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Had he not been sent to Canada a second time, his feud with Laval, Duchesneau, and the Jesuits would fill a much larger space in the canvas than it occupies at present. For in the absence of great deeds to his credit obstinacy and truculence might have been thought the essentials rather than the accidents of his character.
Duchesneau persisted, and was going out with the draft in his hand, when Frontenac planted himself before the door, and told him that he should not leave the council chamber till he had signed the paper. "Then I will get out of the window, or else stay here all day," returned Duchesneau. The imprisonment of Amours was short, but strife did not cease.
On the other side were the members of the council, with Aubert de la Chesnaye, Le Moyne and all his sons, Louis Joliet, Jacques Le Ber, Sorel, Boucher, Varennes, and many more, all supported by the intendant Duchesneau, and also by his fast allies, the ecclesiastics. The faction under the lead of the governor had every advantage, for it was sustained by all the power of his office.
But his forces were small and he had received particular instructions to reduce expenditure. And, with Duchesneau at hand to place a sinister interpretation upon his every act, the conditions were not favourable for immediate action. Then in 1682 he was recalled.
Another article gave the title of patron to any seigneur who should erect a religious edifice; this article was just as fantastic, "for," wrote Commissioner Duchesneau, "there is no private person in this country who is in a position to build churches of any kind." The king, always well disposed towards the clergy of Canada, came to their aid again in this matter.
The boy was amusing himself by singing a song, when Frontenac's partisan, Boisseau, with one of the guardsmen, approached, and, as young Duchesneau declares, called him foul names, and said that he would give him and his father a thrashing.
On the afternoon of the twentieth of March, a son of Duchesneau, sixteen years old, followed by a servant named Vautier, was strolling along the picket fence which bordered the descent from the Upper to the Lower Town of Quebec.
Since this antagonism lasted for seven years and had large consequences, it becomes important to examine its deeper causes as well as the forms which under varying circumstances it came to assume. In the triangular relations of Frontenac, Laval, and Duchesneau the bishop and the intendant were ranged against the governor.
From the early years of Frontenac's regime he made himself useful, not only to Frontenac but to each succeeding governor, until, crippled by gout and age, he died, still in harness. The letter in which the governor Vaudreuil announces Du Lhut's death to the Colonial Office at Paris is a useful comment upon the accusations of Duchesneau.
The brandy question, which was partly ecclesiastical and partly civil, proved an excellent battle-ground for the three great men of Canada; and, as finance was concerned, the intendant had something to say about the establishment of parishes. But of the manifold contests between Frontenac and Duchesneau the most distinctive is that relating to the fur trade.
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