Source: Photograph by WTL© on site in Montréal (2016).
Image: This bronze statue is found in the Place d'Armes on the lower left side of the monumental statue of Maisonneuve, which is on the pedestal at the top of the monument. The building in the background is the BMO Banque de Montréal.
Comments: When Maisonneuve arrived on Mount Royal Island in 1642 he was accompanied by Jeanne Mance. She was from an upper bourgeois family in the Haute-Marne region in northern France. Until 1640 she worked as a nurse in the horrific Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). In 1640, when was in Troyes, Champagne, she, like Marguerite Bourgeoys, had a kind of secular change of vocation, which took her in 1642 to Québec City and then to Montréal, where she co-founded the settlement of Ville-Marie. Here she established a hospital, first in her home, and then, in 1645, in the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal (> hôtel de Dieu i.e., hospital of God). Later she returned to France where she obtained more backing for the hospital along with more nurse volunteers from the Religous Hospitallers of St. Joseph.
Return to the Montréal 01 and you will see a large gray building with a green cupola: that is the current building of this hospital, still called the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, which is one of Canada's most advanced hospitals... begun by Jeanne Mance in 1642/1645.
Humanities Questions: (A) Describe and evaluate this humanities artifact; (B) comment on its physical and symbolic relationship with the larger monument; (C) comment on the three-and-a-half centuries legacy of Jeanne Mance to French Canada and beyond, to Latin America; (D) was Jeanne Mance a humanist or a humanitarian? (E) What is the statue itself?