Laval had a threefold strength at court; his high birth, his reputed sanctity, and the support of the Jesuits. This was not all, for the permanency of his position in the colony gave him another advantage. The governors were named for three
* La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VII. It is charitable to
ascribe this writer’s many errors to carelessness.
years, and could be recalled at any time; but the vicar apostolic owed his appointment to the Pope, and the Pope alone could revoke it. Thus he was beyond reach of the royal authority, and the court was in a certain sense obliged to conciliate him. As for Mézy, a man of no rank or influence, he could expect no mercy. Yet, though irritable and violent, he seems to have tried conscientiously to reconcile conflicting duties, or what he regarded as such. The governors and intendants, his successors, received, during many years, secret instructions from the court to watch Laval, and cautiously prevent him from assuming powers which did not belong to him. It is likely that similar instructions had been given to Mézy, * and that the attempt to fulfil them had aided to embroil him with one who was probably the last man on earth with whom he would willingly have quarrelled.
An inquiry was ordered into his conduct; but a voice more potent than the voice of the king had called him to another tribunal. A disease, the result perhaps of mental agitation, seized upon him and soon brought him to extremity. As he lay gasping between life and death, fear and horror took possession of his soul. Hell yawned before his fevered vision, peopled with phantoms which long and lonely meditations, after the discipline of Loyola, made real and palpable to his thought. He smelt the fumes of infernal brimstone, and
* The royal commissioner, Gaudais, who came to Canada with
Mézy, had, as before mentioned, orders to inquire with great
secrecy into th« conduct of Laval. The intendant, Talon, who
followed immediately after, had similar instructions.
heard the bowlings of the damned. He saw the frown of the angry Judge, and the fiery swords of avenging angels, hurling wretches like himself, writhing in anguish and despair, into the gulf of unutterable woe. He listened to the ghostly counsellors who besieged his bed, bowed his head in penitence, made his peace with the church, asked pardon of Laval, confessed to him, and received absolution at his hands; and his late adversaries, now benign and bland, soothed him with promises of pardon, and hopes of eternal bliss.
Before he died, he wrote to the Marquis de Tracy, newly appointed viceroy, a letter which indicates that even in his penitence he could not feel himself wholly in the wrong. * He also left a will in which the pathetic and the quaint are curiously mingled. After praying his patron, Saint Augustine, with Saint John, Saint Peter, and all the other saints, to intercede for the pardon of his sins, he directs that his body shall be buried in the cemetery of the poor at the hospital, as being unworthy of more honored sepulture. He then makes various legacies of piety and charity. Other bequests follow, one of which is to his friend Major Angoville, to whom he leaves two hundred francs, his coat of English cloth, his camlet mantle, a pair of new shoes, eight shirts with sleeve buttons, his sword and belt, and a new blanket for the major’s servant. Felix Aubert is to have fifty francs, with a gray jacket, a small coat of gray serge, “which,” says the testator, “has been worn for a while,” and a
* Lettre de Mézy au Marquis de Tracy, 26 Avril 1665.
pair of long white stockings. And in a codicil he farther leaves to Angoville his best black coat, in order that he may wear mourning for him. *
His earthly troubles closed on the night of the sixth of May. He went to his rest among the paupers; and the priests, serenely triumphant, sang requiems over his grave.