was practically the modern franc, about twenty cents.]
in these five years is a sober estimate of what the royal
treasury must have spent in the work of colonizing Canada.

No campaign for immigrants in modern days has been more
assiduously carried on. Officials from Paris searched
the provinces, gathering together all who could be induced
to go. The intendant particularly asked that women be
sent to the colony, strong and vigorous peasant girls
who would make suitable wives for the habitants. The king
gratified him by sending whole shiploads of them in charge
of nuns. As to who they were, and where they came from,
one cannot be altogether sure. The English agent at Paris
wrote that they were 'lewd strumpets gathered up by the
officers of the city,' and even the saintly Mere Marie
de l'Incarnation confessed that there was beaucoup de
canaille among them. La Hontan has left us a racy picture
of their arrival and their distribution among the rustic
swains of the colony, who scrimmaged for points of vantage
when boatloads of women came ashore from the ships.
[Footnote: Another view will be found in The Great
Intendant in this Series, chap. IV.]

The male settlers, on the other hand, came from all
classes and from all parts of France. But Normandy,
Brittany, Picardy, and Perche afforded the best recruiting
grounds; from all of them came artisans and sturdy
peasants. Normandy furnished more than all the others
put together, so much so that Canada in the seventeenth
century was more properly a Norman than a French colony.