It were difficult to group on a smaller and brighter canvass, so many of the glorious figures of our storied past.
In the days of de Montmagny and later, the Jesuits' Journal retraces gay scenes at the Château in connection with the festivals of the patron saints, of St. Joseph, whose anniversary occurred on the 19th March, and of St. John the Baptist, whose fête happened on the 24th June.
For a long time the old Château, was the meeting place of the Superior
Council.
"On any Monday morning one would have found the Superior Council in session in the antechamber of the Governor's apartment, at the Château St. Louis. The members sat at a round table, at the head was the Governor, with the Bishop on his right and the Intendant on his left. The councillors sat in the order of their appointment, and the attorney-general also had his place at the board. As La Hontan says, they were not in judicial robes, but in their ordinary dress and all but the Bishop wore swords. The want of the cap and the gown greatly disturbed the Intendant Meules, and he begs the Minister to consider how important it is that the councillors, in order to inspire respect, should appear in public in long black robes, which on occasions of ceremony they should exchange for robes of red. He thinks that the principal persons of the colony should thus be induced to train up their children to so enviable a dignity; "and" he concludes, "as none of the councillors can afford to buy red robes, I hope that the King will vouchsafe to send out nine such; as for the black robes, they can furnish those themselves."
"The King did not respond, and the nine robes never arrived. The official dignity of the Council was sometimes exposed to trials against which even red gowns might have proven an insufficient protection. The same Intendant urges that the tribunal ought to be provided immediately with a house of its own."
"It is not decent," he says, "that it should sit in the Governor's antechamber any longer. His guards and valets make such a noise, that we cannot hear each other speak. I have continually to tell them to keep quiet, which causes them to make a thousand jokes at the councillors as they pass in and out. As the Governor and the council were often on ill terms, the official head of the colony could not always be trusted to keep his attendants on their good behaviour." (Parkman's Old Regime, p. 273.)
At other times, startling incidents threw a pall over the old pile. Thus in August 1666, we are told of the melancholy end of a famous Indian warrior: "Tracy invited the Flemish Bastard and a Mohawk chief named Agariata to his table, when allusion was made to the murder of Chasy. On this the Mohawk, stretching out his arm, exclaimed in a Braggart tone, "This is the hand that split the head of that young man." The indignation of the company may be imagined. Tracy told his insolent guest that he should never kill anybody else; and he was led out and hanged in presence of the Bastard. [33]
Varied in language and nationality were the guests of the Château in days of yore: thus in 1693, the proud old Governor Frontenac had at one and the same time Baron Saint Castin's Indian father-in-law, Madocawando, from Acadia, and "a gentleman of Boston, John Nelson, captured by Villebon, the nephew and heir of Sir Thomas Temple, in whose right he claimed the proprietorship of Acadia, under an old grant of Oliver Cromwell." (Parkman's Frontenac, p. 357.)
FORT ST. LOUIS
Ere one of the last vestiges of the ancien régime, Haldimand Castle, disappears, a few details culled from reliable sources may not be unacceptable, especially as by fire, repairs and the vicissitudes of time, the changes are so great, as to render difficult the delineation of what it originally formed part of in the past.