Chapter 6. The Noblesse And The People

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_ CHAPTER VI. 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-Salieres 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-Salieres 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.

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-a-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 Blasphemateurs_, 1666.]

[Footnote 9: _Jugements et Deliberations du Conseil Superieur_.]

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 chateau of the Governor.

[Footnote 10: The declivity above its site is still known as Palace Hill.]

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. _

Read next: Chapter 7. Frontenac And La Salle

Read previous: Chapter 5. Royal Government

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