The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval by Adrien Leblond de Brumath
page 94 of 229 (41%)
page 94 of 229 (41%)
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with joy the arrival of the sons of the blessed Jean Baptiste de la
Salle, the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, so well known throughout the world for their modesty and success in teaching. The girls of the colony were no less well looked after than the boys; at Quebec, the Ursuline nuns, established in that city by Madame de la Peltrie, trained them for the future irreproachable mothers of families. The attempts made to Gallicize the young savages met with no success in the case of the boys, but were better rewarded by the young Indian girls. "We have Gallicized," writes Mother Mary of the Incarnation, "a number of Indian girls, both Hurons and Algonquins, whom we subsequently married to Frenchmen, who get along with them very well. There is one among them who reads and writes to perfection, both in her native Huron tongue and in French; no one can discern or believe that she was born a savage. The commissioner was so delighted at this that he induced her to write for him something in the two languages, in order to take it to France and show it as an extraordinary production." Further on she adds, "It is a very difficult thing, not to say impossible, to Gallicize or civilize them. We have more experience in this than any one else, and we have observed that of a hundred who have passed through our hands we have hardly civilized one. We find in them docility and intelligence, but when we least expect it, they climb over our fence and go off to run the woods with their parents, where they find more pleasure than in all the comforts of our French houses." At Montreal it was the venerable Marguerite Bourgeoys who began to teach in a poor hovel the rudiments of the French tongue. This humble school was transformed a little more than two centuries later into one of the most vast and imposing edifices of the city of Montreal. Fire destroyed it in 1893, but we must hope that this majestic monument of Ville-Marie |
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