A Fille du Roi Marries in Chateau Richer

This story is taken from Here to Stay, a history  of my 17th century ancestors. A fille du roi was a ward of the state sent to New France to marry.

September 22 fell on a Tuesday, a good as any day for a wedding. Father Thomas Morel, the missionary who was assigned to the Cote de Beaupré, completed the union of Marthe Quittel and Barthélémy Verreault at the chapel of Chateau Richer[1]. One wonders what feelings Marthe, whose abjuration of Calvinism was only two months old, brought to this ceremony. Did some part of her wish for a more familiar Protestant rite?

The two who hardly knew each other were now married for life. On the skills, the aptitudes, and the attitudes of the one depended the survival, and ultimately success or failure, of the other.

After the wedding mass, it was customary for the newly-weds who had no parents in New France to bring their guests back to their own home. That Tuesday in September, the leaves turning red and yellow, one imagines the guests walking from Notre Dame de la Visitation to the land next to the Sault aux Puces where stood the house Barthélémy had built himself and the fille du roi he would eventually marry. The house was small, and the guests gathered in the open, the neighbor women serving food they shared with this couple who had so little. Soon the guests were feasting, as they gazed down from the yard of the farm to the Saint-Lawrence flowing easterly. The Ile d’Orléans spread before them to the south, the island where just nine year earlier the Iroquois had effected their daring morning raid to wipe out the Hurons.

Wedding parties were welcome breaks—it was not everyday a fille du roi marries, and they often included every colonist in the area. Among the guests that day were the notary Pierre Duquet, Gilles Enard and Marie Debure, a normande who had sailed with Marthe from France on the Marie-Thérèse and who was soon to marry Gilles. Other guests who we can presume were in attendance were Etienne de Lessart one of Barthélémy’s witnesses at the marriage contract. His neighbors to the west Jean Plante and his wife, Françoise Boucher, and those to the east, Zacharie Cloutier, fils, and his wife, Madeleine Emard. Perhaps Nicolas Marsolet and the bourguignon Denis Derome and Jean Gervaise who had been witnesses to the contract signing.

As the air cooled, some of the celebrants left for the evening milking and perhaps to assure the animals were all safe. When they returned, a bonfire would have been lit. Someone began playing music, and men and women danced into the night on the soil of the yard, dancing the dances they had known in France, thinking perhaps of the people they had left behind, of the mothers and fathers and the siblings who were not with them to share this day, whom they would never see again.

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See previous posts on this fille du roi