An unrecorded pamphlet, containing the rules and regulations governing the charitable Hôtel-Dieu of the city of Alençon, and outlining the dismissal of nine women and widows for neglecting their care-giving roles at the charity. We have found no other record of it as a whole, or of its constituent parts.
Collated here are five related documents on the administration of the Hôtel-Dieu: the XXXIV reglement, or Rules, for its running and provision from 1677; the 1676 ‘Contrat d’establissement de huit filles de la Charité’, contracting eight ‘Grey sisters’, members of the order of the Daughters of Charity, to take on the roles of the dismissed women; the Approbation from the Bishop of Sées, 1678; the 1685 Royal Letters Patent confirming the reglement; and finally, an up-to-date ‘Nomination’ of the presidents and administrators of the Hôtel-Dieu for 1705, and the two years following.
From as early as the twelfth century in France, Hôtels-Dieu were charitable institutions established by the Catholic Church to provide care for the local poor. That in Alençon, per this pamphlet, provided care for 28 elderly patients - ‘vieillards & vieilles femmes’ - and 23 children; however, as the opening to the reglement explains, the care received by those residents has been severely lacking. Elisabeth d’Orleans, Duchess d’Alençon has been made aware of numerous abuses, ‘plusieurs Abus’ at the Hôtel-Dieu that require addressing, prime among them, the nine girls and widows’ - chosen ‘pour s’appliquer au service des pauvres’ - dereliction of their duty of care.
Rules 30-34 describe how those women, whose residence in the Hôtel-Dieu appears to have been contingent on their payment of an annuity and the provision of support to infirm residents, have preferred retreat and prayer, to doing their duty. They are named in full; Jeanne & Françoise Marquand, Anne Guillain, Anne Laudier, Marguerite Quillet, Magdelaine Cyr, the widow of Macé Paquier, Marie Lucas, Loüise du Clos and Françoise Quillet. They are requested to leave immediately, in order to make space in their lodgings for the poor, and for their replacements, eight Filles de la Charité ‘whose piety, modesty and experience in helping the sick are universally known, desired and honoured’ (p.9).
Any money paid by the women will be returned to them, and help will be given, in some cases, for the provision of new lodgings elsewhere. It is interesting to note that the sums of money paid by the women in return for their lodgings, and detailed here are not insubstantial, nor are some of the other donations; Marie Lucas, for example, was evidently a landowner, and is said to have donated two pieces of arable land, one acre and one journeau, to the Hôtel-Dieu.
Their replacements are nuns from the order of the Filles de la Charité, the so-called ‘Grey Sisters’, named for their distinctive grey habits. Founded in 1633, the Filles were a non-cloistered religious community, whose observance included care for the poor and sick; they were long associated with their work in Hotels-Dieu, most notably that in Paris.
