What happened
Marie-Josephte Corriveau was born in 1733 at Saint-Vallier, near Quebec City. Her first husband, the farmer Charles Bouchard, died in 1760; in July 1761 she married Louis Dodier. On the night of 26–27 January 1763 Dodier was murdered. The case was tried by a British military tribunal – the colony was then under occupation following the conquest of New France. Her father, Joseph Corriveau, was sentenced to death first, but he then declared that his daughter alone was guilty. On 15 April 1763 Marie-Josephte confessed to striking her sleeping husband twice on the head with an axe, and that same day she was sentenced to hang and to have her body displayed in chains. She was executed, probably on 18 April, on the Buttes-à-Nepveu by the Plains of Abraham, and her body was hung in an iron cage at a crossroads in Pointe-Lévy, where it remained until at least 25 May. The cage was dug up around 1850 in the Lauzon cemetery and is now kept by the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City. In legend, La Corriveau became a serial killer who disposed of as many as seven husbands, and in Philippe Aubert de Gaspé's Les Anciens Canadiens (1863) she begs a late traveller, from her cage at night, to carry her to a sabbath of witches and will-o'-the-wisps on the Île d'Orléans.
Witnesses
The records of the British court martial of March–April 1763; the legend was popularised by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé (1863), James MacPherson Le Moine (1863), William Kirby (The Golden Dog, 1877) and Louis Fréchette (1898).
Explanations and hypotheses
The trial and execution are well documented; the research of folklorist Luc Lacourcière and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography separate the facts from the legend that grew around them. Corriveau killed one husband – there is no evidence she killed the first, and the tales of two to seven victims, of poisons or of molten lead poured into an ear are inventions of 19th-century writers. William Kirby even made her a descendant of the Paris poisoner La Voisin. Gibbeting in a cage was unheard of in Canada, and for French Canadians it became a symbol of the harshness of the British conquerors – which helps explain why the story has survived for more than two and a half centuries.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Luc Lacourcière, Dictionary of Canadian Biography – Corriveau, Marie-Josephte, known as La Corriveau
- The Canadian Encyclopedia – La Corriveau
- Atlas Obscura – La Corriveau’s Cage
More: Wikipedia (en)