Bride of New France
By Suzanne Desrochers
Penguin Canada, 224 pages, $25
This is a moody, beautiful piece of historical fiction, casting Louis XIV's Paris as a grey and Gothic city, pitiless toward its poor and dark with imperial desires.
The novel opens with a swift and frightening prologue, in which Parisian archers seize the protagonist, Laure Beauséjour, as they implement the 1656 decree to clear the streets of beggars. It then shifts to the gloomy setting of the notorious Salpêtrière Hospital, where Laure finds herself imprisoned.
She can hear the murmurs of madwomen through the walls of her dormitory, as well as the weak cries of infants and orphans. The place is truly ghastly in its muffled expressions of sorrow -- as bad as the mysterious attic in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and just as symbolic of the secrets at an empire's centre.
These are the shadows within the Sun King's dominion, the dark recesses containing the history of the women whom Louis XIV tried to banish from his sight: the destitute and delinquent, 800 of whom were sent to marry the men stationed in the French colonies. It is into the world of these so-called filles du roi that French Canadian Suzanne Desrochers tries to bring some light.
As she notes in her afterword, Desrochers grew up on stories of the filles du roi, despite the sparse historical record about them. Unaware of their origins in the Salpêtrière, she had also romanticized the women's lives and their voyages across the sea, until research for her MA thesis in history quickly set her straight.
With this novel, her first, Desrochers returns to that research in an attempt to imagine the flesh-and-blood women in the archives of the Salpêtrière's workshops.
Like the best of historical fiction, the novel rewards us with knowledgeable and intriguing details, this time about late 17th-century Paris and Quebec. And it is through Laure's skepticism and ambition that Desrochers casts a stern eye upon the ways in which the Salpêtrière women were used, starved and shipped across the Atlantic to marry the fur traders and expand the empire.
The characters are interesting, if a bit flat at times, and the settings compelling. The chapters describing the ship that carries the filles du roi to Canada offer moments of great writing and insight, and the scene in which Laure views a slave ship from her own hold is particularly breathtaking.
Desrochers' writing sustains a good pace: it is at once melancholic and engaging, consistently delivering skilful turns of phrase. But it is not flawless, mostly because Laure often functions as the vehicle through which the world is observed. "Laure enquires," "Laure walks over," "Laure sits on the bed": too many sentences open like this, and they weigh things down.
There's also a repetitive quality to the characters' fears of the New World "savages," as if we're being entreated to shake our heads from our enlightened position in the present.
One of the novel's key strengths lies in its brevity, not because you want it to end quickly but because it seems to keep its distance from what it cannot know. In the three distinct settings of the hospital, the ship and the colony, it confers a sense of what it might have felt like to be someone in Laure's position in the 1660s, and then it backs off.
It pairs well with Toni Morrison's most recent novel A Mercy, high praise indeed. For, as Morrison's characters journey to Maryland in the same period, Desrochers' go north, past the icebergs to a place where "they cannot imagine what the rest of their lives will be."
Dana Medoro is a professor in the department of English, film and theatre at the University of Manitoba.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 22, 2011 H8
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