They had already assumed this right, without waiting for the royal license; but thus far it had profited them little. The gentilhomme was not a good shopkeeper, nor, as a rule, was the shop-keeper’s vocation very lucrative in Canada. The domestic trade of the colony was small; and all trade was exposed to such vicissitudes from the intervention of intendants, ministers, and councils, that at one time it was almost banished. At best, it was carried on under conditions auspicious to a favored few and withering to the rest. Even when most willing to work, the position of the gentilhomme was a painful one. Unless he could gain a post under the Crown, which was rarely the case, he was as complete a political cipher as the meanest habitant. His rents were practically nothing, and he had no capital to improve his seigniorial estate. By a peasant’s work he could gain a peasant’s living, and this was all. The prospect was not inspiring. His long initiation of misery was the natural result of his position and surroundings; and it is no matter of wonder that he threw himself into the only field of action which in time of peace was open to him. It was trade, but trade seasoned by adventure and
* Lettre de Meules au Ministre, 1685.
ennobled by danger; defiant of edict and ordinance, outlawed, conducted in arms among forests and savages,—in short, it was the Western fur trade. The tyro was likely to fail in it at first, but time and experience formed him to the work. On the Great Lakes, in the wastes of the Northwest, on the Mississippi and the plains beyond, we find the roving gentilhomme, chief of a gang of bushrangers, often his own habitants; sometimes proscribed by the government, sometimes leagued in contraband traffic with its highest officials, a hardy vidette of civilization, tracing unknown streams, piercing unknown forests, trading, fighting, negotiating, and building forts. Again we find him on the shores of Acadia or Maine, surrounded by Indian retainers, a menace and a terror to the neighboring English colonist. Saint-Castin, Du Lhut, La Durantaye, La Salle, La Motte-Cadillac, Iberville, Bienville, La Vérendrye, are names that stand conspicuous on the page of half-savage romance that refreshes the hard and practical annals of American colonization. But a more substantial debt is due to their memory. It was they, and such as they, who discovered the Ohio, explored the Mississippi to its mouth, discovered the Rocky Mountains, and founded Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans.
Even in his earliest day, the gentilhomme was not always in the evil plight where we have found him. There were a few exceptions to the general misery, and the chief among them is that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. Charles Le Moyne, son of an innkeeper of Dieppe and founder of a family the most truly eminent in Canada, was a man of sterling qualities who had been long enough in the colony to learn how to live there. * Others learned the same lesson at a later day, adapted themselves to soil and situation, took root, grew, and became more Canadian than French. As population increased, their seigniories began to yield appreciable returns, and their reserved domains became worth cultivating. A future dawned upon them; they saw in hope their names, their seigniorial estates, their manor-houses, their tenantry, passing to their children and their children’s children. The beggared noble of the early time became a sturdy country gentleman; poor, but not wretched; ignorant of books, except possibly a few scraps of rusty Latin picked up in a Jesuit school; hardy as the hardiest woodsman, yet never forgetting his quality of gentilhomme; scrupulously wearing its badge, the sword, and copying as well as he could the fashions of the court, which glowed on his vision across the sea in all the effulgence of Versailles, and beamed with reflected ray from the chateau of Quebec. He was at home among his tenants, at home among the Indians, and never more at home than when, a gun in his hand and a crucifix on his breast, he took the war-path with a
* Berthelot, proprietor of the comté of St. Laurent, and
Robineau, of the barony of Portneuf, may also be mentioned
as exceptionally prosperous. Of the younger Charles Le
Moyne, afterwards Baron de Longueuil,
Frontenac the governor says, “son fort et sa maison nous
donnent une idée des chateaux de France fortifiez.” His fort
was of Stone and flanked with four towers. It was nearly
opposite Montreal, on the south shore.
crew of painted savages and Frenchmen almost as wild, and pounced like a lynx from the forest on some lonely farm or outlying hamlet of New England. How New England hated him, let her records tell. The reddest blood streaks on her old annals mark the track of the Canadian gentil-homme.