Part 10 (2/2)

On the 10th August the return journey was begun, and on the 20th the army reached Montreal. Some lives had been lost in the rapids; otherwise there had been no casualties. In concluding his letter to the king, Frontenac, after praising the officers under his command, particularly M. de Callieres, put in a modest word for himself: ”I do not know whether your Majesty will consider that I have tried to do my duty, and, if so, whether you will judge me worthy of some mark of honour such as may enable me to live the brief remainder of my life in some distinction. However your Majesty may decide, I must humbly beg you to believe that I am prepared to sacrifice the remainder of my days in your Majesty's service with the same ardour which I have always. .h.i.therto displayed.” His Majesty was graciously pleased to say in reply, by the mouth of the minister, that he was entirely satisfied with the count's expedition against the Onondagas and Oneidas, and with his whole conduct. After dealing with other matters the minister added: ”Until his Majesty has it in his power to bestow on you more marked proofs of his satisfaction, he has granted you his Military Order of St. Louis, and you will find herewith his permission to you to wear its cross.” This was a distinction of which his subordinate Callieres, as well as M. de Vaudreuil and the intendant, Champigny, were already in enjoyment; yet it was all that the very decided merit of M. de Frontenac was able to extract. It is said that the violent take the kingdom of heaven by force; but it is also said that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Frontenac tried to make his way by dint of self-a.s.sertion, but in the end his success was only moderate. The enemies whom he thrust aside, or cowed into silence, could whisper at opportune moments, and their whispers did him no good; while sometimes they could secure gratifications for themselves decidedly worth having.

Various inconclusive negotiations for peace followed the Onondaga campaign; and things dragged on in this way till news came in January 1698, though not through an authorized channel, of the signing of the Peace of Ryswick. The officer in command at Albany, Peter Schuyler, had deputed Captain John Schuyler and one Dellius to carry the news to Callieres at Montreal. Frontenac received it at Quebec a few days later.

The messengers stated that a new governor was coming out to New York--the Earl of Bellomont--and mentioned that instructions had been given to their Indians to cease their warfare against the French.

Frontenac sent a reply stating that he would have to await confirmation of the news from his own government; but he did not think it well to recognize that part of the message which a.s.sumed, on the part of the English, authority over the Iroquois. Early in the following June (1698) Schuyler and Dellius came, bringing some twenty French prisoners of all ages, and also a letter from the Earl of Bellomont to Frontenac, forwarding copies in French and Latin of the treaty of peace, and proposing that Frontenac should give up all his Iroquois prisoners to him, undertaking, on his part, to secure the restoration of all the French prisoners whom the Iroquois might be holding. This brought things to an issue. Frontenac replied in firm but courteous terms, saying that, although he was still without advices from his government, he was prepared to hand over all English prisoners in his custody, but that he could not understand how his Lords.h.i.+p could have instructed his delegates to ask for the return of the Iroquois prisoners. The Iroquois had been uninterruptedly subjects of the French king from a time prior to the taking of New York by the English from the Dutch. So far as they were concerned, therefore, the Earl of Bellomont need not give himself any trouble, as they were suing for peace, had engaged to restore all their French prisoners, and had given hostages for the fulfilment of their promise. He also referred, as a further proof of French authority, to the missions which they had maintained among the Iroquois for over forty years. This letter was dated 8th June. Bellomont replied on the 13th August, manifesting much irritation at Frontenac's refusal to recognize the Iroquois as English subjects, and consequently covered by the peace. He told Frontenac that he had sent word to those nations to be on their guard, that he had furnished them with arms and munitions of war, and promised them a.s.sistance in case they were attacked. As to the Jesuit missionaries, the Indians had repeatedly entreated him ”to expel those gentlemen from amongst them,” their wish being ”to have some of our Protestant ministers among them, instead of your missionaries, in order for their instruction in the Christian religion.” Here was a pretty quarrel right on the head of a peace! Frontenac replied with his customary firmness, saying that he would pursue his course unflinchingly and insist on the fulfilment by the Iroquois of the engagement they had entered into before the declaration of peace. He referred to the fact that commissioners were to be appointed to decide questions of boundary, and said that, such being the case, the earl had taken too absolute a position. Here the correspondence ended so far as Frontenac was concerned. He was fighting in a losing cause, for the claim of England to the territory in dispute was shortly afterwards recognized. He could, however, at least say that the cause was not lost through him; to the last he maintained with courage, resolution, and dignity, what he held to be the rights of his sovereign. As regards the formal establishment of peace with the Iroquois it was not to be in his time. His last despatch to the court bears date the 25th October. He tells the minister that the Iroquois, who had promised to come and conclude peace and bring back their prisoners, have not yet done so, and that he has no doubt they are held back by the Earl of Bellomont. The minister answers that, to prevent a continuation of disputes, he had consented that the tribes in question should remain undisturbed and enjoy the peace concluded at Ryswick. The boundary question would be settled in due time by the commissioners appointed for that purpose.

This reply Count Frontenac was not destined to see. Three months, indeed, before it was penned the curtain had fallen upon his eager, strenuous, and, broadly speaking, honourable life. About the middle of November he fell ill. He was in his seventy-ninth year. In a few days, if not from the first, he knew that he had pa.s.sed into the shadow of death, that he was at last meeting One whom he could not conquer. The old man made all his arrangements with admirable calmness. On the 22nd November he sent for the notary to make his will. He expressed a desire to be buried, not in the cathedral church, but in that of the Recollets, whose milder theology had best suited his practical and somewhat Erastian turn of mind. He makes pecuniary provision for a daily ma.s.s on his behalf for one year, and a yearly one thereafter on the anniversary of his death, Mme. de Frontenac to share in it after her death. His heart was to be placed in a chapel of the Church of St.

Nicolas des Champs at Paris, where the remains of his sister, Mme. de Monmort, were already reposing. A merchant of Quebec, Francois Hazeur, and his private secretary, are named as his executors. He requests Champigny to support his friends in having his wishes carried out. He bequeaths to him a crucifix of aloes wood, and to Mme. de Champigny a reliquary. The bishop, M. de Saint Vallier, came to see him several times during his illness, as also did the intendant; death, not for the first time, was acting the part of reconciler. It was rather expected by the clerical party that, in his last moments, the old warrior would express deep contrition for his deficiencies on the religious side and his frequent opposition to the policy of the church; but in this they were disappointed. ”G.o.d gave him full time,” says an anonymous critic of the period, who has annotated very harshly the funeral sermon preached over his remains, ”to recognize his errors, and yet to the last he showed a great indifference in all these matters. In a word, he behaved during the few days before his death like one who had led an irreproachable life and had nothing to fear.” The last rites of religion were administered by the Recollet father, Olivier Goyer, and on the 28th November 1698, retaining his faculties to the last, the veteran pa.s.sed peacefully away.

What manner of man he was, this narrative, it may be trusted, has in some measure shown. Compounded of faults and virtues, his was a character that appealed strongly to average human nature. Common people understood, admired and trusted him. His faults were those common, everyday ones,[55] which it is not impossible to forgive; and he had the more than compensating virtues of courage, decision, simplicity, underlying kindliness, and humour. His nature, vehement, turbulent, and self-a.s.serting throughout his early and middle manhood, was gaining towards the end that ripeness in which, according to Shakespeare, lies the whole significance of life. The Abbe Gosselin has defined with great exactness his att.i.tude towards religion. ”Frontenac,” he says, ”was a Christian and a religious man after the fas.h.i.+on of his time, and as people generally are in the great world; attached to the church, but with all the Gallican ideas of the period, according to which the church was only a dependency of the state; making it a point of honour to discharge the duties inc.u.mbent on a gentleman and a Christian, but drawing a clear distinction between the demands of duty and those of perfection.”[56] The late Abbe Verreau, quoted by Gosselin in his _Life of Laval_, has a few words of mingled praise and blame, which, perhaps, in their general effect are not far from the truth. ”The harsh doctrines of Jansenism,” he says, ”and domestic troubles had infused into his nature something unrefined which the outward manners of the aristocrat did not entirely conceal. . . . When, however, he yielded to the natural bent of his mind, he attracted every one by the intellectual grace and charm of his conversation. . . . His ambition was to be in New France the reflection of the great monarch who ruled in Old France.” The Abbe probably exaggerates the effect of Jansenist doctrines upon the mind of Frontenac, and also that of his conjugal difficulties; but he rightly discerns an element in his character which clashed with his finer and more distinguished qualities.

There is no known extant portrait of Frontenac. For many years a certain photograph was sold at Quebec as representing him on his death-bed, and was reproduced in different works relating to Canadian history. Parkman, the historian, sent it to the late M. Pierre Margry of Paris, the well-known authority on early Canadian history, who at once p.r.o.nounced that it was not a portrait of Frontenac at all, but had been taken from one of the ill.u.s.trations published in Lavater's celebrated work on physiognomy, the original being a German professor of the name of Heidegger. How it ever came to pa.s.s for a portrait of Frontenac remains a mystery. The matter is fully discussed in Mr. Ernest Myrand's work, _Sir William Phipps devant Quebec_. So far as appears, it was through a correspondence between Mr. Myrand and M. Pierre Margry, that the fact of the unauthenticity of the alleged portrait of Frontenac first became known in Canada.

The funeral sermon over the deceased governor was preached by the Recollet father who had attended his death-bed, and the ma.n.u.script of it is still preserved in the library of Laval University. The eulogium of the sympathetic father may here and there be a little forced; but surely a generous meed of praise was due to the man who, when past the meridian of life, had undertaken and borne unflinchingly for many years the burden of so difficult and dangerous an administration as that of Canada. The ma.n.u.script has been annotated by an anonymous and unfriendly ecclesiastical hand, one of whose criticisms is quoted above. The critic's point of view is further indicated by the comment on the preacher's statement that Frontenac diligently practised the reading of spiritual books. ”As for his reading, it was often Jansenist books, of which he had a great many, and which he greatly praised and lent freely to others.” The _odium theologic.u.m_ here is not difficult to discern.

The people, however, who cared little for theological subtleties and animosities, but who judged their fallen chief as a man and an administrator, mourned him sincerely. His death was announced by the intendant to the king in words that are almost touching; and Callieres, a good soldier, and a man after his own heart, ruled in his stead.

[Footnote 54: The Peace of Ryswick, 20th September 1697.]

[Footnote 55: [Greek: Ta koina ton anthropon pathe.]--Aristotle, _Rhet._ vii.]

[Footnote 56: _Monseigneur de Saint Vallier et son Temps_, p. 32.]

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