#la corriveau

[paperandsong]

Hey, you seem like you are very interested by legends and poto crossovers and i felt like you might be interested by Québéquois legends. More particularly the stories of La Corriveau and Rose Latulipe. Coming from Québec and having heard these stories, i think they bolth have phantom-y vibes in my opinion. Especially the story of Rose Latulipe.

Hi Anon! It’s true – I love folklore of all kinds. Christine Daaé was raised with Swedish fairy tales and Breton legends and I like exploring how that must have impacted her as an adult. Did she believe in the Voice, even when she probably knew better, because she so desperately wanted all of her father’s legends to be true? When I read about George Sand’s Légendes rustiques I started to think about what other stories Christine might have heard as a child, especially in Perros. This was the inspiration for the PotO Légendes rustiques project. 

Thank you so much for suggesting these two Québéquois legends! I had not heard of them before. I agree with you – Rose Latulipe definitely has Phantom vibes – specifically Red Death Phantom vibes.

I’ll summarize the stories for others:

Rose Latulipe is an 18th century legend about a young girl who loves to dance. At Mardi Gras, a stranger arrives at her parents’ party. His horse breaths fire, he wears velvet gloves over his claws. Sometimes he has a hoof. He dances with Rose until midnight, when Mardi Gras is over and Lent begins, at which time he reveals himself as the Devil. In some stories, a priest or another pious party-goer defends Rose with a cross. But in other stories, Rose is whisked away to Hell. This story makes me think of both the Red Death and the Swedish song Hårgalåten, also about a stranger with a cloven foot who shows up to make everyone dance. I found an illustrated video of the story at TV5 Québec Canada here. 

Image from TV5 Québec Canada

La Corriveau is another Québéquois legend from the 18th century about a real woman named Marie-Josephte Corriveau. She was accused of murdering her second husband, and later accused of murdering her first as well. She was found guilty and hanged by the British Army. Her body was hanged in a kind of cage, called a gibbet, for public display at the crossroads of Lauzon and Bienville streets in Québec. Legends rose up about Corriveau and the crossroads where her body once hung are said to be haunted by her ghost, still trapped in its cage. The historical woman had a very hard life, with all of her ten siblings dying in childhood, being married at 16, and being poorly treated most of her life. When she did confess to the murder, it was because of her husband’s treatment of her. 

Illustration by Charles Walter Simpson for the Légendes du Saint-Laurent, 1926

[whysperingwoods]

random question: have you heard of la Corriveau?

Yes! La Corriveau is a famous legend here and one of the most famous “witches” in Canada (although she’s never actually been accused of witchcraft). I was thinking about making a video about her story, it’s pretty interesting!

[the-october-country]

Sometimes stories of true crime give rise to folklore...

[w1tch1ng-h0ur]

La Corriveau

Marie-Josephte Corriveau was born in 1733 in Saint-Villier, a small town in what is now Quebec. Marie married young, wedding a farmer named Charles Bouchard at the age of sixteen. The couple had two daughters and a son before Charles died under mysterious cirumstances. Marie was known to be a beautiful woman but was very jealous. Marie’s second husband was a doctor who had a lot of female clients and suspected that he was cheating on her with one of them. One night, Marie gave her husband poisoned her husbands food. The coroner concluded that the doctors death was accidental due to her claiming that she unknowingly poisoned her husband. According to the legends, Marie Corriveau may have had as many as seven husbands and all of them died under Mysterious circumstances. Her last husband lead to her demise. Marie remarried, to a man named Louis Etienne Dodier. The marriage was not a happy one, and both Marie and her father Joseph Corriveau were known to be on bad terms with Dodier. it was rumored that dodier was killed by one of his horses and people began to grow suspicious after she didn’t grieve as much widow would.  

In 1763, the British took official possession of France’s North American territories, they were eager to make an impression on the local colonists as a force for order, so they decided to hold an inquiry into the death. The inquiry opened on March 29th, around two months after Dodier’s death, at the Uruline convent in Quebec City.  The inquiry took 11 days, with most of the Corriveau’s neighbours testifying, and at the end of it they decided that Joseph Corriveau had murdered Louis Dodier, that Marie had been an accessory, and that Isabelle Sylvain (a cousin of Marie’s) had perjured herself to protect them. With the force of martial law behind them, they immediately passed a sentence of death on Joseph, while Marie and Isabel were sentenced to be whipped and branded.

The story did not end there, however. Before the sentence of death was due to be carried out, Joseph made a confession to his priest that his daughter Marie had actually been the one to kill Dodier, and he had simply helped her. Whether it was Joseph or his confessor who passed this on to the authorities, they decided to hold a retrial. At this Marie pleaded guilty to the charge of murdering her husband. Her father and her cousin were both released without charge (her father receiving an official royal pardon), but Marie was sentenced not just to death, but to death and exposure. Because by the laws of England Marie was not just guilty of murder, but of the more serious charge of Petty Treason.

Marie lived on in legend, however. Stories soon started that she was a witch. Like all witches, she vowed that the grave would not hold her, and her corpse did not rest easy in the cage at the crossroads. According to the legend, her last words were “I shall be avenged!”  Rather than standing for two months and then getting a Christian burial, instead she was said to have hung at the crossroads for years before disappearing, claimed by the devil himself. people said that anytime they walked on the crossroad, it would feel as though her corpse would follow their movement. Some even claimed that her corpse would “hug” them. Other stories had her ghost float around, still bound within the cage, clinging to the backs of lone travellers and demanding that they carry her across the Saint Lawrence river.

This local folklore received a major boost in 1849. The cage was exhibited in Montreal and New York, awakening interest in the local tales that had sprung up over the previous century. 

The motif of La Corriveau in her cage continued to drift through Quebec’s culture, inspiring novels, ballets, painting and music. Even to this day she is referenced, such as in the song “La corrida de la Corriveau” by Mes Aïeux, released in 2001. The cage stolen from the church in Lévis was considered lost – legend had it in “Barnum’s Boston Museum”, with a placard simply reading “From Quebec”, though Barnum had never had a museum in Boston, and no such exhibit could be found in the city. It was assumed it had been lost in a fire, until 2011. That year the Lévis Historical Society discovered it exactly where you would expect to find the cage of a legendary witch – Salem, Massachusetts. The Peabody Essex museum, which had been storing the cage in a back room, loaned it to the city of Lévis for two years, and it remains there today.

[mebwalker]

Jules d'Haberville and Cameron of Lochiel

Jules d’Haberville and Cameron of Lochiel

An incident in the rebellion of 1745, David Morier (Photo credit) —ooo — In 2012, I wrote two posts about Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens. I mentioned Sir Charles G. D. Robert‘s first translation of Aubert de Gaspé’s novel, The Canadians of Old, published in 1890). In fact, I did not discover Sir Roberts’s second translation until I prepared my last post. As a university teacher of…

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[cloverhighfive]

favourite bit of lore?

There’s a legend where I live about a woman, la Corriveau, in the 1700′s who murdered her husband because he was abusive. She was convicted and was hanged, and then they put her body in a cage at a crossroads for 5 weeks.

The crossroads is haunted, as you can hear chains, especially in... the house that was built on that corner.

[griffiadirtycanadian]

A Quebecois inspired couple from two of my favorite urban legend! La corriveau and La chasse galerie(the bewitched canoe)! 

[abbypaige-mending]

From Vilified to Victorious: Reconceiving La Corriveau in Anne Hébert’s La Cage

“Considering that the French-Canadian mother ‘is the only female archetype in Quebec literature’ (Le Moyne 79), Hébert re-establishes Ludivine’s bonds with her historical model, while also scoffing at the societal and literary pigeonhole that reduces women to their reproductive capacities.”