking about it.”43 Indeed, in his circular letter, he had envisaged the possibility of one community taking refuge with another or even dispersing into private homes in the city or countryside, but did not authorize plans for wholesale evacuation. What for him was one of many eventualities was for Duplessis license to leave the threatened town. She had obviously already been thinking in terms of an orderly evacuation. What neither Portbriand nor Duplessis foresaw at this point – and for that matter, nor did the military men Vaudreuil or Montcalm – was that they were not just on the eve of a “terrible siege” that would blockade the city. Over the next few days, Wolfe’s troops easily took control of the heights at Pointe Lévy across from the city that Montcalm and Vaudreuil had left undefended and from which Quebec could be bombarded. Wolfe mounted his cannons on the cliffs of Georges Duplessis’s former seigneurie of Lauzon, which his daughter had likely visited in her youth. The townspeople were dismayed that their military leaders were doing nothing and demanded action. Finally, on the night of 12 July, a woman’s siege and occupation

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a party of about a thousand militia and local men, including boys from the Jesuit college, led by Jean-Daniel Dumas, crossed the river to storm the cannons. The bombing started that same evening, and the pastor of the town’s parish described in his journal how women and children gathered and waited for their attacking men to put an end to it. He portrayed them in terms of the roles typically reserved for women in times of war: fear, weeping, and prayer: “By two o’clock in the morning, people were waiting in the town with impatience for the party of Monsieur Dumas to put an end to the cannonade and the bombardment of the English that held the whole town in the grip of fear and especially the women with their children, who were in large number near the citadel, in tears, lamentations and prayer, which were unceasing among them, and they grouped themselves in clusters to say the rosary.”44 The British immediately demonstrated that their cannon range extended to the entire city, upper as well as lower. One bomb fell within fifty feet of the Saint-Jean gate, in the neighbourhood of the hospital.45 Meanwhile, the inexperienced and poorly led party that had crossed the river returned in failure, never having fired on the English. The next morning, women, finding their menfolk unable to defend them, fled with their children to the suburbs and countryside as soon as the town gates opened.46 Duplessis and her community experienced the same fear. She wrote the mother superior of the Hôpital-Général that same day.47 In her account written after the siege to communities in France, Duplessis said that the English “began to bombard the city and did it with a sharpness that much terrified us and which obliged us to ask his lordship our bishop permission to take refuge at the HôpitalGénéral.”48 Pontbriand’s initial reaction was a stern rebuke, and he tried to shame Duplessis by accusing her of unseemly fear. The authorities, in fact, were trying to reassure the terrified population that day. Montcalm visited the city, and the bishop wanted the nuns to set an example by not giving in to the panic. In his 13 July letter he minimized the danger and made light of the possibility of casualties, even deaths – at the most two nuns might die, he said – and asked pointedly who would care for the poor and sick. “Your sisters are not yet hardened to war. Even if a few bombs fell on your establishment, they would not set it afire. They would only make a hole in

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the floors, and I am persuaded that not even two nuns will be killed in the whole bombardment. Your dispersal will be too rushed. You must summon up your courage, and who will care for the patients and the poor? The Ursulines will soon be in the same situation. All the priests would desert.” Duplessis had often asked the bishop to shore up her courage when committing to loans over the course of the last few years. Now he accused her of giving in to fear rather than strengthening her community for the ordeal: “Strengthen your sisters and for that, I beg the Lord to fortify you. Because to speak frankly, I think you are a bit of a coward.”49 Still, a postscript acknowledged that he did not expect to persuade her and authorized her to follow her inclination: “There is no cure for fear; do what you wish. The mother superior of the Hôpital-Général indicates to me that she will gladly share with you.”50 He as much as admitted now that his June circular letter had been largely irrelevant; it was based on the supposition that he would be far from Quebec. However, since he remained in the vicinity, and could visit the Hôpital-Général easily, he expected to be consulted. In fact, he came there almost daily since Charlesbourg was nearby.51 Later that day, twenty-eight nuns from the hospital made their way down to the Hôpital-Général on the Saint-Charles River, out of cannon range. They brought with them their bedding and a food supply – bread, eggs, meat, and peas – so as to be as little a burden as possible. They were joined that evening by the Ursulines, whose monastery had actually been damaged by the bombing. The next day a smaller contingent of seven hospital nuns arrived. Five converse sisters had been left behind to protect against looting.52 On 13 July, the town’s lower-class women took matters into their own hands, just as they had demonstrated in January, when Bigot had reduced the food ration. They had to fend for themselves by fleeing out the gates when military leaders failed to protect them. Fear was certainly a factor, but it was a reasonable one. Duplessis reacted to the same male failures with equal determination in the deliberate way that was her trademark. Her foresight allowed her negotiations with administrators, whether the intendant or the bishop, to lead to outcomes that she had a hand in designing. Unlike Vaudreuil, Montcalm, and Pontbriand, Duplessis organized an orderly retreat.

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Women and the Rules of War Conditions at the Hôpital-Général were already crowded. Since the 1755 fire, it had served as the primary military hospital where soldiers who arrived sick from France were treated. Family members of the nuns and refugees of all sorts now packed its halls and outbuildings. Its nuns gave their sisters from the Hôtel-Dieu their own cells. The church was turned into a ward for the sick and wounded, and all three communities gathered in the adjoining choir area, separated by a grille from the main church, for their religious offices throughout the day. The Ursulines were on one side facing the two Augustinian hospital communities on the other.53 The communities had visited each other separately in the past, and the Ursulines had housed the Hôtel-Dieu community briefly after the 1755 fire, but never had the three been together. In her report to Pontbriand written the day after their arrival, Duplessis asked his permission for two items. The authorities wanted to set up a first aid station just outside the Saint-Jean gate using furniture and supplies from the Hôtel-Dieu and staffed in part by its nuns. Patients would then be directed to the Hôpital-Général. Would he permit this exception to clausura?54 Second, to reduce crowding there, Duplessis suggested that several sisters be lodged with family members in the area or at Saint-Augustin. Pontbriand replied enthusiastically to the first request, and refused the second. He wanted the nuns to maintain community life as much as possible: “I do not grant permission to visit or lodge with relatives. Stay where you are in a prayful attitude. That is what you have to do. Ready yourself to rise higher if you can.”55 This immediate experience of Duplessis and her community must be situated in the context of how the opposing generals viewed the campaign. Montcalm and Wolfe were agreed at least on one thing: it should be fought according to the standards of war prevalent in Europe. In fact, the British and French governments had signed an agreement for how prisoners of war in military hospitals would be treated. The two generals saw battles as staged affairs between uniformed soldiers; non-combatants, certainly women and children, and even civilian males, were not to be molested.56

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10.2 This view by Richard Short shows the destruction caused by the bombing in the neighbourhood of the Duplessis home. On the right is the Jesuit college. In the centre, where the Rue de la Fabrique (on the right leading to the cathedral) meets the Rue Saint-Joseph (to the left), is the home (with a porch) of Jacques Imbert, the current treasurer of the marine, the post once held by Georges Duplessis.

Wolfe could be accused of ignoring these gentlemanly rules of war early on. While the bombardment of a besieged town was not unprecedented in Europe, Wolfe’s destruction of Quebec went far beyond trying to silence its defenders’ batteries that hampered his access upriver. Very early in the bombing, shots coming from the seigneurie de Lauzon damaged sites in the upper city dear to Duplessis. On 18 July, the English directed their bombs to the neighbourhood of the Hôtel-Dieu. One destroyed a room of the building. Munitions had been stored in other rooms that fortunately did not explode.57 On 22 July, the cathedral burned along with the entire block of houses on the Côte de la Fabrique that included the former Duplessis family home.58 After the siege, Duplessis summed up the effects of the two months of daily bombing on the hospital and monastery in her letter to communities in France: “Fifteen bombs that did astonishing damage fell on our buildings, and a quantity of others around the house. So many bombs fell around our property that heaps of them have been piled up there. They broke down the trees in the garden, ploughed up the vegetable plots, and ruined all our hope for this year. Thieves pillaged the rest.”59 Despite her having left converse sisters to watch over the property, and despite the hanging of pillagers by the authorities, much property was lost to looters throughout the city. Wolfe was attacking civilian morale as much as the town’s military defences. He said as much in an episode that featured women and that involved playing loose with the rules of war. On 21 July, his forces succeeded in landing at Pointe-aux-Trembles above the town, where they made prisoner two hundred women who had sought refuge there. He took pride in treating them well, especially the elite ladies among them, and they were allowed to return to Quebec in a prisoner exchange after a few days. But as the French officers complained to him at the time, taking women prisoners needlessly contravened the rules of war. Montcalm noted in his journal that Wolfe only wanted to receive the prettiest ones of the group.60 Wolfe’s subordinate officer George Townshend drew caricatures that targeted Wolfe in the same vein. “Send me fifty beautiful virgins,” one of his cartoons has Wolfe saying.61 Wolfe seems to have had a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, by treating the women well, even permitting a priest captured 238

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10.3 George Townsend’s satirical cartoon evokes Wolfe’s interview with elite women after their capture on 21 July at Pointe-auxTrembles and Townsend’s disapproval. The petitioning women ask if Wolfe will spare the town. He replies using French, “that depends … more petitions … Send me quickly fifty beautiful virgins and we will see.”

with them to give spiritual comfort, he demonstrated his gentlemanly conduct. He also used the women to send back a message. As one Canadian account puts it, “He advised them strongly not to return to the town that in a few days would be reduced to ashes.”62 Duplessis, although at the Hôpital-Général, would have heard echoes of this event.63 At the end of July, a second episode in the campaign engaged the nuns’ nursing skills directly and had lasting consequences for the hospital. Previous wars in North America had been frontier ones that featured raids by Canadians deep into British territory or into contested areas. In the heart of Canada, European-style battles were possible. However, Wolfe found it difficult to identify a suitable site for the decisive battle he envisaged; Montcalm’s tactic was simply to wait him out, hoping the English would be forced to leave when cold weather arrived. On 31 July, Wolfe finally mounted a large attack against the French fortifications near the Montmorency Falls, the only major battle of his campaign until the Plains of Abraham six weeks later. Casualties at Montmorency were much higher on the British side than the French, and a few wounded British soldiers, at least those who were saved from being scalped by Vaudreuil’s Indigenous allies, were brought to the hospital. Among them was a Captain David Ochterlony who was rescued by French soldiers and who wrote to Wolfe praising the good care that he was receiving.64 Although Ochterlony died at the hospital on 14 August, Wolfe expressed his gratitude, first to his rescuers and later to the nuns who had cared for him: “In one of the letters of this same general, he indicated all his gratitude for the consideration that the lady hospitallers who cared for this officer showed. He declared that if fortune favoured his arms, he would order their house be honoured and respected.”65 Wolfe’s first letters had complained bitterly to Vaudreuil about French complicity with the scalping of wounded or captured soldiers. However, this episode showed the British officers that papist French nuns could be trusted to give equal treatment to their wounded compatriots and to enemy prisoners of war. At the same time, Wolfe’s gratitude signalled to the nuns that good relations were possible even with Anglican heretics. The British had their own military hospitals situated on the Ile

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d’Orléans, but they recognized the superiority of the ones directed by Canadian nuns. Duplessis does not mention this incident in her surviving writings, but Hôtel-Dieu nuns were certainly part of the care given Ochterlony. Many Hôtel-Dieu nuns already had experience at the Hôpital-Général. In 1757, while the Hôtel-Dieu was recovering from its fire, arriving soldiers with contagious diseases had been directed to the Hôpital-Général. Ten nuns of that community had died caring for them, and Pontbriand had sent temporary replacements from the Hôtel-Dieu. Legardeur says, in fact, that gratitude for this past aid made the Hôpital-Général nuns eager to welcome their sisters fleeing the bombardment of the town in 1759.66 Duplessis was uncharacteristically optimistic about how long the stay at the Hôpital-Général would last. In her 14 July letter she had talked about arrangements “for only a little time because I hope the battle will soon occur.” However, Vaudreuil and Montcalm continued their defensive strategy of waiting Wolfe out. Wolfe himself could not decide on another major encounter but added to his destruction of the besieged town by bombs a brutal campaign of burning the farms and crops of the habitants in the territory he controlled from Baie Saint-Paul to the Chaudière River on both sides of the Saint Lawrence. Wolfe justified this destruction on two accounts. His troops were harassed by Canadian militiamen defending their homes. All ablebodied Canadian men formed this militia; they were poorly uniformed, if uniformed at all, making the distinction between combatant and non-combatant hard to draw for the British soldiers. Second, the scalping practices of Vaudreuil’s allies that shocked Montcalm as much as they did Wolfe were advanced as justification. Matthew C. Ward has thoroughly assessed Wolfe’s scorched-earth campaign in the light of eighteenth-century standards of warfare. He concluded that while they were not “necessarily outside the established ‘rules of war,’” they were of “dubious morality,” and that even Wolfe’s immediate subordinates were troubled by them.67 The property damage Wolfe’s New England Rangers inflicted was enormous, and there were incidents of killing and even scalping civilians. However, the depredations were chiefly to property, and did not come close to the terrorizing tactics, which routinely included killing, scalping, and

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taking prisoners for ransom, that the allies of the French inflicted on New England settlements.68 As late as 1757, Vaudreuil had authorized such an attack on three hundred Palatine settlers at German Flats in the Mohawk River valley. Duplessis had no time to reflect on the rules of war during her stay at the Hôpital-Général, if one judges by her surviving correspondence. It shows her preoccupied with finding supplies for her charges. The food supplies that Duplessis had brought ran out, and her community could not count on the supplies of the HôpitalGénéral nuns. She turned to the colony’s three leaders, who now had their headquarters at Charlesbourg. On 7 August, Bigot wrote: “I am in despair about not being able to obtain foodstuffs for you … Meat must replace bread. Have some bought. Saving money is not at issue to preserve life. I have my hands more than full, and despite all my best efforts, cannot supply all needs.”69 Bigot’s advice to spend money on meat purchases reflects his longstanding assessment that Duplessis had resources she hesitated to commit. Three days later, Vaudreuil could do no better.70 Always thinking ahead, Duplessis realized that with all ablebodied men serving in the militia, it would be difficult to harvest the wheat crop that had just ripened. In fact, army officers reported major incidents of desertion as militiamen returned to the Montreal area for the harvest. To remedy the situation, Vaudreuil and Montcalm released some of their troops for the task, and Duplessis must have requested her share, because on 26 August, Vaudreuil asked her to furnish a list of names and their companies before he would authorize this help.71 The hospital’s major agricultural holdings were at Saint-Augustin, behind French lines. She had reported to Hecquet the previous year that women had had to join in the harvest,72 and again they likely joined any soldiers Duplessis was able to obtain in 1759. Likewise, women replaced able-bodied men by helping to ferry supply wagons. At the end of the month, her situation must have been worse, because Pontbriand reported on 26 August that despite his strongest efforts, he could obtain nothing for the two refugee communities at the Hôpital-Général: “I have found everything unrelenting in trying to obtain bread for you and the Ursulines.” His advice was characteristically both practical and spiritual: “You must do like the Poor 242

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Clares and hope to be able to gather a hundred pounds of flour in the country parishes. I do not see any other solution.” They should imitate the Franciscan nuns who lived by begging daily alms. Of the three leaders to whom Duplessis turned, the bishop was the one who was eventually able to purchase food. Two months later he wrote Duplessis that the supplies which he sent her and the Ursulines from Charlesbourg could be considered a gift that they need not repay.73

Women Deal with Their Generals’ Defeat While there were skirmishes that brought wounded French and English soldiers to the hospital during August and the first weeks of September, Thursday 13 September was an entirely different matter. Retrospectively, the battle on the Plains of Abraham has come to symbolize the fall of New France, but none of the participants on either side saw the colony’s defeat as irreversible. The actual battle began about ten a.m. and was over in half an hour. The English pursued the retreating French troops but did not prevent many, like the wounded Montcalm, from taking shelter within the town walls. Other French soldiers made their way back down the escarpment toward Beauport. A contingent of colonial militia troops covered their escape by defending access to the pontoon bridge across the Saint Charles River. This action was near enough to the Hôpital-Général for the nuns to observe. According to Legardeur, “Several Canadian officers with large families met the same fate [as Montcalm]. We saw this slaughter from our windows.”74 By about noon, the British decided to regroup on the battlefield and this allowed the retreating French to make their way back to Beauport. Wounded soldiers began to arrive en masse at the hospital, some of them relatives of the nuns. “We were surrounded by the dead and dying who were being brought to us by the hundreds all together, of whom some were closely related to us. We had to hide our legitimate sorrow and seek out where to put them … imagine our perplexity and our terror.”75 The French still controlled the town itself and Beauport, but had retreated to the east side of the Saint Charles River, leaving the hospital in a sort of no man’s land. “The enemy was master of the countryside and at our doorstep; at risk from the fury of the soldiers, we had everything to dread.”76 a woman’s siege and occupation

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That evening about six o’clock, Vaudreuil called a council at which it was decided to evacuate the army immediately to positions on the Jacques Cartier River, further up the Saint Lawrence. The evacuation went on all night, unnoticed by the British. The Hôpital-Général, like the town, where only a small garrison remained with the townspeople, had been abandoned by the French army. That night, those nuns who were not caring for the wounded gathered for prayer. “The three communities … prostrated themselves at the foot of the altars to beg divine mercy – like Moses, we only prayed with our hearts.” Between ten p.m. and midnight, their prayers were interrupted. Legardeur continues her account: “The silence and consternation that reigned among us allowed us to hear the loud and repeated knocks at our doors. Two young nuns who carried soup to the patients could not avoid being there when the portal was opened. The pallor and terror that had overcome them touched the officer, and he prevented the whole guard from entering.” The officer had been sent by Brigadier-General George Townshend, who had taken charge after Wolfe’s death. Legardeur noted, “He ordered the three mother superiors to come to him. He knew that the others had found refuge with us. He told the three of us that we should all be reassured, that a part of their army would encircle and take over our house so that the French army, which he knew was not far away, could not take their entrenchments by force.”77 Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay, who held the post of king’s lieutenant, was in charge of the beleaguered town. He was a military officer from a distinguished family of Canadian nobility. His older sister, Marie-Charlotte de Ramezay de Saint-Claude de la Croix, had just stepped down as mother superior of the Hôpital-Général earlier that year, and had reassumed the position of bursar. Since mid-August he had been a patient in his sister’s hospital, and was there, in fact, when the battle took place on the Plains of Abraham. He left immediately, however, to retake command of the town upon hearing of Montcalm’s defeat, despite his ill health. In deciding to withdraw his army from Beauport, Vaudreuil had sent directions to Ramezay to hold out only as long as food supplies allowed. Vaudreuil also sent a draft of articles of surrender. By 17 September, when Ramezay received some food and, more importantly, news that Lévis had rallied the soldiers upriver at the Jacques Cartier 244

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and had arrived at Saint-Augustin, less than a day’s march from the city, it was too late: Ramezay had already agreed to surrender. The articles were signed the next day, and the British entered the city. Women figured prominently in the reasons given for the town’s surrender. One witness calculated their number at four thousand.78 Ramezay himself cited two thousand six hundred women and children.79 On 15 September, the town’s remaining principal merchants and bourgeois drafted a request to Ramezay that urged surrender. They begged that their wives and children be spared the rage of the English: “What a spectacle for this small remaining group to see their wives and children immolated to their fury.”80 They asserted that the military officials should not sacrifice the few remaining men in the town; these husbands were needed to provide for their families: “Endeavour to preserve them for their wives and children.”81 In May, Vaudreuil had urged Canadians to fight to defend their property, women, and children. In September, the Canadians cited their families as a reason for saving what was left of their possessions in the town by surrendering it. While property damage had been high because of the bombardment and subsequent looting, there had been few civilian deaths. Wolfe had succeeded in breaking Canadian morale.82 Having failed to defend their women and children from the British, Canadian males attributed their surrender to this same duty to protect their wives and offspring. The sixth article of capitulation dealt with religion and gave protections to religious orders as part of permitting the practice of Catholicism: “The free exercise of the Roman religion is granted, likewise safe-guards to all religious persons.”83 The favourable experiences of the British at the Hôpital-Général must have aided Wolfe’s temporary successor, George Townshend, to accept this clause. The Hôtel-Dieu community returned to the upper city on 21 September. Legardeur of the Hôpital-Général recorded that “[t]he reverend mother Sainte-Hélène … touched when she saw us weighed down under the burden of work that increased daily, left twelve of her dear daughters who stayed until autumn and who were a great help to us.”84 Jérôme de Foligné described the very real uncertainties that awaited the town women when they returned after the surrender with rhetorical flourish: “It was on this day that we saw our unfortunate women come out of the woods dragging behind them their small a woman’s siege and occupation

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children, devoured by flies, without clothes, bewailing their hunger. What dagger blows for the poor women who did not know if they still had husbands and where their men would take them and with what aid they would give their poor children, at the beginning of a season during which it is difficult to protect oneself when one is in one’s household.”85 Like the Hôtel-Dieu nuns, they returned to bombed quarters needing repair, unsure where they would find food and firewood to survive the winter. However, the nuns discovered upon their return an advantage that ordinary women lacked. On 22 September, patients were admitted to the Hôtel-Dieu, but only a few. The daily register for admissions for that date notes: “The English, having reserved and taken our house for their sick troops, and having forbidden us from admitting any others without their orders or consent.”86 For the next two decades there would be few civilian patients.87 The Duplessis sisters had spent the last ten years fighting off attempts to turn the Hôtel-Dieu into a de facto military hospital. It would now be one until 1784, but changed circumstances meant that its repurposing as a British military hospital would contribute to its salvation. The regular payments from the British to the Hôtel-Dieu over twenty-five years aided its eventual solvency and assured that immediate necessities would be secured.88

A Mother Superior Navigates Occupation Whatever her dismay might have been, Duplessis attacked the crisis with her habitual determination and sense of practicalities. Repairing the monastery for the winter and securing foodstuffs and firewood were the most immediate needs. She wrote Robert Monckton, the British commander at the time, to describe how the state of the building threatened his officers: “Our house was neither burned nor flattened by the bombs and cannons, but it is so much in disrepair and it has rained so excessively in it that in the room where your sick officers are located, one can scarcely find a spot to place their beds because the ceiling is so full of holes. There are several chimneys damaged by cannonballs that put us in danger of a fire.” Roof and chimney repairs were urgent. She requested permission to bring lime and sand from Beauport. The condition of their farms and garden showed that they could not provide food to their patients or 246

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themselves: “Our fields have been ruined by the armies and cattle so that we haven’t gotten a blade of straw, and our garden plots were pillaged by all sorts of people who took away what the artillery did not destroy.” She added that the French cavalry had confiscated their livestock.89 She closed her letter, in much the same way she closed letters to French authorities, by mentioning the 1755 fire from which the hospital had not yet recovered. Duplessis’s request was effective. The British supplied food from their stores and paid 956 livres for their officers and soldiers cared for at the hospital that autumn.90 Duplessis was attentive to the family needs of sisters in the community. Two nuns wrote Monckton immediately after the capitulation to ask that their brothers, who had been captured at Carillon by the British in 1758, be freed. The first was a choir nun, Marie-Madeleine Trudel de Saint-Paul. When she was successful, a converse sister, Marie-Madeleine Rocheron de Sainte-Apolline, requested the same favour for her brother on 21 September. It is likely that Duplessis wrote this letter, and she may have written the first.91 During this period, Duplessis’s sister-in-law Geneviève Guillimin found her way to Montreal, where she and her daughter became boarders in November 1759 with Marguerite d’Youville’s Grey Sisters.92 Duplessis was able to send off short letters to supporters in France. These are particularly valuable since no letters written by lay women in the aftermath of the defeat have been published. Duplessis was frank but prudent in her judgments. Her letter to Villars of the Missions étrangères in Paris is noteworthy for its defence of Montcalm. Vaudreuil tried to shift the blame for the defeat to the French general.93 Duplessis’s summary, written a month later, probably for Villars, stresses the piety with which Montcalm died and his high reputation at court before it tries to attenuate the circumstances of his defeat: “They made a landing on the thirteenth of the same month at a poorly guarded spot and their attack was so sudden, that although they were indeed fewer in numbers than our army, they had the advantage, being sited on a rise and the French in a valley. This battle was bloody. Our forces retreated in disorder. The English general was killed. Monsieur the marquis de Montcalm was wounded and died the next day, 14 September, on the eve of receiving from the king new and greater favours, by which he was honoured. He received the favour of dying in a most Christian way, very submissive a woman’s siege and occupation

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to God’s commands, and of receiving the last sacraments with great presence of mind.”94 However, the Anse au Foulon was poorly guarded because of Montcalm’s obsession that the English attack would come at Beauport, and he ordered his troops to charge on the Plains without waiting for nearby reinforcements. Duplessis’s claim that the French lines were disadvantaged because they were formed up in a valley is only partially true. Montcalm positioned his troops on the Buttes-à-Neveu, higher than the English lines, but, as his second-in-command FrançoisGaston de Lévis noted, the English were positioned initially behind a rise among the fields on the plain.95 As the French descended the Buttes, their ranks became somewhat disorganized, and they fired their first volley too soon against the English, who had advanced to the top of the rise. Duplessis was on excellent terms with Montcalm, and she downplays the general’s responsibility. The second part of her letter to Villars deals with business. Duplessis maintains that her hospital has been poorly treated by Bigot and company: “We were quite deprived of favours during the preceding regime, despite the need that we had to be helped.” Thus she simply asks that Villars continue to lobby for the three favours that she had requested the previous year: expansion of the hospital, a loan of 30,000 livres, and relief from certain taxes. Her second letter can be compared to Legardeur’s 1765 account in that it is a circular one addressed to houses of their order in France.96 Although she is writing to women, Duplessis’s succinct account does not describe the nuns’ reaction to events in terms of emotions commonly attributed to women such as apprehension, tears, terror, and consternation, as Legardeur would do. Furthermore, there is little of Pontbriand’s doloristic providentialism found in his pastoral letter of 28 October, which saw the sins of the Canadians as the cause of the disaster and which Legardeur also used in her account. According to the bishop, only the conversion of each Canadian heart could reverse the military defeat, which he attributed to the just and avenging arm of the Lord: “If each individual does not reform completely his conduct, can we reasonably hope that God will cease to punish us?”97 Duplessis had herself used similar language of a God of Justice when she had commiserated with Hecquet over the sins of France and Canada. However, here she limits herself to the need to submit to 248

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the divine will: “God has permitted this sad turn of events, and one must indeed accept it.” Without saying it explicitly, she seems guided by a corollary she had often expressed to her friend Marie-Catherine: even when God permits the elect to suffer, he sends consolations to lighten the burden. She does not scrimp on details of their plight that might encourage alms from France, but she tempers them with compensatory facts. The five converse nuns who rode out the siege might not have saved the garden from pillage, but they did successfully guard the building’s contents. Compared to her condemnation of the hospital’s treatment under Bigot in her letter to Villars, Duplessis is effusive in her praise for the English. The hospital’s needs are being met: “They exercise their victory properly and make one hope for gentleness in their manner of government … We have received many courtesies from them since our return to our house where they call often … The English are the ones buying us the things we need.” Of course, she knew her letter would likely be read by English officials. The hospital, as well as the town, was fortunate that James Murray, rather than Wolfe, directed the occupation. Like Townshend, he had voiced objections to Wolfe’s campaign of destruction in August and September.98 Duplessis probably also wrote the duchesse d’Aiguillon. William Pitt’s 5 January 1760 letter to the duchess that will be quoted in the concluding chapter shows that, with Quebec in English hands, Duplessis realized the importance of lobbying the London authorities as she had once lobbied the French court.99 Nonetheless, there seem to have been periods when the British did not meet her requests. A 19 January 1760 letter from Murray’s secretary implies that moving the community during that difficult winter had been considered. After regretting that the general was “mortified” that he could not provide supplies that Duplessis requested, his secretary Hector Théophilus Cramahé wrote: “If the difficulty of finding means of subsistence makes you decide to leave this town, the general has ordered me to assure you that he will take every sort of arrangement to facilitate your obtaining the means to go to the place you choose for your refuge and that of your community.”100 The letter’s tone is cordial and helpful, and rather than tension with Murray, it leads one to believe the British general regretted not being able to offer more help, rather than being an example of the a woman’s siege and occupation

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administrative courtesy of refusal Bigot excelled in. The letter was written the day Duplessis fell ill from the attack that would leave her dead five days later. Article six of the surrender had guaranteed to the bishop the “liberty to come and exercise freely and with decency the functions of his office.”101 However, Pontbriand did not avail himself of this provision. He left Quebec with Vaudreuil and Bigot for Montreal, where supplies were more plentiful and where the French administrative team was based. He named Jean-Olivier Briand as his vicar. Duplessis corresponded with the bishop, who congratulated her on her good relations with the English: “I note with pleasure that the government under which you are presently looks favorably on you.” But aware of the proselytizing tendencies she had shown ten years earlier with Pehr Kalm, he recommended discretion in regard to her British patients: “I advise you not to talk to them much about religion. That could antagonize them. The piety and modesty of your comportment will have more effect, if God so wills.” He justified disregarding the religious ministry that had always accompanied the nuns’ medical care on the principle that the defeated owe obedience to their masters: “The Christian religion demands for victorious rulers who have conquered the obedience and respect that one owes to the others; thus you and all your sisters can have the same merit as when you serve the French.” The merit the nuns accrued for heaven would be no less, he assured her.102 The reversal of policy in regard to Protestants must have been particularly hard for Duplessis to accept, since Pontbriand had never shown the slightest tolerance for them. In 1747, and again as recently as 1757, the bishop had complained to the minister in Versailles that Huguenots were in the colony despite regulations against their presence. The 1747 letter mentions seven or eight merchants, but that modest number was too large for Pontbriand, and he wanted them expelled.103 In December 1759, in addition to the nuns’ not witnessing to Protestants, the bishop specified that Catholic soldiers among the British wounded were off limits as well. Even on their deathbeds, a discreet anointing and general absolution would have to do.104 In the name of prudence, he reassured a troubled Duplessis on this point on 31 December: “You must not exhort them, even the ones who

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10.4 Geneviève Duplessis was buried in May 1756 in the vaults of the Jesuit church, shown in this Richard Short view. After the bombing in 1759, the only church edifice intact enough to hold services was the Ursuline chapel, which the town’s Catholic parish and the Anglican occupiers shared.

might be Catholic because the government is opposed to that.”105 The institutional survival of his church was this bishop’s priority.106 One first-hand account of a visit by a British officer to the HôtelDieu during the beginning of the occupation gives indirect praise of Duplessis, although it does not mention her by name. John Knox recounted his visit, during which he was shown the collections of paintings that survived the bombing.107 He visited all three monasteries and even spent a week posted at the Hôpital-Général, where he was impressed by the breeding, elegance, and politeness of the nuns, who invited him to a breakfast tea, and by the good care given to the English wounded.108 His assessment of the Hôtel-Dieu Augustinians is much briefer: “The sisters of this convent are, in general, elderly women, less polite and complaisant than in the other two nunneries; which I impute to their remarkable austerity.”109 Duplessis, whom Knox surely met, was seventy-two. She must have been more reserved and businesslike than her Hôpital-Général and Ursuline counterparts and less willing to hide her displeasure. She would have been, however, pleased that her house’s austerity had been recognized. Duplessis’s dealings with the bishop and British chiefs concerned coping with the coming severe winter under occupation. All parties realized, however, that the seizure of the colony’s capital might not be definitive. Many of the articles of surrender ended with “until the possession of Canada shall have been decided between their Britannic and most Christian Majesties.”110 Both the Canadians and the French left in Quebec, like Duplessis and the English occupiers, knew that a French army under Lévis was gathering strength for a spring offensive to retake the town. Canada was only one theatre of a world war, and the overall peace settlement might leave Canada in French hands.

Conclusion The year 1759 produced no maiden warriors for Canada such as MarieMadeleine Jarret de Verchères, who held off Iroquois assailants in 1692 in the absence of her father, as her mother had already done in 1690. War at times occasions such a reworking of gender roles. However, during the Quebec campaign, women are not even described as helping improve the town’s fortifications, as was sometimes the 252

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case in Europe. Their only practical contribution mentioned is pitching in with the harvest and supply trains. Nonetheless, 1759 did see women administrators such as Duplessis, working within their normal gender roles, assure survival for their institutions, despite the failures of the colony’s military leadership. During warfare it is common for women’s roles to coalesce around the traditional ones they know best.111 Over the years, Duplessis had learned to clothe a forthright demand that the hospital’s needs be met in the deferential tone thought appropriate for women. This skill allowed her to exploit French and British notions of the civilized rules of war in order to salvage as much as possible for her hospital and community during her most trying year. When even her bishop could not envisage the needed evacuation from the town, she was ready with her own plan of action.

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chapter

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Epilogue and Conclusion: Bride of an Unworthy Spouse: Femme forte or femme tendre? Death according to the Rule Duplessis had reported health problems as far back as 1730 at age fortythree, but in comparison with Geneviève, whose health was always worse and whose imminent death Marie-André prophesied as early as 1733, she minimized her own maladies. “People have predicted to me that I would bury my entire family … My health is better than ever, although I am not without much pain,” she reported in 1735.1 Both sisters suffered from lung problems; coughing up blood, accompanied by weakness, was the major symptom. While Geneviève had to be relieved of her duties as bursar several times, notably in 1747, it was only in 1754, at age sixty-seven, that Marie-André reported the need for a prolonged convalescence, although as usual, she played down her condition, citing her strong “French constitution”: “I indeed thought I was leaving for the other world six months ago. In our community, they are surprised to see me back on my feet. The milk that they had me drink did me much good. Nonetheless, my cough, which announces that my end is near, returned a few weeks ago, despite the measures of care that they oblige me to take. Even though I am speaking like this, do not think that I am at the point of death. One languishes sometimes for a long time. It was once predicted to

me that I would bury all my family, and that having a French body, it would be necessary to bludgeon me to death.”2 Then, in the summer of 1755, Marie-André was sidelined by a skin problem. When she became mother superior again in 1756, she was troubled by the example such exemptions from the rule gave to the community. They must have included being excused from her turn at night watch in the wards, since Bishop Pontbriand reassured her in a 1757 letter not to be disturbed on that score.3 The next year she was again minimizing her condition to Marie-Catherine, equating it simply with the gradual decline of old age: “Our age brings with it infirmities. Since God sees my spirit harried by worries, he graciously spares my body. I am doing well enough, and except for my weight, I would not consider myself old. Time passes very quickly and leads us to eternity.”4  She did not linger months between life and death as her mother and sister had done, and no unseemly outbursts, as in the first stages of their last illnesses, were reported. On 19 January 1760, she was attacked by a violent pain in the side. A French doctor was called, and General James Murray sent one of his own, but neither could save her. She remained lucid, and on the third day of her illness JeanOlivier Briand, who had been left as administrator of the Quebec church when Bishop Pontbriand left for Montreal, gave her the last sacraments, assisted by a Jesuit. Two days later, on 23 January, she died, a few months before her seventy-third birthday. As was the custom in monasteries when death could be predicted, she died surrounded by the entire community, which assembled to recite the prayers for the dying and to catch any last words and instructions. None, however, are reported in her death notice.5 The frankest report on her state of mind and on her legacy is not found in that notice, but in a letter written the following summer by the community’s assistant superior: “She died … with her heart pierced with sorrow, leaving a community without bread and other necessities of life, weighted down with debts caused by our fire; although she was not able to provide for our temporal needs because of the circumstances of the day, it is not the same on the spiritual side where she left us virtuous examples, whose memory will live eternally in our house.”6 She closed by requesting prayers for a principle dear

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to Duplessis’s heart: “that observance of the rule be practised as it has been up to the current moment.” Briand convened the community on 2 February to elect a successor. It chose Marie-Ursule Chéron des Anges. In congratulating her, Pontbriand reminded her that borrowing would be unavoidable in the circumstances, as if he wanted to warn her against Duplessis’s obsession: “It will indeed be necessary for you to take on debt, fortunate if you can find what it will take to keep your house afloat.”7 Chéron was an ailing caretaker and died in office in October 1762. Her successor, Marie-Louise Curot de Saint-Martin, whom Briand had named hospital bursar in 1760, proved to be the competent administrator Duplessis had been and eventually served six terms. The debt was practically eliminated. She would be superior when the community was able to reopen the hospital to civilians in 1784, after the British troops evacuated it. Duplessis’s manoeuvring in the 1750s to obtain patronage at court by trying to dedicate the annals to the duc de Richelieu played a role in this success. Letters from the marquis de Montcalm to Duplessis indicate that efforts to gain Richelieu’s support continued. On 12 November 1756, Montcalm noted that he had written to both Richelieu and the duchesse d’Aiguillon “to commend to them the interest of a house founded by their forebears and whose nuns serve so well God and the state.”8 The next year, he noted a letter from the duchesse stating she had solicited on the Hôtel-Dieu’s behalf.9 The dowager duchess Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac corresponded, in fact, with William Pitt, who promised protection for the hospital. The British leader wrote in early 1760, “Monsieur Pitt is deeply impressed by the flattering sign of kindly sentiments with which Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon has deigned to honor him. He is happy to be able to direct his attentions to a goal that is of value to humanity and gives him at the same time the honor of obeying the order of Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon.”10 Pitt contacted the military governor James Murray, who took steps to put the hospital on better financial footing by cancelling taxes Bigot had insisted the hospital owed.11 Duplessis might have been more astute to attempt to dedicate the annals to the duchess, rather than to Richelieu. The duchess continued her intervention in 1761 by asking Pierre de La Rue, who handled the affairs of the Quebec diocese in France, 256

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to intercede with both the French authorities and Pitt.12 Hans Stanley, whom Pitt had sent to Paris in late May 1761 to begin negotiations to end the war,13 wrote Pitt on 9 June: “The Duchess d’Aiguillon is most grateful for his Majesty’s gracious condescensions in favor of the convent founded by her ancestors at Quebec. She has recommended to my care some holy oils, to be used in the sacraments at Canada. If they reach you, I do not doubt of their being treated with that respect which she deserves, and which even a mistaken religion has a right to claim.”14 Whether or not these oils made their way to Quebec is less important than this proof of the nuns’ skill at setting in motion client-patron relations at the highest levels of state. The cosmopolitan solidarity of the British and French aristocracies trumped differences of religion and nationality. The Hôtel-Dieu found financial stability by becoming exactly what Duplessis had always opposed: a military hospital, and a British one at that. The Hôpital-Général, which had sought out a military role, faced bankruptcy after the fall of Quebec because of unreimbursed expenses for care that it had given to injured French troops and for wartime depredations to its estates. It saved itself by selling its most advantageous seigneurie in 1767.15 The reputation for solid piety and observance that the Hôtel-Dieu enjoyed under Duplessis’s leadership largely continued after her death. This is confirmed by three Protestant visitors to the Quebec convents: Pehr Kalm in 1749, John Knox in late 1759, and Frances Brooke between 1763 and 1767. All three were more struck by the noble manners of the Hôpital-Général nuns than by their piety. Knox noted what he called the “remarkable austerity” of the Hôtel-Dieu, although Kalm and Brooke suggested that the Ursulines had the greatest reputation for piety. None of the three found fault with the Hôtel-Dieu.16 There was no breakdown of religious discipline there, as was apparently the case at the Hôpital-Général in the aftermath of the war. In a secret instruction to the mother superior of that house that Micheline D’Allaire dates to about 1766, Briand, then bishop of Quebec, who knew that community well because he had made it his residence, taxed it with multiple offenses against poverty, obedience, and communal living.17 Despite the prediction that she would outlive her siblings, Marie-André was survived by her two brothers and by her friend Marie-Catherine Hecquet. The Jesuit lived another decade after bride of an unworthy spouse

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her. Just as Louis XV abandoned Canada to its unrelenting English enemies, the king acquiesced in 1764 to the suppression of the Society of Jesus, which had long been under fire from the philosophes and Jansenists. After the order was abolished, Jesuits were eligible for a pension, and François-Xavier, whose health had deteriorated, found refuge with the bishop of Langres. He died somewhere near Paris in December 1771.18 The only family member not in the Hôtel-Dieu’s orbit, CharlesDenis, ended badly, dying in Versailles on 14 August 1765.19 However, his wife seems to have managed to remake her life, many years after her husband’s death. After losing her home in 1757 in Quebec, Geneviève Guillimin eventually found her way to Montreal, where she and her daughter became boarders in November 1759 with Marguerite d’Youville’s Grey Sisters.20 The daughter, Marie-JosepheAndré Duplessis de Morampont, who bore the names of her two aunts in religion, signed a marriage contract with a young officer from France, Pierre-Louis de Rastel de Rocheblave, on 20 September 1760 in Montreal, just weeks after the surrender of that city to General Jeffery Amherst’s army.21 She and her mother seem to have still been in Montreal in 1762, but on 8 July 1766, the governor of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon wrote the minister in France that Madame Duplessis, having lost everything in the siege of Quebec, had been forced to spend the previous year on the islands, which remained French possessions, and that her husband had just died. Her request for relief was refused.22 She managed to reach France, probably with the help of her son-in-law, who continued his military service in other French colonies. On 25 May 1779 she married an officer in the coast guard, Antoine-Mathieu Jourjon, himself a widower, at the colonial port of La Rochelle.23 Upon his death, she finally received the royal pension she had sought; but not for the services of her first husband, rather for those of the second one!24 Marie-Catherine Hecquet died in her Parisian home on 7 July 1764, aged seventy-eight, in the presence of two Parisian in-laws with Jansenist sympathies. Burial was in her parish church of SaintHippolyte.25 Duplessis’s letters addressed to her eventually made their way to the French national archives because descendants with Jansenist ties preserved among family papers these marks of friendship from the sister of a Jesuit. 258

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Femme forte / femme tendre: The Managerial Femme forte When Duplessis died in 1760, she was eulogized for her devotion to observance of the rule, her talents as a writer, her prudence, and her gentleness. Only one eulogy mentions her force of character.26 H.R. Casgrain, in summing up Duplessis’s career in his history of the Hôtel-Dieu, contrasted her gentleness with the strength of her mentor Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. One was the “femme forte,” the strong woman, characterized by energy; the other the “femme tendre,” the gentle woman, characterized by mildness.27 However, Duplesssis’s gentleness, affability, and calm exterior belied both a steely tenacity and a tendency to brood over disasters she foresaw. Both character traits were present in her 1719 protest against the acquiescence of the advisory council to Saint-Vallier’s decision to build a house for ill priests at the hospital highlighted in this book’s introduction. Her reputed mildness was to some extent crafted, despite the contrast that she herself drew between her calmness and her sister’s impulsiveness. As one early business supplier learned, Marie-André could react “with a touch of fire,”28 but she moderated the tendency more successfully than Geneviève. In fact, Casgrain’s stark contrast between la femme forte and la femme tendre is misplaced and has contributed to an underestimation of Duplessis’s impact. Casgrain was working within the French hagiographic tradition that celebrated the cardinal virtue of fortitude in seventeenth-century holy women such as Jeanne de Chantal and Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation.29 This tradition took its inspiration from the Vulgate’s translation of the “capable wife” in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs as mulierem fortem. When rendered in French as femme forte, the title could apply to any woman as well as wives. In his history of the Hôtel-Dieu, Casgrain labelled Guyart, Juchereau, Catherine de Longpré de SaintAugustin, and even Marie-Catherine Tibierge de Saint-Joachim as femmes fortes, but not Duplessis. Casgrain was also implicitly invoking a second tradition of the femme forte, the warrior or amazon, since he compared Juchereau to Judith, who saved Israel by decapitating the Assyrian king Holofernes. These femmes fortes were celebrated during the regency of Anne d’Autriche when aristocratic women took up arms in the civil strife bride of an unworthy spouse

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called the Fronde. As Ian Maclean explained, such femmes fortes retained attributes usually ascribed to women – for example, beauty and compassion – but added masculine traits that invert misogynistic views of female nature: women are capricious and fickle; the femme forte is resolute and unswerving. Women are soft; the femme forte is energetic and courageous.30 If Casgrain had looked beyond received hagiographic stereotypes, he could have located a version of the femme forte that appeared toward in the second half of the seventeenth century and that allows for a more accurate assessment of Duplessis’s career. In reaction to amazon women who took political stands or participated in military action, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon used the praise of the good wife in Proverbs 31 to encourage aristocratic women to leave the temptations of city and court life and become efficient managers of their husbands’ rural estates.31 In his 1687 treatise on women’s education, De l’Éducation des filles, the future archbishop of Cambrai limited girls’ access to humanist learning,32 but proposed that they acquire the basic accounting, legal, and other skills needed for prudent stewardship of their families’ properties. Fénelon substituted an enhanced supervisory role for warrior qualities so that the new femme forte’s activities centred on domestic economy. Two decades before Fénelon, a woman, in fact a Benedictine abbess famous for her humanist learning and ties to Parisian salon circles, Marie-Éléonor de Rohan, had published a paraphrase of this last chapter of Proverbs centred on the same managerial role that is even more relevant for assessing Duplessis. Rohan’s paraphrase does not translate the Latin text of the Vulgate literally. It inserts features not found in the biblical text. For example, Rohan’s praise of the femme forte explicitly adds tenderness to the model: “All of her words are lessons of wisdom, and they are accompanied by a sweetness that is never interrupted by bursts of anger.”33 Even more importantly, Rohan’s version highlights the subordination of women inherent in this model. First, she emphasizes the silence expected of women by stating that the femme forte “only” speaks to console and instruct.34 In addition, her femme forte is not only the wife who manages her husband’s estates as competently as her husband might. Rohan adds that this wife multiplies her spouse’s wealth and advances his career: “She obtains for him the highest positions and makes him celebrated in the eyes of men.”35 260

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Duplessis found herself in the fraught position of this managerial femme forte. The model incorporates a grave gender imbalance that puts high expectations on the wife while prescribing limits on her speech and allowing her husband to reap the rewards of her foresight and industry. Duplessis was a supremely competent and resourceful wife married to an unstable, unreliable spouse. Nuns were, of course, seen as wedded to Christ, but Christ was not the unworthy husband here. The unreliable spouse was the colonial state that the hospital served, and its male administrators. Theirs was not the irresponsibility of her brother Charles-Denis who abandoned wife and daughter. Because the king chronically underfunded his colony, even the best of officials such as Gilles Hocquart were more like heads of a large harem, unable to provide for all their wives. The seraglio analogy can even be stretched to apply to Bishops Saint-Vallier and Pontbriand, who favoured the Hôpital-Général over the Duplessis sisters’ Hôtel-Dieu. Years of royal underinvestment and administrators who routinely put family advancement over service to the king came to a head in the military miscalculations of Montcalm, Vaudreuil, and Ramezay in the 1759 defeat. Women such as Duplessis were forced to cope with this colonial system that compounded the failings of the patriarchal French state and church. And unlike Marie-Catherine Hecquet and Duplessis’s sister-in-law Geneviève Guillimin, she could not file for a financial separation from an irresponsible spouse. The situation of the managerial femme forte caught in this colonial gender imbalance is crucial to assessing Duplessis’s accomplishments and impact in a Canada undergoing rapid change. Her career as an administrator was not without its disappointments. Her surest coup was the purchase of the Saint-Augustin seigneurie, which delivered steady income and supplies over the years. Her apparent failure was not engineering a major enlargement of the hospital. However, her legacy stands up well in comparison with other leaders of women’s communities, and indeed with other Canadian women of the period. Moreover, because we have the wide-ranging correspondence of Marie-André and her sister Geneviève – the sort of business and personal letters largely missing in the case of other mother superiors of her generation (or laywomen) – a much more rounded assessment has been possible.36 We have an inside view of how Duplessis worked the various networks of administrators, suppliers, and supporters in a bride of an unworthy spouse

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society where clientage was so important, and of how she mobilized her family to support the hospital. Bishops and intendants might grumble about the “independence” shown by the Duplessis sisters, but they tolerated it. Fifty years later, as François Rousseau noted, Canadian ecclesiastical authorities would judge such an independent attitude inadmissible.37 She seems to have sensed that her fears at times could paralyze her. On 15 July 1758, at a time of food shortages for everyone in the town, when the hospital was having difficulty feeding its patients and staff, Duplessis wrote Pontbriand asking him to give her courage. Flour was available, but at such an inflated price that she feared not being able to repay debts in the fall: “A word of reply from you will make me more courageous, and I will act boldly.” Pontbriand replied briskly and imperatively: “My dear daughter, one must insure that one has what is required to live. It is better to borrow than put life at risk. Buy the flour.” Sometimes she needed to have her back up against a wall. When the 1755 catastrophe made borrowing necessary to rebuild, Duplessis was more than up to the task. Despite her fears and need for occasional reassurance, she guided her twin institutions, the community and the hospital through the siege and beginning of the occupation.

Writing Her Community / Writing New France Duplessis’s firsts as a Canadian writer argue for a place for her among New France’s notable authors. Her earliest texts show an innovative spirit found nowhere else in the literature of the French regime. The fictional frame of her Histoire de Ruma could have been the product of a Parisian salon and seems to have no precedent in convent writing. Likewise, the structure of her Musique spirituelle, based on parallels between monastic life and Baroque music, stretches the conventions of convent texts. Although a nun, she had no qualms about declaring that one goal of her writing was to please and amuse and even to satisfy the curiosity of her readers. This is particularly prominent in her early texts, the Histoire de Ruma and the Musique spirituelle, and plays a role in the Annales. In wrapping up her encomium of Louis XIV in that book, she declared that she took pleasure in writing it, just as she expected her nun readers to enjoy it: “They will have as 262

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much pleasure in hearing this great king talked about, as I have in writing something regarding him.”38 In 1730, she addressed the issue head-on when she maintained to Hecquet that pleasure and edification could go hand in hand: “Although my state as a nun commits me to mortify myself in all things, I do not find fault with the pleasure that I experience in seeing your letters because they edify me while gladdening me.”39 However, by 1730, she had largely forgone the wit that marks her first two texts. The shift likely took place during the redaction of the Annales. Their dedicatory letter asserts that the entire book will be written in the “simple and naïve” style of the accounts of the early days of the hospital composed by the founding nuns that are quoted extensively in the first pages. In a 1720 letter to Hecquet, Duplessis roundly criticized the airs of a woman who had recently returned from aristocratic circles in France: “Nevertheless she has much wit. She is knowledgeable about numerous subjects. She has read all the tales, and her conversation is quite amusing, but I prefer less sparkle and a more natural tone. Affectation has always been odious to me.”40 Marie-André could well be accusing herself of similar failings. At the end of this letter she bemoaned her spiritual tepidness just at the time when her brother was exhorting her to aspire to a higher level of commitment to her vocation. No other eighteenth-century Canadian nun can rival Duplessis. Devotional texts, such as the many that Duplessis wrote for her community, do not seem to have survived from other convents. At the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal, Marie-Anne-Véronique Cuillerier and Catherine Porlier left short chronicles that mix coverage of the wars with events at their hospital and monastery. Their texts have nothing of the polish of Duplessis’s Annales and little of the verve of their predecessor, Marie Morin. Morin’s substantial annals are entitled, like Duplessis’s, a history of the “establishment” of her hospital, but their make-up is quite different. Morin composed hers over a twentyeight-year period from 1697 to 1725 and never attempted to blend its disparate parts into a smooth, coherent volume as Duplessis did. When Morin cited her “inability” and her “meagre” talent as an historian, or apologized for a lack of skill,41 she was not invoking the kind of exaggerated modesty that Duplessis used when she apologized that as a woman writer she could not summon the needed eloquence to bride of an unworthy spouse

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compose a proper encomium for Jean Talon.42 Although Morin had spent a few years as a pupil of the Ursulines of Quebec, she did not have Duplessis’s intellectual fibre. The “simple and naïve” style proclaimed in the dedicatory letter of the Quebec annals is not nearly as down-to-earth as the style of Morin’s Simple and True History that gives the Montreal annals their warm appeal and makes them compelling on their terms. Duplessis had been forced to hide her voice behind the official author of her history, Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau. Morin spoke directly with the authority of an eyewitness who had joined her community in 1662, just three years after its founding, and who had served as bursar and mother superior. Morin’s eye is focused pointedly on Montreal, unlike Duplessis, who situated her hospital in the entire sweep of the colony’s development. Morin felt obliged to include accounts of the Phips and Walker invasions, but hers are paltry in comparison with Duplessis’s lengthy reports. Both Morin and Duplessis seek to edify their communities, but Duplessis also aims to provide hers with practical information. The Ursulines had an annalist with a flair for eloquence, MarieCharlotte Daneau de Muy, who covered the military operations of the war leading up to the fall of Quebec with considerable detail, to judge by the many extracts included in the nineteenth-century history of that monastery.43 However, in late May 1759, she stopped including military events in her chronicle to concentrate on convent affairs, and she died the day after the battle of the Plains of Abraham. Also capable of rivalling Duplessis might have been Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny, whose account of the 1759 siege of Quebec viewed from the angle of the Hôpital-Général is somewhat longer and has more scope than any of Duplessis’s short later pieces. Like Duplessis, whose account of the 1755 hospital fire was a plea for help to rebuild, Legardeur shaped her narrative as a lobbying effort to convince the French court to pay its debt to her institution, but she left no other substantial texts. The Annales themselves may be a patchwork of shorter pieces, but they were conceived as a unified book covering eighty years of history. Duplessis’s own vision pervades her book. She takes pride in the spiritual valour of the foundresses and their successors, in the level of care the nuns provide, and in their prudent administration of the hospital. However, the colony’s precarious financial situation 264

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constantly jeopardizes their achievement. Canada did subsequently enjoy economic expansion after 1720, but Duplessis’s constant scramble to finance hospital operations meant that she always saw the colony as disadvantaged. Despite this overarching vision, the book is not meant to be read straight though. It summarizes conveniently various documents of record preserved in chapter meeting minutes, registers of professions, account books, etc. Thus, its most inviting sections – at least for modern readers – are the longer narrative set pieces that sometimes seem lost amid the routine chronicling of yearly elections and the entrances and deaths of minor members of the community. After the Annales were completed, Duplessis appears not to have undertaken any further texts of substantial length. When she announced their publication to Hecquet, she did not mention plans for a sequel. Shorter texts, in fact, became her comfort zone, either by talent or because she wrote when she could fit in time between other tasks. She had settled into the established genres of convent writing, which she executed with a sure hand. Although her community and its hospital were always her focus, she knew that she was writing a Canadian chronicle as well. From her perch in the upper town near the ramparts overlooking the Saint Charles and Saint Lawrence Rivers, she had a bird’s-eye view of the colony. Its religious, economic, and political affairs had a daily impact on her institution. However, Duplessis wrote New France quite differently from two other major women writers of the colony, Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon. Guyart’s and Bégon’s letters have been seen as giving Canadian literature worthy examples of famous European models. Already at the time of her death, Guyart was saluted as a second Teresa of Avila, “the Teresa of Canada.” Bégon’s reports of the life of Montreal’s high society have the allure of the court gossip that Madame de Sévigné sent her daughter, and her unrequited obsession with her son-in-law Honoré Michel de Villebois has the flavour of the passion that Julie de Lespinasse would have for Jacques-Hippolyte de Guibert later in the eighteenth century. Guyart’s correspondence with her son and Bégon’s with her son-in-law had largely unavowed compulsions as their subtext: the nun’s guilt for her abandonment of her adolescent son Claude to become an Ursuline and Bégon’s one-sided solicitude for Michel de Villebois. bride of an unworthy spouse

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New France was the site of Guyart’s mystical and apostolic epic. She never abandoned the utopic vision of a church in New France modelled on the early Christians that drove her initial missionary impulse. Her letters recounting the successes and challenges of the missions can be seen as part of the Jesuit publicity machine that produced the yearly published accounts known as the Jesuit Relations. The Jesuit editors, in fact, at times solicited texts from her. She saw the missions in terms of miracles of grace and martyrdom. At the end of her life, she did acknowledge that her early dream of “civilizing” the Indigenous population was illusory, but she did not give up her hope of Christianizing them on a large scale.44 Duplessis was disabused from the start on both scores. Her administrative letters to secure scarce resources give Duplessis’s correspondence a dimension missing in Guyart’s. Of Guyart’s two hundred seventy-eight surviving letters, only about three – routine letters to the governor and French financial agents – represent what must have been an extensive business and administrative correspondence. On the other hand, at least half of Duplessis’s remaining letters deal with hospital operations. If they were merely a dry suite of orders placed and accounts paid, this correspondence would have little resonance. However, she engaged colonial officials and patrons in France on many levels. She strategized with Ruette d’Auteuil over how to address the intendant Dupuy, fretted through multiple drafts of a petition to the minister of the marine Rouillé, and orchestrated campaigns to win support from French donors in the 1720s and 1750s. Her administrative correspondence – from routine letters dealing with the appointment of confessors with Pontbriand or flour supplies with Bigot to the formal bureaucratic eloquence of her requests to the minister in Versailles – is her passionate defence of “the poor,” that is the Hôtel-Dieu, poorly treated by French colonial administrators. Like Duplessis, Guyart wrote annual letters back to France each fall, but the Ursuline focuses more on the progress of “this new church” than on political and economic development. Duplessis’s letters to Hecquet span four decades from 1718 until 1758 and thus take up where the Annales end. They share the same vision of the colony’s precarious state found in that book. She organized them as chronicles like the Annales, as snapshots of the notable events in 266

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the colony and hospital of the year. Duplessis’s crisp style in these letters and the quality of the information she presented was evident to readers of two extracts from them published during her lifetime – her account of the Inuit in Hecquet’s book and her description of the “hospital rock” in the Annales. The first attracted the attention of Louis de Jaucourt, who used it in the Encyclopédie. Duplessis’s longest text is an institutional chronicle written for her sister nuns. Guyart’s is an account of her interior life written for her son, the Relation de 1654. It is a chronicle of sorts, in which time is not measured by years but by successive “states of prayer,” thirteen in all. This second thread of Guyart’s writing in Canada – her spiritual advice to her Benedictine son – met with more success than her missionary enterprise. Claude Martin became a pillar of his Congregation of Saint-Maur. By publishing her writings and her biography, he opened the cause that led to his mother’s canonization in 2014. Duplessis only focused incidentally on herself. Managing a poor hospital in a needy New France, she wrote to secure resources for her “poor,” and to maintain the quality of community spiritual life that she had found at the Hôtel-Dieu. Élisabeth Bégon was a close contemporary of Duplessis – only nine years younger – and she too could talk about her “poor country.”45 Canada might have been Bégon’s “dear fatherland,”46 but family loyalty propelled her. New France was the family’s stage. The only Canadian by birth of these three women, Bégon left her native land behind when prospects in France seemed brighter. She recounted the foibles and corruption of the Montreal elite for her son-in-law Michel de Villebois, who held a post in the colonial administration in New Orleans, between November 1748 and autumn of the next year, when she left for France. Once in Rochefort, she reported to him the news she received from correspondents in Canada and her contacts in the French colonial administration until his death in late 1752. Because she was unable to send letters regularly, Bégon recorded her daily routine as an intense, concentrated diary, written not just for herself, but with the hope of engaging her seemingly indifferent son-in-law. Her style has a gossipy sparkle that delights readers today. Bégon’s outlook was worldly and her piety conventional. She was chiefly motivated by advancing the prospects of her family, unlike Guyart and Duplessis, who were committed to Canadian institutions. bride of an unworthy spouse

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Bégon sent gossip not just to entertain Michel de Villebois, but also to further his career. Once in Louisiana, he began accusing his superiors, including Vaudreuil – whom Duplessis would later count as a protector – of corruption. Bégon, who had managed to rent her Montreal house to Bigot on advantageous terms, scolded her sonin-law for not grasping, as others had, how the colonial system was exploited by royal officials for their own benefit and for not grabbing his share of the bounty: “Thus take advantage, my dear son, of their lessons and work accordingly.”47 This corruption, clientism, and inefficiency that were the lifeblood of the colonial regime frustrated Duplessis at every turn. However, there is much more to Bégon’s letters than this socialite chronicle of New France’s elite. They are gripping because they reveal the intensity of her emotional life: her obsession with her son-in-law, and her devotion to the education of his daughter. They are infused with an immense, but largely unarticulated, frustration that goes beyond Michel de Villebois’s failure to reciprocate her solicitude. Colonial society could offer a laywoman like Bégon no social role to match her talents. She spotted the hypocrisies and contradictions of her world, but, trapped within them, had little urge to analyze them. What began in Bégon’s early diary entries as tittle-tattle about the colonial elite took a turn worthy of a sentimental novel in the final letters, when her son-in-law refused her career advice and withdrew guardianship of his daughter from her. Duplessis is the most wide-ranging and versatile writer of eighteenth-century New France, even though after her early innovative texts she stayed within the conventions of convent writing. She worked in many genres: devotional texts, lengthy and brief historical narratives, private and administrative correspondence. The difficulty of accessing her writings other than the Annales, her ambivalence about Canada (although she devoted fifty years to a key institution in Quebec), and her status as a nun have worked against the recognition she deserves. She excelled at narrative texts, but lacked an autobiographic flair. Personal effusions are spare in her writings. She preferred to chronicle the colony’s affairs, her community’s life, or her family’s activities. She wrote most of her texts for the HôtelDieu community with little thought of reaching a larger public. Still, she thought of some of them – especially early ones – as books. 268

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She gave the manuscripts of the Musique spirituelle and the Annales the layout of printed books.48 Toward the end of her career, she went further. By securing publication of the Annales in 1751, she recognized that she had indeed authored a book, a book that told a Canadian success story of the establishment of her hospital against great obstacles. The wrongheaded policies of colonial administrators now endangered that success, thus her need to reach an audience in France. Duplessis is the first Canadian woman to arrange publication of her own book. She is in fact one of the rare residents of French colonial Canada to do so. Most books about New France, such as those of Lahontan and Charlevoix, were published by men upon their return to Europe after a stint in the colony.49 Few writers of New France can match Duplessis’s legacy.

Force Allied with Mildness Duplessis spent her entire life, except for the short interlude in her father’s home in Quebec, in environments controlled by women. She was raised by two women in Paris who shaped her head for business and her devotion. At age twenty, she entered the convent, where she was joined shortly by Geneviève. Her defence of the nuns’ financial management of the hospital can be seen as an effort to maintain female control of an institution that women staffed. However, episcopal oversight and the need for public subsidies meant that males were not just looking over the nuns’ shoulders, but had the final word when they cared to assert themselves. Early on, at least, she showed uneasiness with this gender hierarchy by venting her displeasure with male authority figures onto other women. In 1719, it was her sisters on the advisory council who accepted Saint-Vallier’s house for ill priests. The next year, she displayed her scorn of male Jansenist leaders by mocking nuns who dared to take theological stands and join the appeal of Unigenitus: “Their names have the honour of being below several bishops and above several scribblers and tract writers whose signatures were bought to add to the total.”50 Although Duplessis was perhaps the closest thing to an intellectual woman that could be found in the colony, and perhaps the only one who might have read the papal bride of an unworthy spouse

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document, she was not troubled by the fact that the eighty-third of the 101 propositions condemned by the bull defended women’s right of access to scripture. It was the indiscreet Geneviève, not MarieAndré, who chafed in the 1750s against the restraints placed on nuns acting as businesswomen who could not leave their cloister to attend to affairs in person. Duplessis learned how to work with bishops, and sometimes around them. She learned how to prepare her proposals for chapter meetings so that the community inevitably adopted them. The model of the managerial femme forte who allied strength and gentleness allows us to understand how Duplessis used the rhetoric of humility and obedience expected from nuns. She instructed Ruette d’Auteuil in 1727 to work within its confines: “Keep in mind, if you please, that nuns are speaking, and consequently they must always be mild, without however sacrificing anything of the vigour that is needed.”51 Her recommendation to Ruette d’Auteuil to clothe force with gentleness points to how she negotiated the tensions inherent in this gender model. Douceur here is not so much mildness, sweetness, or softness, to judge by the drafts of letters sent in the Dupuy affair, as it is sensitivity to conventional social and gender hierarchies. Her force or amazon spirit was unswerving – and sometimes counterproductive – in standing up for the rights of the hospital. She combined this grit with a savvy about social conventions and an air of affability as she managed the hospital and community. Her success in guiding the Augustinian sisters for thirty years was made possible because behind her shield of “tenderness” this manager had the tenacity of a warrior femme forte. Writing this biography has been possible because two women can indeed be fast friends. Duplessis often chided Hecquet for not always being faithful to their annual rendezvous. However, of all the personal exchanges she maintained, this one has survived because her friend treasured her letters. Duplessis often closed them with some variant of the expression “our tender and constant friendship.” Despite separation, the Jansenist and the Jesuit’s sister used forbearance to refashion a version of their childhood bond under the banner of Christian friendship. In her 1755 Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, Hecquet conspicuously declared Marie-André to be “my intimate friend,”52 even though she seems to have hidden her fervent allegiance to Jansenism. On the 270

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other hand, complete intimacy did mark Marie-André’s particular friendship with her nun sister, and reading Geneviève’s frank letters against her sister’s has proved revealing. Their administrative collaboration brought them together, and they created for themselves a nest of security where they exchanged confidences about their spiritual ambitions and strategized for the hospital. They could let slip the mask of deference and decorum they had to display with male outsiders and even to some extent with other community members. The praise Geneviève made of her sister’s friendship with Hecquet applies better to her own with Marie-André: “one relishes the sweet pleasantness (douceur) of having solid and constant friends.”53 The sister-confidants had all the more fortitude to fight for their hospital because they could withdraw to this intimacy.

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notes Introduction 1 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, Actes capitulaires, 7 August 1719. 2 Ibid. 3 hdq-f1-k1, 3/3: 5, 20 May 1730 letter of Dupas, apothecary at La Rochelle. 4 See Choquette, “‘Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu.’” Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 81–92, shows how the concept was used by the Jesuits to attract female benefactors in France to finance the nun and lay “amazons in Canada.” 5 Gray’s The Congrégation de Notre-Dame deals with three mother superiors: Marie Barbier, who antedates Duplessis, and MarieJosèphe Maugue-Garreau and Marie Raizenne at the end of the eighteenth century. Noel has focused on the Hôpital-Général and stresses its aristocratic tendencies; she discusses the RamezayDuchesnay duo in “Besieged but Connected,” “Caste and Clientage,” and “Decoding the Eighteenth-Century Convent,” in Along a River, 182–204. This book synthesizes the last forty years of research on Canadian convents within a powerful interpretation of women’s roles in Canada into the 1830s. Noel generally focuses more on the official correspondence of governors and intendants than on internal documents that give the nuns’ perspective. 6 Wheelwright entered the Ursulines in 1713. Her documentary record as an Ursuline before she became mother superior is thin, and Little has to rely on generic descriptions of convent practices to reconstruct much of her life as a nun in The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Julie Wheelwright’s Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright makes excellent use of surviving

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Ursuline documents and is a more conventional biography, although it includes chapters that narrate the author’s research journey. Carr, “Une ‘histoire véritable’ littéraire,” 171–90. Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle (1718),” 50–9. At the 1945 colloquium in honour of the centenary of FrançoisXavier Garneau’s Histoire du Canada, Gustave Lanctot, the Dominion Archivist, regretted the absence of a paper on Duplessis in his plenary lecture: “A surprising thing that has not yet been pointed out is that the first Canadian to attempt historical work is a woman named Marie-Andrée Duplessis, whose Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec might well have deserved to have a place on the program of this centenary” (Centenaire de l’Histoire du Canada, 18). Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, ed. Ghislaine Legendre. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” ed. Verreau. Duplessis “is perhaps not inferior to her” (41). Casgrain, Histoire, 434. Ibid., 331. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, ed. J.-Edmond Roy. G. Duplessis, “La Manne de Jésus”; M.-A. Duplessis, “La Plaie du cœur divin.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” ed. A.-L. Leymarie. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, ed. Albert Jamet. Gies, “Mère Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, annaliste et épistolière.” Rémillard, “Mère Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène,” 388–408. Ibid., 388. LeBlanc, Anthologie, 226. Rousseau’s three books, based on an intimate knowledge of the Hôtel-Dieu’s archives, give a more balanced and authoritative treatment than any of the three colonial Quebec monasteries have received. Although his revised thesis, L’Œuvre de chère, focuses on food practices, it contains much detail about other aspects of the hospital’s operations. His two-volume history of the Augustinian sisters and their hospital, La Croix et le scalpel, combines an insightful account of the evolving spirituality that inspired the

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nuns with institutional practices. His La Passion de servir focuses on key figures in the pre-Duplessis history of the house. Melançon and Dubois, “Les Amitiés féminines,” 97–113. Simon, “Intérêt pharmaceutique des lettres adressées à l’apothicaire Féret.” J. Roy, “Stratégies épistolaires”; “Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre.” J. Roy, “Femmes et littérature … au-delà de la Sainte-Trinité.” Fino, L’Hospitalité, figure sociale de la charité. Théry, in De plumes et d’audace, makes use of the annals, but gives little attention to Duplessis as their author. Smart, in De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan, devotes a chapter to Élisabeth Bégon’s correspondence, but only mentions Duplessis’s in passing (97–8). Piché discusses the project in “‘Ma très chère mère du Canada.’”  Ursule-Marie des Anges in F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, ed. Roy, appendix, xiv. On the importance of transatlantic families, see Hardwick et al., “Introduction,” 205–24. The only work to shed new light on François-Xavier since J.Edmond Roy is Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis.” Hecquet, Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel. It was republished as an appendix by Lyon-Caen, who traced Hecquet’s entire family over several generations in Un Roman bourgeois.

Chapter One 1 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. Lyon-Caen’s Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV exploits a wealth of archival material about the Homassel family and to a lesser extent about the Leroys. 2 See Langer, Perfect Friendship, 14–39, for an overview that begins with antiquity and an analysis of the paradoxes of the standard canons of friendship. Hayes shows how two female moralists in the eighteenth century, the marquise de Lambert and Mme d’Arconville, doubted the possibility of friendship between women, just as previous male writers had (“Friendship and the Female Moralist,” 171–89). 3 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 48.

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4 For information on this monastery, see Houth, “Les Couvents du tiers ordre,” 459–62. 5 This information about Marie Leroy’s family comes from the wedding contract of her brother Denis Leroy (anf, Minutier central, 21 April 1686, Étude X, 210), and the 6 November 1694 inventory after the death of Pierre Josse (Minutier central, Étude XXXIII, 381), supplemented by information from Pasquier, Relevé des naissances, mariages. Le Peletier might have played a role in Georges Duplessis’s posting to Canada since he signed the wedding contract of Georges’s brother-in-law, Denis Leroy, in 1686. 6 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 42. 7 Angot, Dictionnaire historique, 3: 517–18. He died in his parish on 13 January 1724 (Archives de la Mayenne, parish register). In 1728, the parishioners sued the sons of his brother Denis Leroy, his heir, trying to reclaiming 3,000 livres they said their pastor owed the church (20 July 1728 judgment, Archives de la Mayenne, B 631). 8 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 144. 9 Ibid., 42. 10 anf, Minutier central, 31 March 1686, Étude CII, 134. 11 16 December 1701 burial according to the parish registers of SaintMartin de Chevreuse, Archives des Yvelines. She had died the previous day at age sixty-eight. Her son Denis Leroy was there, but Marie Leroy is not listed as present. 12 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 26, 107–10. 13 Ibid., 41–2. For more information on this guild, see Crowston, Fabricating Women, 74–6. 14 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. 15 Matthew 5:44. 16 John 15:13. 17 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 114. 18 Ibid., 127–8. 19 Ibid., 114. 20 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182. 21 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 111. 22 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 50. 23 Ibid., NF 4: 48. 24 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 194–5. 25 Ibid., appendix, xii.

276

notes to pages 19–24

26 On this institution, see Coüard, “Contribution à l’histoire de l’instruction publique.” 27 Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 143. 28 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 194. 29 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 300–1. 30 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 118. 31 hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, Dissection spirituelle, twenty-first day. 32 Hecquet, “Vie de Michelle Homassel,” 114. 33 Ibid., 123–4. 34 Ibid., 127. 35 Ibid., 125. 36 The year 1702 is sometimes given as the date of her departure because Ursule-Marie des Anges said in her obituary letter that Duplessis’s mother came for her when she was fifteen. However, it is likely to have occurred in 1701, since Duplessis wrote Hecquet on 21 October 1720 that her mother had come for her in 1700, and Hecquet stated that Leroy cut short her visit because of her quarrel with her sister when Marie-André was about thirteen. In the Histoire de Ruma, Duplessis said she regretted leaving behind her grandmother who died in December 1701. Her departure must have predated this death. The intendant Jean Brochart de Champigny wrote the minister on 15 October 1700, “Madame Duplessis is travelling to France on the ship the Seine in order to bring back the rest of her family,” and requested that she be granted passage on the king’s ship for the return (anf anom col c11a 18/fol. 92–108v). 37 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182. 38 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 75. 39 Ibid., NF 3: 306. 40 Ibid., NF 3: 300–1. 41 On Jacques Homassel’s dealings with Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, see Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 91. A sample of Georges Duplessis’s dealings with his son, Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, is discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter Two 1 anf, Minutier central, 31 March 1686, Étude CII, 134. 2 Son of Georges Regnard and Jeanne Fournier, he was baptized on

notes to pages 24–30

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Easter day 1657 in the parish church of Saint-Utin. His godfather was Monsieur de Saint-Léger le jeune, and his godmother Mademoiselle de Meix-Tiercelin. His mother Jeanne Fournier died in 1680 and his father in 1682, according to parish registers (Archives de la Marne). Georges’s wedding contract lists both him and his deceased father as “sieur de Morampont,” but this honorific does not imply nobility or even possession of a seigneurie. Morampont is a manor house just outside of Saint-Utin. Georges might have taken the appellation “du Plessis” from a family property to distinguish himself from other brothers. His son Charles-Denis used the “de Morampont” appellation consistently. According to a letter of François-Xavier, his younger brother Charles-Denis was involved in the 1750s in a lawsuit involving a Morampont inheritance (11 April 1751 letter of F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 277). The fief of Morampont changed hands frequently, to judge by the number of persons holding the title of seigneur in the parish registers, and it is not certain when the Regnards acquired it. 3 Not present were two surviving brothers of her father, who lived in relative comfort. The best situated was Jacques Leroy (1638–1710), who died at Versailles, where he was an officer in the household of the duchess of Bourgogne. (Burial at Saint-Martin de Chevreuse, 10 February 1710, Archives des Yvelines.) For his will and inventory see anf, Minutier Central, 11 February 1710, Étude XXIII, 401. His post as serdeau involved clearing the table in the elaborate ceremonial of meals at the palace. One of four gentlemen holding this title, he served three months of the year, from January through March (Trabouillet, Etat de France, 2: 66). Another brother, Charles Leroy, who lived on the Rue de la Huchette, is listed as a “bourgeois de Paris” in his renunciation after the death of his brother Jacques (anf, Minutier central, 24 February 1710, Rénunciation, Étude XXIII, 401). 4 In addition to Gédéon Berbier du Metz, we find his brother Louis Berbier du Metz, commendatory abbot of the abbey of SaintMartin de Huiron near Vitry-Le-François. Their sister Marguerite was also present, along with her husband Antoine Le Ménestrel, treasurer of the king’s buildings (trésorier des bâtiments du roi). On the Berbier du Metz clan, see Castelluccio, Le Garde-Meuble de la couronne, 77–98. Jacques Fournier (not listed as a relative

278

notes to pages 30–1

5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

despite bearing the name of Georges’s mother) was captain-colonel of the three companies of guards and archers of Paris (capitainecolonel des trois compagnies des gardes et archers de Paris), a sort of bourgeois militia. anf, Minutier central, 21 April 1686, Étude X, 210. Georges Duplessis and Marie Leroy are not among the witnesses of her brother Denis’s contract, signed three weeks after theirs. Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances, 35–8, 50–5. Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 138. Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: 89n. Pierre-Georges Roy notes that although in hundreds of documents Duplessis is called the treasurer of the marine in Quebec, he most likely only occupied that post on an interim basis and served rather as a deputy or associate to the official representative of the treasurer general (La Ville de Québec, 1: 474). On the overall functioning of the institution, see Legohérel, Les Trésoriers généraux; see Shortt, ed., Documents, for its functioning in Canada, e.g. 1: 49n. Keyes gives more information in “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux.” Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux,” 184–5. This category of financier, who held and dispersed monies, was distinct from the two other major groups of financiers during the Bourbon regime: the farmers general of taxes, who collected customs and excise taxes, and the receivers general of finances, who collected taxes on property, persons, and income such as the taille (Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 85–6). Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: 75n. Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 295–6. Shortt, ed., Documents Relating to Canadian Currency, 1: xli. Ibid., 1: li. Ibid., 1: 87. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, i; notice biographique, xiv. 25 October 1696 letter of Champigny to the minister, anom col c11a 14/fol. 196–207v. 27 October 1698 letter of Champigny to the minister, anom col c11a 16/fol. 130.  4 November 1740 letter of G. Duplessis to Féret, in M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 95–6.

notes to pages 31–4

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20 19 October 1705 letter of Jacques Raudot to the minister, anom col c11a 22/fol. 297–319v. 21 On Dupuy’s piety, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 389–90. 22 Cliche, Les Pratiques de dévotion, 197. 23 J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 57. 24 anom col c11a 113/fol. 262–262v, 9 October 1721, “Balance des fonds remis, recettes extraordinaires et des dépenses de l’année 1711.” This salary had not increased in 1730. That year, the intendant Gilles Hocquart wrote concerning the current representative of the treasurer, Nicolas Lanoullier de Boisclerc, “How, with the 1,200 livres that is given Lanoullier by the treasurers of the Marine can they expect that the duties be well carried out? It is not possible that a man so poorly paid not to look for and find resources in his official funds” (16 October 1730, cited by Keyes, “Un Commis,” 199). 25 Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 97–9; on the business activities of Jean Petit, who held the office from 1702 until 1720 and with whom Duplessis worked, see Bosher, Business and Religion, 292–5. 26 Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 46. 27 J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 5. 28 Ibid., 2: 20–1. 29 Ibid., 2: 53. 30 4 November 1701 summary of letter of Duplessis to the minister, anom col c11a 19/fol. 73v–74f. 31 8 November 1704 memorandum of Duplessis, anom col c11a 22/ fol. 145–154v. 32 Frégault, Le XVIIIe Siècle canadien, 185–6. 33 6 November 1701 letter of Levasseur de Neré to the minister, anom col c11a 19/fol. 89–90v. 34 Miquelon’s account in New France 1701–1744, 55–71, is followed here. Frégault’s more extensive and detailed account is critical of Duplessis (Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle canadien, 242–88). 35 Ruette d’Auteuil, who had previously helped Duplessis in the purchase of Lauzon by allowing his name instead of Duplessis’s to be used on the contract, led the first charge against him. Ruette d’Auteuil’s protest may have been correct in strict legal terms, but was untimely, according to D’Allaire, Montée et déclin d’une famille noble, 111.

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notes to pages 34–7

36 2 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister in ibid., 118. 37 See the 11 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister, anom col c11g 3/fol. 110–28. 38 11 November 1707 letter of Raudot to the minister, anom col c11g 3/fol. 128–9. 39 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 383. 40 18 June 1708 letter of Pontchartrain to Raudot, anom col c11g 21/ fol. 198–198v. 41 anom col c11A 29/fol. 354–7. The letter was probably written in 1709 since it mentions the 22 October 1708 agreement made at Quebec. 42 6 July 1709 letter of king to Vaudreuil and Raudot, anom col c11g 4/fol. 3–17; rapq (1942–43), 413. 43 Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle canadien, 274. 44 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 45 Marcel Moussette compares the other three accounts, all written by administrators, to Marie-André’s. Besides giving more details of the disaster, she emphasizes the moral qualities of the victims and their pious deaths according to the conventions of the annals genre. The annals relate the loss of her father’s papers impersonally, with no mention of its consequences for her family (Moussette, “Québec 1713,” 69–100). 46 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 382. 47 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 48 Roy, Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 58. 49 7 November 1711 summary of letter of Vaudreuil and Raudot, anom col c11a 32/fol. 195–204. 50 8 November 1711 letter of Vaudreuil, anom col c11a 32/fol. 65–81. 51 5 November 1712 letter of Nicolas Pinaud to the minister, anom col c11a 33/fol. 300–301v. 52 12 November 1712 letter of Vaudreuil and Bégon to the minister, anom col c11a 33/fol. 15–37. 53 Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances, 124. 54 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 135. 55 1 June 1714 letter of the minister to Denis Leroy, anom col b36 fol. 195v. 56 12 November 1714 letter of Bégon to the minister, anom col c11a 34/fol. 303–320v.

notes to pages 37–9

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57 Legohérel, Les Trésoriers généraux, 294–8. 58 Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux,” 188–90. 59 J.-Edmond Roy is defensive in his account of Duplessis’s troubles and stresses his honesty: “Monsieur Duplessis could have, like so many finance officers, speculated with the king’s funds and have enriched himself, but he preferred to maintain the reputation of an honest honorable man that he had painstakingly acquired … The courts could have justified him from a strictly business point of view, but he wanted total vindication from the people who had confided in him their trust.” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, notice biographique, xi–xii.) 60 Brun. “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 40. 61 The contract lists Georges’s inheritance from his parents as his lineage property, without specifying what this inheritance consisted of. 62 anf, Minutier Central, 15 May 1700, Étude XVI, 621. 63 See J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 58, for a list of most of these. 64 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, i–ii. 65 hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 24, undated draft of letter of G. Duplessis to Maurepas, “Si je n’avais que mes intérêts.” 66 On these matrilineal networks, see Chapman, “Patronage as Family Economy,” 11–35. 67 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136. According to Philippe-Baby Casgrain, the site was later occupied by a commercial building constructed in 1900 by the widow of Samuel Fisher. That building is located at 8–12 Côte de la Fabrique, “Le Kent House,” 13. 68 Lafontaine, Recensements annotés, 19. 69 Boisclair, Catalogue des œuvres peintes, 74–7; banq, Étude Henry Hiché 220. Her Jesuit son had sent the painting of Saint Helen. In 1722, he mentioned the portrait of the Franciscan as being in his mother’s home (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 94). 70 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, ii. 71 Ibid., 74. 72 Ibid., 101. 73 Ibid., 108–9. 74 banq, 3 July 1719 donation of Marie Leroy, Étude Pierre Rivet Chevalier.

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notes to pages 39–43

75 banq, Étude Hiché, number 220, 10 September 1731 will of Marie Leroy, widow of Georges Regnard Duplessis. 76 hdq-f1-h4, 4/7: 11; Pierre André de Leigne, the officer of the prévôté court, approved their request on 3 August 1736. 77 banq, 15 June 1715, sale of a lot, Étude Barbel. 78 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136. 79 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 74. 80 On the family, see Pierre-Georges Roy, La Famille Lanoullier. 81 Marie Leroy signed the marriage contracts of Jean-Eustache in 1719 and of Nicolas in 1720 as a cousin, but when Nicolas signed Charles-Denis Duplessis’s contract in 1742, Nicolas listed his relationship as “allié,” that is, someone related by marriage rather than blood. The father of Nicolas and Jean-Eustache, Jean Lanoullier, came from Rungis and his 1681 contract was written by a notary named Josse in Monthléry, according to Macouin, Les Familles pionnières, 115. Marie Leroy’s grandmother was Andrée Josse of Limours. Monthléry is about 20 km from Limours, both in the modern Essonne department. 82 3 November 1719, anom col c11a fol. 332–332v. 83 4 November 1719 request of Marie Leroy, anom col c11a fol. 158–158v. 84 10 November 1719 accounting of card money by Pierre Peire, anom col c11a fol. 218–218v. 85 17 April 1731 letter of Maurepas to Hocquart, anom col c11a 56/fol. 53–57v; 17 October 1731 letter of Hocquart to Maurepas, anom col c11a fol. 217–222v. 86 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 136–7. 87 Ibid., NF 2: 135. J.-Edmond Roy’s paraphrase and commentary, first in his edition of François-Xavier’s letters (“Notice biographique,” xxvi–xxvii) and then in his Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, has led historians to believe that she paid this sum, not accounted for it, as her daughter’s letter states. “His widow, who had always served as guarantor in all of his offices, had to account for a quarter-century administrative period. How could one verify so complicated a management when all the relevant documents had been destroyed? She was held responsible for 1,200,000 livres. All was paid.” Pierre-Georges Roy thus said she paid over a million livres in his entry on Marie Le Roy in A travers l’Histoire

notes to pages 43–5

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88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96

de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 135. Voisine writes in his dcb entry on Georges Duplessis: “In January 1713 all the treasury papers were destroyed when the intendant’s palace in Quebec burned. Duplessis was held responsible for the loss of the card money, treasury bonds, bills in hand, and vouchers for expenditures – all the treasury papers – and he was obliged to make reimbursement. He died on 30 Oct. 1714, before he had finished payment, and his widow had to pay more than a million livres.” Such an amount would have been impossible for an individual to reimburse. As a cumulative sum of money handled by the treasurer’s office over numerous years that had to be accounted for, it is plausible. Lafontaine, Recensements annotés, 129. banq, 16 July 1757 Seizure, TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P60. Brun, “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 44. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 97. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 163–4. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 105–6. Brun, “Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance,” 42. Brun does not discuss Leroy in her survey of widowhood, and Leroy, by exploiting a variety of ad-hoc strategies, seems to have fared better than most of the cases Brun cites. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 390. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 174.

Chapter Three 1 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. 2 See listings in the prdh database (“Programme de recherche en démographie historique”), nos. 62337, 62318, 62444, 62501, 62577, 62652. 3 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 44. 4 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xii. 5 Simpson, Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 127. 6 Coüard, “Contribution à l’histoire de l’instruction publique,” 184. 7 31 October 1701 letter of Sister Saint-Ignace, cited by Gosselin, L’Instruction au Canada, 192. 8 For the founding of the Hôpital-Général and its conflicts with the

284

notes to pages 47–52

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19

Hôtel-Dieu, see Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres. O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 186. J.-Edmond Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 2: 57. Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 1: 526. For this description of Georges Duplessis, written by his daughter, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 390–1. D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 69. D’Allaire divides the recruits whose family status can be identified into four groups: the elite of governmental function or dignity; entrepreneurs; craftsmen; rural dwellers subject to a quit-rent. The first two comprise the upper strata of society (ibid., 53–6). Ibid., 68–9. According to Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 135, on 31 December 1708, a week before Marie-André’s profession, the community had forty-three members, including four postulants and novices, and he calculates that in the decade 1699–1708, twenty-four recruits joined the community. Her brother says that in 1728 he met a Flemish Jesuit who had a copy of the sermon from papers he inherited from Bigot (Lettres, 152). There were two Bigot Jesuits in Quebec at this time, the brothers Jacques (1651–1711) and Vincent (1649–1720). Most likely the preacher was Vincent, who took an interest in the HôtelDieu. The previous year François-Xavier had reminded his sister that Bigot had preached on the cross: “I still keep in mind what the saintly Father Bigot said about it to my sister Sainte-Hélène the day that she had the happiness of being admitted among the spouses of Jesus-Christ. We have wed the cross; do not be surprised if Jesus Christ, who loves us in a special way, does not let a day pass without making us feel its weight. Let us love it despite our resistance and let us kiss with respect our chains despite nature’s revolt. Let us adore in silence and humility the Providence that permits many things that annoy and keep us busy from uniting ourselves interiorly to God … In a word, let us love the cross.” (Lettres, 139.) F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xii–xiii. Ragueneau, La Vie de la Mère Catherine, 196–7. In a political analysis of the biography, Lignereux, “Catherine de Saint-Augustin: une héroïcité sans héroïsme?” shows how Ragueneau exploited

notes to pages 52–7

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20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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Catherine’s spirituality to defend the Jesuit’s own largely theocratic vision of the colony; Pearson, “‘I willingly speak to you about her virtues,’” points out the extent to which Catherine’s private ascetic and mystical performance had public repercussions. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218–19. Ibid., 427. Ibid., 426–9. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiii. Ibid., 52. The text was completed by November 1718, the date of the approbation by Joseph de la Colombière found in the manuscript (M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55). Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle,” 51. On music at the Hôtel-Dieu, see Schwandt, “Le petit motet,” 231–54, and Pinson, “Les Communauté féminines,” 109–42, in GallatMorin and Pinson, La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France. M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 58. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 55. Recueil tiré des Constitutions, traité III (1, 2), 91. On monastic particular friendships, condemned by the patristic founders, rehabilitated to some extent in the Middle Ages, but again denounced after the Council of Trent, see Wright, Bonds of Perfection, 102–58, and McGoldrick, The Sweet and Gentle Struggle, 475–93. Quoted in Wright, Bonds of Perfection, 115. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 383. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181–5. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 105, undated circular death notice in MarieAndré’s hand beginning “Ce n’est pas sans une vive douleur.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 73. Ibid., NF 2: 77–8. Ibid., NF 3: 176. Marie Irwin de la Conception was “very much a friend” of Catherine Le Contre de Sainte-Agnès, “our Lord being the bond of their union.” So great was their friendship that they died within a week of each other (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 231).

notes to pages 57–62

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Catherine Longpré de Saint-Augustin was likewise “very much the friend” of Marie-Renée Boulic de la Nativité. They admonished each other on their hidden faults, and thus “both made great strides on the path toward perfection” (307–8). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 41. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 33. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 49. Recueil tiré des Constitutions, 4–5. The classic reference is to the two sisters in Luke 10:38–42. While Martha busies herself preparing for Jesus’s visit, Mary sits at his feet without helping and absorbs his teaching. When Martha complains, Jesus replies that Mary has chosen the better part. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 21. hdq-f1-d6/6-f1-e2, “Sermon prêché à la vêture de Geneviève Duplessis,” by an unnamed priest. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 22. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 90–1. Fino, L’Hospitalité, 201–2. F.-X Duplessis, Lettres, 67. Ibid., 35–6. Teresa of Avila, La Vie de Sainte Thérèse, ch. 7.21, p. 100; ch. 22.11, p. 347; ch. 24.6, p. 388. For a comprehensive analysis of Teresa’s view of friendship, see Soughers, “Friendship with the Saints,” 81–144. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 5. The text, written in her hand, begins by citing John 15:15, on which it is a commentary. “Je ne vous appellerai plus serviteurs mais amis parce qu’un serviteur ne sait pas les desseins de son maître, mais il communique tous ses secrets à ses amis”: “I will no longer call you servants but friends because a servant does not know the intentions of his master, but he communicates all his secrets to his friends.” F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 36. Ibid., 48. Fino analyzes the Dissection as a theological treatise. She situates it in terms of seventeenth-century spiritual authors to whose

notes to pages 63–7

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

writings Duplessis had access, such as Jean Eudes and Jean de Bernières-Louvigny. Fino’s discussion of how the tension between contemplation and action is worked out on the theological level is particularly rich. My emphasis is more on how the Dissection shows Duplessis working out this tension in her personal spiritual life (L’Hospitalité, 195–209). hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, Dissection spirituelle. I give the number of the meditation in which the citations are found. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 48. Ibid., 56. Fino, L’Hôspitalité, 185–95. Ragueneau, Vie de la Mère Catherine, 62, 55. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 146–7. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 49. Ibid., NF 3: 50. Ibid., NF 3: 49–50. Ibid., NF 3: 97. Ibid., NF 3: 290. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, La Manne de Bethléem. In dedicating this devotional text to the Carmelites she made explicit her attraction to them and her frustration as a hospitaller. She says that Providence did not allow her to enter the Carmelites’ holy retreat, despite her inclination to their life. Instead she finds herself “called for, badgered, tired out by the large number of patients” in the hospital, which requires her to function in a position that prevents her from attaining the composure needed for contemplation. She writes the devotional text to overcome the distractions of her work. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, circular letter in Marie-André’s hand beginning “Ce n’est pas sans une vive douleur.” M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 44. Ibid., NF 3: 306.

Chapter Four 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. 2 Hecquet recounts this period of her life between leaving Paris and her marriage in an unpublished memoir, “Account of the vexations undergone on account of the formulary” (“Relation des vexations

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3

4 5 6

7 8

essuyées au sujet du formulaire”). A sequel up to about age fifty is entitled “Continuation including the vexations undergone on account of the Constitution Unigenitus” (“Suite comprenant les vexations au sujet de la Constitution Unigenitus”). The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (SJ Ms 8/558), the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris (Ms 5356), and the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Paris (BO 875), hold copies. I quote from the Port-Royal manuscript. I discuss her journey into Jansenism at greater length in “Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction.” For a lucid analysis of why the bull was a theological and tactical disaster, unfair to Quesnel and bordering on intellectual dishonesty, see the account by McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2: 353–5, 370–7. He acknowledges that the bull condemns nine propositions that he deems indefensible, but adds that many more did not deserve anathemas (2: 354). He gives a detailed, theologically informed account of the Jesuits’ role and the ensuing controversies. Ibid., 2: 387. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 27. Ibid., 79. In this June 1721 letter Duplessis alludes to a letter missing from the published collection in which he described his uncle in more detail. Jean Leroy appears in the parish registers of SaintCénéré as pastor in 1692, although for most of the decade a vicar signs them; Leroy begins to appear regularly around 1699. Before coming to the diocese of Le Mans, Jean Leroy was a priest of the diocese of Paris, which was a Jansenist stronghold. He is not listed in Nivelle’s catalogue of clergy who registered a public appeal against Unigenitus, although the chapter of the cathedral of his diocese in Le Mans did (La Constitution Unigenitus déférée à l’Eglise universelle, ou recueil général des actes d’appel interjetés au futur concile). He was buried in the parish church on 20 January 1724 (Parish records, Archives de la Mayenne). On 31 January 1724, François-Xavier sent his sisters a report he had received of the death from relatives in Paris (Lettres, 116). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 97–8. On the early quarrels concerning Jansenism in the seventeenth century see Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France, 14–74, and McManners, Church and Society, 2: 345–52. Sedgwick’s

notes to pages 76–7

289

9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

18

19

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chapter answering the question “What Was Jansenism?” (193–207) is a short, classic assessment of the nature of the movement highlighting its contradictions and situating it in terms of other currents in the church. Quantin, in Le Rigorisme chrétien (12), points out that rigorism was equated with excessive rigour and was a label no one desired. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 15. McManners, Church and Society, 2: 349. This view of Jansenism is elaborated by Chédozeau, “Port-Royal et le jansénisme.” See also McManners, Church and Society, 2: 422–34, on this point and on the changing face of Jansenism, noting that the Jansenists were no more tolerant than their persecutors. McManners, Church and Society, 2: 394. Upon returning to France in 1718, he wrote an account of his Canadian experiences contrasting his harsh treatment by the bishop, egged on by the Jesuits, with more sympathetic treatment by most others (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada”). His version is complemented by one that Duplessis included in the Annales based on information she received from the Jesuits and her own contact with him as a patient at the hospital. She stressed how the Jansenist temptation represented by Poulet was overcome (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’HôtelDieu, 404–8). Hurtubise, “Ni janséniste, ni gallican, ni ultramontain,” 10–11. The cathedral canons noted this fact when Bishop Pierre-Herman Dosquet required them to sign the formulary in November 1730. For their text, see Têtu, “Le Chapitre de la cathédrale de Québec,” 358. La Charité, “Les Deux Éditions du Rituel du diocèse de Québec.” La Charité uses a looser definition of Jansenism (82–3) than I use. I see Saint-Vallier as a rigorist on contrition who was distrustful of the Jesuits, but not as a Jansenist in terms of the theology of grace. “My Lord the bishop of Quebec has written me that he cannot take any measures about the acceptance of the pope’s bull that condemns the book of Quesnel because the gentlemen [?] of the Clergy have not written him about it, and to bring him to a decision it appears to me necessary to act with him in the same way as has been done with the other bishops who do not belong

notes to pages 78–82

20

21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

to the Clergy of France. He only awaits that to issue his pastoral letter when you will have sent the necessary dispatches on this subject.” (3 July 1715 letter of Pontchartrain to l’abbé de Maupeou, Archives publiques du Canada, B, 37, 125–125v, as cited by Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle, 153.) “I first expressed my surprise about the special treatment he reserved for me by requiring that I accept the bull, which he had not yet done from any of his other clergy” (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 217). The printed version of SaintValier’s “Mandement promulgant la constitution Unigenitus” in the Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires des Evêques de Québec, 1: 486–7, gives no date, although it appears in the collection between a text of 1713 and one of 1716. A note indicates that the text is truncated and thus without a date in the copies preserved in the diocesan archives, the archives of the Seminary, and the Hôpital-Général. Was the date eliminated on all three copies to conceal the bishop’s delay? See the testimony of the Jesuit superior in Canada in Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: 142. La Charité, “Les Deux Éditions du Rituel du diocèse de Québec,” 80–1. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 404. Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: 142. The Jesuit was so vociferous with secular officials that he had to be replaced, according to a sympathizer of Poulet’s at the Seminary, Joachim Fornel. See his 13 November 1719 letter to Poulet appended to Poulet’s relation of events, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 226–7. Indeed, Duparc, not d’Heu, is listed as confessor by the next year in Hôtel-Dieu records. Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 223. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 406. Ibid., 408. Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 218–19. On the Rioux brothers, see Grenier, “Jean Rioux: émigrant breton, seigneur canadien,” 73–88. Grenier does not mention this episode. Mandements des Evêques de Québec, 1: 496–8.

notes to pages 82–4

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31 Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 222. 32 The first is a Port-Royalist critique of Ragueneau’s 1671 biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 236–7). Jamet does not provide documentation in support of this claim of a Jansenist critique, and I have been unable to locate any. The second concerned André de Merlac, whom SaintVallier had installed as superior of the Hôtel-Dieu. He was accused of Jansenism and attempting to seduce some of the nuns with his ideas (279–80). The affair was treated with so much secrecy that it is difficult to verify the accusations. 33 Ibid., 408. 34 The Jesuit historian Lucien Campeau, who distinguished Jansenism clearly from rigorism, cited Duplessis in minimizing the penetration of Jansenism in the Canadian church (“Le Jansénisme en Nouvelle-France,” 309–10). 35 Thiboult was the pastor of the town parish and an officer in the local ecclesiastical tribunal. According to Poulet (“Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 224), “As for the ecclesiastical tribunal, M. Thiboult was the only one who could listen to reason. I do not know if his interests would have allowed him to do me justice. He had told me several times that everything I would do would be useless.” On Thiboult and Fornel, see Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle, 155; on Leclair, see note 38 below. 36 Fornel’s letter to Poulet makes these two points. The hypocritical Jesuits “have not been so scrupulous when they had to follow the pope in condemning their Chinese superstitions” (Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 226). According to Fornel (227), the probabilism that the Jesuits teach allows for a “method that makes it easy in the confessional to hardly ever have to refuse absolution to the unworthy and thus drawing to themselves large numbers of people.” 37 “The council of Quebec is only made up of merchants, all ignorant of the fundamental laws of the kingdom and of what takes place in France, and most are devoted to the Jesuits” (ibid., 224). 38 This fact is made explicit in a memorandum to Cardinal de Noailles on behalf of Pierre Leclair, found in the bnf manuscript with papers addressed to the cardinal, that contains Poulet’s account. Leclair is described as “very full of zeal for the truth,”

292

notes to pages 84–5

39 40

41

42

the code expression for Jansenism among its supporters. “He noted that several of his colleagues are disposed to join with him in declaring themselves openly in favour of truth, but for that to happen, he would need tenure … The bishop of Quebec only has his parishes served by Canadian clerics as missionaries, who being revocable at pleasure, find themselves unable to support themselves and defend themselves in different affairs” (lac, mg 7, I, A2, vol. 20973, p. 60). Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 212–13. At least one priest who served in Canada did appeal Unigenitus, but only after his return to relative safety in France. Abel Maudoux (1652–1736), priest of the Foreign Missions, arrived in Canada in 1688 and served at Trois-Rivières and in Acadia. He left Canada in 1702 for the diocese of Le Mans where he signed the appeal in 1717 and 1721 (Nivelle, La Constitution Unigenitus, Suite du tome second, 196–9). Poulet’s stay overlapped with that of the future schismatic Jansenist bishop Dominique-Marie Varlet, who was in Quebec for thirteen months between September 1717 and October 1718. Varlet, a priest of the Foreign Missions, had left France before Unigenitus to be a missionary, first around Mobile and then at Cahokia. He left the Illinois Country for Quebec in 1717 to obtain recruits for his mission there. While he must have stayed at the Seminary and had contacts with devout circles, no traces of his Quebec stay have been found. Poulet does not cite him. Pierre Hurtubise expressed surprise that so few traces of this stay remain: “Did certain pious hands, desirous of maintaining the good reputation of the church of New France, learning later that Varlet became schismatic, take care to erase most of the traces of his stay in Canada? We will never know, perhaps” (Hurtubise, “Varlet,” 31–2). See his series of letters in the Utrecht Jansenist collection to Dom Thierry de Viaixnes, a Jansenist monk of the Benedictine Congregation of Vannes, exiled in Holland. On 26 April 1722, Poulet wrote that he had been busy with “much writing for Canada.” On 14 September, he said he had been able to send books by way of La Rochelle. A note included in an April/May 1723 letter gave an update: “Isn’t Monsieur Desprez in contact with some people in Quebec? I received two or three letters from there this

notes to page 86

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43

44

45 46

47

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year. They send no news of importance. The package of good books that I sent there last year arrived safely. I am sending another. It is a pity that I am missing the best texts” (Utrecht State Archive, PortRoyal Collection PR 3903). We do not know who these contacts were, but Fornel and Leclair are strong candidates, given their appearance in the same bnf manuscript that contains Poulet’s account. Rocher notes how this “non-Jansenist, rigorist tradition” came to dominate the Quebec church between 1850 and 1950 in his lecture “History and Social Change,” 362–3. Gauvreau shows that toward the end of this period, progressive Catholics in Quebec denounced this puritanical, clerical attitude, especially in regard to sexuality and marriage issues, as “Jansenistic” (The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 75, 88–9). This is especially ironic when one considers how proud the clerical establishment between 1850 and 1950 was that Canada had been kept uncontaminated by Jansenism. In the Annales, she said that the Port-Royalists measured God’s mercy according to the narrowness of their own hearts (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 236). See Fino on these points, especially her discussion of Duplessis’s “Dissection spirituelle” in L’Hospitalité, 200–2, 212–14. It is likely that Duplessis had direct or indirect access during this period to the Gazette d’Amsterdam, known commonly as the Gazette de Hollande. She alluded to the fact that Poulet published an account of his Canadian stay in it (Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 407); see the edition of 4 April 1719. The appeal of the Abbeville Cordelières, which she cited in her 1720 letter to Hecquet, is quoted in the 11 November 1718 edition of the paper, after an item on the appeal of the Sorbonne. She seems to have been given access to a 1729 anti-Jansenist tract, Quatrième Mémoire sur les projets jansénistes, as indicated by a note on a copy held by the Sulpician library in Montreal, according to Julie Roy and Michel Brisebois, La Bibliothèque de “Ces Messieurs,” 50–1. She recounts these trials in “Continuation including the vexations undergone on account of the Constitution Unigenitus,” the sequel to the account of her persecutions because of the formulary, found in the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, ms. 338bis.

notes to pages 86–7

48 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 98. 49 Ibid., NF 3: 177–8. 50 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 161. See also his letter of 21 May 1729 where he announced the decision (157). 51 See Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis et l’imagerie du calvaire d’Arras,” for details and illustrations. 52 François-Xavier’s misogyny is typical of Jesuit anti-Jansenist polemics. For other examples see Carr, “Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction.” Three editions of the Nouvelles contain accounts of the 1736 Abbeville mission: 17 November (182–3); 24 November (185–6); 1 December (192). François-Xavier is singled out as one of the most aggressive anti-Jansenist preachers there. He is ridiculed for repeating the frequent Jesuit accusation that the Jansenists had women priests, “women who reciting the canon of the mass imagine themselves consecrating” (183). The Jansenists maintained that the priest should pronounce the canon of the mass audibly so that those attending it could hear the words of consecration, and that the laity, even women, should have access to a French translation of the Latin text of the mass. The possibility that twelve to fifteen thousand attendees could have been adequately confessed in two to three weeks is ridiculed (185). The account of an earlier 1736 mission at Saint-Germain-en-Laye says that he mocked Jansenist women as “women theologians” (29 September 1736, 154). 53 30 May 1736 letter of Hecquet to Jean Soanen, State Archive Utrecht, Fonds Port-Royal, 6614. 54 Hecquet, “Suite comprenant les vexations,” 267. 55 Ibid., 258. The 14 July 1736 edition of the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, in its account of the Amiens mission of the previous year, identified François-Xavier in the same way as a “native of Canada” (109). 56 I discuss this episode from a slightly different perspective in “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist.” 57 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 230. 58 Ibid., NF 3: 283. 59 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 98. 60 Some new characters become partners in the exchange: Geneviève sent Hecquet a brief note in 1720, and Hecquet’s oldest daughter Marie-Catherine, whom she nicknamed Manon

notes to pages 87–91

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76

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after Marie-André, seems to have written at least two letters to Duplessis. The two friends used an uncle-by-marriage of Hecquet, Jean-Baptiste Demus, to exchange gifts, and later one of Hecquet’s sons-in-law, Pierre Bourdeau, to exchange letters. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 54. Ibid., NF 3: 171. Ibid., NF 4: 53–4. Ibid., NF 4: 57. Ibid., NF 3: 288. Ibid., NF 2: 77. Ibid., NF 3: 303. Ibid., NF 3: 306. Ibid., NF 3: 228. Ibid., NF 4: 43–4. Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 361. The indication of his alcoholism is found in the periodic reports that the supervisor of the prisoners on La Désirade was required to make. In 1765, he reported, “Antoine Philippe Duhecquet has always behaved well. His only failing is drink, which happens to him seldom, however.” Philippe seems to have reformed, but too late (anf, Colonies, C/10d/2). On 31 August 1755, she bought a house on the Rue de l’Oursine along the Bièvre River, not far from her house on the Rue Mouffetard. Her husband was required by law to give his authorization for such a transaction by his wife. The notary duly collected it, not in Paris, but in a parloir of the asylum run by the Frères de la Charité in Charenton, where Jacques Hecquet was interned “by order of his Majesty” (anf, Minutier central, Étude CXV, 689, 31 August 1755). She had evidently obtained a lettre de cachet against him. The Charenton hospital, where the marquis de Sade would be lodged from 1801 to 1814, catered to well-off individuals of the bourgeoisie or lower nobility thought to be insane. anf, Minutier central, Étude LXXVII, 297, 7 July 1764. Melançon and Dubois, “Les Amitiés féminines,” 104, point to how this tension ultimately reinforces their friendship.

notes to pages 91–4

77 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 227. 78 Ibid., NF 3: 232. 79 1740 draft in NF 3: 278–83; 1751 fragment of draft in NF 3: 359–61; 1756 letter in Carr, “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist,” 101–5. 80 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 58. 81 See Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois, 7–8, for the mechanics of the survival of Homassel family documents held in the anf, T 77. 82 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 98. 83 See Piché, “‘Ma très chère mère du Canada,’” for examples and an analysis of how they reflect the French view of Canada. A handful of post-1755 replies received from these convents survive, but none of hers. 84 On these material questions see Harrison, Until Next Year, 65. 85 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 56. 86 Ibid., NF 3: 179. 87 Ibid., NF 5: 371. 88 Ibid., NF 4: 47. 89 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 261–2. 90 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 134. 91 Her letter to the duchess is quoted in a note to a 25 February 1753 letter of her brother (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 284–5). 92 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 117–18. 93 Ibid., NF 4: 242. 94 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1:7, draft of a 20 October 1751 letter to La Galissonière by Geneviève Duplessis beginning “Nous numes pas lhonneur de recevoir des marques de votre souvenir.” 95 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 361. 96 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 12, This undated draft by Geneviève beginning “Je ne doute pas quil ny est des simpathies” can be dated to fall 1753 and identified as addressed to Franquet. It mentions that the Recollet priest Simple Bocquet, who returned to Quebec from his missions in the Gaspé area at that time to become pastor at TroisRivières, had crossed in the Saint Lawrence the ship in which the addressee was returning to France. Franquet sailed for France in autumn 1753. Of course, this is a draft and might not represent the letter actually sent.

notes to pages 94–100

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Chapter Five 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 164. 2 Kalm’s report is analyzed at the end of this chapter. The Philadelphia hospital was modelled on voluntary hospitals that were founded in Britain earlier in the eighteenth century (Williams, America’s First Hospital, 1–15). Colonial Mexico was more densely populated and had a network of as many as 128 hospitals by the early seventeenth century (Risse, “Medicine in New Spain,” 41). 3 Poulet, “Un Bénédictin janséniste réfugié au Canada,” 223. A 7 October 1731 letter from the intendant and governor to the minister repeats that the bourgeois and well-off habitants use the hospital and are charged for services received (anom col c11a 54/fol. 91– 96v). Hospitals in the British thirteen colonies evolved alongside of, or out of, almshouses. French and Canadian almshouses, hôpitaux généraux, were founded as a supplement to the already existing hôtels-Dieu. 4 Rousseau gives statistics on admissions, staffing, medical practice, and financing at the hospital in his indispensable history of the institution, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 55–84. 5 For Duplessis’s account of this separation and the nuns’ rationale for requesting it, see M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 137, 184–5. 6 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 104–5. 7 Other women’s communities in Canada managed somewhat comparable portfolios. For comparison, revenues at the HôtelDieu of Montreal in the period between 1723 and the early 1750s usually ranged between 12,000 and 15,000 livres according to Ducharme, “Les Revenus des Hospitalières de Montréal,” 223. At the Hôpital-Général in Quebec, revenues were somewhat higher: 20,026 livres in 1723 and 38,669 livres in 1752, although in the 1730s, the average income only ranged between 14,000 and 25,000 livres. Like the Hôtel-Dieu, it consistently showed a deficit between 1723 and 1752, according to D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 231–2. Moreover, all the houses had similar revenue sources, even if the percentage that each source contributed to the total varied from community to community: a royal subsidy; rentes from

298

notes to pages 102–4

8

9

10 11

12

13

investments in France; produce and the sale of produce from land holdings in the colony; sale of goods made by the nuns; gifts and payments from patients or boarders. Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the hospital’s finances (45–142). No other Canadian community has received such scrutiny, although D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, does provide some statistics. Noel, Along a River, points to several exceptions. The three single Desaunier sisters ran what she calls a “notorious smuggling ring” operating between Montreal and Albany (99–102). Noel notes that while the single Louise de Ramezay managed a series of enterprises, other women of her aristocratic clan were also involved in business (160). See the first five chapters of Noel’s Along a River for an overview of the economic position of women. Other articles and books I have found useful include Plamondon, “Une Femme d’affaires: MarieAnne Barbel”; Young, “‘… sauf les périls et fortunes de la mer’”; her Kin, Commerce, Community; and Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, veuve et seigneuresse. See Parent, “Entre le Juridique et le social,” 38–40, on the separation des biens. A notable exception of a widow directing seigneurial property is the mother of Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay of the HôpitalGénéral. Marie-Catherine Peuvret (1667–1739) became seigneuresse of Beauport just outside of Quebec in 1715 at age forty-eight upon the death of her husband. She did have a son who could have assumed management of the estate in 1715, and other sons who attained legal majority later, but they seemed not to have been interested in or capable of the duties, and she directed it until her death (Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, 120–3). See Grenier, “Réflexion sur le pouvoir féminin, Marie-Catherine Peuvret,” 306–7, and his detailed study of twenty-nine widows in his Seigneurs campagnards, 185–93; only two of the twenty-nine managed the seigneurie when a son of legal age was available. Dinet-Lecomte, Les Sœurs hospitalières en France, 297. Her book is a comprehensive examination of all aspects of nuns’ engagement with hospital work in the Ancien Régime based on archival work with many orders.

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14 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 3, 31 September 1749 draft of letter by G. Duplessis to La Galissonière. 15 Noel gives multiple examples of how the two Hôpital-Général nuns worked their noble connections to promote their house (185–95). See also O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 368–70, and the dcb articles on them. 16 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 5, “État de la situation de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec et de l‘administration du bien des pauvres depuis le 10e juillet 1724 jusqu’au 15e de mars 1747.” 17 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 10, “Observations sur ce que Monseigneur a souhaité qu’on éclaircit, et sur les causes de dépense extraordinaire de cet hôpital dans l’année 1747.” 18 Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec, 81 CD SS. Hosp. H.-D, 1: 4. Undated memo in Marie-André’s hand to Pontbriand that seems related to the 1747 reports cited in the previous two notes. 19 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 85. 20 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” fol. 15–17. Besides her 21 October 1720 letter to Hecquet (NF 2: 76), Duplessis also takes up this case in the Annales, 403–4, which in part simply incorporates text from the chapter minutes. 21 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. 22 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 90. 23 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 404. 24 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 5, “État de la situation de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec et de l‘administration du bien des pauvres depuis le 10e juillet 1724 jusqu’au 15e de mars 1747.” 25 Dubé gives the best blow-by-blow overview of the affair in his biography, Claude-Thomas Dupuy, 281–6. D’Allaire discusses it briefly in her study of the D’Auteuil family, Montée et déclin d’une famille noble, 238–9. Also see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 398n.  26 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 1, 9 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 27 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 2, 11 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 28 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 1, 9 June 1727 letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil. 29 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 7, 21 June 1727 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Ruette d’Auteuil.

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notes to pages 106–10

30 hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 8, 1 July 1727 letter of Ruette d’Auteuil to M.-A. Duplessis. 31 hdq-f1-h4, 4/11: 2, “Récit de ce qui s’est passé entre Mr Dupuy intendant et les religieuses de l’Hôtel-Dieu.” This four-page account is the sort of narrative that she would have incorporated into a second installment of the Annales. 32 Dinet-Lecomte in Les Sœurs hospitalières identifies several methods of hospital organization, with lay administrators being both the most widespread and giving the nuns the least independence, while the arrangement at the Hôtel-Dieu, where the nuns were in complete control of day-to-day operations, was rarer (284–308). 33 hdq- f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” 5 September 1732 minutes. 34 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 104. 35 2,000 livres of Marie-Geneviève Lefebvre’s 1732 dowry were used toward paying off the wall’s construction (D’Allaire, Les Dots des religieuses, 155n31). 36 14 October 1733 letter of Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, anom col c11a 59/fol. 161–162v. 37 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 112–14. 38 Ibid., 114–17. 39 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 393–6. 40 1727, a two-week visit by the mother superior and her assistant (letter of Geneviève to Ruette d’Auteuil, 11 June 1727, hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 2); 1729, a stay of six weeks on the island (Actes capitulaires, note for the chapter meeting of 21 May 1729, written by MarieAndré, hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1). 41 hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1, “Actes capitulaires,” chapter meeting of 25 July 1733. 42 hdq-f5-d44/13: 7, 4 July 1736 legal brief on behalf of de la Lande de Gayon accusing the nuns of “using the veil of the poor to despoil her and her children of their property” (“Répliques pour Dame Marie-Thérèse de La Lande Gayon”). 43 See Rousseau’s summary of her prospectus, L’Œuvre de chère, 117. He provides a detailed overview of the property (117–30). 44 Blais, “La ‘seigneurie des pauvres,’” 180. His thesis adds details not found in Rousseau’s L’Œuvre de chère and comparisons with other religious communities. 45 These improvements are discussed in Blais, “La ‘seigneurie des pauvres,’” 114–20.

notes to pages 111–15

301

46 Ibid., 182–4. Barthe’s “Du manoir au parloir,” 156–77, does not isolate the period of the Duplessis administration to permit comparisons with the Ursulines’ management or rural holdings. 47 Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 127, cites documents of the nuns in 1747 and 1750 that make this argument. 48 See Rousseau’s overall assessment of Saint-Augustin’s contribution, L’Œuvre de chère, 127, and Blais’s conclusion. 49 Recueil tiré des Constitutions, 250–6. 50 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 6, June 1727 letter of Duplessis to Thomas-Jacques Taschereau. 51 hdq-f1-a6, 1/: 14, 1748, “Éclaircissements sur les usages de l’hôpital.” 52 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 14, draft of 1748 letter by G. Duplessis to Bigot. 53 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 15, 1748 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 54 The letters in the hdq date from 1747 and 1749. 55 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 290–1, 370–1. 56 Ibid., NF 5: 312. 57 Ibid., NF 3: 104–5. 58 Ibid., NF 3: 171. 59 Ibid., NF 3: 181. 60 Casgrain says that the relics were finally obtained through Charlevoix’s auspices (Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 363). 61 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 229–30. 62 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 371. 63 Martin, “Le Père François-Xavier Duplessis et l’imagerie du calvaire,” 11–37. 64 Ibid., 31. 65 hdq-f1-b1, 8/1, “Observations de S. M.-André Duplessis dite SainteHélène sur plusieurs articles de nos règlements, 3.” 66 Another brother, Paul-Antoine-François Lanoullier des Granges, arrived in Canada in 1730 and became a royal notary in Quebec in 1748. In 1750, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu appointed him judge of their seigneurie of Saint-Bernard near Charlesbourg (GeorgesPierre Roy, La Famille Lanoullier, 24), an appointment that probably owed something to the Duplessis sisters. 67 31 October 1735 letter of Jean-Eustache Lanoullier to the minister, anom col c11a 64/fol. 263–6.

302

notes to pages 115–23

68 25 November 1750 request of Geneviève to J.-E. Lanoullier, banq, TL5, D2749. 69 On Nicolas see Keyes, “Un Commis des trésoriers généraux de la marine.” Around 1734, Marie-André made inquiries on Nicolas’s behalf to Hecquet about importing fabric to Canada, probably one of his attempts to supplement his income. 70 “The only relative we have in this country is a brother who will apparently be married this winter” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 96). 71 The contract had been signed the previous day in the presence of Hocquart, who had supported her father in his difficulties. The bride came to the marriage with a dower of 6,000 livres, but how much of this was cash is uncertain since she only received 3,000 livres when her father’s modest estate was settled in 1744. For details, see Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, 68–9; banq-q, Greffe de Bardolet, 31 October 1744. On Guillimin, see Pierre-Georges Roy, La Famille Guillimin. 72 He gives an account of his military career in a complaint addressed to the minister dated 10 November 1748. He was distressed to see more junior officers advanced ahead of him in the last list of promotions (anom col e 160, “Duplessis de Morampont, prévôt des maréchaux de France au Canada, sa veuve Geneviève Guillemin, réfugiée aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon [1748/1766]”). Duplessis’s role is not mentioned in Dunning Idle’s detailed history of the Saint Joseph post, The Post of the St Joseph River. 73 In 1743, Marie-André professed to be delighted with her niece, who shared her name and reportedly shared her looks: “My young brother … has a small daughter that one says looks like us and whose mother and father are crazy about; she’s so sharp and good that she is a little jewel” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 292). 74 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 246–7. 75 Ibid., 265–6. 76 Ibid., 277. 77 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 443. The French edition, Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada en 1749, has useful notes, but does not contain all of Kalm’s text available in English. 78 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 446.

notes to pages 123–6

303

79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

304

Ibid., 2: 445. Ibid., 2: 445. Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 135. Miquelon, New France, 223. In his Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 560–85, Casgrain lists all the choir and converse nuns by date of entrance, dates of profession and death, and years as nuns. Pelletier adds the profession of the fathers (Le Clergé en Nouvelle France, 247–58). In addition to his thorough analysis of multiple aspects of recruitment, Rousseau includes a chart that gives the total number of members including postulants by decade beginning with 1648 (La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 129–40). D’Allaire’s study of dowries in all the Canadian communities, Les Dots, is indispensable. Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 138. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 567–8. 30 October 1744 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 82/fol. 326–327v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 302. 8 October 1747 letter of Pontbriand to Maurepas, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. 8 October 1747 letter of Hocquart and La Galissonière to the minister, anom col c11a 107/fol. 56–8. According to the Recette et emploi des dots des religieuses professes, hdq-f1-a5, 6/1: 3, one of the four was received gratis; two paid 1,500 livres and the fourth paid 3,000 livres. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 305. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 569. D’Allaire discusses this episode, although not in these terms (Les Dots, 24). Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 446. Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 27. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 90, 96–7. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 356. See Rousseau, L’Œuvre de chère, 93–6, on this per diem. 1733: anom col c11a 60/fol. 359–361v; 1737: col c11a 67/fol. 37–38v; 1742: col c11a 77/fol. 11–13v; 1749: col c11a 93/fol. 309–310v.

notes to pages 126–9

100 27 October 1749 letter of Bigot to the minister, anom col c11a 93/ fol. 309–310v. 101 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 445.

Chapter Six 1 Gallat-Morin and Pinson, La Vie musicale en Nouvelle France, 381–2. 2 Noel, Along a River, 295–6n. 3 Carr, “From the Cloister to the World,” 18. 4 Rowan, “Between Salon and Convent.” 5 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 187. 6 Carr, “Une ‘histoire véritable’ littéraire à l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.” 7 Schwandt, “Musique spirituelle (1718): Canada’s First Music Theory Manual.” 8 M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55. 9 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181. 10 M.-A. Duplessis, “Musique spirituelle,” 55. 11 See Julie Roy, “Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre.” 12 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 185. 13 Biblia sacra: Vulgatæ editionis Sixti V. & Clementis VIII. Pont. Max. auctoritate recognita; La Sainte Bible traduite en françois, le latin de la Vulgate à côté. This last volume published in 1702 is now housed in the Jesuit library in Montreal. 14 M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 184. 15 Ibid., 183–5. 16 Ibid., 185. 17 See Andrès, Histoires littéraires des Canadiens, 175–82, for an analysis of this short text and the controversies it provoked. 18 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 358. These letters are lost, but in a letter of 2 March 1709 to her sister Louise, the princess mentioned Charles Le Moyne (Charlotte-Élisabeth d’Orléans, Correspondance, 2: 16–18). 19 Van der Cruysse, Madame Palatine, 483–4. 20 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 369. 21 For examples of these poems, most of which are found in a manuscript of the Hôtel-Dieu, see Lemay, Échos héroï-comiques.

notes to pages 129–40

305

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43

306

Arnauld d’Andilly, “Sur la conformité,” 1: 250–6. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 4. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 6. hdq-f1-e2, 1/1: 2, p. 74. In a note in his edition of her brother’s letters, J.-Edmond Roy lists several other short devotional texts by Duplessis that I have not been able to identify in the Hôtel-Dieu archives: “Méditations sur l’eucharistie et la communion, sur la manière d’offrir à Dieu toutes les actions de sa journée” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 192). F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. Cited in Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 433. hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 1. hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 2. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 21. Dedication letter, hdq-f1-e2, 1/2: 1. Guyart, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 2: 415–21. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 379. “I have hardly been able to glance for several moments at your meditations on the mysteries of the blessed childhood of our Lord which were given to me several days ago. If I can have them published, you will indeed receive copies” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 192). M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 370. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 177. See Pouliot’s article that situates Duplessis’s account among other contemporary ones, “Une primeur québécoise: la fête et l’office de la Sainte Famille” (hdq-a-5, c 8). M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 220. Casgrain prints her account of the statue in Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 363–70. “Relation au sujet de notre incendie,” hdq-a5, 3/1: 15t, 16t; cover letters, hdq-f1-a6, 1/4: 5 and hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 56. “I would go beyond the limits of a letter if I said here all the good that she did; but since I hope in time to have her life written, one will see there in more detail her wonderful and striking deeds” (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 428). The 1666

notes to pages 140–7

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

Recueil tiré des Constitutions charges the secretary with composing circular letters for deceased nuns (368–9), even though the superior signed them. It is very likely that Duplessis wrote the letter for her beloved mentor at the request of Geneviève Dupuy and thus announced her plan to compose a biography. Fournier, “La Bibliothèque des Augustines,” item 297. Rousseau gives the text of the seventeenth-century letters in La Passion de servir. For analysis of how shifts in the spirituality of the Augustines from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth are reflected in the death notices, see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 337–53. Rapley, “‘Un Trésor enfoui,’” 157. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 102. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 103. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 104. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, 105. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 295–6.

Chapter Seven 1 Marie Morin’s chronicle of the Montreal Hôtel-Dieu received a critical edition by Ghislaine Legendre in 1979, Histoire simple et véritable. Legendre also edited the much shorter continuations of Morin’s annals by Marie-Anne-Véronique Cuillerier, “Relation de sœur Cuillerier,” and by Catherine Porlier, “Relation de la sœur Porlier.” Substantial extracts of the Quebec Ursuline annals are quoted in Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, just as extracts of the annals of the Quebec Hôpital-Général are found in O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général. Likewise, those of the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières are quoted in Les Ursulines des Trois-Rivières. No such annals seem to exist for the fire-plagued Montreal Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Marguerite Bourgeoys. 2 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliv. Jamet discusses approximate dates of composition (xliii). For studies of the annals, besides Jamet’s introduction, see Gies, “Mère Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène.” 3 hdq-f1-a5, 1/1: 1. 4 Despite the title given by the nuns, Jamet published the book under

notes to pages 147–53

307

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

308

the title Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec 1636–1716. The book is not referred to as “annales” in the text itself, where “histoire” is used in the dedication to the Virgin. However, Duplessis uses the term “annales” in her 3 November 1753 letter to Hecquet announcing the book’s publication (“Lettres,” NF 4: 48), and it was used in her death notice. For example, the Coustumier et Directoire pour les sœurs religieuses de la Visitation goes into great detail on how “the one who will have charge of documents” should safeguard the convent’s records (159–63). For an overview of convent writing in French, see Carr, “From the Cloister to the World.” Cited in F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xviii. The entire letter held in the Hôtel-Dieu archives does not seem to have been published (hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of J.-B. Chardon to M.-A. Duplessis, tentatively dated to 11 April 1732). This quotation is printed in Roy’s edition and Jamet cites other extracts in his edition of the Annales. Ursule-Marie Chéron confirmed this statement in the circular letter she wrote after Duplessis’s death: “Our reverend mother J. F. de Saint Ignace, first Canadian mother superior, judged that she was capable of doing the annals of your house from its foundation. She proposed it to her, and she did it out of obedience and with so much success that this work was the admiration of everyone with taste who agreed that her facility in writing and her deep judgment made her capable of writing the history of the establishment of Canada.” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv.) M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliii. Ibid., 85, 236, 280, 404–8. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 401–3. François Rousseau notes how the revenues from the rentes, chiefly on the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, diminished by half between 1713 and 1720 (La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 111). M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xxxii–xxxiii. hdq-f1-b1, 2/1, Règlements des Religieuses hospitalières de la miséricorde de Jésus … établi à Dieppe, 159.

notes to pages 155–7

15 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, unpaginated pages in the dedication to the mother of God. 16 Ibid., unpaginated pages. 17 hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of J.-B. Chardon to M.-A. Duplessis, tentatively dated to 11 April 1732. 18 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 75, 374, 389. 19 According to the Règlements of the Hôtel-Dieu (hdq-f1-b1, 2/1), the secretary should record the following in the annals: “The first book will be that of the annals of the monastery in which will be told the beginnings and progress of the house; the names of its founders, of the first ecclesiastical superior, of the first mother superior and of the other nuns who accompanied her in its founding, of other persons who gave the most aid; the memorable events that happened there; the diverse monasteries from which they came; the deceased nuns of the house or its foundations who have excelled in virtue and sanctity of life, indicating the day, month and year of their death; the place of their burial and other items worthy of passing to posterity” (169–70). 20 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, unpaginated letter. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Ibid., 424. 23 Ibid., 424. 24 Daneau de Muy (1694–1759) became annalist around 1755, according to Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 322. Her detailed account of the war is quoted extensively in volume 2. Her perspective is as providentialist as Duplessis’s; Canada’s woes are a warning and punishment for the sins of its people. This compensates perhaps for the fact that she cannot always link military events to the affairs of her house. 25 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 246. 26 Ibid., 361. 27 Parkman, France and England in North America, 2: 456–7; M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 366–8. 28 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xl–xliii. 29 Ibid., 8. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 82.

notes to pages 158–62

309

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

310

Ibid., 104. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 361. Ibid., xli. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 421. Greer, “Colonial Saints,” 336–8. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 66–9, 236–42. Ibid., 210–20. Ibid., 132, 135. Ibid., x–xix, 8. Ibid., 10, 298. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 103–7. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166–7. For the Hôpital-Général’s view of the affair see O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 103–76, which includes extracts of their annals and other documents. For a more impartial view, see D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général, 23–30, and Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 296. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 292–3. Oury, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et ses pauvres, 111–12. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 292. Cited by D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général, 25. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 297. Ibid., 378. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 44, for a note Jamet gives (hdq manuscript, p. 23): “[Isaac

notes to pages 162–8

66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

Jogues] found a death that one could consider that of a martyr.” Ibid., 142, 166. Ibid., 142, p. 78 of the hdq manuscript. Ibid., 166n3. Ibid., 166, p. 90 of the hdq manuscript. Ibid., 218, p. 118 of the hdq manuscript. Médiathèque Montauban, ms. 18. Although Jamet does not mention the Montauban manuscript in his edition, it might be the source of his variants. This manuscript’s paper is thinner than that of the Quebec one. In one of the cases where Jamet gives the original text, this text can be deciphered. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 55. “They removed our confessor, gave us a young Canadian one to whom several cannot adapt; these perturbations cause unfortunate biases that separate people” (ibid., NF 3: 49). Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 165–6. hdq-f1-g4, 1/18: 113, undated letter of Louis Gérard to M.-A. Duplessis. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xix. See also an undated draft of this letter, hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 25, from Geneviève to an unknown correspondent, beginning “Monsieur le danger que vous avez courut qui a conduit monsieur votre pere.” J.-Edmond Roy dates the letter to 8 November 1751. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xliv. O’Reilly, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 297. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 7. M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 56. Ibid., 414–15. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 374; M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 492. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 238–9. This episode is discussed in Suire’s Sainteté et lumières, 367, and in Moureau, La Plume et le plomb, 246. Pearson discusses it from the Canadian angle in “Becoming Holy,” 323. 10 August 1751 letter of Abbé Geinoz to Malesherbes, lac, microfilm reel C-9193, vol. 22137. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218n.

notes to pages 168–73

311

89 Ibid., 224; Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada, 141–2. 90 Moureau, La Plume et le plomb, 246–7. According to Moureau (251–2), the censor, Alexandre-François Cotterel, was often charged with dealing with such difficult cases. 91 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 49. 92 M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 279. 93 Ibid., 267, 279. La Tour made most of these changes directly on the Montauban manuscript, crossing out passages and writing new connecting text between the lines. Such changes can be found on practically every page of the manuscript. 94 On the back of the title page an early archivist has written “Writing of Mother Saint-Helen” (“Écriture de Mère Ste-Hélène”). The copy seems to have been the one reserved for the mother superior since another notation on the title page itself specifies “superior’s room” (“ch. Supre 1811”). 95 M.-A. Duplessis, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 279. 96 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 218. 97 Journal des savants, August 1752, 574. 98 Meusnier de Querlon, Annonces, affiches, et avis divers, known as the Affiches de province, 2 April 1755, 53–4. 99 Pierre Rousseau, Correspondance littéraire, 364–5. The book was also announced as selling for two livres ten sous, but without a review, in the 7 April 1755 issue of the Parisian Annonces, affiches et avis divers, known as the Affiches de Paris to distinguish it from Meusnier de Querlon’s paper with the same title (214). 100 Alléon-Dulac, Mélanges, 2: 436. 101 Ursule-Marie Chéron in her 1760 circular letter, in F.-X. Duplesssis, Lettres, appendix, xiv. 102 Berthiaume, “1744: François-Xavier de Charlevoix.”

Chapter Eight 1 2 3 4 5 6

312

M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 295–6. Ibid., NF 3: 357. Ibid., NF 3: 175. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 181. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 45. M.-A. Duplessis, “Histoire de Ruma,” 182.

notes to pages 173–80

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 51. Ibid., NF 6: 42. Ibid., NF 3: 285–6. Ibid., NF 5: 363–4. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 282. Ibid., NF 4: 51. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, lxxxiii. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 5: 367. 28 September 1742 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 78/fol. 423–428v. 20 October 1743 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 80/fol. 349–353v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 292. Ibid., NF 3: 255–6. 1747 letter of Pontbriand to Maurepas, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. 25 September 1748 letter of Bigot and La Galissonière, anom col c11a 91/fol. 32–35v; 4 October 1748 letter of same, anom col c11a 107/fol. 51–2. 16 October 1750 letter of Bigot and Jonquière to the minister, anom col c11a 95/fol. 70–72v. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 256. “1727 Rapport ou feuille au roi,” anom c11a 106/fol. 120–36. 28 September 1742 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 78/fol. 423–428v; 20 October 1743 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom c11a 80/fol. 349–353v. 1747 letter of Pontbriand to the minister, anom col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 15, 20 January 1748 letter of Duplessis to Pontbriand. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 25, 1751 draft of letter by Geneviève to unknown correspondent, “Le danger que vous avez couru qui a conduit monsieur votre père.” hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 16, 20 October 1750 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to d’Aiguillon. hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 7, draft of 1752 memorandum by Geneviève beginning “Nous nous sommes tenues dans le silence depuis plusieurs années.”

notes to pages 180–5

313

30 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 5, 28 October 1752 letter of Louis Franquet to one of the Duplessis sisters. 31 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 10, letter of Antoine-Louis Rouillé of 8 June 1753 to the mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Poussou, “Les Débats entre historiens,” 32–3. 35 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 7, 20 October 1751 letter of Geneviève to La Galissonière, beginning “Nous numes pas lhonneur de recevoir des marques de votre souvenir.” In fact, favouring the HôpitalGénéral was a longstanding policy of the colony’s administrators. Hocquart wrote the minister in October 1744 of his intention to favour that institution (col c11a 81/fol. 400–401v). The nuns of the Hôpital-Général believed that Pontbriand favoured them over the other two Quebec communities, as Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny noted in her relation on the siege of the city: “Monseigneur [Pontbriand] … since his arrival in this country has always protected, I could even say, preferred us” (Hébert, Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 20). 36 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 11, 1752 draft of letter by Geneviève to La Galissonière beginning “quelque precotion qune religieuse doive prendre.” She adds that though they are reimbursed at a higher rate, “[t]hey have sometimes in a month more than this hospital has in a year … I think that the policy of several persons is to discredit this house to raise up and sustain the other.” 37 Noel, Along a River, 194–5. 38 See Vaudreuil to the minister, 22 October 1756, col c11a 101/ fol. 127–8, and Allard, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 42. Faillon cites Vaudreuil’s letter including these remarks about Pontbriand: “This prelate is indefatigable … He has made a trip to Montreal just to hurry the workers hired to build the two wards of the hospital” (Vie de Mlle Mance, 2: 256). 39 Porlier, “Relation de la sœur Porlier,” 171–2. 40 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 150–3. 41 Ibid., 1: 158–60. 42 La Rue, “Lettres,” 327, 367, 387. 43 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 6, draft of 1751 letter by Geneviève to unknown correspondent (perhaps Franquet) beginning “Monsieur, le respect

314

notes to pages 186–8

et la confiance combattent un peu le penchant.” 44 hdq-f1-g11, 1/1: 11, 1752 draft of letter of Geneviève Duplessis to La Galissonière beginning “quelque precotion qune religieuse doive prendre.” 45 hdq-f1-a6, 1/1: 7, “Notes des articles sur lesquels on peut se rendre service à cet hôtel-Dieu de Québec.” 46 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 3A, draft of 16 July 1752 letter by Geneviève, probably destined for Franquet. 47 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 276–7. 48 On La Porte, see Frégault, François Bigot, 1: 289–93. 49 hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 23, 1752 letter of Geneviève Duplessis to Arnaud de Laporte beginning “Jay assez de matiere pr avoir l’honneur de vous entretenir.” 50 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 16, draft of a 29 June 1755 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to welcome Vaudreuil. Vaudreuil had arrived in Quebec on 23 June, and the letter is written on his saint’s day. 51 hdq-f1-g18/14: 43, 12 November 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 52 Two memos in 1751 and 1752 lay out in detail her charges of neglect and active hostility by Bigot (hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 2, and hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 1A). 53 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 20, 17 April 1756 letter from Franquet to M.-A. Duplessis. 54 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 281. 55 The affair left traces in the court records. See banq TL1,S11,SS1,D99,P896, 21 March 1752, default to Maurice Jean Boulanger; see hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 17. 56 hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 18B, “Exposition qui peut apprendre la vérité à ceux qui pensent qu’on fait un grand tort aux pauvres.” 57 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161–3. 58 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52. 59 I cite the 1755 first edition of Hecquet’s Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage with my own translations. Aroles’s extensive archival work in Marie-Angélique: Haut Mississippi, 1712 – Paris, 1775 documented the wild girl’s life from her discovery in 1731 to her death and set forth an account of her prior life as a member of the Fox nation in Wisconsin who became a French slave. It is fundamental to a study of the case, but only available in a few

notes to pages 188–91

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60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

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French libraries. Because it lacks academic annotation, scholars have not fully exploited its richness. For more details, see two academic studies which situate the case in Enlightenment debates and complement each other: Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster, and Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children. Benzaquén does not take into account Aroles’s findings. Douthwaite’s book is chiefly useful as an examination of the eighteenth-century writers who discuss the case. She seems not to have consulted Duplessis’s letters published in Nova Francia around 1930 that confirm Hecquet’s authorship, thus missing the opportunity to explore how Hecquet’s Jansenist allegiance shaped the Histoire, both in its genesis and in its point of view (41–4). A subsequent update, “La jeune Fille sauvage mise à jour,” which brings into play European attitudes toward North American Indigenous peoples, also is a lost opportunity because it does not take into account Hecquet’s longstanding interest in them. On the other hand, Scholl, “La Correspondance de MarieAndrée Regnard Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène et la réception de son image des Esquimaux,” does consider them. A graphic biography by Gaëlle Hersent, loosely based on Aroles’s reconstruction, was published in 2015: Sauvage, biographie de Marie-Angélique. It presents Hecquet and La Condamine collaborating closely in producing the Histoire, which is unlikely given his anti-Jansenism (123–5, 144–8). The classic account is by the historian of Jansenism Gazier, Une Suite à l’histoire de Port-Royal. Hecquet, Histoire, 60–1. Ibid., 63–4. Hecquet compares the Indigenous to the first Christians: “I therefore in imagination saw your poor savages only paying attention to how they could acquire the favour of their new intercessors before God without being distracted by the display of their own finery or by considering that of others in the places where they found themselves” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 280). Ibid., NF 4: 52. Ibid., NF 3: 44. For an overview of relations between the French and Indigenous

notes to pages 193–7

68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79

peoples, see the chapter of Moogk, “Europeans and ‘the Wild People’: French-Amerindian Relations,” in La Nouvelle France, 17–50, especially 47–50 on Lahontan. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52–3. Ibid., NF 2: 39, 42. Ibid., NF 2: 40. “All the fruit that the missionaries have in some areas is to baptize many infants who die quite young and to give these barbarians an idea of our religion by the purity of their lives. The missionaries usually sanctify themselves greatly there, and we have known several who, when coming back from their work completely broken, were so united to God that hearing and seeing them, we were entirely edified and burned with the desire for virtue” (25 October 1740 letter of M.-A. Duplessis, NF 3: 285). Goddard notes that some Jesuits who sought to work in the foreign missions – he cites Louis Lallemant in the early seventeenth century – sought posts in Canada in the belief that the crosses and travails they expected to experience there would purify them, no matter their success in winning Native souls (“Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought,” 189). See Arnauld’s 1691 La Morale pratique des Jésuites. Canada is discussed, including a reference to Ragueneau’s biography of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, Œuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld, 34: 714. Lahontan, Œuvres complètes, 1: 653–68. Ibid., 1: 655. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 43. Catherine Maire explicates this scenario in a number of her works. One of the most explicit on the conversion of the pagans is “La Date du ‘retour’ d’Israël,” 218. The basis for this exegesis is found in Le Sesne d’Étemare’s transcription of lectures by Duguet in Explication de quelques prophéties touchant la conversion future des Juifs, 4; for the failures of the missions to the pagans, see 23. Carr, “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist,” 105. Hecquet, Histoire, 20. Racine, “L’Epître II sur l’homme,” in Poésies nouvelles, 2: 28–33, where he speaks of “Le penchant où conduit la coupable nature / The propensity to which guilty nature leads.”

notes to pages 197–9

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80 81 82 83

84 85 86

87

Hecquet, Histoire, 40. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 37. Hecquet, Histoire, 66. “The only role I had in this production is to have made some changes in the manuscript, whose original I still possess, and to have cut some facts which were only founded on hearsay and without any plausibility, and to have added, especially at the end, some conjectures to those of Madame H. on the way that the young savage and her companion might have been transported to France” (“Lettre à M. de Boissy,” Année littéraire, 20 January 1755, 215–16). “I recognized myself in the place where you cite me; I only told you the truth” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 57). Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5: 949. On this point see Bruna, “Les Esquimaux des Lumières.” She presents a detailed analysis of Enlightenment attitudes toward the Inuit. Wilson gives a blow-by-blow account of the manoeuvrings in Diderot, 150–72.

Chapter Nine 1 Casgrain lists four sets of documents that were lost: the deeds to the Saint Augustin holdings; contracts for property holdings in the city and records of donations; various contracts of the hospital; and the chapter proceedings dealing with the hospital (Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 385). 2 For an account of the fire, see Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 156–63. 3 M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 412–15. 4 For this episode, see Les Ursulines de Trois-Rivières, 1: 269–87, and Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 182–98. 5 Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 189–90. 6 Séguin, Atlas historique du Québec, 15. 7 Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 198. 8 See Rapley’s 1994 article “The Shaping of Things to Come.” She gives an excellent overview of the financial difficulties of female

318

notes to pages 199–204

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

communities, which were largely caused by royal policies, and how royal authorities acted to suppress the monasteries. See 435–6 on patronage. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 290. Gosselin, L’Église du Canada, 3: 202. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, undated draft of Geneviève Duplessis to unnamed correspondent, “Ma soeur avait l’honneur de vous écrire quelquefois.” Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 397–8. hdq-f1-g2/1: 42, “Mémoire de Monseigneur l’évêque de Québec à l’occasion de l’incendie de l’Hôtel-Dieu.” hdq-f1-g1/1: 45, “Projet pour l’administration des biens des pauvres pendant le temps que les dames hospitalières demeurent chez les révérends pères jésuites.” See Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161–2, on this episode. hdq-f1-a6, 1/2: 17, 10 August 1755 letter of G. Duplessis to Victor Varin de La Marre. hdq-f1-g2/1: 46, “Réplique au projet de Monseigneur.” Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 162, 331. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, 12 August 1755 draft of Geneviève Duplessis to the duchesse d’Aiguillon. hdq-f1-a6, 2/5: 16, draft of letter of Geneviève to unnamed correspondent that begins, “Vous recevrez par M votre secrétaire une lettre.” hdq-f1-a5, 3/1: 15, “Relation de la mère Ste-Hélène au sujet de notre incendie 1755.” hdq-f1-a6, 1: 45, “Brouillons de lettres à diverses personnes après 1755 demandant secours.” Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 157. The minutes of the 23 November 1755 chapter meeting contain the bishop’s memorandum followed by the nuns’ discussion and response (hdq-f1-b3, 1/1: 1). Rousseau discusses the choices in La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 157–61. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 113. See hdq, correspondence of Duplessis with Pontbriand, for these letters. 11 November 1756 letter of Pontbriand, anom col c11a 107/fol. 36–7.

notes to pages 204–10

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27 Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 161. 28 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 302. On de Rupelmonde, see Villermont, La Société au XVIIIe siècle, 289–331. 29 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 302n1. 30 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 111. 31 Hecquet, “Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel,” 114. 32 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 111. 33 Dumont de Montigny, The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 77. According to the Registre journalier des malades, Montigny began his stay at the hospital as a patient on 22 September 1717. After his recovery, he stayed on as a military boarder, listed as a “canonnier” or gunner. He left the hospital on 13 November 1718. hdq-f5-g1, 2/1:3. 34 hdq-t30, Vaudreuil, 2, 29 March 1756 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. 35 hdq-f1-g9/95: 1, 5 May 1756 letter of Esther Wheelwright to M.-A. Duplessis. Neither Julie Wheelwright, Esther: The Remarkable True Story, nor Little, The Many Captivities of Esther, discusses this letter. See Little, 79–125, for Wheelwright’s life between her arrival in Quebec in 1708 and her entry into the Ursulines in 1713. 36 Esther’s letter to her mother is cited by Little, The Many Captivities of Esther, 183–6. 37 hdq-f1-g2/1: 74, 9 May 1757 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 38 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 283–4. 39 Ibid., 297n1, 18 February 1757 letter of Villars. 40 Ibid., 301–3. 41 7 November 1749 letter to the minister in his personnel file, lac mg1-e, Microfilm reel no. F-614, F-828. 42 7 October 1750 letter to the minister in his personnel file, lac mg1-e, Microfilm reel no. F-614, F-828. 43 4 November 1756 letter of Vaudreuil, anom col c11a 101/fol. 143–143v. 44 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 280–1. 45 Ibid., 284. 46 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 52. 47 Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, 242. 48 13 July 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P61. 49 19 July 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D87,P62.

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notes to pages 210–15

50 12 November 1757, banq, “Fonds Prévôté de Québec,” TL1,S11,SS1,D108,P19. 51 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 288–9. 52 Ibid., 292. 53 Ibid., 297, 299–300. 54 hdq-f1-k1, 3/5: 6, 12 March 1757 letter of l’abbé de l’Isle-Dieu to M.-A. Duplessis and 18 February 1757 letter of François Sorbier de Villars to Duplessis. 55 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 13, 11 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 56 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 9, 25 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 57 hdq-f1-k4, 1/14: 13, 11 March 1757 letter of Claude-Michel Sarrazin to M.-A. Duplessis. 58 F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 289. 59 Wildenstein, Rapports d’experts, 60–3; anf, Y 1901. Charles-Denis’s address is listed as “la rue des Grès, l’hostel Chaumont.” This street was located near the present Place du Panthéon. 60 The portrait had been painted from a profile of Pontbriand, and the experts opined that it was as faithful as could be expected when turning a profile into a full-face portrait. The portrait must have included the bishop’s coat of arms, reproduced with slight variation, according to the experts, from a silver seal that they were shown (Wildenstein, Rapports d’experts, 59–61). Jouffroy was at the beginning of his career (Geyssant, “Pierre Jouffroy,” 62–73). The Musée de la civilization in Quebec holds a portrait of the bishop, attributed to an Ursuline said to have painted it for the cathedral chapter in 1749 (accession number 1991.3874). It has the awkwardness of a portrait done from a profile view. 61 31 December 1763 letter of Charles-Denis Duplessis to Antoine de Sartine, bnf, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Archives de la Bastille, Prisonniers vol. 12146; lac, Reel F-1542. 62 hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 22, 19 April 1757 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. 63 hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 29, 8 July 1757 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. 64 hdq-f1-g2/1: 96, 8 September 1758 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. 65 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 113. 66 Ibid., NF 4: 113–14.

notes to pages 215–19

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67 hdq-f1-g18/14: 39, 27 August 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 68 According to Stanley, perhaps thirty were killed and two hundred taken captive (New France: The Last Phase, 161, 289n24). Frégault points out that “the massacre at Fort William Henry was one more atrocity – a spectacular one – in a long series of atrocities. Bands of Indians, sometimes led by Canadian officers, had spread terror and destruction along the British frontiers” (Canada: The War of the Conquest, 154). Crouch highlights that the junior French officers were particularly aghast at William Henry and stresses that their allies felt betrayed when Montcalm deprived them of the reward they expected (Nobility Lost, 85–9). 69 Montcalm, Journal, 7: 292–3. 70 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 114. Bougainville expressed his horror in 1757 at several episodes of eating British prisoners in his journal (Écrits sur le Canada: 12 June, 206; 24 July, 228; 15 August at Montreal, 256). 71 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 114. 72 Ibid., NF 4: 115–16. 73 Frégault debunks this inflation (Canada: The War of the Conquest, 221–2). 74 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 115–16. 75 Bougainville, Écrits sur le Canada, 314. 76 Warwick, “Littérature de la Nouvelle France,” 261. 77 “L’Anglais fait des prisonniers / Nous en faisons à milliers / Voilà la ressemblance / Le Français les traite bien / Mais l’Anglais les traite en chien / Voilà la différence” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 117–18). 78 Ibid., NF 4: 116.

Chapter Ten 1 Montcalm, Journal, 7: 285. 2 Cited in Courville, Mémoires, 126. 3 Andrès and Willemin-Andrès give a useful bibliography of such accounts in their edition of Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 229–34. 4 Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 11–31. Legardeur’s retrospective account is a circular letter ostensibly addressed to the order’s

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notes to pages 219–24

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12

communities in France designed to encourage them to lobby for funds owed the Hôpital-Général by Versailles. See Julie Roy’s analysis of this text that skillfully links its rhetorical strategies to the emergence of a Canadian identity, “Marie-Joseph Legardeur.” Charlotte Daneau de Muy de Sainte-Hélène, the Ursuline annalist, included the military situation in her chronicle until late May 1759, when she began concentrating on convent events alone (Burke, Les Ursulines de Québec, 2: 380–90). Noel focuses on the role of the noble nuns at the Hôpital-Général, not women in general, in her vivid account of how the colony’s women’s religious communities weathered the British victory, Along A River, 197–202. Dechêne gives examples concerning women, but focuses on the male militia in Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 408–18. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, includes the most complete account that I have found of the experience of Canadian women, including Indigenous ones, and even discusses the women camp followers of Wolfe’s forces. MacLeod’s short “Women of War” singles out Legardeur as the only woman to have written about the siege, but surveys the multiple aspects of women’s participation that are elaborated on in this chapter. Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 58–79, discusses examples of the participation of elite and non-elite women as combatants in Canada and Acadia during the seventeenth century. Cohn, “Women and Wars,” 10. My thinking on this issue has been informed by her essay (1–35). A classic example is Pepper’s chapter “The Two Pompadours or Women in the Downfall of New France,” in Maids and Matrons of New France, 269–86. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 492. Lévis, Journal, 1: 119. Bougainville, Écrits sur le Canada, 277, 286. Other French officers use the word “attroupement,” an unruly, unauthorized gathering, for previous similar events. While such events in France could involve violence and property damage and thus merit the term “riot,” this is not reported in the Canadian ones I have found described. See Bouton, The Flour War. Bouton noted that women led 93.5 percent of such riots in France where the gender of participants

notes to pages 224–6

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13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

324

is known. Authorities tended to excuse women’s participation in these events by attributing it to their maternal role, and punished female participants much less harshly than male ones (224–33). Dechêne dismissed these demonstrations by women in 1757 and 1758 (she does not mention the 1759 one) as “weak” because they did not lead to violence (Le Partage des subsistances, 171). Montcalm, Journal, 7: 492. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 51, 22 January 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis; hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 58, 13 April 1759 letter of Bigot to the bursar. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 50, 3 January 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 54, early February 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Bigot. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 52, 9 February 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 53, 12 February 1759 letter of Bigot and undated one of Bigot to the bursar. hdq-f1-g2/1: 101, 10 February 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand with his reply at the foot of the letter. hdq-f1-g2/1: 98, 2 April 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires, 2: 135.  Montcalm, Journal, 7: 495. Ibid., 7: 510–11. Mandements, Lettres pastorales et circulaires, 2: 135. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 511. hdq-f1-g2/1: 102, 27 April 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand. hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 61, 26 May 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-t2-c336/2, 18 February 1759 letter of Villars to M.-A. Duplessis. F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, 301. Marie-Marguerite-Daniel Saint-Arnaud de Saint-Arsène to Duplessis on 12 February 1759, in Lemire-Marsolais, Histoire de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 5: 93–4. Original in hdq-f1-g9/22: 1. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. This

notes to pages 226–30

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

undated copy of a fall 1759 circular letter of Duplessis to convents of the order in France begins “Je ne doute point que les nouvelles publiques ne vous aient informées de la prise de Québec.” It is not in her hand. Deschênes gives abundant examples of the poor implementation of the evacuation on the south shore (L’Année des Anglais, 29–44). Dechêne includes examples from the north shore (Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 402–6). Montcalm, Journal, 7: 524. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 4: 168. Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 65. Ibid., 78. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 542; Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 75. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, 65–6. Panet, Journal du siège de Québec, 5. Joannès, Mémoire sur la campagne de 1759, 4: 221. hdq-f1-g2/1: 103, 13 June 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq- f1-g2/1: 105, 27 June 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g2/1: 106, 29 June 1759 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Pontbriand with his reply at bottom of page. Récher, Journal du Siège de Québec, 17–18. Fauteux, Journal du Siège, 94. Hébert, ed., Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 84. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 13. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. hdq-f1-g2/1: 107, 13 June letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g2/1: 108. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 14. hdq-f1-g2/1: 109, 14 July 1759 letter to Pontbriand from M.-A. Duplessis. These details come from Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 13–14. hdq-f1-g2/1: 109, 14 July 1759 letter to Pontbriand from M.-A. Duplessis. French soldiers did not always respect the nuns working in these mobile hospital stations. O’Reilly tells how a Hôpital-Général nun, Marie-Thérèse de Lantagnac de

notes to pages 230–6

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55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64

65

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Sainte-Élisabeth, was more than once insulted by soldiers. On one occasion, a soldier put his sword to her throat and snatched away food she had prepared for the wounded (Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 627). hdq-f1-g2/1: 109; his replies are written on Duplessis’s 14 July letter. For a thoughtful and full assessment of the standards of war as applied to Wolfe’s Quebec campaign, see Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 44–68. He takes into account British, French, Canadian, and Indigenous views and practice. Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 98–9. Panet, Journal du siège de Québec, 14. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. Montcalm, Journal, 7: 580–1. Ward, The Battle for Quebec, illustration 42. Illustration 43 shows a second Townshend caricature that has this dialogue between Wolfe and a subordinate: Wolfe: “We will not let any of them escape my dear Isaac, the pretty ones will be furnished at Headquarters.” The subordinate replies: “I understand you completely General. Strike ‘em in their weakest part Egad!” Fauteux, ed., Journal du siège, 101. One of the elite women taken prisoner, Marie-Françoise Chartier de Lotbinière, was the sister-in-law of the mother superior of the Hôpital-Général and the wife of the man whom Duplessis’s brother Charles-Denis had bested for the position of provost marshal in 1749, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay. Récher says the captain wrote on 2 August (Journal du siège, 28). See also the notes of Andrès and Willemin-Andrès in their edition of Fauteux, Journal du siege, 201, 206. O’Reilly recounts a similar rescue at the vestibule of the Hôpital-Général. A warrior entered the hospital’s vestibule with a bound captive British officer whom he intended to torture. Sister Marguerite-Françoise Hiché de Saint-Henri had the presence of mind to cut the prisoner’s bonds so that he could escape inside, while other nuns distracted his captor (Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 617–18). Hébert, ed., Le Siège de Québec en 1759, 98. Montcalm confirms the tenor of this last letter without giving its contents. In his Journal for 24 August, he noted, “Monsieur le marquis de Vaudreuil, pressured

notes to pages 236–40

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

by Monsieur le marquis de Montcalm, wrote General Wolfe, to inform him of the death of the captain of the Royal Americans wounded in the battle of 31 August. We send back at the same time his trunk and silver. Reply of Monsieur Wolfe that was very polite, unlike his ordinary practice” (7: 597). See Doughty’s note on this incident in Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 20–1. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 12. Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 34. See also his chapter “The Distasteful War” in The Battle for Quebec, 113–70. Dechêne is particularly vigorous in exposing how eighteenthcentury Canadians and French-Canadian historiography turned a blind eye to these depredations (Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 167–87). hdq-f1-g11, 2/4: 64, 7 August 1759 letter of Bigot to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 1/2: 14, 10 August 1759 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. hdq-f1-g11, 1/2: 15, 26 August 1759 letter of Vaudreuil to M.-A. Duplessis. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 116. hdq-f1-g2/1: 111, 12 October 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 18. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 18–19. The three mother superiors were Duplessis, MarieJoseph Duchesnay de l’Enfant-Jésus of the Hôpital-Général, and the Ursuline Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat de la Nativité. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 4: 208. Ramazay, “Conseil de guerre,” Mémoire du sieur de Ramezay, 28. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 27. Poussou points out in his review of the performance of each of the male leaders in the campaign that the Canadian Ramezay’s surrender of the town without a struggle was as much responsible for the overall defeat in 1759 as the tactical errors of the Frenchman Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham (“Les Débats entre historiens,” 30–1).

notes to pages 241–5

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83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102

328

Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 129–30. Legardeur, “Relation du siège,” 21. Foligné, Journal mémoratif, 214. Trudel, L’Église canadienne sous le régime anglais, 2: 258. His book offers detailed comparisons of the female and male communities based on their archives. Ibid., 2: 258. Ibid., 2: 302–16, 269–84. Duplessis’s letter of 14 October 1759 to Monckton (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 256–7). These figures come from Trudel, whose sub-chapter, “The Presence of the English Becomes Lucrative,” sums up his evaluation (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 263–74. The letters are summarized in the calendar of letters for The Northcliffe Collection, 273–4. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Guillimin, 17. While Poussou approves Montcalm’s overall strategy, he faults his tactical errors on 13 September (“Les Débats entre historiens”).  hdq-f1-k1, 3/10: 3a, draft of letter of M.-A. Duplessis probably to Villars beginning “Je vs ay une double obligation de mavoir fait lhonneur de mécrire cette année.” This draft seems to be answered by a 10 February one written by Villars who says he is replying to a letter she wrote on 16 October 1759 (hdq-f1-k1, 3/10: 4). Lévis, Journal des Campagnes, 1: 209. hdq-f1-d1, 2/1: 3, “Circulaires et notices biographiques sur quelques religieuses décédées aux XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIXe siècles,” 16–17. Mandements, lettres pastorales, 2: 141. Dechêne notes that the first pastoral letter of Pontbriand that speaks in terms of calamity and guilt only dates from January 1758. She suggests a reading of his pastoral letters in which it is not France that abandoned Canada, but God (Dechêne, Le Peuple, l’état et la guerre, 451–3). Ward, “Crossing the Line?” 54–5. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 438. 19 January 1760 letter Hector Theophilus Cramahé to M.-A. Duplessis (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 266). Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 130. hdq-f1-g2/1: 111, 12 October 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis.

notes to pages 245–50

103 col c11a 89/fol. 257–260v. His 30 October 1757 letter that mentions this issue is addressed to Pierre de La Rue, his representative in France. As much as Duplessis respected honorable Protestant merchants in town, such as the member of the Mounier family who brought her Marie-Catherine’s letters, she supported the bishop’s policy. Mounier was “one of the most obstinate of his sect,” despite being a “very honest gentleman” (“très honnête homme”). “If there are a few Huguenots in the town,” she wrote Hecquet in 1753, “they are abhorred and not allowed to dogmatize” (M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 51). Two Mounier merchants signed the declaration requesting that Ramezay surrender the town in September 1759 (Ramezay, Mémoire, 27). 104 Trudel cites his 9 December 1759 letter to his vicar general Briand on this point (L’Église canadienne, 1: 72–3). 105 hdq-f1-g2/1: 113, 31 December 1759 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. 106 Galland, writing fifty-seven years after Trudel’s study, confirms that loyalism to the new regime characterized the stance of the clergy (“In tempore tribulationis,” 60–2). 107 “The Hotel de Dieu is a spacious fair building, with an Attic story; and seems as if intended, in process of time, to be enlarged in the form of a square; but at present, it consists of two wings only, making a saliant angle. By an inscription, I perceived it was constructed in the year 1639, at the sole expense of Mary de Vignerot, duchess of Aiguillon; of whom I saw a tolerable portrait, on her knees in a praying posture: her Grace dedicated this house to St Joseph, who is also the Patron of Canada. I had a view of many other paintings of angels, saints, &c. but they are too indifferent to deserve any notice.” (Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 224–5.) 108 Ibid., 2: 233–8. 109 Ibid., 2: 225. Trudel compares the composition of the communities in September 1760. He notes that the Hôpital-Général community was also the youngest. The average age at the Hôtel-Dieu was 45.6 and 35.1 at the Hôpital-Général (Trudel, L’Église canadienne, 2: 260–3). 110 Knox, An Historical Journal, 2: 130. 111 Martino, Women at War in the Borderlands, 119, notes that with

notes to pages 250–3

329

the end of the Iroquois wars and the militarization of Canadian society, “the need for women’s physical participation in the wars of the eighteenth century” was largely eliminated.

Epilogue and Conclusion 1 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 178. 2 Ibid., 4: 54. 3 hdq-f1-g2/1: 80, 14 September 1757 letter of Pontbriand to M.-A. Duplessis. 4 M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 4: 116. 5 In addition to her circular letter written by her successor UrsuleMarie Chéron (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xi–xvi), Briand wrote a letter of consolation to the community two days after her death (Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 432–4). Auguste Gosselin cites a fragment of the letter sent by Pontbriand on 2 March 1760 in L’Église du Canada, 3: 204. Briand’s letter is useful for its list of her attributes – “her gentleness, her good nature, her prudence, her modesty, her humility, her poverty, her love of prayer, her mortification, her observance of the rule, and complete fidelity in everything, even in the smallest points, by which she climbed to this intimate union with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that is the delight of saints” – on which the circular letter elaborates. 6 hdq-f1-a6, 2/6: 1, letter of the assistant, Marie-Jeanne Tibierge de Sainte-Agnès, to houses in France, written in the summer of 1760. 7 hdq-f1-g2/1: 115, 2 March 1760 letter of Pontbriand to Chéron. 8 hdq-f1-g18/14: 43, 12 November 1756 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 9 hdq-f1-g18/14: 44, 3 September 1757 letter of Montcalm to M.-A. Duplessis. 10 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 4: 437. 11 Ibid., 4: 438. 12 hdq-f1-g18/14: 21a, 18 April 1761 letter of the abbé de l’Isle-Dieu to the duchess. 13 Pitt, Correspondence of William Pitt, 2: 119. 14 Ibid., 2: 127. 15 O’Reilly, Monsieur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital-Général, 393.

330

notes to pages 254–7

16 Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels, 2: 443–6 on the Hôtel-Dieu, 2: 453–5 on the Hôpital-Général, and 2: 470–1 for the Ursulines; Knox, An Historical Journal, 212–25; Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 14–16. 17 D’Allaire, L’Hôpital-Général de Québec, 184–6. 18 Ibid., lxx–lxxiii, for an account of his last years. 19 Archives des Yvelines, état civil, registre paroissial Notre-Dame, 15 July 1765. 20 P.-G. Roy, La famille Guillimin, 17. 21 Would Charles-Denis, who aspired to a noble lifestyle that was beyond his means, have taken satisfaction from the fact that his granddaughter, Marie-Geneviève, was certified in May 1772 to Louis XV as having two centuries of noble linage? The girl had been born on 21 August 1761 in Montreal where Charles-Denis’s wife and daughter had taken refuge. Two facts, however, might have blunted his delight. His granddaughter’s noble status was not based on Denis’s Morampont lineage, but on that of her father, Louis de Rastel. The Rastel de Rocheblave family could document its ancestry back to nobility in Dauphiné in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the certification was only done to allow the girl entry into the Maison Royale de l’Enfant-Jésus. This academy resembled the more famous Saint-Cyr, founded by Madame de Maintenon, in that it educated children of impoverished nobility. But it served a clientele of more reduced means and of lower status (Armelin, Preuves de noblesse, 2). 22 In 1774 a similar request for a 200-livre pension, this time with the support of the archbishop of Paris, was refused. The minister explained that unlike refugees from Ile Royale, the inhabitants of Quebec had been at liberty to sell their property with the advent of the British regime, and thus no compensation would be made (anom col e 160, “Duplessis de Morampont, prévôt des maréchaux de France au Canada, sa veuve Geneviève Guillemin, réfugiée aux îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon [1748/1766]”). 23 Hebert, Acadians in Exile, 174. 24 A 1791 list of pensioners has her down for 200 livres, the amount she had requested in 1774 (État nominatif des pensions, 3: 427). 25 Archives de Paris, V3E/D 746, fichiers de l’état civil reconstitué de Paris, 7 July 1764.

notes to pages 257–8

331

26 Chéron included it among other virtues: “her strength, her equanimity, her perfect resignation to the will of God” (F.-X. Duplessis, Lettres, appendix, xiv). 27 Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 4: 434. 28 hdq-f1-k1, 3/3: 5, 20 May 1730 letter of Dupas, apothecary at La Rochelle. 29 Lencquesaing analyzes this tradition that emphasizes valour in the context of nuns and hagiography in terms of gender theory and Jeanne de Chantal in “Confisquer l’exceptionnel féminin.” Gagnon shows how this tradition was adapted by Casgrain and other nineteenth-century Quebec clerical hagiographers in his chapter on them in Le Québec et ses historiens, 71–121. They used the femme forte tradition to attribute reputedly masculine traits to Canadian holy women (76–7). 30 See Maclean’s chapter “The New Feminism and the Femme Forte, 1630–1650,” in Woman Triumphant, 64–87, especially 86–7. 31 Fénelon, Œuvres, 1: 153–66, ch. 11–12. See Stanton, The Dynamics of Gender, 103–11, on Fénelon. The femme forte model was alive at the Hôtel-Dieu for superiors well into the nineteenth century. François Rousseau notes that Julie-Élisabeth Gibson de Saint-Henry was eulogized as a femme forte in her 1888 circular letter (La Croix et le scapel, 1: 347). 32 Nonetheless, Fénelon made room for belle-lettristic reading – ancient and modern history, poetry, and eloquence – in ch. 12. 33 Rohan published the first edition of La Morale du Sage in 1667. I cite the 1681 edition, 252. The Douai-Rheims translation based on the Vulgate and used by English Catholics in the seventeenth century gives for verse 26 “She hath opened her mouth to wisdom, and the law of clemency is on her tongue.” 34 Rohan’s paraphrase (252) of verse 26 adds a sentence that has no basis in the Vulgate: “She only opens her mouth to instruct and console those who need it.” 35 Ibid., 251. For verse 23, Douai-Rheims gives “Her husband is honourable in the gates, when he sitteth among the senators of the land.” 36 D’Allaire, in the conclusion to her history of the Hôpital-Général, bewailed the dearth of such letters for that institution (L’HôpitalGénéral de Québec, 228).

332

notes to pages 259–61

37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

Rousseau, La Croix et le scalpel, 1: 332. M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 420. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 3: 54. Ibid., NF 2: 74. The woman in question was Anne-Catherine André de Leigne, the oldest daughter of Pierre André de Leigne; she married Nicolas Lanoullier de Boisclerc in January 1721. Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, 8, 17, 184. “He deserves to be praised by persons more eloquent than we, who being simple women, confine all our gratefulness to praying that God reward our benefactors” (M.-A. Duplessis, Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 180). See Julie Roy, “Des Femmes de lettres avant la lettre,” for an analysis of another lengthy work by her, the l’Abrégé de la vie de la comtesse de Pontbriand. 1 September 1668 letter to Claude Martin on the difficulty of “civilizing” them (Guyart, Correspondance, 809). She expressed great hopes for miraculous large-scale conversions in her 1 October 1669 letter to Cécile de Saint-Joseph in the wake of the pacification of the Iroquois in the late 1660s when Jesuit missionaries could be more active (854–5). See Deslandres, “L’Utopie mystique et les tracas,” 113–30, for an overview of this issue. Cowan, “Education, Francisation, and Shifting Colonial Priorities,” sorts out the various strands in the evolving Ursuline attitude. Bégon, Lettres au cher fils, 356 (10 April 1751), 378 (2 January 1752). Ibid., 369 (23 July 1751). Ibid., 330 (10 December 1750). See Julie Roy, “Des Femmes de lettres avant la lettre,” on the manuscript book. The list of authors who published their books and died in Canada is short. It includes Nicolas Denys, Bishop Saint-Vallier, and Pierre Boucher. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 76. hdq-f1-h4, 4/12: 7, 21 June 1727 letter of M.-A. Duplessis to Ruette d’Auteuil. Hecquet, Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 59–60. M.-A. Duplessis, “Lettres,” NF 2: 77.

notes to pages 262–71

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356

bibliography

index Abbeville, 17, 20, 27, 75, 89, 90, 92–3 Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, duchesse d’: solicitation of, 99, 101, 170, 177–8, 185, 190, 207, 249–50; intervention of, 256–7 Aiguillon, Marie-Madeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’, foundress, 99, 153, 164, 176, 178, 185 Alléon-Dulac, Jean-Louis: Mélanges d’histoire naturelle, 176 André de Leigne, Anne-Catherine, 263, 333n40 Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu: antiJansenism in, 156, 175; appeal to pleasure and curiosity in, 159; censorship of, 172–3; colony’s history in, 4, 159–61; composite nature of, 153–5; Duplessis’s authorship of, 114, 155–6; Duplessis’s corrections to manuscript of, 168–70; Duplessis’s corrections of printed book of, 175; Duplessis’s point of view in, 156–7, 161–3;

edition and publication in 1751 by La Tour, 131, 171–3, 185; evaluation of, 177–8, 263–5; financial information in, 159; on Hôpital-Général’s founding, 166–8; Jamet’s edition of, 9, 131, 171, 173; Juchereau’s role in, 155– 7, 264; never-written sequel to, 132, 145–7, 177, 265; promotion of community’s spiritual life in, 157–8; providentialist history in, 159–63, 177; published reviews of, 175–6; reliability of, 159, 161; title of, 307n4. See also Augustinian Sisters; Duplessis, Marie-André (writings); HôtelDieu de Québec Arnauld, Antoine, 78–9, 317n72 Arnauld, d’Andilly, Angélique de Saint-Jean de, 140, 155 Assembly of Clergy of France, 81–2 Augustine of Hippo, 77–9 Augustinian Sisters of Mercy: action/prayer tension, 60, 64–6, 141; chapter meetings, role of, 108, 116; dowry system and recruiting, 54, 61, 126–7, 166, 168, 188; monastery, 54,

58; moderate monastic life, 59–60, 74; musical culture, 59; separation of finances from hospital, 103, 191, 206; warning against particular friendships, 60. See also Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Ayen, duchesse d’, 99 Bacqueville de La Potherie, Claude-Charles Le Roy de: Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale, 177 Barbier, Marie, 7 Bavière, Charlotte-Élisabeth de, 139 Beauharnois de la Boische, Charles, 110, 124 Bégon, Élisabeth, 7, 11–12, 96, 265, 267–8, 275n28 Bégon, Michel de la Picardière, 38–40, 45 Berbier du Metz, Gédéon, 31 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric: Recueil de voyages au nord, 201 Bigot, François, 16, 96, 129, 132, 190, 204, 210, 217, 221, 226, 268; corruption of, 182, 189–90, 217, 224–5; and Duplessis’s efforts to woo, 101, 118, 218, 226–7, 228; efficiency of, 187; hostility to hospital of, 183–6, 190, 218, 226–9, 242, 249, 256 Bigot, Vincent, 55, 63, 212, 285n17 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 220–1, 230 Boulic, Marie-Renée de la Nativité, 57, 132, 287n40; criticism of, 132, 165–9, 175

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Boullongne d’Ailleboust, MarieBarbe de, 145, 163, 173, 175 Bourdeau, Pierre, 92–3, 296n60 Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 6, 51, 54 Braddock’s defeat, 218–19 Branssat, Marie-Anne Migeon de, 7, 327n77 Brébeuf, Jean de, 57, 172 Briand, Jean-Olivier, 143, 250, 255 Brooke, Frances, 257 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe de, 44 Cahusac, Louis de, 172–3 Campra, André, 59 capillaire, syrup of, 99 Carillon, battle of, 220–1 Carmelites, 51, 61, 64, 73, 80, 96, 144–5, 147 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond, 8–9, 16, 259–60 Catalogne, Gédéon, 35 Catherine de Saint-Augustin. See Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine de Saint-Augustin Champigny, Jean Brochart de, 32, 33–4, 139 Chantal, Jeanne de, 259 Chapter of cathedral of Quebec, 169–70, 290n17, 321n60 Chardon, Jean-Baptiste, 155–6, 158, 170 Charest, Étienne, 38 Charlevoix, Pierre-FrançoisXavier de, 302n60; Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 177; Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 147, 177

Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 59 Chartier de Lotbinière, RenéLouis, 37 Chéron, Ursule-Marie, 50, 143, 256, 275n30, 277n36, 308n7 Chevreuse, 19, 23–4, 30 Cohn, Carol, 224 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 19, 31 Commission des secours, 204, 210, 230 Company of the Colony, 36–41, 45, 55, 110 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 7, 51–2, 54, 230, 307n1 Congregation of Saint-Maur, 81, 267 Congregation of the Virgin, 34 convent writing, 14, 94, 151, 262, 265, 268; annals, 131; obituary letters, 51, 139, 140, 147–8; précieuses abbesses, 132; recordkeeping, 155 Coste, Hilarion de: Éloges et Vies des reynes, princesses, 138 Council of Trent, 80, 164 Cramahé, Hector Théophilus, 249–50 Crespieul, François, 173 Cuillerier, Marie-Anne-Véronique: Relations, 263, 307n1 Curot, Marie-Louise de SaintMartin, 256 D’Allaire, Micheline, 257 Daine, François, 118 Daneau de Muy, Charlotte, 160, 264 Demus, Jean-Baptiste, 91, 296n60 Desprez (correspondent of Poulet), 293n42

Diefendorf, Barbara, 66 Dosquet, Pierre-Herman, 81, 86, 169–70 Douin, Andrée: family background, 18–19; as wife, 17– 19; as mother, 19, 21, 26, 30–1; as pious grandmother, 17, 18, 23–4, 28–9, 137; death of, 276n11 Douin, Louis-François, 19, 43 dressmakers’ guild (linen-drapers, lingères), 19, 20, 24 Dubois, Paul-André, 10 Duguet, Jacques-Joseph, 198 Dumas, Jean-Daniel, 219, 234 Dumont de Montigny, JeanFrançois-Benjamin, 211–12 Duparc, Jean-Baptiste, 82, 291n25 Dupas (apothecary), 4, 332n28 Duplessis, Charles-Denis: birth, 41, education, 5, 43; Morampont name of, 278n2; marriage, 12, 47, 123–4; military career, 43, 48–9, 123–4; as provost marshal, 214; last trip to Paris, 214–17; abandonment of family and bankruptcy, 74, 214–16; dispute over portraits, 216–17; last years and death, 217, 258 Duplessis, François-Xavier, 12, 23, 99, 230; birth, 33, 41; Jesuit novitiate, 5, 43, 63–6, 76–7; spiritual advice to sisters, 58–9, 62–7, 69; on the cross, 87, 121, 285n17; lobbying for family, 124–5; lobbying for hospital, 12, 125, 189–90, 210, 213–14, 230; as mission preacher, 14, 87, 93; mission at Abbeville, 76, 87–90;

index

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anti-Jansenist polemics and misogyny, 77, 87–9, 90; and publishing Geneviève’s texts, 145; on Geneviève’s death, 150–1; on Charles-Denis’s marital problems, 214–16; declining heath and death, 99, 213, 258 Duplessis, Geneviève: birth, 41; Paris trip and education, 28, 41, 136, 180; attachment to her sister, 13, 28, 61–2, 66, 72, 211, 271; vivacity, 62, 67, 117–18, 151; vocation as nun, 5, 43, 61–2, 64, 136–8; Carmelite contemplative “temptation,” 64–7, 73, 144–5, 150–1, 288n72; as bursar, 12, 114, 116–19, 206; as part of administrative team, 12, 106, 110, 182, 205; on clausura, 107, 270; hopes for publication, 145; burnout, 81–2, 117–18, 189–91; in 1755 fire, 146; health and death, 74, 149–51, 211–13, 254; La Manne de Bethléem, 9, 73, 143–5; Réflexion sur le mystère de l’ascension, 144–5 Duplessis, Georges Regnard: baptism, 278n1; family background and name, 30–1, 278n2; marriage, 19, 30–2; posting to Canada, 5, 17, 32, 276n5; as father, 27, 137; as treasurer of the marine office, 32–3, 39, 279n8; business activities, 9, 33–7; as friend of hospital, 158; friendship with Dupuy, 34, 52; Jesuit piety, 34, 48, 54, 76; relations with

360

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Canadian authorities, 33–4, 37–9; financial decline, 38–40; death and posthumous debts, 40, 44–6, 283n87; evaluation, 47–8, 282n59 Duplessis, Joseph, 40; birth, 41; death, 43 Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character): spelling of name, 16; birth, 5; devotion to grandmother, 18, 23–4; education and business apprenticeship in Paris, 23–6; as a Parisian, 28, 93, 95, 182; ambivalence toward Canada, 180–2, 268; attachment to Hecquet, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 26–7, 76, 90–5, 101, 121, 270–1; as motive force of correspondence with Hecquet, 91–2; departure from France, 26–8, 277n36; attachment to Geneviève, 13, 28, 61–2, 66, 72, 211, 271; adolescence in Quebec, 5, 51–4; family home in Quebec, 41; novitiate, 54–5, 113; on detachment, 67–74; on flexibility concerning the rule, 59, 74, 122; on inner peace, 69–74; on Jansenism, 75–6, 83–6, 156; on mental prayer, 72, 142; oral instructions to community, 122, 143; and proselytizing Protestants, 129, 250; calm disposition, 50, 62, 67, 129, 142, 259; foresight, 117, 227; fearfulness, 3–4, 102, 208, 227, 234–5, 262; touch of fire, 4,

55, 111, 259; death, 6, 205, 254–6. See also Augustinian Sisters; Duplessis, Geneviève; Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel; Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Duplessis, Marie-André (managerial career): administrative correspondence, 11, 95–101, 266; on borrowing, 118, 184, 208, 256, 261; and clausura, 107, 115, 125, 228, 236, 270; and conflicts over purchasing practices, 117–18; evacuation plans in 1759, 233–5; and independence, 107–8, 113, 188, 205, 207, 262; leading role when not mother superior, 110–11, 121, 125, 208; letterwriting campaigns, 111, 123, 185, 207; managerial philosophy, 115–16; and managerial team with Geneviève, 12, 106, 110, 114, 116, 182, 205; mentoring by Juchereau, 5, 14, 58; minor trade, 118–19; as managerial femme forte, 259–62, 270; as femme tendre, 9, 259, 270; as novice mistress, 58–60; and popular piety, 119–21; and protest over priests’ house, 3–6; reaction to Pontbriand’s rebuilding plans (1755), 204–10; and rebuke by Rouillé, 186–8; and rhetorical tone of nuns, 110, 253, 270; and secrecy, 108, 120. See also Augustinian sisters; Duplessis, Geneviève; Dupuy, Claude-Thomas; Hôtel-Dieu de

Québec; Pontbriand, HenriMarie Dubreil de; siege of Quebec Duplessis, Marie-André (writings): Canadian firsts, 7, 10, 177, 262, 269, 274n9; circular death notices, 147–51; and epistolary conventions, 97; as historian, 4, 7, 159, 177, 308n7; and manuscript-books, 136, 153, 170, 269; pleasure in, 59, 135, 141, 159, 262–3; short devotional texts, 142–3; short narrative texts, 145–6; and wit (esprit), 131–3, 140–2, 263; Dissection spirituelle, 67–9, 72, 74, 133, 140–3; Histoire de Ruma, 7, 11, 15, 27, 61, 133–9, 150, 159, 262; Musique spirituelle, 7, 10, 13, 15, 58–60, 62, 67, 74, 133–6, 140–2, 159, 262, 269. See also Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu; Hecquet, Marie-Catherine; New France; salons; women Duplessis, Marie-Joseph-André, 124, 215, 247, 258 Dupuy, Claude-Thomas, 71, 96, 99, 100, 109–13, 117, 123, 184, 270 Dupuy, Geneviève de la Croix, 34, 58 Dupuy, Marie-Madeleine de la Nativité, 59 Dupuy de Lisloye, Paul, 34, 48, 52, 54, 113, 137, 158, 172 Duquesne de Menneville, Ange, 186 Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 15, 200–1, 267

index

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Étemare, Jean-Baptiste Le Sesne des Ménilles de, 198 femme forte, 9, 16; as amazon, 252, 259–60; biblical origins of, 259–60; in hagiography, 6, 259–60; as manager, 260–1 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-: De l’Éducation des filles, 260 Féret, Jacques Tranquillain, 11, 95, 97, 99–100, 118, 145 Ferland, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 8 Fiducie du patrimoine culturel des Augustines, 11 Filles de la Croix, 24, 28 Fino, Catherine, 11, 66, 69 Fleury Deschambault, JeanneCharlotte de, 223 Foligné, Jérôme de, 245 Fontaine, Guillaume, 19–20 Fontaines-Marans, Madeleine Du Bois de Saint-Joseph de, 164 Forestier, Marie, 147, 153 Fornel, Joachim, 83, 85, 291n25, 292n36 Fort William Henry, 219–20 Fox nation, 315n59 Franciscan sisters of Abbeville, 75, 80, 269 Franquet, Louis, 100–1, 185–6, 189, 190, 207, 210 Frégault, Guy, 35–7, 322n68 friendship, 10, 13–14; Christian, 22, 62, 94–5, 100–1; classical notions of, 21, 22; epistolary, 90–5; friends of the hospital, 96–101, 158, 170, 190, 205;

362

index

with God, 66; friends as supporters, 31, 139; friends as work colleagues, 31; and instrumental friends, 95; particular friendships at the Hôtel-Dieu, 62, 68; between women, scepticism about, 18, 21, 275n1; warning against particular friends in the religious life, 50, 60–2, 94. See also Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character) Frontenac, Louis de Buade de, 33 Gaultier, Jean-François, 117–18, 125 Gauvreau, Michael, 294n43 Gérard, Louis, 170, 311n75 Gies, Loretto, 10 Giffard, Marie-Françoise de SaintIgnace, 55 Giffard de Moncel, Robert, 158 Greer, Allan, 163 Greinoz, François, 172–3 Groulx, Lionel, 10 Guenet, Marie, 147 Guigues, Louis, 36 Guillimin, Charles, 44, 123 Guillimin, Geneviève-Élisabeth, 123, 214–16, 247, 258 Guillimin, Guillaume, 123–4 Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation, 6, 8, 10, 12, 96, 259; as historian, 177, 265–7; Relation de 1654, 267; Retraites, 144, 170 Hardy, Claire, 24 Havard de Beaufort, FrançoisCharles, 121

Hecquet, Jacques, 75, 93, 94; at Charenton asylum, 296n74 Hecquet, Marie-Catherine (Manon, daughter of MarieCatherine Homassel Hecquet), 63, 295n60 Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel: and father, 18, 26–7, 93; education under Michelle Homassel, 20–3; on MarieAnne Leroy, 22; friendship with Duplessis, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 26–7, 76, 90–5, 101, 121, 270–1; and Jansenism, 29, 75–6, 80, 87–90, 198–9, 201; as closet Jansenist, 89–90, 94–5, 97, 175, 270; marriage and financial separation, 75, 90, 94; as mother, 63, 90, 93–4; as unreliable correspondent of Duplessis, 91–3, 95; and gift exchanges with Duplessis, 95, 97, 99, 119, 221; Paris home, 93, 193; obsession with Indigenous peoples and ties to wild girl, 15, 191–9; and La Condamine, 200; death, 257–8; preservation of correspondence by descendants, 8, 95, 258; Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 13, 15, 191–201, 270; Vie de Madame Michelle Homassel, 13, 18. See also Duplessis, Marie-André (life and character); Jansenism Hecquet, Philippe (doctor), 28–9, 90 Hecquet, Philippe (son of MarieCatherine Hecquet), 94

Heu, Jacques d’, 83–4, 291n25 Hocquart, Gilles, 45, 113, 117, 123–4, 127, 181, 183, 261, 303n71 Homassel, Jacques: as businessman, 17, 26–7, 29, 93; as father, 17, 26–8, 90–1 Homassel, Marie-Catherine. See Hecquet, Marie-Catherine Homassel Homassel, Michelle Fontaine, 13, 17–18, 28–9, 89, 94; charity, 193; educational practices, 22–3; as partner of Marie-Anne Leroy, 21–2, 26; as wife and mother, 19–20; spiritual practices, 20 Hôpital-Général, 7, 8, 34, 107, 119, 122, 125–6, 205, 298n7; annals of, 167, 307n1; favoured by administrators, 186–7, 204, 261; opposition to its establishment, 52–4, 57, 166–8; novices, 54; as military hospital, 218, 257; during 1759 siege, 234–45; postsiege, 252, 257 hospitality, ix, 64 Hôtel de Ville de Paris investments, 44, 108–9 Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 7, 166, 203, 298n7; annals, 263–4, 307n1; construction of royal wing, 187 Hôtel-Dieu de Québec (hospital): agricultural holdings of, 113–15; as British military hospital, 246–7, 256–7; bursar’s role in, 103, 106; clientele, 103, 161–2; damage during siege, 238, 246–8; finances, 103–4,

index

363

108–9, 187; and 1755 fire, 146, 148–9, 202–4; and health care in Quebec, 102–3; as French military hospital, 128–9, 181, 188; operating plant, 125–8; patient care, 103, 128; patient load, 116–17, 128; paying for expansion, 183–8, 261; priests’ house in, 3–4, 102, 109, 259, 269; rebuilding after fire, 204–10; royal support, 128–9, 181, 184; urban holdings of, 109–13. See also Augustinian Sisters Huguenots, 77, 250–1 Ile-aux-oies, 58, 113–14, 172, 176 Indigenous peoples: as allies of French, 32, 220; as converts, 163–4, 161, 181, 194–7, 266; exoticism of, 41, 99, 119; as noble savages, 193–4; Duplessis’s opinion of, 51, 196–9, 220; Hecquet’s interest in, 15, 193–9; as patients at hospital, 103, 161– 2, 171; as slaves, 47, 196, 315n56; war practices of, 220, 241–2 indulgences, 119, 121, 173 Innocent X, 79 Jacquelin (Quebec merchant), 92 Jamet, Albert, 9, 144, 152–3, 156, 161–2, 164, 168, 171, 173 Jansen, Cornelius: Augustinus, 77, 78 Jansenism and Jansenists, 10, 12; in Canada, 14, 81–6, 156, 294n43; components of, 77–9, 200; and conversion of unbelievers, 198–9;

364

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and criticism of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 201; and fact/ doctrine distinction, 79; and formularies against, 81–2, 86; and Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 87, 201; as opponents of the Jesuits, 76–80, 197, 213, 258; and scepticism about Jesuit missions, 88–9, 197, 213; and women, 75, 80. See also Jesuits; Poulet; rigorism; Unigenitus Jaucourt, Louis de, 200–1, 207 Jauffroy, Pierre, 216–17 Jesuits, 71, 258; Canadian land holdings, 115; Canadian missions, 161, 197–8, 266; as critics of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 201; as friends of Duplessis family, 29, 34, 49, 55, 76, 93, 212; and misogyny, 76, 89; as opponents of Jansenism, 76–7, 82–6; as supporters of HôtelDieu, 71, 146, 149–50, 161–2, 176, 206. See also Jansenism Josse, Guy, 19 Josse, Pierre, 19, 31–2 Jourjon, Antoine-Mathieu, 258 Journal de Trévoux, 176 Juchereau de la Ferté, Jean, 114 Juchereau de la Ferté, JeanneFrançoise, 3, 5, 7–9, 54–8, 82, 147, 157–8, 264; and conflict with Saint-Vallier, 57, 167–8; as femme forte, 9, 259; as mentor of Duplessis, 14, 57–8, 114. See also Annales Juchereau Duchesnay, MarieJoseph, 7, 107, 299n11

Kalm, Pehr, 14, 102, 125–9, 183, 250, 257 Knox, John, 252, 257 La Colombière, Joseph de, 54, 135, 286n25 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de, 191; as editor of Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 199–200 La Galissonière, Roland-Michel Barrin de, 100–1, 106, 125, 127, 186, 188–9 La Guirlande de Julie, 136 La Jonquière, Jacques-Pierre de, 124 La Lande Gayon, Marie-Thérèse de, 114 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 193 La Motte, Louis-François-Gabriel d’Orléans de, 90 La Porte, Arnaud de, 189–90 La Rochefoucauld-Roye, Éléonore de, 41 La Rue, Pierre de, abbé de l’IsleDieu, 187–8, 215, 256–7 La Tour, Bertrand de, 9, 15; Duplessis on, 169; as editor of Annales, 169–73, 175, 185, 199 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de: Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale, 195–9, 201 Lajoüe, Marie-Anne, 148 Lanctot, Gustave, 274n9 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, JeanEustache, 44–5, 122–3, 283n81 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, Nicolas, 44, 122–4, 280n24, 283n81 Lanoullier des Granges,

Paul-Antoine-François, 302n66 Lauzon, 35, 38–9, 41, 51, 109–10, 116, 233, 280n35 Laval, François de, 57, 81, 103, 164–9, 171, 175 Law, John (bank and Mississippi company), 44, 108, 157 laxism. See rigorism Le Cointre, Anne, 147 Le Moyne, Pierre: La Galerie des femmes fortes, 138 Le Peletier, Claude, 19, 31–2, 276n5 LeBlanc, Léopold, 10 Leblanc, Marie-Angélique: benefactors of, 193, 200; death, 200; discovery of, 191–2; Duplessis on, 191, 299; meeting with Hecquet, 193–5; speculation over origins, 192–5, 199 Leclair, Pierre, 81, 85, 292n38, 294n42 Legardeur de Repentigny, MarieJoseph: Relation du siège de Québec, 224, 241, 243–5, 248, 264 Leroy, Denis, 19, 31, 39, 43, 45, 276n5, 276n7 Leroy, Jacques, 139, 278n3 Leroy, Jean (husband of Andrée Douin), 19 Leroy, Jean (son of Andrée Douin), 19, 43, 99; Jansenism, 29, 77, 90; death, 276n7, 289n6 Leroy, Marie, 151, 279n5; marriage contract, 19, 30–2, 137; as mother, 26–7, 41–4; trips to Paris, 26–7, 37, 41, 55, 276n11;

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financial dealings as wife, 37, 40–1; as widow, 40–7, 77, 119, 122, 283n87, 284n94; allowances for religious children, 43; illness and death, 47; evaluation of, 48, 137 Leroy, Marie-Anne: as business woman, 13, 19–20, 24–6, 104, 139; Duplessis’s opinion of, 22, 28; Hecquet’s opinion of, 22; as partner of Michelle Homassel, 21–2 Lespinasse, Julie de, 265 Levasseur de Neré, Jacques, 36 Lévis, François-Gaston de, 244, 248, 252 Leymarie, A.-L., 9 Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne de (1626–1685), 139 Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne de (1656–1729), 139 Longueuil, Marie-Élisabeth Lemoyne de, 61–2, 135, 138–9 Louis XIII, 162 Louis XIV, 19, 39, 76, 79, 81, 139, 163, 172, 262 Louis XV, 123, 157, 163, 221, 224, 257–8 Louis-le-Grand (Jesuit college, Paris), 43, 93 Lubert, Louis de, 32 Lyon-Caen, Nicolas, 93, 275n1, 275n33 Maboul (book censor), 172–3 Machault D’Arnouville, JeanBaptiste de, 210 Maclean, Ian, 260 Maillou, Marie-Joseph, 149 Malesherbes, Guillaume de

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Lamoignon de, 172 Malidor, Pierre, 33 Mance, Jeanne, 6 Marie de l’Incarnation. See Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation Martin, Claude, 144, 147, 170, 177, 265, 267 Maudoux, Abel, 293n40 Maupeou, Charles-Guillaume de, 82 Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de, 6, 41, 107, 124, 126–7, 183–5 Maurice (baker), 190–1 Melançon, François, 10–11 Mercier, Marie-Madeleine, 123 Merlac, André de, 292n32 Meusnier de Querlon, Gabriel de, Affiches de province, 176 Mézy, Augustin de Saffray de, 168 Miquelon, Dale, 126, 280n34 Molinism, 77. See also Jesuits Monckton, Robert, 246–7 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de: criticism of Bigot, 229, 231; criticism of Vaudreuil, 224, 229; dismay at Indigenous allies, 220–1; Duplessis on his death, 247–8; Duplessis on his victories, 217–21; as friend of hospital, 190, 221, 256; on women, 223. See also siege of Quebec Montigny, François de, 95, 97, 119 Moogk, Peter N., 32 Morin, Marie, 7, 11; Histoire simple et véritable, 7, 177, 263–4, 307n1 mortification, 20, 51, 60, 68–9, 74, 163, 330n5. See also Simon

de Longpré, Catherine de Saint-Augustin Mounier (Protestant merchants), 93, 329n103 Moureau, François, 173 Murray, James, 249, 255–6 music: and Baroque ornaments, 140–1; and monastic spirituality, 59–60, 140–1; naughty songs, 24, 68; plainchant, 59, 140; and pleasure, 60, 135; songs celebrating French victories, 99, 221 mutilated crucifix, 121, 145–6 New France: Élisabeth Bégon’s perspective on, 265, 267–8; Duplessis’s perspective on, 4, 7, 12, 97, 157, 161, 265–9; Guyart’s perspective on, 265–7; literature of, 7, 10–11, 131–2, 262, 269 Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, 77, 79, 292n38 Noel, Jan, 132, 187, 273n5 Notre-Dame de Toutes-Grâces, 119–20, 145–6 Ochterlony, David, 240–1 Oratorians, 20, 22, 29 Oswego (Chouaguen), 218–19 palls, 97, 202 Pâris, François de, 93 Parkman, Francis, 161 Pascal, Blaise, 78 patriarchal colonial state, 16, 162, 261, 268–9

Péan, Michel-Jean-Hugues, 217, 225 Pearson, Timothy G., 286n19, 311n86 Petit de Verneuil, Jacques, 32–3, 39–40, 51 Petit, Jean, 39–40, 51, 280n25 Philippe d’Orléans, 76–7 philosophes, 12, 191, 199–201, 258 Phips, William: 1690 attack, 160–1, 163, 219, 264 Pinaud, Nicolas, 38–9 Pitt, William, 249, 256–7 playing-card money, 33, 40, 157, 159 Poisson, Jeanne-Antoinette, marquise de Pompadour, 225 Pontbriand, Henri-Marie Dubreil de, 11, 96, 108, 117, 123, 188, 191, 241; Duplessis’s relation with, 204, 226, 228, 255, 262; and 1759 evacuation, 231–6; pastoral letters, 228–9, 248; portrait, 217; and Protestants, 250–1; role after 1755 fire, 15, 204–10; support for hospital, 121, 126–7, 145, 183–4, 190, 226, 228, 242–3, 256; role after Trois-Rivières Ursuline fire, 203–4 Pontchartrain, Jérôme Phélypeaux de, 34–9, 41, 45, 82 Pontchartrain, Louis Phélypeaux de, 32, 277n41 Poor Board, 34, 48, 52 Porlier, Catherine, 263 Portneuf (widow), 118 Port-Royal, 20, 29, 79, 84, 140, 155, 292n32, 294n44. See also Jansenism Potawatomi nation, 124

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Poulet, Georges-François, 14, 76, 81–6, 103. See also Jansenism; Jesuits; Saint-Vallier Puritanism, 78. See also rigorism Quesnel, Pasquier, Réflexions morales, 76–7, 79–80 Queylus, Gabriel Thubières de Levy de, 164–6 Racine, Louis, 193 Ragueneau, Paul: Vie de la Mère Catherine, 147, 170, 173, 285n19, 292n32, 317n72 Ramezay, Jean-Baptiste-NicolasRoch de, 244–5, 261, 327n82 Ramezay, Marie-Charlotte de Sainte Claude de, 7, 107, 244 Rapley, Elizabeth, 148 Rastel de Rocheblave, Pierre-Louis de, 258 Raudot, Antoine-Denis, 34, 36–7, 39, 132, 139 Raudot, Jacques, 34, 36–7, 39, 132, 139 Recollets, 52, 85, 203 relics, 57, 119, 196 Rémillard, Juliette, 10 Renaud d’Avène Des Méloizes, Angélique, 225, 229, 231 Richelieu, Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal de, 99, 164, 170–1 Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, 6, 99, 111, 170–1, 185, 190, 221, 256 Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Pierre de, 216, 231, 261, 268; as suitor of Geneviève, 211–12;

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attitude to women in wartime, 223–4, 245; and practices of Indigenous allies, 220, 240–2; as ally of hospital, 190, 206, 210, 242. See also siege of Quebec Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Philippe de, 38, 212 rigorism, 78, 86, 294n43. See also Jansenism Rioux, Marie-Madeleine, 83–4 Rioux, Nicolas, 81, 83–4 Rocher, Guy, 294n43 Rocheron, Marie-Madeleine de Sainte-Apolline, 247 Roches, Marie-Marthe des, 149 Rohan, Marie-Éléonor de, 132, 260 Rouillé, Antoine-Louis, 185–6, 266 Rousseau, François, 10, 187, 207, 262 Rousseau, Pierre: Correspondance littéraire, 176 Rowan, Mary M., 132 Roy, J.-Edmond, 9, 12, 43, 282n59, 283n87 Roy, Julie, 11 Ruette d’Auteuil, FrançoisMadeleine-Fortuné, 270; conflict with Dupuy, 110–11, 266; purchase of Lauzon, 110, 280n35 rules of war, 220, 225, 236–42. See also Indigenous peoples; siege of Quebec; Wolfe, James Rupelmonde, Marie de, 210 Sabatier, Pierre, 82, 90 Saint-Arnaud, Marie-MargueriteDaniel de Saint-Arsène, 230

Saint-Augustin (seigneurie), 113–15, 121, 123, 218, 236, 242, 245, 261 Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne de, 78 Saint-Marcel hospital nuns, 193 Saint-Utin (Marne), 30–1, 124 Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix-Chevières de, 3–4, 71, 102, 106, 110–11, 169, 269; and Hôpital-Général, 51–4, 57, 166–8, 261; and Jansenism, 81–6, 110, 111, 290n18, 292n31; and Rituel de Québec, 82 salons, 10; in Canada, 132, 139; conventions of salon writing, 133–8, 141; in France, 136, 138, 260, 262; and nuns as précieuses, 132; and worldly wit, 131–3, 139–40 Sarrazin, Claude-Martin, 215–16 Sartine, Antoine de, 217 Schwandt, Erich, 10 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 136; Les Femmes illustres, 138 seamstress’s guild (couturières), 20 Seminary of Foreign Missions, Paris, 82, 85, 93, 119, 229, 247 Seminary of Quebec, 71, 82–3, 85, 115, 205 siege of Quebec: bombardment during, 234–5, 238, 246; and bread riots, 226; destruction on south shore during, 241–2; elite women during, 225, 226, 229, 231; failed evacuation of countryside during, 230–1; and generals’ strategic failures,

224, 230, 231, 248, 261; at Hôpital-Général, 243–4; lower-class women during, 225, 226, 229, 230–1, 234, 242; and Montmorency Falls battle, 240–1; and women at town’s surrender, 245–6 Simon, Lorène, 10 Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine de Saint-Augustin, 155; and Duplessis, 72, 74; as femme forte, 259; miracles and visions, 55–7, 72, 74, 163, 172–3; and mortification, 69, 74; spiritual friendships, 62; Ragueneau’s life of, 147, 170, 173. See also mortification Soanen, Jean 20, 22, 89 Soumande, Louise de SaintAugustin, 52 Sovereign/Superior Council, 35–6, 85, 123–4 Stanley, Hans, 257 Sulpicians, 85, 115 Surin, Jean-Joseph, 67, 71 Talon, Jean, 132, 157, 264 Taschereau, Thomas-Jacques, 100, 117 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 197 Teresa of Avila, 60–1, 62–6, 265; Life, 66–7; Way of Perfection, 60 Thiboult, Thomas, 83, 85 Thierry de Viaixnes, 293n42 Thomas à Kempis: Imitation of Christ, 71 Tibierge, Catherine de SaintJoachim, 61, 106, 111, 179, 259

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Townshend, George, 238, 244, 245, 249 Treasury of the Marine, 18, 32–3, 39–40, 44, 48, 123, 279n9, 279n10, 280n24 Trudel, Marie-Madeleine de SaintPaul, 247 Unigenitus (Clement XI), 14, 75–7, 79–82, 85–6, 289n3, 293n40. See also Jansenism; Poulet Ursulines, 8, 51, 54, 58, 71, 80, 119, 126, 125–6, 257; annals of, 160, 264, 307n1; conflict over their annals, 169–70; fire in TroisRivières, 203–4, 210; hospitality after 1755 fire, 149, 202–3, 212; during 1755 siege, 235–6 Varin de La Marre, Jean-Victor de, 206 Varlet, Dominique-Marie, 293n41 Vaudreuil, Louise-Élisabeth de Joybert de, 33, 132 Verchères, Marie-Madeleine Jarret de, 252 Verreau, H.-A., 8, 10 Villars, François Sorbier de, 215, 229–30, 247–8 Villebois, Honoré Michel de, 265, 267–8 Visitation nuns, 80, 96, 147 Vitré, Antoine, 137 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 138, 193, 200

370

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Walker, Hovenden: 1711 expedition of, 45, 139–40, 160–1, 162, 176, 219, 230, 264 Ward, Matthew C., 241 Warwick, Jack, 221 Wheelwright, Esther, 7; friendship with Geneviève, 212–13 Wolfe, James, 230–3, 244–5; and rules of war, 236–41, 249; and women, 238–40 women: and brothels, 229; and family mentality, 61, 104–6, 267; financial and legal status, 104–6; financial separation from husband, 40, 94, 105, 261; lobbying by, 41; and male oversight, 105–6, 164, 204, 207, 269; misogynous commonplaces used by Duplessis, 75–6, 108, 160, 269; as motivator in war, 223, 245–6; spiritual agency, 163–4; wartime role, 223, 229, 242, 252–3. See also friendship