The White and the Gold (66 page)

The soldiers, who had nothing to do at this stage, drank a great deal and smoked even more. They quarreled noisily as they planked the soiled cards down on the uptilted kegs which served as tables, calling impatiently to be favored with the best takers of tricks, Tiddy, Gleek, Tup-tup, and Towser.

Meules gathered up all the cards he could find, had some of them cut into halves and quarters to represent the valuations of four francs, forty
sols
, and fifteen
sols
, stamped them with the word “bon,” signed and sealed in wax, and appended his own signature as well as that of a treasury clerk. These were handed back to the soldiers in lieu of pay, and a proclamation was made that the cards were to be accepted as money. The experiment proved quite successful, and in the fall, when the regular supply of currency arrived, the much-thumbed and greasy bits of paper were redeemed. Meules was warned not to repeat the experiment, however. It was a dangerous thing to do, averred the King’s officials, and might lead to inflation in prices.

The next year more playing-card money had to be issued in spite of this stern admonition, because once again the currency shipment was overlooked. This happened so often, in fact, that gradually playing-card money became recognized. The people in Canada were now accustomed to it and, in fact, liked it very much, finding it handier than the bulky items of barter. The idea had been followed in the New England colonies, where soldiers were paid in paper money. It continued right through the period of the French regime, and in the year 1749, in fact, an official issue was made in paper which reached a value of one million livres.

One of the disadvantages of the new money was the relative ease with which it could be counterfeited. The laws had to be made very severe. In 1690 a French-Canadian surgeon was condemned to be flogged on his naked back in all the public squares of Quebec for making card money. Death by hanging was decreed for the offense at a later stage.

The ingenuity of Meules had played a large part, beyond any doubt, in revolutionizing banking and monetary practice. It is possible that the handy bills which today repose so easily in wallets and in pockets would never have come into existence if he had not found himself with a hundred soldiers on his hands and no currency to use in paying them.

Bishop Laval did not long enjoy the title which had come to him after so much delay. It has already been pointed out that he was broken in health when he reached Quebec with his laurels; although it must be added that he would have resented the use of any such word as “laurels,” being convinced that he had done nothing to deserve praise or reward. The long tour he made of his diocese drew further on his strength. When he returned to Quebec, it was with the conviction that he could not hope to administer for any length of time the duties of his office with the vigor demanded of the incumbent.

On August 28, 1685, the old bishop attended the meeting of the Sovereign Council in Quebec with a light in his eye which would have been familiar to the governors who had faced him in earlier years. With Frontenac recalled and out of his path, he had hopes of revoking the edict which secured the parish priests in their posts. He had accepted the edict with seeming resignation and had given much careful attention to the selection of the men for the various parishes. Deep in his mind and heart, however, the decision had always rankled.

La Barre, who was still governor at this time, was absent on his abortive expedition against the Senecas when the Council met. The intendant Meules was on hand, as were also the citizen members, all of whom were appointees of the King and submissive to his ideas. It undoubtedly was in the bishop’s mind that an expression in his favor by the members might lead to a consideration on the part of the King. The verdict, however, was in favor of the edict. Disappointed, saddened, secretly bitter no doubt, the bishop realized that he must bow to the inevitable.

The defeat thus sustained in his final stand against the will of the King made it clear to the old bishop that the days of his usefulness were over. He decided to resign.

To sail the Atlantic was an undertaking of the most rigorous kind. When the weather proved rough, which could always be expected in the fall, the port lids would be closed and the tiny cabins would become dark and the air so foul that passengers were driven to the perils of the deck. Here the freeboards would be raised, but no precautions could keep the water from washing across. After the first
few days the cooks had to depend on the food supplies in the rancid barrels lashed outside the galley: dried eels, salted fish and beef, and whatever such unskilled hands could concoct with flour, dried fruits, and spices. This was no hardship for the Spartan prelate who had eschewed the pleasures of the table all through the span of his years, but it seems certain that his strength suffered from it. For a man as sick and old as Bishop Laval the Atlantic crossing was a terrible ordeal.

It might have been expected that he would spare himself the adventure by sending his resignation by letter, but he never stooped to such weakness. It seemed incumbent on him to present his reasons in person and so he took himself aboard the last packet, fully conscious of the fact that he might never again set eyes on this beloved land.

Appreciating the importance of having the right successor, Laval addressed himself on reaching France to men whose opinions he valued. From each of them he received the highest encomiums of the King’s almoner, the Abbé Saint-Vallier. He was young, gifted, and zealous. He was, moreover, generous to a fault and almost as free in his personal charities as Laval himself. The post that Saint-Vallier was filling at the royal court was pleasant and easy and one which could be converted into a springboard to eminence and power by an ambitious man. The bishopric of Quebec, on the other hand, offered nothing but hardships, disappointments, worries, and dangers. Any man willing to trade the one for the other would be eminently worthy. When Saint-Vallier unhesitatingly expressed his eagerness to accept, Laval was certain that he had found the man he sought.

There must have been some hesitation in the King’s mind about accepting the resignation of the bishop. Laval had become a legend and he seemed essential to the spiritual life of the colony. Nevertheless, the monarch expressed his willingness to have the old man step aside and conferred on him the privilege of nominating a successor. Laval spoke up for Saint-Vallier, and in due course the appointment was made.

It had been in the old man’s mind that, when freed of his duties, he would retire into the seminary at Quebec for the balance of his life and spend his time in encouraging the young priests. To his dismay he found that he would not be allowed to return to Canada. It was made clear to him in diplomatic terms that the King felt the
new incumbent should have a free hand. Disappointed, and no doubt a little shocked at this unexpected turn of events, the old man bowed to the monarchial will. He saw his successor set sail for Canada in June of. the following year on the same ship which was taking out the new governor, the Marquis de Denonville.

Denonville was a soldier of long experience and he was being sent out to take hold of the Iroquois problem with an iron hand. There was a companion ship, and eight hundred soldiers were divided between the two. They were packed in as tight as fish in salted kegs, and the nature of the hardships the poor fellows were condemned to suffer can easily be imagined. The King’s decision to keep Laval in France spared the venerable prelate from a sight which would have wrung his heart, the conveyance each day to the railings of bodies sewed up in canvas to be committed to the deep. The fevers created by the filthiness of the holds and the scurvy (no effort seems to have been made to recover the cure for that foul disease) took heavy toll. One hundred and fifty men died before the ships put in at Quebec.

T
HE bad impression of La Salle, created by the hostility and innuendoes of Le Febvre de la Barre, had spread in France. At first the successful exploration of the mysterious Mississippi had caught the fancy of the public and there had been general praise of the man who had accomplished the feat. This would not have lasted long in any event. Envy and malice are always active at court, and reputations can be unmade in a whispering conspiracy. The fine edge of La Salle’s acclaim had been blunted, and it needed only the animadversions of the governor to start the pendulum swinging in the other direction.

La Salle himself seems to have been impervious to such small matters. He made a quiet entrance into Paris, restrained in mood and deeply preoccupied. A little shabby in attire, perhaps, for his purse was again as flat as the old skin from which the spring snake has emerged. He went to his humble apartments in the Rue de la Truanderie and applied at once for audiences with the King and his ministers. Louis, always curious and with an eye for the spectacular, decided to see the homecomer himself.

One morning, therefore, La Salle appeared by appointment in the royal anterooms. At the designated moment (Louis being as punctual as any humble clerk) he was ushered into the cabinet of the King. He had heard much about it, mostly from men who had never been there; how in the blazing effulgence of the Sun King casual visitors blinked and became tongue-tied and the pretensions of the unworthy or the unlucky shriveled to nothing. It is unlikely that La
Salle saw anything in the small room save a stoutish man behind an ornate escritoire, a man with the florid cheeks of high living and a sharp eye. As solemn as a saulie himself, La Salle had room in his mind for one thought only, the need to convince this omnipotent being of the feasibility of a great new scheme.

This was what they discussed. France and Spain were now at war, and La Salle pointed out to the King that the northwestern point of Mexico, where gold and silver mines were yielding their wealth to Castilian greed, was not far south of the mouth of the Mississippi. Why not, therefore, accomplish a double purpose by establishing on the newly claimed river a colony strong enough to command a foothold on the Mexican coast? He had a plan worked out in full detail. Give him two ships and two hundred men, half of them soldiers, half artisans. He would then recruit in Canada a much larger force of trained woodsmen. An alliance would be made with the northern confederacy of Indian tribes, and a party of four thousand warriors would be brought down the Mississippi to join in an attack on the Spanish settlements. La Salle proposed to take possession of New Biscay, the Spanish province which lay between the twenty-fifth degree of latitude and the twenty-seventh, and this would place in the hands of the French King the fabulous mines of Ste. Barbe.

Such was the scheme proposed to the ambitious King. It is hard to believe that La Salle could have advanced an idea as wild as this with a straight face or that a man as shrewd as Louis XIV could have considered it in full seriousness. If La Salle really believed that a war party of four thousand western braves could be persuaded to travel down the great river (for which they had a superstitious dread) to fight a powerful white race, leaving their own lands wide open to more mass raids by the Iroquois, he had no conception whatever of Indian nature. If he thought this unprecedentedly large native force could be fed off the land and kept in control while en route, he was the most optimistic general who ever courted failure. If he was convinced, finally, that such an army could be held together and made effective against the trained soldiers of Spain, he was indulging in dreams as ephemeral as soap bubbles. In other words, if he had faith in this preposterous plan, he was mad. The misfortunes he had suffered, the hardships he had endured had affected his brain.

On the other hand, if he did not believe in what he was proposing, he was holding out false prospects to the King in order to win the royal interest in the project closest to his heart, the colonization of the mouth of the Mississippi.

As to the judgment displayed by King Louis and his minister in accepting this harebrained scheme, the less said the better.

Louis was silent and noncommittal after his visitor left. Courtiers who considered themselves reliable barometers of the royal temper laughed contemptuously and said to one another, “Whatever his purpose may have been, this gloomy clod has failed.” But they were wrong. The King might maintain an outward show of indifference, but underneath he was seething with purpose. Almost above everything else he would like to scoop into his own treasure chest a share of the easy wealth which Spain controlled. He had already sent a scorching letter to La Barre, who was still functioning in Canada, ordering him to reverse his attitude on La Salle. He, La Barre, must make it clear to the Iroquois that the brave explorer could not be attacked at will, that on the contrary he stood high in the favor of the King. La Barre must lose no time in restoring La Salle’s possessions.