[11] On Frontenac and his family, see Appendix A.
[CHAPTER II.]
1672-1675.
Frontenac at Quebec.
Arrival • Bright Prospects • The Three Estates of New France • Speech of the Governor • His Innovations • Royal Displeasure • Signs of Storm • Frontenac and the Priests • His Attempts to civilize the Indians • Opposition • Complaints and Heart-burnings.
Frontenac was fifty-two years old when he landed at Quebec. If time had done little to cure his many faults, it had done nothing to weaken the springs of his unconquerable vitality. In his ripe middle age, he was as keen, fiery, and perversely headstrong as when he quarrelled with Préfontaine in the hall at St. Fargeau.
Had nature disposed him to melancholy, there was much in his position to awaken it. A man of courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the splendors of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a stern gray rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged merchants and traders, blanketed Indians, and wild bush-rangers. But Frontenac was a man of action. He wasted no time in vain regrets, and set himself to his work with the elastic vigor of youth. His first impressions had been very favorable. When, as he sailed up the St. Lawrence, the basin of Quebec opened before him, his imagination kindled with the grandeur of the scene. "I never," he wrote, "saw any thing more superb than the position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future capital of a great empire." [1]
[1] Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672.
That Quebec was to become the capital of a great empire there seemed in truth good reason to believe. The young king and his minister Colbert had labored in earnest to build up a new France in the west. For years past, ship-loads of emigrants had landed every summer on the strand beneath the rock. All was life and action, and the air was full of promise. The royal agent Talon had written to his master: "This part of the French monarchy is destined to a grand future. All that I see around me points to it; and the colonies of foreign nations, so long settled on the seaboard, are trembling with fright in view of what his Majesty has accomplished here within the last seven years. The measures we have taken to confine them within narrow limits, and the prior claim we have established against them by formal acts of possession, do not permit them to extend themselves except at peril of having war declared against them as usurpers; and this, in fact, is what they seem greatly to fear." [2]