Jeanne Mance
1606-1673 17th century
Going to nurse where nothing yet exists; the stubbornness of foundations no one signs.
Who was Jeanne Mance?
From Champagne, she crossed the Atlantic at thirty-four, a laywoman, in order to nurse. Co-founder of Ville-Marie, which became Montreal, she opened the Hôtel-Dieu there and ran it for thirty years, sailing back to France more than once for the money and the hands that were lacking. A fall on the ice broke an arm whose use she lost for years.
In their own words
If you could do one further act of charity (that I should have my keep, for myself and for one servant, and that the two thousand livres of income you have given should go entirely to the poor), we would have better means of helping them. […] I find it hard to propose this to you, because I find it hard to ask; but your kindness is so great that I would fear an everlasting reproach if I failed to tell you the needs I know of.
Mademoiselle Mance admitted to her that her frail constitution, together with the poor health she had known for seventeen or eighteen years, meant that no great reliance should be placed on her person; but that she nonetheless abandoned herself into the hands of God for the carrying out of his good pleasure, both towards the poor and in whatever else he might wish.
Mademoiselle Mance, weighing all this, told Monsieur de Maisonneuve that she advised him to go to France; that the benefactress had given her twenty-two thousand livres for the hospital […]; that she would hand them over to him so that help might be obtained […]; and that even if it were not worth the twenty-two thousand livres, she did not think she should look at it so closely, because if it were not done all was lost.