Of the condition of the women in the Acadian colony but little is known. It was probably, as a rule, that which was common to the French peasantry of the time; but there was in the settlement a lack of women, as we know from the account of Marc Lescarbot in 1507, wherein he tells us that it was owing to the want of good housewives that the cows which had been imported at so many pains died soon after their arrival; and much of his treatise is given up to bewailing the absence from the colony of women in sufficient numbers to make it pleasant and thriving. Yet among these colonists, who were rudely driven from their homes by the strong hand of England, there were women, as we know from the poetical story of Evangeline, too familiar in Longfellow's poem to be narrated here, as well as from the later story of the Lady de la Tour, a Huguenot girl who had married Charles la Tour, the seigneur of Port Royal. It was a time of conspiracy and internecine strife among the people of Acadia, and though conspiracy and strife were petty enough in cause and action and result, they were none the less important to the actors in them. There arose on the part of Charles de Menou, Seigneur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, a plot to deprive La Tour of his seigniory, which Charnisay, whose lands adjoined those of his rival, claimed as his own. The French court and the governor's house at Boston, then tenanted by the stern John Endicott, were made in turn arenas of dispute, but we are concerned more with the appeal to force which came at last. Charles La Tour had gone to Boston to seek aid against his rival, leaving his fort in the hands of his wife, who had already been of sterling service in baffling the intrigues of Charnisay, when his opponent, hearing that the chatelaine was alone in command of the fort and had but fifty retainers and little ammunition, determined to take by force that which he coveted. So he sailed into the Bay of Saint John, where stood Fort La Tour, and summoned the garrison to surrender. But the Lady de la Tour was as dauntless in courage as she was faithful in heart to the fortunes of her husband, and she answered with cannon balls. Charnisay replied in kind, but the lady had the better of the argument, though conducted on principles not congenial to her sex, and she forced her foe to retire in discomfiture, notwithstanding his superiority in men and arms. She herself directed and inspired the defence, and it is said that she even laid some of the guns with her own hands. Her triumph was brief, however, for Charnisay returned in two months' time; and though she again gallantly defended her home and her husband's stronghold, her situation grew at last so desperate that she yielded to fair proffers of treaty and surrendered. But the victor had no intention of holding to his plighted word, and he promptly hanged every man in the garrison, with the exception of one who turned hangman as the price of his own miserable life.