The White and the Gold (74 page)

The genius for organization which had been dormant in Bienville all these years came to life. Remembering the land on the broad bend of the Mississippi which his great brother, now moldering in a Spanish grave, had selected as the best site for the projected capital, he moved his men there at once and set them to work. The place which had served as the terminal point of the portage was cleared off and made into the Place d’Armes of the new town. The north side of the square, looking down to the river, was selected for the cathedral; although for the time being the young leader could contrive nothing more than a shrine under a canopy of canvas. On each side of the square he built frame
casernes
(barracks) for the soldiers who were coming on the first ships. At the southwest corner he raised a hasty single-story building which would serve for administration purposes.

Streets were then cut through the woods and underbrush and small houses were run up hastily. With the addition of a great many tents, the capital of the new El Dorado (named New Orleans for the regent) was capable of housing in one way or another all the people due to arrive. Here was a second miracle, a man-made one, the credit for which belongs to Bienville.

Then the ships began to arrive at the mouth of the river and the place was quickly overrun. The new arrivals were a thoroughly unsuitable lot, as Bienville saw at one glance. His work as governor of this hastily thrown together metropolis was not going to be easy.

Back in France the Bubble burst. The company failed, thousands of investors were impoverished, John Law had to leave France in great haste and secrecy. The only thing that did not vanish was the
capital of the new empire which Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville was building and which was now crowded with disillusioned people. This part of the experiment had to go on.

A real and enduring miracle came about. Slowly the town grew as ways were found to use the resources of the river lands. Permanent buildings were erected, churches and schools as well as private residences of charm and individuality. The first personal wealth produced sent the possessors out to fine houses and plantations along the streams and bayous. Bienville never returned to Canada, he never married, and when he was allowed finally to retire he was an old man. He went to Paris to spend what was left of his life.

He was eighty-seven years old when Louis XV, who had very slight consideration for the obligations and responsibilities of kingship, decided to hand Louisiana to Spain. Bienville tried to intercede, to convince the King that the charming civilization which the people of the colony had created would wither and die under alien rule. The King would not see him, and the ministers were unsympathetic. Bienville died before the transfer was carried out officially, and it was generally believed that the blow had broken his heart.

May, 1708

Bishop Laval was dying. Quebec, which had always maintained an air of gaiety and sophistication even when a scowl above a black cassock had carried authority, paused and pondered what it would mean to be without him. A deep sense of impending loss took possession of the people of the town.

Visitors had always been impressed with the volatile spirits of Quebec. They had commented on the gay air of the town and, in particular, on the beauty and charm of the women. This had been in no sense an exaggeration. Often in the late evening hours, the still, cold air would fill suddenly with the high notes of feminine voices and with the last snatches of song as social circles dissolved and the members took their way homeward. The shadows cast by the high palisade Frontenac had built back of the heights were seldom untenanted, for here young lovers went for walks, and often the crunch of slow footsteps on the snow would evoke the same sharp
Qui vive?
as the old governor had heard from the sentries in the stone towers.

But the people of Quebec were as devout as they were gay, and so the loss of the old bishop was going to be deeply felt. They had been on his side in the main when they found that he and his successor were at odds. Laval had been so sure of the fitness of the Abbé Saint-Vallier that it had come as a shock to find that the new bishop did not share his convictions at all on certain points. Saint-Vallier was not inclined to place much importance in the seminary which he, Laval, had founded with so much enthusiasm and which he felt should be the very heart and core of spiritual life in the colony. A decree had been passed which limited the institution to the education of priests, and the number of directors had been reduced casually to five. The new bishop had accepted fifteen thousand francs from the King for the erection of an episcopal palace and the funds had been used for the purpose, so that now Laval in his bare Utile corner of the seminary could see the tall windows and fine glass of his successor. Saint-Vallier had been an ardent supporter of Denonville, even when the mistakes of that well-meaning but weak governor had brought Canada to the brink of ruin.

Troubles had multiplied on the head of the old man since his return from France. A scourge had carried off a quarter of the inhabitants of Quebec. The seminary had burned down, and Laval, desperately ill at the time, had been carried half clad from his bed. It had been necessary for him to accept on behalf of himself and his staff the hospitality of the episcopal palace; although he had cringed no doubt from the evidences it presented of easy living. When the walls of the new seminary were halfway up, another fire swept the neighborhood and the work had to be started over again. The Spartan old prelate had removed himself before this from the comparative magnificence of his successor’s abode.

Fortunately, because two such men could not have lived in peace together, Saint-Vallier had now been absent from Canada for the better part of ten years. The King, who generally had a shrewd grasp of the situation in his favorite colony, which was also his pet extravagance, had realized the danger in the open lack of unity between the two men. Perhaps he also had been disappointed in Saint-Vallier. At any rate, he summoned the new bishop back to France in 1700 and kept him there on various pretexts. In 1705 permission was granted him to return, and he set sail for Quebec in a ship called the
Seine
, which was taking out a million francs. Getting wind of this tempting cargo, perhaps, an English ship chased and
captured the
Seine
, taking all the crew and passengers back to England. Saint-Vallier had been a prisoner of war ever since and he would remain in England for two years more. In his absence two of his assistants attended to the executive duties, but for spiritual guidance the people had turned back to Laval. He ordained the new priests, he presided at confirmation, he visited the sick and attended the dying. His face, wrinkled with age and reduced to boniness by the rigor of his fasting, was seen everywhere in spite of the infirmities which had gripped him.

The old prelate’s asceticism had increased rather than diminished with the years. He still rose without fail at two in the morning and dressed himself hurriedly in the cold of his room. The tendency to varicose veins had become worse with the years, and as a result an unsteadiness had developed in his legs. It had become necessary to bind them every day, and in this he would allow no help. Stooping with great difficulty in the dark (for the use of candles was an extravagance) and groaning from the pain he was inflicting on himself, he took a long time at the task. Not until he was dressed would he light the charcoal in his brazier, and even in the depth of winter he allowed himself no better than a feeble fire, above which he would huddle as he turned to his morning devotions. At four he would be ready to set out for the cathedral, where he would celebrate the four-thirty Mass.

He could no longer venture out alone as he had done when he was young. An
engagé
at the seminary, Houssard by name, devoted himself to the service of the stern old man. Houssard would come to the bishop at four, his eyes heavy with sleep, to escort his master through the darkness of the streets. Sometimes the bishop was too weak to walk and Houssard would take him on his back. They must have cast a curious shadow when the
engagé
, carrying the thin figure pickaback, emerged on stumbling feet from the twisting and narrow streets into the full light of the moon.

The prelate spared neither himself nor the back of the devoted Houssard, for always he must go to the cathedral for later services on Sundays and saints’ days. He must attend all funerals and respond to every request for his presence. The people of the town had become well accustomed to the sight of the old man being thus carried wherever duty called him. Nothing could be said to convince him that the time had come for him to rest.

He continued thus to tend the spiritual needs of the ill and the
dying until it became only too apparent that his own end was close at hand. This was in 1707, and during the summer of that year it seemed that he could not rally from the weakness which had seized him; but he did, and even presented an appearance of physical improvement. He smiled again and spoke much of the future and of all the things he intended to do. This improvement carried him through the winter.

Spring was late the next year. On Good Friday, Houssard carried the ailing prelate to the cathedral. There was still ice on the streets and a bitter and unseasonable wind had risen and was twirling the snow about the eaves of the houses and making it almost impossible for the eye to see the top of the spire. It was not surprising that the bishop’s feet were frozen before they reached the comparative warmth of the cathedral. The old man said nothing about it until it was too late to take the necessary steps. Even had he done so, it is doubtful if any measures could have been taken to relieve him, for the swollen veins in his legs gave at best a poor circulation of the blood. Gangrene set in and he suffered terribly during his last few days on earth.

He did not complain, but the intensity of the pain wrung exclamations from him. “O God have pity on me!” he cried. “O God of mercy, let Thy will be done!”

He had no thought that his accomplishments had set him apart. The humility he had shown in his later years seemed to accelerate, in fact, as the end drew near. Someone made the suggestion that he do as the saints had so often done and voice a last message for the people he was leaving.

The dying man shook his head slowly from side to side.

“They were saints,” he whispered. “I am a sinner.”

He died early in the morning of May 6, 1708. There had been no gaiety in Quebec for many days, nor would there be for a long time thereafter. The spiritual father of the colony had been taken away, and with bowed heads the people prayed long and earnestly that his benign influence would not be lost to them.

The great men had been passing one by one. La Salle, Talon, Frontenac (who died in the Château of St. Louis in 1698), Iberville, and now Laval. With the death of this passionately devout churchman, who had been so arbitrary in his first years and so gentle and understanding in his last, an ending seemed to come to the period of Titans.

It is too sweeping a generalization to say that New France produced her great men in the seventeenth century and that the full flowering of genius in the American colonies did not come until the eighteenth. It would be even more dangerous to draw from this a reason for the ultimate success of the English in the long struggle. This much can be said, at any rate, in support of such statements: the eighty-one years from the time when Champlain founded the settlement at Quebec until the period of open and declared war began, the French colony produced a long succession of great men. Some of them were men of extreme bravery, some were wise and farseeing, all were romantic and adventurous. There would be outstanding men in the eighteenth as well—La Mothe-Cadillac, La Harpe, Le Sueur, Varennes de la Verendrye and his sons, the Mallet brothers—but active and daring as they were, they seem of lesser stature.

The great figures of New France began with Cartier and Champlain and included those enumerated above: La Salle, Talon, Frontenac, Iberville, Laval. Of these, Iberville alone was born in the colony. The others, who might not otherwise have emerged into the bright white light of historical importance, came from France and found in Canada the setting and the opportunity for their particular talents and personal characteristics. Consider, for a brief and concluding moment, the list of the great and the near great and the picturesque minor characters who performed so actively in the wings and the fly.

De Monts’ made possible the continuance of Champlain’s effort at colonization, but he does not stand with the others in enduring bronze or marble. Champlain’s renegade servant, Etienne Brulé, made for himself an amazing record of getting first to places of importance, north, south, and west. If he had not sold himself to the Kirkes, he would have an honored place of his own. Radisson and Groseilliers have been getting more recognition as new records are uncovered, more especially Radisson, who seems to have been the greatest and luckiest of traders. It was not his way to start out with a certain number of companions and canoes and to come back with a smaller train and stories of ill fortune; rather he came back with more canoes than he started with, packed deep with furs, amid a noisy and cheerful gabble of great things done and seen. It was unfortunate
for France that he lacked the patience to accept official rebuffs and injustices; and equally to be regretted that the hidebound and high-nosed governors with whom he came in contact could not see the possibilities in this footloose genius. Now they begin to crowd the stage, these men who opened up the North and the West—Marquette and Joliet, who discovered the Mississippi, Du Lhut, Durantaye, Perrot, Tonty, the Jesuit fathers who would be found in the most unexpected corners of the wilderness to which their zeal had carried them; and, towering above them all, La Salle.

On with the list. There was Maisonneuve, unselfish and chivalrous, who saw Montreal through its first perilous stages. After him came Dollier de Casson, the gentle Sulpician giant who fled the face of war, only to find himself more deeply immersed in violence than before. Adam Dollard supplied the one story which would live if all other colonial annals were lost and forgotten. No equal can be found for the story of the Jesuit martyrs, Jogues, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Daniel, Bressani. Four women, all different one from another but all brave and devout, played remarkable parts, Madame de la Peltrie, Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, Jeanne Mance, Marguerite Bourgeoys. Louis Hébert, courageous and industrious, the first settler, must never be overlooked. Can other histories produce the equal of Charles le Moyne and his ten fabulous sons? Great men indeed, great days, great deeds.