Here meals were prepared and consumed. Here also the family spent leisure hours. Note the salt box on the wall beneath the lantern. Salt was a vital commodity. Since the colony produced none, it had to be imported from France and was expensive. The furnishings in this room would all have been produced locally, including the catalogne rug on the floor. The depth of the window casement indicates the thickness of the stone walls. The Canadian settlers were jacks-of-all-trades, each farm being almost a self-sufficient economic unit. These rural homes compared very favourably with the hovels occupied by the peasants of Europe. Visitors from France frequently remarked that these simple farmers lived as well as did many of the country gentry at home.
Every home had its spinning wheel. In the early years of the colony's history, the settlers had to import most of their clothing from France, but by the end of the seventeenth century they were making most of their own. They made linen from flax and a coarser cloth from hemp. Sheep were raised to provide wool, which was spun into various types of coarse but durable cloth. Roots, fruit, and nut shells provided natural dyes. By the eighteenth century Madame de Repentigny, the wife of a seigneur, could boast that she was clad from head to foot in clothes of native manufacture. The upper class, however, wore finer clothes imported from France and were very anxious to be dressed in the latest fashions of Paris and Versailles.
