Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/254

242  'Tu marcheras toi-même Pendant plus de mille ans; Le dernier jugement Finira ton tourment!'"

He has been tramping ever since, wearing his shoemaker's apron, and always with five sous, never more or less, in his pocket, glad to drink a glass of wine with any honest bourgeois he meets, hut much tormented in soul when he halts for that purpose. The ballad, as sung in French Canada, is given in full in Ernest Gagnon's collection.

Among the miracles recorded by ecclesiastics, the most striking was the defeat of the English expedition against Quebec in 1690 by the Virgin Mary, to whom a church, still standing in Lower Town—Notre Dame des Victoires—was forthwith dedicated. Miraculous cures were wrought by the relics of the Jesuit Brebeuf, murdered in the country of the Hurons near Penetanguishene, and through invoking the Jesuit Le Jeune. These are about the only miracles officially credited to the Jesuits; they bear no comparison with those ascribed to the Jesuit Anchieta in Brazil; still less with those of St. Francis Xavier and the missionary thaumaturgists of his day. The performance of miracles by the Canadian Jesuits may possibly have been hindered by the presence of heretic traders from the neighboring English and Dutch colonies; it was cynically suggested at the time that unless they could banish the smallpox, always raging among the Indians and frequently attacking the settlements, it was useless to work minor wonders as a means of impressing either red men or white.

The nuns were more successful. Marie de l'Incarnation and the Mère de Saint-Augustin possessed the spiritual charismata of the Christian women of whom Tertullian wrote: "There is at this day among us a sister who has the gift of revelations, which she receives in church amid the solemnities of the Lord's day by ecstasy of the spirit; she converses with angels and sometimes also with the Lord, and she both hears and sees mysteries." The astounding visions of these two Quebec nuns are described at length by a recent biographer, Abbé Casgrain. Both were forewarned of the earthquake of 1663, when, as the Relations say, rivers and lakes changed their beds, mountains were swallowed, and forests hurled in the air, the trees falling on end with the roots upward; the warning was conveyed by the appearance of demons, which gathered over Quebec and were restrained for a time, but only for a time, by a majestic youth of whom they stood in awe. The statue of Notre Dame de Toute-Grâce, at the Hôtel-Dieu Convent, was wonderfully gifted. The Mère du Saint-Esprit, of that house, foretold its destruction by fire. In 1810 a Protestant woman visited it at Christmas and prayed