Bride of New France Read Free

to read, Madame d’Aulnay taught her to write, a skill that Laure found much more difficult to learn than reading. Madame d’Aulnay said that mostly it is men who write. Even some poor men, she said, sit on street corners as clerks and write out accounts and letters for those who require their services. Sewing and needlework are much more useful for girls to learn, but Laure was already quicker and knew more patterns than most eleven-year-old servants girls, so Madame felt there was no harm in teaching her to write a few words.
    Laure first traced the letters in a box of sand, over and over, until Madame d’Aulnay was satisfied that she was ready to try writing them in ink on paper. Madame d’Aulnay sat Laure in front of her écritoire and removed from it the objects she would need for writing: a sheet of thick paper made of linen fibres, a goose feather, a small knife to trim the nib of the pen, a vial of ink, an instrument to scratch out mistakes from the paper, and sand, to dry the ink. Laure first learned to sign her name, and once she mastered this skill, Madame d’Aulnay told her that she could already do more than most women in France.
    But these memories of a better, more hopeful time are long past. Laure would probably still be in her salon had Madamed’Aulnay not died three years ago. Being forced to return to the Salpêtrière after her mistress’s death had been a cruel fate. Not even being placed in the Sainte-Claire dormitory or meeting Madeleine, her first and only friend in the hospital, could compensate for her loss. For Laure, the years since Madame d’Aulnay’s, clothed in the hard grey hospital linen, have passed like a prison sentence.
    “Don’t tell me you’re going to sit over there brooding and miss out on your chance to see this. Why don’t you tell Mireille to come and see for herself? She might learn something for her new prince in Canada.” Madeleine does not respond. Laure turns back to the window and the scene below.
    The Superior has reason to be concerned about the morality of the Sainte-Claire girls. After all, the Salpêtrière houses every sort of woman imaginable in the kingdom. Laure has even heard that there is a woman of the court imprisoned in a special chamber on a lettre de cachet from the King. There are also some Protestants, and a few foreign women, from Ireland, Portugal, and Morocco, mixed in with the others. Laure isn’t sure of all the hospital’s divisions. Only that there are about forty other dormitories. Infants are kept in the crèche , slightly older boys and girls are put in separate dormitories. There are also several divisions for girls working at cloth making and bleaching, one for pregnant women, another for nursing women and their children, several for madwomen young and old, a number for women with infirmities—blindness, epilepsy. There are a few dormitories too for old women, and one for husbands and wives over the age of seventy. There are no men in the Salpêtrière between the ages of eleven and seventy, other than the archers and the servant boys.
    The people gathered in the courtyard of the Maison de la Force are standing in clusters, exchanging news and gossip.Their voices are loud and punctuated by laughter. Occasionally, someone will glance back at the entrance to the courtyard, eager for the prostitutes’ arrival. Laure can see that the people are dressed in tattered clothing and have the same vulgar tongues as some of the Salpêtrière residents. Sometimes a voice will rise above the others carrying a piece of information. She learns things the officers do not tell the residents. The administrators attempt to keep the divisions of women from mixing. Of course, occasional stories still manage to find their way through the dormitory walls, fragments that are whispered at church service, embellished during the long workdays, and passed along so often that they become legends. There are women that everyone knows even though they have long