As I was skipping past

‘Rosalie, our little seamstress, . . . is always alone in the sewing room and yesterday, . . . as I was skipping past her, she said, ‘You’re looking quite pale, mamzelle Henriette, are you tired?’ ‘I’m more frustrated, Rosalie!’ ‘And with what?’ ‘Oh with myself, I suppose!’ ‘But you’re very fortunate, mamzelle!’ ‘Me fortunate?’ This is Henriette Desaulles, a precocious 15 year old French-Canadian, synthesising for her diary a conversation she had had earlier in the day. The diary is considered to be a ‘valuable testimony of private life in the 19th century’, and today is the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth.

Henriette was born in Saint-Hyacinthe, a city in Quebec, Canada, on 6 February 1860, into a well-known middle class family. She was educated at a local convent. In 1881, she married Maurice Saint-Jacob and together they had seven children. Maurice died in the mid-1890s while campaigning as a liberal candidate. Subsequently, Henriette wrote a celebrated literary column in Montreal’s Le Devoir under the pseudonym Fadette. There is almost no other information about her freely available on the internet, especially in English. The Diary Junction has links to websites with biographical information in French.

Henriette’s memory, however, has been kept alive because of a diary she kept as a teenager and in the years before her marriage. This was first published in its original language (French) in 1971 in Montreal by Hurtubise as Fadette - Journal d’Henriette Dessaulles, 1874-1880. It was translated and published in English by Hounslow Press as Hopes and Dreams: The Diary of Henriette Dessaulles, 1874-1881. Liedewy Hawke, the translator, won the 1986 Canada Council Prize for Translation as well as the John Glassco Translation Prize. Library and Archives Canada has various editions of the diary listed in its index.

Unfortunately, it seems there are no extracts of Henriette’s diary online except for the one made available by the website of McCord Museum of Canadian History, which also displays a picture of the original pages. The museum says Henriette was ‘a remarkably perceptive adolescent’ and that her diary provides a ‘valuable testimony of private life in the 19th century’. The entry below, it says for example, shows ‘the very different daily realities experienced by people in different social classes’.

23 October 1875
‘Rosalie, our little seamstress, . . . is always alone in the sewing room and yesterday, . . . as I was skipping past her, she said, ‘You’re looking quite pale, mamzelle Henriette, are you tired?’
‘I’m more frustrated, Rosalie!’
‘And with what?’
‘Oh with myself, I suppose!’
‘But you’re very fortunate, mamzelle!’
‘Me fortunate?’
‘But of course! You have good parents, everything you could ever want, you’re rich, you live in a fine house, you have people waiting on you hand and foot, you have a good education! Not many people are as fortunate as you.’ I didn’t reply immediately, for what could I say to her?
‘And you, Rosalie, I asked finally, ‘aren’t you fortunate?’
‘Please excuse me, mamzelle, she replied, ‘I’m quite content with my fate.’
‘You live with you’re family?’
‘No, they’re all dead. I rent a small room where I live all alone, but not for long since I work here every day from seven in the morning til seven at night. When I leave here in the evening I go to the church to pray, and go straight to bed when I get home because I have to be up at five in the morning!’
‘And Sundays?’
‘I spend a lot of time in church and, from time to time, I write to my nephew who is a vicar in the United States.’
‘And you’re content like this?’
‘Yes, I perform my duties as best I can for the Good Lord, and I know that He will do the same for me.’ ’