ed and scarcely voluntary, Quebec
became a city of men chiefly, there being few women besides cloistered
nuns. There had always been a demand for wives, but now that the
soldiers and officers of the Carignan-Salieres had elected to remain
in the country, the scarcity of women induced a matrimonial famine.

Talon speedily apprised Colbert of the situation, and the most comely
inmates of the refuge hospitals of Paris and Lyons were summoned to
fill this void. In 1665 one hundred of the "King's girls" arrived in
Quebec, almost instantly to be provided with partners; and although
the supply was doubled in the following year, it yet remained below
the conjugal demand.

To supply the needs of the seigneurs also became a real problem.
Talon, with grim humour, demanded a consignment of young ladies; and
in 1667 he was able to announce as follows: "They send us eighty-four
girls from Dieppe and twenty-five from Rochelle; among them are
fifteen or twenty of pretty good birth; several of them are really
_demoiselles_, and tolerably well brought up." Amusing evidence,
however, of the exceeding delicacy of such a market is found in a
letter, in which the match-making Intendant alludes to the supply of
the year 1670. "It is not expedient," he ungallantly writes to
Colbert, "to send more _demoiselles_. I have had this year fifteen of
them instead of the four I asked for."

La Hontan, writing a few years later, cannot refrain from exercising
keen but slanderous wit at the expense of these fair cargoes from
Quebec so gladly received. His description, albeit scandalous, is
amusing: "After the regiment of Carrigan was disbanded, ships were
sent out freighted with girls of indifferent virtue, under the
direction of a few pious old duennas, who divided them into three
classes. These vestals were, so to speak, piled one on the other in
three different halls, where the bridegrooms chose their brides as a
butcher chooses his sheep out of the midst of the flock. There was
wherewith to content the most fantastical in these three harems; for
here were to be seen the tall and the short, the blond and the brown,
the plump and the lean; everybody, in short, found a shoe to fit him.
At the end of a fortnight not one was left. I am told that the
plumpest were taken first, because it was thought that, being less
active, they were more likely to keep at home, and that they could
resist the winter cold better. Those who wanted a wife applied to the
d