When the tour was finished, I went into the Musée de l'Amérique. I explored an exhibit called "Une Colonie Retrouvée/ A Colony Found Again," which is a multimedia presentation on a short-lived French colony in Quebec at what is now Cap-Rouge.
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Jacques Cartier, the explorer who claimed Canada for the French, and the soldier and courtier Jean-François de la Rocque de Roberval were sent by Francis I to form a colony in North America during the 1540s. The colony fell apart in 1543 due to disease, bad weather, hostile Indians, and lack of supplies. Part of the reason why Francis I wanted a colony was to gain mineral wealth. Cartier and Roberval found what they thought was diamonds and gold but was later revealed to quartz and fool's gold leading to a saying "faux comme les diamants du Canada/ fake as Canadian diamonds." An interesting story I learned about was that of Marguerite de la Rocque, Roberval's unmarried niece who had an affair with a young man during the voyage over to Canada. She and her lover were punished for their immorality by being marooned on a remote island, where they had a child. Her lover and their child died of disease and she was eventually rescued by fishermen. It had been a beautiful day when I left Laval, so I put on a cute summer outfit only to get caught in the rain on my back.
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Tuesday night was the third of the excursions I had booked: a ghost tour in Vieux-Québec. We left Laval at eight o'clock at night and we met the tour guide at Le Marrin which was a jail back in colonial times. Our guide was Jean Rattier, a servant who was convicted of killing a young woman in the Seventeenth Century and sentenced to hang. Luckily for him, Rattier was sentenced to hang around the time that the executioner of Quebec died and he escaped execution by taking the job for himself. He lead us through Vieux-Québec and we ran into a number of Quebec's other ghostly residents including Docteur l'Indienne, who is believed to have been Canada's first serial killers; Jean Hautecoeur, a man who was hung for murder by none other than Jean Rattier; Marie Maréchal, a haunted and hysterical woman out for revenge for the slaughter of her family; La Carriveau, who was put to death for killing her second husband and her dead body was displayed in an iron cage; and Marie Rivière, a fille du roi (a young woman who was sent to the colonies to marry a settler) and the wife of Jean Rattier, who put her in the stocks for theft.
