THE NOBLESSE AND THE PEOPLE
The Canadian seigneur held his lands of the King, and the _habitants_,
or cultivators of the soil, held theirs of the seigneur upon the
performance of specific duties and the payment of _cens et rente_.
These tributes varied curiously in kind and amount; and on St.
Martin's Day, when the _censitaires_ commonly liquidated the
obligations of their tenure, the seigneurie presented an animated
scene. Here were gathered all the tenants, bearing wheat, eggs, and
live capons to pay for their long narrow farms, at a rate ranging from
four to sixteen francs.
The annual delivery of his handful of sous and his bundle of produce
did not, however, complete the obligations of the _censitaire_.
Throughout the year he must grind his grain at the seigneur's mill,
paying one bushel in every fourteen for the service, bake his bread in
the seigneur's oven, work for him one or two days in the year, and
forfeit one fish in every eleven to the lord of the manor. Military
service, however, was no part of the _habitant's_ duty as a tenant;
for the judicious Colbert, jealous always for the power of the
monarchy, had clipped this ancient feature from Canadian feudalism,
and given absolute military control of the country to the Governor at
Quebec. The seigneur's judicial powers varied according to the
importance of his fief. Barons were empowered to erect gallows and
pillories, but the ordinary judicial powers of a Canadian seigneur
were confined to Middle and Low justice, which comprehended only minor
offences.
The solicitous interest of Louis XIV. in the affairs of New France
promised much for the country's prosperity; and every ship sailing to
the St. Lawrence carried out a fresh batch of emigrants. For all of
these the King paid out of his own pocket, and it cost him a pretty
penny to respond to Intendant Talon's persistent appeals for more
settlers. Agencies were established at several points in France to
recruit colonists, and grants of money and land were held out as
inducements to new settlers. In this way the King and Colbert managed
to send out about three hundred men each year. But, as might be
expected of emigration state-aided and scarcely voluntary, Quebec
became a city of men chiefly, there being few women besides cloistered
nuns. There had always been a demand for wives, but now that the
soldiers and officers of the Carignan-Salières had elected to remain
in the country, the scarcity of women induced a matrimonial famine.
Talon speedily apprised Colbert of the situation, and the most comely
inmates of the refuge hospitals of Paris and Lyons were summoned to
fill this void. In 1665 one hundred of the "King's girls" arrived in
Quebec, almost instantly to be provided with partners; and although
the supply was doubled in the following year, it yet remained below
the conjugal demand.
To supply the needs of the seigneurs also became a real problem.
Talon, with grim humour, demanded a consignment of young ladies; and
in 1667 he was able to announce as follows: "They send us eighty-four
girls from Dieppe and twenty-five from Rochelle; among them are
fifteen or twenty of pretty good birth; several of them are really
_demoiselles_, and tolerably well brought up." Amusing evidence,
however, of the exceeding delicacy of such a market is found in a
letter, in which the match-making Intendant alludes to the supply of
the year 1670. "It is not expedient," he ungallantly writes to
Colbert, "to send more _demoiselles_. I have had this year fifteen of
them instead of the four I asked for."
La Hontan, writing a few years later, cannot refrain from exercising
keen but slanderous wit at the expense of these fair cargoes from
Quebec so gladly received. His description, albeit scandalous, is
amusing: "After the regiment of Carrigan was disbanded, ships were
sent out freighted with girls of indifferent virtue, under the
direction of a few pious old duennas, who divided them into three
classes. These vestals were, so to speak, piled one on the other in
three different halls, where the bridegrooms chose their brides as a
butcher chooses his sheep out of the midst of the flock. There was
wherewith to content the most fantastical in these three harems; for
here were to be seen the tall and the short, the blond and the brown,
the plump and the lean; everybody, in short, found a shoe to fit him.
At the end of a fortnight not one was left. I am told that the
plumpest were taken first, because it was thought that, being less
active, they were more likely to keep at home, and that they could
resist the winter cold better. Those who wanted a wife applied to the
directresses, to whom they were obliged to make known their
possessions and means of livelihood before taking from one of the
three classes the girl whom they found most to their liking. The
marriage was concluded forthwith, with the help of a priest and
notary, and the next day the Governor caused the couple to be
presented with an ox, a cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two
barrels of salted meat, and eleven crowns in money."
On their part the girls were permitted to reject any suitor who
displeased them; and at these annual marriage fairs the contest for
favour was keen on both sides. But the paternalism of the Grand
Monarch went even farther than the mere enlistment of wives for the
colonists. Bounties were offered on early marriages; and the maid who
married before she was sixteen received the "King's gift" of twenty
livres, in addition to her ordinary dowry. Bachelors who refused to
marry were rendered as uncomfortable as possible, and were taxed for
their abstinence or timidity. Children were likewise made a good
asset, and blessed was the man whose house was full of them. Thus runs
an edict of the time: "...In future all inhabitants of the said
country of Canada who shall have living children to the number of ten,
born in lawful wedlock, not being priests, maids, or nuns, shall each
be paid out of the moneys sent by His Majesty to the said country a
pension of three hundred livres a year, and those who shall have
twelve children, a pension of four hundred livres, and that, to this
effect, they shall be required to declare the number of their children
every year in the months of June and July to the Intendant of justice,
police, and finance, established in the said country, who, having
verified the same, shall order the payment of said pensions, one-half
in cash, and the other half at the end of each year."
It was not by accident but by design that an aristocratic class was
created in French Canada. The perpetual contrast between the English
and the French systems of colonisation was but the difference between
natural evolution and artificial construction. The Canadian
aristocracy was a consistent detail of the latter and in keeping with
Louis' ambitious scheme of personal government. The caste system
grafted upon the stem of the colonial plant was a picturesque
adornment to the life of Quebec, but a doubtful experiment from any
other point of view, as time proved.
For the most part the Canadian _noblesse_ were either officers of the
disbanded Carignan-Salières regiment, or _gentilhommes_ who had come
to the New World in search of adventure or gain. In both cases they
were unsuited to the hard and restrictive conditions of a rugged
country. The soldiers steadfastly refused to beat their swords into
ploughshares or their spears into pruning-hooks, and most of them
accepted a state not far removed from actual want, rather than stain
their martial hands with manual labour. The leisured class thus became
the starving class, and the King's annual subsidies alone kept these
families from destitution. Many of them were also in receipt of the
bounties granted to large families--an ineffective resource, inasmuch
as hungry children but consumed the supply and renewed the demand.
Disdaining work of any sort, the Canadian _gentilhomme_ yet gave
himself airs that were in amusing contrast to his shabby coat and
empty stomach. The world, he held, owed him a living without the
labour of his hands, and to him "the world" was Louis the perpetual
almsgiver.
The official correspondence of the period describes in some detail the
pangs of these ill-conditioned gentry. "Two days ago," writes the
Governor of Quebec in 1686, "Monsieur de Saint-Ours, a gentleman of
Dauphiny, came to me to ask leave to go back to France in search of
bread. He says that he will put his ten children in charge of any one
who will give them a living, and that he himself will go into the army
again. His wife and he are in despair; and yet they do what they can.
I have seen two of his girls reaping grain and holding the plough.
Other families are in the same condition. They come to me with tears
in their eyes. All our married officers are beggars; and I entreat you
to send them aid. There is need that the King should provide support
for their children, or else they will be tempted to go over to the
English."
Nor was this impecunious _noblesse_ merely a passive burden to New
France, for the dignified hardships of their estate soon bred active
conditions equally distressing to those in authority. Having no
inducement to remain peacefully at home, the sons of the seigneurs
took to the woods, often enticing the more unsettled of their own
_habitants_ to follow them thither to a life of unbridled freedom and
outlawry. Reckless bushrangers, they carried on an illicit trade with
the Indians, diverting peltries from the fur company at Quebec, and
demoralising the savage proselytes of the missions. In this
unfortunate way the _gentilhomme_ and his children compromised with
labour and managed to keep body and soul together.
Harsh edict and cruel ordinance were repeatedly launched against the
practices of these well-bred offenders, but the ready covert of the
forest made the evasion of the King's justice an easy matter.
Moreover, the Church, while it suffered much from such children, did
not venture to reprove too strongly their flagrant excesses, lest they
should thenceforth dispense altogether with her sacraments; for a
furtive life in the wild woods did not prevent the superstitious
_coureurs de bois_ from occasionally coming to confession or to Mass.
[Illustration: OLD BISHOP'S PALACE (AT THE TOP OF MOUNTAIN HILL)]
A royal edict ordered that any person going into the woods without a
license should be whipped and branded for the first offence, and sent
for life to the galleys for the second; while a third offence was
punishable by death. The whole criminal code of Quebec was, indeed, of
a piece with this; and an obvious feature was the quasi-religious
character of most of the offences. The edict against blasphemy read as
follows: "...All persons convicted of profane swearing or blaspheming
the name of God, the most Holy Virgin, His Mother, or the Saints,
shall be condemned for the first offence to a pecuniary fine according
to their possessions and the greatness and enormity of the oath and
blasphemy; and if those thus punished repeat the said oaths, then for
the second, third, and fourth time they shall be condemned to a
double, triple, and quadruple fine; and for the fifth time they shall
be set in the pillory on Sunday or other festival days, there to
remain from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, exposed to
all sorts of opprobrium and abuse, and be condemned besides to a heavy
fine; and for the sixth time they shall be led to the pillory, and
there have the upper lip cut with a hot iron; and for the seventh time
they shall be led to the pillory and have the lower lip cut; and if,
by reason of obstinacy and inveterate bad habit, they continue after
all these punishments to utter the said oaths and blasphemies, it is
our will and command that they have the tongue completely cut out, so
that thereafter they cannot utter them again."[8]
A citizen who had the temerity to eat meat during Lent without
priestly permission was condemned to be tied three hours to the public
stake, then led to the door of the church, there on his knees to ask
pardon of God and the King. For approving of the execution of Charles
I. by his English subjects, one Paul Dupuy was held to have libelled
the monarchy and to have encouraged sedition. He was condemned to be
dragged from prison by the public executioner, led in his shirt, with
a rope about his neck and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the
fort, there to beg pardon of the King; thence down Mountain Hill to
the pillory of Lower Town to be branded on the cheek with a
fleur-de-lis, and set in the stocks. Poor Dupuy's crime was not yet
expiated, for, according to the remainder of the sentence, he was to
be "led back to prison and put in irons till the information against
him shall be completed."[9] Convicts and felons were sometimes
tortured before being strangled. The execution usually took
place at _Buttes-à-Neveu_, a little hillock on the Plains of
Abraham,--afterwards to become more justly celebrated and less
notorious,--and the dead body, enclosed in an iron cage, was left
hanging for months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children
and a gruesome warning to evildoers.
[Footnote 8: _Edit du Roy contre les Jureurs et Blasphémateurs_,
1666.]
[Footnote 9: _Jugements et Délibérations du Conseil Supérieur_.]
[Illustration: NEW PALACE GATE]
The people of Quebec were regularly apprised of the laws under which
they lived. On Sundays after Mass the ordinances of the Intendant were
read at the doors of the churches. These related to any number of
subjects--regulations of inns and markets, poaching, sale of brandy,
pew-rents, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes, domestic servants,
quarrelling in church, fast driving, the careful observance of feast
days, and so on.
Law-breakers were tried by the Superior Council, which met for that
purpose every Monday morning in the ante-chamber of the Governor's
apartment at Fort St. Louis. The Governor himself presided at the
Round Table, the bar of justice; on his right sat the bishop, and on
his left the Intendant, the councillors sitting in order of
appointment. Such at least was the _venue_ until about 1684, when the
old brewery which Talon had built in Lower Town on the bank of the
river St. Charles was transformed into a _Palais de Justice_. The
altered structure served also as a residence for the King's judicial
proxy, and was commonly known as the Palace of the Intendant.[10] It
was an imposing mixture of timber and masonry, and at the close of the
seventeenth century was the most considerable building in Quebec.
While lacking the glorious site of the Castle of St. Louis, in point
of interior decoration it far eclipsed this château of the Governor.
[Footnote 10: The declivity above its site is still known as Palace
Hill.]
[Illustration: INTENDANT'S PALACE]
The present dilapidated tenements clustering about the foot of Palace
Hill can, of course, give no idea of the natural position of the
ancient _Palais de l'Intendant_. La Potherie, who visited Quebec in
1698, and Charlevoix, who writes in 1720, describe this district as
the most beautiful in the city. Instead of the crowded quays of
to-day there was a terraced lawn bordered with flower gardens; and
where now the winches creak and rattle, and the railway engines hiss
and scream, birds sang among willow-trees, and the Angelus echoed
through a quiet woodland. Across the St. Charles lay the well-ordered
grounds of the Jesuit monastery, and farther to the west the lonely
spire of the General Hospital peeped through the ancient trees.
Such were the pleasing _environs_ of the block of buildings which went
by the name of _Le Palais_. In form it was almost a square, each side
measuring about one hundred and twenty feet. An arched gateway, facing
the sheer cliff, led into a large courtyard in which were situated the
entrances to the Intendant's residence, the Court of Justice, the
King's stores, and the prison. Soon it was also to be the site of _La
Friponne_, the scene of the ribald revels of Bigot.