CCHA Historical Studies, 67
(2001), 27-41
Besieged
but Connected: Survival
Strategies
at a Quebec Convent
Jan Noël
Choir
sisters at the eighteenth century Hôpital-Général de Québec rose in the
pre-dawn blackness, then devoted some seven hours each day to sacred music,
prayer, and meditation in their cells. Still, some of them were remarkably well
versed in the ways of the world. Demonstrating the point are three nuns who
served as Mother Superiors during invasions that brought the enemy right to
their doorstep. Mother St. Claude de la Croix and Mother de la Visitation were
Superiors, respectively, when the British troops arrived in 1759 and during the
early Conquest period.1 Fifteen years later Mother St. Alexis was forced to harbour invading
American Revolutionary troops at the convent. Each of these Superiors came from
families where women engaged in economic and clientage networks, a source of
strength in trying times.
Indeed, those who took the veil in New France
fell heir to several traditions that empowered them. First of all, the convent
itself was a dedicated community that stood behind its elected leaders, placing
a skilled personnel at the Superior’s command. Secondly, nuns built upon a lay
tradition of feminine economic enterprise in New France. Such enterprise was
accepted by society and encouraged by a legal system that allowed women, and
particularly widows and unmarried women, considerable control of land and resources.
Thirdly, colonial correspondence indicates that gentlewomen – be they lay or
religious – could win access to governing clienteles.2 In sum, economic skills and mastery of clientage,
present in the ruling families from which many sisters came, flourished in the
collective setting of the convent. The similarities between Superiors and
laywomen of their class deserve a closer look. This in turn raises questions
about nuns’ values, which will be assessed in the closing section of the paper.
Hôpital-Général de Quebéc
Source: Harper’s Monthly Magazine,
January 1859
The Hôpital-Général de Québec, like the Ursuline and Hôtel Dieu
convents, survived a catastrophic half-century of conquest by the British, new
anti-Catholic prejudices, financial crisis, and then arrival of ill-disciplined
American troops. Although all three Quebec convents faced these problems to a
degree, convent resilience was particularly evident at the well-connected
Hôpital-Général, where at times more than one half the choir sisters were
members of the nobility.3 This hospice (which received the disabled,
abandoned, quarantined, and mentally ill during ordinary times, and the wounded
during wartime) experienced graver financial crises than the town’s other two
convents4, and counted heavily on friends in high places.
The institution’s Christian idealism also served it well, helping it
consolidate those friendships. To see how three Mother Superiors built a
survival strategy that blended religious ideals with enterprise and
connections, let us turn first to the last in line, Mother St. Alexis. On an
August day in 1797, she could be found holding court amidst a throng of
visitors at the elegant convent outside the walls of the old city.
Clergymen rose in turn to speak in praise of
Mother Marie-Catherine de Noyan de St.Alexis. Sisters recalled stories of her
fifty-year service. From Montreal the dying bishop sent his co-adjutor, who
conducted her through a throng of townspeople, friends, and relatives gathered
to honour her long life in religion. Later in the day, when the co-adjutor
yelled “To the plunder, gentlemen!” the thirty-six clergymen rushed to a table
to pick from an array of handcrafted souvenirs. Crowning the event was a banquet spread before every inhabitant
of the institution, its orphans, invalids and street people as well as its
well-heeled pupils and pensioners.
The
day was rich with ritual and obeisance. Its solemnities included nonstop
morning masses from four to nine in the specially decorated church. When the
worshipping throng adjourned to the community parlour, the co-adjutor presented
an armchair to “the heroine of the fete,” and all were seated. Nine students
with garlands of lilies in their hair moved the audience to tears as they
recited a specially commissioned eulogy. As the chant to “Alexis queen of
hearts” rose to idolatrous heights, the whole audience joined in:
...Tout plait, tout charme en elle:
Sa
charité, sa candeur.
Par
sa bonté naturelle
Elle
gagne tous les coeurs;
Alexis
est le modèle
Et
l’idole de ses soeurs.5
On
that day of 24 August 1797 inside their rambling riverside convent, said to be
the most beautiful building in Canada, the aura of love and tranquillity
contrasted sharply with the news from France. In the wake of the Revolution of
1789, sisters of the same Augustinian order had been chased from their
convents, forced to abandon the habit, and imprisoned for refusing to take the
oath to the now officially dechristianized state. The combination of
unyielding conviction and aristocratic background targeted the sisters for
persecution by Revolutionaries. Nor did other privileged or educated women fare
particularly well when the Rights of Man were advanced in France. In 1793 the
Convention outlawed women’s Revolutionary clubs. Learned ladies who had
presided over literary salons found themselves shunned.6 And even across the Atlantic, outside the Quebec
convent’s walls, colonists echoed the popular Revolutionary refrain: corruption
in France was not so much the fault of Kings as of their scheming consorts.
Those were bitter times for aristocratic women. Yet the rows of glowing faces
turned towards the day’s heroine at the Hopital Général de Québec included
people as refined as many then languishing in French prisons or long ago driven
in tumbrels to the guillotine. No such horrors touched that most aristocratic
of colonial convents, where the aging daughters of New France’s military noblesse
lived on.
Still,
the Hôpital had once seen danger from another quarter. As they reminisced that
evening, they likely retold the story of Mother St. Alexis facing the invading
Yankee troops who commandeered the Hôpital when she was Superior in the autumn
of 1775. The nuns were forced to house four hundred soldiers “all people
of detestable crudeness and effrontery,” whose lack of discipline was lamented
even by General Washington and the Congress.7 One day an American officer demanded to see the Superior. He reproached
her indignantly: Not enough was being done for his sick soldiers there! He added that the King ordered that beds be
prepared for them. “What King is that?” Sister St. Alexis archly enquired. “If
it isn’t the King, it’s the Congress,” he retorted. “Well then! Not for one nor
the other, can we provide beds, because we don’t have any, and besides we have
no obligation to care for your sick,” declared this daughter of a Canadian war
hero.8 The
angry officer stormed off and proceeded to threaten the chaplain and the doctor
several times with his sword. The officer was later reprimanded for his
bullying. Still, Mother St. Alexis was evidently chastened by his complaint.
Shortly afterwards she issued bandages and blankets and begin ministering to
the enemy wounded.
Daring
to confront her angry assailant, Mother St. Alexis showed rather striking
confidence in the hands of an occupying army. Striking too are those paeans she
received two decades later in the 1790s, a post-Revolutionary era when
authoritative women were retreating from the public eye, and receiving public
acclaim began to be seen as immodest in a lady. St. Alexis’ regal quality is
all the more surprising given the circumstances of her birth. Her mother was
widowed in 1728 and remarried in November 1731. The future nun was born in 1730
and sent to the convent as a baby.9 Though a late
nineteenth-century convent annalist averred “we do not know why a child so
young would have been entrusted to the nuns,” it seems probable that
cooperative hands at the convent (where several relatives were nuns) agreed to
care for an infant whose presence was embarrassing and inconvenient.
Mother
St. Alexis, who lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight, was literally a
cradle-to-grave couventine, an unalloyed example of total immersion in
convent life. She arrived at the Hôpital-Général at eighteen months of age, and
left it only for a few short visits to the homes of friends and relatives. Her
character, learning and attainments reveal the convent culture that shaped her.
She was one of a number of administrators that the annals of Quebec convents
from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries describe as femmes
fortes.
Can we hope to know the true character of the
three Mother Superiors under review? Unfortunately obituary notices and other
descriptions of nuns in the Hôpital annals tend to be even more uniformly
laudatory than obituaries usually are. Though we will not hear of anyone’s
whining voice, bad breath, or mediocre mind, it is nonetheless possible to
glean something of the personality of each nun from the particular qualities
the annals mention. Mother St. Alexis from her youth was singled out for
“sweetness but firmness, enjoying great confidence” and was described as “being
much loved.” Here was a toddler some of the nuns probably enjoyed pampering. No
wonder this person with “rich natural abilities” acquired “the happiest of
dispositions.”10 The story of her repartee with a threatening
American officer, the fact that she became confidante of several cultured
French emigré priests who visited the Hôpital, her six-time re-election as
Superior, her reputation as the convent’s “ornament,” and the unusual literary
outpourings on her anniversary attest learning and leadership. She also
possessed her share of the business acumen that historian Micheline D’Allaire
has ascribed to her Augustinian Order.11
One of
Mother St. Alexis’ terms as superior occurred in the early 1790s, when the
scant metropolitan revenues that survived the Conquest were extinguished
completely by the French Revolution. The Superior was not paralysed by the
prospect of material disaster. In the family of her mother’s first husband, the
Charly St. Anges, women were economically active, shipping out furs in exchange
for merchandise from France. Her mother’s family of birth, the
Ailleboust-D’Argenteuils, also included female transatlantic traders.12 Dealing astutely with finances was not an unaccustomed or déclassé
activity among her kinswomen.
Nor
was it foreign to convents. Under Mother St. Alexis’ leadership, the nuns
brought in income by manufacturing all kinds of handsome painted, carved, or
quilled wooden boxes, as well as tapestries, rugs, and travelling bags, the
kind of items coveted by wealthy eighteenth-century tourists. They also
produced chandeliers, gilded statuary, and other decor for sale to churches.
One of the nuns who was a particularly gifted artist belonged to the family of
the sculptor Levasseur, himself a pensioner at the Hôpital. The community also
resorted to the less genteel business of taking in laundry. The latter would
have fallen not to choir nuns but to converse sisters drawn from humble
families who did most of the heavy labour, again replicating a system nuns
learned in the homes of their birth.13 When she became too hard pressed to retain all the field workers needed
for the convent lands, Sister St. Alexis secured Bishop Hubert’s permission to
dispense with cloister to undertake this vital task. After hearing mass each
morning, a crew of nuns went out to work in the fields, returning at eight at
night. Seeing women toiling outdoors would not have shocked the people of New
France, where women frequently joined the men at haying and harvest time. Other
convents did the same in times of need.
Besides
the ability to manage these varied enterprises, Mother St. Alexis also had the
benefit of kinship to many other members of the colonial noblesse. In
this she was typical, for the colony’s 181 noble families intermarried
extensively. Since nearly one in five noble daughters took the veil,14 the convents too were riddled with kin networks.
The warmth of such relationships is captured
in the memoirs of Philippe Aubert de Gaspé. He described his uncle Charles de
Lanaudière, a hero of the 1760 Battle of St. Foy just outside the Hôpital,
which received the wounded as they fell. He recalled how his cousins Mother St.
Alexis and Mother Catherine often told him that “that great baby de Lanaudière
gave us more trouble during his illness than all the other wounded men in our
hospital put together.” It appeared, de Gaspé wrote, “that my dear uncle, finding
himself among relatives, made liberal use of this privilege to tease the
nurses.”15 As a boy, de Gaspé was taken to see another relative
who was a lay pensioner at the Hôpital. The Hôpital curate who celebrated the
Mass merely smiled at the tuneless enthusiasm of the little boy, who could not
refrain from accompanying the nuns’ choir.
This
indulgent priest, Father Rigauville, was also related to Mother St. Alexis. He
used his ability to travel freely across the colony to secure contracts for the
nuns’ manufactures and students for their boarding school, helping forestall a
threatened closure of the Hopital. This kinsman of the Superior also left his seigneurie
to the Hôpital when he died. Rigauville laboured so tirelessly on their behalf
that the nuns deemed him their second founder. Unlike some earlier
ecclesiastical supervisors, the gentle Rigauville seems to have shown no
interest in curbing what one of his predecessors called the nuns’ “abusive
spirit of independence and liberty.”16 With Rigauville the bonds are more suggestive of kinship and affection
than of hierarchical or patriarchal authority. The nuns also maintained
generally good relations with Bishop Briand, whose royalist politics matched
their own. Mother St. Alexis’ male relatives in the Lanaudière, Rigauville, and
de Salaberry families were among the minority of colonists who answered the
1775 call of British governor and Catholic bishop to take arms against the
rebel invasion.
Kinship accounts for much of the largesse bestowed on the institution.
The nuns taught Mademoiselle Geneviève St. Ours from the age of five and occasionally
hosted her as an adult pensioner. She was related to all three of our Mother
Superiors and to three other nuns. This admiring recipient of convent services
was well aware of its financial woes. In September 1790, her letter to her
“Dear and beloved friend and cousin,”
exhorted Mother St. Alexis to dry her tears and rest easy. Mlle. St. Ours had
arranged with her brothers to use her own legal portion of the family
seigneurie towards remitting the convent debt of 14,789 livres, thereby
softening the blow of its lost French revenues.17 The other Superiors under consideration, Mothers St. Claude and de la
Visitation, also had beneficent relatives outside the walls and under their
roof, siblings who became pensioners.
The
convent’s links spanned continents and ethnic divisions. It had one and
sometimes two agents working in France to procure supplies and tend
investments. The nuns learned to cultivate British gentlemen too, lobbying
their new rulers at Quebec. An incident in 1784 shows the same grasp of public
affairs D’Allaire noted in her study of the Order:
Our Mothers established first in principle that
that law [of Habeas Corpus] which was about to come into force in Canada
enshrines one of the most precious rights ... of the individual; they next
ascertained that the Legislative Council had recently formulated a project
tending to exclude from this privilege the religious orders.18
The annals record that the nuns examined
possible motives for the exclusion, one being misplaced concern that this right
would encourage members to escape. They decided to request this English right
since they were now “faithful subjects of Great Britain.” The appeal alluded to
“our Governor’s frequent pitying the slavery of members of orders, due to their
vows – slavery he would want to mitigate with the right of habeas corpus.” The remark about slaves suggests Catholics
were well aware of prejudiced talk against convents. The law was redrafted to
include the nuns. They also reached an accord with the new government for
subsidized care of the mentally ill.
Two
earlier Superiors at the time of the British siege demonstrate the same two
traditions of economic enterprise and cultivation of patrons. Mother Charlotte
de Ramezay de St. Claude de la Croix was Superior the spring that the
long-dreaded British invasion fleet entered the St.Lawrence. Soon bombardment
began, an event that nearly flattened the town and sent hundreds of refugees
scurrying to the Hôpital outside its gates. Mother de la Visitation became
Superior just after the colony’s final surrender to the British in 1760. The
two Superiors were cousins and daughters of warriors.
The
tall Mother St. Claude was by all accounts a forceful character. Daughter of an
ill-tempered Montreal governor, she grew up amid a life of privilege in the
Chateau de Ramezay. Her brother, Lieutenant du roi Roch de Ramezay, would yield
up the starving town to British forces in the autumn of 1759. Mother St. Claude
reputedly showed her own martial spirit by spreading false rumours of British
defeats in those bitter final months, a bid to demoralize British officers who
were recuperating at the Hôpital. The British suspicions swirling about her
support the annals’ indication that she was a redoubtable character.19
Mother
St. Claude displayed a keen awareness of the aristocratic condition into which
she was born. Nobles were a class apart, said even to have different blood from
commoners. They were further set apart with separate laws, a high degree of
endogamy, dress codes, taboos on manual labour, and the injunction to “live
nobly and serve the King.”20 Living nobly involved living a gracious
lifestyle and showing courtesy to other nobles who were all part of the King’s
“family.” The courtesy of bluebloods extended even to nobles of other nations,
seen for example in officers entertaining enemy nobles in their tents on the
eve of battle. As for serving the King, noble nuns looked after (or if one
prefers Foucaultian terms, incarcerated) fevered soldiers. This was a fitting
counterpart to their brothers’ efforts on the battlefields, sometimes costing
their lives.
Aristocrats
stuck together. Like the weddings of her sisters, Mother St. Claude’s
investiture was a social gathering attracting prominent guests. In the early
eighteenth century the convent’s aristocratic founder, Bishop Saint-Vallier – a
former chaplain at the French court – favoured the noblesse and
contributed to their dowries; Governor Vaudreuil did the same. When a successor
of Saint-Vallier’s attempted to curb what he saw as the excessive independence
of the nuns by appointing a non-noble mother superior (violating the convent
rule that required election), Mother St. Claude was prominent among those who
rebelled. Continuing to obey the noble Superior, several of the sisters wrote
direct appeals to the court, which the Governor duly forwarded with his
dispatches. The governor discussed matters with Hôpital nuns numerous times in
response to their resistance, and advocated their cause in the colonial
dispatch of 1728. The Crown did not rescind the appointment, but an election
was called shortly afterwards in 1729 and a noble was selected. Thenceforth all
Superiors until the Conquest were noble. The nuns also secured support of
Governor and Intendant against Bishop Dosquet’s attempt to reduce their numbers
and place them under control of the Hôtel-Dieu. He was no match for Governor
Beauharnois, a member of the Phélypeaux clan that was well connected at the
French court.21 In the Gallican church of New France final
decisions about convent procedures (constitutions, expansions, even size of
dowry and attire) rested with the Crown rather than the Bishop. Finding allies
in government was therefore essential. However, convents did so at a price.
They could be required, for example, to accept as postulants protegées of the
Governor or even the Minister of Marine.22
In becoming a client of the Crown and its
colonial brokers, Mother St. Claude was following a pattern familiar from
childhood. The family devoted itself to entertaining official visitors, reviewing
troops, and other activities as part of the aristocratic imperative to live
nobly and serve the King. “What would people think of us,” her weary mother is
reported to have told her children after an arduous round of entertaining, “if
we refused to associate with his Majesty’s officers, with high-ranking
citizens?”23 As girls, Mother St. Claude and her sister
declared they would enter the convent to avoid such duties. Indeed her younger
sister Catherine, who became an Ursuline, made a name for herself by warning
students away from worldly frivolities. In particular, she turned a wrathful
eye on the panier skirt. A demoiselle who succumbed to the panier
mode would wear a wooden underframe fitted with side panels at the waist,
allowing her skirt to billow out to a circumference that might surpass three
metres. Admiring gazes were drawn to the resultant ability of heavy fabrics to
defy gravity, of lighter silks to bounce with every step the lady took.
A carriage ride away from the Ursuline
convent Catherine’s sister, Mother St. Claude, gradually rising to the office
of Superior at the Hôpital Général, viewed the world with a more accommodating eye. Like her mother
before her, she became hostess to people of rank, supplying special quarters to
officers, and housing proteges of the Governor, even when it meant bending
convent rules. She is recorded as going out of her way to provide polite conversation
and English tea to an enemy officer under her roof (though – an accident,
surely – she boiled the unfamiliar beverage to an ominous resin). In the same
way that Mother St. Claude and her colleagues sought help from colonial
officials to preserve the rule of aristocratic nuns within the convent, Mother
St. Claude’s mother had penned supplications to preserve the interests of her
own noble family. Men and women of the officer class did this regularly. Madame
de Ramezay secured a commission for her son, and pensions for herself and
daughters.24
“Doing good to people of rank,” it has been observed,
was a code of honour in ruling circles of the ancien régime. Nuns, like
other nobles, knew the system required visiting, petitioning, setting a fine
table for a fine guest, gifts, names dropped, and favours rendered. At convent
recitals the high voices of pupils flattered in turn the “generous nobility” of
the Governor, the Intendant, the Intendant’s wife, adding that
A heart sensitive to the plight of the
unfortunate
Can
count on a happy destiny....25
This reminded the visiting dignitaries that the
nuns and their works were conduits to the ultimate Patron. “One cannot,” the
Annals recorded, “have too many heavenly protectors.”26 Earthly ones were not neglected either. In Mother St. Claude’s early
convent days, the nuns even went to dinner parties at the Governor General’s
chateau. Governor Philippe de Vaudreuil’s wife brought medicine to the bedside
of a dying noble Superior, and the Governor and friends dropped in to an extent
that appalled successive Bishops as violating cloister.
Patron-client relations were typically face to face, generating few
documents. The Governor and Intendants’ visits, their recorded defence of the
convent against the Bishop, and praise of its “indispensable service” to the
colony, however, are strong clues. Pointing in the same direction is historian
Micheline D’Allaire’s observation that the Crown from 1730 onward tended to
favour the Hôpital’s interests.27 Imbroglios
with ecclesiastics became a thing of the past, as the two beneficent government
officials continued in office until 1747-8. The Annals single out Governor
Beauharnois and Intendant Hocquart as “among the first rank of friends who gave
unequivocal proof of their goodwill ... according their protection on every
occasion.”28 The annalist also reported with satisfaction
that Bishop Pontbriand, who began his twenty-year term of office in 1741, from
the outset appreciated the merits of the Superior and “relied entirely on her
prudence for all the conduct of the House.”29 He, too, they ranked among their prime friends and protectors.
Just
as patron-client relations show continuity between convents and manor houses,
so do their economic activities. The widowed Madame de Ramezay (and later her
unmarried daughter Louise) worked to develop lumber production at Chambly near
their seigneurial lands. Though the widow failed, Louise prospered and
undertook other business enterprises including tanneries in Montreal. Louise’s
sister, Mother St. Claude, likewise directed enterprises. In the same decades
Louise was travelling back and forth between her operations at Montreal and
those at Chambly, Mother St. Claude herself was travelling out to oversee
operations on her convent’s St. Vallier seigneurie, combining her
practical concerns as financial officer with honorifics of the seigneurial role
such as becoming godparent to the child of a censitaire. She also
followed her father’s footsteps as a builder. A 120-foot wing with unusually
spacious cells for the nuns was added to the Hôpital during one of her several
terms as its financial officer or dépositaire. The annalist saw Mother
St. Claude’s upbringing as an asset: “Obliged by her office to have daily
dealings with people of all ranks,” it was recorded, “she showed herself by the
nobility of her manners and delicacy of her behaviour, always worthy of her
high birth.”30
Superiors
oversaw their complex services, lands, and manufactures in the manner of
chatelaines. Visitors such as Swedish botanist Peter Kalmwere were impressed by
their courtesy and the lavish table they spread:
The abbess led me ... through all the
apartments, accompanied by a great number of nuns. Most of the nuns here are of
noble families and one was the daughter of a governor [Mother St. Claude]. She
had a very grand air ... They all seemed more polite than those in the other
nunnery. ... The dishes were ... as numerous and various as on the tables of
great men ... [including] several sorts of wine and ... many dainties.31
It was during the 1760-66 tenure of Mother
Marie-Joseph Legardeur de Repentigny de la Visitation, that novelist Frances
Brooke visited and reported that “one forgets the nun and sees only the lady of
distinction.”32 The notion was seconded by Bishop Briand who
found their conversation and habits altogether too worldly (perhaps exacerbated
in his day by postulants alleged to have joined the convent in search of safety
during the war).
During the Superiorship of Mother de la
Visitation, the familiar themes re-emerge. Rather than treading the same ground
again, one might simply juxtapose two letters that show the aristocrat’s
instinct to take charge and make connections. Mother de la Visitation’s mother
was Agathe St. Père, who is credited with establishing the textile industry in
Canada. When woollen supplies being shipped to the colony in 1704 perished in a
shipwreck, St. Père ransomed nine English weavers from Indian captors and had
them instruct the townspeople on looms she distributed. Married to an
illustrious military officer and moving in ruling circles, she persuaded the
Governor and Intendant to endorse her request for a Crown subsidy. In their
dispatch of 1708 they enclosed her confident appeal to the Minister of Marine.
She touted her own initiatives and “the perfect awareness I have of the care
you take over this country” and sent samples of the cloth her employees made.
She suggested to the King a number of other colonial resources to be tapped:
buffalo wool for clothing, and a natural rot-resistant material for ship’s
rigging. Agathe St. Père showed familiarity with the Crown’s concern for
colonial development and no bashfulness in singing the praises of her own work.33
Sixty years later, in a colony recently fallen to the British, St.
Pere’s daughter in turn wrote to the Minister of Marine at the French court.
She was exasperated by the Crown’s failure to send the accustomed compensation
to the Hôpital-Général for its care of the wounded during the last two years of
the war. Mother de la Visitation’s letter exudes the same sense of entitlement
as her mother to appeal directly to the Versailles and expect a response:
Monseigneur,
The
Peace is concluded, and we lament to see this unfortunate colony lose the
glorious title of New France ... sensible of the loss to France of an immense
country whose value she doesn’t appreciate, the English, more attentive to the
interests of their nation, take pains to keep it ... Isn’t it time,
Monseigneur, after three years of waiting and suffering, to be reimbursed for
the sums we advanced for the healing and redeployment of our troops? ... take
note, Monseigneur, if you please, that the rentes with which our good
and well-loved King gratified our house, have been withheld since that
unfortunate war. They have been retained in his coffers; would not sending them
be an act of justice that is our due?34
Unlike her mother’s letter, Mother de la
Visitation’s appeal did not receive the crucial endorsement of Governor and
Intendant. With the fall of the colony, those officials had fled to France.
Without their protection, some combination of warm Christian hospitality and
cold calculation enabled the convent to face the unknown.
Was it
only her veil and her celibacy that differentiated the managerial nun from the
lady of the manor? One wishes to do
justice to those who gave their lives to religion and whose piety was often
noted from childhood.35 Still, it seems clear the vows of poverty and
obedience were not unconditional, given the lavish banquets, gorgeous
buildings, and class favouritism, as well as the worldliness and
insubordination bishops berated. Turning to the fourth vow, that of Christian
hospitality, helps demonstrate the complex values at work within an aristocratic
convent.
Hospitality to all who entered their portals
was a promise made by the Augustinians of the Hôpital Général and the
Hotel-Dieu. This had been honoured to the extent that Superiors were known to
give the nuns’ personal linen to bandage wounded soldiers, and the Hôpital’s
bread supply to a woman begging at the door.36 In his history of the Church after the Conquest, Marcel Trudel noted
that each of the Quebec convents spent some time nursing British soldiers
during the Conquest period, and he sees this hospitality as winning them
preference with the new rulers. Trudel contrasts British remuneration and
generosity to the convents with what appears to be harsher treatment of male
clergy such as the Jesuits at a time when the priesthood was already decimated
by death and emigration.37
Certainly
the Hôpital-Général distinguished itself in its hospitality to the enemy. The
battle of Montmorency was fought in June 1759, shortly after the invading fleet
arrived at Quebec. Mother St. Claude personally cared for a British officer
wounded in this encounter; it was reported that she wept when he died. In
response, General Wolfe promised that should victory be his, he would extend
protection to her and the Hôpital. After Wolfe’s death, General Murray kept the
pledge. When British forces occupied the institution, they treated the nuns
with great respect.
Meanwhile,
going beyond her vow of Christian hospitality, Mother St. Claude also plied the
path of aristocratic courteoisie she had learned as a child. Only a week
after her brother yielded the starving town to the British, she sent to General
Amherst a gift of preserves the nuns had made, with a fawning note. They were
“eager to present their respects to his excellency, to express their deep
appreciation for his protection, wishing him health.”38 In the final year of the colony’s existence, with Mother de la
Visitation now its superior, the Hôpital continued to treat the British
wounded, burying on its grounds those who did not survive.
The
British military government responded with the customary courtesy of well-bred
gentlemen to ladies of similar rank. Governor Murray sent provisions to the
Hôpital sisters over the course of that hungry winter of 1759-60 and paid for
British patients. Made aware of their desperate finances when the French court
failed to reimburse wartime expenses, Murray appealed on their behalf to both
the French and British governments.
As for
the nuns, who can say what proportion of their conduct was calculation, what
proportion charity? In 1759-60 they showered with kindness the formidable
British invader; the following decade they begrudged the sickly American one.
Or was the operant difference that of manners: did hospitality falter in the
face of the unspecified “coarseness” and “dissipation” of the Americans? Did
they act out of noble ideas of courtesy, Christian vows of hospitality, realpolitik,
or all three? As noted, Mother St. Alexis evidently did take it to heart when
accused of neglecting the Americans, and changed her ways. The motives, and the
conduct, seem complex. They were based on more than one code of honour, not
unalloyed with baser metals.
Whatever
their motives, in those trying times the nuns’ networks proved vital. The ties
established during the Conquest period by Mother St. Claude and Mother de la
Visitation remained firm, Carleton’s government awarding the Hôpital a contract
to care for British invalids. Governor Carleton’s aide-de-camp during the
Revolution was Mother St. Alexis’ kinsman, Lanaudière, and his efforts were
seconded by the other relatives who supported the cause. The nuns feared their
buildings would be targeted when the Americans occupied them. Carleton,
however, ordered his forces not to fire on the Hôpital, a questionable decision
from the military point of view since it handed a safe base to ill and
vulnerable invaders.
With
friends in high places and a government that compensated them for their work,
the sisters survived both the two sieges and the change of rulers. One might
conclude they fared considerably better than lay members of the aristocracy.
Mother St. Claude’s brother Roch, along with a number of fellow officers, fled
to France where they received a nasty scapegoating for the loss of Canada, some
facing prison. Others, including Roch de Ramezay, eked out a penurious
existence, and their families were imperiled again by the French Revolution. In
the colony, Mother de la Visitation lost her closest male relatives on the
field of battle and her surviving brother fled to France. Mother St. Alexis’
stepfather also emigrated to France, where he was imprisoned in the Bastille.39 Another of her relatives died a captive in a Pennsylvania prison.
Nobles who stayed in the colony and managed to survive both wars were deprived
of the government largesse to which the French regime had accustomed them.40 Humiliated by an influx of newcomers who ridiculed their antiquated
chivalry, this now impotent class could neither persuade nor compel the habitants
to resist Yankee invaders. Noblemen learned to keep quiet about the military
exploits that had once been their glory, while those chosen for Governor
Carleton’s Council learned to stifle their true opinions. Aubert De Gaspé, born
in 1786, mentioned several times in his memoirs how he and others of his class
for decades dreaded taunts of being “French and bad subjects” of the new monarch.
Among the French Canadians, they lost leadership to the middle classes. Their
sisters at the Hôpital-Général rebounded from the hardships and humiliations of
wartime more quickly and more fully. Their services before and after the
Conquest were praised by Governors, Legislature, townspeople, and visitors. In
terms of numbers, they had more professed nuns in the 1790s than at the most
flourishing period of French rule in the 1740s.41
As the well-attended adulation of Mother St. Alexis that August day in 1797 suggests, the nuns at the Hôpital-Général de Québec experienced a generally happier fate than their families exiled in France or struggling in fast-changing currents at home. Some indefinable blend of economic enterprise, religious idealism, and ability to attach themselves to ruling clienteles preserved the sisters and their work. At a time when the ebb tide of French empire could have submerged their way of life, they displayed all the structured buoyancy of a lady in a panier skirt.