The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition by Mary Dunn (review)

he makes a convincing argument for why de Foix all but disappeared from French history textbooks in the mid-twentieth century while simultaneously illuminating nineteenth- and twentieth-century French attitudes toward heroism. Altogether, this is a well-written and valuable contribution to the study of a historical figure who until now has been as neglected by scholars as by history. Ithaca College (NY) Rachel A. Paparone Dunn, Mary. The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition. New York: Fordham UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8232-6721-7. Pp. 224. $45. Marie de l’Incarnation was the foundress of the Ursuline order in New France. Dunn carefully examines how Marie came to abandon her son in order to pursue her passion of serving God. The fourth of Florent Guyart and Jeanne Michelet’s eight children , Marie was born in 1599 in Tours. Dunn explains how at the tender age of seven, Marie experienced her first of many mystical encounters with Jesus Christ and how at age fourteen, she declared her desire to enter religious life among the Benedictines of Beaumont. However, Marie’s parents intended that she marry Claude Martin, a master silk worker. Accepting her fate, Marie married Claude in 1617 and gave birth to their son Claude in 1619. Six months after her son’s birth, her husband died, leaving her a nearly penniless widow. Placing her son in the care of a wet nurse, Marie isolated herself for two years, reading and praying, furthering her spiritual development.When reunited with her son, Marie, rather than being joyful, attempted to detach herself from him so that he would not feel her absence so deeply when the time came for her to leave him. Despite her efforts, her son Claude became very attached to her and she to him. Marie and Claude then moved in with her sister and her sister’s husband Paul Buisson, owner of a successful transportation business. There, while suffering from her yearning to serve God more directly, she managed the house and the kitchen. In 1630, the invitation from Mother Françoise de St. Bernard to join the Ursulines arrived : “Although Marie fretted about Claude, ‘who was not yet twelve years old and whom I saw stripped of all goods,’ God soon gave her to believe that ‘He would take care of what I wanted to leave out of love for him’” (4). Despite her own qualms and against the wishes of her family, Marie turned the care of her son over to the Buissons and entered the Ursuline convent on 25 Jan. 1631. While Marie thrived in the convent , her son was devastated and made several attempts to see her. In spite of his efforts , Marie was determined to live her life in God’s service, and inspired by a vision, she set her sights on a vocation in New France. In 1639, Marie, with Madeleine de la Peltrie and three other Ursulines, set sail from Dieppe for the New World and for the next thirty-three years would work tirelessly to instill the virtues of Catholicism in the 198 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 199 native populations. But Marie’s story does not end there: she maintained correspondence with Claude; correspondence that supplemented her formal Relations writings and allows us to understand how hard it was for her to abandon her son. It is within the context of Marie’s writings that Dunn sagaciously explores abandonment (e.g., within seventeenth-century French family life), the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and maternal sacrifice. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Guenin-Lelle, Dianne. The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. ISBN 978-1-49680486-0. Pp. xv + 200. $65. This well-researched, interdisciplinary study on the history of colonization of Louisiana and its largest city New Orleans uncovers the complex factors behind the persistence of an imagined“Frenchness,”self-fashioning, and“cultural slippages”(168) that permeate colonial history and the Louisianan urban landscape. Guenin-Lelle shows that creolization and nineteenth-century French Creole literature underline that Louisiana is an in-between space, unique in North America. The first...