# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/The Miracles of Sainte Anne

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THE MIRACLES OF SAINTE ANNE
BOATMEN sing prayers and praises to the good Sainte Anne; the habitants kneel at wayside shrines to her; they build chapels to her memory; they make pilgrimages to her finger in Baie St. Paul; and well may they do these things, for she has been their friend in a thousand perils. True, the French have a mediæval honesty of faith, and they pray to many other saints beside, nay, are on intimate terms with them. It is recorded by the proud old family of Lévis, after which they have named Point Lévis (not Levi), opposite Quebec, that when a chevalier of that house was about to salute a statue of the Virgin, he heard a sweet voice from heaven saying, "Cousin, keep on your hat." All through old Canada you find churches where sacred relics—bits of bone or withered toes and fingers—work wonders of healing among the afflicted, and a well-known type of the votive church is that of Bonsecours, in ​Montreal, where stands an image of the Virgin that has for years exercised a miraculous power of saving sailors in storms and besetments, and they have made many offerings in return.
Yet, of all churches in the colony, that of Ste. Anne de Beaupré (St. Anne of the Bowsprit) is most noted. The name is derived from this circumstance. Two fishermen were caught in a storm on the St. Lawrence, and one was swept overboard and drowned. The other, clinging to the bowsprit, swore that if Sainte Anne would help him to reach the shore he would build a shrine to her. The boat bumped into the land at the site of the chapel, whose erection he undertook forthwith. This first chapel was finished in 1660; the new one, raised by the Pope to a shrine of the first order, in 1876. The healing spring was a separate discovery. It was while working here to lay the foundations for a house that a habitant, Louis Guimont, who had been racked with rheumatism, suddenly found relief. Scoffers said that he had sweat the disease out by hard work, but Guimont scoffed at them in turn, for had not Sainte Anne blessed the spring beside the way and whispered words of promise to him? The fame of the spot went through the country. Increasing thousands go to it on crutches or on litters, and leave them there, together with spectacles, bandages, splints, pill-boxes, cigars, liquor,—an astonishing array of proofs of release from illness and bad habits through ​saintly intercession. Water from the spring that bubbles forth beside the church is carried away in bottles by the multitude, and is used in the curing of all diseases.
Our saint was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and, under authority of the Pope, in 1876 became patroness of Canada. On her death, in Jerusalem, she was placed in the family vault, whence, in Marcus Aurelius's day, her coffin was torn by the infidels, who were trying to efface all sacred relics and monuments from the Holy Land. One coffin, which they pitched upon the sands, they could neither burn nor break open. It was that of Sainte Anne. Enraged at the futility of their assaults, they dragged it to the Mediterranean and threw it into the water. It refused to sink, and swam to the town of Apt, in Provence, where it lay buried in the sand until a huge fish uncovered it, in the sight of a party of fishermen. They took it up, and discovered it to be the coffin of Sainte Anne, though they could not open it, and their bishop walled it up in a crypt, where it stayed for seven hundred years, with a lamp burning before it. Next the Emperor Charlemagne opened the crypt, in obedience to a vision granted to a deaf and dumb boy, and removed the coffin. After some other centuries the bones were sent to Canada, and they are now exhibited at the shrine of Beaupré.
It was Sainte Anne who saved the wife of Cadieux, or Cayeux, though some believe that it could have ​been only the Virgin herself. Cadieux was a French immigrant of education, a soldier and adventurer, who had either a disappointing love-affair or had fallen out of favor at court. He had a native thrift, withal, wrote pleasant verse and music, was popular with all sorts in the New World, and traded with the Indians, to his own advantage, when he went to live beside Calumet Falls, near the present village of Bryson. The Ottawas thought so much of him that they gave him one of their girls to wife. While these two were packing furs into their canoe for a semi-annual shipment to Montreal, rumors came to them of an approach of the hostile Iroquois, in war-paint. Hastily finishing the loading of the boat, Cadieux committed it, with his wife and two others, to the torrent. The oarsmen were skilled, but in the rapid and dangerous stream their address would have gone for naught had not the wife prayed to Sainte Anne for guidance. Instantly a figure, shining, silvery, misty, appeared before the prow, as if it were shaped from the spray, and, closely following, as it led this way and that, past shoals and rocks and eddies, the rowers brought the canoe to quiet water. Nor did the saint desert them then, but shone before them all the way to Montreal, where they went thankfully ashore, sold their furs at a good figure, and did not forget the Church when they received their money.
But how fared it with Cadieux all this time? ​Heavily. Fearful lest the canoe should be seen and fired on, he and an Indian friend remained to drive back the invading Iroquois. He likewise should have invoked a saint, but he was too busy and eager to remember his duty, so his patron was forgotten. When the marauders appeared, the two fighters dodged from tree to tree, shooting from different points and giving to the enemy an impression that a considerable force was standing against them. Every shot brought down a man; but Cadieux's Indian friend was slain and his wigwam was burned before the band retreated. Knowing that it was likely to return, the white man fled into the forest, and died there of hunger, exhaustion, and "the madness of the woods." His last energies were given to writing "The Lament of Cadieux" on a large sheet of birch bark that was clasped to his breast when the rescue-party found him. It is a sad song that is often heard on the river, where it is sung by the "shanty-men." His memorial cross has been cut away by lumbermen for sacred relics, but the spoilers have tried to make good the loss by carving votive crosses on the neighboring trees, Cadieux's "Lament" is a poem of some length, beginning in this fashion: