Such, up to the last, was the attitude of the martial Governor, who, at the age of seventy-six, was ready once more to undertake the punishment of the Iroquois. He would fain have walked and toiled like the rest of the twenty-two hundred men who composed his column; but the Indian allies, unable to see him endure the hardships of the march, bore him triumphantly on their shoulders. Their faith in the great Onontio was without measure, and French prestige among them was now at its highest point. The Onondagas fled before their advance; the Oneidas begged for peace. The villages of the enemy were given to the flames, and the savages, thus rendered homeless, became a charge upon the friendly English settlements, only to increase the enmity which already marked the relations of the latter with the French colony.
Frontenac returned once more in triumph to Quebec, and a semblance of peace reigned in North America—the ominous calm before a storm which was soon to shake the Continent. The Castle of St. Louis now became a centre of gaiety, despite the grey hairs of its distinguished occupant, whose spirits and buoyancy were still unquenched. Quebec was giving unmistakable signs of a social revolt against the rigorous subjection in which the Church had held her. Exiled from Fontainebleau, the officers of the Governor's suite did their best to improvise a counterpart, and the ladies of the ambitious noblesse were not loth to join in the crude but brilliant revels of the castle. The winter carnival, then, as now, afforded merriment to a gay company, the King's representative being as keen a pleasure-seeker as the rest. On Frontenac's suggestion, private theatricals were added to the polite diversions of Quebec. The Marquis de Tracy's ball far back in 1667 had given grievous offence to the Jesuits, and the unholy acting of plays was now declared an open profanity. Nicomède and Mithridate were condemned as immoral; but when Tartuffe, Molière's mordant satire upon religious hypocrisy, was put upon the boards, the limits of endurance were reached and overpassed.
La Motte Cadillac, a staff officer, thus describes the excitement raised by these performances: "The clergy beat their alarm drums, armed cap-à-pie, and snatched their bows and arrows. The Sieur Glandelet was the 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...persuaded the Bishop to publish a mandate in the church whereby the Sieur de Mareuil, a half-pay lieutenant, was interdicted the use of the sacraments."
THE CITADEL IN WINTER
In the midst of it all, death was slowly creeping upon the central figure of so many stormy scenes. The treaty concluded at Ryswick in 1697, and proclaimed in Canada, improved the position of the French in America, encouraging them to new aspirations of conquest. Already on the brink of the grave, the indomitable Frontenac cast his challenge in the teeth of New England, claiming the Iroquois as the recalcitrant subjects of Louis XIV. The gage was duly taken, and although the challenger could not await the issue, his visor remained closed till the end. Even in death Count Frontenac set his face against the Jesuits, for he was buried in the Récollet Chapel. When he was laid to rest the province was stricken with genuine grief, for all men felt that the best bulwark of New France had been laid in mortal ruin.