10. Léon and Marie Arsenault

Four of the above children died in infancy. Théodore was only seven months old, Edmond was almost two years old, Pierre survived only three weeks and baby Dorothy passed away when she was eight months. Although if it was considered bad luck to give a newborn the name of a deceased child, Marie and Léon did not hesitate to do so. They, in fact passed the names of all the children they lost to the babies that followed. Medical science not being what it is today, it is not clear of what those infants died of. At the time, it was said that they died of "inflammation of the intestines". To comfort herself from those losses, Marie would often say: "They are well taken care of now; they are in heaven."

Marie gave birth to a child almost every two years during the first 26 years of her married life. There was no question of practising any method of birth control since the Roman Catholic Church considered it to be a grave sin. Aunt Josephine Arsenault remembers a priest who, during a mission, told women that all the children they prevented from being born would tug on their skirts and make it harder to fly to heaven!

While raising her family, Marie could generally count on the assistance of a servant girl to help take care of the children and also to do housework and some of the chores on the farm. As the children grew, they were all given chores to do such as feeding the farm animals, milking the cows, taking in the firewood, weeding the garden, washing the dishes and taking care of the smaller ones. Like children in general, they would have preferred doing other things than their chores. Aunt Matilda recalls:

My responsibility was to take care of the baby. There was always a baby in the cradle. Of course, I was young and I would have preferred to play outside instead of rocking the cradle. I remember one day asking my mother: "Why do we always have a baby in the cradle?" And she answered: "Which one do you think we should not have?" That finished me off. I never forgot that.

Léon was an enterprising man. He soon expanded the small farm he had bought from Pierre and Madeleine Pitre and became the largest landowner in Maximeville. At one point he owned about 60 acres of cleared land and about 100 acres of wood. Apart from the house, the property consisted of a barn, a piggery, a hen-house, a wood shed, a workshop (called Zélica's house), a garage and an ice-house. On the second floor of Zélica's house, there was a large room where the farm helpers slept during the summer season.

On the farm there was generally a few cows, two or three pigs, sheep, hens and of course a few horses. The eldest of the family remember well Harry and George. Léon was proud of his trotters, his favourite being George.

Along with the fishing revenues, the farm permitted the family to lead a rather decent living. Léon sold milk to the local cheese factory and Marie sold the eggs she collected through the Egmont Bay Egg Circle, a type of co-operative marketing board. During the spring, Léon made some money by selling a dozen lambs and in the fall he would sometimes sell a few pigs.

-27-