Parkman Vol. 4, Chapter 8

We have seen that Laval, when at court, had been invited to choose a governor to his liking.

Continuing chapter 7.

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

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada

In the following spring [1664] Colbert wrote as follows to his relative Terron, intendant of marine: —

I do not know what report M. Gaudais has made to you, but family interests and the connections which he has at Quebec should cause him to be a little distrusted. On his arrival in that country, having constituted himself chief of the council, he despoiled an agent of the Company of Canada of all his papers, in a manner very violent and extraordinary, and this proceeding leaves no doubt whatever that these papers contained matters the knowledge of which it was wished absolutely to suppress. I think it will be very proper that you should be informed of the statements made by this agent, in order that, through him, an exact knowledge may be acquired of everything that has taken place in the management of affairs.”

[Lettre de Colbert a Terron, Rochelle, 8 Fev., 1664. “Il a spolié un agent de la Compagnie de Canada de tous ses papiers d’une manière fort violente et extraordinaire, et ce procédé ne laisse point à douter que dans ces papiers il n’y eût des choses dont on a voulu absolument supprimer la connaissance.” Colbert seems to have received an exaggerated impression of the part borne by Gaudais in the seizure of the papers.]

Whether Terron pursued the inquiry does not appear. Meanwhile new quarrels had arisen at Quebec, and the questions of the past were obscured in the dust of fresh commotions. Nothing is more noticeable in the whole history of Canada, after it came under the direct control of the Crown, than the helpless manner in which this absolute government was forced to overlook and ignore the disobedience and rascality of its functionaries in this distant transatlantic dependency.

As regards Dumesnil’s charges, the truth seems to be, that the financial managers of the colony, being ignorant and unpractised, had kept imperfect and confused accounts, which they themselves could not always unravel; and that some, if not all of them, had made illicit profits under cover of this confusion. That their stealings approached the enormous sum at which Dinesnil places them is not to be believed. But, even on the grossly improbable assumption of their entire innocence, there can be no apology for the means, subversive of all justice, by which Laval enabled his partisans and supporters to extricate themselves from embarrassment. —

Note:

Dumesnil’s principal memorial, preserved in the archives of the Marine and Colonies, is entitled Mémoire concernant les Affaires du Canada, qui montre et fait voir que sous prétexte de la Gloire de Dieu, d’Instruction des Sauvages, de servir le Roy et de faire la nouvelle Colonie, il a été pris et diverti trois millions de livres ou environ. It forms in the copy before me thirty-eight pages of manuscript, and bears no address; but seems meant for Colbert, or the council of state. There is a second memorial, which is little else than an abridgment of the first. A third, bearing the address Au Roy et a nos Seigneurs du Conseil (d’Etat), and signed Peronne Dumesnil, is a petition for the payment of 10,132 livres due to him by the company for his services in Canada, “ou il a perdu son fils assassiné par les comptables du dit pays, qui n’ont voulu rendre compte au dit suppliant, Intendant, et ont pillé sa maison, ses meubles et papiers le 20 du mois de Septembre dernier, dont il y a acte.”

Gaudais, in compliance with the demands of Colbert, gives his statement in a long memorial, Le Sieur Gaudais Dupont à Monseigneur de Colbert, 1664.

Dumesnil, in his principal memorial, gives a list of the alleged defaulters, with the special charges against each, and the amounts for which he reckons them liable. The accusations cover a period of ten or twelve years, and sometimes more. Some of them are curiously suggestive of more recent “rings.” Thus Jean Gloria makes a charge of thirty-one hundred livres (francs) for fireworks to celebrate the king’s marriage, when the actual cost is said to have been about forty livres. Others are alleged to have embezzled the funds of the company, under cover of pretended payments to imaginary creditors; and Argenson himself is said to have eked out his miserable salary by drawing on the company for the pay of soldiers who did not exist.

The records of the Council preserve a guarded silence about this affair. I find, however, under date 20 Sept., 1663, “Pouvoir â M. de Villeray de faire recherche dans la maison d’un nommé du Mesnil des papiers appartenants au Conseil concernant Sa Majesté;” and under date 18 March, 1664, “Ordre pour l’ouverture du coffre contenant les papiers de Dumesnil,” and also an “Ordre pour mettre l’Inventaire des biens du Sr. Dumesnil entre les mains du Sr. Fillion.”

Chapter 8

We have seen that Laval, when at court, had been invited to choose a governor to his liking. He soon made his selection. There was a pious officer, Saffray de Mézy, major of the town and citadel of Caen, whom he had well known during his long stay with Bernières at the Hermitage. Mézy was the principal member of the company of devotees formed at Caen under the influence of Bernières and his disciples. In his youth he had been headstrong and dissolute. Worse still, he had been, it is said, a Huguenot; but both in life and doctrine his conversion had been complete, and the fervid mysticism of Bernières acting on his vehement nature had transformed him into a red-hot zealot. Towards the hermits and their chief he showed a docility in strange contrast with his past history, and followed their inspirations with an ardor which sometimes overleaped its mark.

Thus a Jacobin monk, a doctor of divinity, once came to preach at the church of St. Paul at Caen; on which, according to their custom, the brotherhood of the Hermitage sent two persons to make report concerning his orthodoxy. Mézy and another military zealot, “who,” says the narrator, “hardly know how to read, and assuredly do not know their catechism,” were deputed to hear his first sermon; wherein this Jacobin, having spoken of the necessity of the grace of Jesus Christ in order to the doing of good deeds, these two wiseacres thought that he was preaching Jansenism; and thereupon, after the sermon, the Sieur de Mézy went to the proctor of the ecclesiastical court and denounced him.

[Nicole, Mémoire pour faire connoistre l’espnt et la conduite de la Compagnie appellée l’Hermitage.]

His zeal, though but moderately tempered with knowledge, sometimes proved more useful than on this occasion. The Jacobin convent at Caen was divided against itself. Some of the monks had embraced the doctrines taught by Bernières, while the rest held dogmas which he declared to be contrary to those of the Jesuits, and therefore heterodox. A prior was to be elected, and, with the help of Bernières, his partisans gained the victory, choosing one Father Louis, through whom the Hermitage gained a complete control in the convent. But the adverse party presently resisted, and complained to the provincial of their order, who came to Caen to close the dispute by deposing Father Louis. Hearing of his approach, Bernières asked aid from his military disciple, and De Mézy sent him a squad of soldiers, who guarded the convent doors and barred out the provincial.

[ibid.]

Among the merits of Mézy, his humility and charity were especially admired; and the people of Caen had more than once seen the town major staggering across the street with a beggar mounted on his back, whom he was bearing dryshod through the mud in the exercise of those virtues. [1] In this he imitated his master Bernières, of whom similar acts are recorded. [2] However dramatic in manifestation, his devotion was not only sincere but intense. Laval imagined that he knew him well. Above all others, Mézy was the man of his choice; and so eagerly did he plead for him, that the king himself paid certain debts which the pious major had contracted, and thus left him free to sail for Canada.

[1: Juchereau, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 149.]

[2: See the laudatory notice of Bernières de Louvigny in the Nouvelle Biographie Universelle.]

His deportment on the voyage was edifying, and the first days of his accession were passed in harmony. He permitted Laval to form the new council and supplied the soldiers for the seizure of Dumesnil’s papers. A question arose concerning Montreal, a subject on which the governors and the bishop rarely differed in opinion. The present instance was no exception to the rule. Mézy removed Maisonneuve, the local governor, and immediately replaced him; the effect being, that whereas he had before derived his authority from the seigniors of the island, he now derived it from the governor-general. It was a movement in the interest, of centralized power, and as such was cordially approved by Laval.

The first indication to the bishop and the Jesuits that the new governor was not likely to prove in their hands as clay in the hands of the potter, is said to have been given on occasion of an interview with an embassy of Iroquois chiefs, to whom Mézy, aware of their duplicity, spoke with a decision and haughtiness that awed the savages and astonished the ecclesiastics.

He seems to have been one of those natures that run with an engrossing vehemence along any channel into which they may have been turned. At the Hermitage he was all devotee; but climate and conditions had changed, and he or his symptoms changed with them. He found himself raised suddenly to a post of command, or one which was meant to be such. The town major of Caen was set to rule over a region far larger than France. The royal authority was trusted to his keeping, and his honor and duty forbade him to break the trust. But when he found that those who had procured for him his new dignities had done so that he might be an instrument of their will, his ancient pride started again into life, and his headstrong temper broke out like a long-smothered fire. Laval stood aghast at the transformation. His lamb had turned wolf.

What especially stirred the governor’s dudgeon was the conduct of Bourdon, Villeray, and Auteuil, those faithful allies whom Laval had placed on the council, and who, as Mézy soon found, were wholly in the bishop’s interest. On the 13th of February he sent his friend Angoville, major of the fort, to Laval, with a written declaration to the effect that he had ordered them to absent themselves from the council, because, having been appointed “on the persuasion of the aforesaid Bishop of Petraea, who knew them to be wholly his creatures, they wish to make themselves masters in the aforesaid council, and have acted in divers ways against the interests of the king and the public for the promotion of personal and private ends, and have formed and fomented cabals, contrary to their duty and their oath of fidelity to his aforesaid Majesty.” [3] He further declares that advantage had been taken of the facility of his disposition and his ignorance of the country to surprise him into assenting to their nomination; and he asks the bishop to acquiesce in their expulsion, and join him in calling an assembly of the people to choose others in their place. Laval refused; on which Mézy caused his declaration to be placarded about Quebec and proclaimed by sound of drum.

[3: Ordre de M. de Mézy de faire sommation a l’Evêque de Petrée, 13 Fev., 1664. Notification du dit Ordre, mène date. (Registre du Conseil Supérieur.)]

The proposal of a public election, contrary as it was to the spirit of the government, opposed to the edict establishing the council, and utterly odious to the young autocrat who ruled over France, gave Laval a great advantage. “I reply,” he wrote, “to the request which Monsieur the Governor makes me to consent to the interdiction of the persons named in his declaration, and proceed to the choice of other councilors or officers by an assembly of the people, that neither my conscience nor my honor, nor the respect and obedience which I owe to the will and commands of the king, nor my fidelity and affection to his service, will by any means permit me to do so.”

[Réponse de l’Evêque de Petrée, 16 Fev., 1664.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 8 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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