If you want to take a truly puzzling journey, see and experience another world, read the latest issue of the Journal of the history of New France, whose file is devoted to the presence of magic and witchcraft in our lands at that time. You will be overthrown.
The English-Canadian historian Mairi Cowan recounts, in a captivating interview, the affair of the possession of Barbe Hallay, a young servant in the manor of the lord and doctor Robert Giffard, in Beauport.
In the fall of 1660, Barbe Hallay showed worrying signs. The devil, it is believed, speaks through her and stones fly into the room she is in. Exorcisms are attempted, without success. It is finally Marie Regnouard, Giffard’s wife, who will find the solution by placing relics of Jean de Brébeuf on the body of the young girl in convulsion.
But who had bewitched the latter? Daniel Vuil, a miller with dubious morals, will carry the hat. He was to marry Barbe Hallay, but the project would have been canceled because of his bad reputation. The curse is her revenge, according to the young woman. Vuil will end up at the stake in 1661 without it being known precisely if it is for this gesture or for his other escapades. Cowan, however, insisted that this was an exceptional case and that the elite in New France, unlike the population, did not believe too much in supernatural phenomena.
There was no witch hunt here. Acadian historian Stephanie Pettigrew identifies twenty known cases of people accused of this misdemeanor in New France, and they are more sorcerers than witches since sixteen of the accused are men.
In 1682, moreover, Louis XIV “entirely decriminalized witchcraft”, declaring, notes Pettigrew, “that those who pass themselves off as witches or who are in cahoots with the devil are guilty either of lying or of blasphemy”. .
Was this the case of Anne de Lamarque, a Montreal innkeeper who, in 1682, was suspected of possessing “a book of magic” with which she bewitched young men to entice them? Historian Stéphan Martel looks into his case. The woman, they say, is an adulteress, runs a brothel and would have tried to abort her lover’s child. It is public rumor and her husband who accuse her of witchcraft. The magistrate, in this case, completely neglects the accusations of magic, which illustrates, notes the historian, the evolution of mentalities in this regard. We will not know, however, how the story ends since the archives are incomplete.
While mentalities are changing, they do not change overnight. In 1689, Jean Boudor, a Montreal merchant, invited the local elite to an evening during which he had fun staging the resurrection of a dead drunken servant. The case could have ended there, says Stephanie Pettigrew, if, the day after these dubious feasts, Boudor and his son-in-law had not behaved like tyrants.
Upon awakening, they find that two linen shirts and two pairs of shoes are missing. They therefore accuse, without proof, a soldier and a servant who work for them and torture them to extract confessions from them. Learning of the affair, the young servant’s brother files a complaint against the torturers, which triggers an investigation revealing the story of the blasphemous resurrection. The two men will eventually be acquitted, probably thanks to their influence in the colony.
Well written, carried out with a strong sense of intrigue that does not exclude historical rigor, these stories are truly fascinating. The one told, off file, by the French journalist Stéphanie Cabre is perhaps even more so. In 1731, in Marne, France, an 18-year-old savage girl appeared. She has just spent ten years in the woods. She knows how to swim, hunt, fish and resist the cold. Placed in convents, the one who was baptized Marie-Angélique Le Blanc easily learned to read and write French, which suggests that she had already known this language. In 2004, the French surgeon and historian Serge Aroles will finally pierce the mystery of its origins.
The young woman comes from the Fox tribe, Aboriginals of the Great Lakes region. She was taken prisoner by the French during a clash in 1716, given as a slave to a Frenchman from Labrador, brought to Marseilles by the latter’s wife in 1720 and sold to a silk mill owner before s ‘escape.
Her life remains mysterious, but one thing is certain, according to Cabre: she is the only case of an intellectually resurrected wild child. She died in France in 1775, at the age of 63, after having held a salon and fascinated the France of the Enlightenment.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.