# Père Marquette/Chapter 3

On the 10th of June, 1637, there was born of a proud and ancient line in a proud and ancient little city of France Jacques Marquette, destined to make famous a name which had been honorable and distinguished for five centuries. Laon, his birthplace, was one of those fortified French towns which has had an unbroken record of combat from the time the Romans built their first watchtower on its rocky eminence to the ghastly and glorious years of the World War. It forced back the Vandals; it held its steep and strongly fortified ridge against the invading Huns. There are some old Latin hexameters—probably the work of a belligerent monk—which tell how the savage hordes, failing of easy victory, passed by the stern little citadel to seek for richer and more defenceless spoil.
If Laon cannot claim to be "virgin of Eng​lish," like St. Malo and other guarded strongholds, it never failed to drive out the invader. If it fell twice before German onslaughts, it rose twice triumphant from defeat. During the Hundred Years War it was snatched from France by the Burgundians, recaptured by the French, lost to the English, and recovered finally after the consecration of Charles the Seventh. Henry the Fourth besieged it successfully in 1594. Beneath its walls Napoleon met defeat.
No city of the Middle Ages fought harder than did Laon for the communal charter, so dear to the burgher's heart, so necessary to his manhood and to his well-being. The immemorial quarrel between feudal lord (in this case a lord bishop) and rebellious commoner assumed its gravest aspect in this warlike town; and the final victory of the burgher brought him long years of prosperity. Far back, in 515, St. Rémy, the "Apostle of the Franks," built a church which took rank as a cathedral, and the hamlet was raised to the dignity of a bishopric. To its famous school, which became a center of learning in the Twelfth Century, there thronged ​students from every part of France. Their numbers, it was said, far exceeded the numbers of the townspeople. Here came the rhetorician, William de Champeaux, and here came the renowned Abelard to study theology under Anselm. Three popes Laon sent to Rome, among them Urban IV, who, as a boy, had been a chorister in the cathedral, who had accompanied St. Louis to the Holy Land, had shared his captivity in Damascus, and had been proclaimed Patriarch of Jerusalem.
The first Marquette mentioned in the annals of Laon is one Vermand, a follower of that singularly ineffective prince, Louis the Seventh. The second is Jacques Marquette, a faithful and devoted servitor of John Le Bon. When the French king was taken prisoner at the battle of Poictiers, and was treated by the victorious Black Prince with a ceremonious and beautiful chivalry which thrilled Froissart's courtly heart with joy, Marquette followed his sovereign's fallen fortunes in England, and afterward labored valiantly to raise the money for his ransom. In return he was made a high official of Laon, and we find his descendants wearing ​three martlets, the city's ancient insignia, upon their coat of arms. In 1590 Nicholas Marquette, an influential and far-seeing magistrate, espoused the cause of Henry of Navarre with so much ardor that he was banished from Laon, only to return with added wealth and honors when the great king was crowned. A Marquette was a member of the States General when that assembly met in Paris before the French Revolution, and three fighting members of the family served under La Fayette in America. Altogether a long record and a brave one.
For many years Laon remained a scholastic as well as a valorous little city, and the Marquettes were by way of being scholars as well as soldiers. Jacques Marquette, the discoverer of the Mississippi, was the son of the astute Nicholas who had been raised to civic eminence by Henry the Fourth. He was the youngest of six children. Through his mother, Rose de la Salle, he was related to the justly famous Jean Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the order of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a society of laymen who nobly devoted themselves to ​teaching the poor boys of France. Jacques received all there was of education in those days. He studied in the Jesuit schools at Nancy and at Pont-à-Mousson, evinced a strong leaning toward a religious life, and entered the Jesuit novitiate at seventeen. There followed twelve years of incessant work at Rheims, Charleville, and Langres. As novice and as priest, as student and as teacher, Père Marquette showed a singular aptitude for languages, an open, friendly, and conciliating disposition, and an ardent desire to carry the torch of faith into the dark places of the world. New France was naturally the goal of his ambition. Since 1611 the Jesuits had labored in that arduous field, and since 1632 they had established a chain of missions stretching from Quebec to the Great Lakes.
Every year there was published in Paris a volume of Jesuit Relations—letters and diaries sent by missionaries to their superiors. They contained information concerning the warring Indian tribes, accounts of life in the wilderness, reports of climate, soil, products, and the fur trade, rude maps of the country so far as it was ​known, appeals for teachers and funds, and—most illuminating of all—plain, pitiless narratives of the deaths suffered by French priests at the hands of hostile savages. These Relations, which are now the source of much valuable knowledge, and which are freely quoted by Parkman and other historians, were issued in duodecimo volumes by Sebastian Cramoisy, and are known to collectors to-day as "Cramoisys." They were widely read, especially in court circles, and were productive of great results. The rich sent money for the missions. Convents despatched vestments, church linen, rosaries, prayer books, and pious pictures. Teaching and nursing orders offered their services to the colonists at Quebec and Three Rivers. Young Jesuit priests dreamed ardently of the day when their lives should be dedicated as a sacrificial flame on the altar of Christian faith.
Among them Père Marquette waited, and hoped, and prayed, and resigned himself anew each year to the will of his superiors. It was this implicit obedience, this absolute self-annihilation that made the order as serviceable as an army. Each unit did its part, but did it as a ​soldier does, with reference to all the other units under one command. Parkman, who has left no phase of Canada's early history unexplored or unrecorded, explains very clearly and accurately the driving power of the first French missionaries. "The lives of these Canadian Jesuits," he says, "attest the earnestness of their faith, and the intensity of their zeal. It was a zeal bridled, curbed, and ruled by a guiding hand. Their marvelous training kindled enthusiasm and controlled it, roused into action a mighty power, and made it as adaptable as those great natural forces which modern science has learned to awaken and to govern."
It is hard to think of Père Marquette, so sensitive, so keen, so alive to pleasure and to pain, as resembling a natural force; but he had been molded into the desired shape, and the process had given him added strength and increased tenacity of purpose. He was twenty-nine when the summons came, and he was ordered to report in Quebec for missionary duty. Joyfully he sailed from France; and on the 20th of September, 1666, it was tersely recorded in the books of the Canadian Jesuits: "Père Jacques Mar​quette arrived in good health, on the seventh ship." His chance had come; and he had need of all the good health and all the good spirits he could muster, to say nothing of all the good fortune that lay in wait, to speed him on his way.