Historical Sketch of the Lévrard-Becquet Seigneury

The year 1672 was a banner year for more than forty seigneuries on the St. Lawrence plain, among them one granted by the comte de Frontenac to a Québec notary, ROMAIN BECQUET. He had also been given l’île Madame, an island of 316 arpents (an arpent is an old French measure of roughly 0.85 acre), directly opposite Berthier-sur-mer but belonging to the parish of Saint-François-Xavier on the Île d’Orléans. Becquet had taken for himself the title of royal notary, and since this was a time when colonists were pouring into New France, the notary had more than enough to do drawing up land contracts and marriage contracts for all the censitaires (tenant farmers) of the Côte de Beaupré and those of the Île d’Orléans, where a large seigneurie (seigneury) belonged to Monseigneur de Laval.

One can easily imagine that seigneur Becquet had little time to travel back up the river to settle his seigneury, which lay upstream from the fief of l’Eschaillons. His wife had died some years earlier, leaving him two daughters, Marie-Louise and Catherine-Angélique. He himself would die fairly young, at the age of 47, and his daughter Marie-Louise would die later. Becquet lost the seigneury for having failed to develop it, but his daughter Catherine-Angélique took up the reins with the help of her husband, LOUIS LÉVRARD, a gunner of Québec. She was only 13 at the time of their marriage! The notarial records of Romain Becquet, preserved at the Archives judiciaires de Québec, remain among the most important for seventeenth-century Québec.

A quarter-century after Becquet, when Louis Lévrard took possession of the seigneury in his wife’s name in 1703, this long delay in occupying the land, together with the absence of a seigneur to manage the estate properly, had bred abuses — among them the takeover of the territory by one GILLES MASSON, a native of Poitou and a colonizer at heart, who had given himself the title of “seigneur of the côte and seigneurie of Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets.” He granted a good fifteen farms, whose unregulated clearing was stripping both land and forest. And so, in 1708, Lévrard obtained an ordinance from the intendant Raudot ordering the Massons to « déguerpir » [clear out] from his seigneury. The Massons, father and son, carried on their attempt at settlement until 1713, and it was only ten years later that Lévrard filed his Foy et Hommage (oath of fealty) at the Château Saint-Louis in Québec, on 17 June 1724, as guardian of his children Pierre (20 years old, then in Martinique), Louis, 17, and Charles, 8, and of their late mother Catherine-Angélique Becquet. CHARLES LÉVRARD worked the seigneury until 1769 and sold it to Charles-François Tarieu Lapérade de Lanaudière, grandson of Madeleine de Verchères, seigneuresse of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade.

Eight heirs came forward, among them Marie-Anne, who married FRANCOIS BABY in 1786. By 1830 there were twelve owners. The Babys had the MANOR built that still stands near the church, and when the seigneuries were abolished in 1854 it was a Québec lawyer, JOSEPH-OVIDE TOUSIGNANT, who, on behalf of Sophie Young, a relative of the Lanaudières, collected 1,382.51 piastres in capital and interest and set up his pied-à-terre in the seventh rang (concession road) of Sainte-Sophie-de-Lévrard. It was in honour of his wife, SOPHIE, that the parish was canonically erected under the name Sainte-Sophie, in 1874.

The building of the present church of Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets gave rise to famous quarrels that degenerated into pitched battles, among them the legend of “LES COQS BLANCS ET LES COQS NOIRS” (the white roosters and the black roosters) and fifteen years of fruitless strife from 1824 to 1837. The parish of Sainte-Cécile-de-Lévrard broke away from the mother parish to be canonically erected on 11 September 1908. It took the name CÉCILE in honour of Cécile Thomur, wife of Charles Lévrard.

Yolande ROUX