Romain Becquet

« On est de son village » [we belong to our village], as the adage goes. But how well do we really know this long preglacial terrace left behind by the Champlain Sea as it withdrew through the narrows of the river!

The seigneuries — seigneuries, the landed estates of New France, spread out like long ribbons hooked onto the rivers and onto the St. Lawrence — were granted to people whose services had earned them the king’s favour. More than forty of them were granted in the course of the year 1672, including our own, Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets. Romain Becquet was the son of a surgeon and came from a small village not far from Rouen, in France. Rouen, in the north of France, was the city where Jeanne d’Arc was burned in 1431, so some 200 years earlier!

Romain Becquet, being a notary, looked after the settlers who were establishing themselves along the côte de Beaupré, at Beauport and on the île d’Orléans, to which Monseigneur de Laval had acquired the titles in order to people this country with good Christians. Mgr de Laval was only 36 years old when he arrived in Canada, and along the sixty leagues of territory bordering the great St. Lawrence River, the seigneuries were occupied by only about 2,500 inhabitants.

Becquet’s greffe (the body of records kept by a notary), preserved at the Archives de Québec, is one of the largest for seventeenth-century Québec. His signature appears on most of our period documents — I mean all those originating from the Île d’Orléans and the surrounding area.

Note: it was in 1672 that Molière wrote Les Femmes Savantes and that the missionary Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reached the Mississippi.

To know one’s own history is to reach the universal, where every other history merges into it. A kind of tuning fork.

Yolande Allaire Roux