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When the Abbé Paquin and his vicar Desèves sought to leave the parish, Girod and Chénier virtually placed them under arrest. The abbé did not mince matters with Chénier.
General impression upon the dazed beholder you could not see the forest for the trees. Psychology, with a capital P and the foot of a lynx, at this juncture stalks into the ranch house. Three men, a cook, a pretty young woman all snowbound. Count me out of it, as I did not count, anyway. I never did, with women. Count the cook out, if you like. But note the effect upon Ross and Etienne Girod.
To St Eustache, on Sunday, November 26, came the news of Wolfred Nelson's victory at St Denis. On Monday and Tuesday bands of Patriotes went about the countryside, terrorizing and disarming the loyalists and compelling the faint-hearted to join in the rising. They then proceeded, under the command of Girod and Chénier, to the Indian mission settlement at the Lake of Two Mountains.
As he raced along the slippery streets the night air was ripped again and again with those same loud reverberations. He saw, by the flickering arc-lamp above the crossing where he had just left Donnelly, another figure flying towards him, and recognized O'Connell. Together they turned into Girod Street.
The Church placed on him its interdict, and he never again set foot on Canadian soil. The behaviour of the adventurer Girod, the 'general' of the rebel force, was especially reprehensible. When he had posted his men in the church and the surrounding buildings, he mounted a horse and fled toward St Benoit.
Let a paragraphic biography of Girod intervene. Etienne was an opera singer originally, we gathered; but adversity and the snow had made him non compos vocis. The adversity consisted of the stranded San Salvador Opera Company, a period of hotel second-story work, and then a career as a professional palmist, jumping from town to town.
Assuming as far as possible the air of an honest labourer who seeks his daily toil, he moved across the network of railway lines, with the intention of making his way by quiet Girod Street to a certain bench in Lafayette Square, where, according to appointment, he hoped to rejoin a pal known as "Slick," this adventurous pilgrim having preceded him by one day in a cattle-car into which a loose slat had enticed him.
The chief organizer of revolt in St Eustache and the surrounding country was a mysterious adventurer named Amury Girod, who arrived in St Eustache toward the end of November with credentials, it would seem from Papineau, assigning to him the task of superintending the Patriote cause in the north. About Girod very little is known.
Their numbers during this period showed a good deal of fluctuation. Ultimately Girod succeeded in gathering about him nearly a thousand men. Not all these, however, were armed; according to Desèves a great many of them had no weapons but sticks and stones. By December 13 Sir John Colborne was ready to move.
Mad recklessness rather than true heroism signalised his action in this unhappy affair, when he led so many of his credulous compatriots to certain death, but at least he gave up his life manfully to a lost cause rather than fly like Papineau who had beguiled him to this melancholy conclusion. Even Girod showed courage and ended his own life when he found that he could not evade the law.
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