Monastic of the Day!

(Not him, obviously. But weren't the 80s ghastly, though?
Leggings and miniskirts, oh my.
And a headband, no less!)

In what seems to be becoming a regular feature here, today's featured religious* is the Venerable Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, 1599-1672, who started out this life in Tours and departed it in an Ursuline convent in New France, which is alot like Québec only with a great deal fewer Frites-Alors, much less poutine, and not even close to as much or as many habitant and habitants.

Both sides of my family, the French ones and the English ones, came over to North America early. This could mean they were desperate, adventurous, bored, reckless, in danger of incarceration, excessively fond of lengthy boat travel, or all these in varying measures. I know a lot about the English side: they fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and sent letters telling about this. I know less about the earliest French arrivals, and I suspect it is because they are the ones who gave the women in our family the facial hair, and the less known about them, the less rancour towards the dead will arise. Still, though, I love the history of Québec/New France/Nouvelle France as much as I love that of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, so while rummaging around online for stuff about the former, I was reminded of the story of the Filles du Roi, in which the above Mother Marie played a part.

(The Roi Whose Filles We're Talking About.
Somehow this style never caught on in Trois-Rivières.
They were still probably wearing headbands.)

Firstly, it should be said that Filles du Roi are not at all the same as filles de joie, who figured in earlier posts and had far better wardrobes, not to mention restaurant choices, even after Escoffier, than the habitants of the Canadian wilderness.

(As you can see from the rug and the furniture
in this painting by honorary Canadian Cornelius Krieghoff,
imported spouses were also forced to endure shopping at Ikea, which was
even more horrific when Karl XI

was in charge of Sweden
than it is now.)

Unlike filles de joie, Filles du Roi were not career women; their job - once they moved to the New World and found a husband (which tended to happen within a month or so after disembarkation) - was to be a wife and mother, which, alongside religious and camp-follower, was one of the three main career trajectories available to women at the time. Despite the arduous passage across the Atlantic, New Franceian Hausfrau could well have seemed the middle-ground option for marriageable girls with a moderate, though not overweening, sense of adventure and a similarly underwhelming set of marriage prospects.

The Filles du Roi were recruited and imported from 1663 to 1673, beginning in northern cities like Paris, Rouen, and New Rochelle. The purpose of the programme was to populate the colony, which would eventually provide new soldiers to defend France's holdings against Iroquois and English alike. Moreover, having a wife, family, house, land - not to mention livestock, two barrels of salted meat, and dowry from the King - would in theory serve to keep more of the colony's male population where they were instead of following the trend of leaving New France to return home after their three years of service. Though there were only 700, or 852, or 1000 women shipped in during those years, the French population of New France was itself only about 2500 in 1663 (as contrasted with English North America, which already had 100,000 inhabitants), with only 1 percent of New France territory being used by the settlers, so the resulting marriages and considerable progeny (you only got a 300-livre annual pension if you stalled at 10 children, but 400 if you made it past a clean dozen) could indeed eventually constitute a relatively significant bulwark against English encroachment once the children reached soldiering age. In 1671 alone, about 700 babies were born to the new families, and by the end of the ten-year importation of Filles du Roi, the sex ratio in Nouvelle France was more or less even. By 1754, at the start of the Seven Years' War, or the Fourth Intercolonial War, or the Guerre de la Conquête, or the 'French and Indian War,' the 'Indians' at least had some Frenchmen to fight alongside them.

All that notwithstanding.



Some of the girls were not as ready for the privations of Canadian homesteading as were others. They got a quick remedial education in whatever practical domestic arts they lacked while awaiting introduction to suitable suitors, plus a ration of pins, needles, thread, taffeta, and scissors among other things. They did not, however, receive a pair of Sorels or experience in wood-chopping or fence-building. Just as the Filles preferred garçons who already had une habitation set up and ready for move-in (look, I love the Canadiens as much as you do and, honestly, probably more so, but that really is the boring reason they're called The Habs: steady settlers with land and a cabin. Homesteaders. Pea soup. Stability and stoicism, not high-sticking), the male colonists were in need more of a sturdy helpmeet than a piano-playing bourgeoise.

Enter Marie Guyart the Ursuline.

(And also another entry, since this one got away from me.)


*And for the irreligious among you, 'religious' in the nominative way is different than the adjectival version. Flat-earthers, for example, or snake-charming charismatics, no matter how ardent their faith in their faith, would only be adjectivally religious, i.e., religious people, a religious population, rather than 'a religious' like Mother Marie, who took vows/joined an order/consecrated her life. It's not biased language, I assure you, and it certainly doesn't prove the earth isn't flat.

You Can Take the Barolo Out of the Piedmont

But you can't take the limestone out of the nebbiolo. Nor can you, even as a human with a great, hulking, ponderous mass of a cerebrum, it seems, rid yourself entirely of what you once were in order to make way for what you would become. All our stories, all our remembrances, our bad mommies and doting daddies and every dance you were never asked to and each imperfect dismount and second place in debate because you only slightly screwed up the Jefferson line are there, somewhere, even when you imagine you are thinking of nothing at all except the mesmerizing horror that is the infield at the Kentucky Derby. They lie around lurking like recessive genes, just waiting for their one brief instant of relevance, to turn some unsuspecting fetus' right eye blue and leave the left one brown, or cause you to say No instinctively when reflection and analysis might have allowed for more than a few shades of gray.

So it is that I predictably turn to poetry to try to get at the nuances of what I might be feeling, for example, or that someone else consistently knocks himself out in squash when he fears he would otherwise be knocked out by something less manly. Where we start to bump up against the things we'll later be banging our heads on if we're not careful is where I try to intuit what you mean by 'squash' and you wonder what it is that Farrokhzad has that you don't.

The answer in either case is usually Nothing and Stop Being a Fatuous Boob, but we can't know that if we stay mired in our own heads. Someone observing me or listening to me is always going to filter what I do or say through his own experience. What might to me feel like the knife-edge of recklessness might to him seem dull and commonplace. Other things might be boring to me while appearing to him frighteningly exotic. And I seem to you perhaps apathetic and restive when I'm really just shy, as I meanwhile tire of what I see as your brittle callousness when you're actually struggling madly to know what to do...

People have gotten tripped up with me when they, in thinking I have so many words at my disposal, believe each one always must be the fruit of exacting, deliberate selection. This puts an undue amount of exegetical weight on 'nuts!' when I drop my keys in a puddle. It also makes it hard to talk crap, which is frequently necessary and often welcome. There is also the problem of the 'literal reading,' which can be done with some books but no persons, since you cannot know what precisely one individual construes as the difference between 'languid' and 'languourous' in the privacy of his own head.

You need, in other words, Context, which only comes over time. I know when an exhusband is being snarky about something in a friendly way, and I also know when he means he really does hate something in the depths of his heart. I know which friends are not disingenuous in embracing ostensibly contradictory opinions and which ones have an unambiguousness of speech that William Penn would covet. Not knowing them, one might think their apparent frankness were there to mask actual doubt -- but it's not; they know what they think, and they say it.

Which brings us to Dating, and why one sometimes just has to cry in bed. I am strongly of the opinion that neither party can give an adequate representation of what he or she is actually likely to bring to the hypothetical relation they are in theory potentially considering as a possibility. Everything relevant comes later. Well, almost: as I have lengthily and tediously admitted earlier, I do understand some people's need for leggy honeyblondes, divinity-school dropouts, effete flutists and partners who iron their socks.

But bracketing all that, or else assuming those factual and obvious criteria are met, the stuff that would constitute the soaring and glorious bits of the relationship once it was not hypothetical cannot be glimpsed over coffee, or even between heady sips of an unfolding Piemontese red. One can't know the depths of a lover's solicitude until it has been evoked. You simply cannot have a discussion about Potential Solicitude - in the main because there is no such thing. A former lover finally got me to the point of intimacy with a cogent and convincing argument that this was something we should no doubt know about, something that would prove quite relevant, and we weren't going to know anything about it, whether it worked for us or not, until we actually undertook it. It wasn't especially romantic, I admit, but there is little about romance that is -- until you get to that point where it all is, where you are routinely overtaken by love because your husband is brushing his teeth, or switching to fourth gear. And of course, if you get to that point, you come to the stunning realization that you no can longer care that he doesn't iron his socks.