♂Pierre Sallé

Pierre Sallé was a master needle-maker in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century, known from the Fichier Origine, the Québec genealogical federation’s file of French emigrants to Canada, as the father of one of the King’s Daughters^W. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Elisabeth Salée (born about 1651).

Life

His daughter’s entry in that file gives what little is known of him. It records that on 22 January 1646 Pierre Sallé and Françoise Loupiat had their marriage contract drawn up before the Paris notary Le Cat. He was then living in the faubourg Saint-Marcel, in the parish of Saint-Médard, on the Left Bank, and she across the river in the rue Saint-Honoré, in the parish of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.

The two came from the same trade: the file names her father, Cosme Loupiat, and his, Raphaël Sallé, as master needle-makers, like Pierre himself. A compiled list of the King’s Daughters, Yves Landry’s, gives Pierre a different trade in his daughter’s entry, hardware merchant at the Palais. The contract itself survives in the Paris notaries’ archives, and a 2024 book on the founding families of New France abstracts it. The abstract records many witnesses, a dowry of 800 livres (600 of it in cash) and a fixed dower of 280 livres; both spouses signed.

The same file names three of the couple’s children, Claude, Marie and Elisabeth, the last born about 1651. In 1670, it records, Elisabeth went to New France as a fille du roi, one of the roughly 800 young women whose passage and dowries the French crown paid between 1663 and 1673 so that they would marry the colony’s settlers. On 9 September 1670 she signed a marriage contract with Jacques Marcot at Trois-Rivières.

Pierre had died by 4 June 1682, when his widow, Françoise Loupiat, contracted for their daughter Marie’s marriage in Paris; their son Claude was among the witnesses.

Notes

His trade

The contract as abstracted in the Fichier Origine file (fiche 320046) gives him as maître aiguiller, master needle-maker, in Paris. Yves Landry’s Les Filles du roi au XVIIe siècle: orphelines en France is a compiled work, and its entry for Isabelle, also called Élisa, Salée gives him as marchand quincaillier au palais, hardware merchant at the Palais, in Paris. The two trades are not reconciled in any known source.