La Corriveau’s story filters through legend and literature

Hard to say when I first saw La Corriveau. She’s always been there, on beer cans or bus shelters; the subject of live theatre or lame TV specials. My little cousin’s costume last Halloween—black wig in disarray, ghoulish face, tattered dress and, of course, the cage.

She was born Marie-Josephte Corriveau, in 1733 in Saint-Vallier, Québec, to Joseph Corriveau and Françoise Bolduc. The only child of nine not to succumb to the various perils of the era—stillbirth, smallpox, typhus—she was destined nonetheless to meet an unfortunate end thirty years later as Québec’s most infamous murderess, convicted under British martial law of killing her second husband and hanged in chains near the Plains of Abraham in 1763.

At sixteen she marries Charles Bouchard. They raise three children and work their parcel of land until Charles dies of putrid fever. A little over a year later, in July 1761, Marie-Josephte marries her neighbour, Louis Dodier.

Dodier quarrels regularly with his in-laws, who own the house in which the couple lives. Scuffles erupt between him and Joseph Corriveau over unpaid rent or access to their co-owned horse. During a disagreement over use of the family bread oven, Corriveau launches himself at his son-in-law wielding first an axe, then a hoe. And who can blame him? Dodier beat Marie-Josephte.

She flees Dodier, takes refuge at her uncle’s house and appeals to the local authority of the time, one Major James Abercrombie, who convinces her to return home where she belongs. A few weeks later, early in the morning on January 27, 1763, Dodier is found dead in the barn, bloody wounds to the head marking his demise. A dung fork lies nearby.

Witnesses gather: the parish priest, a British captain of militia, eight or nine villagers. Suspicion falls on Joseph Corriveau: did he not publicly assault his son-in-law? But Joseph shares a surname with many others in the parish—the honour of the community is at stake. It is in the best interest of all to declare the death an accident. Taking on the role of coroner, the parish priest, in his report to the authorities, writes that Louis Dodier was kicked in the head by a horse. The body is expeditiously buried—no time for a wake. Later, during the trial, one villager will complain that Dodier was buried without so much as a clean shirt.

In the village, rumours crackle. Both father and daughter had reason to want Dodier dead. The brother of the deceased files a petition with Abercrombie and demands justice. Abercrombie orders that the corpse be exhumed. The surgeon who examines the body details the nature of the head wounds: a fractured jaw and four deep punctures, perfectly spaced three inches apart. He concludes that no horse hoof could inflict such injuries. Joseph Corriveau is charged with murder, and his daughter, Marie-Josephte, charged as his accomplice.

The French have recently lost to the English at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. All cases are tried in military courts, as British civilian courts do not yet exist. The makeshift court martial is held in Quebec City’s couvent des ursulines. The trial unfolds in English and it is unclear how much Marie-Josephte and her father understand of the proceedings. Unclear, too, whether or not the British military men who comprise the jury understand the various French testimonies. Twenty-four witnesses take the stand: neighbours of Dodier, other villagers, the parish priest, the captain of militia, Major Abercrombie himself. Hearsay proliferates: the father is violent and quarrelsome; the daughter a slut and a drunkard who has been seen throwing up in her children’s bonnets. The defence lawyer, a French Canadian, is unfamiliar with British martial law and is unable to build a solid defence. Impossible to poke holes in the witnesses’ dubious testimonies—there is no cross-examination in courts-martial. Joseph Corriveau is found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Marie-Josephte is sentenced to “Receive Sixty Lashes with a Cat and Nine Tales upon her bare back, at three different places viz under Gallows, upon the Market place of Quebec, and in the Parish of St Vallier, twenty Lashes at each place, and Branded in the Left hand with the Letter M.”

This beating and branding will never take place. The day before Joseph Corriveau is scheduled to be hanged, a priest is summoned. Joseph confesses that he did not kill his son-in-law—he was merely his daughter’s accomplice after the fact. The priest tells him that by remaining silent, he is committing murder against himself, thus endangering his immortal soul. Joseph accepts a pardon in exchange for his statement: “The Night of the 26th of January about ten O’Clock, this Declarant being then in his Bed, his Daughter knocked at the Window, and said in a low voice, Father come.”

He let her into the house.

“Dodier is dead. I killed him.”

Joseph, in his statement, says that upon hearing this, he called his daughter a “Vile Wretch” and sent her away, but later helped her drag the body from the bed to the barn. He says, “It was Marie-Josephte Corriveau who killed her Husband in his Bed, with a Blunted Hatchet.” Afterwards, she burned the bloody sheets.

On Friday, April 15, 1763, Marie-Josephte is tried a second time under martial law. She confesses to killing her husband in his sleep, and is sentenced to be hanged in chains. She must pay for the iron gibbet herself. The trial lasts no more than half an hour.

Hanged in chains means hanged twice. The first hanging is unexceptional by eighteenth-century standards: a scaffold erected at the city’s highest point, a noose, a crowd hungry for grisly entertainment. All this Marie-Josephte’s father, too, would have suffered.

But Marie-Josephte is a woman who has killed her husband. She must be made an example of. The second hanging is anything but routine. Once the life is choked out of her, Marie-Josephte is taken down and encased in a tight-fitting, iron exoskeleton and hauled to a well-travelled crossroads in Pointe-Lévy for display. For five weeks she decays in her cage, dangling by the hook at the top of the gibbet, after which time Governor James Murray allows the body to be taken down and buried. The display of power over the French Canadians has been made.

Easy to see why the collective memory of Marie-Josephte Corriveau has been long and fantastical. She’s unequalled in her infamy and humiliation. Gibbeting was unknown to the French Canadians; even the British usually reserved this gruesome punishment for the most heinous and traitorous male criminals.

Decades pass and the story transforms, filtered through legend and literature. It wasn’t one husband that La Corriveau killed, but two husbands or five or seven. She slipped arsenic into food, butchered spousal flesh with her axe. She hanged one husband, poisoned another with herbs, poked yet another in the navel with an awl. Occasionally, she is hilariously inept: when she is unsuccessful in strangling one of the husbands in his sleep, she goes at the job again with a hammer, then a pitchfork. Over the years, she metamorphoses into a witch courted by werewolves, a ghost who rattles her cage and haunts unsuspecting male travellers on the high road at night.

The first husband’s putrid fever is of course entirely forgotten. La Corriveau killed him, too, by pouring molten lead into his sleeping ears.

In 1851, eighty-eight years after her death, Marie-Josephte Corriveau goes on the road.

Her cage, one bone still rattling inside, is accidentally exhumed—then is stolen—from a Pointe-Lévy cemetery. The cage is displayed first near the Bonsecours market in Montreal, then in a cabinet of curios in Quebec City. Only 25 cents to view the gibbet that contained French Canada’s most notorious murderess!

By the end of August, La Corriveau has crossed the border and debarked in New York City. She is advertised in the New York Daily Tribune and has her own exhibit at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, alongside:

the every-where-talked-about-and-admired HAPPY FAMILY, a large collection of Birds, Beasts, &c., by nature hostile to each other, but taught by a Mysterious Process to dwell together in the utmost harmony and affection. Cats, Rats, Dogs, Pigeons, Owls, Mice, &c., &c., all Educated to Peace, may be here witnessed in a state of Christian Communism, having laid aside all their destructive instincts to assume those of Social Tranquillity.

She is the newly acquired:

GREAT HISTORICAL CURIOSITY.—IRON GIBBET OF OLDEN TIMES, and thrown aside by the progress of civilization during the last century; one of these public death instruments found in Point Levy, Canada East, in the course of May last, had been used under the Government of Sir G. Murray, first Governor of Canada, after its capitulation, in the year 1763, for the execution of a female who had murdered three successive husbands. It will be exhibited during a few days, at No. 252 Broadway, 2nd floor, room No. 11, from 8 A.M. to 9 P.M., where historical details of her criminal life may be procured.

La Corriveau is still newsworthy 80 years later, in 1931, when the New York Sun profiles her cage, acquired by the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts. Just down the street from the sorcery museum in the witch capital of the USA, the gibbet hangs “in fitting comradeship with a guillotine blade which was in service during the French Revolution.”

It is more than 200 years after her death when feminist writers such as Anne Hébert claim her. In Hébert’s La Cage, first staged in 1989, Marie-Josephte is a prisoner of her sex, of male violence. She is born with her cage.

One morning I read that the Musée de la civilisation has repatriated the cage. She’s finally come home! She’ll be on display for only five days.

I take the number 21 bus to the museum’s Maison Chevalier. Six bucks to descend into the vaulted cellar—a temporary, rubble stone crypt. There she is under the stone arches: a supine skeleton of rusted, pitted hoops, an iron beauty asleep inside a glass cage.

I linger over her display, take selfies with the cage. She’s destined for storage.

No matter. I know she’ll live a thousand more lives.