He sat back, and eyed me triumphantly.
"Surely we have that supremacy now!"
He winked at me again, and drew from a drawer in the table a heavy book such as accounts are kept in.
"Jean," he said, "I am about to disclose to you a secret—which is not a secret, because every trader who works for himself is acquainted with it."
He flipped through the pages.
"Here is the account for this post for the year just ended. We handled a total of 204 'green' deerskins and 23 packets of various kinds of furs. On these we cleared a profit of 2,382 livres, 3 sols, 9 deniers,[[1]] which would not come anywhere near covering the operating expenses of the post. You will find the same story at every post from here to the Mississippi."
[[1]] About $476.
"Why, monsieur?"
"These sacré English! First they turn the Iroquois against us—and in that success, I am bound to say, they have been ably assisted by ourselves;[[2]] then they build the post of Fort Oswego, at the foot of the Onondaga's River on Irondequoit Bay;[[3]] then they send out a swarm of young men to trap and shoot in the Indian country; then they pass this accursed law that forbids us obtaining Indian goods from the New York merchants! Peste, what a people! They have us in a noose."
[[2]] Joncaire was one of the few Frenchmen who had the confidence of the Iroquois. He had been captured as a young man by the Senecas and adopted into that tribe.