"And a French king ruled Canada."
"And the French regiments marched its soil. Do you remember the hot morning we stood hand in hand watching the Royal Rousillons wheel into the Place d'Armes in front of the church?"
"How old were we then?"
"I was eleven; it was my birthday. Don't you remember?"
The wine came in and was set on a little table. The first speaker opened a bottle and poured out two glasses.
Pierre le Gardeur, Knight of St. Louis, Brigadier-General, Governor of Mahé and Marquis de Répentigny—for this was he—was a tall, spare man whose complexion the suns of the tropics had browned, whose hair was whitened with foreign service, and whose blue eyes and sensitive, handsome features wore a strange, settled look of melancholy. Evidently some long-standing sorrow threw its shadow over his spirit.
His friend, the Marquis de Lotbinière, was a person of much more worldly aspect, of largish build and beginning to incline to flesh, but whose dark eyes were steady with the air of business capability and self-possession. The care and finish of his dress and manner showed pronounced pride of rank—a kind of well-regulated ostentation. His family were descended from the best of the half-dozen petty gentry in the rude, early days of the colony of his origin. He had by his ability become engineer-in-chief under Montcalm. Yet from the point of view of the Versailles nobility—the standard he himself was most ambitious to apply—he was but an obscure colonel, and his title a questionable affair. He acquired it in this wise.
At the fall of New France the last French Governor, Vaudreuil, passed over to Europe and sold out his Canadian properties. De Lotbinière, who remained, bought them for a song, including the château in Montreal and several large seigniories, chiefly wild lands, but growing in value. In the original grant of one of them to the Marquis de Vaudreuil, he found that it had been intended as a Canadian marquisate, an honorary appellation, however, which the Vaudreuils never pursued any further. This lapsed marquisate of the former proprietors gave Lotbinière his idea; proprietor of a marquisate, he ought to be a marquis. He determined to find some way of procuring the title for himself. He visited Paris as much and long as possible, and, by various devices, kept his name and services before the War Office. During the American Revolution he conceived the project of secretly negotiating with the Revolutionists for the re-transfer of Canada to the French. He persuaded the War Office to permit him to try his hand in the matter without publicly compromising Versailles, and received, on pressing his request, an equivocal grant of the coveted title, to be attached to his Canadian seigniory, but only if held of the Crown of France, and not of any foreign power. His secret negotiations at Washington failed and were never heard of. He nevertheless called himself Marquis.
The two gentlemen were united by relationship, for besides the inextricable genealogical links which bound together the chief families of the colony, each had espoused a daughter of the Chevalier Chaussegros de Léry, king's engineer, an excellent gentleman, who, like de Lotbinière, had returned to Canada after its cession and become a subject, a truly loyal one, of the English Crown.
"I expect our good nephew, Louis de Léry, here in a few minutes," said Répentigny. "He is in the Bodyguard, his father wrote."