In 1670, there were only five teachers for the many calls on the education of the girls, so Marguerite Bourgeoys went to France for assistance, and after six months she saw Colbert, who promised to assist her so that her congregation in May, 1671, received the approval of the "Roi Soleil," Louis XIV, who was then with his brilliant court at Dunkerque. She returned to Quebec in 1672, on August 14th, bringing back a miraculous oaken statue of the Blessed Virgin, of some eight inches in height for the church of Bonsecours, already projected in 1651 and to be built shortly. With her came several novices to join her order, some of noble families, Elizabeth de la Bertache, Madeleine de Constantin, Thérèse Soumillard, Pierrette Laurent, Geneviève Durosoy, Marguerite Soumillard, and Marguerite Sénécal, who was the bursar of the very slender funds of the party.
In addition to the externes the congregation was beginning to have boarders and was reaching such a point of utility, when she might extend her work throughout the colony, that she had been persuaded to ask for the above royal letters patent of incorporation. Her eventual aim was to establish a regular congregation, with religious vows of its own. For the present, Laval did not favour such a plan; he rather wished to avoid a multiplicity of religious congregations in a poor country, and he would have preferred her companions to join the Ursulines at Quebec, becoming if necessary a branch establishment.
To this the independent Marguerite Bourgeoys was opposed. The Ursulines was an enclosed order and the Montreal congréganistes wished indeed to live in community, but to circulate freely among the people—a new idea then among religious congregations of women, very untried and to which consequently the conservative bishop of Petrea was not favourable. Yet, in 1689, on a visit of Laval to Montreal, the foundress was authorized to spread her fellow workers over his diocese, and it was about this time that they began to adopt a form of dress based on an Acadian model.
The education of Indian children was greatly promoted under the new policy of Louis XIV, and Laval, in the intention of "Gallicizing" the natives in language, religion and customs, and eventually of allying them in marriage with the colonists from France. This had been one of Laval's objects in founding the "petit séminaire" of Quebec. He persuaded the Jesuits and the Ursulines to start Indian schools for Algonquin boys and Huron and Algonquin girls at Quebec. On September 27, 1670, Marie de l'Incarnation announced the marriage of some of her girls to Frenchmen, with domestic success.
Laval also induced the Sulpicians at Montreal to undertake the work for the children of those Algonquin and Huron parents who had been captured by the Iroquois. The city archives contain the contracts of July 16, 1669, by which Jacques Akimega, thirteen years of age, and Louise Resikouki, an Algonquin girl of twelve years, bind themselves to be lodged and educated like French people till eighteen years of age, at the seminary on a gift of 500 livres, provided by Dollier de Casson on the stipulation that if the contract was broken the money shall go for the education of other savage children.
Other Indian girls being forthcoming, Marguerite Bourgeoys undertook their training at the congregation, and on November 14, 1672, we have the contract of marriage between one of them, Marie Magdalene Catherine Nachital, and Pierre Hogue, born at Belle-Fontaine, near Amiens.
One of the pupils of the congregation, called Gannensagouas and baptized Marie Thérèse, after the queen of France, later in 1681 made her religious profession as a nun in the congregation order, by that time erected.
But the work of Gallicizing and civilizing these wayward, liberty-loving, capricious children of the woods was an ungrateful task. Most of those who entered the cloister of the Ursulines were like birds of passage and they flew over the cloister walls to escape the melancholy of their restrained lives, even when their parents did not take them away. Nor did the Jesuits succeed any better. The Sulpicians made a bold attempt by taking their Indian school into the country. M. de Fénelon, one of their number, was charged to form an establishment under the name of La Présentation at Gentilly, situated on the bank of the St. Lawrence above Lachine, and in addition he secured a concession on January 9, 1673, of the three islands opposite between Lachine and Cap St. Gilles, which had been granted originally to Picoté de Bélestre and were now exchanged for land on the island. These islands were then named the Iles de Courcelles, after the governor general, and on one of them at a place called the Baie d'Urfé, after the name of one of the Sulpician missionaries, an Indian mission was established. We may here mention the Jesuit missions, on the south shore facing Montreal of the seigneuries of Madeleine la Prairie and St. Lambert, which commenced with a few savages in 1669, the progenitor of the fifth site, the Caughnawaga reservation, as known today.
NOTE