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The French Foreign Office is less communicative. The papers of their two ablest diplomatists, Barthélemy and Talleyrand, have been made public, besides those of Fersen, Maury, Vaudreuil, and many émigrés; and the letters of several deputies to their constituents are now coming out.
After some too generous misgivings, I now claim my own. I could not enter here, to speak with a certain lady, save as the Governor, but as the Governor I now ask speech with Mademoiselle Duvarney. Do you hesitate?" he added. "Do you doubt that signature of his Majesty? Then see this. Here is a line from the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the late Governor.
At Quebec, probably fourteen thousand men, of whom four thousand were the pick of the French regiments in Canada, were under command of Montcalm, Lévis, and Vaudreuil, and were entrenched on a height of land stretching for nearly six miles from the St.
As early as the year 1716 the Marquis de Vaudreuil had stated to the French government: "The English wish to seize upon the lands that the Abenakis and Indians of the River St. The Indians so far from withdrawing on this account have answered that this land has always belonged to them, and that they do not consider themselves subjects of the French, but only their allies."
I learned also that Voban had carried word to the Governor of the deed to be done that night; had for a long time failed to get admittance to him, but was at last permitted to tell his story; and Vaudreuil had gone to Bigot's palace to have me hurried to the citadel, and had come just too late.
You are accused of having given the furnishing of provisions to one man, who under the name of commissary-general, has set what prices he pleased; of buying for the King at second or third hand what you might have got from the producer at half the price; of having in this and other ways made the fortunes of persons connected with you; and of living in splendor in the midst of a public misery, which all the letters from the colony agree in ascribing to bad administration, and in charging M. de Vaudreuil with weakness in not preventing."
Most of the French writers of the time mention these barbarities without much comment, while Vaudreuil loudly denounces them. Yet he himself was answerable for atrocities incomparably worse, and on a far larger scale. He had turned loose his savages, red and white, along a frontier of six hundred miles, to waste, burn, and murder at will.
Moreover, the Chevalier de Vaudreuil, who commanded at Montreal in the absence of M. de Callières, who had gone to France, carried his lack of foresight to the extent of permitting the officers stationed in the country to leave their posts. It is astonishing to note such imprudent neglect on the part of men who must have known the savage nature.
Would that be compensation? Then I will show you the way. We have three times as many soldiers as the English, though of poorer stuff. We could hold this place, could defeat them, if we were united and had but two thousand men. We have fifteen thousand. As it is now, Vaudreuil balks Montcalm, and that will ruin us in the end unless you make it otherwise. You would be a patriot?
Others said that they had been driven to desert by the want of good food, and that within a year twelve hundred men had died of disease at Oswego. [Footnote 427: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 4 Août, 1756. Vaudreuil
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