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Updated: June 27, 2025
A great fabric it was, this homespun, with nothing but wool in it, not attractive in pattern but able to stand no end of wear. It was fashioned for the habitant's use into roomy trousers and a long frock coat reaching to the knees which he tied around his waist with a belt of leather or of knitted yarn.
Every habitant has his horse and sleigh and thinks little of a long drive. Often in the foreground of the habitant's life, always in the background at least, stand the Church and the priest. Malbaie, like a hundred other populous, present-day Roman Catholic parishes, was nursed in the first instance by the travelling missionary.
Gambling at cards was more common among the people than suited either the priests or the civil authorities, as the records often attest. Less objectionable amusements were afforded by the corvees recreatives or gatherings at a habitant's home for some combination of work and play. The corn-husking corvee, for reasons which do not need elucidation, was of course the most popular of these.
A wolf that can break the back of a full-grown collie at one snap of his jaws, and gallop off with the carcass as if it were a chipmunk, is about as undesirable a neighbor, in the night woods, as any loup-garou ever devised by the habitant's excitable imagination.
So it turned out that if the habitant's crop failed he had little chance to do anything else without the seigneur's consent; he is, says the report of a Commission of Enquiry in 1843, "kept in a perpetual state of feebleness and dependence. He can never escape from the tie that forever binds to the soil him and his progeny; a cultivator he is born, a mere cultivator he is doomed to die."
The habitant had a profound belief in the supernatural, and was prone to associate miraculous handiwork with every unusual event. He peopled the earth and the air, the woods and the rivulets, with spirits of diverse forms and varied motives. The red man's abounding superstition, likewise, had some influence upon the habitant's highstrung temperament.
His grandson John Nairne, seigneur. Village life. The Church's influence. The habitant's tenacity. His cottage. His labours. His amusements. The Church's missionary work in the villages. The powers of the bishop. His visitations. The organization of the parish. The powers of the fabrique. Lay control of Church finance. The curé's tithe. The best intellects enter the Church.
Viewed by the traveller who passed along the river this straggling line of whitewashed structures stood out in bold relief against the towering background of green hills beyond. The whole colony formed one long rambling village, each habitant touching elbows with his neighbour on either side. Within the habitant's abode there were usually not more than three regular rooms.
Then we coursed along the valley, the habitant's eyes still on the trees, and once he stopped to emit a gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up sap trough; but I could not divine whether Paul's mirth were over a prospect of sugaring-off in the maple-woods, or at some foolish habitant who had tapped the maple too early.
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