Dauversière, Jérôme Le Royer de La

DAUVERSIÈRE, JÉRÔME LE ROYER de la. - Founder of the Congregation of the Hospitaller Daughters of St. Joseph and promoter of the founding of Montreal, b. at La Flèche (Anjou, France), of a family belonging to the lesser nobility, on 18 March 1597, d. there on 6 Nov. 1659. A tax collector at La Flèche, he married in 1618 Jeanne Baugé, by whom he had 5 children. This modest tax collector, commonly called "le saint homme de La Flèche," a faithful executor of a precise mission entrusted to him by divine Providence, matured between 1630 and 1640, with the counsel of Fr. Étienne, a Recollect, of the Jesuits François Chauveau and Charles Lalemant and of the Sulpician Jean-Jacques Olier, the plan of the twofold bold foundation recalled above, soon translated into reality. Indeed he began by giving origin at La Flèche, on 23 Dec. 1639, thanks to the collaboration of Mlle Marie de la Ferre, to the Hospitaller Congregation of the Daughters of St. Joseph with simple vows and without enclosure, canonically erected by the bishop of Angers on 19 Oct. 1643. Subsequently, in order to contribute effectively to the evangelization of the savages, he promoted the founding of the city of Ville-Marie, today Montreal, on the island of the same name, of which he had been, since 1640, co-proprietor with Baron Pierre Chevrier de Fancamp.

The existence of the city began on 17 May 1642, the day on which the 40 colonists landed on the island, led by the valiant Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, and by the intrepid Mlle Jeanne Mance, foundress and first directress of the Hôtel-Dieu of the incipient city. D., while remaining in France, provided for all the needs of the colonists, from their voyage to their tools of work, with his own means, with loans and with the generous offerings given for a purely missionary ideal by the members of the "Company of Montreal," created for that purpose and of which he was procurator. These two foundations procured for him endless worries of a moral and financial order, yet at his death the Congregation was directing 5 Hôtels-Dieu (at La Flèche, Moulins, Laval, Baugé, Ville-Marie) and the little town of Ville-Marie already counted some hundreds of inhabitants. He died atrociously tormented by moral pains and physical sufferings, leaving a precarious inheritance, immediately placed under sequestration by the treasury and by the numerous creditors who had granted him, as procurator of the "Company of Montreal," large sums of money, sums that they later recovered thanks to the intervention of various persons and in particular of Mademoiselle Anne de Melun, princess of Epinoy, who became a hospitaller nun. The process of beatification of D. and of Ferre is deposited with the S. Congregation of Rites.

A. Pietro Frutaz