The Nuns of French Canada

If there are no Canadians canonized by the Catholic Church, it is not due to the exceptional spirituality of some but the remoteness of the region to the contemporary centers of Western Civilization.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 19.

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. [1] 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. [2] Now and then at a later day a real or suspected Jansenist found his way to Canada, and sometimes an esprit fort, like 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.

[1: 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.]

[2: Denonville au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1686.]

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.

[Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre de — Sept., 1661.]

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 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.

[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.]

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, [3] and the first Canadian newspaper dates from the British conquest.

[3: A printing-press was afterwards brought to Canada, but was soon sent back again.]

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 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.”

[Le Roy a Laval, 9 Avril, 1667 (extract in Faillon).]

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.” [4] 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.

[4: Ancien règlement du Petit Séminaire de Québec, see Abeille VIII., no. 32.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 19 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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