A living Catholicism, marked by sincerity, simple fervour, and firmly rooted habits of morality, was perpetuated within these families and gave them a very particular character, a stamp of higher nobility. Often, in the earliest days, when no chapel had yet been built and the priest came only once every three or four months, each household became a little church in which the messe blanche—the “white Mass”—was celebrated. On Sundays the father gathered together his wife, children, and servants; they prayed and listened to a pious reading.

During the Iroquois wars, particularly at Trois-Rivières, almost every house was transformed into an oratory, where lamps burned as ardently as the hearts and prayers of those brave people. The custom was preserved of saying every evening what they called the grand’prière, the “great prayer”: that is, prayers from the Mass-book, invariably followed by the recitation of the Rosary. The same practices were observed by the garrisons of the forts—for example at Fort Saint-Frédéric, commanded by M. de Lusignan, a Canadian—where, as Kalm tells us, morning and evening prayers were said in common.

It was above all in the education of children that the Christian spirit of the family found expression, as indeed it ought. Bishop de Saint-Vallier observed that fathers and mothers fulfilled, toward their children and servants, something of the office of the priest. With what devout hands our foremothers fashioned the souls of their sons and daughters, and amid what delicate modesty they taught them to grow! We know it from the many tributes paid to mothers who had themselves been educated by the religious sisters of those early days; and we know it still from the spirit that continues to reign in families where the old traditions have been preserved.

There we find again those blessed and pious words that were the first to be placed upon a child’s lips. There we learn the simple devices by which the very young were kept in the path of duty: how easy it was, for example, to make the Child Jesus weep, and equally easy to lose one’s New Year’s gifts—which in those days had not yet come to be brought by an old German buffoon. We learn, too, how serious a thing it was to utter certain words which men banished from their lips, being, thank God, too well brought up to indulge in that thoroughly modern and vulgar ugliness of blasphemous swearing and cursing.

And there, in those families, we still hear, as in former times, the first lessons of the catechism and the first formulas of prayer taught by a mother’s lips. There, finally, have been preserved and devoutly handed down to us the holy and simple ballads brought from France by our earliest foremothers:

It’s the little grey hen
That laid in the church…
The Blessed Virgin goes forth singing,
Her beautiful hair hanging down…

Yes, Canadian family society nobly fulfilled its two principal purposes: to have children and to bring them up well.

Other venerable documents bear witness to the family piety of former days: I mean the wills of our ancestors. The old people left us no Books of Hours. Rarely did they depart without leaving their descendants a sheaf of counsels in which one finds something of the moving grandeur of the farewells of the patriarchs.

“We have gone through hundreds upon hundreds of wills,” writes the historian of the Seigneurie of Lauzon, “in which the notary, grave and solemn, begins by declaring that he has found the testator ‘sound in mind, memory, and understanding, going about and attending to his affairs.’”

Then the testator himself dictated his last wishes:

“Knowing,” he would say, “that nothing is more certain than death, nor anything more uncertain than its hour, he does not wish to be overtaken by it before making his will.”

And then:

“As a Roman Catholic and Apostolic Christian, I commend my soul to God the Father Almighty, beseeching Him, through the merits, Passion, and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, through the intercession of the glorious Virgin Mary, of my patron saint, and of all the other saints, when my soul shall be separated from my body, to be pleased to place it among the blessed in the heavenly Kingdom…”

“Only after this,” continues Edmond Roy, “did the testator turn his thoughts toward earthly things and dictate to the notary, naming the person who was to succeed him.”

Among the records of this ancient piety we must reread the Farewells of Grandfather Boucher, that veteran of New France whose lifetime extended over almost the whole period of the French régime. He came here at the age of thirteen in 1634 and died on April 19, 1717, at the age of ninety-seven.

Before departing this life, Grandfather Boucher wrote down his final wishes for all his descendants. He gave his soul to God and his body to the earth; then he multiplied his counsels to his wife and to each of his children. They are counsels of the highest order: counsels of unity, selflessness, integrity, and fidelity to God.

Among them I find this passage, which even today has lost none of its living relevance:

“We must do what we can to acquire property and neglect no opportunity to do so, but always without injury to our conscience or our honour. Better to live poor, better to die, than to do anything contrary to the command of God.”

The Farewells of Grandfather Boucher were devoutly preserved by his numerous descendants. Until not so many years ago, a touching custom still required this venerable document to be read in its entirety once a year, with the family assembled together and kneeling.