THE BROAD, BLACK GATEWAY OF A LIE.
The Count de la Galissoniere was seated in his cabinet a week after the arrival of La Corriveau on her fatal errand. It was a plain, comfortable apartment he sat in, hung with arras, and adorned with maps and pictures. It was there he held his daily sittings for the ordinary despatch of business with a few such councillors as the occasion required to be present.
The table was loaded with letters, memorandums, and bundles of papers tied up in official style. Despatches of royal ministers, bearing the broad seal of France. Reports from officers of posts far and near in New France lay mingled together with silvery strips of the inner bark of the birch, painted with hieroglyphics, giving accounts of war parties on the eastern frontier and in the far west, signed by the totems of Indian chiefs in alliance with France.
There was a newly-arrived parcel of letters from the bold, enterprising Sieur de Verendrye, who was exploring the distant waters of the Saskatchewan and the land of the Blackfeet, and many a missive from missionaries, giving account of wild regions which remain yet almost a terra incognita to the government which rules over them.
At the Governor's elbow sat his friend Bishop Pontbriand with a secretary immersed in papers. In front of him was the Intendant with Varin, Penisault, and D'Estebe. On one side of the table, La Corne St. Luc was examining some Indian despatches with Rigaud de Vaudreuil; Claude Beauharnais and the venerable Abbe Piquet overlooking with deep interest the rude pictorial despatches in the hands of La Corne. Two gentlemen of the law, in furred gowns and bands, stood waiting at one end of the room, with books under their arms and budgets of papers in their hands ready to argue before the Council some knotty point of controversy arising out of the concession of certain fiefs and jurisdictions granted under the feudal laws of the Colony.
The Intendant, although personally at variance with several of the gentlemen sitting at the council table, did not let that fact be visible on his countenance, nor allow it to interfere with the despatch of public business.
The Intendant was gay and easy to-day, as was his wont, wholly unsuspecting the foul treason that was plotting by the woman he admired against the woman he loved. His opinions were sometimes loftily expressed, but always courteously as well as firmly.
Bigot never drooped a feather in face of his enemies, public or private, but laughed and jested with all at table in the exuberance of a spirit which cared for no one, and only reined itself in when it was politic to flatter his patrons and patronesses at Versailles.
The business of the Council had begun. The mass of papers which lay at the left hand of the Governor were opened and read seriatim by his secretary, and debated, referred, decided upon, or judgment postponed, as the case seemed best to the Council.
The Count was a man of method and despatch, clear-headed and singularly free from prejudice, ambiguity, or hesitation. He was honest and frank in council, as he was gallant on the quarter-deck.
The Intendant was not a whit behind him in point of ability and knowledge of the political affairs of the colony, and surpassed him in influence at the court of Louis XV., but less frank, for he had much to conceal, and kept authority in his own hands as far as he was able.
Disliking each other profoundly from the total divergence of their characters, opinions, and habits, the Governor and Intendant still met courteously at the council-table, and not without a certain respect for the rare talents which each recognized in the other.
Many of the papers lying before them were on subjects relating to the internal administration of the Colony,--petitions of the people suffering from the exactions of the commissaries of the army, remonstrances against the late decrees of the Intendant, and arrets of the high court of justice confirming the right of the Grand Company to exercise certain new monopolies of trade.
The discussions were earnest, and sometimes warm, on these important questions. La Corne St. Luc assailed the new regulations of the Intendant in no measured terms of denunciation, in which he was supported by Rigaud de Vaudreuil and the Chevalier de Beauharnais.
But Bigot, without condescending to the trouble of defending the ordinances on any sound principle of public policy, which he knew to be useless and impossible with the clever men sitting at the table, contented himself with a cold smile at the honest warmth of La Corne St. Luc, and simply bade his secretary read the orders and despatches from Versailles, in the name of the royal ministers, and approved of by the King himself in a Lit de Justice which had justified every act done by him in favor of the Grand Company.
The Governor, trammelled on all sides by the powers conferred upon the Intendant, felt unable to exercise the authority he needed to vindicate the cause of right and justice in the colony. His own instructions confirmed the pretensions of the Intendant, and of the Grand Company. The utmost he could do in behalf of the true interests of the people and of the King, as opposed to the herd of greedy courtiers and selfish beauties who surrounded him, was to soften the deadening blows they dealt upon the trade and resources of the Colony.
A decree authorizing the issue of an unlimited quantity of paper bills, the predecessors of the assignats of the mother country, was strongly advocated by Bigot, who supported his views with a degree of financial sophistry which showed that he had effectively mastered the science of delusion and fraud of which Law had been the great teacher in France, and the Mississippi scheme, the prototype of the Grand Company, the great exemplar.