CHAPTER   22
1663-1763.  

PRIESTS AND PEOPLE.

WHEN Laval and the Jesuits procured the recall of Me’zy, they achieved a seeming triumph; yet it was but a defeat in disguise.  While ordering home the obnoxious governor, the King and Colbert made a practical assertion of their power too strong to be resisted.  A vice regal officer, a governor, an intendant, and a regiment of soldiers were silent but convincing proofs that the mission days of Canada were over, and the dream of a theocracy dispelled forever.  The ecclesiastics read the signs of the times, and for a while seemed to accept the situation.

The King on his part, in vindicating the civil power, had shown a studious regard to the sensibilities of the bishop and his allies.  The lieutenant-general Tracy, a zealous devotee, and the intendant Talon, who at least professed to be one, were not men to offend the clerical party needlessly.  In the choice of Courcelle, the governor, a little less caution had been shown.  His chief business was to fight the Iroquois, for which he was well fitted; but he presently showed signs of a willingness to fight the Jesuits also.  The colonists liked him for his lively and impulsive speech; but the priests were of a different mind, and so, too, was his colleague Talon, a prudent person, who studied the amenities of life, and knew how to pursue his ends with temper and moderation.  On the subject of the clergy he and the governor substantially agreed, but the ebullitions of the one and the smooth discretion of the other were mutually repugnant to both.  Talon complained of his colleague's impetuosity; and Colbert directed him to use his best efforts to keep Courcelle within bounds, and prevent him from publicly finding fault with the bishop and the Jesuits.  Next we find the minister writing to Courcelle himself to soothe his ruffled temper, and enjoining him to act discreetly, "because," said Colbert, "as the colony grows, the King's authority will grow with it, and the authority of the priests will be brought back in time within lawful bounds." 
Meanwhile, Talon had been ordered to observe carefully the conduct of the bishop and the Jesuits, "who," says the minister, "have hitherto nominated governors for the King, and used every means to procure the recall of those chosen without their participation;l filled offices with their adherents, and tolerated no secular priests except those of one mind with them." Talon, therefore, under the veil of a reverent courtesy, sharply watched them.  They paid courtesy with courtesy, and the intendant wrote home to his master that he saw nothing amiss in them.  He quickly changed his mind.  "I should have had less trouble and more praise," he writes in the next year, "if I had been willing to leave the power of the Church where I found it." "It is easy," he says again, "to incur the ill will of the Jesuits if one does not accept all their opinions and abandon one's self to their direction even in temporal matters; for their encroachments extend to affairs of police, which concern only the civil magistrate," and he recommends that one or two of them be sent home as disturbers of the peace.  They, on their part, changed attitude towards both him and the governor.  One of them, Father Bardy, less discreet than the rest, is said to have preached a sermon against them at Quebec, in which he likened them to a pair of toadstools springing up in a night, adding that a good remedy would soon be found, and that Courcelle would have to run home like other governors before him.

Tracy escaped clerical attacks.  He was extremely careful not to provoke them; and one of his first acts was to restore to the council the bishop's adherents whom Me’zy had expelled.  And if, on the one hand, he was too pious to quarrel with the bishop, so, on the other, the bishop was too prudent to invite collision with a man of his rank and influence.

After all, the dispute between the civil and ecclesiastical powers was not fundamental.  Each had need of the other; both rested on authority, and they differed only as to the boundary lines of their respective shares in it.  Yet the dispute of boundaries was a serious one, and it remained a source of bitterness for many years.  The King, though rigidly Catholic, was not yet sunk in the slough of bigotry into which Maintenon and the Jesuits succeeded at last in plunging him.  • He had conceived a distrust of Laval, and his jealousy of his royal authority disposed him to listen to the anti clerical counsels of his minister.  How needful they both thought it to prune the exuberant growth of clerical power, and how cautiously they set themselves to do so, their letters attest again and again.  "The bishop," writes Colbert, "assumes a domination far beyond that of other bishops throughout the Christian world, and particularly in the kingdom of France." "It is the will of his Majesty that you confine him and the Jesuits within just bounds, and let none of them, overstep these bounds in any manner whatsoever.  Consider this as a matter of the greatest importance, and one to which you cannot give too much attention." "But," the prudent minister elsewhere writes, "it is of the greatest consequence that the bishop and the Jesuits do not perceive that the intendant blames their conduct."

It was to the same intendant that Colbert wrote, " it is necessary to diminish as much as possible the excessive number of priests, monks, and nuns in Canada." Yet in the very next year, and on the advice of Talon, he himself sent four more to the colony.  His motive was plain.  He meant that they should serve as a counterpoise to the Jesuits.  They were mendicant friars, belonging to the branch of the Franciscans known as the Rccollets; and they were supposed to be free from the ambition for the aggrandizement of their Order which was imputed, and with reason, to the Jesuits.  Whether the Rccollets were free from it or not, no danger was to be feared from them; for Laval and the Jesuits were sure to oppose them, and they would need the support of the government too much to set themselves in opposition to it.  "The more Recollets we have," says Talon, "the better will the too firmly rooted authority of the others be balanced."

While Louis XIV.  tried to confine the priests to their ecclesiastical functions, he was at the same time, whether from religion, policy, or both combined, very liberal to the Canadian Church, of which, indeed, he was the main stay.  In the yearly estimate of " ordinary charges" of the colony, the Church holds the most prominent place; and the appropriations for religious purposes often exceed all the rest together.  Thus, in 1667, out of a total of 36,360 francs, 28,000 are assigned to Church uses.  The amount fluctuated, but was always relatively large.  The Canadian cure's were paid in great part by the King, who for many years gave eight thousand francs annually towards their support.  Such was the poverty of the country that, though in 1685 there were only twenty-five curds, each costing about five hundred francs a year, the tithes utterly failed to meet the expense.  As late as 1700, the intendant declared that Canada without the King's help could not maintain more than eight or nine cure's.  Louis XIV.  winced under these steady demands, and reminded the bishop that more than four thousand cure's in France lived on less than two hundred francs a year.  "You say," he wrote to the intendant, " that it is impossible for a Canadian curd to live on five hundred francs.  Then you must do the impossible to accomplish my intentions, which are always that the cure's should live on the tithes alone." Yet the head of the Church still begged for money, and the King still paid it.  " We are in the midst of a costly war," wrote the minister to the bishop, "yet in consequence of your urgency the gifts to ecclesiastics will be continued as before." And they did continue.  More than half a century later, the King was still making them, and during the last years of the colony he gave twenty thousand francs annually to support Canadian cure's.

The maintenance of cure's was but a part of his bounty.  He endowed the bishopric with the revenues of two French abbeys, to which he afterwards added a third.  The vast tracts of land which Laval had acquired were freed from feudal burdens, and emigrants were sent to them by the government in such numbers that, in 1667, the bishop's seigniory of Beaupre and Orleans contained more than a fourth of the entire population of Canada.J He had emerged from his condition of apostolic poverty to find himself the richest land owner in the colony.

If by favors like these the King expected to lead the ecclesiastics into compliance with his wishes, he was doomed to disappointment.  The system of movable curds, by which the bishop like a military chief could compel each member of his clerical army to come and go at his bidding, was from the first repugnant to Louis XIV.  On the other hand, the bishop clung to it with his usual tenacity.  Colbert denounced it as contrary to the laws of the kingdom.  "His Majesty has reason to believe," he writes, "that the chief source of the difficulty which the bishop makes on this point is his wish to preserve a greater authority over the cure’s." The inflexible prelate, whose heart was bound up in the system he had established, opposed evasion and delay to each expression of the royal will; and even a royal edict failed to produce the desired effect.  In the height of the dispute, Laval went to court, and, on the ground of failing health, asked for a successor in the bishopric.  The King readily granted his prayer.  The successor was appointed; but when Laval prepared to embark again for Canada, he was given to understand that he was to remain in France.  In vain he promised to make no trouble; and it was not till after an absence of four years that he was permitted to return, no longer as its chief, to his beloved Canadian Church.

Meanwhile Saint-Vallier, the new bishop, had raised a new tempest.  He attacked that organization of the seminary of Quebec by which Laval had endeavored to unite the secular priests of Canada into an attached and obedient family, with the bishop as its head and the seminary as its home, a plan of which the system of movable cure's was an essential part.  The Canadian priests, devoted to Laval, met the innovations of Saint-Vallier with an opposition which seemed only to confirm his purpose.  Laval, old and worn with toil and asceticism, was driven almost to despair.  The seminary of Quebec was the cherished work of his life, and, to his thinking, the citadel of the Canadian Church; and now he beheld it battered and breached before his eyes.  His successor, in fact, was trying to place the Church of Canada on the footing of the Church of France.  The conflict lasted for years, with the rancor that marks the quarrels of non combatants of both sexes.  " He " (Saint-Vallier), says one of his opponents, " has made himself contemptible to almost everybody, and particularly odious to the priests born in Canada; for there is between them and him a mutual antipathy difficult to overcome." He is described by the same writer as a person " without reflection and judgment, extreme in all things, secret and artful, passionate when opposed, and a flatterer when he wishes to gain his point." This amiable critic adds that Saint-Vallier believes a bishop to be inspired, in virtue of his office, with a wisdom that needs no human aid; and that whatever thought comes to him in prayer is a divine inspiration to be carried into effect at all costs and in spite of all opposition.

The new bishop, notwithstanding the tempest he had raised, did not fully accomplish that establishment of the cure's in their respective parishes which the King and the minister so much desired.  The Canadian cure" was more a missionary than a parish priest; and Nature as well as Bishop Laval threw difficulties in the way of settling him quietly over his charge.

On the Lower Saint Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, six leagues across, a ship from France, the last of the season, holds her way for Quebec, laden with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for Indian trade, the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the King's orders from Versailles.  Swelling her patched and dingy sails, she glides through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing but her to remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little troubled world before.  On the far verge of the ocean like river, clouds and mountains mingle in dim confusion; fresh gusts from the north dash waves against the ledges, sweep through the quivering spires of stiff and stunted fir trees, and ruffle the feathers of the crow, perched on the dead bough after his feast of mussels among the sea weed.  You are not so solitary as you think.  A small birch canoe rounds the point of rocks, and it bears two men,  one in an old black cassock, and the other in a buckskin coat, both working hard at the paddle to keep their slender craft off the shingle and the breakers.  The man in the cassock is Father Morel, aged forty-eight,  the oldest country curd in Canada, most of his brethren being in the vigor of youth, as they had need to be.  His parochial charge embraces a string of incipient parishes extending along the south shore from Riviere du Loup to Riviere du Sud, a distance reckoned at twenty-seven leagues, and his parishioners number in all three hundred and twenty-eight souls.  He has administered spiritual consolation to the one inhabitant of Kamouraska; visited the eight families of La Bouteillerie and the five families of La Combe; and now he is on his way to the seigniory of Saint Denis with its two houses and eleven souls.  

The father lands where a shattered eel pot high and dry on the pebbles betrays the neighborhood of man.  His servant shoulders his portable chapel, and follows him through the belt of firs and the taller woods beyond, till the sunlight of a desolate clearing shines upon them.  Charred trunks and limbs encumber the ground; dead trees, branchless, barkless, pierced by the woodpeckers, in part black with fire, in part bleached by sun and frost, tower ghastly and weird above the labyrinth of forest ruins, through which the priest and his follower wind their way, the cat bird mewing, and the blue jay screaming as they pass.  Now the golden rod and the aster, harbingers of autumn, fringe with yellow and purple the edge of the older clearing, where wheat and maize, the settler's meagre harvest, are growing among the stumps.

Wild looking women, with sunburnt faces and neglected hair, run from their work to meet the cure"; a man or two follow with soberer steps and less exuberant zeal; while half savage children, the coureurs de bois of the future, bareheaded, barefooted, and half clad, come to wonder and stare.  To set up his altar in a room of the rugged log cabin; say mass, hear confessions, impose penance, grant absolution; repeat the office of the dead over a grave made weeks before; baptize, perhaps, the last infant; marry, possibly, some pair who may or may not have waited for his coming; catechise as well as time and circumstance would allow the shy hut turbulent brood of some former wedlock,  such was the work of the parish priest in the remoter districts.  It was seldom that his charge was quite so scattered and so far extended as that of Father Morel; but there were fifteen or twenty others whose labors were like in kind, and in some cases no less arduous.  All summer they paddled their canoes from settlement to settlement ; and in winter they toiled on snow shoes over the drifts, while the servant carried the portable chapel on his back, or dragged it on a sledge.  Once, at least, in the year the cure" paid his visit to Quebec, where, under the maternal roof of the seminary, he made his retreat of meditation and prayer, and then returned to his work.  He rarely had a house of his own, but boarded in that of the seignior or one of the habitants.  Many parishes or aggregations of parishes had no other church than a room fitted up for the purpose in the house of some pious settler.  In the larger settlements there were churches and chapels of wood, thatched with straw, often ruinous, poor to the last degree, without ornaments, and sometimes without the sacred vessels necessary for the service.  In 1683 there were but seven stone churches in all the colony.  The population was so thin and scattered that many of the settlers heard mass only three or four times a year, and some of them not so often.  The sick frequently died without absolution, and infants without baptism.

The splendid self devotion of the early Jesuit missions has its record; so, too, have the unseemly bickerings of bishops and governors.  But the patient toils of the missionary cure" rest in the obscurity where the best of human virtues are buried from age to age.  What we find set down concerning him is, that Louis XIV.  was unable to see why he should not live on two hundred francs a year as well as a village curd by the banks of the Garonne.  The King did not know that his cassock and all his clothing cost him twice as much and lasted half as long; that he must have a canoe and a man to paddle it; and that when on his annual visit the seminary paid him five or six hundred francs, partly in clothes, partly in stores, and partly in money, the end of the year found him as poor as before except only in his conscience.

The Canadian priests held the manners of the colony under a rule as rigid as that of the Puritan churches of New England,  but with the difference that in Canada a large part of the population was restive under their control, while some of the civil authorities, often with the governor at their head, supported the opposition.  This was due partly to an excess of clerical severity, and partly to the continued friction between the secular and ecclesiastical powers.  It sometimes happened, however, that a new governor arrived, who was so pious that the clerical party felt that they could rely on him.  Of these rare instances the principal is that of Denonville, who, with a wife as pious as himself, and a young daughter, landed at Quebec in 1685.  On this, Bishop Saint-Vallier, anxious to turn his good dispositions to the best account, addressed to him a series of suggestions or rather directions for the guidance of his conduct, with a view to the spiritual profit of those over whom he was appointed to rule.  The document was put on file, and the following are some of the points in it.  It is divided into five different heads, —"Touching feasts," "touching balls and dances," "touching comedies and other declamations," "touching dress," "touching irreverence in church." The governor and madame his wife are desired to accept no invitations to suppers,  that is to say, late dinners,  as tending to nocturnal hours and dangerous pastimes; and they are further enjoined to express dissatisfaction, and refuse to come again, should any entertainment offered them be too sumptuous.  " Although," continues the bishop under the second head of his address, " balls and dances are not sinful in their nature, never the less they are so dangerous by reason of the circumstances that attend them and the evil results that almost inevitably follow, that, in the opinion of Saint Francis of Sales, it should be said of them as physicians say of mushrooms, that at best they are good for nothing;" and, after enlarging on their perils, he declares it to be of great importance to the glory of God and the sanctification of the colony, that the governor and his wife neither give such entertainments nor countenance them by their presence.  "Nevertheless," adds the mentor, "since the youth and vivacity of mademoiselle their daughter requires some diversion, it is permitted to relent somewhat, and indulge her in a little moderate and proper dancing, provided that it be solely with persons of her own sex, and in the presence of madame her mother; but by no means in the presence of men or youths, since it is this mingling of sexes which causes the disorders that spring from balls and dances." Private theatricals in any form are next interdicted to the young lady.  The bishop then passes to the subject of her dress, and exposes the abuses against which she is to be guarded.  "The luxury of dress," he says, "appears in the rich and dazzling fabrics wherein the women and girls of Canada attire themselves, and which are far beyond their condition and their means, in the excess of ornaments which they put on; in the extraordinary head dresses which they affect, their heads being uncovered and full of strange trinkets; and in the immodest curls so expressly forbidden in the epistles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, as well as by all the fathers and doctors of the Church, and which God has often severely punished,  as may be seen by the example of the unhappy Pretextata, a lady of high quality, who, as we learn from Saint Jerome, who knew her, had her hands withered, and died suddenly five months after, and was precipitated into hell, as God had threatened her by an angel; because, by order of her husband, she had curled the hair of her niece, and attired her after a worldly fashion."

Whether the Marquis and Marchioness Denonville profited by so apt and terrible a warning, or whether their patience and good nature survived the episcopal onslaught, does not appear on record.  The subject of feminine apparel received great attention, both from Saint-Vallier and his predecessor, each of whom issued a number of pastoral mandates concerning it.  Their severest denunciations were aimed at low necked dresses, which they regarded as favorite devices of the enemy for the snaring of souls; and they also used strong language against certain knots of ribbons called fontanges, with which the belles of Quebec adorned their heads.  Laval launches strenuous invectives against "the luxury and vanity of women and girls, who, forgetting the promises of their baptism, decorate themselves with the pomp of Satan, whom they have so solemnly renounced; and, in their wish to please the eyes of men, make themselves the instruments and the captives of the fiend." 

In the journal of the superior of the Jesuits we find, under date of February 4, 1667, a record of the first ball in Canada, along with the pious wish, " God grant that nothing further come of it." Nevertheless more balls were not long in following; and, worse yet, sundry comedies were enacted under no less distinguished patronage than that of Frontenac, the governor.  Laval denounced them vigorously, the Jesuit Dablon attacked them in a violent sermon; and such excitement followed that the affair was brought before the royal council, which declined to interfere.  This flurry, however, was nothing to the storm raised ten or twelve years later by other dramatic aggressions, an account of which will appear in the sequel of this volume.

The morals of families were watched with unrelenting vigilance.  Frontenac writes in a mood unusually temperate, " They (the priests) are full of virtue and piety, and if their zeal were less vehement and more moderate, they would perhaps succeed better in their efforts for the conversion of souls; but they often use means so extraordinary, and in France so unusual, that they repel most people instead of persuading them.  I sometimes tell them my views frankly and as gently as I can, as I know the murmurs that their conduct excites, and often receive complaints of the constraint under which they place consciences.  This is above all the case with the ecclesiastics at Montreal, where there is a cure from Franche Cerate" who wants to establish a sort of inquisition worse than that of Spain, and all out of an excess of zeal."

It was this cure", no doubt, of whom La Hontan complains.  That unsanctified young officer was quartered at Montreal, in the house of one of the inhabitants.  "During a part of the winter I was hunting with the Algonquins; the rest of it I spent here very disagreeably.  One can neither go on a pleasure party, nor play a game of cards, nor visit the ladies, without the cure" knowing it and preaching about it publicly from his pulpit.  The priests excommunicate masqueraders, and even go in search of them to pull off their masks and overwhelm them with abuse.  They watch more closely over the women and girls than their husbands and fathers.  They prohibit and burn all books but books of devotion.  I cannot think of this tyranny without cursing the indiscreet zeal of the cure" of this town.  He came to the house where I lived, and, finding some books on my table, presently pounced on the romance of Petronius, which I valued more than my life because it was not mutilated.  He tore out almost all the leaves, so that if my host had not restrained me when I came in and saw the miserable wreck, I should have run after this rampant shepherd and torn out every hair of his beard."

La Mothe-Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, seems to have had equal difficulty in keeping his temper.  "Neither men of honor nor men of parts are endured in Canada; nobody can live here but simpletons and slaves of the ecclesiastical domination.  The count (Frontenac) would not have so many troublesome affairs on his hands if he had not abolished a Jericho in the shape of a house built by messieurs of the seminary of Montreal, to shut up, as they said, girls who caused scandal; if he had allowed them to take officers and soldiers to go into houses at midnight and carry off women from their husbands and whip them till the blood flowed because they had been at a ball or worn a mask; if he had said nothing against the cure's who went the rounds with the soldiers, and compelled women and girls to shut themselves up in their houses at nine o'clock of summer evenings; if he had forbidden the wearing of lace, and made no objection to the refusal of the communion to women of quality because they wore a fontange; if he had not opposed excommunications flung about without sense or reason,  if I say, the count had been of this way of thinking, he would have stood as a nonpareil, and have been put very soon on the list of saints, for saint making is cheap in this country."

While the Sulpitians were thus rigorous at Montreal, the bishop and his Jesuit allies were scarcely less so at Quebec.  There was little goodwill between them and the Sulpitians, and some of the sharpest charges against the followers of Loyola are brought by their brother priests at Montreal.  The Siilpitian Allet writes: " The Jesuits hold such domination over the people of this country that they go into the houses and see everything that passes there.  They then tell what they have learned to each other at their meetings, and on this information they govern their policy.  The Jesuit, Father Ragueneau, used to go every day down to the Lower Town, where the merchants live, to find out all that was going on in their families; and he often made people get up from table to confess to him." Allet goes on to say that Father Chatelain also went continually to the Lower Town with the same object, and that some of the inhabitants complained of him to Courcelle, the governor.  One day Courcelle saw the Jesuit, who was old and somewhat infirm, slowly walking by the chateau, cane in hand, on his usual errand,  on which he sent a sergeant after him to request that he would not go so often to the Lower Town, as the people were annoyed by the frequency of his visits.  The father replied in wrath, " Go and tell Monsieur de Courcelle that I have been there ever since he was governor, and that I shall go there after he has ceased to be governor;" and he kept on his way as before.  Courcelle reported his answer to the superior, Le Mercier, and demanded to have him sent home as a punishment; but the superior effected a compromise.  On the following Thursday, after mass in the cathedral, he invited Courcelle into the sacristy, where Father Chatelain was awaiting them; and here, at Le Mercier's order, the old priest begged pardon of the offended governor on his knees.

The Jesuits derived great power from the confessional; and, if their accusers are to be believed, they employed unusual means to make it effective.  Cavelier de la Salle says: " They will confess nobody till he tells his name, and no servant till he tells the name of his master.  When a crime is confessed, they insist on knowing the name of the accomplice, as well as all the circumstances, with the greatest particularity.  Father Chatelain especially never fails to do this.  They enter as it were by force into the secrets of families, and thus make themselves formidable ; for what cannot be done by a clever man devoted to his work, who knows all the secrets of every family; above all, when he permits himself to tell them when it is for his interest to do so ? "

The association of women and girls known as the Congregation of the Holy Family, which was formed under Jesuit auspices, and which met every Thursday with closed doors in the cathedral, is said to have been very useful to the fathers in their social investigations.  The members are affirmed to have been under a vow to tell one another every good or evil deed they knew of every person of their acquaintance; so that this pious gossip became a copious source of information to those in a position to draw upon it.  In Talon's time the Congregation of the Holy Family caused such commotion in Quebec that he asked the council to appoint a commission to inquire into its proceedings.  He was touching dangerous ground.  The affair was presently hushed, and the application cancelled on the register of the council.

The Jesuits had long exercised solely the function of confessors in the colony, and a number of curious anecdotes are on record showing the reluctance with which they admitted the secular priests, and above all the Re’collets, to share in it.  The Re'collets, of whom a considerable number had arrived from time to time, were on excellent terms with the civil powers, and were popular with the colonists; but with the bishop and the Jesuits they were not in favor, and one or two sharp collisions took place.  The bishop was naturally annoyed when, while he was trying to persuade the King that a cure" needed at least six hundred francs a year, these mendicant friars came forward with an offer to serve the parishes for nothing; nor was he, it is likely, better pleased when, having asked the hospital nuns eight hundred francs annually for two masses a day in their chapel, the Re'collets underbid him, and offered to say the masses for three hundred.  They, on their part, complain bitterly of the bishop, who, they say, would gladly have ordered them out of the colony, but, being unable to do this, tried to shut them up in their convent, and prevent them from officiating as priests among the people.  "We have as little liberty," says the Re'collet writer, " as if we were in a country of heretics." He adds that the inhabitants ask earnestly for the ministrations of the friars, but that the bishop replies with invectives' and calumnies against the Order; and that when the Re'collets absolve a penitent, he often annuls the absolution.

In   one   respect  this   Canadian  Church  militant achieved a complete success.     Heresy was scoured out of the colony.  When Maintenon and her ghostly prompters overcame the better nature of the King, and wrought on his bigotry and his vanity to launch him into the dragonnades; when violence and lust bore the crucifix into thousands of Huguenot homes, and the land reeked with nameless infamies; when churches rang with Te Deums, and the heart of France withered in anguish,  when, in short, this hideous triumph of the faith was won, the royal tool of priestly ferocity sent orders that heresy should be treated in Canada as it had been treated in France.  The orders were needless.  The pious Denonville replies, "Praised be God! there is not a heretic here." He adds that a few abjured last year, and that he should be very glad if the King would make them a present.  The Jesuits, he further says, go every day on board the ships in the harbor to look after the new converts from France.  Now and then at a later day a real or suspected Jansenist found his way to Canada, and sometimes an esprit fort, like La Hontan, came over with the troops; but on the whole a community more free from positive heterodoxy perhaps never existed on earth.  This exemption cost no bloodshed.  What it did cost we may better judge hereafter.

If Canada escaped the dragonnades,  so also she escaped another infliction from which a neighboring colony suffered deplorably.  Her peace was never much troubled by witches.  They were held to exist, it is true; but they wrought no panic.  Mother Mary of the Incarnation reports on one occasion the discovery of a magician in the person of a converted Huguenot miller, who, being refused in marriage by a girl of Quebec, bewitched her, and filled the house where she lived with demons, which the bishop tried in vain to exorcise.  The miller was thrown into prison, and the girl sent to the Hotel Dieu, where not a demon dared enter.  The infernal crew took their revenge by creating a severe influenza among the citizens.

If there are no Canadian names on the calendar of saints, it is not because in byways and obscure places Canada had not virtues worthy of canonization.  Not alone her male martyrs and female devotees, whose merits have found a chronicle and a recognition; not the fantastic devotion of Madame d'Ailleboust, who, lest she should not suffer enough, took to herself a vicious and refractory servant girl, as an exercise of patience; and not certainly the mediaeval pietism of Jeanne Le Ber, the venerated recluse of Montreal,  there are others quite as worthy of honor, whose names have died from memory.  It is difficult to conceive a self abnegation more complete than that of the hospital nuns of Quebec and Montreal.  In the almost total absence of trained and skilled physicians, the burden of the sick and wounded fell upon them.  Of the two communities, that of Montreal was the more wretchedly destitute, while that of Quebec was exposed, perhaps, to greater dangers.  Nearly every ship from France brought some form of infection, and all infection found its way to the Hotel-Dieu of Quebec.  The nuns died, but they never complained.  Removed from the arena of ecclesiastical strife, too busy for the morbidness of the cloister, too much absorbed in practical benevolence to become the prey of illusions, they and their sister community were models of that benign and tender charity of which the Roman Catholic Church is so rich in examples.  Nor should the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation be forgotten among those who, in another field of labor, have toiled patiently according to their light.

Mademoiselle Jeanne Le Ber belonged to none of these sisterhoods.  She was the favorite daughter of the chief merchant of Montreal,  the same who, with the help of his money, got himself ennobled.  She seems to have been a girl of a fine and sensitive nature; ardent, affectionate, and extremely susceptible to religious impressions.  Religion at last gained absolute sway over her.  Nothing could appease her longings or content the demands of her excited conscience but an entire consecration of herself to Heaven.  Constituted as she was, the resolution must have cost her an agony of mental conflict.  Her story is a strange, and, as many will think, a very sad one.  She renounced her suitors, and wished to renounce her inheritance; but her spiritual directors, too far sighted to permit such a sacrifice, persuaded her to hold fast to her claims, and content herself with what they called "poverty of heart." Her mother died, and her father, left with a family of young children, greatly needed her help; but she refused to leave her chamber where she had immured herself.  Here she remained ten years, seeing nobody but her confessor and the girl who brought her food.  Once only she emerged, and this was when her brother lay dead in the adjacent room, killed in a fight with the English.  She suddenly appeared before her astonished sisters, stood for a moment in silent prayer by the body, and then vanished without uttering a word.  "Such," says her modern biographer, "was the sublimity of her virtue and the grandeur of her soul." Not content with this domestic seclusion, she caused a cell to be made behind the altar in the newly built church of the Congregation, and here we will permit ourselves to cast a stolen glance at her through the narrow opening through which food was passed in to her.  Her bed, a pile of straw which she never moved, lest it should become too soft, was so placed that her head could touch the partition which alone separated it from the Host on the altar.  Here she lay wrapped in a garment of coarse gray serge, worn, tattered, and unwashed.  An old blanket, a stool, a spinning wheel, a belt and shirt of haircloth, a scourge, and a pair of shoes made by herself of the husks of Indian corn, appear to have formed the sum of her furniture and her wardrobe.  Her employments were spinning and working embroidery for churches.  She remained in this voluntary prison about twenty years; and the nun who brought her food testifies that she never omitted a mortification or a prayer, though commonly in a state of profound depression, and what her biographer calls "complete spiritual aridity." When her mother died, she had refused to see her; and, long after, no prayer of her dying father could draw her from her cell.  "In the person of this modest virgin," writes her reverend eulogist, "we see, with astonishment, the love of God triumphant over earthly affection for parents, and a complete victory of faith over reason and of grace over nature."

In 1711, Canada was threatened with an attack by the English; and Mademoiselle Le Ber gave the nuns of the Congregation an image of the Virgin on which she had written a prayer to protect their granary from the invaders.  Other persons, anxious for a similar protection, sent her images to write upon; but she declined the request.  One of the disappointed applicants then stole the inscribed image from the granary of the Congregation, intending to place it on his own when the danger drew near.  The English, however, did not come, their fleet having suffered a ruinous shipwreck ascribed to the prayers of Jeanne Le Ber.  "It was," writes the Sulpitian Belmont, "the greatest miracle that ever happened since the days of Moses." Nor was this the only miracle of which she was the occasion.  She herself declared that once when she had broken her spinning wheel, an angel came and mended it for her.  Angels also assisted in her embroidery, "no doubt," says Mother Juchereau, "taking great pleasure in the society of this angelic creature." In the church where she had secluded herself, an image of the Virgin continued after her death to heal the lame and cure the sick.

Though Jeanne rarely permitted herself to speak, yet some oracular utterance of the sainted recluse would now and then escape to the outer world.  One of these was to the effect that teaching poor girls to read, unless they wanted to be nuns, was robbing them of their time.  Nor was she far wrong, for in Canada there was very little to read except formulas of devotion and lives of saints.  The dangerous innovation of a printing press had not invaded the colony, and the first Canadian newspaper dates from the British conquest.

All education was controlled by priests or nuns.  The ablest teachers in Canada were the Jesuits.  Their college of Quebec was three years older than Harvard.  We hear at an early date of public disputations by the pupils, after the pattern of those tournaments of barren logic which preceded the reign of inductive reason in Europe, and of which the archetype is to be found in the scholastic duels of the Sorbonne.  The boys were sometimes permitted to act certain approved dramatic pieces of a religious character, like the Sage Visionnaire.  On one occasion they were allowed to play the Cid of Corneille, which, though remarkable as a literary work, contained nothing threatening to orthodoxy.  They were taught a little Latin, a little rhetoric, and a little logic; but against all that might rouse the faculties to independent action, the Canadian schools prudently closed their doors.  There was then no rival population, of a different origin and a different faith, to compel competition in the race of intelligence and knowledge.  The Church stood sole mistress of the field.  Under the old regime the real object of education in Canada was a religious and, in far less degree, a political one.  The true purpose of the schools was: first, to make priests; and, secondly, to make obedient servants of the Church and the King.  All the rest was extraneous and of slight account.  In regard to this matter, the King and the bishop were of one mind.  "As I have been informed," Louis XIV.  writes to Laval, " of your continued care to hold the people in their duty towards God and towards me by the good education you give or cause to be given to the young, I write this letter to express my satisfaction with conduct so salutary, and to exhort you to persevere in it." 

The bishop did not fail to persevere.  The school for boys attached to his seminary became the most important educational institution in Canada.  It was regulated by thirty-four rules, " in honor of the thirty-four years which Jesus lived on earth." The qualities commended to the boys as those which they should labor diligently to acquire were "humility, obedience, purity, meekness, modesty, simplicity, chastity, charity, and an ardent love of Jesus and his Holy Mother." Here is a goodly roll of Christian virtues.  What is chiefly noticeable in it is, that truth is allowed no place.  That manly but unaccommodating virtue was not, it seems, thought important in forming the mind of youth.  Humility and obedience lead the list; for in unquestioning submission to the spiritual director lay the guaranty of all other merits.

We have seen already, that, besides this seminary for boys, Laval established another for educating the humbler colonists.  It was a sort of farm school; though besides farming, various mechanical trades were also taught in it.  It was well adapted to the wants of a great majority of Canadians, whose tendencies were anything but bookish; but here, as elsewhere, the real object was religious.  It enabled the Church to extend her influence over classes which the ordinary schools could not reach.  Besides manual training, the pupils were taught to read and write; and for a time a certain number of them received some instruction in Latin.  When, in 1686, Saint-Vallier visited the school, he found in all thirty-one boys under the charge of two priests; but the number was afterwards greatly reduced, and the place served, as it still serves, chiefly as a retreat during vacations for the priests and pupils of the seminary of Quebec.  A spot better suited for such a purpose cannot be conceived.

From the vast meadows of the parish of Saint Joachim, which here border the Saint Lawrence, there rises like an island a low flat hill, hedged round with forests like the tonsured head of a monk.  It was here that Laval planted his school.  Across the meadows, a mile or more distant, towers the mountain promontory of Cape Tourmente.  You may climb its woody steeps, and from the top, waist deep in blueberry bushes, survey, from Kamouraska to Quebec, the grand Canadian world outstretched below; or mount the neighboring heights of Saint Anne, where, athwart the gaunt arms of ancient pines, the river lies shimmering in summer haze, the cottages of the habitants are strung like beads of a rosary along the meadows of Beaupre", the shores of Orleans bask in warm light, and far on the horizon the rock of Quebec rests like a faint gray cloud; or traverse the forest till the roar of the torrent guides you to the rocky solitude where it holds its savage revels.  High on the cliffs above, young birch trees stand smiling in the morning sun; while in the abyss beneath the snowy waters plunge from depth to depth, and, halfway down, the slender harebell hangs from its mossy nook, quivering in the steady thunder of the cataract.  Game on the river; trout in lakes, brooks, and pools; wild fruits and flowers on meadows and mountains,  a thousand resources of honest and wholesome recreation here wait the student emancipated from books, but not parted for a moment from the pious influence which hangs about the old walls embosomed in the woods of Saint Joachim.  Around on plains and hills stand the dwellings of a peaceful peasantry, as different from the restless population of the neighboring States as the denizens of some Norman or Breton village.

Above all, do not fail to make your pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Anne.  You may see her chapel four or five miles away, nestled under the heights of the Petit Cap.  Here, when Ailleboust was governor, he began with his own 'hands the pious work, and a habitant of Beaupre, Louis Guimont, sorely afflicted with rheumatism, came grinning with pain to lay three stones in the foundation, in honor probably of Saint Anne, Saint Joachim, and their daughter the Virgin.  Instantly he was cured.  It was but the beginning of a long course of miracles continued more than two centuries, and continuing still.  Their fame spread far and wide.  The devotion to Saint Anne became a distinguishing feature of Canadian Catholicity, till at the present day at least thirteen parishes bear her name.  But of all her shrines, none can match the fame of Saint Anne du Petit Cap.  Crowds flocked thither on the week of her festival, and marvellous cures were wrought unceasingly, as the sticks and crutches hanging on the walls and columns still attest.  Sometimes the whole shore was covered with the wigwams of Indian converts who had paddled their birch canoes from the farthest wilds of Canada.  The more fervent among them would crawl on their knees from the shore to the altar.  And, in our own day, every summer a far greater concourse of pilgrims  not in paint and feathers, but in cloth and millinery, and not in canoes, but in steamboats  bring their offerings and their vows to the "Bonne Sainte Anne."

To return to Laval's industrial school.  Judging from repeated complaints of governors and intendants of the dearth of skilled workmen, the priests in charge of it were more successful in making good Catholics than in making good masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and weavers; and the number of pupils, even if well trained, was at no time sufficient to meet the wants of the colony, for, though the Canadians showed an aptitude for mechanical trades, they preferred above all things the savage liberty of the backwoods.

The education of girls was in the hands of the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation, of whom the former, besides careful instruction in religious duties, taught their pupils " all that a girl ought to know." This meant exceedingly little besides the manual arts suited to their sex; and, in the case of the nuns of the Congregation, who taught girls of the poorer class, it meant still less.  It was on nuns as well as on priests that the charge fell, not only of spiritual and mental, but also of industrial, training.  Thus we find the King giving to a sisterhood of Montreal a thousand francs to buy wool, and a thousand more for teaching girls to knit.  The King also maintained a teacher of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four hundred francs.

During the eighteenth century, some improvement is perceptible in the mental state of the population.  As it became more numerous and more stable, it also became less ignorant; and the Canadian habitant, towards the end of the French rule, was probably better taught, so far as concerned religion, than the mass of French peasants.  Yet secular instruction was still extremely meagre, even in the noblesse.

"In spite of this defective education," says the famous navigator, Bougainville, who knew the colony well in its last years, " the Canadians are naturally intelligent.  They do not know how to write, but they speak with ease, and with an accent as good as the Parisian." He means, of course, the better class.  "Even the children of officers and gentlemen," says another writer, "scarcely know how to read and write; they are ignorant of the first elements of geography and history." And evidence like this might be extended.

When France was heaving with the throes that prepared the Revolution; when new hopes, new dreams, new thoughts  good and evil, false and true  tossed the troubled waters of French society,  Canada caught something of its social corruption, but not the faintest impulsion of its roused mental life.  The torrent surged on its way; while, in the deep nook beside it, the sticks and dry leaves floated their usual round, and the unruffled pool slept in the placidity of intellectual torpor.  

Note
Several Frenchmen of a certain intellectual eminence made their abode in Canada from time to time.  The chief among them are the Jesuit Lafltau, author of Mceurs des Sauvages Americains; the Jesuit Charlevoix, traveller and historian ; the physician Sarrazin; and the Marquis de la Galisonniere, the most enlightened of the French governors of Canada.  Sarrazin, a naturalist as well as a physician, has left his name to the botanical genus Sarrace.nia, of which the curious American species, S.  purpurea, the "pitcher plant," was described by him.  His position in the colony was singular and characteristic.  He got little or no pay from his patients; and though at one time the only genuine physician in Canada (Callieres et lieauharnois an Ministre, Nov., 1702), he was dependent on the King for support.  In 1609 we find him thanking his Majesty for 300 francs a year, and asking at the same time for more, as he has nothing else to live on.  (Callieres et Champigny au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1699.) Two years later the governor writes, that, as he serves almost everybody without fees, he ought to have another 300 francs.  (Ibid., 5 Oct., 1701.) The additional 300 francs was given him; but, finding it insufficient, he wanted to leave the colony.  "He is too useful," writes the governor again; "we cannot let him go." His yearly pittance of 600 francs, French money, was at one time reinforced by his salary as member of the Superior Council.  He died at Quebec in 1734.