* For an interesting account of the shrine at the Petit
Cap, see Casgrain, Le Pélérinage de la Bonne Sainte Anne, a
little manual of devotion printed at Quebec. I chanced to
visit the old chapel in 1871, during a meeting of the parish
to consider the question of reconstructing it, as it was in
a ruinous state. Passing that way again two years after, I
found the old chapel still standing, and a new one, much
larger, half finished
** Most of them were moreover retained, after leaving the
school, by the seminary, as servants, farmers, or vassals.
La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VI
mechanical trades, they preferred above all things the savage liberty of the backwoods.
The education of girls was in the hands of the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation, of whom the former, besides careful instruction in religious duties, taught their pupils “all that a girl ought to know.” * This meant exceedingly little besides the manual arts suited to their sex; and, in the case of the nuns of the Congregation, who taught girls of the poorer class, it meant still less. It was on nuns as well as on priests that the charge fell, not only of spiritual and mental, but also of industrial, training. Thus we find the king giving to a sisterhood of Montreal a thousand francs to buy wool, and a thousand more for teaching girls to knit. ** The king also maintained a teacher of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four hundred francs.
During the eighteenth century, some improvement is perceptible in the mental status of the population. As it became more numerous and more stable, it also became less ignorant; and the Canadian habitant, towards the end of the French rule, was probably better taught, so far as concerned religion, than the mass of French peasants. Yet secular instruction was still extremely meagre, even in the noblesse. “In spite of this defective education,” says the famous navigator, Bougainville, who knew the colony well in its last years, “the
* A lire, à écrire, les prières, les mœurs chrétiennes, et
tout ce qu'une fille doit savoir. Marie de l'Incarnation,
Lettre du 9 Août, 1668.
** Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1686.
Canadians are naturally intelligent. They do not know how to write, but they speak with ease and with an accent as good as the Parisian.” * He means, of course, the better class. “Even the children of officers and gentlemen,” says another writer, “scarcely know how to read and write; they are ignorant of the first elements of geography and history.” ** And evidence like this might be extended.
When France was heaving with the throes that prepared the Revolution; when new hopes, new dreams, new thoughts,—good and evil, false and true,—tossed the troubled waters of French society, Canada caught something of its social corruption, but not the faintest impulsion of its roused mental life. The torrent surged on its way; while, in the deep nook beside it, the sticks and dry leaves floated their usual round, and the unruffled pool slept in the placidity of intellectual torpor. ***
* Bougainville, Mémoire de 1757 (see Margry, Relations
inédites).
** Mémoire de 1736; Detail de toute la Colonie (published
by Hist. Soc. of Quebec).
*** Several Frenchmen of a certain intellectual eminence
made their abode in Canada from time to time. The chief
among them are the Jesuit Lafitau, author of Mœurs des
Sauvages Américains; the Jesuit Charlevoix, traveller and
historian; the physician Sarrazin; and the Marquis de la
Galisonnière, the most enlightened of the French governors
of Canada. Sarrazin, a naturalist as well as a physician,
has left his name to the botanical genus Sarracenia, of
which the curious American species, S. purpurea, the
“pitcher-plant,” was described by him. His position in the
colony was singular and characteristic. He got little or no
pay from his patients; and, though at one time the only
genuine physician in Canada (Callieres et Beauharnois au
Ministre, 3 Nov., 1702), he was dependent on the king for
support. In 1699, we find him thanking his Majesty for 300
francs a year, and asking at the same time for more, as he
has nothing else to live on. ( Callères et Champigny au
Ministre, 20 Oct., 1699.) Two years later the governor
writes that, as he serves almost everybody without fees, he
ought to have another 300 francs. (Ibid., 5 Oct., 1701.) The
additional 300 francs was given him; but, finding it
insufficient, he wanted to leave the colony. “He is too
useful,” writes the governor again: “we cannot let him go.”
His yearly pittance of 600 francs, French money, was at one
time re-enforced by his salary as member of the Superior
Council. He died at Quebec in 1734.