Chapter V,

DENOMINATIONAL INSTITUTIONS.

We must now turn to the efforts made for education in the State of Louisiana under denominational influences. Many of the private schools are more or less strictly affiliated with denominational interests, but the scope of the present volume will not permit the writer to do more than describe such of the institutions as seem to him most important historically, or from the permanence given them by endowments.

THE URSULINES' CONVENT.

The educational efforts of the Ursuline nuns may certainly claim the first notice of a historian of education in Louisiana by reason of the antiquity of their establishment. These efforts began in the autumn of 1727, and they have probably never been discontinued since that time. Into the penetralia of conventual education no investigator may go, but we are furnished with ample information of the inception of the undertaking. We have seen how Governor Bienville made an effort to have a male college established in the colony. It was by his hand also that the first efforts were made for the education of girls.

To obviate the necessity of sending them abroad for education Bienville sought in his native Canada a few Sœurs Grises to teach the girls and take charge of the sick; but his project proved impracticable. Feeling that the prosperity and even the existence of the colony depended, in a great measure, in establishing educational institutions for the young, the governor consulted Father Beaubois, the lately arrived superior of the Jesuits, who had come to evangelize the outlying districts of Orleans Island and the Indian tribes of the Territory. The zealous father suggested the Ursulines of Rouen as likely to be able to supply religious teachers, and to them application was immediately made. To Bienville, then, New Orleans is indebted for its first convent, though the nuns did not arrive during his administration. Perier replaced him as governor October 26, 1726, and they did not reach New Orleans until August 7, 1727. *

Father Beaubois, acting under the authority of Mgr. Jean de la Croix de St. Valier, bishop of Quebec, negotiated with the Company of the Indies, which agreed to maintain six nuns, to pay their passage, and that of four servants to serve them during the voyage, and further, to pay the passage of those who for any motive might wish to

*The Ursulines in Louisiana, p. 5.

return to France. It was agreed that one of the nuns should be housekeeper of the hospital and should occupy herself with all the temporal concerns; that two others should continually be at the service of the sick; that there should be one for the school of the poor, and another should serve as substitute to any of the others in case of sickness or the like. When the nuns might do so advantageously they were to take, if they thought proper, boarding pupils, but none of those that might be charged with the care of the sick should be diverted nor applied to the education of the boarding pupils.*

On the 12th of January, 1727, all the nuns destined for the Louisiana Monastery assembled in the infirmary of the Ursulines' convent in Rouen, to meet for the first time the superior, Mother Marie Tranchepain de St. Augustine, who had been set over the new establishment by the bishop of Quebec, in whose diocese Louisiana then was. The names of these first sisters were as follows:

Soeur Marguerite Judde de St. Jean l'Évangéliste, professe de la Communeauté de Rouen.

Soeur Marianne Boulanger de St. Angélique de Rouen.

Sœur Magdeleine de Mahiew de St. Francis de Xavier, professe de la Communeauté du Hâvre.

Sœur Renée Guiquel de Ste. Marie, professe de Vannes.

Soeur Marguerite de Salaou de Ste. Thérèse de Ploërmel.

Sour Cécile Cavalier de St. Joseph, professe de la Communeauté d'Elbouf. Soeur Marianne Daiu de Ste. Marthe, professe de la Communeauté de Hennebon. Soeur Marie Hochard de St. Stanislas, novice.

Soeur Claude Maffy, séculière de Chœur.

Soeur Anne, séculière converse.

These sisters were accompanied to New Orleans by Fathers Tartarin and Doutrebleau, very worthy missionaries of the Society of Jesus. On the 22d of February, 1727, they embarked on the Gironde at Port l'Orient, but contrary winds detained them in the harbor until *Soeur Tranchepain de St. Augustine's Avant propos. The royal approval was also sought for this establishment, and was given in the following document:

To-day King Louis XV being at Fontainebleau, it has been represented to him on the part of Sisters Marie Tranchepain de St. Augustine and Marie Anne Le Boulanger de Ste. Angélique, Ursulines of Rouen, that they had, with the assistance of Sister Catherine de Bruserby de St. Amant, first superior of the Ursulines of France, ratified a bargain with the directors of the Company of the Indies, whereby the said sisters engage to transport themselves to Louisiana with four other nuns of their order, to charge themselves with the care of the Hospital of New Orleans, and to employ themselves at the same time in the education of young girls, conformably to their want. The Company of the Indies undertakes to provide for the needs of the hospital and for the maintenance of the nuns according to the agreement. They hope by the benediction of God a happy success in their enterprise, whose pious and charitable principles promise them the protection of the King, supplicating very humbly His Majesty to approve their establishment in the province of Louisiana, whereto His Majesty, having regard and wishing to favor every thing that can contribute to solacing the sick poor and to the education of youth, has approved the treaty made between the directors of the Company of the Indies and the Ursuline nuns."

the following day. The mother superior described the passage as most perilous, and the length of time consumed by the voyage thoroughly bears her out, for it was not until the 7th of August that the party reached New Orleans. At some distance below the city they had taken to small craft, so as to hasten up the river, and thus an early opportunity was given for that hospitable reception thus recorded by the superior:

When we were 8 or 10 leagues from New Orleans we commenced to meet habitations. There was no one but stopped us to make us enter his house, and everywhere we were received with a joy beyond all expression. On every side they promised us boarding pupils, and some wished to give them to us already.

This hospitality, we may be sure, was not diminished as they drew nearer to the city, for the mother superior writes:

The inhabitants of New Orleans wish that we should lack nothing; they vie with one another in hospitality toward us. This generosity charges us with obligation to almost everybody. Among our most devoted friends are M. le Commandant and his lady, who are persons full of merit, and their society is very agreeable.

The welcome given by Father Beaubois and the reception of the nuns is thus described in the Ursulines in Louisiana (p. 12):

The delight of Father Beaubois on the arrival of the nuns, whom he had given up as lost, can not be described. When the first greetings were over he conducted them to the poor church, to thank God for having rescued them from the dangers of the deep, and thence to his own house, where they sat down to a comfortable breakfast at 11 o'clock. Whether they walked processionally or were conveyed in the carriages of the commandant does not appear. But, breakfast over, they were anxious to be conducted, as soon as convenient, to their own home. The monastery the Company of the West Indies was building was far from completion, but the best house in the colony, Bienville's country house, was offered for their temporary abode. This, then, into which they entered on the evening of August 7, 1727, was the first convent on the delta of the Mississippi, the oldest, indeed, from St. Lawrence to the Gulf by some seventy years. It was situated in the square now bounded by Bienville, Chartres, Douane (custom-house), and Decatur streets. It was two stories high; the flat roof could be used as a belvedere or gallery. Six doors gave air and entrance to the apartments on the ground floor. There were many windows, but, instead of glass, the sashes were covered with fine. thin linen, which let in as much light as glass and more air. The ground about the house was cleared; it had a garden in front and a poultry yard in the rear, but the whole establishment was in the depth of the forest; the streets, marked by the surveyor some years before, had not yet been cut through as far as Bienville street, on which the nuns' garden opened; on all sides were forest trees of prodigious height and size. From the roof the nuns could look abroad on a scene of weird and solemn splendor. The surrounding wilderness, with its spreading live oaks and ghastly cypresses, cut up by glassy, meandering bayous, was the refuge and home of reptiles, wild beasts, vultures, herons, and many wondrous specimens of the fauna of Louisiana.

EARLIEST EFFORTS.

Almost immediately our good nuns began to teach the children, to instruct the Indian and negro races, and to care for the sick. The governor wished them to

add a Magdalen asylum to their good works; but I doubt if they were able to undertake this work of mercy for the abandoned women of the colony. They received under their protection the orphans of the Frenchmen recently massacred by the Natchez, and the filles-à-la-cassette (girls with trunks or caskets), several installments of whom the king sent out as wives for his soldiers. And later these good nuns received large numbers of the exiled women and children of the wandering Acadians.*

The one to whose care the instruction of the children was first allotted was Soeur Madeleine Mahieu de St. Francis Xavier. She, haply the first woman engaged in the systematic instruction of girls in the colony, was the first of the company of nuns to be called to her reward (July 6, 1728). The circular letter issued in her honor by the mother superior makes the following statement:

She solicited me many times that she might have the care of instructing the savages and negresses, but being already under promise to another sister, I granted her the instruction of the day pupils (externes). She took delight in them, and nothing contented her more than to see their number increase, and the more ignorant these children were the more devoted she was to them.t

The boarding department was under the supervision of Sœur Marguerite Judde. She died on the 14th of August, 1731, and is thus characterized by the superior:

Her love for poverty was so great, that she never wished to keep for herself any of the boarding money, or the payments parents made her.

Of the extent of her duties we may gain a hint from the statement that in May, 1728, less than a year after the arrival of the Ursulines— The nuns had twenty boarders, among them girls of 15 who had never heard mass and whom they took great pains to instruct, that when they went home they might establish religion in their families.

CHANGES IN LOCATION.

We have seen that the nuns were first domiciled in Bienville's country house:

Tradition asserts that the nuns did not remain long in Bienville's house. A plantation and some slaves had been given to them by the Indian company, to which they removed, probably, as soon as they were able to erect a temporary dwelling. Bienville's house, though the largest in the colony, soon became too small for the numbers placed under their care. Not a stone upon a stone remains of these two oldest convents on the delta. The first fell a prey to the flames in the dreadful conflagration which spread from the house of a Spaniard, on Good Friday, 1788, to nearly 500 houses, leaving thousands homeless. What the second was like I have not been able to ascertain, but its site is on a short street, flanked by cotton presses, and opening on the Levee, called Nun street, in commemoration of the nuns who once prayed and taught within its limits. A long, straggling street, thickly fringed with very unpretentious houses, runs through the old Ursuline plantation, and recalls its ancient owners by its title, Religious street. Time has not left the slightest vestige of these old monasteries or the fine trees and well-kept gardens that surrounded them.

*Ursulines in Louisiana, p. 13.

Tranchepain de St. Augustine, p. 43,

Ursulines in Louisiana, p. 12,

The third convent of Louisiana stands quite within the ancient city limits of the capital, on the square bounded by Chartres, Ursuline, Hospital and Old Levee streets, on a line with the first, Bienville's house, but at the opposite end of the city. It was begun in 1727, finished in 1734, and is to-day the oldest house in the Mississippi Valley, and perhaps the strongest. Built of the very best materials, in the Tuscan composite style, its walls are several feet thick, the beams and rafters, which the saw never touched, seem as strong as when they left the forest, the shutters are of iron, and the bolts and bars and hinges are not surpassed for size and strength by those of any prison. The builders made it strong enough to stand a siege, for in those days an attack from the Indians or the English was by no means improbable.*

The Ursulines made another removal in 1824. In 1831 their old convent became, for a brief time, the statehouse, and in 1834 was granted by them for the perpetual use of the archbishop, and since that time it has been his seat. A more charming spot it would be hard to find, and one's thoughts are prone to wander, while looking out upon the garden of bananas, oranges, and ferns, back to the time when it was the haunt of gentle maidens that embroidered and stitched and knitted fancy work there, filling out in the practice of these housewifely accomplishments the day that was further devoted to study and music and religion.

No one would dream of asserting that the equipment in teachers and material was large in those early times, and, from the standpoint of to-day, the culture that could have been gained from these sources was not large. Indeed, in those times, when the need of multiplying and so possessing the earth, was great, time could not be spared for any extended cultivation. A woman's first duty was then felt to be to the race and not to her own individual cultivation. There were no young novices recruited from the pupils, and small wonder it is, though the writer of The Ursulines in Louisiana (p. 13) remarks:

It is not a little singular that among all these girls, and even among their own pupils, they never, in the early times, found a religious vocation, but were obliged to depend upon their mother country for subjects. Women were very scarce throughout the colony, and the poor young creatures just referred to had scarcely tasted the hospitality of the Ursulines when they were claimed by planters and settlers in need of helpmates. These marriages, made on so short an acquaintance, almost invariably turned out well.

We must not however, with the thankful Phariseeism of our day, look down upon such influences for culture. A few months of refining association often outweighs in its effect on character all the coarseness of untutored years, granted a fine nature to start with. That was the time for ornamental education, the education that aims at accomplishment. We may regret that this course is still largely followed in the education of women in Louisiana; it would be anachronistic to undervalue its importance and value for the earlier times.

*The Ursulines in Louisiana, p. 14.

Cable, The Creoles of Louisiana,