Parkman Vol. 5, Chapter 15

The winter that followed the arrival of the furs from the upper lakes was a season of gayety without precedent since the war began.

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

Previously in Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. Beginning Chapter 15.

While the Canadians hailed Frontenac as a father, he found also some recognition of his services from his masters at the court. The king wrote him a letter with his own hand, to express satisfaction at the defense of Quebec, and sent him a gift of two thousand crowns. He greatly needed the money, but prized the letter still more, and wrote to his relative, the minister Ponchartrain: “The gift you procured for me, this year, has helped me very much towards paying the great expenses which the crisis of our affairs and the excessive cost of living here have caused me; but, though I receive this mark of his Majesty’s goodness with the utmost respect and gratitude, I confess that I feel far more deeply the satisfaction that he has been pleased to express with my services. The raising of the siege of Quebec did not deserve all the attention that I hear he has given it in the midst of so many important events, and therefore I must needs ascribe it to your kindness in commending it to his notice. This leads me to hope that whenever some office, or permanent employment, or some mark of dignity or distinction, may offer itself, you will put me on the list as well as others who have the honor to be as closely connected with you as I am; for it would be very hard to find myself forgotten because I am in a remote country, where it is more difficult and dangerous to serve the king than elsewhere. I have consumed all my property. Nothing is left but what the king gives me; and I have reached an age where, though neither strength nor goodwill fail me as yet, and though the latter will last as long as I live, I see myself on the eve of losing the former: so that a post a little more secure and tranquil than the government of Canada will soon suit my time of life; and, if I can be assured of your support, I shall not despair of getting such a one. Please then to permit my wife and my friends to refresh your memory now and then on this point.” [1] Again, in the following year: “I have been encouraged to believe that the gift of two thousand crowns, which his Majesty made me last year, would be continued; but apparently you have not been able to obtain it, for I think that you know the difficulty I have in living here on my salary. I hope that, when you find a better opportunity, you will try to procure me this favor. My only trust is in your support; and I am persuaded that, having the honor to be so closely connected with you, you would reproach yourself, if you saw me sink into decrepitude, without resources and without honors.” [2] And still again he appeals to the minister for “some permanent and honorable place attended with the marks of distinction, which are more grateful than all the rest to a heart shaped after the right pattern.” [3] In return for these sturdy applications, he got nothing for the present but a continuance of the king’s gift of two thousand crowns.

[1: Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691.]

[2: Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692.

[3: Ibid., 25 Oct., 1693.]

Not every voice in the colony sounded the governor’s praise. Now, as always, he had enemies in state and Church. It is true that the quarrels and the bursts of passion that marked his first term of government now rarely occurred, but this was not so much due to a change in Frontenac himself as to a change in the conditions around him. The war made him indispensable. He had gained what he wanted, the consciousness of mastery; and under its soothing influence he was less irritable and exacting. He lived with the bishop on terms of mutual courtesy, while his relations with his colleague, the intendant, were commonly smooth enough on the surface; for Champigny, warned by the court not to offend him, treated him with studied deference, and was usually treated in return with urbane condescension. During all this time, the intendant was complaining of him to the minister. “He is spending a great deal of money; but he is master and does what he pleases. I can only keep the peace by yielding everything.” [4] “He wants to reduce me to a nobody.” And, among other similar charges, he says that the governor receives pay for garrisons that do not exist and keeps it for himself. “Do not tell that I said so,” adds the prudent Champigny, “for it would make great trouble, if he knew it.” [5] Frontenac, perfectly aware of these covert attacks, desires the minister not to heed “the falsehoods and impostures uttered against me by persons who meddle with what does not concern them.” [6] He alludes to Champigny’s allies, the Jesuits, who, as he thought, had also maligned him. “Since I have been here, I have spared no pains to gain the goodwill of Monsieur the intendant, and may God grant that the counsels which he is too ready to receive from certain persons who have never been friends of peace and harmony do not sometime make division between us. But I close my eyes to all that and shall still persevere.” [7] In another letter to Ponchartrain, he says: “I write you this in private, because I have been informed by my wife that charges have been made to you against my conduct since my return to this country. I promise you, Monseigneur, that, whatever my accusers do, they will not make me change conduct towards them, and that I shall still treat them with consideration. I merely ask your leave most humbly to represent that, having maintained this colony in full prosperity during the ten years when I formerly held the government of it, I nevertheless fell a sacrifice to the artifice and fury of those whose encroachments, and whose excessive and unauthorized power, my duty and my passionate affection for the service of the king obliged me in conscience to repress. My recall, which made them masters in the conduct of the government, was followed by all the disasters which overwhelmed this unhappy colony. The millions that the king spent here, the troops that he sent out, and the Canadians that he took into pay, all went for nothing. Most of the soldiers, and no small number of brave Canadians, perished in enterprises ill devised and ruinous to the country, which I found on my arrival ravaged with unheard-of cruelty by the Iroquois, without resistance, and in sight of the troops and of the forts. The inhabitants were discouraged, and unnerved by want of confidence in their chiefs; while the friendly Indians, seeing our weakness, were ready to join our enemies. I was fortunate enough and diligent enough to change this deplorable state of things, and drive away the English, whom my predecessors did not have on their hands, and this too with only half as many troops as they had. I am far from wishing to blame their conduct. I leave you to judge it. But I cannot have the tranquillity and freedom of mind which I need for the work I have to do here, without feeling entire confidence that the cabal which is again forming against me cannot produce impressions which may prevent you from doing me justice. For the rest, if it is thought fit that I should leave the priests to do as they like, I shall be delivered from an infinity of troubles and cares, in which I can have no other interest than the good of the colony, the trade of the kingdom, and the peace of the king’s subjects, and of which I alone bear the burden, as well as the jealousy of sundry persons, and the iniquity of the ecclesiastics, who begin to call impious those who are obliged to oppose their passions and their interests.” [8]

[4: Champigny au Ministre, 12 Oct., 1691.]

[5: Ibid., 4 Nov., 1693.]

[6: Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692.]

[7: Ibid., 20 Oct., 1691.]

[8: “L’iniquité des ecclésiastiques qui commencent à traiter d’impies ceux qui sont obligés de resister à leurs passions et à leurs interêts.” Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691.]

As Champigny always sided with the Jesuits, his relations with Frontenac grew daily more critical. Open rupture at length seemed imminent, and the king interposed to keep the peace. “There has been discord between you under a show of harmony,” he wrote to the disputants. [9] Frontenac was exhorted to forbearance and calmness; while the intendant was told that he allowed himself to be made an instrument of others, and that his charges against the governor proved nothing but his own ill-temper. [10] The minister wrote in vain. The bickerings that he reproved were but premonitions of a greater strife.

[9: Mémoire du Roy pour Frontenac et Champigny, 1694.]

[10: Le Ministre à Frontenac, 8 May, 1694; Le Ministre à Champigny, même date.]

Bishop Saint-Vallier was a rigid, austere, and contentious prelate, who loved power as much as Frontenac himself, and thought that, as the deputy of Christ, it was his duty to exercise it to the utmost. The governor watched him with a jealous eye, well aware that, though the pretensions of the Church to supremacy over the civil power had suffered a check, Saint-Vallier would revive them the moment he thought he could do so with success. I have shown elsewhere the severity of the ecclesiastical rule at Quebec, where the zealous pastors watched their flock with unrelenting vigilance, and associations of pious women helped them in the work. [11] This naturally produced revolt, and tended to divide the town into two parties, the worldly and the devout. The love of pleasure was not extinguished, and various influences helped to keep it alive. Perhaps none of these was so potent as the presence in winter of a considerable number of officers from France, whose piety was often less conspicuous than their love of enjoyment. At the Château St. Louis a circle of young men, more or less brilliant and accomplished, surrounded the governor, and formed a center of social attraction. Frontenac was not without religion, and he held it becoming a man of his station not to fail in its observances; but he would not have a Jesuit confessor and placed his conscience in the keeping of the Récollet friars, who were not politically aggressive, and who had been sent to Canada expressly as a foil to the rival order. They found no favor in the eyes of the bishop and his adherents, and the governor found none for the support he lent them.

[11: Old Régime, chap. xix.]

The winter that followed the arrival of the furs from the upper lakes was a season of gayety without precedent since the war began. All was harmony at Quebec till the carnival approached, when Frontenac, whose youthful instincts survived his seventy-four years, introduced a startling novelty which proved the signal of discord. One of his military circle, the sharp-witted La Motte-Cadillac, thus relates this untoward event in a letter to a friend: “The winter passed very pleasantly, especially to the officers, who lived together like comrades; and, to contribute to their honest enjoyment, the count caused two plays to be acted, ‘Nicomede’ and ‘Mithridate.'” It was an amateur performance, in which the officers took part along with some of the ladies of Quebec. The success was prodigious, and so was the storm that followed. Half a century before, the Jesuits had grieved over the first ball in Canada. Private theatricals were still more baneful. “The clergy,” continues La Motte, “beat their alarm drums, armed cap-a-pie, and snatched their bows and arrows. The Sieur Glandelet was first to begin, and preached two sermons, in which he tried to prove that nobody could go to a play without mortal sin. The bishop issued a mandate, and had it read from the pulpits, in which he speaks of certain impious, impure, and noxious comedies, insinuating that those which had been acted were such. The credulous and infatuated people, seduced by the sermons and the mandate, began already to regard the count as a corrupter of morals and a destroyer of religion. The numerous party of the pretended devotees mustered in the streets and public places, and presently made their way into the houses, to confirm the weak-minded in their illusion, and tried to make the stronger share it; but, as they failed in this almost completely, they resolved at last to conquer or die, and persuaded the bishop to use a strange device, which was to publish a mandate in the church, whereby the Sieur de Mareuil, a half-pay lieutenant, was interdicted the use of the sacraments.”

[La Motte-Cadillac à — — — , 28 Sept., 1694.]

From Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, Chapter 15 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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