The White and the Gold (16 page)

The brusque gentleman who informed him of this late change of heart on their part had an agreement drawn up for Hébert to sign. He realized that he had no choice in the matter. He had disposed of his shop, he had cut loose from his snug moorings, and now he could not turn back. He signed the scandalously unfair paper and took his worried family aboard the ship for the New World.

The ship landed at Tadoussac on a warm summer day, with the sun bright overhead and an invigorating breeze blowing across the
majestic river. The first settler went ashore with hopes so high that no thought of the chicanery of the directors came up to disturb him. It did not matter that the chapel in which a Récollet father said Mass was a flimsy structure made out of the branches of trees and that a cloud of mosquitoes descended upon them. It did not matter later that the Indians who watched them land at the dilapidated supply sheds in Quebec were dirty and practically naked and openly sullen. This was the New World, and to stout Louis Hébert the great wall of rock above the tumble-down houses in the grove was a symbol of the new world which would rise about it. He was so anxious to begin that he could not tolerate a day’s delay. Up the steep pathway he led his family to inspect the ten acres which had been allotted to him on the crest. There they spent the first night under a tree. The exact spot where the tree stood is still pointed out to curious visitors.

Louis Hébert soon demonstrated that he was of the true pioneering breed. No repining for him over the lost ease of his comfortable shop on a fashionable street in Paris, no sulking over the bad faith of the company. He set to work at once and cleared a considerable stretch of the land. The temporary house he set up for his small family and the one domestic who had followed them out was soon replaced by a permanent one, a substantial structure of stone. All that is known of this first real house to be reared on Canadian soil was that it was of one story, the length thirty-eight feet, the width nineteen feet.

Here the Héberts seem to have been happy. Certainly they were industrious. The vegetables they grew on their fertile acres soon supplied all of the less fortunate families on the riverbanks; and for this, under the terms of the unfair agreement, they received no pay. At the same time the head of the family acted as physician and dispenser to the whole colony.

With Champlain he was always on the best of terms, not blaming the founder for the repudiation of the first agreement. It is said that Champlain, who was now fifty years of age and was beginning to fill his doublets with a degree of amplitude, plodded up the steep path frequently to visit the Héberts, his dog Matelot at his heels. There was another reason for the frequency of his visits: he liked to look down over the river and the country which stretched to the south and to think of the day when all this land would be as thickly settled as Normandy or Touraine.

As physician to the colony Louis Hébert had his reward in the
love and often expressed gratitude of the people he served. Fortunately he was to receive more tangible evidences. In 1621, when a proper legal system was inaugurated in Quebec, he was appointed King’s procurator in the first court of justice. In 1623 he was given full title to the land on the summit and was admitted to the ranks of the minor gentry. The following year he received an additional grant of land on the banks of the St. Charles, with which went the title of Sieur d’Epinay. He had become reasonably prosperous. His children had grown up and married and had built around the comfortable parental home. Paris had become no more than a dim memory; the new life had been infinitely more satisfying than an existence on the edge of the royal court.

The first Hébert daughter, Anne, married Etienne Jonquit but died soon after in 1620. The second daughter, Marie Guillaumette, married Guillaume Couillard in 1621, a carpenter who had arrived in Quebec a year before the Héberts. They raised a family of sturdy children, and from this fine stock a line descended which has never been broken and has played a prominent part in French-Canadian history.

It was a severe loss to the colony when Louis Hébert suffered a fall and died on January 25, 1627.

There had been no time for romance in Champlain’s life. During the years when a man usually seeks a wife he was campaigning actively in the religious wars under the brave St. Luc and the scheming Brissac. Then came his Spanish journeys and the writing of
Bref Discours
, and finally he had involved himself in long absences in Canada. Nevertheless, he had been married in Paris in 1610 under circumstances which might have led to a highly romantic married life. Returning to France after his first victory over the Iroquois, when he was forty-three years of age and at the very peak of his career and his physical powers, he had contracted a matrimonial alliance with a daughter of the secretary of the King’s chamber, one Nicholas Boullé, a wealthy Huguenot. Hélène Boullé was only twelve years old when they took the vows together in the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. Because of her age the marriage contract stipulated that she must remain with her parents for at least two years before joining her husband in Canada, and it is easy
to believe that Champlain looked forward with ardent expectancy to the time when his young bride would arrive in Quebec.

Nicholas Boullé gave a dowry of six thousand livres to his daughter, which was quite a handsome one for that period. The Sieur de Monts was one of the witnesses, and it is certain that the union had the full approval of the King. It was understood that the bride would become a Catholic before the time came to join her husband.

Then the knife of the assassin Ravaillac struck down the great King Henry and, as has already been recorded, trying days began for the Canadian colony. Champlain may have been too exclusively concerned with the heavy pressure of his duties to bring his young wife out at the time stipulated. It is more likely, however, that he considered the future of the little settlement too uncertain for her to be involved in its struggles and privations. Whatever the reason, she remained in France for ten years after the wedding. His relationship with her was limited to the brief visits he could pay her during those harassed periods when he progressed back and forth between the court at Fontainebleau and the seaports.

Madame de Champlain was, therefore, twenty-two years old when she finally came to Canada. She had become a mature woman, thoughtful and intelligent, a devout Catholic, and an ardent believer in the cause to which Champlain was committed. She had long desired to see the fabulous land of which she had heard so much and to take her place beside her now famous husband. The once slender and dark-eyed girl had become an attractive woman, still small, still gay in manner. Having been a Parisienne all her life, she knew how to dress herself expensively and well.

Champlain, by way of contrast, was now fifty-three years old. The time had passed when he could venture boldly on journeys into hostile Indian territory. His hair was sprinkled with gray and lacking in the bristling quality it had possessed when he first assumed the responsibility for the colonizing of a continent. The long years of struggle, were beginning to show.

The arrival of the young wife was auspicious enough. She was accompanied by four women who are generally supposed to have been her own servants. It is improbable that the realistic Champlain would think of setting up such an elaborate household in the midst of the primitive colony, and so it is more likely that some of the women had come out to find husbands among the unattached men. They were all much of an age, and a sense of expectancy and excitement
had helped them over the hardships and illnesses of the long crossing. The ship in which they had sailed held a large company, including a brother-in-law of Madame de Champlain, a Monsieur Guers, who was coming as commissioner for Montmorenci, and three Récollet fathers.

The wife of the founder came ashore at Quebec in a flurry of excitement. She had brought many trunks with her, filled with the beautiful clothes which a ransacking of Paris shops had yielded. Much of her trousseau—this was a bridal voyage, although she was a married woman of ten years—was white, for the latest fashions in Paris ran to that most becoming of all colors for the young and fair. There had been, in fact, quite a revolution from the ugly extremes of the sixteenth century, when ladies appeared in the extravagance of Catherine-wheel farthingales and skirts so absurdly wide and so firmly wired that it was difficult for the lovely creatures to squeeze themselves through doorways. The farthingale was seldom seen any more, and it may be taken for granted that it would not be found in the rich assortment of clothes and accessories and trinkets which filled the young wife’s trunks. Even the wide neck ruffs, stiffly starched and pleated, had given place to the rebato, a much smaller type of collar. Daintiness was now the order of the day, and it was the prevailing note in the wrist cuffs of point lace, the graceful slashed sleeves, the barred petticoats, and the trim polonian shoes.

Madame Champlain frequently wore a gold chain around her neck with a small mirror. The Indians, who became much attached to her, counted it a great privilege to look at the mirror and see themselves reflected there. They believed this meant that she always kept them in her heart.

The wives of the little settlement gazed with famished wonder and delight at the gaily bedecked mate of their dignified leader and the excited bevy of young women who followed at her heels, equally gay with their many-colored falles and buskes and puffs. As there was always a fresh breeze on the river, they would be wearing the rakish hats which had taken France by storm a year before, made of beaver and almost masculine in size. Under the brim of her hat of this variety, handsomely plumed and feathered and banded, Madame de Champlain glanced about her with curiosity in her dark eyes. Perhaps there was a shade of dismay in them as they rested on the tipsy walls of L’Abitation, Champlain’s official home, and took note of the dilapidated wharves and the mud of the streets.

It should be explained that there were only eighteen artisans in the colony, and these had been employed in helping the Récollet fathers with the raising of their walls and the construction of stalls and pens for the cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Champlain had his plans drawn for the stone citadel on the crest, but the need of the friars had been more pressing and he had delayed the start on the fortress. Under these circumstances there had been no possibility of repairing any of the dwelling houses.

This was unfortunate. The hasty foundations of L’Abitation had been sinking, and as a result the floors were so uneven that it was like living in a ship’s cabin in rough weather. The doors and windows fitted so badly that the place was full of drafts and could not be properly heated in wintertime. The roof leaked, allowing water to run down the walls, so that there was about the house a close and unpleasant odor of mildew.

Perceiving his wife’s instant reaction to her new home, Champlain withdrew some of the artisans from their labors with the Récollets and set them instead to repairing L’Abitation. It is unlikely that they were able to do anything about the topsy-turvy walls and the uneven floors, but they succeeded in making the house dry and warm.

The first winter was a period of difficult readjustment for the delicately reared young woman from Paris. There was very little for her to do. Housework was negligible. The beautiful snow, greeted at first with delight, began very soon to dampen her spirits, for there is no loneliness like that of a cold open space where no life stirs and the clouds are gray and low and menacing. In this strange white world she was like a prisoner. The summit, where the stone walls of the friendly Héberts showed against the skyline and at night a light twinkled across the drifted snow of the narrow path, was difficult to achieve, but there was no other place to go, and many times she trudged slowly up the winding trail.

Champlain did the best he could, no doubt, to ease the strain of life under such circumstances. It is not on record that he started anything like the
Ordre de Bon Temps
to add spice to the dull existence of his pent-up wife, but he had at any rate seen to it that the larders were sufficiently stocked to keep the dreaded scurvy away from the door. It was a relieved man who wrote in his notes of May 6 that work had been started at last on the foundations of the citadel and that “the cherry trees have begun to open their buds and the hypaticas are springing from the soil.” Some days later he noted down
other pleasant items of news. The raspberries were budding and the elder bushes were showing their leaves. “The violets,” he exulted, “are in flower and the chervil are ready to cut.”

At last winter was over and the miracle of spring had begun.

It should be stated that in reality very little is known about the married life of Champlain and the unhappy woman who was his wife. He avoided the subject in the journals he maintained so faithfully, setting down the fact of her arrival and the date when she left, nothing more. The sparse references of the elderly husband are supplemented, fortunately, by stray bits of information from other sources; and the random glimpses thus afforded of the pair are as useful as the single bone of a prehistoric monster from which scholars are able to reconstruct the whole frame of the long-extinct animal.

It is certain that the marriage was not a success. If there had been less disparity in their ages, if it had been the good fortune of the young wife to have taken her place by his side earlier, the situation might have been different. Madame de Champlain had character and courage, and it is pleasant to indulge in thoughts of what might have been; of his young wife accompanying the founder of Quebec on some of his ventures into the western wilds, sitting in the prow of a canoe, her eyes as filled with excitement as his with the beauty and wonder of the new continent.

The years that she remained in America were punctuated with excitement of a kind. There was an anxious period when the Indians camping near Quebec killed two Frenchmen and, fearing reprisals, decided to take the initiative and wipe out the whole colony. The purpose of the savages came early to the ear of the commander, and he took steps to improve the defenses. There were many watchful days and nights before the fear subsided and friendly relations were established again.