The habitant liked to sing, especially when working with others in the woods or when on the march.  The voyageurs relieved the tedium of their long journeys by breaking into song at intervals.  But the popular repertoire was limited to a few folksongs, most of them songs of Old France.  They were easy to learn, simple to sing, but sprightly and melodious.  Some of them have remained on the lips and in the hearts of the French-Canadian race for over two hundred years.  Those who do not know the Claire fontaine and Ma boule roulant have never known French Canada.  The foretier of today still goes to the woods chanting the Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre which his ancestors caroled in the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet.  When the habitant sang, moreover, it was in no pianissimo tones; he was lusty and cheerful about giving vent to his buoyant spirits.  And his descendant of today has not lost that propensity.

The folklore of the old dominion, unlike the folk music, was extensive.  Some of it came with the colonists from their Norman firesides, but more, perhaps, was the outcome of a superstitious popular imagination working in the new and strange environment of the wilderness.  The habitant had a profound belief in the supernatural, and was prone to associate miraculous handiwork with every unusual event.  He peopled the earth and the air, the woods and the rivulets, with spirits of diverse forms and varied motives.  The red man’s abounding superstition, likewise, had some influence upon the habitant’s highstrung temperament.  At any rate, New France was full of legends and weird tales.  Every island, every cove in the river, had one or more associated with it.  Most of these legends had some moral lessons attached to them:  they were tales of disaster which came from disobeying the teachings of the Church or of miraculous escape from death or perdition due to the supernatural rewarding of righteousness.  Taken together, they make up a wholesome and vigorous body of folklore, reflecting both the mystic temper of the colony and the religious fervor of its common life.  A distinguished son of French Canada has with great industry gathered these legends together, a service for which posterity will be grateful.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Sir J.M.  Lemoine, Legends of the St. Lawrence (Quebec, 1878).]

Various chroniclers have left us pen portraitures of the habitant as they saw him in the olden days.  Charlevoix, La Hontan, Hocquart, and Peter Kalm, men of widely different tastes and aptitudes, all bear testimony to his vigor, stamina, and native-born vivacity.  He was courteous and polite always, yet there was no flavor of servility in this most benign trait of character.  It was bred in his bone and was fostered by the teachings of his church.  Along with this went a bonhomie and a lightheartedness, a touch of personal vanity, with a liking for display and ostentation, which unhappily did not make for thrift.