_Fontainebleau.--Louis XIV.--Colbert.--The Company of the West.--Evil
Omens.--Action op the King.--Tracy, Coürcelle, And Talon.--The Regiment
Of Carignan-Sallères.--Tracy at Quebec.--Miracles.--A Holy War._
|Leave Canada behind; cross the sea, and stand, on an evening in June,
by the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. Beyond the broad gardens,
above the long ranges of moonlit trees, rise the walls and pinnacles of
the vast chateau; a shrine of history, the gorgeous monument of lines of
vanished kings, haunted with memories of Capet, Valois, and Bourbon.
There was little thought of the past at Fontainebleau in June, 1661. The
present was too dazzling and too intoxicating; the future, too radiant
with hope and promise. It was the morning of a new reign; the sun of
Louis XIV. was rising in splendor, and the rank and beauty of France
were gathered to pay it homage. A youthful court, a youthful king;
a pomp and magnificence such as Europe had never seen; a delirium
of ambition, pleasure, and love,--wrought in many a young heart an
enchantment destined to be cruelly broken. Even old courtiers felt the
fascination of the scene, and tell us of the music at evening by the
borders of the lake; of the gay groups that strolled under the shadowing
trees, floated in gilded barges on the still water, or moved slowly
in open carriages around its borders. Here was Anne of Austria, the
king’s mother, and Marie Thérèse, his tender and jealous queen; his
brother, the Duke of Orleans, with his bride of sixteen, Henriette of
England; and his favorite, that vicious butterfly of the court, the
Count de Guiche. Here, too, were the humbled chiefs of the civil war,
Beaufort and Condé, obsequious before their triumphant master. Louis
XIV., the centre of all eyes, in the flush of health and vigor, and the
pride of new-fledged royalty, stood, as he still stands on the canvas
of Philippe de Champagne, attired in a splendor which would have been
effeminate but for the stately port of the youth who wore it. *
Fortune had been strangely bountiful to him. The nations of Europe,
exhausted by wars and dissensions, looked upon him with respect and
fear. Among weak and weary neighbors, he alone was strong. The death
of Mazarin had released him from tutelage; feudalism in the person of
Condé
* On the visit of the court at Fontainebleau in the summer
of 1661, see Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, Mémoires de
Madame de La Fayette, Mémoires de l’Abbé de Choisy, and
Walckenaer, Mémoires sur Madame de Sevigné.
was abject before him; he had reduced his parliaments to submission;
and, in the arrest of the ambitious prodigal Fouquet, he was preparing a
crashing blow to the financial corruption which had devoured France.
Nature had formed him to act the part of king. Even his critics and
enemies praise the grace and majesty of his presence, and he impressed
his courtiers with an admiration which seems to have been to an
astonishing degree genuine. He carried airs of royalty even into his
pleasures; and, while his example corrupted all France, he proceeded to
the apartments of Montespan or Fontanges with the majestic gravity of
Olympian Jove. He was a devout observer of the forms of religion; and,
as the buoyancy of youth passed away, his zeal was stimulated by a
profound fear of the devil. Mazarin had reared him in ignorance; but his
faculties were excellent in their way, and, in a private station,
would have made him an efficient man of business. The vivacity of
his passions, and his inordinate love of pleasure, were joined to a
persistent will and a rare power of labor. The vigorous mediocrity of
his understanding delighted in grappling with details. His astonished
courtiers saw him take on himself the burden of administration, and work
at it without relenting for more than half a century. Great as was his
energy, his pride was far greater. As king by divine right, he felt
himself raised immeasurably above the highest of his subjects; but,
while vindicating with unparalleled haughtiness his claims to supreme
authority, he was, at the outset, filled with a sense of the duties of
his high place, and fired by an ambition to make his reign beneficent to
France as well as glorious to himself.
Above all rulers of modern times, he was the embodiment of the
monarchical idea. The famous words ascribed to him, “I am the
state,” were probably never uttered; but they perfectly express his
spirit. “It is God’s will,” he wrote in 1666, “that whoever is
born a subject should not reason, but obey;” * and those around him
were of his mind. “The state is in the king,” said Bossuet, the
great mouthpiece of monarchy; “the will of the people is merged in
his will. Oh kings, put forth your power boldly, for it is divine and
salutary to human kind.” **
For a few brief years, his reign was indeed salutary to France. His
judgment of men, when not obscured by his pride and his passion for
flattery, was good; and he had at his service the generals and statesmen
formed in the freer and bolder epoch that had ended with his accession.
Among them was Jean Baptiste Colbert, formerly the intendant of
Mazarin’s household, a man whose energies matched his talents, and who
had preserved his rectitude in the midst of corruption. It was a hard
task that Colbert imposed on his proud and violent nature to serve the
imperious king, morbidly jealous of his authority, and resolved to
* Œuvres de Louis XIV., II. 283.
** Bossuet, Politique tirée de l’Ecriture sainte, 70.
(1843).
accept no initiative but his own. He must counsel while seeming to
receive counsel, and lead while seeming to follow. The new minister bent
himself to the task, and the nation reaped the profit. A vast system
of reform was set in action amid the outcries of nobles, financiers,
churchmen, and all who profited by abuses. The methods of this reform
were trenchant and sometimes violent, and its principles were not always
in accord with those of modern economic science; but the good that
resulted was incalculable. The burdens of the laboring classes were
lightened, the public revenues increased, and the wholesale plunder of
the public money arrested with a strong hand. Laws were reformed and
codified; feudal tyranny, which still subsisted in many quarters,
was repressed; agriculture and productive industry of all kinds were
encouraged, roads and canals opened; trade stimulated, a commercial
marine created, and a powerful navy formed as if by magic. *
It is in his commercial, industrial, and colonial policy that the
profound defects of the great minister’s system are most apparent.
It was a system of authority, monopoly, and exclusion, in which the
government, and not the individual, acted always the foremost part.
Upright, incorruptible, ardent for the public good, inflexible,
arrogant, and domineering, he sought to drive France into paths of
prosperity, and create colonies by the
* On Colbert, see Clement, Histoire de Colbert. Clément,
Lettres et Mémoires de Colbert; Chéruel, Administration
monarchique en France, II chap, vi Henri Martin, Histoire de
France, XIII., etc.
energy of an imperial will. He feared, and with reason, that the want of
enterprise and capital among the merchants would prevent the broad and
immediate results at which he aimed; and, to secure these results,
he established a series of great trading corporations, in which the
principles of privilege and exclusion were pushed to their utmost
limits. Prominent among them was the Company of the West. The king
signed the edict creating it on the 24th of May, 1664. Any person in
the kingdom or out of it might become a partner by subscribing, within
a certain time, not less than three thousand francs. France was a mere
patch on the map, compared to the vast domains of the new association.
Western Africa from Cape Verd to the Cape of Good Hope, South America
between the Amazon and the Orinoco, Cayenne, the Antilles, and all New
France, from Hudson’s Bay to Virginia and Florida were bestowed on it
for ever, to be held of the Crown on the simple condition of faith
and homage. As, according to the edict, the glory of God was the chief
object in view, the company was required to supply its possessions with
a sufficient number of priests, and diligently to exclude all teachers
of false doctrine. It was empowered to build forts and warships, cast
cannon, wage war, make peace, establish courts, appoint judges, and
otherwise to act as sovereign within its own domains. A monopoly of
trade was granted it for forty years. * Sugar from the Antilles, and
furs from Canada, were the chief source of expected profit; and Africa
was to supply the slaves to raise the sugar. Scarcely was the grand
machine set in motion, when its directors betrayed a narrowness and
blindness of policy which boded the enterprise no good. Canada was a
chief sufferer. Once more, bound hand and foot, she was handed over to
a selfish league of merchants; monopoly in trade, monopoly in religion,
monopoly in government. Nobody but the company had a right to bring
her the necessaries of life; and nobody but the company had a right to
exercise the traffic which alone could give her the means of paying
for these necessaries. Moreover, the supplies which it brought were
insufficient, and the prices which it demanded were exorbitant. It was
throttling its wretched victim. The Canadian merchants remonstrated.
** It was clear that, if the colony was to live, the system must be
changed; and a change was accordingly ordered. The company gave up its
monopoly of the fur trade, but reserved the right to levy a duty of
one-fourth of the beaver-skins, and one-tenth of the moose-skins: and it
also reserved the entire trade of Tadoussac; that is to say, the trade
of all the tribes between the lower St. Lawrence and Hudson’s Bay.
It retained besides the exclusive right of transporting furs in its own
ships, thus controlling the commerce of Canada, and discouraging, or
rather extinguishing, the enterprise of Canadian merchants. On its part,
it was required to pay governors, judges, and all the colonial officials
out of the duties which it levied. ****
Yet the king had the prosperity of Canada at heart; and he proceeded to
show his interest in her after a manner hardly consistent with his late
action in handing her over to a mercenary guardian. In fact, he acted as
if she had still remained under his paternal care. He had just conferred
the right of naming a governor and intendant upon the new company; but
he now assumed it himself, the company, with a just sense of its own
unfitness, readily consenting to this suspension of one of its most
important privileges. Daniel de Rémy, Sieur de Courcelle, was
appointed governor, and Jean Baptiste Talon intendant. (v) The nature of
this duplicate government will appear hereafter. But, before appointing
rulers for Canada, the king had appointed a representative of the Crown
for all his American domains. The Maréchal d’Estrades had for some
time held the title of viceroy for America; and, as he could not fulfil
the duties of that office, being at the time ambassador in Holland,
the Marquis de Tracy was sent in his place, with the title of
lieutenant-general.----
* Arrêt du Conseil du Roy qui accorde a la Compagnie le
quart des castors, le dixième des orignaux et la traite de
Tadoussac: Instruction a Monseigneur de Tracy et a Messieurs
le Gouverneur et L'Intendant.
This company prospered as little as the rest of Colbert’s
trading companies. Within ten years it lost 3,523,000
livres, besides blighting the colonies placed under its
control. Recherches sur les Finances, cited by Clement,
Histoire de Colbert.
** Commission de Lieutenant Général en Canada, etc., pour
M. de Courcelle, 23 Mais, 1665; Commission d’intendant de la
Justice, Police, et Finances en Canada, etc., pour M. Talon,
23 Mars, 1665.
*** Commission de Lieutenant Général de l’Amérique
Méridionale et Septentrionale pour M. Prou Conseil du Roy
qui accorde a la Compagnie le quart des castors, le dixième
des orignaux et la traite de Tadoussac: Instruction a
Monseigneur de Tracy et a Messieurs le Gouverneur et
L'Intendant.
This company prospered as little as the rest of Colbert’s
trading companies. Within ten years it lost 3,523,000
livres, besides blighting the colonies placed under its
control. Recherches sur les Finances, cited by Clement,
Histoire de Colbert.
**** Commission de Lieutenant Général en Canada, etc., pour
M. de Courcelle, 23 Mais, 1665; Commission d’intendant de la
Justice, Police, et Finances en Canada, etc., pour M. Talon,
23 Mars, 1665.
(v) Commission de Lieutenant Général de l’Amérique
Méridionale et Septentrionale pour M. Prouville de Tracy, 19
Nov., 1663.
Canada at this time was an object of very considerable attention at
court, and especially in what was known as the _parti dévot_. The
_Relations_ of the Jesuits, appealing equally to the spirit of religion
and the spirit of romantic adventure, had, for more than a quarter of a
century, been the favorite reading of the devout, and the visit of
Laval at court had greatly stimulated the interest they had kindled.
The letters of Argenson, and especially of Avaugour, had shown the
vast political possibilities of the young colony, and opened a vista of
future glories alike for church and for king.
So, when Tracy set sail he found no lack of followers. A throng of young
nobles embarked with him, eager to explore the marvels and mysteries
of the western world. The king gave him two hundred soldiers of the
regiment of Carignan-Salières, and promised that a thousand more should
follow. After spending more than a year in the West Indies, where, as
Mother Mary of the Incarnation expresses it, “he performed marvels
and reduced everybody to obedience,” he at length sailed up the St.
Lawrence, and, on the thirtieth of June, 1665, anchored in the basin
of Quebec. The broad, white standard, blazoned with the arms of France,
proclaimed the representative of royalty; and Point Levi and Cape
Diamond and the distant Cape Tourmente roared back the sound of the
saluting cannon. All Quebec was on the ramparts or at the landing-place,
and all eyes were strained at the two vessels as they slowly emptied
their crowded decks into the boats alongside. The boats at length drew
near, and the lieutenant-general and his suite landed on the quay with a
pomp such as Quebec had never seen before.
Tracy was a veteran of sixty-two, portly and tall, “one of the largest
men I ever saw,” writes Mother Mary; but he was sallow with disease,
for fever had seized him, and it had fared ill with him on the long
voyage. The Chevalier de Chaumont walked at his side, and young nobles
surrounded him, gorgeous in lace and ribbons and majestic in leonine
wigs. Twenty-four guards in the king’s livery led the way, followed by
four pages and six valets; * and thus, while the Frenchmen shouted and
the Indians stared, the august procession threaded the streets of the
Lower Town, and climbed the steep pathway that scaled the cliffs above.
Breathing hard, they reached the top, passed on the left the dilapidated
walls of the fort and the shed of mingled wood and masonry which then
bore the name of the Castle of St. Louis; passed on the right the old
house of Couillard and the site of Laval’s new seminary, and soon
reached the square betwixt the Jesuit college and the cathedral. The
bells were ringing in a phrensy of welcome. Laval in pontificals,
surrounded by priests and Jesuits, stood waiting to receive the deputy
of the king; and, as he greeted Tracy and offered him the holy water,
he looked with anxious curiosity to see what manner of man he was. The
signs were auspicious. The deportment of the lieutenant-general
* Juchereau says that this was his constant attendance when
he went abroad.
left nothing to desire. A _prie-dieu_ had been placed for him. He
declined it. They offered him a cushion, but he would not have it; and,
fevered as he was, he knelt on the bare pavement with a devotion that
edified every beholder. _Te Deum_ was sung, and a day of rejoicing
followed.
There was good cause. Canada, it was plain, was not to be wholly
abandoned to a trading company. Louis XIV. was resolved that a new
France should be added to the old. Soldiers, settlers, horses, sheep,
cattle, young women for wives, were all sent out in abundance by his
paternal benignity. Before the season was over, about two thousand
persons had landed at Quebec at the royal charge. “At length,”
writes Mother Juchereau, “our joy was completed by the arrival of two
vessels with Monsieur de Courcelle, our governor; Monsieur Talon, our
intendant, and the last companies of the regiment of Carignan.”
More state and splendor more young nobles, more guards and valets: for
Courcelle, too, says the same chronicler, “had a superb train; and
Monsieur Talon, who naturally loves glory, forgot nothing which could do
honor to the king.” Thus a sunbeam from the court fell for a moment on
the rock of Quebec. Yet all was not sunshine; for the voyage had been
a tedious one, and disease had broken out in the ships. That which bore
Talon had been a hundred and seventeen days at sea, * and others were
hardly more fortunate. The hospital was crowded with the sick; so, too,
were the church and the neighboring houses;
* Talon au ministre, 4 Oct., 1665.
and the nuns were so spent with their labors that seven of them were
brought to the point of death. The priests were busied in converting
the Huguenots, a number of whom were detected among the soldiers and
emigrants. One of them proved refractory, declaring with oaths that he
would never renounce his faith. Falling dangerously ill, he was carried
to the hospital, where Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin bethought her
of a plan of conversion. She ground to powder a small piece of a bone
of Father Brebeuf, the Jesuit martyr, and secretly mixed the sacred dust
with the patient’s gruel; whereupon, says Mother Juchereau, “this
intractable man forthwith became gentle as an angel, begged to be
instructed, embraced the faith, and abjured his errors publicly with an
admirable fervor.” *
Two or three years before, the church of Quebec had received as a gift
from the Pope, the bodies or bones of two saints; Saint Flavian
and Saint Félicité. They were enclosed in four large coffers or
reliquaries, and a grand procession was now ordered in their honor.
Tracy, Courcelle, Talon, and the agent of the company, bore the canopy
of the Host. Then came the four coffers on four decorated litters,
carried by the principal ecclesiastics. Laval followed in pontificals.
Forty-seven priests, and a long file of officers, nobles, soldiers, and
inhabitants, followed the precious relics amid the sound of music and
the roar of cannon. **
* Le Mercier tells the same story in the Relation of 1665.
** Compare Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre, 16 Oct., 1660,
with La Tour Vie de Laval, chap. x.
“It is a ravishing thing,” says Mother Mary, “to see how marvellously
exact is Monsieur de Tracy, at all these holy ceremonies, where he is
always the first to come, for he would not lose a single moment of them.
He has been seen in church for six hours together, without once going
out.” But while the lieutenant-general thus edified the colony,
he betrayed no lack of qualities equally needful in his position. In
Canada, as in the West Indies, he showed both vigor and conduct. First
of all, he had been ordered to subdue or destroy the Iroquois, and the
regiment of Carignan-Salières was the weapon placed in his hands for
this end, Four companies of this corps had arrived early in the season,
four more came with Tracy, more yet with Salières, their colonel, and
now the number was complete. As with slouched hat and plume, bandoleer,
and shouldered firelock, these bronzed veterans of the Turkish wars
marched at the tap of drum through the narrow street, or mounted the
rugged way that led up to the fort, the inhabitants gazed with a sense
of profound relief. Tame Indians from the neighboring missions, wild
Indians from the woods, stared in silent wonder at their new defenders.
Their numbers, their discipline, their uniform, and their martial
bearing, filled the savage beholders with admiration.
Carignan-Salières was the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to
America by the French government. It was raised in Savoy by the Prince
of Carignan in 1644, but was soon employed in the service of France;
where, in 1652, it took a conspicuous part, on the side of the king, in
the battle with Condé and the Fronde at the Porte St. Antoine. After
the peace of the Pyrenees, the Prince of Carignan, unable to support
the regiment, gave it to the king, and it was, for the first time,
incorporated into the French armies. In 1664, it distinguished itself,
as part of the allied force of France, in the Austrian war against
the Turks. In the next year it was ordered to America, along with the
fragment of a regiment formed of Germans, the whole being placed under
the command of Colonel de Salières. Hence its double name. *
Fifteen heretics were discovered in its ranks, and quickly converted.
** Then the new crusade was preached; the crusade against the Iroquois,
enemies of God and tools of the devil. The soldiers and the people were
filled with a zeal half warlike and half religious. “They are made to
understand,” writes Mother Mary, “that this is a holy war, all
for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. The fathers are doing
wonders in inspiring them with true sentiments of piety and
* For a long notice of the regiment of Carignan-Salières
(Lorraine), see Susane, Ancienne Infanterie Française V 236.
The portion of it which returned to France from Canada
formed a nucleus for the reconstruction of the regiment,
which, under the name of the regiment of Lorraine, did not
cease to exist as a separate organization till 1794. When it
came to Canada it consisted, says Susane, of about a
thousand men, besides about two hundred of the other
regiment incorporated with it. Compare Mémoire du Roy pour
servir d’instruction au Sieur Talon, which corresponds very
nearly with Susane’s statement.
** Besides these, there was Berthier, a captain, “Voilà”
writes Talon to the king, “le 16me converti; ainsi votre
Majesté moissonne déjà à pleines mains de la gloire pour
Dieu, et pour elle bien de la renommée dans toute l’étendue
de la Chrétienté” Lettre au 7 Oct., 1665.
devotion. Fully five hundred soldiers have taken the scapulary of the
Holy Virgin. It is we (_the Ursulines_), who make them; it is a real
pleasure to do such work;” and she proceeds to relate a “_beau
miracle_” by which God made known his satisfaction at the fervor of
his military servants.
The secular motives for the war were in themselves strong enough; for
the growth of the colony absolutely demanded the cessation of Iroquois
raids, and the French had begun to learn the lesson that, in the case
of hostile Indians, no good can come of attempts to conciliate, unless
respect is first imposed by a sufficient castigation. It is true that
the writers of the time paint Iroquois hostilities in their worst
colors. In the innumerable letters which Mother Mary of the Incarnation
sent home every autumn, by the returning ships, she spared no means to
gain the sympathy and aid of the devout; and, with similar motives, the
Jesuits in their printed _Relations_, took care to extenuate nothing of
the miseries which the pious colony endured. Avaugour, too, in urging
the sending out of a strong force to fortify and hold the country, had
advised that, in order to furnish a pretext and disarm the jealousy of
the English and Dutch, exaggerated accounts should be given of danger
from the side of the savage confederates. Yet, with every allowance,
these dangers and sufferings were sufficiently great.
The three upper nations of the Iroquois were comparatively pacific;
but the two lower nations, the Mohawks and Oneidas, were persistently
hostile; making inroads into the colony by way of Lake Champlain and
the Richelieu, murdering and scalping, and then vanishing like ghosts.
Tracy’s first step was to send a strong detachment to the Richelieu to
build a picket fort below the rapids of Chambly, which take their
name from that of the officer in command. An officer named Sorel soon
afterwards built a second fort on the site of the abandoned palisade
work built by Montmagny, at the mouth of the river, where the town of
Sorel now stands; and Salières, colonel of the regiment, added a third
fort, two or three leagues above Chambly. * These forts could not wholly
bar the passage against the nimble and wily warriors who might pass them
in the night, shouldering their canoes through the woods. A blow, direct
and hard, was needed, and Tracy prepared to strike it.
Late in the season an embassy from the three upper nations--the
Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas--arrived at Quebec, led by Garacontié,
a famous chief whom the Jesuits had won over, and who proved ever after
a staunch friend of the French. They brought back the brave Charles Le
Moyne of Montreal, whom they had captured some three months before,
and now restored as a peace-offering, taking credit to themselves that
“not even one of his nails had been torn out, nor any part of his body
burnt.” ** Garacontié made a
* See the map in the Relation of 1665. The accompanying
text of the Relation is incorrect.
** Explanation of the eleven Presents of the Iroquois
Ambassadors. N. Y Colonial Docs.. IX. 37
peace speech, which, as rendered by the Jesuits, was an admirable
specimen of Iroquois eloquence; but, while joining hands with him and
his companions, the French still urged on their preparations to chastise
the contumacious Mohawks.