A Passion for Survival: The True Story of Marie Anne and Louis Payzant in 18th-Century Nova Scotia

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

Like those of Madeleine de Verchиres and Laura Secord, Marie Anne
Payzant’s story is freighted with fictions. Linda Layton, a descendant
of the Huguenot family whose lives she chronicles, sets out to tell the
“true” story. Even without imaginative embellishments, the
experiences of Marie Anne and Louis Payzant are the stuff of great
drama. Following Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edit of Nantes in 1685,
French Protestants, known as Huguenots, suffered inhumane treatment in
their homeland. Widower Louis Payzant and his 15-year-old daughter
escaped from Caen, France, to the British island of Jersey in 1739. Here
Louis married another Huguenot refugee, Marie Anne Noget. In 1753, they
moved to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, with their four young children and two
servants, only to be attacked in 1756 by Maliseet allies of the French,
who were facing the final showdown in their contest with the British for
supremacy in North America. Louis was killed, along with a servant and
her child. Marie Anne, pregnant with her fifth child, and two of her
children were taken to Quebec; two children remained in captivity for a
year. In the spring of 1760, Marie Anne moved her family to Falmouth,
Nova Scotia, where New England Planters were settling on the lands
formerly held by Acadians. Marie Anne survived a disastrous marriage
with a rogue (well-documented in the court records) and died at the age
of 85 in 1796.

A librarian by profession, Layton sifts through a wide range of primary
and secondary sources to separate fact from fiction. She notes, for
example, that there is no evidence to suggest that Marie Anne was
related to the Marquis de Montcalm or that she was born in Caen, as has
sometimes been claimed. Supported by footnotes, an extensive
bibliography, and visits to the sites where the story unfolds, this
narrative is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature that
is helping Canadians to understand their complicated 18th-century roots.