Lartigue House

The first house you approach on the quay was one of the most admired in the town. Its owner, a Gascon named Joseph Lartigue (c. 1683-1743) and his wife, Jeanne Dihars, a Basque woman, came to Louisbourg with the first settlers from Placentia, Newfoundland. He had been a fisherman and trader, but here he accepted public office, becoming a member of the Superior Council and serving as town magistrate. Business sense, family alliances and official favour raised him to prominence in the town. Lartigue had the original of this house built here in 1734.

The house, a timberframe structure with rubblestone fill, is soundly built and handsome, but would we share the envy of Lartigue’s peers? The house is not large and part of it was used as a courtroom, yet Joseph and Jeanne lived here with their twelve children, several servants and a slave named Pompée. Lartigue was prosperous when he built this house and thought himself well favoured by it. Acknowledging his satisfaction, we begin to see that ideals of space and privacy change, and that the Lartigues accepted different standards than we might.

Except for four years of exile in France, Mme. Lartigue lived here through the whole existence of French Louisbourg, one of a few colonists to see both its foundation and its fall. Exiled again, she died in 1763.

The Lime Kiln

If you inspected the Dauphin demi-bastion closely, you know the stones of Louisbourg are not squared to lie together like bricks. The walls are a mass of round rubblestones in a cake of mortar, and kilns like this one produced all the tons of mortar the fortress needed. Trained limeburners burned quarried limestone in a wood fire here, then slaked the resulting quicklime in adjacent pits and mixed it with sand to make mortar. It was a tricky chemical process — incompletely burned limestone or salt from the beach sand sometimes spoiled the product — and the acrid fumes marred some of Joseph Lartigue’s pleasure in his nearby house.

This may be a good place to consider the sheer labour of fortress building. This fortress rose in just over two decades, tons of stone and earth shaped to an intricate plan by arduous hand labour. Only one quarter is rebuilt today.