Day 2 of our discussion! I'm very excited to hear your thoughts about today's topics!

Can you imagine stepping off a ship, unwashed and disheveled from six weeks on the ocean, and immediately being scrutinized by hundreds of men? And you think online dating is bad! Would you want to meet your husband that way? When I use the term “brood mare”, do you feel offended? But that is what the French king wanted these adopted daughters to do – have children, not just one or two, but ten or twelve. A documented fact is that the Crown rewarded the MEN money if his wife had baby eleven, twelve and thirteen.When I read the law that a Frenchman would be jailed if he served liquor to a native who in turn hurt someone while drunk, my hackles went up. How unfair! The drunk should be jailed. Ooops – I shouldn’t state my opinion. Let me hear yours!And to make matters worse, that society in New France didn’t have to assign designated drivers within their drinking scene. Instead they planned to have one designated super drunk. One man in the group would be plied with all the alcohol available until he was delirious. He was to become intensely intoxicated and thereby have a spiritual experience. What a difference in culture, eh? What are your thoughts about their way of handling alcohol?One of my purposes for writing White Heart was to educate my readers about the problem of sexual abuse. One out of three women in today’s society has been a victim of such abuse. One of the first symptoms appearing to the woman is an experience of dissociation. This is when she loses touch with reality because the memories of her abuse begin to break through her consciousness. When Jeanne asks Madeleine about marital relations, Madeleine’s psyche is unable to ward off the image and she collapses.  We will see this unfold more as the story develops.

Author’s tidbit:

In order to visualize the Ursuline convent, I visited a restored convent in Montreal. One of the pleasures of researching White Heart was touring a variety of museum and historical landmarks.