_Church and State.--The Bishop and the King.--The King and the
Cures.--The New Bishop.--The Canadian Cure.--Ecclesiastical
Rule.--Saint-Vallier and Denonville.--Clerical Rigor.--Jesuit and
Sulpitian.--Courcelle and Châtelain.--The Recollets.--Heresy
and Witchcraft.--Canadian Nuns.--Jeanne Le Ber.--Education.--The
Seminary.--Saint Joachim.--Miracles op Saint Anne.--Canadian Schools._
|When Laval and the Jesuits procured the recall of Mézy, they achieved
a seeming triumph; yet it was but a defeat in disguise. While ordering
home the obnoxious governor, the king and Colbert made a practical
assertion of their power too strong to be resisted. A vice-regal
officer, a governor, an intendant, and a regiment of soldiers, were
silent but convincing proofs that the mission days of Canada were over,
and the dream of a theocracy dispelled for ever. The ecclesiastics read
the signs of the times, and for a while seemed to accept the situation.
The king on his part, in vindicating the civil power, had shown a
studious regard to the sensibilities of the bishop and his allies. The
lieutenant-general Tracy, a zealous devotee, and the intendant Talon,
who at least professed to be one, were not men to offend the clerical
party needlessly. In the choice of Courcelle, the governor, a little
less caution had been shown. His chief business was to fight the
Iroquois, for which he was well fitted, but he presently showed signs of
a willingness to fight the Jesuits also. The colonists liked him for his
lively and impulsive speech; but the priests were of a different mind,
and so, too, was his colleague Talon, a prudent person who studied
the amenities of life and knew how to pursue his ends with temper
and moderation. On the subject of the clergy he and the governor
substantially agreed, but the ebullitions of the one and the smooth
discretion of the other were mutually repugnant to both. Talon
complained of his colleague’s impetuosity; and Colbert directed him
to use his best efforts to keep Courcelle within bounds and prevent him
from publicly finding fault with the bishop and the Jesuits.* Next we
find the minister writing to Courcelle himself to soothe his ruffled
temper, and enjoining him to act discreetly, “because,” said
Colbert, “as the colony grows the king’s authority will grow with
it, and the authority of the priests will be brought back in time within
lawful bounds.” **
Meanwhile, Talon had been ordered to observe carefully the conduct
of the bishop and the Jesuits, “who,” says the minister, “have
hitherto nominated governors for the king, and used every
* Colbert a Talon, 20 Fev., 1668.
** Colbert a Courcelle, 19 Mai, 1669
means to procure the recall of those chosen without their participation;
* filled offices with their adherents, and tolerated no secular priests
except those of one mind with them.” ** Talon, therefore, under the
veil of a reverent courtesy, sharply watched them. They paid courtesy
with courtesy, and the intendant wrote home to his master that he saw
nothing amiss in them. He quickly changed his mind. “I should have had
less trouble and more praise,” he writes in the next year, “if I had
been willing to leave the power of the church ¦where I found it.” ***
“It is easy,” he says again,
“to incur the ill-will of the Jesuits if one does not accept all their
opinions and abandon one’s self to their direction even in temporal
matters; for their encroachments extend to affairs of police, which
concern only the civil magistrate;” and he recommends that one or two
of them be sent home as disturbers of the peace. **** They, on their
part, changed attitude towards both him and the governor. One of them,
Father Bardy, less discreet than the rest, is said to have preached a
sermon against them at Quebec, in which he likened them to a pair of
toadstools springing up in a night, adding that a good remedy would soon
be found, and that Courcelle would have to run home like other governors
before him. (v)
Tracy escaped clerical attacks. He was
* Instruction au Sieur Talon.
** Mémoire pour M. de Tracy.
*** Talon au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1666.
**** Talon, Mémoire de 1667.
(v) La Salle, Mémoire de 1678 This sermon was preached on
the 12th of March, 1667.
extremely careful not to provoke them; and one of his first acts was
to restore to the council the bishop’s adherents, whom Mézy had
expelled. * And if, on the one hand, he was too pious to quarrel with
the bishop, so, on the other, the bishop was too prudent to invite
collision with a man of his rank and influence.
After all, the dispute between the civil and ecclesiastical powers was
not fundamental. Each had need of the other. Both rested on authority,
and they differed only as to the boundary lines of their respective
shares in it. Yet the dispute of boundaries was a serious one, and it
remained a source of bitterness for many years. The king, though rigidly
Catholic, was not yet sunk in the slough of bigotry into which Maintenon
and the Jesuits succeeded at last in plunging him. He had conceived a
distrust of Laval, and his jealousy of his royal authority disposed him
to listen to the anti-clerical counsels of his minister. How needful
they both thought it to prune the exuberant growth of clerical power,
and how cautiously they set themselves to do so, their letters attest
again and again. “The bishop,” writes Colbert, “assumes a
domination far beyond that of other bishops throughout the Christian
world, and particularly in the kingdom of France.” ** “It is the
will of his Majesty that you confine him and the Jesuits within just
bounds, and let none of them
* A curious account of his relations with Laval is given in
a letter of La Motte-Cadillac, 28 September, 1694.
** Colbert a Duchesneau, 1 Mai, 1677.
overstep these bounds in any manner whatsoever. Consider this as a
matter of the greatest importance, and one to which you cannot give too
much attention.” * “But,” the prudent minister elsewhere writes,
“it is of the greatest consequence that the bishop and the Jesuits do
not perceive that the intendant blames their conduct.” **
It was to the same intendant that Colbert wrote, “it is necessary to
diminish as much as possible the excessive number of priests, monks,
and nuns, in Canada.” Yet in the very next year, and on the advice of
Talon, he himself sent four more to the colony. His motive was plain. He
meant that they should serve as a counterpoise to the Jesuits. *** They
were mendicant friars, belonging to the branch of the Franciscans known
as the Recollets; and they were supposed to be free from the ambition
for the aggrandizement of their order which was imputed, and with
reason, to the Jesuits. Whether the Recollets were free from it or not,
no danger was to be feared from them; for Laval and the Jesuits were
sure to oppose them, and they would need the support of the government
too much to set themselves in opposition to it. “The more Recollets we
have,” says Talon, “the better will the too firmly rooted authority
of the others be balanced.” ****
While Louis XIV. tried to confine the priests to
* Colbert a Duchesneau, 28 Avril, 1677.
** Instruction pour M. Bouteroue, 1668.
*** Mémoire succinct des principaux points des intentions
du Roy sur le pays de Canada, 18 Mai, 1669.
**** Talon au Ministre, 10 Oct., 1670.
their ecclesiastical functions, he was at the same time, whether from
religion, policy, or both combined, very liberal to the Canadian church,
of which, indeed, he was the mainstay. In the yearly estimate of
“ordinary charges” of the colony, the church holds the most
prominent place; and the appropriations for religious purposes often
exceed all the rest together. Thus, in 1667, out of a total of 36,360
francs, 28,000 are assigned to church uses. * The amount fluctuated, but
was always relatively large. The Canadian curés were paid in great
part by the king, who for many years gave eight thousand francs annually
towards their support. Such was the poverty of the country that, though
in 1685 there were only twenty-five curés, ** each costing about five
hundred francs a year, the tithes utterly failed to meet the expense.
As late as 1700, the intendant declared that Canada without the king’s
help could not maintain more than eight or nine curés. Louis XIV.
winced under these steady demands, and reminded the bishop that more
than four thousand curés in France lived on less than two hundred
francs a year. *** “You say,” he wrote to the intendant, “that it
is impossible for a Canadian curé to live on five hundred francs. Then
you
* Of this, 6,000 francs were given to the Jesuits, 6,000 to
the Ursulines, 9,000 to the cathedral, 4,000 to the
seminary, and 3,000 to the Hôtel-Dieu. Etat de dépense,
etc., 1677. The rest went to pay civil officers and
garrisons. In 1682, the amount for church uses was only
12,000 francs. In 1687 it was 13,500. In 1689, it rose to
34,000, including Acadia.
** Increased soon after to thirty-six by Saint-Vallier,
Laval’s successor.
*** Mémoire a Duchesneau, 15 Mai, 1678; Le Roy a
Duchesneau, 11 Juin, 1680.
must do the impossible to accomplish my intentions, which are always
that the curés should live on the tithes alone.” * Yet the head of
the church still begged for money, and the king still paid it. “We
are in the midst of a costly war,” wrote the minister to the bishop,
“yet in consequence of your urgency the gifts to ecclesiastics will
be continued as before.” ** And they did continue. More than half a
century later, the king was still making them, and during the last
years of the colony he gave twenty thousand francs annually to support
Canadian curés. ***
The maintenance of curés was but a part of his bounty. He endowed the
bishopric with the revenues of two French abbeys, to which he afterwards
added a third. The vast tracts of land which Laval had acquired were
freed from feudal burdens, and emigrants were sent to them by the
government in such numbers that, in 1667, the bishop’s seigniory
of Beaupré and Orleans contained more than a fourth of the entire
population of Canada. **** He had emerged from his condition of
apostolic poverty to find himself the richest landowner in the colony.
If by favors like these the king expected to lead the ecclesiastics into
compliance with his
* Le Roy a Duchesneau, 30 Avril, 1681.
** Le Ministre a l’Evêque, 8 Mai, 1694.
*** Bougainville, Mémoire, 1757.
**** Entire population, 4,312; Beaupré and Orleans, 1,185.
Recensement de 1667. Laval, it will be remembered,
afterwards gave his lands to the seminary of Quebec. He
previously exchanged the island of Orleans with the Sieur
Berthelot for the island of Jesus. Berthelot gave him a
large sum of money in addition.
wishes, he was doomed to disappointment. The system of movable curés,
by which the bishop like a military chief could compel each member of
his clerical army to come and go at his bidding, was from the first
repugnant to Louis XIV. On the other hand, the bishop clung to it with
his usual tenacity. Colbert denounced it as contrary to the laws of the
kingdom. * “His Majesty has reason to believe,” he writes, “that
the chief source of the difficulty which the bishop makes on this point
is his wish to preserve a greater authority over the curés.” **
The inflexible prelate, whose heart was bound up in the system he had
established, opposed evasion and delay to each expression of the royal
will; and even a royal edict failed to produce the desired effect. In
the height of the dispute, Laval went to court, and, on the ground of
failing health, asked for a successor in the bishopric. The king readily
granted his prayer. The successor was appointed; but when Laval prepared
to embark again for Canada, he was given to understand that he was to
remain in France. In vain he promised to make no trouble; *** and it was
not till after an absence of four years that he was permitted to return,
no longer as its chief, to his beloved Canadian church. ****
* Le Ministre a Duchesneau, 15 Mai, 1678.
** Instruction a M. de Meules, 1682.
*** Laval au Père la Chaise, 1687. This forms part of a
curious correspondence printed in the Foyer Canadien for
1866, from originals in the Archevêché of Quebec.
**** From a mémoire of 18 Feb., 1685 (Archives de
Versailles) it is plain that the court, in giving a
successor to Laval, thought that it had ended the vexed
question of movable curés.
Meanwhile Saint-Vallier, the new bishop, had raised a new tempest. He
attacked that organization of the seminary of Quebec by which Laval had
endeavored to unite the secular priests of Canada into an attached and
obedient family, with the bishop as its head and the seminary as its
home, a plan of which the system of movable curés was an essential
part. The Canadian priests, devoted to Laval, met the innovations
of Saint-Vallier with an opposition which seemed only to confirm his
purpose. Laval, old and worn with toil and asceticism, was driven almost
to despair. The seminary of Quebec was the cherished work of his life,
and, to his thinking, the citadel of the Canadian church; and now he
beheld it battered and breached before his eyes. His successor, in fact,
was trying to place the church of Canada on the footing of the church
of France. The conflict lasted for years, with the rancor that marks the
quarrels of non-combatants of both sexes. “He” (_Saint-Vallier_),
says one of his opponents, “has made himself contemptible to almost
everybody, and particularly odious to the priests born in Canada;
for there is between them and him a mutual antipathy difficult to
overcome.” * He is described by the same writer as a person “without
reflection and judgment, extreme in all things, secret and artful,
passionate when opposed, and a flatterer when he wishes to gain his
point.” This amiable critic adds that Saint-Vallier believes a
* The above is from an anonymous paper, written apparently
in 1695 and entitled Mémoire pour le Canada.
bishop to be inspired, in virtue of his office, with a wisdom that needs
no human aid, and that whatever thought comes to him in prayer is a
divine inspiration to be carried into effect at all costs and in spite
of all opposition.
The new bishop, notwithstanding the tempest he had raised, did not fully
accomplish that establishment of the curés in their respective parishes
which the king and the minister so much desired. The Canadian curé was
more a missionary than a parish priest; and nature as well as Bishop
Laval threw difficulties in the way of settling him quietly over his
charge.
On the Lower St. Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, six leagues
across, a ship from France, the last of the season, holds her way for
Quebec, laden with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for
Indian trade, the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the
king’s orders from Versailles. Swelling her patched and dingy sails,
she glides through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing
but her to remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little
troubled world before. On the far verge of the ocean-like river, clouds
and mountains mingle in dim confusion; fresh gusts from the north dash
waves against the ledges, sweep through the quivering spires of stiff
and stunted fir-trees, and ruffle the feathers of the crow, perched on
the dead bough after his feast of mussels among the seaweed. You are
not so solitary as you think. A small birch canoe rounds the point of
rocks, and it bears two men; one in an old black cassock, and the
other in a buckskin coat; both working hard at the paddle to keep their
slender craft off the shingle and the breakers. The man in the cassock
is Father Morel, aged forty-eight, the oldest country curé in Canada,
most of his brethren being in the vigor of youth as they had need to be.
His parochial charge embraces. a string of incipient parishes extending
along the south shore from Riviere du Loup to Rivière du Sud, a
distance reckoned at twenty-seven leagues, and his parishioners number
in all three hundred and twenty-eight souls. He has administered
spiritual consolation to the one inhabitant of Kamouraska; visited the
eight families of La Bouteillerie and the five families of La Combe; and
now he is on his way to the seigniory of St. Denis with its two houses
and eleven souls. *
The father lands where a shattered eel-pot high and dry on the pebbles
betrays the neighborhood of man. His servant shoulders his portable
chapel, and follows him through the belt of firs, and the taller woods
beyond, till the sunlight of a desolate clearing shines upon them.
Charred trunks and limbs encumber the ground; dead trees, branchless,
barkless, pierced by the woodpeckers, in part black with fire, in part
bleached by sun and frost, tower ghastly and weird above the labyrinth
of forest ruins, through which the priest and his
* These particulars are from the Plan général de l’estât
présent des missions du Canada, fait en l’année, 1683. It is
a list and description of the parishes with the names and
ages of the cures, and other details. See Abeille, I. This
paper was drawn up by order of Laval.
follower wind their way, the cat-bird mewing, and the blue-jay screaming
as they pass. Now the goldenrod and the aster, harbingers of autumn,
fringe with purple and yellow the edge of the older clearing, where
wheat and maize, the settler’s meagre harvest, are growing among the
stumps.
Wild-looking women, with sunburnt faces and neglected hair, run from
their work to meet the curé; a man or two follow with soberer steps and
less exuberant zeal; while half-savage children, the _coureurs de bois_
of the future, bareheaded, barefooted, and half-clad, come to wonder and
stare. To set up his altar in a room of the rugged log cabin, say mass,
hear confessions, impose penance, grant absolution, repeat the office
of the dead over a grave made weeks before, baptize, perhaps, the last
infant; marry, possibly, some pair who may or may not have waited for
his coming; catechize as well as time and circumstance would allow the
shy but turbulent brood of some former wedlock: such was the work of the
parish priest in the remoter districts. It was seldom that his charge
was quite so scattered, and so far extended as that of Father Morel; but
there were fifteen or twenty others whose labors were like in kind, and
in some cases no less arduous. All summer they paddled their canoes from
settlement to settlement; and in winter they toiled on snowshoes over
the drifts; while the servant carried the portable chapel on his back,
or dragged it on a sledge. Once, at least, in the year, the curé paid
his visit to Quebec, where, under the maternal roof of the seminary
he made his retreat of meditation and prayer, and then returned to
his work. He rarely had a house of his own, but boarded in that of the
seignior or one of the _habitants_. Many parishes or aggregations of
parishes had no other church than a room fitted up for the purpose in
the house of some pious settler. In the larger settlements, there were
churches and chapels of wood, thatched with straw, often ruinous, poor
to the last degree, without ornaments, and sometimes without the sacred
vessels necessary for the service. * In 1683, there were but seven stone
churches in all the colony. The population was so thin and scattered
that many of the settlers heard mass only three or four times a
year, and some of them not so often. The sick frequently died without
absolution, and infants without baptism.
The splendid self-devotion of the early Jesuit missions has its record;
so, too, have the unseemly bickerings of bishops and governors: but the
patient toils of the missionary curé rest in the obscurity where the
best of human virtues are buried from age to age. What we find set down
concerning him is, that Louis XIV. was unable to see why he should not
live on two hundred francs a year as well as a village curé by the
banks of the Garonne. The king did not know that his cassock and all his
clothing cost him twice as much and lasted half as long; that he must
have a canoe and a man to paddle it; and that when on his
* Saint-Vallier, Estat présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie
Française, 22ed. 18nt-Vallier, Estat présent de l’Eglise
et de la Colonie Française, 22 (ed. 1856).
annual visit the seminary paid him five or six hundred francs, partly
in clothes, partly in stores, and partly in money, the end of the year
found him as poor as before except only in his conscience.
The Canadian priests held the manners of the colony under a rule as
rigid as that of the Puritan churches of New England, but with the
difference that in Canada a large part of the population was restive
under their control, while some of the civil authorities, often with the
governor at their head, supported the opposition. This was due, partly
to an excess of clerical severity, and partly to the continued friction
between the secular and ecclesiastical powers. It sometimes happened,
however, that a new governor arrived, so pious that the clerical party
felt that they could rely on him. Of these rare instances the principal
is that of Denonville, who, with a wife as pious as himself, and a young
daughter, landed at Quebec, in 1685. On this, Bishop Saint-Vallier,
anxious to turn his good dispositions to the best account, addressed to
him a series of suggestions or rather directions for the guidance of his
conduct, with a view to the spiritual profit of those over whom he was
appointed to rule. The document was put on file, and the following
are some of the points in it. It is divided into five different heads:
“Touching feasts,” “touching balls and dances,” “touching
comedies and other declamations,” “touching dress,” “touching
irreverence in church.” The governor and madame his wife are desired
to accept no invitations to suppers, that is to say late dinners, as
tending to nocturnal hours and dangerous pastimes; and they are further
enjoined to express dissatisfaction, and refuse to come again, should
any entertainment offered them be too sumptuous. “Although,”
continues the bishop under the second head of his address, “balls
and dances are not sinful in their nature, nevertheless they are so
dangerous by reason of the circumstances that attend them, and the evil
results that almost inevitably follow, that, in the opinion of Saint
Francis of Sales, it should be said of them as physicians say of
mushrooms, that at best they are good for nothing;” and, after
enlarging on their perils, he declares it to be of great importance to
the glory of God and the sanctification of the colony, that the governor
and his wife neither give such entertainments nor countenance them by
their presence. “Nevertheless,” adds the mentor, “since the youth
and vivacity of mademoiselle their daughter requires some diversion, it
is permitted to relent somewhat, and indulge her in a little moderate
and proper dancing, provided that it be solely with persons of her own
sex, and in the presence of madame her mother; but by no means in the
presence of men or youths, since it is this mingling of sexes which
causes the disorders that spring from balls and dances.” Private
theatricals in any form are next interdicted to the young lady. The
bishop then passes to the subject of her dress, and exposes the abuses
against which she is to be guarded. “The luxury of dress,” he says,
“appears in the rich and dazzling fabrics wherein the women and girls
of Canada attire themselves, and which are far beyond their condition
and their means; in the excess of ornaments which they put on; in
the extraordinary head-dresses which they affect, their heads being
uncovered and full of strange trinkets; and in the immodest curls so
expressly forbidden in the epistles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, as
well as by all the fathers and doctors of the church, and which God has
often severely punished, as may be seen by the example of the unhappy
Pretextata, a lady of high quality, who, as we learn from Saint Jerome,
who knew her, had her hands withered, and died suddenly five months
after, and was precipitated into hell, as God had threatened her by an
angel; because, by order of her husband, she had curled the hair of her
niece, and attired her after a worldly fashion.” *
Whether the Marquis and Marchioness Denonville profited by so apt and
terrible a warning, or whether their patience and good-nature survived
the episcopal onslaught, does not appear on record. The subject of
feminine apparel received great attention, both from Saint-Vallier and
his
* “Témoin entr’autres l’exemple de la malheureuse
Prétextate, dame de grande condition, laquelle au rapport de
S. Jérôme, dont elle étoit connue, eut les mains desséchées
et cinq mois après mourut subitement et fut précipitée en
enfer, ainsi que Dieu l’en avoit menacée par un Ange pour
avoir par le commandement de son mari frisé et habillé
mondainement sa nièce.” Divers points a représenter a Mr. le
Gouverneur et à Madame la Gouvernante, signé Jean, évesque
de Québec. (Registre de l’Evêché de Québec.) The bishop on
another occasion holds up the sad fate of Pretextata as a
warning to Canadian mothers; but in the present case he
slightly changes the incidents to make the story more
applicable to the governor and his wife.
predecessor, each of whom issued a number of pastoral mandates
concerning it. Their severest denunciations were aimed at low-necked
dresses, which they regarded as favorite devices of the enemy for the
snaring of souls; and they also used strong language against certain
knots of ribbons called _fontanges,_ with which the belles of Quebec
adorned them heads. Laval launches strenuous invectives against “the
luxury and vanity of women and girls, who, forgetting the promises of
their baptism, decorate themselves with the pomp of Satan, whom they
have so solemnly renounced; and, in their wish to please the eyes of
men, make themselves the instruments and the captives of the fiend.” *
In the journal of the superior of the Jesuits we find, under date of
February 4, 1667, a record of the first ball in Canada, along with
the pious wish, “God grant that nothing further come of it.”
Nevertheless more balls were not long in following; and, worse yet,
sundry comedies were enacted under no less distinguished patronage than
that of Frontenac, the governor. Laval denounced them vigorously, the
Jesuit Dablon attacked them in a violent sermon; and such excitement
followed that the affair was brought before the royal council, which
declined to interfere. ** This flurry,
* Mandement contre le luxe et la vanité des femmes et des
filles, 1682. (Registres de l'Evêché de Québec.) A still
more vigorous denunciation is contained in Ordonnance contre
les vices de luxe et d’impureté, 1690. This was followed in
the next year by a stringent list of rules called Réglement
pour la conduite des fidèles de ce diocèse.
** Arrêts du 24 et 28 juin par lesquels cette affaire (des
comédies) est renvoyésn& Sa Majesté, 1681. (?) (Registre du
Conseil Souverain.)
however, was nothing to the storm raised ten or twelve years later
by other dramatic aggressions, an account of which will appear in the
sequel of this volume.
The morals of families were watched with unrelenting vigilance.
Frontenac writes in a mood unusually temperate, “they (_the priests_)
are full of virtue and piety, and if their zeal were less vehement and
more moderate they would perhaps succeed better in their efforts for the
conversion of souls; but they often use means so extraordinary, and in
France so unusual, that they repel most people instead of persuading
them. I sometimes tell them my views frankly and as gently as I can,
as I know the murmurs that their conduct excites, and often receive
complaints of the constraint under which they place consciences. This is
above all the case with the ecclesiastics at Montreal, where there is a
curé from Franche Comté who wants to establish a sort of inquisition
worse than that of Spain, and all out of an excess of zeal.” *
It was this curé, no doubt, of whom La Hontan complains. That
unsanctified young officer was quartered at Montreal, in the house of
one of the inhabitants. “During a part of the winter I was hunting
with the Algonquins; the rest of it I spent here very disagreeably. One
can neither go on a pleasure party, nor play a game of cards, nor visit
the ladies, without the curé knowing it and preaching about it publicly
from his pulpit. The priests excommunicate
* Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691.
masqueraders, and even go in search of them to pull off their masks and
overwhelm them with abuse. They watch more closely over the women and
girls than their husbands and fathers. They prohibit and burn all books
but books of devotion. I cannot think of this tyranny without cursing
the indiscreet zeal of the curé of this town. He came to the house
where I lived, and, finding some books on my table, presently pounced
on the romance of Petronius, which I valued more than my life because it
was not mutilated. He tore out almost all the leaves, so that if my
host had not restrained me when I came in and saw the miserable wreck,
I should have run after this rampant shepherd and torn out every hair of
his beard.” *
La Motte-Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, seems to have had equal
difficulty in keeping his temper. “Neither men of honor nor men of
parts are endured in Canada; nobody can live here but simpletons and
slaves of the ecclesiastical domination. The count (_Frontenac_)
would not have so many troublesome affairs on his hands if he had not
abolished a Jericho in the shape of a house built by messieurs of
the seminary of Montreal, to shut up, as they said, girls who caused
scandal; if he had allowed them to take officers and soldiers to go into
houses at midnight and carry off women from their husbands and whip them
till the blood flowed because they had been at a ball or worn a mask; if
he had said nothing against the curés
* La Hontan, I. 60 (ed. 1709). Other editions contain the
same story to different words.
who went the rounds with the soldiers and compelled women and girls to
shut themselves up in their houses at nine o’clock of summer evenings;
if he had forbidden the wearing of lace, and made no objection to
the refusal of the communion to women of quality because they wore a
_fontange_; if he had not opposed excommunications flung about without
sense or reason; if, I say, the count had been of this way of thinking
he would have stood as a nonpareil, and have been put very soon on the
list of saints, for saint-making is cheap in this country.” *
While the Sulpitians were thus rigorous at Montreal, the bishop and his
Jesuit allies were scarcely less so at Quebec. There was little goodwill
between them and the Sulpitians, and some of the sharpest charges
against the followers of Loyola are brought by their brother priests
at Montreal. The Sulpitian Allet writes: “The Jesuits hold such
domination over the people of this country that they go into the houses
and see every thing that passes there. They then tell what they have
learned to each other at their meetings, and on this information they
govern their policy. The Jesuit, Father Ragueneau, used to go every day
down to the Lower Town, where the merchants live, to find out all that
was going on in their families; and he often made people get up from
table to confess to him.” Allet goes on to say that Father Châtelain
also went continually to the Lower Town with the same object, and that
some
* La Motte-Cadillac à-, 28 Sept., 1694.
of the inhabitants complained of him to Courcelle, the governor. One
day Courcelle saw the Jesuit, who was old and somewhat infirm, slowly
walking by the Château, cane in hand, on his usual errand, on which he
sent a sergeant after him to request that he would not go so often
to the Lower Town, as the people were annoyed by the frequency of
his visits. The father replied in wrath, “Go and tell Monsieur de
Courcelle that I have been there ever since he was governor, and that I
shall go there after he has ceased to be governor;” and he kept on
his way as before. Courcelle reported his answer to the superior, Le
Mercier, and demanded to have him sent home as a punishment; but the
superior effected a compromise. On the following Thursday, after mass
in the cathedral, he invited Courcelle into the sacristy, where Father
Châtelain was awaiting them; and here, at Le Mercier’s order, the old
priest begged pardon of the offended governor on his knees. *
The Jesuits derived great power from the confessional; and, if their
accusers are to be believed, they employed unusual means to make it
effective. Cavelier de la Salle says: “They will confess nobody till
he tells his name, and no servant till he tells the name of his master.
When a crime is confessed, they insist on knowing the name of the
accomplice, as well as all the circumstances, with
* Mémoire d’Allet. The author was at one time secretary to
Abbé Quélus. The paper is printed in the Morale pratique des
Jésuites. The above is one of many curious statements which
it contains.
the greatest particularity. Father Châtelain especially never fails to
do this. They enter as it were by force into the secrets of families,
and thus make themselves formidable; for what cannot be done by a clever
man devoted to his work, who knows all the secrets of every family;
above all when he permits himself to tell them when it is for his
interest to do so?” *
The association of women and girls known as the Congregation of the
Holy Family, which was formed under Jesuit auspices, and which met every
Thursday with closed doors in the cathedral, is said to have been very
useful to the fathers in their social investigations. ** The members are
affirmed to have been under a vow to tell each other every good or evil
deed they knew of every person of their acquaintance; so that this pious
gossip became a copious source of information to those in a position
to draw upon it. In Talon’s time the Congregation of the Holy Family
caused such commotion in Quebec that he asked the council to appoint a
commission to inquire into its proceedings. He was touching dangerous
ground. The affair was presently hushed, and the application cancelled
on the register of the council. ***
The Jesuits had long exercised solely the function of confessors in the
colony, and a number of
* La Salle, Mémoire, 1678.
** See Discovery of the Great West, 105.
*** Représentation faite au conseil au sujet de certaines
assemblées de femmes ou filles sous le nom de la Sainte
Famille, 1667. (Registre du Conseil Souverain.) The paper is
cancelled by lines drawn over it; and the following minute,
duly attested, is appended to it: “Rayé du consentement de
M. Talon”
curious anecdotes are on record showing the reluctance with which they
admitted the secular priests, and above all the Recollets, to share in
it. The Recollets, of whom a considerable number had arrived from time
to time, were on excellent terms with the civil powers, and were popular
with the colonists; but with the bishop and the Jesuits they were not
in favor, and one or two sharp collisions took place. The bishop was
naturally annoyed when, while he was trying to persuade the king that a
curé needed at least six hundred francs a year, these mendicant friars
came forward with an offer to serve the parishes for nothing; nor was
he, it is likely, better pleased when, having asked the hospital nuns
eight hundred francs annually for two masses a day in their chapel, the
Recollets underbid him, and offered to say the masses for three hundred.
* They, on their part, complain bitterly of the bishop, who, they say,
would gladly have ordered them out of the colony, but being unable to
do this, tried to shut them up in their convent, and prevent them
from officiating as priests among the people. “We have as little
liberty,” says the Recollet writer, “as if we were in a country
of heretics.” He adds that the inhabitants ask earnestly for the
ministrations of the friars, but that the bishop replies with invectives
and calumnies against the order, and that
* “Mon dit sieur l’evesque leur fait payer (aux
hospitalières) 800L. par an pour deux messes qu’il leur fait
dire par ses Séminaristes que lei Récollets leurs voisins
leur offrent pour 300L.” La Barre au Ministre, 1682.
when the Recollets absolve a penitent he often annuls the absolution. *
In one respect this Canadian church militant achieved a complete
success. Heresy was scoured out of the colony. When Maintenon and her
ghostly prompters overcame the better nature of the king, and wrought
on his bigotry and his vanity to launch him into the dragonnades; when
violence and lust bore the crucifix into thousands of Huguenot homes,
and the land reeked with nameless infamies; when churches rang with _Te
Deums_, and the heart of France withered in anguish; when, in short,
this hideous triumph of the faith was won, the royal tool of priestly
ferocity sent orders that heresy should be treated in Canada as it
had been treated in France. ** The orders were needless. The pious
Denonville replies, “Praised be God, there is not a heretic here.”
He adds that a few abjured last year, and that he should be very glad
if the king would make them a present. The Jesuits, he further says,
go every day on board the ships in the harbor to look after the
new converts from France. *** Now and then at a later day a real or
suspected Jansenist found his way to Canada, and sometimes an _esprit
fort_, like
* Mémoire instructif contenant la conduite des PP.
Récollets de Paris en leurs missions de Canada, 1684. This
paper, of which only a fragment is preserved, was written in
connection with a dispute of the Recolléts with the bishop
who opposed their attempt to establish a church in Quebec.
** Mémoire du Roy a Denonville, 31 Mai, 1686. The king here
orders the imprisonment of heretics who refuse to abjure, or
the quartering of soldiers on them. What this meant the
history of the dragonnades will show.
*** Denonville au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1686.
La Hontan, came over with the troops; but on the whole a community
more free from positive heterodoxy perhaps never existed on earth.
This exemption cost no bloodshed. What it did cost we may better judge
hereafter.
If Canada escaped the dragonnades, so also she escaped another
infliction from which a neighboring colony suffered deplorably. Her
peace was never much troubled by witches. They were held to exist, it is
true; but they wrought no panic. Mother Mary of the Incarnation reports
on one occasion the discovery of a magician in the person of a converted
Huguenot miller who, being refused in marriage by a girl of Quebec,
bewitched her, and filled the house where she lived with demons, which
the bishop tried in vain to exorcise. The miller was thrown into prison,
and the girl sent to the Hôtel-Dieu, where not a demon dared enter. The
infernal crew took their revenge by creating a severe influenza among
the citizens. *
If there are no Canadian names on the calendar of saints, it is not
because in byways and obscure places Canada had not virtues worthy
of canonization. Not alone her male martyrs and female devotees, whose
merits have found a chronicle and a recognition; not the fantastic
devotion of Madame d’Aillebout, who, lest she should not suffer
enough, took to herself a vicious and refractory servant girl, as an
exercise of patience; and not certainly the mediaeval pietism of Jeanne
Le Ber, the
* Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre de--Sept., 1661.
venerated recluse of Montreal. There are others quite as worthy of
honor, whose names have died from memory. It is difficult to conceive a
self-abnegation more complete than that of the hospital nuns of Quebec
and Montreal. In the almost total absence of trained and skilled
physicians, the burden of the sick and wounded fell upon them. Of the
two communities, that of Montreal was the more wretchedly destitute,
while that of Quebec was exposed, perhaps, to greater dangers. Nearly
every ship from France brought some form of infection, and all infection
found its way to the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec. The nuns died, but they
never complained. Removed from the arena of ecclesiastical strife, too
busy for the morbidness of the cloister, too much absorbed in practical
benevolence to become the prey of illusions, they and their sister
community were models of that benign and tender charity of which the
Roman Catholic Church is so rich in examples. Nor should the Ursulines
and the nuns of the Congregation be forgotten among those who, in
another field of labor, have toiled patiently according to their light.
Mademoiselle Jeanne Le Ber belonged to none of these sisterhoods. She
was the favorite daughter of the chief merchant of Montreal, the same
who, with the help of his money, got himself ennobled. She seems to have
been a girl of a fine and sensitive nature; ardent, affectionate, and
extremely susceptible to religious impressions. Religion at last gained
absolute sway over her. Nothing could appease her longings or content
the demands of her excited conscience but an entire consecration of
herself to heaven. Constituted as she was, the resolution must have cost
her an agony of mental conflict. Her story is a strange, and, as many
will think, a very sad one. She renounced her suitors, and wished to
renounce her inheritance; but her spiritual directors, too farsighted
to permit such a sacrifice, persuaded her to hold fast to her claims,
and content herself with what they called “poverty of heart.” Her
mother died, and her father, left with a family of young children,
greatly needed her help; but she refused to leave her chamber where she
had immured herself. Here she remained ten years, seeing nobody but her
confessor and the girl who brought her food. Once only she emerged, and
this was when her brother lay dead in the adjacent room, killed in a
fight with the English. She suddenly appeared before her astonished
sisters, stood for a moment in silent prayer by the body, and
then vanished without uttering a word. “Such,” says her modern
biographer, “was the sublimity of her virtue and the grandeur of her
soul.” Not content with this domestic seclusion, she caused a cell to
be made behind the altar in the newly built church of the Congregation,
and here we will permit ourselves to cast a stolen glance at her through
the narrow opening through which food was passed in to her. Her bed, a
pile of straw which she never moved, lest it should become too soft, was
so placed that her head could touch the partition, that alone separated
it from the Host on the altar. Here she lay wrapped in a garment of
coarse gray serge, worn, tattered, and unwashed. An old blanket, a
stool, a spinning-wheel, a belt and shirt of haircloth, a scourge, and
a pair of shoes made by herself of the husks of Indian-corn, appear to
have formed the sum of her furniture and her wardrobe. Her employments
were spinning and working embroidery for churches. She remained in this
voluntary prison about twenty years; and the nun who brought her food
testifies that she never omitted a mortification or a prayer, though
commonly in a state of profound depression, and what her biographer
calls “complete spiritual aridity.”
When her mother died, she had refused to see, her; and, long after,
no prayer of her dying father could draw her from her cell. “In the
person of this modest virgin,” writes her reverend eulogist, “we
see, with astonishment, the love of God triumphant over earthly
affection for parents, and a complete victory of faith over reason and
of grace over nature.”
In 1711, Canada was threatened with an attack by the English; and she
gave the nuns of the Congregation an image of the Virgin on which she
had written a prayer to protect their granary from the invaders. Other
persons, anxious for a similar protection,, sent her images to write
upon; but she declined the request. One of the disappointed applicants
then stole the inscribed image from the granary of the Congregation,
intending to place it on his own when the danger drew near. The English,
however, did not come, their fleet having suffered a ruinous shipwreck
ascribed to the prayers of Jeanne Le Ber. “It was,” writes the
Sulpitian Belmont, “the greatest miracle that ever happened since the
days of Moses.” Nor was this the only miracle of which she was
the occasion. She herself declared that once when she had broken
her spinning-wheel, an angel came and mended it for her. Angels also
assisted in her embroidery, “no doubt,” says Mother Juchereau,
“taking great pleasure in the society of this angelic creature.”
In the church where she had secluded herself, an image of the Virgin
continued after her death to heal the lame and cure the sick. *
Though she rarely permitted herself to speak, yet some oracular
utterance of the sainted recluse would now and then escape to the outer
world. One of these was to the effect that teaching poor girls to read,
unless they wanted to be nuns, was robbing them of their time. Nor
was she far wrong, for in Canada there was very little to read except
formulas of devotion and lives of saints. The dangerous innovation of
a printing-press had not invaded the colony, ** and the first Canadian
newspaper dates from the British conquest.
All education was controlled by priests or nuns. The ablest teachers in
Canada were the Jesuits. Their college of Quebec was three years older
than
* Faillon, L’Héroine chrétienne du Canada, ou Vie de Mlle.
Le Ber. This is a most elaborate and eulogistic life of the
recluse. A shorter account of her will be found in
Juchereau, Hôtel-Dieu. She died in 1714, at the age of
fifty-two.
** A printing-press was afterwards brought to Canada, but
was soon sent back again.
Harvard. We hear at an early date of public disputations by the pupils,
after the pattern of those tournaments of barren logic which preceded
the reign of inductive reason in Europe, and of which the archetype
is to be found in the scholastic duels of the Sorbonne. The boys
were sometimes permitted to act certain approved dramatic pieces of a
religious character, like the _Sage Visionnaire_. On one occasion they
were allowed to play the Cid of Corneille, which, though remarkable as
a literary work, contained nothing threatening to orthodoxy. They
were taught a little Latin, a little rhetoric, and a little logic; but
against all that might rouse the faculties to independent action, the
Canadian schools prudently closed their doors. There was then no rival
population, of a different origin and a different faith, to compel
competition in the race of intelligence and knowledge. The church stood
sole mistress of the field. Under the old régime the real object of
education in Canada was a religious and, in far less degree, a political
one. The true purpose of the schools was: first, to make priests; and,
secondly, to make obedient servants of the church and the king. All the
rest was extraneous and of slight account. In regard to this matter,
the king and the bishop were of one mind. “As I have been informed,”
Louis XIV writes to Laval, “of your continued care to hold the people
in their duty towards God and towards me by the good education you give
or cause to be given to the young, I write this letter to express my
satisfaction with conduct so salutary, and to exhort you to persevere in
it.” *
The bishop did not fail to persevere. The school for boys attached
to his seminary became the most important educational institution
in Canada. It was regulated by thirty-four rules, “in honor of the
thirty-four years which Jesus lived on earth.” The qualities commended
to the boys as those which they should labor diligently to acquire were,
“humility, obedience, purity, meekness, modesty, simplicity, chastity,
charity, and an ardent love of Jesus and his Holy Mother.” ** Here is
a goodly roll of Christian virtues. What is chiefly noticeable in it is,
that truth is allowed no place. That manly but unaccommodating virtue
was not, it seems, thought important in forming the mind of youth.
Humility and obedience lead the list, for in unquestioning submission to
the spiritual director lay the guaranty of all other merits.
We have seen already that, besides this seminary for boys, Laval
established another for educating the humbler colonists. It was a sort
of farm-school, though besides farming various mechanical trades were
also taught in it. It was well adapted to the wants of a great majority
of Canadians, whose tendencies were any thing but bookish; but here,
as elsewhere, the real object was religious. It enabled the church to
extend her influence over classes which the ordinary schools could not
reach. Besides manual training, the pupils were taught to
* Le Roy a Laval, 9 Avril, 1667 (extract in Faillon).
** Ancien règlement du Petit Séminaire de Québec, see
Abeille VIII., no. 32.
read and write; and for a time a certain number of them received some
instruction in Latin. When, in 1686, Saint-Vallier visited the school,
he found in all thirty-one boys under the charge of two priests; but the
number was afterwards greatly reduced, and the place served, as it still
serves, chiefly as a retreat during vacations for the priests and pupils
of the seminary of Quebec. A spot better suited for such a purpose
cannot be conceived.
From the vast meadows of the parish of St. Joachim, that here border the
St. Lawrence, there rises like an island a low flat hill, hedged round
with forests like the tonsured head of a monk. It was here that Laval
planted his school. Across the meadows, a mile or more distant, towers
the mountain promontory of Cape Tourmente. You may climb its woody
steeps, and from the top, waist-deep in blueberry-bushes, survey, from
Kamouraska to Quebec, the grand Canadian world outstretched below; or
mount the neighboring heights of St. Anne, where, athwart the gaunt arms
of ancient pines, the river lies shimmering in summer haze, the cottages
of the _habitants_ are strung like beads of a rosary along the meadows
of Beaupré, the shores of Orleans bask in warm light, and far on the
horizon the rock of Quebec rests like a faint gray cloud; or traverse
the forest till the roar of the torrent guides you to the rocky solitude
where it holds its savage revels. High on the cliffs above, young
birch-trees stand smiling in the morning sun; while in the abyss beneath
the snowy waters plunge from depth to depth, and, half way down, the
slender hare-bell hangs from its mossy nook, quivering in the steady
thunder of the cataract. Game on the river; trout in lakes, brooks, and
pools; wild fruits and flowers on meadows and mountains,--a thousand
resources of honest and wholesome recreation here wait the student
emancipated from books, but not parted for a moment from the pious
influence that hangs about the old walls embosomed in the woods of St.
Joachim. Around on plains and hills stand the dwellings of a
peaceful peasantry, as different from the restless population of the
neighboring states as the denizens of some Norman or Breton village.
Above all, do not fail to make your pilgrimage to the shrine of St.
Anne. You may see her chapel four or five miles away, nestled under the
heights of the Petit Cap. Here, when Aillebout was governor, he began
with his own hands the pious work, and a habitant of Beaupré, Louis
Guimont, sorely afflicted with rheumatism, came grinning with pain to
lay three stones in the foundation, in honor probably of Saint Anne,
Saint Joachim, and their daughter, the Virgin. Instantly he was cured.
It was but the beginning of a long course of miracles continued more
than two centuries, and continuing still. Their fame spread far and
wide. The devotion to Saint Anne became a distinguishing feature of
Canadian Catholicity, till at the present day at least thirteen parishes
bear her name. But of all her shrines none can match the fame of St.
Anne du Petit Cap. Crowds flocked thither on the week of her festival,
and marvellous cures were wrought unceasingly, as the sticks and
crutches hanging on the walls and columns still attest. Sometimes the
whole shore was covered with the wigwams of Indian converts who had
paddled their birch canoes from the farthest wilds of Canada. The more
fervent among them would crawl on their knees from the shore to the
altar. And, in our own day, every summer a far greater concourse of
pilgrims, not in paint and feathers, but in cloth and millinery, and not
in canoes, but in steamboats, bring their offerings and their vows to
the “Bonne Sainte Anne.” *
To return to Laval’s industrial school. Judging from repeated
complaints of governors and intendants of the dearth of skilled
workmen, the priests in charge of it were more successful in making
good Catholics than in making good masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and
weavers; and the number of pupils, even if well trained, was at no time
sufficient to meet the wants of the colony; ** for, though the Canadians
showed an aptitude for
* 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 reenforced by his salary as member of the Superior
Council. He died at Quebec in 1734.