* Ibid. Lettre a M de Morangi, 5 Sept., 1658.
** Délibérations de la Compagnie de la Nouvelle France.
*** Papiers d'Arqenson. Lettre à son Frère, 1659.
qualities he cannot succeed. Besides, it is absolutely necessary that he should be a man of property and of some rank, so that he will not be despised for humble birth, or suspected of coming here to make his fortune; for in that case he can do no good whatever.” *
His constant friction with the head of the church distressed the pious governor, and made his recall doubly a relief. According to a contemporary writer, Laval was the means of delivering him from the burden of government, having written to the President Lamoignon to urge his removal. ** Be this as it may, it is certain that the bishop was not sorry to be rid of him.
The Baron Dubois d’Avaugour arrived to take his place. He was an old soldier of forty years service, *** blunt, imperative, and sometimes obstinate to perverseness; but full of energy, and of a probity which even his enemies confessed. “He served a long time in Germany while you were there,” writes the minister Colbert to the Marquis de Tracy, “and you must have known his talents, as well as his bizarre and somewhat impracticable temper.” On landing, he would have no reception, being, as Father Lalemant observes, “an enemy of all ceremony.” He went, however, to see the Jesuits, and “took a morsel of food in our refectory.” **** Laval was prepared to receive
* Ibid. Lettre (à son Frère?), 4 Nov., 1660. The originals
of Argenson’s letters were destroyed in the burning of the
library of the Louvre by the Commune.
** Lachenaye, Mémoire sur le Canada.
*** Avaugour, Mémoire, 4 Août, 1663.
**** Lalemant, Journal des Jésuites, Sept., 1661.
him with all solemnity at the church; but the governor would not go. He soon set out on a tour of observation as far as Montreal, whence he returned delighted with the country, and immediately wrote to Colbert in high praise of it, observing that the St. Lawrence was the most beautiful river he had ever seen. *
Dubois d'Avaugour
From an engraving by P. Aubry, in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
It was clear from the first that, while he had a prepossession against the bishop, he wished to be on good terms with the Jesuits. He began by placing some of them on the council; but they and Laval were too closely united; and if Avaugour thought to separate them, he signally failed. A few months only had elapsed when we find it noted in Father Lalemant’s private journal that the governor had dissolved the council and appointed a new one, and that other “changes and troubles” had befallen The inevitable quarrel had broken out; it was a complex one, but the chief occasion of dispute was fortunate for the ecclesiastics, since it placed them, to a certain degree, morally in the right.