The following is an excerpt—Filles du roi/Daughters of the King: Marthe Quittel Comes for a Husband— from my Here To Stay / Lives in 17th Century Canada. It will be launched on October 15, 2025.

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On July 16, the Marie-Thérèse, having left Le Havre on May 10, sailed into port. It was captained by the Sieur Poullet (Puet), a frequent visitor to the colony. In addition to bringing supplies, he carried two welcome cargoes—twelve horses sent by the new intendant, Jean Talon, who was yet to arrive, and eight filles du roi.

The moose of France come to help the colonists.

Up until then, the colonists had used only oxen to help with their labors—whether it was to haul lumber or to plow the fields. Those colonists born in France remembered the powerful yet more nimble horses and were very pleased to have them introduced in New France. The horses, they told the habitants born in Canada, would help ease their work and, although there were few roads and these were rather rough, the horses could be used for transportation. The Natives encamped in their bark-and-skin huts on the outskirts of the town were astonished. After examining the strange, hornless animals, they exclaimed that the “moose of France were so gentle and so submissive to the will of the men.”

We meet Anne Gasnier.

The small contingent of filles du roi landing that day was accompanied by Anne Gasnier (Madame Jean Bourdon) who had an apostolate or—as we would call it today—a sort of agency that brought women to New France for marriage. Madame Bourdon was responsible for recruiting and chaperoning the girls and for informing them about life in New France. She kept a record of their names and those of their parents, their ages and their place of birth.

She and her husband, Jean, who accompanied her on these trips, lived at the foot of Côte de la montagne. They were relatively well off, their house having four rooms with fireplaces and four rooms without. In addition, they had four cellars, an attic and two freestanding storage rooms. Their lot measured seventy-eight feet on the front and one hundred and ninety-eight in depth along the cliff—above which was the Upper Town.

Madame Bourdon, in the words of Marie de l’Incarnation, “experienced continually the sense of God’s presence and of union with his divine majesty.” Marie de l’Incarnation also said of Madame Bourdon that she was “the mother of the unfortunate and the example of all kinds of good works.”

Born in 1611, Anne Gasnier had immigrated to Canada as a widow, intending to devote her life to the destitute of the colony. She intended never to marry again, but, when Jean Bourdon’s first wife, Jacqueline Potel, seven months pregnant, died from a bad fall, leaving him seven young children to raise, Anne Gasnier had taken pity on him and consented, under the condition they live as brother and sister, to marry him and mother his children. At the time, the youngest Bourdon child, Jacques, was only three.

Bourdon was an influential man in the colony. Arriving on August 8, 1634, he had been in the first ranks of new colonists after the Kirke brothers were evicted by the Treaty of St-Germain-en-Laye of 1632. The year after his arrival, on November 9, 1635, he married Jacqueline Potel. Bourdon had been named interim governor of Trois-Rivières in 1645. That year, he had been named to the Communauté des Habitants de la Nouvelle France, the colony’s then-governing body. In 1651, he became the procureur (business manager) of the Communauté. Over the years, he was granted many seigneuries which he turned over to his sons to help set them up in life. Each of his four daughters became nuns.

Anne Gasnier’s marriage to such a man had placed her in a position to do many good works. Devoting herself mainly to female immigrants, she made many trips to France to recruit respectable marriageable girls. Often it was she who provided the newly arrived women with room and board until they married.

Filles du roi/Daughters of the King: Marthe Quittel Comes for a Husband

Among the eight filles du roi aboard the Marie-Thérèse who were coming to find husbands was a Normande, Marthe Quittel, a Protestant from Rouen. Jean Bourdon was from Rouen, and so it was understandable that Madame Bourdon would have recruited girls there. It may have been she who was responsible for bringing the Rouennaise Marthe Quittel.

As chaperone, Madame Bourdon had likely taken it upon herself to instruct Marthe in the tenets of Catholicism. Although Marthe had been baptized as a Protestant in Rouen in 1638, she had converted to Calvinism. Because Protestants could not stay openly in New France, this impoverished fille du roi, on the day after she arrived in New France, knowing that a return to Rouen held no promise for her, “abjured” Calvinism and “accepted the one, true faith” before Father Ango des Maizerets, the representative of Bishop François de Montmorency Laval.

Marthe was placed in the home home of a fellow Rouennais, Nicolas Marsolet, and his wife Marie Le Barbier on the nearby Côteau Ste-Geneviève. Housed with a distinguished and respectable family, Marthe could now meet eligible male colonists.

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