Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers Page A

Marguerite who travelled to Canada. The Marguerite in the Queen’s story went to Canada a long time ago, before there were any towns or soldiers in that place. There weren’t any other women from France living there yet.”
    “It must have been even more frightening in those times,” Madeleine says.
    “Yes, there were no houses, no churches, only the Savages and the jungle. She travelled with the adventurer Jacques Cartier, who was seeking gold and a way to China. But you will see, she was a very brave woman.”
    Laure pauses as she hears footsteps in the hallway outside the dormitory. It is probably Madame Gage or one of theofficers coming to check that the girls are sleeping. In the distance, from another dormitory, Laure can make out the faint sound of a woman screaming. If one stops to listen, the muffled cries of the mad and infirm women of the other dormitories can be heard at intervals throughout the night as well as during the day.
    “The Marguerite in the story had been a real woman who travelled with her husband on a ship to Canada. Not like the girls they are sending from here that don’t yet have husbands.”
    Madeleine interrupts Laure to say that she never wants to get married like the girl Marguerite.
    “The husband isn’t really the point of the story, except to show that women can be faithful both to men and to God.”
    Madeleine nods and goes on listening.
    “So this Marguerite follows her husband, who was an artisan, probably a shoe cobbler because Madame du Clos has told me that this is a necessary trade in new lands where people must first do much walking in order to finally settle somewhere. So Marguerite follows her husband the shoe cobbler onto a ship. Onboard the ship, the husband gets into trouble, for it is the nature of men to get into trouble when they travel to foreign places.”
    Madeleine asks Laure what kind of trouble the husband gets into.
    Laure says she isn’t sure exactly except that the cobbler had betrayed his master in some way that involved the native Savages. “I cannot imagine what sort of betrayal except it would surely have been bad to trust those people as they do not speak French nor are they Catholic.”
    “Are the Savages of Canada Protestants? In La Rochelle, there are many Protestants,” Madeleine says.
    “The Savages of Canada are not even Protestants but something far worse, closer to country witches with incantations and potions of mysterious poisons,” Laure explains. “The captain of the ship, Roberval, discovered the cobbler’s betrayal of his master and decided to hang him. But his wife, Marguerite, pleaded instead that her husband be allowed to live and that the two of them be dropped from the ship onto an uninhabited island of Canada.”
    “It is natural that a woman should try to keep her husband from hanging, even though he has been disloyal,” Madeleine says.
    Laure then tells Madeleine that the wife asked the captain, before he dropped them on the island, to give them only the subsistence they would need: some wine, bread, maybe some seeds for the next growing season, and the Bible. Her husband also wanted to take his arquebus with him.
    “But what would she do with a Bible if there was no priest there to read it for her?” Madeleine asks.
    “This woman could read the Bible on her own,” Laure says. “And so the couple was dropped, by the Sieur de Roberval, onto the island in Canada. They set about right away to build some sort of a hut in the jungle.”
    “But I thought Canada is a cold place and not a jungle,” Madeleine says.
    “The Queen didn’t know that when she wrote the story, as she had never been to Canada herself. When the lions and other beasts come for the couple, they fight them off, the man with his arquebus and the woman with her stones. They even kill a few of the creatures to eat. At night by the light of their fire, the woman reads the Bible to her husband. But he grows weaker on their diet of meat and on the putrid