So the first Canadian home was founded in romance, and, better yet, in true love; and Marguerite de Roberval, faithful wife in fact if not by title, deserves to be held in honor among Canadian traditions as the tutelary saint of the Canadian household. Nor was there lack of romance in the further story of the women of Canada, while love and faith are also to be found prominent in that story.
Of the condition of the women in the Acadian colony but little is known. It was probably, as a rule, that which was common to the French peasantry of the time; but there was in the settlement a lack of women, as we know from the account of Marc Lescarbot in 1507, wherein he tells us that it was owing to the want of good housewives that the cows which had been imported at so many pains died soon after their arrival; and much of his treatise is given up to bewailing the absence from the colony of women in sufficient numbers to make it pleasant and thriving. Yet among these colonists, who were rudely driven from their homes by the strong hand of England, there were women, as we know from the poetical story of Evangeline, too familiar in Longfellow's poem to be narrated here, as well as from the later story of the Lady de la Tour, a Huguenot girl who had married Charles la Tour, the seigneur of Port Royal. It was a time of conspiracy and internecine strife among the people of Acadia, and though conspiracy and strife were petty enough in cause and action and result, they were none the less important to the actors in them. There arose on the part of Charles de Menou, Seigneur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, a plot to deprive La Tour of his seigniory, which Charnisay, whose lands adjoined those of his rival, claimed as his own. The French court and the governor's house at Boston, then tenanted by the stern John Endicott, were made in turn arenas of dispute, but we are concerned more with the appeal to force which came at last. Charles La Tour had gone to Boston to seek aid against his rival, leaving his fort in the hands of his wife, who had already been of sterling service in baffling the intrigues of Charnisay, when his opponent, hearing that the chatelaine was alone in command of the fort and had but fifty retainers and little ammunition, determined to take by force that which he coveted. So he sailed into the Bay of Saint John, where stood Fort La Tour, and summoned the garrison to surrender. But the Lady de la Tour was as dauntless in courage as she was faithful in heart to the fortunes of her husband, and she answered with cannon balls. Charnisay replied in kind, but the lady had the better of the argument, though conducted on principles not congenial to her sex, and she forced her foe to retire in discomfiture, notwithstanding his superiority in men and arms. She herself directed and inspired the defence, and it is said that she even laid some of the guns with her own hands. Her triumph was brief, however, for Charnisay returned in two months' time; and though she again gallantly defended her home and her husband's stronghold, her situation grew at last so desperate that she yielded to fair proffers of treaty and surrendered. But the victor had no intention of holding to his plighted word, and he promptly hanged every man in the garrison, with the exception of one who turned hangman as the price of his own miserable life. To make the blot upon his escutcheon yet fouler, Charnisay actually had the rope placed around the neck of the chatelaine herself; but, though her heroic spirit disdained to plead for safety to such a monster, either whim or some fear of results, for he could not be accused of any humane impulse, caused him to remit the sentence. It might almost as well have been carried out, however, for in a few days the lady died from grief at her defeat and the baseness of treachery to which she and her followers had been subjected.
Whittier has sung the wrath of the husband of the Lady de la Tour; but he omits to mention, nor would it chime well with the rest of the poem, that years afterward that husband married the widow of the man who had placed the rope around the neck of the heroic lady, and who had been drowned in the Penobscot River while on a voyage. The marriage, which found its celebrants at an advanced age for matrimonial union, settled forever the sternest struggle that Acadia had known; but even this desirable result scarcely enables us to forgive the Seigneur de la Tour for his treason to the memory of his devoted wife in thus allying himself to the house of him who had done her to death.
With this story of the most famous of the women of Acadia let us turn to Canada proper. It was not for some time after the first futile and later partially successful attempts to found a colony upon the bleak shores of the Saint Lawrence that there was to be found on those shores the refining influence that comes from feminine companionship. The first permanent colony, however, which established itself on the heights of Quebec, held among its members one of the gentler sex, Dame Hebert, the wife of Louis Hebert, who had been an Acadian. His wife was a woman of courage and resource, as befitted a pioneer colonist; and she had need of both qualities in her fight with the conditions that pressed so hardly upon the new colonists. She first set her foot upon Canadian soil in 1617, and she lived through the most remarkable of the mutations of the first colony, including the surrender to the English and the treaty of Saint Germain which again gave Canada to France. For the first three years of her sojourn in the new land she was the only woman on those shores; and when in 1620 she was joined in her isolation by Helene de Champlain, wife of the great pioneer of New France, it was but for a time, hardly four years in all. At the expiration of that period Madame de Champlain returned, broken in health and spirits by her exile, to her beloved France, held by her in higher esteem than her gallant but cold husband, and there she entered a convent, leaving behind her a memory as one of the two women who first inhabited the wilderness of New France, and leaving also her name to an island in the Saint Lawrence. Though much may be said in extenuation of the homesickness and lack of endurance found in the young wife of the great Champlain, she was no heroine as was Dame Hebert, and her easy acceptance of the Catholic faith as her own after her marriage,--she had been a staunch Huguenot,--moved thereto rather by the atmosphere of her new home than by any conviction, is suggestive of the real lack of strength in her character. Yet she is worthy of remembrance as one of the women pioneers of Canada. Those of her sex who followed in her westward footsteps were generally made of sterner stuff than the faint-hearted Helene; but it was long before she knew a successor as one of the women of New France, for her return to the land of her birth was in 1624, and it was not until 1634 that the third woman, the wife of the surgeon Giffard, came to found a home amid the wilds of the west. It is true that there were two girls, the daughters of Dame Hebert, in the colony even before the coming of Madame de Champlain; but these could be considered only as involuntary pioneers and do not deserve to be placed among those who came of their free will, or for love of their husbands. One of these daughters of Dame Hebert, however, furnished in her union with Stephen Jonquest occasion for the first marriage ceremony celebrated in Canada, a ceremony which preceded by more than two years that first celebrated in New England.
For more than two decades after the death of Champlain in 1635, the tide of immigration was very feeble; but it bore on its bosom two notable women in the annals of Canada Madame de la Peltrie, the founder of the first girls' school ever opened in the province, and Mother Marie Guyard, the honored head of that school. In 1659 these two and five other women, three calling themselves Hospitalières, arrived at the little settlement of Quebec, consisting of scarcely two hundred and fifty souls. They came for the glory of God, to work His work among the Indians; and they were received with all the honors the little colony could compass. Madame de la Peltrie, the head of the peaceful expedition, found the state of affairs worse than she had been told by the missionaries who had urged her coming; but she faced the difficulties and discouragements of the situation with a heart as gallant as that of those of her sex who dared "battle, murder, and sudden death" at the hands of the Indians in their search for a home, and the Ursuline Convent at Quebec is an enduring monument to the memory of the women who did so much for the uplifting of the Indians of Canada.
Her coadjutor, Mother Marie Guyard, left behind her a name no less honored than that of Madame de la Peltrie a name unexcelled for the virtues of piety, constancy, self-sacrifice, and devotion to the cause of degraded humanity. Her work among the Indians bore noble fruit, even if hardly to the extent of her wishes. She had many discouragements to face and obstacles to overcome; among them, not a few at the hands of those who should have been her allies. In 1661 the new governor, Baron Dubois d'Avaugour, moved thereto by an ill-advised plea on the part of a missionary for the commutation of the sentence passed upon a woman for violating the law that no brandy should be sold to the Indians, gave free license to the sale of spirituous liquors throughout the dominion. The result was deplorable and almost nullified the work of a score of weary years; and Mother Marie, sick at heart, wrote thus to her son:
"I have told you in another letter about a cross that is far harder to bear than the incursions of the Iroquois. There are in this country certain Frenchmen so despicable and so little touched by the fear of God that they are ruining all our new Christians by giving them strong drink, such as wine and brandy, to get their beaver-skins from them."
It was because of this and kindred causes that Mother Marie deemed her life-work a failure at last; but the thought was erroneous. She left her influence in the hearts of many of her Indian pupils, and she gave to Canada by her efforts the school which is one of the noblest monuments of the past of Quebec.
The Hospitalières, who had come over in the same ship with the founders of the girls' school, founded the hospital that is now known as Quebec's Hotel-Dieu; at first, their philanthropic efforts on behalf of the Indians found nothing but failure as reward, for an unfortunate epidemic that broke out soon after the establishment of the hospital in an old storeroom, and the death of most of the patients there treated, persuaded the red men that the hospital was a scheme devised for their extinction rather than for their good. But here, too, perseverance in good works overcame stupendous difficulties, though here again, as well, the result did not take the form which was at first intended. Yet none the lighter is the praise to be awarded to the noble women who undertook the work and who carried it on in the face of danger and failure, and the names of such women as Marie Irwin, Catherine Chevalier, and Madame d'Ailleboust, the wife of the third governor of Quebec, are still deservedly held in honor by the dwellers in New France.
In the younger sister colony to Quebec, that of Montreal, Jeanne Mance founded a hospital with the money supplied her by Madame Bullion, a rich and pious widow living in Old France but interested in all projects for the amelioration of existent conditions in the new land. The hospital was of excellent service in caring for the wounded who had done battle with the fierce Iroquois, and many a stricken soldier blessed the name of its founder. Marguerite de Bourgeoys, of whom Parkman writes as the "fair ideal of Christian womanhood, a flower of earth expanding in the rays of heaven," on her part founded in Montreal a girls' school, and her work so prospered that she actually built by her own efforts a church, now known, though in its second building, as "Notre Dame de Bonsecours." She and Jeanne Mance were known as "the two mothers of Montreal," and well did they deserve the honorable title.