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Updated: June 27, 2025
A habitant's wife, learning that a near neighbour had made an offering to the curé for prayers for rain, declared that she would give nothing, since if rain fell on the neighbour's farm it would not stop there: "S'il mouille chez les Pierrot Benjamin, il mouillera ben icitte." In each year, if he chooses, the habitant has a good many chances to cast his vote.
Each was therefore permitted to have a bake-oven of his own, and there was, of course, plenty of wood near by to keep it blazing. Many allusions have been made, in writings on the old regime, to the habitant's corvee or obligation to give his seigneur so many days of free labour in each year. In France this incident of seigneurial tenure cloaked some dire abuses.
Here the children, often a dozen or more of them, were stowed away at night on mattresses of straw or feathers laid along the floor. As the windows were securely fastened, even in the coldest weather this attic was warm, if not altogether hygienic. The love of fresh air in his dwelling was not among the habitant's virtues.
He unloaded his secret information to his friend, and was rewarded by Ingolby suddenly shaking his hand warmly. "That's the line," Ingolby said decisively. "When do you go over to Manitou again to cut old Hector Marchand's hair? Soon?" "To-day is his day this evening," was the reply. "Good. You wanted to know what the wig and the habitant's clothes are for, Berry well, for me to wear in Manitou.
But they are charming, nevertheless, and the people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient cottage an old man, in the true habitant's red woollen cap with a long fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe.
Immediately all save the Factor rushed forward to meet the little half-breed who was in charge of the storm-bound packet, and to welcome him with a fusilade of gunshots. Everyone was happy now, for last year's news of the "Grand Pays" the habitant's significant term for the outer world had at last arrived. The monotonous routine of the Post was forgotten.
Now it happened that in thus adapting the shape of grants to the immediate convenience and caprice of the habitants a curious handicap was in the long run placed upon agricultural progress. By the terms of the Custom of Paris, which was the common law of the colony, all the children of a habitant's family, male and female, inherited equal shares of his lands.
But you'll promise not to get married eh? Anyhow, there's no one in the parish for you to marry. You're too well-born and you've been too well educated for a habitant's wife and the Cure or I can't marry you." He was not taken back to see her flush deeply, and it pleased him to see this much life rising to his own touch, this much revelation to give his mind a new interest.
There were the family dinner-table of hewn pine, chairs made of pine saplings with, seats of rushes or woven underbark, and often in the corner a couch that would serve as an extra bed at night. Pictures of saints hung on the walls, sharing the space with a crucifix, but often having for ominous company the habitant's flint-lock and his powder-horn hanging from the beams.
He unloaded his secret information to his friend, and was rewarded by Ingolby suddenly shaking his hand warmly. "That's the line," Ingolby said decisively. "When do you go over to Manitou again to cut old Hector Marchand's hair? Soon?" "To-day is his day this evening," was the reply. "Good. You wanted to know what the wig and the habitant's clothes are for, Berry well, for me to wear in Manitou.
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