[6] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692.
[8] "L'iniquité des ecclésiastiques qui commencent à traiter d'impies ceux qui sont obligés de resister à leurs passions et à leurs interêts." Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691.
As Champigny always sided with the Jesuits, his relations with Frontenac grew daily more critical. Open rupture at length seemed imminent, and the king interposed to keep the peace. "There has been discord between you under a show of harmony," he wrote to the disputants. [9] Frontenac was exhorted to forbearance and calmness; while the intendant was told that he allowed himself to be made an instrument of others, and that his charges against the governor proved nothing but his own ill-temper. [10] The minister wrote in vain. The bickerings that he reproved were but premonitions of a greater strife.
[9] Mémoire du Roy pour Frontenac et Champigny, 1694.
[10] Le Ministre à Frontenac, 8 May, 1694; Le Ministre à Champigny, même date.
Bishop Saint-Vallier was a rigid, austere, and contentious prelate, who loved power as much as Frontenac himself, and thought that, as the deputy of Christ, it was his duty to exercise it to the utmost. The governor watched him with a jealous eye, well aware that, though the pretensions of the Church to supremacy over the civil power had suffered a check, Saint-Vallier would revive them the moment he thought he could do so with success. I have shown elsewhere the severity of the ecclesiastical rule at Quebec, where the zealous pastors watched their flock with unrelenting vigilance, and associations of pious women helped them in the work. [11] This naturally produced revolt, and tended to divide the town into two parties, the worldly and the devout. The love of pleasure was not extinguished, and various influences helped to keep it alive. Perhaps none of these was so potent as the presence in winter of a considerable number of officers from France, whose piety was often less conspicuous than their love of enjoyment. At the Château St. Louis a circle of young men, more or less brilliant and accomplished, surrounded the governor, and formed a centre of social attraction. Frontenac was not without religion, and he held it becoming a man of his station not to fail in its observances; but he would not have a Jesuit confessor, and placed his conscience in the keeping of the Récollet friars, who were not politically aggressive, and who had been sent to Canada expressly as a foil to the rival order. They found no favor in the eyes of the bishop and his adherents, and the governor found none for the support he lent them.
The winter that followed the arrival of the furs from the upper lakes was a season of gayety without precedent since the war began. All was harmony at Quebec till the carnival approached, when Frontenac, whose youthful instincts survived his seventy-four years, introduced a startling novelty which proved the signal of discord. One of his military circle, the sharp-witted La Motte-Cadillac, thus relates this untoward event in a letter to a friend: "The winter passed very pleasantly, especially to the officers, who lived together like comrades; and, to contribute to their honest enjoyment, the count caused two plays to be acted, 'Nicomede' and 'Mithridate.'" It was an amateur performance, in which the officers took part along with some of the ladies of Quebec. The success was prodigious, and so was the storm that followed. Half a century before, the Jesuits had grieved over the first ball in Canada. Private theatricals were still more baneful. "The clergy," continues La Motte, "beat their alarm drums, armed cap-a-pie, and snatched their bows and arrows. The Sieur Glandelet was first to begin, and preached two sermons, in which he tried to prove that nobody could go to a play without mortal sin. The bishop issued a mandate, and had it read from the pulpits, in which he speaks of certain impious, impure, and noxious comedies, insinuating that those which had been acted were such. The credulous and infatuated people, seduced by the sermons and the mandate, began already to regard the count as a corrupter of morals and a destroyer of religion. The numerous party of the pretended devotees mustered in the streets and public places, and presently made their way into the houses, to confirm the weak-minded in their illusion, and tried to make the stronger share it; but, as they failed in this almost completely, they resolved at last to conquer or die, and persuaded the bishop to use a strange device, which was to publish a mandate in the church, whereby the Sieur de Mareuil, a half-pay lieutenant, was interdicted the use of the sacraments." [12]