"On the 6th of September we set out in the steamboat for Montreal. Sir Francis sent us his carriage, which was very useful to the ladies. On the dock stood a company of the Sixty-Fifth Regiment, with their flags displayed as a guard of honour, which I immediately dismissed. The fortifications saluted us with 21 guns; this caused a very fine echo from the mountains. Night soon set in, but we had sufficient light to take leave of the magnificent vicinity of Quebec."
St. Vallier street is sacred to Monseigneur de St. Vallier; his name is identified with the street which he so often perambulated in his visits to the General Hospital, where he terminated his useful career in 1729. His Lordship seems to have entertained a particular attachment for the locality where he had founded this hospital, where he resided, in order to rent his Mountain Hill Palace to Intendant Talon, and thus save the expense of a chaplain. The General Hospital was the third asylum for the infirm which the Bishop had founded. Subsequently, came the Intendant de Meules, who, toward 1684, endowed the eastern portion of the quarter with an edifice (the Intendant's Palace) remarkable for its dimensions, its magnificence and its ornate gardens.
Where Talon (a former Intendant) had left a brewery in a state of ruin and about seventeen acres of land unoccupied, Louis XIV., by the advice of his Intendant de Meules, lavished vast sums of money in the erection of a sumptuous palace, in which French justice was administered, and in which, at a later period, under Bigot, it was purchasable. Our illustrious ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (corvées) and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (lettres de cachet). What did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna Charta signify to them?
On this spot stood the notorious warehouse, where Bigot, Cadet and their confederates retailed, at enormous profits, the provisions and supplies which King Louis XV. doled out in 1758 to the starving inhabitants of Quebec. The people christened the house "La Friponne," (The Cheat!!) Near the sight of Talon's old brewery which had been converted into a prison by Frontenac, and which held fast, until his trial in 1674, the Abbé de Fénélon [119] now stands the Anchor Brewery (Boswell's).
We clip the following from an able review in the Toronto Mail, Dec., 1880, of M. Marmette's most dramatic novel, "l'Intendant Bigot":
"In the year 1775 a grievous famine raged, sweeping off large numbers of the poor, while the unscrupulous Bigot and his satellites were revelling in shameless profligacy. It is midnight of Christmas, when an old officer, M. de Rochebrune, pressed with cold and hunger to the last point, resolved to pawn his St. Louis Cross of gold at the Intendant's Palace stores. On the way thither the officer and his young daughter, a young girl of fourteen, are startled at the blaze of light illuminating the Palace windows, during one of the Intendant's festivals. The pleasures of the evening are suddenly interrupted and shaded by the entry of the aged, suffering M. de Rochebrune and his wan-visaged but beautiful daughter. Words of galling truth are addressed to Bigot before his painted courtezans and his other depraved attendants, whose hearts are too hard and whose consciences are too seared to be tortured by either misery or reproof, and the ruffian varlets eject both father and daughter to the furies of the midnight blast. The ball ended, Bigot leads Madame de Pean to her vehicle, when she tumbles over an object which, when torches are brought, was found to be the corpse of the suppliant rebuker of a few hours previous, alongside of which lay the unconscious form of his daughter, half buried in the drifting snow. 'Mon Dieu,' exclaimed Madame de Pean, 'Il ne dormira pas de la nuit, c'est bien sûr.' This tragic event is narrated with thrilling effect, in the author's best style." P. B.
In a paper read by us before the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, 3rd December, 1879, we alluded in the following terms to the history of the "Friponne" and the infamous entourage of Intendant Bigot in the second part of our lecture: the first part related to Kalm's ramble round the city in 1749.
Prepare, now for other—dark—far less pleasant scenes. The bright sky of old Stadacona will rapidly lower; leaden clouds, pregnant with storms are hovering over head. The simplicity of early days is getting obsolete. Vice, gilded vice, flaunts in the palace. Gaunt famine is preying on the vitals of the people. 'Tis so at Versailles; 'tis so at Quebec. Lust—selfishness—rapine—public plunder everywhere—except among the small party of the Honnêtes Gens: [120] a carnival of pleasure, to be followed by the voice of wailing and by the roll of the muffled drum.
In 1748, the evil genius of New France, "La Pompadour's protégé" François Bigot, thirteenth and last Intendant, had landed at Quebec.
Born in Guienne, of a family distinguished at the bar, Bigot, prior to coming to Canada had occupied the high post of Intendant in Louisiana. In stature, he was small—but well formed;—active—full of pluck— fond of display and pleasure—an inveterate gambler. Had he confined his operations merely to trading, his commercial ventures would have excited little blame, trading having been a practice indulged in by several other high colonial officials. His salary was totally inadequate to the importance of his office, and quite insufficient to meet the expenditure his exalted position led him into. His speculations, his venality, the extortions practised on the community by his heartless minions: this is what has surrounded his memory with eternal infamy and made his name a by-word for scorn.