Louisiana | The forgotten women of French Louisiana

In Paris, on a wall of the Salpêtrière hospital, a plaque commemorates the Filles du Roy who crossed the Atlantic to populate New France. But of these women sent to Louisiana in the 1700s, we find no mention.

Julia Malye was studying in Oregon when she began researching New Orleans, with the idea of ​​traveling to Louisiana before returning home to France. “That’s how I came across the story of these women. What really struck me was the fact that they had been completely forgotten, that no one remembered them anymore – neither in France nor in the United States. And to see, too, the few traces we leave as women in the archives,” she confides while passing through Montreal this week for the release of her fourth novel, Louisiana.

Louisiana tells the fate of three women locked up in the Salpêtrière hospital in 1720. Women without family, who committed a crime or who were simply abandoned at the institute by their loved ones. Through a combination of circumstances, they find themselves on a list of potential mothers for the colony.

“What interested me was the marginalized status they had. What did it mean to be a woman and an outsider at the time? We didn’t want them in France. They were sent like wombs to give birth to a French colony which was already under the seal of failure, because the various commercial companies which wanted to establish themselves there and trade in what would be cultivated there were realized that they had made a mistake and that it was going to be unbearable. »

Hope for a new life

After a terrible boat trip, these young women arrive in a hostile and unknown territory where they will soon all be married. Despite their bad luck in life so far, they want to believe in the possibility of a new beginning. But in their host land, they will experience great and small bereavements, famine, hurricanes, as well as the violence of the fighting between French soldiers and indigenous tribes.

The challenge, for Julia Malye, was to find enough information to ensure that we managed to feel at their side – which she manages to accomplish with great virtuosity.

“It was a balancing act between finding what transforms time – be it sensory details that relate to nature, trees, vegetation, the humid air of Louisiana – and the big questions that we ask ourselves when we talk about motherhood, loss, sisterhood, love, she explains. What’s left, actually? What is specific to a time, to an era? And what, ultimately, will ensure that readers, 300 years later, will still be able to identify with these moments, while avoiding adhering to 21st century values?^e century on a mentality from another time? »

To obtain documentation, the novelist delved into the historical collections of New Orleans, at Tulane University and even at the Ursuline convent. She contacted descendants of these women, grateful for the attention paid to their ancestors. She even went so far as to meet the leader of the Natchez nation for these passages where she features an indigenous woman and consulted a specialist in Yoruba culture to create the characters of the slaves who were in the service of the families of French settlers. Always with the aim of remaining as faithful as possible to historical facts.

Unusually, the French writer, who also teaches fiction writing in Paris, wrote Louisiana in English first, which seemed natural to her at the time since she was studying in the United States. Then she undertook to rewrite it herself in French, which led to countless back and forths and endless modifications between one version and the other – a monk’s work which took her eight years until publication. of the novel. “I felt like I was playing the game of seven differences,” she says with a laugh.

His first novel, Tocqueville’s fiancée, published in 2010 – when she was 15! – was also a historical novel. “The questions of memory, forgetting, time are things that obsess and fascinate me. And I think that the possibility in writing of returning to a moment that has passed is something that is almost magical. It’s one of the powers of writing to travel through time. »

But after spending practically his entire twenties in the 18th century^e century, Julia Malye says she wants to return to contemporary questions in her future writings. “I have another novel project for which I’m waiting a bit because at the moment, it’s more short texts that I want to write! »

Louisiana

Julia Malye

Stock

558 pages