Baron Dubois d’Avaugour New Governor of Canada

He was an old soldier of forty years service, blunt, imperative, and sometimes obstinate to perverseness; but full of energy, and of a probity which even his enemies confessed.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Continuing with Chapter 6.

His disgust at length reached a crisis. “I am resolved to stay here no longer, but to go home next year. My horror of dissension, and the manifest certainty of becoming involved in disputes with certain persons with whom I am unwilling to quarrel, oblige me to anticipate these troubles, and seek some way of living in peace. These excessive fatigues are far too much for my strength. I am writing to Monsieur the President, and to the gentlemen of the Company of New France, to choose some other man for this government.” [1] And again, “if you take any interest in this country, see that the person chosen to command here has, besides the true piety necessary to a Christian in every condition of life, great firmness of character and strong bodily health. I assure you that without these
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[1: Papiers d’Arqenson. Lettre à son Frère, 1659.]

qualities he cannot succeed. Besides, it is absolutely necessary that he should be a man of property and of some rank, so that he will not be despised for humble birth, or suspected of coming here to make his fortune; for in that case he can do no good whatever.”

[Ibid. Lettre (à son Frère?), 4 Nov., 1660. The originals of Argenson’s letters were destroyed in the burning of the library of the Louvre by the Commune.]

His constant friction with the head of the church distressed the pious governor and made his recall doubly a relief. According to a contemporary writer, Laval was the means of delivering him from the burden of government, having written to the President Lamoignon to urge his removal. [2] Be this as it may, it is certain that the bishop was not sorry to be rid of him.

[2: Lachenaye, Mémoire sur le Canada.]

The Baron Dubois d’Avaugour arrived to take his place. He was an old soldier of forty years service, [3] blunt, imperative, and sometimes obstinate to perverseness; but full of energy, and of a probity which even his enemies confessed. “He served a long time in Germany while you were there,” writes the minister Colbert to the Marquis de Tracy, “and you must have known his talents, as well as his bizarre and somewhat impracticable temper.” On landing, he would have no reception, being, as Father Lalemant observes, “an enemy of all ceremony.” He went, however, to see the Jesuits, and “took a morsel of food in our refectory.” [4] Laval was prepared to receive him with all solemnity at the church; but the governor would not go. He soon set out on a tour of observation as far as Montreal, whence he returned delighted with the country, and immediately wrote to Colbert in high praise of it, observing that the St. Lawrence was the most beautiful river he had ever seen. [5]

[3: Avaugour, Mémoire, 4 Août, 1663.]

[4: Lalemant, Journal des Jésuites, Sept., 1661.]

[5: Lettre d’Avaugour au Ministre, 1661.]

It was clear from the first that, while he had a prepossession against the bishop, he wished to be on good terms with the Jesuits. He began by placing some of them on the council; but they and Laval were too closely united; and if Avaugour thought to separate them, he signally failed. A few months only had elapsed when we find it noted in Father Lalemant’s private journal that the governor had dissolved the council and appointed a new one, and that other “changes and troubles” had befallen The inevitable quarrel had broken out; it was a complex one, but the chief occasion of dispute was fortunate for the ecclesiastics, since it placed them, to a certain degree, morally in the right.

The question at issue was not new. It had agitated the colony for years, and had been the spring of some of Argenson’s many troubles. Nor did it cease with Avaugour, for we shall trace its course hereafter, tumultuous as a tornado. It was simply the temperance question; not as regards the colonists, though here, too, there was great room for reform, but as regards the Indians.

Their inordinate passion for brandy had long been the source of excessive disorders. They drank expressly to get drunk, and when drunk they were like wild beasts. Crime and violence of all sorts ensued; the priests saw their teachings despised and their flocks ruined. On the other hand, the sale of brandy was a chief source of profit, direct or indirect, to all those interested in the fur trade, including the principal persons of the colony. In Argenson’s time, Laval launched an excommunication against those engaged in the abhorred traffic; for nothing less than total prohibition would content the clerical party, and besides the spiritual penalty, they demanded the punishment of death against the contumacious offender. Death, in fact, was decreed. Such was the posture of affairs when Avaugour arrived; and, willing as he was to conciliate the Jesuits, he permitted the decree to take effect, although, it seems, with great repugnance. A few weeks after his arrival, two men were shot and one whipped, for selling brandy to Indians. [6] An extreme though partially suppressed excitement shook the entire settlement, for most of the colonists were, in one degree or another, implicated in the offence thus punished. An explosion soon followed; and the occasion of it was the humanity or good-nature of the Jesuit Lalemant.

[6: Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1661.]

A woman had been condemned to imprisonment for the same cause, and Lalemant, moved by compassion, came to the governor to intercede for her. Avaugour could no longer contain himself, and answered the reverend petitioner with characteristic bluntness. “You and your brethren were the first to cry out against the trade, and now you want to save the traders from punishment. I will no longer be the sport of your contradictions. Since it is not a crime for this woman, it shall not be a crime for anybody.” [7] And in this posture he stood fast, with an inflexible stubbornness.

[7: La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. V.]

Henceforth there was full license to liquor dealers. A violent reaction ensued against the past restriction, and brandy flowed freely among French and Indians alike. The ungodly drank to spite the priests and revenge themselves for the “constraint of consciences,” of which they loudly complained. The utmost confusion followed, and the principles on which the pious colony was built seemed upheaved from the foundation. Laval was distracted with grief and anger. He outpoured himself from the pulpit in threats of divine wrath, and launched fresh excommunications against the offenders; but such was the popular fury, that he was forced to yield and revoke them.

[Journal des Jésuites, Feb., 1662. The sentence of excommunication is printed in the Appendix to the Esquisse de la Vie de Laval. It bears date February 24. It was on this very day that he was forced to revoke it.]

Disorder grew from bad to worse. “Men gave no heed to bishop, preacher, or confessor,” writes Father Charlevoix. “The French have despised the remonstrances of our prelate, because they are supported by the civil power,’ says the superior of the Ursulines. “He is almost dead with grief, and pines away before our eyes.”

Laval could bear it no longer, but sailed for France, to lay his complaints before the court, and urge the removal of Avaugour. He had, besides, two other important objects, as will appear hereafter. His absence brought no improvement. Summer and autumn passed, and the commotion did not abate. Winter was drawing to a close, when, at length, outraged Heaven interposed an awful warning to the guilty colony.

Scarcely had the bishop left his flock when the skies grew portentous with signs of the chastisement to come. “We beheld,” gravely writes Father Lalemant, “blazing serpents which flew through the air, borne on wings of fire. We beheld above Quebec a great globe of flame, which lighted up the night, and threw out sparks on all sides. This same meteor appeared above Montreal, where it seemed to issue from the bosom of the moon, with a noise as loud as cannon or thunder, and after sailing three leagues through the air it disappeared behind the mountain whereof this island bears the name.”

[Lalemant. Relation, 1663, 2.]

Still greater marvels followed. First, a Christian Algonquin squaw, described as “innocent, simple, and sincere,” being seated erect in bed, wide awake, by the side of her husband, in the night between the fourth and fifth of February, distinctly heard a voice saying, “Strange things will happen to-day; the earth will quake!” In great alarm she whispered the prodigy to her husband, who told her that she lied. This silenced her for a time; but when, the next morning, she went into the forest with her hatchet to cut a faggot of wood, the same dread voice resounded through the solitude, and sent her back in terror to her hut.

[Lalemant, Relation, 1663, 6.]

These things were as nothing compared with the marvel that befell a nun of the hospital, Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin, who died five years later, in the odor of sanctity. On the night of the fourth of February, 1663, she beheld in the spirit four furious demons at the four corners of Quebec, shaking it with a violence which plainly showed their purpose of reducing it to ruins; “and this they would have done,” says the story, “if a personage of admirable beauty and ravishing majesty [Christ], whom she saw in the midst of them, and who, from time to time, gave rein to their fury, had not restrained them when they were on the point of accomplishing their wicked design.” She also heard the conversation of these demons, to the effect that people were now well frightened, and many would be converted; but this would not last long, and they, the demons, would have them in time, “Let us keep on shaking,” they cried, encouraging each other, “and do our best to upset every thing.”

[Ragueneau, Vie de Catherine de St. Augustin, Liv. IV. chap. i. The same story is told by Juchereau, Lalemant, and Marie de l’Incarnation, to whom Charlevoix erroneously ascribes the vision, as does also the Abbe La Tour.]

Now, to pass from visions to facts: “At half-past five o’clock on the morning of the fifth,” writes Father Lalemant, “a great roaring sound was heard at the same time through the whole extent of Canada. This sound, which produced an effect as if the houses were on fire, brought everybody out of doors; but instead of seeing smoke and flame, they were amazed to behold the walls shaking, and all the stones moving as if they would drop from their places. The houses seemed to bend first to one side and then to the other. Bells sounded of themselves; beams, joists, and planks cracked; the ground heaved, making the pickets of the palisades dance in a way that would have seemed incredible had we not seen it in divers places.

“Everybody was in the streets; animals ran wildly about; children cried; men and women, seized with fright, knew not where to take refuge, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of the houses, or swallowed up in some abyss opening under their feet. Some, on their knees in the snow, cried for mercy, and others passed the night in prayer; for the earthquake continued without ceasing, with a motion much like that of a ship at sea, insomuch that sundry persons felt the same qualms of stomach which they would feel on the water. In the forests the commotion was far greater. The trees struck one against the other as if there were a battle between them; and you would have said that not only their branches, but even their trunks started out of their places and leaped on each other with such noise and confusion that the Indians said that the whole forest was drunk.” Mary of the Incarnation gives a similar account, as does also Frances Juchereau de Saint-Ignace; and these contemporary records are sustained to some extent by the evidence of geology. * A remarkable effect was produced on the St. Lawrence, which was so charged with mud and clay that for many weeks the water was unfit to drink. Considerable hills and large tracts of forest slid from their places, some into the river, and some into adjacent valleys. A number of men in a boat near Tadoussac stared aghast at a large hill covered with trees, which sank into the water before their eyes; streams were turned from their courses; waterfalls were levelled; springs were dried up in some places, while in others new springs appeared. Nevertheless, the accounts that have come down to us seem a little exaggerated, and sometimes ludicrously so; as when, for example, Mother Mary of the Incarnation tells us of a man who ran all night to escape from a fissure in the earth which opened behind him and chased him as he fled.

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 6 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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