Who is Marie-Claude Chamois?

Answer 1

Between 1665 and 1672, Louis XIV, King of France, sent at his expense around 1000 young women to New France.

Fourteen-year-old Marie-Claude Chamois, one of the filles du roi, left France in 1670 for the New World (As portrayed Maude Richer-Lanciault.). These young women mostly came from the Paris area or the diocese of Rouen. They were poor, abandoned, and with no future in France. The King bestowed upon them a dowry of between 50 and 300 livres to settle them in the colony and thus increase its population. Marie-Claude Chamois was one of these women. This is her story:

Marie-Claude Chamois was the youngest of four children born to a well off Paris family. In 1669 she fled her home. A priest took her in and placed her in a shelter for abandoned women, poor children and the mentally ill.

"I was taken first to the Hospital de la Pitié in 1669 and then brought to the Salpetrière Hospital", she wrote. "I was baptized at Saint-Gervais de Paris, and raised by my mother until the age of 13 in the Faubourg St. Antoine", recounted Marie-Claude Chamois in remarks collected and published by the Chancellor of Aguesseau, "I had to flee to avoid the advances of my own brother who respected neither the Laws of Nature, Religion nor the Law."

A year later, her life was turned upside down once more. "I was chosen to join a number of others who had to cross to America, and I would have rather renounced my homeland and take a perilous voyage to the New World than beg my mother's help. I resigned myself to silence in an alien land, with neither friends, assistance nor parents condemned to a perpetual exile."

She arrived in Quebec in October 1670 and married François Frigon, a citizen of Batiscan. She was 14 years old. Marie-Claude Chamois and François Frigon had 7 children. They are the ancestors of every Frigon in North America.