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As soon as Spring arrived, we all returned to our families. Many of us had to help with work in the fields. After a long winter, life would regain its right, and the bazaars, the religious or profane holidays, and marriages, followed each other with a still solid rhythm, even if the heart was no longer in it after so many years of pillage, of suffering, and of fratricidal hate.

One foggy and frosty morning in the Fall of 1659, a Jesuit Father who we did not know, appeared in the college yard, issuing forth, thin, black, austere and astonishing, from the thick soup which, for almost three weeks now, had hovered over Dijon. Crowding into the galleries along the nave of the church which were reserved for us, we could see him stride with a steady step the distance which separated him from the altar, kneel down and start praying with fervour.

After the mass, he spoke powerfully and persuasively. His warm voice vibrated under the venerable vaulted ceiling, exhorting us to cross the ocean to evangelise the savages in New France in order to save them from the torments of Hell. All day long, discussions simmered and during the evening, after classes, i continued talking about it quite late, in the darkness with my friends. Eldest son of my family, my life had seemed to stretch out before me; i would have to continue the tasks that my father had set me.

But, the ocean, virgin lands, souls in peril….

The preacher was waiting for us after mass the following morning, for the signing of contracts : ocean crossing paid for, an assured welcome by the community of Jesuit Fathers… no end-of-month worries for a pure soul determined to serve the Lord ! I signed up. Without talking it over with my father. Once accepted, how could he have withheld me from Holy Mother Church ?

This text is an extract from L'histoire de Nicolas Perrot (2001), reproduced here with the generous permission of Christine Sobota, Louise Sauvageau, Etienne Audet-Walsh, and Jean-Pierre Sergerie