Marie Jeanne

Marie Jeanne Dufour was born on January 16, 1740, near Beaufort in the Avesnois, the northern borderlands of France. Louis XV was king, and the wars along the border would not end until the peace of 1748. Her people spoke Picard at home and in the lanes after Mass. The parish church set the calendar: saints’ days, processions, the rules of marriage and inheritance. Her parents, Antoine Dufour and Marguerite Caron, worked as laboureurs on a holding that kept cattle and grew grain and hay. A household with land and animals had more than a family that depended on wages.

Marie Jeanne was the fifth of six children. Two had died before she was born: Anne in 1736 and Pierre in 1738. Catherine, the eldest, born in 1732, salted meat, scalded pigs, and laid out linen for baptisms. Jacques, born in 1734, worked behind their father with the horses. Marie Jeanne started with the small tasks—fetching water, minding poultry, bringing bread to men in the meadow—and took on more as she grew. When a child fell ill, their mother tied a scapular to the shirt and muttered a charm as she rubbed goose fat into the chest, then still brought the family to confession when the priest called for it.

Those wars brought soldiers and talk more than battle. Men marched on the roads toward Maubeuge; travelers spoke of sieges farther off. Antoine counted sacks twice before market and told the children to stay in sight when strangers passed.

In 1753 her younger brother Louis died at eleven. He had been the one she hauled on her hip when their mother’s hands were full, the child sent with her to gather kindling and keep her company on the path. After his death she took on his chores without being asked. She did them sharply, too. When Jacques left a gate swinging, she slammed it and told him, in front of their father, that he fed other people’s cattle when he let theirs stray. Antoine did not rebuke her for the words; he rebuked Jacques for the gate.

She never learned to read. The church’s Latin and the clerk’s French were sounds, not marks she could follow. She memorized prayers in Picard and knew when to respond during Mass. When she needed to keep track of things, she laid objects out—eggs in a row to count, coins in piles, lengths of linen folded the same way each time.

In 1759 she began walking home from Mass more slowly when Jean-Baptiste Lemaire fell into step beside her. He was from a parish a short distance away, close enough that the families recognized one another’s fields and surnames. He was broad-shouldered, steady with animals, and stubborn about how he held a tool. They met at market, too, where she sold butter and a little spun thread and he bargained for iron and salt. That winter he came to Antoine’s house to speak with her father. The following year, she and Jean-Baptiste began behaving as an engaged couple. They lay together before their wedding, once, in the back of a loft when the older people were outside with the animals. Afterward she became rigid about her own routine, counting the weeks in her head and watching her body for signs that would force a hurried marriage.

They married in the parish church, with the priest reading words she could not follow but knew were binding. She moved to Jean-Baptiste’s home and took over its hearth. The first years were hard work and constant friction. She spoke quickly and did not soften her corrections. He answered in the same tone. They still rose before dawn, still put their shoulders into the same tasks. When she took milk to skim, she did it the same way every morning; when he harnessed the horses, he did it the way his father had. Quarrels ended not with apologies but with bread set on the table and work resumed.

Their first child, Marguerite Lemaire, was born in 1762. Pierre-Jacques followed in 1764. That same year Catherine died, at thirty-two. Marie Jeanne walked back to Beaufort for the funeral and helped wash the sheets for the dinner that followed. She scolded a cousin for drinking too much beer before the work was done. Grief showed in her as order: scrubbed boards, full kettles, bread kept from burning.

Jean was born in 1767. By then Marie Jeanne had become the woman other women sent for when a birth began unexpectedly. She was not a midwife, but she was steady with boiling water, clean linen, and blunt instruction. She also went to a woman the village called Sœur Barbe—not a nun, but an older widow with a reputation for cures that sat comfortably beside churchgoing. Marie Jeanne carried Sœur Barbe’s little packets of dried herbs, and she tucked a blessed candle stub into a chest for emergencies. She prayed to the Virgin Mary with the rosary when she had one, and she used charms when fear rose in her throat.

In 1770 she was pregnant again and afraid. Late in the term she began bleeding. Women gathered, and Sœur Barbe came with cloths and a jar of strong-smelling infusion. Marie Jeanne lost the child and bled heavily. For weeks she moved slowly, leaning on doorframes, skin pale against the dark of her hair. Marguerite, eight years old, kept the smaller children fed and out of the way without being told. When she could walk again, she was harsher than before: she snapped at children who tracked mud on the floor, and she checked the larder so often that Jean-Baptiste told her to leave the jars alone. She answered that jars did not fill themselves.

Marie-Anne, her fourth surviving child, arrived in 1772. Louis, their fifth, was born in 1775 and died the same year. Marie Jeanne had the infant baptized quickly. She kept the tiny cap and wrapped it in linen, stowed where her hands went when she was troubled.

From 1774 her parents began to need her. Antoine’s body slowed first. By 1776 he could not spend a whole day in the fields, and he sat indoors mending harness when his hands stopped shaking. Marie Jeanne walked back to Beaufort more often, carrying food, clean shirts, and news, with Marguerite—now in her teens—helping carry the loads. She organized help from Jacques when she could and argued with him when she could not. Antoine died in 1778. Her mother lingered longer, weaker each winter, and Marie Jeanne washed her, fed her, and kept her from falling when she rose. Marguerite Caron died in 1782, with a candle blessed at Candlemas set near the bed and the sign of the cross made over her forehead.

The next years held illness again. Jean-Baptiste began coughing in 1783, and the sickness came and went for years—fevers that left him in bed for weeks, then months of fragile health before the next bad spell. She slept lightly and rose when he called. She boiled broth, rubbed his back with warmed oil, and kept the children in line so the farm did not stall. She also quarreled with Madeleine Hubert, a neighbor who came with soup and stayed long enough to comment on Marie Jeanne’s temper. Marie Jeanne told her to mind her own pot. Later, at market, they laughed together over the price of onions and traded gossip about a cow that had broken its leg, the two of them enemies and allies at the same time.

In the winter of 1790 Jean-Baptiste’s cough worsened for the last time. He stayed in bed through January and could not sit up by February. Marie Jeanne kept the fire high and spooned broth into him, but his chest rattled and his skin went grey. He died in the bed they had shared for thirty years. She washed him herself and laid him out in a clean shirt. The priest came, and the neighbors, and then they were gone and the house was quiet.

She was fifty. A neighbor’s husband suggested she marry again—a widow with a farm needed a man’s name on leases and a man’s back in the fields. She said she had spent thirty years learning one man’s stubbornness and would not start with another. She depended instead on Pierre-Jacques, now twenty-six, to interpret papers and deal with officials. He could read and she could not, which gave him an authority she resented. She pushed him hard and accused him of withholding coins; he accused her of refusing reality. Jean, the steadier son, managed what he could between them. Marguerite came from her own household when the arguments ran too loud, bringing food and sitting with her mother until the shouting stopped and Marie Jeanne, exhausted, ate. But even with all of them, the household had fewer hands and less money.

Then the Revolution arrived. In 1791 the government required every priest to swear loyalty to the new civil constitution. Abbé Delattre, who had baptized Marie Jeanne’s children and buried her parents, refused the oath and disappeared from the parish—some said he was hiding in a farmhouse near Avesnes, others that he had crossed into the Austrian Netherlands. A younger priest named Martin took the oath and said Mass in the same church. Marie Jeanne went, but she kept her saints’ images at home and said her old prayers in Picard. Sœur Barbe was long dead by then, but Marie Jeanne still kept her dried herbs and used the same charms when she was frightened. Madeleine Hubert stopped going to Mass entirely and told Marie Jeanne she would not hear a traitor priest. They did not speak for weeks. Later they made it up without apology, the way they always did.

During the war years, soldiers moved through the Nord requisitioning hay and grain. A corporal named Lefebvre came to the door with papers and an impatient voice. Marie Jeanne hid grain behind stacked flax and told the children to keep quiet. Madeleine came the next morning to warn that another party was on the road from Landrecies, and they buried what they could in the garden. Marie Jeanne stopped going to market on days when the roads felt unsafe. She counted what remained each evening, scolded Marie-Anne for waste, and checked the door latch repeatedly at night.

The crisis of those years ground on. The holding was split and the terms worsened. Animals were sold. Linen she had spun and stored for years went out of the house for cash. She ate less so the younger ones could eat more, then argued bitterly when Pierre-Jacques spoke of taking what remained for his own household. She did not flatter or plead. She demanded.

After 1800 she stayed closer to home, taking satisfaction in small routines: the clean sweep of a hearth, a loaf baked evenly, a bowl of thick soup with a bit of bacon when there was bacon. She still enjoyed the noise after Mass, the quick exchanges in Picard, and the sharp humor of women who had done hard work all their lives. When she was angry she went to the edge of the yard and stood where she could see the fields, hands busy with a scrap of flax even if there was nothing urgent to spin.

Her eldest daughter Marguerite died in 1806 at forty-four. She had been the one who came without being asked—who brought food when Marie Jeanne forgot to eat, who sat through arguments between her mother and Pierre-Jacques, who knew when to talk and when to keep her hands busy and wait. Without her, the house was quieter and harder.

By then her son’s Pierre-Jacques and Jean had married, moved out, and were starting their own families. Only Marie-Anne, who never married , remaind and kept the household together with plain meals and careful savings.

Napoleon’s wars continued to take men and grain; the demands came regardless of who sat on what throne. In 1816 cold rain fell through the summer and the harvest failed. Bread prices doubled. Marie Jeanne and Marie-Anne rationed their flour and ate soup without meat through the winter.

In the autumn of 1819 a pain settled in Marie Jeanne’s abdomen and did not leave. It grew worse through the winter. Her belly swelled while the rest of her thinned. She could not eat without vomiting, and by January she spent more hours in bed than out of it. Marie-Anne kept the fire going and boiled broth and did not know what was wrong. No one did. Marie Jeanne died on January 29, 1820, in the bed she had shared with Jean-Baptiste and then slept in alone for thirty years. Marie-Anne washed her and dressed her in a clean shift, and the parish buried her in the churchyard with the priest’s prayers spoken over the grave.