CHAPTER 8
1659, 1660.

 LAVAL AND ARGENSON.

WE are touching delicate ground.  To many excel-lent Catholics of our own day Laval is an object of veneration.  The Catholic university of Quebec glories in bearing his name, and certain modern ecclesiastical writers rarely mention him in terms less reverent than "the virtuous prelate," or "the holy prelate." Nor are some of his contemporaries less emphatic in eulogy.  Mother Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Superior of the Hotel Dieu, wrote immediately after his death: "He began in his tenderest years the study of perfection, and we have reason to think that he reached it, since every virtue which Saint Paul demands in a bishop was seen and admired in him;" and on his first arrival in Canada, Mother Marie de 1'Incarnation, Superior of the Ursulines, wrote to her son that the choice of such a prelate was not of man, but of God.  "I will not, she adds.  "say that he is a saint; but I may say with truth that he lives like a saint and an apostle." And she describes his austerity of life; how he had but two servants, a gardener whom he lent on occasion to his needy neighbors and a valet; how he lived in a small hired house, saying that he would not have one of his own if he could build it for only five sous; and how, in his table, furniture, and bed, he showed the spirit of poverty, even, as she thinks, to excess.  His servant, a lay brother named Houssart, testified, after his death, that he slept on a hard bed, and would not suffer it to be changed even when it became full of fleas; and, what is more to the purpose, that he gave fifteen hundred or two thousand francs to the poor every year.1 Houssart also gives the following specimen of his austerities: " I have seen him keep cooked meat five, six, seven, or eight days in the heat of summer; and when it was all mouldy and wormy he washed it in warm water and ate it, and told me that it was very good." The old servant was so impressed by these and other proofs of his master's sanctity, that "I determined," he says, "to keep everything I could that had belonged to his holy person, and after his death to soak bits of linen in his blood when his body was opened, and take a few bones and cartilages from his breast, cut off his hair, and keep his clothes, and such things, to serve as most precious relics." These pious cares were not in vain, for the relics proved greatly in demand.

Several portraits of Laval are extant.  A drooping nose of portentous size; a well-formed forehead; a brow strongly arched; a bright, clear eye; scanty hair, half hidden by a black skullcap; thin lips, compressed and rigid, betraying a spirit not easy to move or convince; features of that indescribable cast which marks the priestly type,  such is Laval, as he looks grimly down on us from the dingy canvas of two centuries ago.

He is one of those concerning whom Protestants and Catholics, at least ultramontane Catholics, will never agree in judgment.  The task of eulogizing him may safely be left to those of his own way of thinking.  It is for us to regard him from the standpoint of secular history.  And, first, let us credit him with sincerity.  He believed firmly that the princes and rulers of this world ought to be subject to guidance and control at the hands of the Pope, the vicar of Christ on earth.  But he himself was the Pope's vicar, and, so far as the bounds of Canada extended, the Holy Father had clothed him with his own authority.  The glory of God demanded that this authority should suffer no abatement; and he, Laval, would be guilty before Heaven if he did not uphold the supremacy of the Church over the powers both of earth and of hell.

Of the faults which he owed to nature, the prin-cipal seems to have been an arbitrary and domineering temper.  He was one of those who by nature lean always to the side of authority; and in the English Revolution he would inevitably have stood for the Stuarts; or, in the American Revolution, for the Crown.  But being above all things a Catholic and a priest, he was drawn by a constitutional necessity to the ultramontane party, or the party of centralization.  He fought lustily, in his way, against the natural man; and humility was the virtue to the culture of which he gave his chief attention; but soil and climate were not favorable.  His life was one long assertion of the authority of the Church, and this authority was lodged in himself.  In his stubborn fight for ecclesiastical ascendency, he was aided by the impulses of a nature that loved to rule, and could not endure to yield.  His principles and his instinct of domination were acting in perfect unison, and his conscience was the handmaid of his fault.  Austerities and mortifications, playing at beggar, sleeping in beds full of fleas, or performing prodigies of gratuitous dirtiness in hospitals, how-ever fatal to self-respect, could avail little against influences working so powerfully and so insidiously to stimulate the most subtle of human vices.  The history of the Roman Church is full of Lavals.

The Jesuits, adepts in human nature, had made a sagacious choice when they put forward this con-scientious, zealous, dogged, and pugnacious priest to fight their battles.  Nor were they ill pleased that, for the present, he was not Bishop of Canada, but only vicar apostolic; for such being the case, they could have him recalled if on trial they did not like him, while an unacceptable bishop would be an evil past remedy.

Canada was entering a state of transition.  Hitherto ecclesiastical influence had been all in all.  The Jesuits, by far the most educated and able body of men in the colony, had controlled it, not alone in things spiritual, but virtually in things temporal also; and the governor may be said to have been little else than a chief of police, under the direction of the missionaries.  The early governors were themselves deeply imbued with the missionary spirit.  Champlain was earnest above all things for convert-ing the Indians; Montmagny was half-monk, for he was a Knight of Malta; d'Ailleboust was so insanely pious that he lived with his wife like monk and nun.  A change was at hand.  From a mission and a trading station, Canada was 'soon to become, in the true sense, a colony; and civil government had begun to assert itself on the banks of the Saint Lawrence.  The epoch of the martyrs and apostles was passing away, and the man of the sword and the man of the gown  the soldier and the legist  were threatening to supplant the paternal sway of priests; or, as Laval might have said, the hosts of this world were beleaguering the sanctuary, and he was called of Heaven to defend it.  His true antagonist, though three thousand miles away, was the great minister Colbert, as purely a statesman as the vicar apostolic was purely a priest.  Laval, no doubt, could see behind the statesman's back another adversary,  the Devil.

Argenson was governor when the crozier and the sword began to clash, which is merely another way of saying that he was governor when Laval arrived.  He seems to have been a man of education, moderation, and sense, and he was also an earnest Catholic; but if Laval had his duties to God, so had Argenson his duties to the King, of whose authority he was the representative and guardian.  If the first collisions seem trivial, they were no less the symptoms of a grave antagonism.  Argenson could have purchased peace only by becoming an agent of the Church.

The vicar apostolic, or, as he was usually styled, the bishop, being, it may be remembered, titular Bishop of Petrsea in Arabia, presently fell into a quarrel with the governor touching the relative position of their seats in church,  a point which, by the way, was a subject of contention for many years, and under several successive governors.  This time the case was referred to the ex-governor, d'Ailleboust, and a temporary settlement took place.  A few weeks after, on the fete of Saint Francis Xavier, when the Jesuits were accustomed to ask the dignitaries of the colony to dine in their refectory after mass, a fresh difficulty arose,  Should the governor or the bishop have the higher seat at table? The question   defied   solution;   so   the   fathers   invited neither of them.

Again, on Christmas, at the midnight mass, the deacon offered incense to the bishop, and then, in obedience to an order from him, sent a subordinate to offer it to the governor, instead of offering it himself.  Laval further insisted that the priests of the choir should receive incense before the governor received it.  Argenson resisted, and a bitter quarrel ensued.

The late governor, d'Ailleboust, had been churchwarden ex officio;  and in this pious community the office was esteemed as an addition to his honors.  Argenson had thus far held the same position; but Laval declared that he should hold it no longer.  Argenson, to whom the bishop had not spoken on the subject, came soon after to a meeting of the wardens, and, being challenged, denied Laval's right to dismiss him.  A dispute ensued, in which the bishop, according to his Jesuit friends, used language not very respectful to the representative of royalty.

On occasion of the "solemn catechism," the bishop insisted that the children should salute him before saluting the governor.  Argenson, hearing of this, declined to come.  A compromise was contrived.  It was agreed that when the rival dignitaries entered, the children should be busied in some manual exercise which should prevent their saluting either.  Nevertheless, two boys, " enticed and set on by their parents," saluted the governor first, to the great indignation of Laval.  They were whipped on the next day for breach of orders.

Next there was a sharp quarrel about a sentence pronounced by Laval against a heretic, to which the governor, good Catholic as he was, took exception.2 Palm Sunday came, and there could be no procession and no distribution of branches, because the governor and the bishop could not agree on points of precedence.

On the day of the Fe’te Dieu, however, there was a grand procession, which stopped from time to time at temporary altars, or reposoirs, placed at intervals along its course.  One of these was in the fort, where the soldiers were drawn up, waiting the arrival of the procession.  Laval demanded that they should take off their hats.  Argenson assented, and the soldiers stood uncovered.  Laval now insisted that they should kneel.  The governor replied that it was their duty as soldiers to stand; whereupon the bishop refused to stop at the altar, and ordered the procession to move on.

The above incidents are set down in the private journal of the superior of the Jesuits, which was not meant for the public eye.  The bishop, it will be seen, was, by the showing of his friends, in most cases the aggressor.  The disputes in question, though of a nature to provoke a smile on irreverent lips, were by no means so puerile as they appear.  It is difficult in a modern democratic society to conceive the substantial importance of the signs and symbols of dignity and authority at a time and among a people where they were adjusted with the most scrupulous precision, and accepted by all classes as exponents of relative degrees in the social and political scale.  Whether the bishop or the governor should sit in the higher seat at table thus became a political question, for it denned to the popular understanding the position of Church and State in their relations to government.

Hence it is not surprising to find a memorial, drawn up apparently by Argenson, and addressed to the council of State, asking for instructions when and how a governor  lieutenant-general for the King  ought to receive incense, holy water, and consecrated bread; whether the said bread should be offered him with sound of drum and fife; what should be the position of his seat at church; and what place he should hold in various religious ceremonies; whether in feasts, assemblies, ceremonies, and councils of a purely civil character, he or the bishop was to hold the first place; and, finally, if the bishop could excommunicate the inhabitants or, others for acts of a civil and political character, when the said acts were pronounced lawful by the governor.

The reply to the memorial denies to the bishop the power of excommunication in civil matters, assigns to him the second place in meetings and ceremonies of a civil character, and is very reticent as to the rest.

Argenson had a brother, a counsellor of State, and a fast friend of the Jesuits.  Laval was in corre-spondence with him, and, apparently sure of sym-pathy, wrote to him touching his relations with the governor.  "Your brother," he begins, "received me on my arrival with extraordinary kindness; " but he proceeds to say, that, perceiving with sorrow that he entertained a groundless distrust of those good ser-vants of God, the Jesuit fathers, he, the bishop, thought it his duty to give him in private a candid warning which ought to have done good, but which, to his surprise, the governor had taken amiss, and had conceived, in consequence, a prejudice against his monitor.

Argenson, on his part, writes to the same brother, at about the same time.  " The Bishop of Petrsea is so stiff in opinion, and so often transported by his zeal beyond the rights of his position, that he makes no difficulty in encroaching on the functions of others; and this with so much heat that he will listen to nobody.  A few days ago he carried off a servant girl of one of the inhabitants here, and placed her by his own authority in the Ursuline convent, on the sole pretext that he wanted to have her instructed,  thus depriving her master of her services, though he had been at great expense in bringing her from France.  This inhabitant is M.  Denis, who, not knowing who had carried her off, came to me with a petition to get her out of the convent.  I kept the petition three days without answering it, to prevent the affair from being noised abroad.  The Reverend Father Lalemant, with whom I communicated on the subject, and who greatly blamed the Bishop of Petrsea, did all in his power to have the girl given up quietly, but without the least success, so that I was forced to answer the petition, and permit M.  Denis to take his servant wherever he should find her; and if I had not used means to bring about an accommodation, and if M.  Denis, on the refusal which was made him to give her up, had brought the matter into court, I should have been compelled to take measures which would have caused great scandal,  and all from the self-will of the Bishop of Petrsea, who says that a bishop can do what he likes, and threatens nothing but excom-munication." 

In another letter he speaks in the same strain of this redundancy of zeal on the part of the bishop, which often, he says, takes the shape of obstinacy and encroachment on the rights of others.  "It is greatly to be wished," he observes, "that the Bishop of Petrsea would give his confidence to the Reverend Father Lalemant instead of Father Ragueneau;"1 and he praises Lalemant as a person of excellent sense.  "It would be well," he adds, "if the rest of their community were of the same mind; for in that case they would not mix themselves up with various matters in the way they do, and would leave the government to those to whom God has given it in charge."

One of Laval's modern admirers, the worthy Abbe’ Ferland, after confessing that his zeal may now and then have savored of excess, adds in his defence that a vigorous hand was needed to compel the infant colony to enter " the good path,"  meaning, of course, the straitest path of Roman Catholic orthodoxy.  We may hereafter see more of this stringent system of colonial education, its success, and the results that followed.