Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV | Page 8

of the scene. "I never," he wrote, "saw any thing more superb than the
position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future capital
of a great empire." [Footnote: _Frontenac au Ministre_, 2 _Nov._,
1672.]
That Quebec was to become the capital of a great empire there seemed
in truth good reason to believe. The young king and his minister
Colbert had labored in earnest to build up a new France in the west. For

years past, ship-loads of emigrants had landed every summer on the
strand beneath the rock. All was life and action, and the air was full of
promise. The royal agent Talon had written to his master: "This part of
the French monarchy is destined to a grand future. All that I see around
me points to it; and the colonies of foreign nations, so long settled on
the seaboard, are trembling with fright in view of what his Majesty has
accomplished here within the last seven years. The measures we have
taken to confine them within narrow limits, and the prior claim we have
established against them by formal acts of possession, do not permit
them to extend themselves except at peril of having war declared
against them as usurpers; and this, in fact, is what they seem greatly to
fear." [Footnote: _Talon au Ministre_, 2 Nov., 1671.]
Frontenac shared the spirit of the hour. His first step was to survey his
government. He talked with traders, colonists, and officials; visited
seigniories, farms, fishing-stations, and all the infant industries that
Talon had galvanized into life; examined the new ship on the stocks,
admired the structure of the new brewery, went to Three Rivers to see
the iron mines, and then, having acquired a tolerably exact idea of his
charge, returned to Quebec. He was well pleased with what he saw, but
not with the ways and means of Canadian travel; for he thought it
strangely unbecoming that a lieutenant-general of the king should be
forced to crouch on a sheet of bark, at the bottom of a birch canoe,
scarcely daring to move his head to the right or left lest he should
disturb the balance of the fragile vessel.
At Quebec he convoked the council, made them a speech, and
administered the oath of allegiance. [Footnote: _Registre du Conseil
Souverain._] This did not satisfy him. He resolved that all Quebec
should take the oath together. It was little but a pretext. Like many of
his station, Frontenac was not in full sympathy with the centralizing
movement of the time, which tended to level ancient rights, privileges,
and prescriptions under the ponderous roller of the monarchical
administration. He looked back with regret to the day when the three
orders of the state, clergy, nobles, and commons, had a place and a
power in the direction of national affairs. The three orders still
subsisted, in form, if not in substance, in some of the provinces of
France; and Frontenac conceived the idea of reproducing them in
Canada. Not only did he cherish the tradition of faded liberties, but he

loved pomp and circumstance, above all, when he was himself the
central figure in it; and the thought of a royal governor of Languedoc or
Brittany, presiding over the estates of his province, appears to have
fired him with emulation.
He had no difficulty in forming his order of the clergy. The Jesuits and
the seminary priests supplied material even more abundant than he
wished. For the order of the nobles, he found three or four
gentilshommes at Quebec, and these he reinforced with a number of
officers. The third estate consisted of the merchants and citizens; and
he formed the members of the council and the magistrates into another
distinct body, though, properly speaking, they belonged to the third
estate, of which by nature and prescription they were the head. The
Jesuits, glad no doubt to lay him under some slight obligation, lent him
their church for the ceremony that he meditated, and aided in
decorating it for the occasion. Here, on the twenty-third of October,
1672, the three estates of Canada were convoked, with as much pomp
and splendor as circumstances would permit. Then Frontenac, with the
ease of a man of the world and the loftiness of a _grand seigneur_,
delivered himself of the harangue he had prepared. He wrote
exceedingly well; he is said also to have excelled as an orator; certainly
he was never averse to the tones of his own eloquence. His speech was
addressed to a double audience: the throng that filled the church, and
the king and the minister three thousand miles away. He told his
hearers that he had called the assembly, not because he doubted their
loyalty, but in order to afford them the delight