“I want to see the Bourgeois Philibert!” exclaimed Jean La Marche. “He is the bravest merchant in New France—the people's friend. Bless the Golden Dog, and curse the Friponne!”
“Hurrah for the Golden Dog, and curse the Friponne!” exclaimed a score of voices; “won't you sing, Jean?”
“Not now; I have a new ballad ready on the Golden Dog, which I shall sing to-night—that is, if you will care to listen to me.” Jean said this with a very demure air of mock modesty, knowing well that the reception of a new ballad from him would equal the furor for a new aria from the prima donna of the opera at Paris.
“We will all come to hear it, Jean!” cried they: “but take care of your fiddle or you will get it crushed in the crowd.”
“As if I did not know how to take care of my darling baby!” said Jean, holding his violin high above his head. “It is my only child; it will laugh or cry, and love and scold as I bid it, and make everybody else do the same when I touch its heart-strings.” Jean had brought his violin under his arm, in place of a spade, to help build up the walls of the city. He had never heard of Amphion, with his lyre, building up the walls of Thebes; but Jean knew that in his violin lay a power of work by other hands, if he played while they labored. “It lightened toil, and made work go merrily as the bells of Tilly at a wedding,” said he.
There was immense talk, with plenty of laughter and no thought of mischief, among the crowd. The habitans of en haut and the habitans of en bas commingled, as they rarely did, in a friendly way. Nor was anything to provoke a quarrel said even to the Acadians, whose rude patois was a source of merry jest to the better-speaking Canadians.
The Acadians had flocked in great numbers into Quebec on the seizure of their Province by the English, sturdy, robust, quarrelsome fellows, who went about challenging people in their reckless way,—Etions pas mon maître, monsieur?—but all were civil to-day, and tuques were pulled off and bows exchanged in a style of easy politeness that would not have shamed the streets of Paris.
The crowd kept increasing in the Rue Buade. The two sturdy beggars who vigorously kept their places on the stone steps of the barrier, or gateway, of the Basse Ville reaped an unusual harvest of the smallest coin—Max Grimau, an old, disabled soldier, in ragged uniform, which he had worn at the defence of Prague under the Marshal de Belleisle, and blind Bartemy, a mendicant born—the former, loud-tongued and importunate, the latter, silent and only holding out a shaking hand for charity. No Finance Minister or Royal Intendant studied more earnestly the problem how to tax the kingdom than Max and Blind Bartemy how to toll the passers-by, and with less success, perhaps.
To-day was a red-letter day for the sturdy beggars, for the news flew fast that an ovation of some popular kind was to be given to the Bourgeois Philibert. The habitans came trooping up the rough mountain-road that leads from the Basse Ville to the Upper Town; and up the long stairs lined with the stalls of Basque pedlars—cheating, loquacious varlets—which formed a by-way from the lower regions of the Rue de Champlain—a break-neck thoroughfare little liked by the old and asthmatical, but nothing to the sturdy “climbers,” as the habitans called the lads of Quebec, or the light-footed lasses who displayed their trim ankles as they flew up the breezy steps to church or market.
Max Grimau and Blind Bartemy had ceased counting their coins. The passers-by came up in still increasing numbers, until the street, from the barrier of the Basse Ville to the Cathedral, was filled with a noisy, good-humored crowd, without an object except to stare at the Golden Dog and a desire to catch a glimpse of the Bourgeois Philibert.