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His seigneury had his attention only when opportunities for some more exciting field of action failed to present themselves. Interesting figure though he was an excellent type of a hundred others it was well for the colony that not all its seigneurs were like him in temperament and ways.
Ill-bred insolence was therefore his only weapon; but his use of this was as effective as if it had been the well-bred variety in the hands of the grandest of grand seigneurs. No wonder, then, that he failed to achieve the position to which, in the view of Lady Lottie Passingham, his talents entitled him.
The Duc, well-dressed and well-bred, but offering in his toilette and in his manners irrefragable evidence that both have been studied, and his conversation bearing that high polish and urbanity which, if not always characteristics of talent, conceal the absence of it, represents l'ancien régime, when les grands seigneurs were more desirous to serve les belles dames than their country, and more anxious to be distinguished in the salons of the Faubourg St.-Germain than in the Chambre de Parlement.
The seigneurs of Old Canada did not form a homogeneous class; men of widely differing tastes and attainments were included among them. There were workers and drones; there were men who made a signal success as seigneurs, and others who made an utter failure.
But the evil did not stop there; for nearly all the few French-Canadian militiamen whom the more distant seigneurs had been able to get under arms deserted en masse, with many threats against any one who should try to turn them out again.
The Manchester bully who lounges into the Café Anglais with his hat on the back of his head; the woman who wears a hat and a long blue veil, and shuffles in in the wake of the malhonnête to whom she is married; again, the boor who can speak only such French as 'moa besoin' and 'j'avais faim, represent English men and women just as fairly as the rude, hoggish, French egg-and-poultry speculators represent the great seigneurs of France.
"And let all you buy be good goods," says he, "for in this country a man is valued at what he seems, and the innkeepers do go in such fear of their seigneurs that they will charge him less for entertainment than if he were a mean fellow who could ill afford to pay."
In these days of civil wars, donations, however perpetual, are not always respected by the inheritors of the royal power, nor by the seigneurs and the bishops. We must, accordingly, be ready to repel force with force. The valley is protected towards the north by almost inaccessible rocky cliffs; on the south by a deep river; on the west by rugged ravines, and to the east by a dense forest.
"When these arrangements had been completed by the two families, the father sent for the son. At this time the latter was Master of petitions to the Grand Council. He was twenty-five years of age, and had already lived a life of folly with all the young seigneurs of the period; in fact, the old purveyor had been forced more than once to pay his debts.
Most of them went to officials of the civil administration, many to retired military officers, many others to the Church and its affiliated institutions, and some to merchants and other lay inhabitants of the colony. Certain seigneurs set to work with real zeal, bringing out settlers from France and steadily getting larger portions of their fiefs under cultivation.
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