"Thieving Buggers" and "Stupid Sluts": Insults and Popular Culture in New France

Abstract

B ) ETWEEN eight and nine o'clock on September evening in I743 Pierre Feret, master mariner, entered inn of Julien Fisel. The hostelry was on Louisbourg's Rue Royale, close to waterfront in an area frequented by merchants and seamen. The fortified port of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island was victualing station for French cod fishery and commercial entrepot for Canada, New England, West Indies, and France. Feret, who seems to have belonged to town's seasonal population of sailors and fisherfolk from France, was quartered at Fisel's inn. By his own admission he was a little tipsy that evening. He went directly to chamber that served as boarders' dining room where he found three ships' captains and court bailiff (huissier) discussing medicinal properties of skulls of men who had been hanged or strangled. The point at issue was whether medication made from these skulls would have more curative power than remedies commonly used by physicians. When Feret heard reference to hanged men, he turned to bailiff, Joseph-Felix Chesnay, shook his fist at him and declared that the buggers of bailiffs were lackeys of executioners [les sacres Bougres d'huissiers etoient des valets des Bourreaux], and in absence of hangman, bailiffs would do his duty. He added that bailiffs were damned buggers who were same as public executioner, and that bailiff and hangman were one and same; they were lowest people [les personnes les plus Villes] in world. Chesnay, who was huissier audiencier of Superior Council of Isle Royale (Cape Breton) as well as of lower court in Louisbourg, objected to this characterization of his occupation and told mariner to moderate his words. This response fired Feret's anger. He called Chesnay a grasshopper from Hell [une sauterelle d'enfer] and repeated claim that the bailiffs