Marie Couvent

Marie Gabriel Bernard Couvent (c. 1757 – June 28, 1837), also known as Justin Fervin, and Marie Justine Cirnaire, was an African-American philanthropist in New Orleans. She is best known for dedicating the property that would be used to construct the Institute Catholique. She likely escaped during the Haitian Revolution. In New Orleans, she married Gabriel Bernard Couvent, a free black man and carpenter. Together, they lived on Barracks Street in the lower French Quarter, and accumulated land and other properties.

Will In her 70s, Marie Couvent informed Fr. Constatine Maenhaut (sometimes written Manehault), a priest at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, of her desire to help found a school for Black orphans. In 1832, she recorded her final will. It read, in part:

I bequeath and order that my land at the corner of Grands Hommes and Union streets [now Dauphine and Touro] be dedicated and used in perpetuity for the establishment of a free school for the colored orphans of the district of Marigny. ...

Maenhaut and the future clergy of the cathedral were entrusted with supervising this will and its aims. Henry Fletcher, a friend of Bernard Couvent, was tasked with executing the terms of the will.

Death Marie Couvent died on June 28, 1837, at about 80.

School

The school she had hoped to establish in her will was not built until almost a decade after her death. Fletcher had failed to construct it, primarily due to opposition from city officials.

Maenhaut then set about trying to construct the school himself 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.