What Happens When A Fille du Roi Dies in Childbirth?
What Happens When a Fille du Roi Dies in Childbirth?
On May 30, 1694, at the parish of Saint-Enfant-Jésus in Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern end of Montreal Island, the curé recorded two entries on the same page of the register. The first was a burial. The second was a baptism.
The woman who died was Françoise Baiselat, about forty-eight years old, wife of André Corbeil dit Tranchemontagne. The child who was baptized was their newborn son, François. His mother's burial and his first breath of recorded existence share the same handwriting, the same ink, the same page.
It is the kind of moment that stops you in the archives. Not because death in childbirth was rare in seventeenth-century New France — it was not — but because of what this particular death set in motion. And because of who this woman was.
Françoise Baiselat was the daughter of a master enamel maker from the Rue Saint-Sauveur in Paris. Around 1668, she sailed to New France as a Fille du Roi — one of the roughly 800 women sent by the Crown to populate the colony. She carried a dowry of 300 livres, an unusually generous sum that suggests she came from a family of some standing. She was approximately seventeen years old.
Within weeks of arriving, she married Laurent Cambin dit Larivière, a former soldier of the Carignan-Salières Regiment who had served in the Dugué Company. They settled at Pointe-aux-Trembles on Montreal Island. Laurent died around 1670, leaving Françoise with a young daughter named Marie-Françoise. She was perhaps twenty-four.
She married again — Pierre Marsan dit Lapierre, another Carignan-Salières veteran from the Chambly Company, born in Rouen. Together they had at least eight children over more than twenty years. Pierre died in late 1693. And so Françoise, now about forty-seven years old, married for the third time: André Corbeil dit Tranchemontagne, yet another former soldier of the regiment, this time from the Crisafy Company. André was born about 1664 — making him nearly twenty years younger than his bride.
That all three husbands came from different companies of the same regiment speaks to the social world of Pointe-aux-Trembles: a community built by military settlement, where the veterans of the Carignan-Salières formed the backbone of parish life.
When Françoise died on May 30, 1694, she left behind children from all three marriages. One adult daughter from the Cambin union. Five or six minor children from the Marsan marriage. And a newborn from the third — whose twenty-seven-year-old father could not sign his name and had no money.
What happened next is what makes this case extraordinary — not because it was unusual for colonial New France, but because the documents survived.
Within a week of Françoise's burial, a guardianship petition was filed. The tutelle — the French colonial legal mechanism that appointed a guardian for minor children — assembled members of the community to act in the children's interest. This was not optional; it was how the system protected the vulnerable.
Then came the hard part. Three estates from three marriages had to be untangled. Property held in community between Françoise and each of her husbands needed to be divided among children from different unions, some of them minors, one of them a newborn. The notary recorded a transaction in which the three families came together in Ville-Marie to negotiate the settlement. Corbeil, the surviving husband, agreed to pay his obligations in wheat — because there was no money.
A compromise was reached with the curé over the funeral debt. A follow-up document in 1697 excluded one of the families — the Du Fresne heirs — from a specific claim against the estate. And then the case went quiet. For nine years.
In 1706, one of the grown Marsan children challenged the original settlement. The dispute escalated beyond the local notary, beyond the seigneurial court, all the way to Jacques Raudot — the Intendant of New France, the second-highest authority in the colony after the Governor. Raudot personally reviewed the evidence accumulated over twelve years and issued his ordonnance, settling the matter once and for all.
Seven legal documents. Twelve years. From parish curé to the Intendant himself.
What these records reveal is not just the details of one family's inheritance struggle — it is the institutional infrastructure of colonial New France in action. The tutelle system ensured that children were not left to fend for themselves. The notarial system created written records of every agreement, every payment, every compromise. The colonial courts provided mechanisms for dispute resolution that could span decades. And when those mechanisms proved insufficient, the Intendant's authority served as the final arbiter.
For genealogists, this case is a reminder of what lies beyond the vital records. We tend to search for baptisms, marriages, and burials — the moments of entry, union, and departure. But the notarial records, guardianship proceedings, and colonial court documents often contain far richer information about how our ancestors actually lived: what they owned, who they trusted, how they resolved conflict, and what happened to their children when they could no longer protect them.
Françoise Baiselat left no written words. She could not sign her name. She appears in the historical record only through the documents that others created around her — a marriage contract, baptismal records, census entries, and the seven legal proceedings that followed her death. But those documents, read together across twelve years, tell us something remarkable: that a woman who crossed an ocean at seventeen, married three soldiers, raised twelve children, and died in childbirth at forty-eight was not forgotten by the systems that governed her world.
The curé paid for her funeral out of his own pocket. The notary assembled three families in one room to protect her children's interests. The tutor system watched over her minor children for years. And when a dispute arose a decade later, the Intendant of New France himself weighed in.
Today, between 1.1 and 1.5 million Quebecers descend from her through the Marsan line alone.
The parish register page from May 30, 1694 — burial and baptism, same day, same hand — is where her story ends and where the story of her legacy begins.
Read the Full Case Study
The Françoise Baiselat Inheritance reconstructs all seven legal documents from 32 primary sources — with complete methodology, document galleries, and evidence analysis.
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