CHAPTER 13
1661-1665.  

ROYAL INTERVENTION.

LEAVE Canada behind; cross the sea, and stand, on an evening in June, by the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau.  Beyond the broad gardens, above the long ranges of moonlit trees, rise the walls and pinnacles of the vast chateau,  a shrine of history, the gorgeous monument of lines of vanished kings, haunted with memories of Capet, Valois, and Bourbon.

There was little thought of the past at Fontainebleau in June, 1661.  The present was too dazzling and too intoxicating; the future, too radiant with hope and promise.  It was the morning of a new reign; the sun of Louis XIV.  was rising in splendor, and the rank and beauty of France were gathered to pay it homage.  A youthful court, a youthful king; a pomp and magnificence such as Europe had never seen; a delirium of ambition, pleasure, and love,  all this wrought in many a young heart an enchantment destined to be cruelly broken.  Even old courtiers felt the fascination of the scene, and tell us of the music at evening by the borders of the lake; of the gay groups that strolled under the shadowing trees, floated in gilded barges on the still water, or moved slowly in open carriages around its borders.  Here was Anne of Austria, the King's mother, and Marie The're'se, his tender and jealous queen; his brother, the Duke of Orleans, with his bride of sixteen, Henriette of England; and his favorite, that vicious butterfly of the court, the Count de Quiche.  Here, too, were the humbled chiefs of the civil war, Beaufort and Conde", obsequious before their triumphant master.  Louis XIV., the centre of all eyes, in the flush of health and vigor, and the pride of new fledged royalty, stood, as he still stands on the canvas of Philippe de Champagne, attired in a splendor which would have been effeminate but for the stately port of the youth who wore it.

Fortune had been strangely bountiful to  Louis XIV.  The nations of Europe, exhausted by wars and dissensions, looked upon him with respect and fear.  Among weak and weary neighbors, he alone was strong.  The death of Mazarin had released him from tutelage; feudalism in the person of Conde’ was abject before him; he had reduced his parliaments to submission; and in the arrest of the ambitious prodigal Fouquet, he was preparing a crushing blow to the financial corruption which had devoured France.

Nature had formed him to act the part of King.  Even his critics and enemies praise the grace and majesty of his presence, and he impressed his courtiers with an admiration which seems to have been to an astonishing degree genuine.  He carried airs of royalty even into his pleasures; and while his example corrupted all France, he proceeded to the apartments of Montespan or Fontanges with the majestic gravity of Olympian Jove.  He was a devout observer of the 'forms of religion; and as the buoyancy of youth passed away, his zeal was stimulated by a profound fear of the Devil.  Mazarin had reared him in ignorance; but his faculties were excellent in their way, and in a private station would have made him an efficient man of business.  The vivacity of his passions and his inordinate love of pleasure were joined to a persistent will and a rare power of labor.  The vigorous mediocrity of his understanding delighted in grappling with details.  His astonished courtiers saw him take on himself the burden of administration, and work at it without relenting for more than half a century.  Great as was his energy, his pride was far greater.  As king by divine right, he felt himself raised immeasurably above the highest of his subjects; but while vindicating with unparalleled haughtiness his claims to supreme authority, he was, at the outset, filled with a sense of the duties of his high place, and fired by an ambition to make his reign beneficent to France as well as glorious to himself.

Above all rulers of modern times, Louis XIV.  was the embodiment of the monarchical idea.  The famous words ascribed to him, "I am the State," were probably never uttered; but they perfectly express his spirit.  "It is God's will," he wrote in 1666, "that whoever is born a subject should not reason, but obey;" and those around him were of his mind.  "The State is in the King," said Bossuet, the great mouthpiece of monarchy; " the will of the people is merged in his will.  O Kings! put forth your power boldly, for it is divine and salutary to humankind." 

For a few brief years, this King's reign was indeed salutary to France.  His judgment of men, when not obscured by his pride and his passion for flattery, was good; and he had at his service the generals and statesmen formed in the freer and bolder epoch that had ended with his accession.  Among them was Jean Baptiste Colbert, formerly the intendant of Mazarin's household,  a man whose energies matched his talents, and who had preserved his rectitude in the midst of corruption.  It was a hard task that Colbert imposed on his proud and violent nature to serve the imperious King, morbidly jealous of his authority, and resolved to accept no initiative but his own.  He must counsel while seeming to receive counsel, and lead while seeming to follow.  The new minister bent himself to the task, and the nation reaped the profit.  A vast system of reform was set in action amid the outcries of nobles, financiers, churchmen, and all who profited by abuses.  The methods of this reform were trenchant and sometimes violent, and its principles were not always in accord with those of modern economic science; but the good that resulted was incalculable.  The burdens of the laboring classes were lightened, the public revenues increased, and the wholesale plunder of the public money was arrested with a strong hand.  Laws were reformed and codified; feudal tyranny; which still subsisted in many quarters, was repressed; agriculture and productive industry of all kinds were encouraged, roads and canals opened, trade was stimulated, a commercial marine created, and a powerful navy formed as if by magic.

It is in his commercial, industrial, and colonial policy that the profound defects of the great minister's system are most apparent.  It was a system of authority, monopoly, and exclusion, in which the government, and not the individual, acted always the foremost part.  Upright, incorruptible, ardent for the public good, inflexible, arrogant, and domineering, he sought to drive France into paths of prosperity, and create colonies by the energy of an imperial will.  He feared, and with reason, that the want of enterprise and capital among the merchants would prevent the broad and immediate results at which he aimed; and to secure these results he established a series of great trading corporations, in which the principles of privilege and exclusion were pushed to their utmost limits.  Prominent among them was the Company of the West.  The King signed the edict creating it on the twenty-fourth of May, 1664.  Any person in the kingdom or out of it might become a partner by subscribing, within a certain time, not less than three thousand francs.  France was a mere patch on the map, compared to the vast domains of the new association.  Western Africa from Cape Verd to the Cape of Good Hope, South America between the Amazon and the Orinoco, Cayenne, the Antilles, and all New France, from Hudson's Bay to Virginia and Florida, were bestowed on it forever, to be held of the Crown on the simple condition of faith and homage.  As, according to the edict, the glory of God was the chief object in view, the company was required to supply its possessions with a sufficient number of priests, and diligently to exclude all teachers of false doctrine.  It was empowered to build forts and war ships, cast cannon, wage war, make peace, establish courts, appoint judges, and otherwise to act as sovereign within its own domains.  A monopoly of trade was granted it for forty years.  Sugar from the Antilles and furs from Canada were the chief source of expected profit; and Africa was to supply the slaves to raise the sugar.  Scarcely was the grand machine set in motion, when its directors betrayed a narrowness and blindness of policy which boded the enterprise no good.  Canada was a chief sufferer.  Once more, bound hand and foot, she was handed over to a selfish league of merchants,  monopoly in trade, monopoly in religion, monopoly in government.  Nobody but the company had a right to bring her the necessaries of life; and nobody but the company had a right to exercise the traffic which alone could give her the means of paying for these necessaries.  Moreover, the supplies which it brought were insufficient, and the prices which it demanded were exorbitant.  It was throttling its wretched victim.  The Canadian merchants remonstrated.  It was clear that if the colony was to live, the system must be changed; and a change was accordingly ordered.  The company gave up its monopoly of the fur trade, but reserved the right to levy a duty of one-fourth of the beaver skins, and one-tenth of the moose skins; and it also reserved the entire trade of Tadoussac,  that is to say, the trade of all the tribes between the lower Saint Lawrence and Hudson's Bay.  It retained, besides, the exclusive right of transporting furs in its own ships,  thus controlling the commerce of Canada, and discouraging, or rather extinguishing, the enterprise of Canadian merchants.  On its part, it was required to pay governors, judges, and all the colonial officials out of the duties which it levied.

Yet the King had the prosperity of Canada at heart; and he proceeded to show his interest in her after a manner hardly consistent with his late action in handing her over to a mercenary guardian.  In fact, he acted as if she had still remained under his paternal care.  He had just conferred the right of naming a governor and intendant upon the new company; but he now assumed it himself, the company, with a just sense of its own unfitness, readily consenting to this suspension of one of its most important privileges.  Daniel de Re’my, Sieur de Courcelle, was appointed governor, and Jean Baptiste Talon intendant.  The nature of this duplicate government will appear hereafter.  But before appointing rulers for Canada, the King had appointed a representative of the Crown for all his American domains.  The Mare’chal d'Estrades had for some time held the title of viceroy for America; and as he could not fulfil the duties of that office, being at the time ambassador in Holland, the Marquis de Tracy was sent in his place, with the title of lieutenant-general.

Canada at this time was an object of very considerable attention at court, and especially in what was known as the parti divot.  The Relations of the Jesuits, appealing equally to the spirit of religion and the spirit of romantic adventure, had for more than a quarter of a century been the favorite reading of the devout, and the visit of Laval at court had greatly stimulated the interest they had kindled.  The letters of Argenson, and especially of Avaugour, had shown the vast political possibilities of the young colony, and opened a vista of future glories alike for Church and for King.

So, when Tracy set sail he found no lack of followers.  A throng of young nobles embarked with him, eager to explore the marvels and mysteries of the western world.  The King gave him two hundred soldiers of the regiment of Carignan Salieres, and promised that a thousand more should follow.  After spending more than a year in the West Indies, where, as Mother Mary of the Incarnation expresses it, "he performed marvels and reduced everybody to obedience," he at length sailed up the Saint Lawrence, and on the thirtieth of June, 1665, anchored in the basin of Quebec.  The broad, white standard, blazoned with the arms of France, proclaimed the representative of royalty; and Point Levi and Cape Diamond and the distant Cape Tourmente roared back the sound of the saluting cannon.  All Quebec was on the ramparts or at the landing place, and all eyes were strained at the two vessels as they slowly emptied their crowded decks into the boats alongside.  The boats at length drew near, and the lieutenant-general and his suite landed on the quay with a pomp such as Quebec had never seen before.

Tracy was a veteran of sixty-two, portly and tall, "one of the largest men I ever saw," writes Mother Mary; but he was sallow with disease, for fever had seized him, and it had fared ill with him on the long voyage.  The Chevalier de Chaumont walked at his side, and young nobles surrounded him, gorgeous in lace and ribbons and majestic in leonine wigs.  Twenty-four guards in the King's livery led the way, followed by four pages and six valets; and thus, while the Frenchmen shouted and the Indians stared, the august procession threaded the streets of the Lower Town, and climbed the steep pathway that scaled the cliffs above.  Breathing hard, they reached the top, passed on the left the dilapidated walls of the fort and the shed of mingled wood and masonry which then bore the name of the Castle of Saint Louis; passed on the right the old house of Couillard and the site of Laval's new seminary, and soon reached the square betwixt the Jesuit college and the cathedral.  The bells were ringing in a frenzy of welcome.  Laval in pontificals, surrounded by priests and Jesuits, stood waiting to receive the deputy of the King; and as he greeted Tracy and offered him the holy water, he looked with anxious curiosity to see what manner of man he was.  The signs were auspicious.  The deportment of the lieutenant-general left nothing to desire.  A priedieu had been placed for him.  He declined it.  They offered him a cushion, but he would not have it; and, fevered as he was, he knelt on the bare pavement with a devotion that edified every beholder.  Te Deum was sung, and a day of rejoicing followed.

There was good cause.  Canada, it was plain, was not to be wholly abandoned to a trading company.  Louis XIV.  was resolved that a new France should be added to the old.  Soldiers, settlers, horses, sheep, cattle, young women for wives, were all sent out in abundance by his paternal benignity.  Before the season was over, about two thousand persons had landed at Quebec at the royal charge.  "At length," writes Mother Juchereau, " our joy was completed by the arrival of two vessels with Monsieur de Courcelle, our governor; Monsieur Talon, our intendant, and the last companies of the regiment of Carignan." More state and splendor, more young nobles, more guards and valets: for Courcelle, too, says the same chronicler, "had a superb train; and Monsieur Talon, who naturally loves glory, forgot nothing which could do honor to the King." Thus a sunbeam from the court fell for a moment on the rock of Quebec.  Yet all was not sunshine; for the voyage had been a tedious one, and disease had broken out in the ships.  That which bore Talon had been a hundred and seventeen days at sea, and others were hardly more fortunate.  The hospital was crowded with the sick; so, too, were the Church and the neighboring houses; and the nuns were so spent with their labors that seven of them were brought to the point of death.  The priests were busied in convert ing the Huguenots, a number of whom were detected among the soldiers and emigrants.  One of them proved refractory, declaring with oaths that he would never renounce his faith.  Falling dangerously ill, he was carried to the hospital, where Mother Catherine de Saint Augustin bethought her of a plan of conversion.  She ground to powder a small piece of a bone of Father Bre’beuf, the Jesuit martyr, and secretly mixed the sacred dust with the patient's gruel; whereupon, says Mother Juchereau, "this intractable man forthwith became gentle as an angel, begged to be instructed, embraced the faith, and abjured his errors publicly with an admirable fervor."

Two or three years before, the Church of Quebec had received as a gift from the Pope the bodies or bones of two saints,  Saint Flavian and Saint Felicite".  They were enclosed in four large coffers or reliquaries, and a grand procession was now ordered in their honor.  Tracy, Courcelle, Talon, and the agent of the company bore the canopy of the Host.  Then came the four coffers on four decorated litters, carried by the principal ecclesiastics.  Laval followed in pontificals.  Forty-seven priests, and a long file of officers, nobles, soldiers, and inhabitants, followed the precious relics amid the sound of music and the roar of cannon.  

" It is a ravishing thing," says Mother Mary, " to see how marvellously exact is Monsieur de Tracy at all these holy ceremonies, where he is always the first to come, for he would not lose a single moment of them.  He has been seen in church for six hours together, without once going out." But while the lieutenant-general thus edified the colony, he betrayed no lack of qualities equally needful in his position.  In Canada, as in the West Indies, he showed both vigor and conduct.  First of all, he had been ordered to subdue or destroy the Iroquois; and the regiment of Carignan SalieTes was the weapon placed in his hands for this end.  Pour companies of this corps had arrived early in the season; four more came with Tracy, more yet with Salieres, their colonel, —and now the number was complete.  As with slouched hat and plume, bandoleer, and shouldered firelock, these bronzed veterans of the Turkish wars marched at the tap of drum through the narrow street, or mounted the rugged way that led up to the fort, the inhabitants gazed with a sense of profound relief.  Tame Indians from the neighboring missions, wild Indians from the woods, stared in silent wonder at their new defenders.  Their numbers, their discipline, their uniform, and their martial bearing filled the savage beholders with admiration.

Carignan Salie'res was the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the French government.  It was raised in Savoy by the Prince of Carignan in 1644, but was soon employed in the service of France; where, in 1652, it took a conspicuous part, on the side of the King, in the battle with Conde’ and the Fronde at the Porte Saint Antoine.  After the peace of the Pyrenees, the Prince of Carignan, unable to support the regiment, gave it to the King, and it was, for the first time, incorporated into the French armies.  In 1664 it distinguished itself, as part of the allied force of France, in the Austrian war against the Turks.  In the next year it was ordered to America, along with the fragment of a regiment formed of Germans, the whole being placed under the command of Colonel de Salieres.  Hence its double name.

Fifteen heretics were discovered in its ranks, and quickly converted.  Then the new crusade was preached,  the crusade against the Iroquois, enemies of God and tools of the Devil.  The soldiers and the people were filled with a zeal half warlike and half religious.  "They are made to understand," writes Mother Mary, " that this is a holy war, all for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  The fathers are doing wonders in inspiring them with true sentiments of piety and devotion.  Fully five hundred soldiers have taken the scapulary of the Holy Virgin.  It is we (the Ursulines), who make them; it is a real pleasure to do such work;" and she proceeds to relate a "beau miracle," by which God made known his satisfaction at the fervor of his military servants.  

The secular motives for the war were in themselves strong enough; for the growth of the colony absolutely demanded the cessation of Iroquois raids, and the French had begun to learn the lesson that in the case of hostile Indians no good can come of attempts to conciliate, unless respect is first imposed by a sufficient castigation.  It is true that the writers of the time paint Iroquois hostilities in their worst colors.  In the innumerable letters which Mother Mary of the Incarnation sent home every autumn, by the returning ships, she spared no means to gain the sympathy and aid of the devout; and, with similar motives, the Jesuits in their printed Relations took care to extenuate nothing of the miseries which the pious colony endured.  Avaugour too, in urging the sending out of a strong force to fortify and hold the country, had advised that, in order to furnish a pretext and disarm the jealousy of the English and Dutch, exaggerated accounts should be given of danger from the side of the savage confederates.  Yet, with every allowance, these dangers and sufferings were sufficiently great.

The three upper nations of the Iroquois were comparatively pacific; but the two lower nations, the Mohawks and Oneidas, were persistently hostile; making inroads into the colony by way of Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, murdering and scalping, and then vanishing like ghosts.  Tracy's first step was to send a strong detachment to the Richelieu to build a picket fort below the rapids of Chambly, which take their name from that of the officer in command.  An officer named Sorel soon afterwards built a second fort on the site of the abandoned palisade work built by Montmagny, at the mouth of the river, where the town of Sorel now stands; and Salieres, colonel of the regiment, added a third fort, two or three leagues above Chambly.  These forts could not wholly bar the passage against the nimble and wily warriors who might pass them in the night, shouldering their canoes through the woods.  A blow, direct and hard, was needed, and Tracy prepared to strike it.

Late in the season an embassy from the three upper nations  the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas  arrived at Quebec, led by Garacontie", a famous chief whom the Jesuits had won over, and who proved ever after a stanch friend of the French.  They brought back the brave Charles Le Moyne of Montreal, whom they had captured some three months before, and now restored as a peace offering, taking credit to themselves that " not even one of his nails had been torn out, nor any part of his body burnt." Garacontie made a peace speech, which, as rendered by the Jesuits, was an admirable specimen of Iroquois eloquence; but while joining hands with him and his companions, the French still urged on their preparations to chastise the contumacious Mohawks.