These girls were called "les filles du roi," since they were maintained at the charge of the king's bounty in the philanthropic orphanages of France. At Montreal, under Marguerite Bourgeoys, they were lodged with her in a house bought by Saint Ange, since the old stable was too small. There, they were carefully instructed in religion and practical affairs to become good mothers of families, and they did not leave her till the day of their marriages. At this time, a pious congregation of lay women was formed by Marguerite Bourgeoys; these met on Sundays for the practice of virtue and many of the newly arrived girls were kept in touch with the gentle and motherly Marguerite, long after their marriages. It was from this date that her home began to be affectionately spoken of as "The Congregation."
In addition to girls of a humble class, demoiselles of a more superior station were also encouraged to come to provide wives for the officers and others, of whom Colbert wished to form the nucleus of a Canadian noblesse. Several others, who first thought of passing through the noviceship at the Hôtel-Dieu and joining the Hospitalières Sisters, found their vocation otherwise, like Perrine de Bélestre, sister of Picoté, who married Michel Godefroy, Sieur de Linlot, at Three Rivers.
When the king's daughters married, they were given the king's dowry, varying in form and value. Sometimes it was a house with provisions for eight months, more often, fifty livres in household supplies, besides a barrel or two of salted meat. [101] And when they were married they were encouraged to rear up a fruitful progeny, for in the "Edits et Ordonnances" of the Province of Quebec, p. 67, a decree is found that "in future all inhabitants of the said country of Canada, who shall have living children to the number of ten, born in lawful wedlock, not being priests, monks or nuns, shall each be paid out of the moneys sent by His Majesty to the said country a pension of 300 livres a year, and those who shall have twelve children a pension of 400 livres; and that to this effect they shall be required to declare the number of their children every year, in the months of June or July, to the intendant of justice, police and finance, established in the same country, who having verified the same, shall order the payment of the said pensions, one-half in cash, and the other half at the end of eight years." Furthermore, he ordered that fathers of large families should have preference over others unless there was strong contrary reason. The decreasing birth rate in France at that period prompted such regulations in New France. The king's activity through Colbert in peopling his colony is seen in numerous letters to his officials. In an instruction to the Intendant Bouteroue in 1668 Colbert writes: "The end and rule of all your conduct should be the increase of the colony; and on this point I should never be satisfied, but labour without ceasing to find every imaginable expedient for preserving the inhabitants, attracting new ones and multiplying marriages."
These encouragements bore fruit. Laval, writing in 1668, says: "The families of our French people in this country are very numerous; for the most part they consist of eight, ten, twelve, and sometimes as many as fifteen or sixteen children. The savages, on the contrary, have only two or three and rarely do they go beyond four."
The Abbé de Queylus, now superior of the seminary at Montreal, wrote to Colbert on May 15, 1669, that owing to the efforts of the king "the number of the inhabitants of New France has increased two-thirds."
The population propaganda at Montreal was left largely to the seigneurs of the seminary. In 1666, there were 582 persons; in 1667, there were 766; in 1672, the population was doubled to 1,500 or 1,600 souls, as Dollier de Casson relates in his account of this year, which is the concluding chapter of his "History of Montreal."
We may fitly conclude this chapter by giving two of the worthy Dollier's reflections:
"First reflection, on the advantage that the women have in this place (Montreal) over men, which is, that although the cold climate is very healthy for the one and the other sex, it is incomparably to the advantage of the feminine, which finds itself here almost immortal—this is what everyone says since the birth of this settlement and what I myself have remarked for six years, for although there are fourteen to fifteen thousand souls here, there has only been the death of one woman for the last six years."
"The second reflection will be on the facility which people of this sex have of marrying here, a fact which is apparently clear to all the world since it is practiced every year, but which is admirably shown by an example I am going to tell you of one qui sera assez rare. It is of a woman who, having this year lost her husband, has had one of the bans published, and being dispensed of the two others had her marriage performed and consummated before her first husband was buried. These two reflections in my opinion will be sufficiently strong to thin out the Hôpital de la Pitié and to secure a good party of girls from all the Paris orphanages if only they are desirous, to live long, or to cultivate a devotion to the seventh of our sacraments."
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