The proposal of a public election, contrary as it was to the spirit of the government, opposed to the edict establishing the council, and utterly odious to the young autocrat who ruled over France, gave
* Ordre de M. de Mézy de faire sommation a l’Evêque de
Petrée, 13 Fev., 1664. Notification du dit Ordre, mène date.
(Registre du Conseil Supérieur.)
Laval a great advantage. “I reply,” he wrote, “to the request which Monsieur the Governor makes me to consent to the interdiction of the persons named in his declaration, and proceed to the choice of other councillors or officers by an assembly of the people, that neither my conscience nor my honor, nor the respect and obedience which I owe to the will and commands of the king, nor my fidelity and affection to his service, will by any means permit me to do so.” *
Mézy was dealing with an adversary armed with redoubtable weapons. It was intimated to him that the sacraments would be refused, and the churches closed against him. This threw him into an agony of doubt and perturbation; for the emotional religion which had become a part of his nature, though overborne by gusts of passionate irritation, was still full of life within him. Tossing between the old feeling and the new, he took a course which reveals the trouble and confusion of his mind. He threw himself for counsel and comfort on the Jesuits, though he knew them to be one with Laval against him, and though, under cover of denouncing sin in general, they had lashed him sharply in their sermons. There is something pathetic in the appeal he makes them. For the glory of God and the service of the king, he had come, he says, on Laval’s solicitation, to seek salvation in Canada; and being under obligation to the bishop, who had recommended him to the king, he felt bound to show proofs of his gratitude on every occasion.
* Réponse de l'Evêque de Petrée, 16 Fev., 1664.
Yet neither gratitude to a benefactor nor the respect due to his character and person should be permitted to interfere with duty to the king, “since neither conscience nor honor permit us to neglect the requirements of our office and betray the interests of his Majesty, after receiving orders from his lips, and making oath of fidelity between his hands.” He proceeds to say that, having discovered practices of which he felt obliged to prevent the continuance, he had made a declaration expelling the offenders from office; that the bishop and all the ecclesiastics had taken this declaration as an offence; that, regardless of the king’s service, they had denounced him as a calumniator, an unjust judge, without gratitude, and perverted in conscience; and that one of the chief among them had come to warn him that the sacraments would be refused and the churches closed against him. “This,” writes the unhappy governor, “has agitated our soul with scruples; and we have none from whom to seek light save those who are our declared opponents, pronouncing judgment on us without knowledge of cause. Yet as our salvation and the duty we owe the king are the things most important to us on earth, and as we hold them to be inseparable the one from the other: and as nothing is so certain as death, and nothing so uncertain as the hour thereof; and as there is no time to inform his Majesty of what is passing and to receive his commands; and as our soul, though conscious of innocence, is always in fear,—we feel obliged, despite their opposition, to have recourse to the reverend father casuists of the House of Jesus, to tell us in conscience what we can do for the fulfilment of our duty at once to God and to the king.” *
The Jesuits gave him little comfort. Lalemant, their superior, replied by advising him to follow the directions of his confessor, a Jesuit, so far as the question concerned spiritual matters, adding that in temporal matters he had no advice to give. ** The distinction was illusory. The quarrel turned wholly on temporal matters, but it was a quarrel with a bishop. To separate in such a case the spiritual obligation from the temporal was beyond the skill of Mézy, nor would the confessor have helped him.
Perplexed and troubled as he was, he would not reinstate Bourdon and the two councillors. The people began to clamor at the interruption of justice, for which they blamed Laval, whom a recent imposition of tithes had made unpopular. Mézy thereupon issued a proclamation, in which, after mentioning his opponents as the most subtle and artful persons in Canada, he declares that, in consequence of petitions sent him from Quebec and the neighboring settlements, he had called the people to the council chamber, and by their advice had appointed the Sieur de Chartier as attorney-general in place of Bourdon.***
Bourdon replied by a violent appeal from the
* Mézy aux PP. Jésuites, Fait au Château de Quebec ce
dernier jour de Février, 1664.
** Lettre du P. H. Lalemant a Mr. le Gouverneur.
*** Declaration du Sieur de Mézy, 10 Mars, 1664.