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- Or Marie Piché.
She was a fille du rois, a "daughter of the king." By 1660 or so it had become apparent that the fledgling North American colony of New France was badly short of marriageable women. To ameliorate this, between 1663 and 1673 the French government recruited respectable young women of limited prospects and, after vetting them for suitability, provided each of them with a small dowry, a chest of clothes, and one-way passage to Quebec. The approximately 800 women who made this journey became known as the "filles du roi", the "daughters of the King." Millions of modern French-Canadians can trace their descent from them, quite often from several.
She is unusual among the filles du roi in that her parentage is completely unknown -- we don't even have their names, or the region of France from which she came.
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