O n Dec. Many of the prisoners had been arrested only months before departure, when corrupt officers of the Parisian police were rounding up women specifically to be shipped off across the Atlantic. Authorities had suddenly become aware of a critical lack of Frenchwomen in a colony that Indies Company officials hoped to develop quickly and turn into a major producer of tobacco, thus allowing France to rival English colonies along the Chesapeake.
Any woman out and about in the streets of Paris was in danger of being arrested on trumped-up charges. Among them was Manon Fontaine, a year-old illiterate Parisian street vendor, who was walking the cobblestones of her native city all day long selling day-old fruit from a basket strapped around her waist, when she was arrested and charged with murder.
Even though Manon had been elsewhere at the time of the crime and could prove it; even though, under questioning, the alleged witnesses who had testified against her all admitted that they had never seen her before, Manon Fontaine spent 19 years behind barsβuntil she was transported to Louisiana.
The women who survived the crossing were dropped off first on an island off the coast of what is now Alabama, then on a beach in what is now Mississippi. Mutinous Women soon made their way to nearby French outposts such as Mobile, and to places as distant as Illinois and Arkansas.
They accomplished almost nothing. To help design the capital he chose his student, Charles Franquet de Chaville, as well as Adrien de Pauger. With a handful of workers, Pauger began clearing enough space so that street layout could begin. And the work was no simple matter since there were huge cypress trees to be uprooted and felled and thick masses of cane and river reeds to be hacked away. Pauger drafted an informal map of projected streets, using letters to reserve spots for specific individuals.
