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The reports or Relations in which each year the Jesuits recorded their efforts, fired the imagination of pious men and women throughout France. Not least they stirred one extraordinary group of men and women, in whom mystic piety, hard-headed grasp of practical affairs and unquestioning courage were strangely mingled, to a resolve to plant the Cross far toward the heart of the new land. Jerôme le Royer de la Dauversière, tax-gatherer of Anjou; Jean Jacques Olier, Paris abbé and later founder of the Order of St. Sulpice; Pierre Chevrier, Baron de Fancamp; Mme. de Bullion, as pious as she was rich; Mlle. Jeanne Mance, honoured of all Canadian nurses who have followed in her footsteps, and Paul de Chomedy, Sieur de Maisonneuve, Christian gentleman, whose simple faith had withstood contact with soldiers and with heretics, were only the more notable of the associates who thus came together to found the Society of Our Lady of Montreal. Their aim was to found a mission outpost on the island of Montreal, which lay at the junction of the two great Indian waterways, the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, and was famed through all North America as a rendezvous. Here priests were to minister to the spiritual needs of such savages as could be made to halt and heed; nursing sisters were to care for the sick and the aged, and teaching sisters to instruct the young. Funds were raised, a grant of the island secured, soldier colonists selected, and three small vessels equipped. In the summer of 1641 the expedition reached Quebec. Here they found little backing for their rash venture. Governor and Jesuit sought to dissuade them from inevitable and useless sacrifice; it was unwise to scatter forces when the whole white population of Canada was less than three hundred; the island of Montreal was straight in the track of the Iroquois hordes who every year swept up the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa in their relentless hunting of men. But Maisonneuve insisted that to Montreal he would go "if every tree on the island were to be changed to an Iroquois," and in the following spring the undaunted little band took possession.