_The Bishop’s Choice.--A Military Zealot.--Hopeful Beginnings.--Signs
of Storm.--The Quarrel.--Distress of Mézy.--He Refuses to Yield.--His
Defeat and Death._
|We have seen that Laval, when at court, had been invited to choose a
governor to his liking. He soon made his selection. There was a pious
officer, Saffray de Mézy, major of the town and citadel of Caen, whom
he had well known during his long stay with Bernières at the Hermitage.
Mézy was the principal member of the company of devotees formed at Caen
under the influence of Bernières and his disciples. In his youth he had
been headstrong and dissolute. Worse still, he had been, it is said,
a Huguenot; but both in life and doctrine his conversion had been
complete, and the fervid mysticism of Bernières acting on his vehement
nature had transformed him into a red-hot zealot. Towards the hermits
and their chief he showed a docility in strange contrast with his past
history, and followed their inspirations with an ardor which sometimes
overleaped its mark.
Thus a Jacobin monk, a doctor of divinity, once came to preach at the
church of St. Paul at Caen; on which, according to their custom, the
brotherhood of the Hermitage sent two persons to make report concerning
his orthodoxy. Mézy and another military zealot, “who,” says the
narrator, “hardly know how to read, and assuredly do not know their
catechism,” were deputed to hear his first sermon; wherein this
Jacobin, having spoken of the necessity of the grace of Jesus Christ in
order to the doing of good deeds, these two wiseacres thought that he
was preaching Jansenism; and thereupon, after the sermon, the Sieur
de Mézy went to the proctor of the ecclesiastical court and denounced
him. *
His zeal, though but moderately tempered with knowledge, sometimes
proved more useful than on this occasion. The Jacobin convent at Caen
was divided against itself. Some of the monks had embraced the doctrines
taught by Bernières, while the rest held dogmas which he declared to be
contrary to those of the Jesuits, and therefore heterodox. A prior was
to be elected, and, with the help of Bernières, his partisans gained
the victory, choosing one Father Louis, through whom the Hermitage
gained a complete control in the convent. But the adverse party
presently resisted, and complained to the provincial of their order, who
came to Caen to close the dispute by deposing Father Louis. Hearing of
his approach, Bernières asked
* Nicole, Mémoire pour faire connoistre l’espnt et la
conduite de la Compagnie appellée l'Hermitage.
aid from his military disciple, and De Mézy sent him a squad of
soldiers, who guarded the convent doors and barred out the provincial. *
Among the merits of Mézy, his humility and charity were especially
admired; and the people of Caen had more than once seen the town major
staggering across the street with a beggar mounted on his back, whom he
was bearing dryshod through the mud in the exercise of those virtues.
** In this he imitated his master Bernières, of whom similar acts are
recorded. *** However dramatic in manifestation, his devotion was not
only sincere but intense. Laval imagined that he knew him well. Above
all others, Mézy was the man of his choice; and so eagerly did he plead
for him, that the king himself paid certain debts which the pious major
had contracted, and thus left him free to sail for Canada.
His deportment on the voyage was edifying, and the first days of his
accession were passed in harmony. He permitted Laval to form the new
council, and supplied the soldiers for the seizure of Dumesnil’s
papers. A question arose concerning Montreal, a subject on which
the governors and the bishop rarely differed in opinion. The present
instance was no exception to the rule. Mézy removed Maisonneuve, the
local governor, and immediately replaced him; the effect being, that
whereas
* ibid.
** Juchereau, Histoire de l'Hôtel-Dieu, 149.
*** See the laudatory notice of Bernières de Louvigny in
the Nouvelle Biographie Universelle.
he had before derived his authority from the seigniors of the island,
he now derived it from the governor-general. It was a movement in the
interest, of centralized power, and as such was cordially approved by
Laval
The first indication to the bishop and the Jesuits that the new governor
was not likely to prove in their hands as clay in the hands of the
potter, is said to have been given on occasion of an interview with an
embassy of Iroquois chiefs, to whom Mézy, aware of their duplicity,
spoke with a decision and haughtiness that awed the savages and
astonished the ecclesiastics.
He seems to have been one of those natures that run with an engrossing
vehemence along any channel into which they may have been turned. At the
Hermitage he was all devotee; but climate and conditions had changed,
and he or his symptoms changed with them. He found himself raised
suddenly to a post of command, or one which was meant to be such. The
town major of Caen was set to rule over a region far larger than France.
The royal authority was trusted to his keeping, and his honor and duty
forbade him to break the trust. But when he found that those who had
procured for him his new dignities had done so that he might be an
instrument of their will, his ancient pride started again into life, and
his headstrong temper broke out like a long-smothered fire. Laval stood
aghast at the transformation. His lamb had turned wolf.
What especially stirred the governor’s dudgeon was the conduct of
Bourdon, Villeray, and Auteuil, those faithful allies whom Laval had
placed on the council, and who, as Mézy soon found, were wholly in
the bishop’s interest. On the 13th of February he sent his friend
Angoville, major of the fort, to Laval, with a written declaration
to the effect that he had ordered them to absent themselves from the
council, because, having been appointed “on the persuasion of the
aforesaid Bishop of Petræa, who knew them to be wholly his creatures,
they wish to make themselves masters in the aforesaid council, and have
acted in divers ways against the interests of the king and the public
for the promotion of personal and private ends, and have formed and
fomented cabals, contrary to their duty and their oath of fidelity to
his aforesaid Majesty.” * He further declares that advantage had
been taken of the facility of his disposition and his ignorance of the
country to surprise him into assenting to their nomination; and he asks
the bishop to acquiesce in their expulsion, and join him in calling an
assembly of the people to choose others in their place. Laval refused;
on which Mézy caused his declaration to be placarded about Quebec and
proclaimed by sound of drum.
The proposal of a public election, contrary as it was to the spirit
of the government, opposed to the edict establishing the council, and
utterly odious to the young autocrat who ruled over France, gave
* Ordre de M. de Mézy de faire sommation a l’Evêque de
Petrée, 13 Fev., 1664. Notification du dit Ordre, mène date.
(Registre du Conseil Supérieur.)
Laval a great advantage. “I reply,” he wrote, “to the request
which Monsieur the Governor makes me to consent to the interdiction of
the persons named in his declaration, and proceed to the choice of other
councillors or officers by an assembly of the people, that neither my
conscience nor my honor, nor the respect and obedience which I owe to
the will and commands of the king, nor my fidelity and affection to his
service, will by any means permit me to do so.” *
Mézy was dealing with an adversary armed with redoubtable weapons.
It was intimated to him that the sacraments would be refused, and the
churches closed against him. This threw him into an agony of doubt and
perturbation; for the emotional religion which had become a part of his
nature, though overborne by gusts of passionate irritation, was still
full of life within him. Tossing between the old feeling and the new,
he took a course which reveals the trouble and confusion of his mind.
He threw himself for counsel and comfort on the Jesuits, though he
knew them to be one with Laval against him, and though, under cover of
denouncing sin in general, they had lashed him sharply in their sermons.
There is something pathetic in the appeal he makes them. For the glory
of God and the service of the king, he had come, he says, on Laval’s
solicitation, to seek salvation in Canada; and being under obligation to
the bishop, who had recommended him to the king, he felt bound to show
proofs of his gratitude on every occasion.
* Réponse de l'Evêque de Petrée, 16 Fev., 1664.
Yet neither gratitude to a benefactor nor the respect due to his
character and person should be permitted to interfere with duty to the
king, “since neither conscience nor honor permit us to neglect the
requirements of our office and betray the interests of his Majesty,
after receiving orders from his lips, and making oath of fidelity
between his hands.” He proceeds to say that, having discovered
practices of which he felt obliged to prevent the continuance, he had
made a declaration expelling the offenders from office; that the bishop
and all the ecclesiastics had taken this declaration as an offence;
that, regardless of the king’s service, they had denounced him as
a calumniator, an unjust judge, without gratitude, and perverted in
conscience; and that one of the chief among them had come to warn him
that the sacraments would be refused and the churches closed against
him. “This,” writes the unhappy governor, “has agitated our soul
with scruples; and we have none from whom to seek light save those who
are our declared opponents, pronouncing judgment on us without knowledge
of cause. Yet as our salvation and the duty we owe the king are
the things most important to us on earth, and as we hold them to be
inseparable the one from the other: and as nothing is so certain as
death, and nothing so uncertain as the hour thereof; and as there is
no time to inform his Majesty of what is passing and to receive his
commands; and as our soul, though conscious of innocence, is always in
fear,--we feel obliged, despite their opposition, to have recourse
to the reverend father casuists of the House of Jesus, to tell us in
conscience what we can do for the fulfilment of our duty at once to God
and to the king.” *
The Jesuits gave him little comfort. Lalemant, their superior, replied
by advising him to follow the directions of his confessor, a Jesuit, so
far as the question concerned spiritual matters, adding that in temporal
matters he had no advice to give. ** The distinction was illusory. The
quarrel turned wholly on temporal matters, but it was a quarrel with
a bishop. To separate in such a case the spiritual obligation from the
temporal was beyond the skill of Mézy, nor would the confessor have
helped him.
Perplexed and troubled as he was, he would not reinstate Bourdon and
the two councillors. The people began to clamor at the interruption of
justice, for which they blamed Laval, whom a recent imposition of tithes
had made unpopular. Mézy thereupon issued a proclamation, in which,
after mentioning his opponents as the most subtle and artful persons
in Canada, he declares that, in consequence of petitions sent him from
Quebec and the neighboring settlements, he had called the people to the
council chamber, and by their advice had appointed the Sieur de Chartier
as attorney-general in place of Bourdon.***
Bourdon replied by a violent appeal from the
* Mézy aux PP. Jésuites, Fait au Château de Quebec ce
dernier jour de Février, 1664.
** Lettre du P. H. Lalemant a Mr. le Gouverneur.
*** Declaration du Sieur de Mézy, 10 Mars, 1664.
governor to the remaining members of the council, * on which Mézy
declared him excluded from all public functions whatever, till the
king’s pleasure should be known. ** Thus church and state still
frowned on each other, and new disputes soon arose to widen the breach
between them. On the first establishment of the council, an order had
been passed for the election of a mayor and two aldermen (_échevins_)
for Quebec, which it was proposed to erect into a city, though it had
only seventy houses and less than a thousand inhabitants. Repentigny
was chosen mayor, and Madry and Charron aldermen; but the choice was not
agreeable to the bishop, and the three functionaries declined to act,
influence having probably been brought to bear on them to that end.
The council now resolved that a mayor was needless, and the people were
permitted to choose a syndic in his stead. These municipal elections
were always so controlled by the authorities that the element of liberty
which they seemed to represent was little but a mockery. On the present
occasion, after an unaccountable delay of ten months, twenty-two persons
cast their votes in presence of the council, and the choice fell on
Charron. The real question was whether the new syndic should belong to
the governor or to the bishop. Charron leaned to the governor’s party.
The ecclesiastics insisted that the people were dissatisfied, and a new
election was ordered, but the voters did not come. The governor now
* Bourdon au Conseil, 13 Mars, 1664.
** Ordre du Gouverneur, 13 Mars, 1664.
sent messages to such of the inhabitants as he knew to be in his
interest, who gathered in the council chamber, voted under his eye,
and again chose a syndic agreeable to him. Laval’s party protested in
vain. *
The councillors held office for a year, and the year had now expired.
The governor and the bishop, it will be remembered, had a joint power
of appointment; but agreement between them was impossible. Laval was
for replacing his partisans, Bourdon, Villeray, Auteuil, and La Ferté.
Mézy refused; and on the eighteenth of September he reconstructed the
council by his sole authority, retaining of the old councillors only
Amours and Tilly, and replacing the rest by Denis, La Tesserie, and
Péronne de Maze, the surviving son of Dumesnil.
Again Laval protested; but Mézy proclaimed his choice by sound of drum,
and caused placards to be posted, full, according to Father Lalemant,
of abuse against the bishop. On this he was excluded from confession
and absolution. He complained loudly; “but our reply was,” says the
father, “that God knew every thing.” **
This unanswerable but somewhat irrelevant response failed to satisfy
him, and it was possibly on this occasion that an incident occurred
which is recounted by the bishop’s eulogist, La Tour. He says that
Mézy, with some unknown design, appeared before the church at the head
of a band of soldiers, while Laval was saying mass. The service over,
the bishop presented himself at the door, on which, to
* Registre du Conseil Supérieur.
** Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1664.
the governor's confusion, all the soldiers respectfully saluted
him. * The story may have some foundation, but it is not supported by
contemporary evidence.
On the Sunday after Mézy’s _coup d’etat_, the pulpits resounded
with denunciations. The people listened, doubtless, with becoming
respect; but their sympathies were with the governor; and he, on his
part, had made appeals to them at more than one crisis of the quarrel.
He now fell into another indiscretion. He banished Bourdon and Villeray,
and ordered them home to France.
They carried with them the instruments of their revenge, the accusations
of Laval and the Jesuits against the author of their woes. Of these
accusations one alone would have sufficed. Mézy had appealed to the
people. It is true that he did so from no love of popular liberty, but
simply do make head against an opponent; yet the act alone was enough,
and he received a peremptory recall. Again Laval had triumphed. He had
made one governor and unmade two, if not three. The modest Levite, as
one of his biographers calls him in his earlier days, had become the
foremost power in Canada.
Laval had a threefold strength at court; his high birth, his reputed
sanctity, and the support of the Jesuits. This was not all, for the
permanency of his position in the colony gave him another advantage. The
governors were named for three
* La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VII. It is charitable to
ascribe this writer’s many errors to carelessness.
years, and could be recalled at any time; but the vicar apostolic owed
his appointment to the Pope, and the Pope alone could revoke it. Thus he
was beyond reach of the royal authority, and the court was in a certain
sense obliged to conciliate him. As for Mézy, a man of no rank or
influence, he could expect no mercy. Yet, though irritable and violent,
he seems to have tried conscientiously to reconcile conflicting
duties, or what he regarded as such. The governors and intendants, his
successors, received, during many years, secret instructions from the
court to watch Laval, and cautiously prevent him from assuming powers
which did not belong to him. It is likely that similar instructions had
been given to Mézy, * and that the attempt to fulfil them had aided to
embroil him with one who was probably the last man on earth with whom he
would willingly have quarrelled.
An inquiry was ordered into his conduct; but a voice more potent than
the voice of the king had called him to another tribunal. A disease, the
result perhaps of mental agitation, seized upon him and soon brought him
to extremity. As he lay gasping between life and death, fear and horror
took possession of his soul. Hell yawned before his fevered vision,
peopled with phantoms which long and lonely meditations, after the
discipline of Loyola, made real and palpable to his thought. He smelt
the fumes of infernal brimstone, and
* The royal commissioner, Gaudais, who came to Canada with
Mézy, had, as before mentioned, orders to inquire with great
secrecy into th« conduct of Laval. The intendant, Talon, who
followed immediately after, had similar instructions.
heard the bowlings of the damned. He saw the frown of the angry Judge,
and the fiery swords of avenging angels, hurling wretches like himself,
writhing in anguish and despair, into the gulf of unutterable woe. He
listened to the ghostly counsellors who besieged his bed, bowed his head
in penitence, made his peace with the church, asked pardon of Laval,
confessed to him, and received absolution at his hands; and his late
adversaries, now benign and bland, soothed him with promises of pardon,
and hopes of eternal bliss.
Before he died, he wrote to the Marquis de Tracy, newly appointed
viceroy, a letter which indicates that even in his penitence he could
not feel himself wholly in the wrong. * He also left a will in which the
pathetic and the quaint are curiously mingled. After praying his patron,
Saint Augustine, with Saint John, Saint Peter, and all the other saints,
to intercede for the pardon of his sins, he directs that his body shall
be buried in the cemetery of the poor at the hospital, as being unworthy
of more honored sepulture. He then makes various legacies of piety and
charity. Other bequests follow, one of which is to his friend Major
Angoville, to whom he leaves two hundred francs, his coat of English
cloth, his camlet mantle, a pair of new shoes, eight shirts with
sleeve buttons, his sword and belt, and a new blanket for the major’s
servant. Felix Aubert is to have fifty francs, with a gray jacket, a
small coat of gray serge, “which,” says the testator, “has been
worn for a while,” and a
* Lettre de Mézy au Marquis de Tracy, 26 Avril 1665.
pair of long white stockings. And in a codicil he farther leaves to
Angoville his best black coat, in order that he may wear mourning for
him. *
His earthly troubles closed on the night of the sixth of May. He went to
his rest among the paupers; and the priests, serenely triumphant, sang
requiems over his grave.
NOTE:--Mézy sent home charges against the bishop and the Jesuits which
seem to have existed in Charlevoix’s time, but for which, as well as
for those made by Laval, I have sought in vain.
The substance of these mutual accusations is given thus by the minister
Colbert, in a memorial addressed to the Marquis de Tracy, in 1665:
“Les Jésuites l’accusent d’avarice et de violences; et lui
qu’ils voulaient entreprendre sur l’autorité qui lui a été
commise par le Roy, en sorte que n’ayant que de leurs créatures dans
le Conseil Souverain, toutes les résolutions s’y prenaient selon
leurs sentiments.”
The papers cited are drawn partly from the Registres du Conseil
Supérieur, still preserved at Quebec, and partly from the Archives of
the Marine and Colonies. Laval’s admirer, the abbé La Tour, in his
eagerness to justify the bishop, says that the quarrel arose from a
dispute about precedence between Mézy and the intendant, and from the
ill-humor of the governor because the intendant shared the profits of
his office. The truth is, that there was no intendant in Canada during
the term of Mezy’s government. One Robert had been appointed to
the office, but he never came to the colony. The commissioner Gaudais,
during the two or three months of his stay at Quebec, took the
intendant’s place at the council-board; but harmony between Laval and
Mézy was unbroken till after his departure. Other writers say that the
dispute arose from the old question about brandy. Towards the end of
the quarrel there was some disorder from this source, but even then the
brandy question was subordinate to other subjects of strife.
* Testament du Sieur de Mézy. This will, as well as the
letter, is engrossed in the registers of the council.