Background
Marie Couvent was born in Guinea, a term which was often used to describe the west coast of Africa in this period.
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Marie Couvent
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Career
She is best known for dedicating the property that would be used to construct the Institute Catholique to that purpose in her will. In her will, Couvent testifies that she was shipped to the French colony of Saint-Domingue as a slave around the age of seven. Throughout her entire life, she could neither read nor write.
lieutenant is likely that she escaped during the Haitian Revolution.
Together, they lived on Barracks Street in the lower French Quarter, and accumulated land and other properties. The Couvents owned several slaves throughout their lives, but petitioned the Orleans parish government to grant freedom to three of them.
In 1821, Marie and Gabriel Bernard Couvent petitioned for the freedom of an enslaved woman named Pauline. In 1829, Bernard Couvent petitioned for the freedom of two other enslaved women, Seraphine and Fillette.
However, Bernard Couvent died on the 22nd of May, before they were freed.
In 1831, Marie Couvent refiled the petition, stating that the women had served her well and nursed her in times of illness. In her 70s, Marie Couvent informed Father Constatine Maenhaut (sometimes written Manehault), a priest at Saint Louis Cathedral in, of her desire to help found a school for orphan children. Couvent, a devout Catholic, considered Father Maenhaut to be a spiritual mentor.
In 1832, she recorded her final will.
lieutenant read, in part:
"I bequeath and order that my land at the corner of Grands Hommes and Union streets be dedicated and used in perpetuity for the establishment of a free school for the colored orphans of the district of Marigny.."
Father Maenhaut and the future clergy of Saint Louis Cathedral were entrusted with the supervision of this will and its aims. Marie Couvent died on 28 June, 1837, at about eighty years of age.
However, the school she had hoped to establish in her will would not be built until almost a decade later. Fletcher had failed to construct the school, primarily due to opposition from city officials.
Father Maenhaut set about trying to construct the school, and enlisted the aid of a man named Francois Lacroix.
Lacroix aided in the foundation of the Society for the Instruction of Indigent Orphans, which raised funds and sued to gain access to Marie Couvent’s property. They succeeded in winning their court case in 1846, and the school finally opened in 1848, eleven years after Marie Couvent"s death.
