The story of the Chevalier's life will help us to understand him in the matter.
He had, in his youth, under the French régime, won distinction as a Canadian officer by many important services, and was entitled by written promises of the Government of France, to money rewards alone of nearly a hundred thousand livres. On the fall of the colony, however, when the Canadian officers proceeded to the home country, they found a cold shoulder turned upon them in the departments of Versailles, so ready to waste immense sums for those in power and to ignore the barest dues of merit. Among the rest, de Léry, his bosom burning with the distress of his family in Paris, paced the corridors of the Colonial Office for nearly two years. Monsieur Accaron, the cold and procrastinative ex-Jesuit deputy of the First Minister, would reply—
"I agree with you, sir, that these services are very distinguished; still, Canada being no longer ours, it is to be admitted they have all been useless."
"Monsieur," the soldier would return, "I have never understood that the misfortunes of the brave lessen their rights."
"Well, well, if you will but wait——"
"I shall be enchanted to wait, and I beg of you to inform me of the means of doing so. I have in Paris my wife and four children, and the twenty louis to which his Majesty has reduced my allowance would not support us in the most favoured province of France."
After making such fruitless attempts, he said boldly to them one day—
"I will return to Canada and try my fortune under a different Crown."
"Do not so easily abandon hope," remarked Accaron coolly.
De Léry, for reply, went to the British Ambassador, told him he had heard high reports of the British nation and offered to become a subject of the English King. In due time a man of so much sense and spirit was received by George III. with satisfaction, as the first of the Canadian gentry to enter his service, and as the Chevalier carried out his new allegiance with the strictest sincerity, time only added to his esteem and he became the favourite Councillor of Governor Dorchester.