1674-1678.
LA SALLE AND THE JESUITS.
THE ABBÉ FÉNELON.--HE ATTACKS THE GOVERNOR.--THE ENEMIES OF
LA SALLE.--AIMS OF THE JESUITS.--THEIR HOSTILITY TO LA SALLE.
A curious incident occurred soon, after the building of the fort on Lake
Ontario. A violent quarrel had taken place between Frontenac and Perrot,
the Governor of Montreal, whom, in view of his speculations in the fur-
trade, he seems to have regarded as a rival in business; but who, by his
folly and arrogance, would have justified any reasonable measure of
severity. Frontenac, however, was not reasonable. He arrested Perrot,
threw him into prison, and set up a man of his own as governor in his
place; and, as the judge of Montreal was not in his interest, he removed
him, and substituted another, on whom he could rely. Thus for a time he
had Montreal well in hand.
The priests of the Seminary, seigneurs of the island, regarded these
arbitrary proceedings with extreme uneasiness. They claimed the right of
nominating their own governor; and Perrot, though he held a commission
from the king, owed his place to their appointment. True, he had set them
at nought, and proved a veritable King Stork, yet nevertheless they
regarded his removal as an infringement of their rights.
During the quarrel with Perrot, La Salle chanced to be at Montreal, lodged
in the house of Jacques Le Ber; who, though one of the principal merchants
and most influential inhabitants of the settlement, was accustomed to sell
goods across his counter in person to white men and Indians, his wife
taking his place when he was absent. Such were the primitive manners of
the secluded little colony. Le Ber, at this time, was in the interest of
Frontenac and La Salle; though he afterwards became one of their most
determined opponents. Amid the excitement and discussion occasioned by
Perrot's arrest, La Salle declared himself an adherent of the Governor,
and warned all persons against speaking ill of him in his hearing.
The Abbé Fénelon, already mentioned as half-brother to the famous
Archbishop, had attempted to mediate between Frontenac and Perrot; and to
this end had made a journey to Quebec on the ice, in midwinter. Being of
an ardent temperament, and more courageous than prudent, he had spoken
somewhat indiscreetly, and had been very roughly treated by the stormy and
imperious Count. He returned to Montreal greatly excited, and not without
cause. It fell to his lot to preach the Easter sermon. The service was
held in the little church of the Hôtel-Dieu, which was crowded to the
porch, all the chief persons of the settlement being present. The curé of
the parish, whose name also was Perrot, said High Mass, assisted by La
Salle's brother, Cavelier, and two other priests. Then Fénelon mounted the
pulpit. Certain passages of his sermon were obviously levelled against
Frontenac. Speaking of the duties of those clothed with temporal
authority, he said that the magistrate, inspired with the spirit of
Christ, was as ready to pardon offences against himself as to punish those
against his prince; that he was full of respect for the ministers of the
altar, and never maltreated them when they attempted to reconcile enemies
and restore peace; that he never made favorites of those who flattered
him, nor under specious pretexts oppressed other persons in authority who
opposed his enterprises; that he used his power to serve his king, and not
to his own advantage; that he remained content with his salary, without
disturbing the commerce of the country, or abusing those who refused him a
share in their profits; and that he never troubled the people by
inordinate and unjust levies of men and material, using the name of his
prince as a cover to his own designs. [Footnote: Faillon, _Colonie
Française_, iii. 497, and manuscript authorities there cited. I have
examined the principal of these. Faillon himself is a priest of St.
Sulpice. Compare H. Verreau, _Les Deux Abbés de Fénelon_, chap. vii.]
La Salle sat near the door, but as the preacher proceeded, he suddenly
rose to his feet in such a manner as to attract the notice of the
congregation. As they turned their heads, he signed to the principal
persons among them, and by his angry looks and gesticulation called their
attention to the words of Fénelon. Then meeting the eye of the curé, who
sat beside the altar, he made the same signs to him, to which the curé
replied by a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Fénelon changed color,
but continued his sermon. [Footnote: _Information faicte par nous, Charles
Le Tardieu, Sieur de Tilly, et Nicolas Dupont, etc. etc., contre le Sr.
Abbé de Fénelon_, MS. Tilly and Dupont were sent by Frontenac to inquire
into the affair. Among the deponents is La Salle himself.]
This indecent procedure of La Salle filled the priests with anxiety, for
they had no doubt that the sermon would speedily be reported to Frontenac.
Accordingly they made all haste to disavow it, and their letter to that
effect was the first information which the Governor received of the
affair. He summoned the offender to Quebec, to answer a charge of
seditious language, before the Supreme Council. Fénelon appeared
accordingly, but denied the jurisdiction of the Council; claiming that as
an ecclesiastic it was his right to be tried by the Bishop. By way of
asserting this right, he seated himself in presence of his judges, and put
on his hat; and being rebuked by Frontenac, who presided, he pushed it on
farther. [Footnote: The Council always held its session with hats on. It
seems that a priest, summoned before it as a witness, was also entitled to
wear his hat, and Fénelon maintained that it had no right to require him
to appear before it in any other character.] He was placed under arrest,
and soon after required to leave Canada; but the king accompanied the
recall with a sharp word of admonition to his too strenuous lieutenant.
[Footnote: _Lettre du Roi à Frontenac_, 22 _Avril_, 1675, MS.]
This affair gives us a glimpse of the distracted state of the colony,
racked by the discord of conflicting interests and passions. There were
the quarrels of rival traders, the quarrels of priests among themselves,
of priests with the civil authorities, and of the civil authorities among
themselves. Prominent, if not paramount, among the occasions of strife,
were the schemes of Cavelier de La Salle. All the traders not interested
with him leagued together to oppose him; and this with an acrimony easily
understood, when it is remembered that they depended for subsistence on
the fur-trade, while La Salle had engrossed a great part of it, and
threatened to engross far more. Duchesneau, Intendant of the colony, and
in that capacity almost as a matter of course on ill terms with the
Governor, was joined with this party of opposition, with whom he evidently
had commercial interests in common. La Chesnaye, Le Moyne, and ultimately
Le Ber, besides various others of more or less influence, were in the
league against La Salle. Among them was Louis Joliet, whom his partisans
put forward as a rival discoverer, and a foil to La Salle. Joliet, it will
be remembered, had applied for a grant of land in the countries he had
discovered, and had been refused. La Salle soon after made a similar
application, and with a different result, as will presently appear. His
adherents continually depreciated the merits of Joliet, and even expressed
doubt of the reality, or at least the extent, of his discoveries.
But there was another element of opposition to La Salle, less noisy, but
not less formidable, and this arose from the Jesuits. Frontenac hated
them; and they, under befitting forms of duty and courtesy, paid him back
in the same coin. Having no love for the Governor, they would naturally
have little for his partisan and _protégé_; but their opposition had
another and a deeper root, for the plans of the daring young schemer
jarred with their own.
We have seen the Canadian Jesuits in the early apostolic days of their
mission, when the flame of their zeal, fed by an ardent hope, burned
bright and high. This hope was doomed to disappointment. Their avowed
purpose of building another Paraguay on the borders of the Great Lakes
[Footnote: This purpose is several times indicated in the _Relations_. For
an instance, see "Jesuits in North America," 153.] was never accomplished,
and their missions and their converts were swept away in an avalanche of
ruin. Still, they would not despair. From the Lakes they turned their eyes
to the Valley of the Mississippi, in the hope to see it one day the seat
of their new empire of the Faith. But what did this new Paraguay mean? It
meant a little nation of converted and domesticated savages, docile as
children, under the paternal and absolute rule of Jesuit fathers, and
trained by them in industrial pursuits, the results of which were to
inure, not to the profit of the producers, but to the building of
churches, the founding of colleges, the establishment of warehouses and
magazines, and the construction of works of defence,--all controlled by
Jesuits, and forming a part of the vast possessions of the Order. Such was
the old Paraguay, [Footnote: Compare Charlevoix, _Histoire de Paraguay_,
with Robertson, _Letters on Paraguay_.] and such, we may suppose, would
have been the new, had the plans of those who designed it been realized.
I have said that since the middle of the century the religious exaltation
of the early missions had sensibly declined. In the nature of things, that
grand enthusiasm was too intense and fervent to be long sustained. But the
vital force of Jesuitism had suffered no diminution. That marvellous
_esprit de corps_, that extinction of self, and absorption of the
individual in the Order, which has marked the Jesuits from their first
existence as a body, was no whit changed or lessened; a principle, which,
though different, was no less strong than the self-devoted patriotism of
Sparta or the early Roman Republic.
The Jesuits were no longer supreme in Canada, or, in other words, Canada
was no longer simply a mission. It had become a colony. Temporal interests
and the civil power were constantly gaining ground; and the disciples of
Loyola felt that relatively, if not absolutely, they were losing it. They
struggled vigorously to maintain the ascendancy of their Order; or, as
they would have expressed it, the ascendancy of religion: but in the older
and more settled parts of the colony it was clear that the day of their
undivided rule was past. Therefore, they looked with redoubled solicitude
to their missions in the West. They had been among its first explorers;
and they hoped that here the Catholic Faith, as represented by Jesuits,
might reign with undisputed sway. In Paraguay, it was their constant aim
to exclude white men from their missions. It was the same in North
America. They dreaded fur-traders, partly because they interfered with
their teachings and perverted their converts, and partly for other
reasons. But La Salle was a fur-trader, and far worse than a fur-trader,--
he aimed at occupation, fortification, settlement. The scope and vigor of
his enterprises, and the powerful influence that aided them made him a
stumbling-block in their path. As they would have put the case, it was the
spirit of this world opposed to the spirit of religion; but I may perhaps
be pardoned if I am constrained to think that the spirit which inspired
these fathers was not uniformly celestial, notwithstanding the virtues
which sometimes illustrated it.
Frontenac, in his letters to the Court, is continually begging that more
Récollet friars may be sent to Canada. [Footnote: The Récollets, ejected
from Canada on the irruption of the English in 1629 (see "Pioneers of
France in the New World"), had not been allowed to return until 1669, when
their missions were begun anew.] Not that he had any peculiar fondness for
ecclesiastics of any kind, regular or secular, white, black, or gray; but
he wanted the Récollets to oppose to the Jesuits. He had no fear of these
mendicant disciples of St. Francis. Far less able and less ambitious than
the Jesuits, he knew that he could manage them, because they would need
his support against their formidable rivals. La Salle, too, wanted more
Récollets, and for the same reason; but in one point he differed from his
patron. He was a man, not only of regulated life, but of strong religious
feeling, and, bating his violent prepossession against the Jesuits, he
respected the Church and its ministers, as his letters and his life
attest. Thus, in replying to a charge of undue severity towards some of
his followers, he alleges in his justification the profane language of the
men in question, and adds, "I am a Christian; I will have no blasphemers
in my camp." [Footnote: Letter of La Salle in the hands of M. Margry.]