After months of silence, I am back writing for my blog and along the way, have run into some problems. I would like to apologize for any strange announcements that you might have received from my blog. I hope that we have resolved them and there won’t be any new “glitches.”
Silence has not meant absence of progress, rest assured. Continuing research in France and Quebec has solved a few mysteries and discovered more roadblocks. However, I am close to finishing the book on the history of Jeanne Chevalier. I promised Jeanne it would be published by the 300th anniversary of her death, November 24 2016, and so it will be! Please stay tuned for the announcement!
In the meantime, I have been busy with some other projects involving spreading the word about Jeanne as well as continuing to try to untangle some puzzles about her life in France and about her first and third husbands. In the effort to promote knowledge about Jeanne, I gave two talks in France about her story – one in Hautot-Saint-Sulpice, Robert Levesque’s birthplace, and one at the Château-Musée in Dieppe, France, the port she left in 1671 to travel to Quebec with a hundred other Filles du Roi.
Another project has been around trying to ensure appropriate recognition of Jeanne’s third husband, Jean-Baptiste-François Deschamps de la Bouteillerie. After a delightful meeting with the Mayor of Cliponville, the village where Deschamps was born, we agreed something needs to be done to honor his life and his entrepreneurial work in founding Rivière-Ouelle, Quebec. With that intent in mind, I have published a short history of his life. You can read it in the article posted on this blog on October 24, 2016. There are plans to establish some sort of memorial to Deschamps in Cliponville as well.
One other project I have been working on is an attempt to address the hypothesis proposed by Eric Mardoc, an historian in Rouen. Mardoc believes there is a possibility that Jeanne came from a noble family or at least from a family of the “petite noblesse.” My research and preliminary response on this topic will be published shortly on this blog.
As soon as the book on Jeanne’s life is sent to the publisher, my next project begins – that of translating the book into French. With the help of translators, I hope to complete that effort by the end of March, 2017. Until then, I hope to stay more timely with blog posts regarding the ever-intriguing story of the life of Jeanne Marguerite Chevalier and her three husbands.