The Fall and Rise of Thèrése Catin: A Portrait from Indiana's French and Canadian History

The unusual portrait drawn in this essay has as its dual setting the early eighteenth-century French-colonial community of Montre al linked with sections of the pays d'en haut (the upper country or Great Lakes basin) that are now part of the American Midwest. Its three subjects, a commoner businesswoman, her merchant hus band, and a renegade nobleman, all virtually unremembered for 250 years, played an active and at times controversial role in the French trade at the Miami post on the Maumee River (today's Fort Wayne, Indiana), the Ouiatanon (Wea) post on the Wabash (now West Lafayette, Indiana), and Detroit. In their home city of Mon treal these three individualists dared to thumb their noses publicly at the Church, at French officialdom in Quebec and in Versailles, and at the society in which they lived. In the face of all, they defi antly maintained their nonconformity and remained the subjects of a major scandal on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a decade. In the process, the political activities of two of them con tributed in the 1720s to the royal disfavor of the venerable gover nor-general of New France. The central figure of this trio was Th?r?se Catin, born in 1686 of humble origin, the third of nine daughters and three sons of Henri Catin, a Montreal butcher, and his wife, Jeanne Brossard.1