This is the story of the life of a fille du roi, of one of my first female ancestors in Canada. For more stories about Marthe Quittel, click on the tag words Marthe Quittel and Franco-American women. French sail ships generally used the north channel of the Saint Lawrence there where the Ile d’Orléans splits […]

The Life of a Fille du Roi after she marries

This is the story of the life of a fille du roi, of one of my first female ancestors in Canada. For more stories about Marthe Quittel, click on the tag words Marthe Quittel and Franco-American women.

French sail ships generally used the north channel of the Saint Lawrence there where the Ile d’Orléans splits the river. Newly-married and living in Chateau Richer, Marthe had a good view of the river and had perhaps seen the St-Jean-Baptiste sailing up the Saint Lawrence towards Québec on the second of October bearing 82 more women to be married and 130 engagés.[1] Some of these people would become her neighbors and friends in Chateau Richer.

Marthe was now living the life of a fille du roi after she settles in New France. Marthe worked with her new husband Barthélémy Verreault to set up house and cultivate the fields of their Chateau Richer farm. Barthélémy must have planted a garden almost as soon as he had bought his land, and now in October it was time to harvest much of what had not yet been harvested. The squashes and pumpkins were brought to the root cellar, while the brassica and the leaf crops were safe for a while yet. Carrots had been protected from the frost either by a covering of earth or by vegetation laid on top of the patch, but it would soon be time to bring them in. Her neighbors too worked in their fields, and they too must have stood up straight every so often to rest their backs. As they did so, they looked out over the fields to the Saint Lawrence, the great river that was at the center of all life in the French colony of Canada.

What a strange, vast new land, she had come to! A land that resembled so little what she had left behind in Rouen, in Normandy, where her parents still lived. She was a city woman. What did she know about living on a farm, about being successful at the life of a fille du roi in New France!?

Perhaps, one morning as she worked outside, she saw the Saint-Sebastien and the La Justice sail easterly, between the north shore and the Ile d’Orléans, as they resumed their slow return to France. On every eastbound ship, there were men and women who were returning to France, men and women who were giving up on the colony and returning to an easier life. Some of the women were people giving up on the life of a fille du roi and returning to the poverty they had known in France.

Now as the leaves turned to yellow and red, announcing the end of warm weather, as the night air turned to the cold that Barthélémy and her neighbors, the Cauchons, warned her was the beginning of a winter such as she had never lived, did Marthe wish she could be on one of the ships that sailed by the land she and Barthélémy farmed?

La-Paix which had sailed passed Chateau Richer on the 19 of September (1665) on its return voyage to France had soon shipwrecked near Matane, and its passengers had bivouacked there scanning the western horizon for one of the ships moored at Québec to rescue them. When at last in October, the Saint-Sebastien had come in sight, the desperate men had made their presence known—one imagines shore fires, shouting, waving large cloths—and to their great relief, had boarded the Saint-Sebastien for the remainder of the long trip.

The last ship of the season to leave was the St-Jean-Baptiste which had arrived on October 2. It left on the fourth of November. Until the following year, Marthe would have no link with France. She was now in the New World for good, married to a man she hardly knew. She had truly begun the life of a fille du roi in New France.

Do you have a story about an ancestor who came to North America  alone and had to forge a life in a strange land? Please share it below.

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Resource: for more on the French in North America go to: http://frenchnorthamerica.blogspot.com/

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