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Hélène Boullé
Born: 1598
Died: 12/20/1654
Religion: Protestant, converted to Catholicism
Ethnicity: French
Primary residence: Paris, France
Hélène Boullé was a French noblewoman who married explorer Samuel de Champlain, and briefly lived in Quebec, then called New France, in the early seventeenth century. Boullé was born in Paris in 1598, to Marguerite Alix and Nicolas Boullé, the secretary of the King’s Chamber to Henry IV. In 1610, when Hélène Boullé was twelve, she married Champlain, who, at forty-three, was thirty-one years her senior. Though it seems unusual, this arrangement was typical. In seventeenth century France, marriages between noble families were largely business negotiations, and aristocratic women usually married before they were eighteen.[1] The marriage contract awarded Champlain a dowry of six thousand livres.[2] In exchange, Boullé became the beneficiary in Champlain’s will. Champlain’s marriage was a savvy business decision; the sizeable dowry may have financed one of his many expeditions to the New World.
It seems likely that their marriage was neither close nor affectionate. Due to her young age, the contract also stipulated that she live at home for two more years, and Champlain left again for New France just three months after the marriage ceremony. We can never know how Champlain and Boullé truly felt about each other. Hélène Boullé left no writing behind, and Champlain did not mention her in any of his writings, though he did name Île Sainte-Hélène, an island in the Saint Lawrence River just southeast of Montreal, after her. In 1614, four years after their marriage, Boullé’s parents disinherited her, as a punishment for running away from her husband and going into hiding. After Champlain’s death in 1636, they revoked the act of disinheritance.[3] Though her family was Protestants, Boullé adopted Champlain’s Catholic faith at age 14. The couple did not have children.
In 1620, Hélène Boullé arrived for the first and only time in New France. Eustache Boullé, her younger brother and Champlain’s lieutenant, was there to greet her when she arrived after a rough passage. Four years of life in Quebec for twenty-two year old Hélène Boullé must have been difficult, though neither she nor Champlain left any record of her time there.
Champlain had founded the town of Quebec in 1608, and in 1618 he presented his master plan for colonization to the King, asking that 300 families to relocate to New France every year. Still, in 1620 Quebec had a meager population of only seven settled families. The fortified habitation was rough and in need of structural repairs. Quebec was populated with merchants, indentured servants, soldiers, sailors, interpreters, Native Americans, and slaves.[4] The Recollets, the first missionaries to New France, arrived in 1615.
Hélène Boullé, who was attended by three personal servants, was likely far more comfortable than any other women in New France at the time. We do not know if her social status prevented her from socializing with women such as Marie Rollet, who arrived in 1617 with her husband Louis Hebert and helped with his apothecary business. In general, life for women in New France was such that only the very privileged owned more than one suit of clothes, as cloth was imported. Women learned to fire muskets, took on a variety of traditionally male chores, and lived in a time of nearly constant warfare.[5]
During her brief time in New France, Boullé studied Algonquian, and taught catechism to a few young Algonquin students.[6] An apocryphal story, describing how the mirrored trinket that Boullé wore especially endeared her to her students, is reported in several histories of New France. In the absence of much concrete information about Hélène Boullé’s time there, this story says much more about the image of European women as gentle, civilizing colonizers, than about Boullé’s actual success as an educator. Boullé’s efforts were a precursor to those of the Ursuline nuns, who came to New France in 1639 with the aim of educating Native children. They soon found that many of their students were resistant to their efforts, and turned their attention instead to educating the daughters of French colonists.[7]
In August 1624, Hélène Boullé left Quebec forever. Back in Paris, she lived alone while Champlain remained in New France and briefly in England until his death in 1635. As was the custom for aristocratic widows in her day, Boullé entered a convent, joining the monastery of St. Ursula at Paris in 1645 first as a benefactress, and then becoming a novice under the name of Hélène de St. Augustin. Rather than merely a retreat from the world, convent life often offered women contemplation, community, education, and a social mission. For the Ursulines, that mission was female schooling, both in France and in the New World.[8] Hélène Boullé founded an Ursuline monastery at Meaux, but lived there only six years until her death on December 20th, 1654. Her life was both typical of a French noblewoman of her era, though often in ways that seem foreign to us now, and unique, as she was one of the few French women of her time to span continents.
[1] Elizabeth Rapley. The Devotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990, (14).
[2] Approximately equivalent to $24,000 today.
[3] Joe C.W. Armstrong. Champlain. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1987, (202-203).
[4] The Clio Collective. Quebec Women: A History. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987, (16).
[5] The Clio Collective. Quebec Women: A History. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987, (21).
[6] Though the sources claim that they were, I’m not sure that her students were Algonquin. Would they have been Montagnais?
[7] Prentice, Bourne, Brandt, et al, Canadian Women: A History Second Edition. Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996, (35)
[8] Rapley, Elizabeth. The Devotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990.
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