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Updated: May 2, 2025
Careless of the difference between good and evil; a courtier who has no idea that anything can be blameworthy in the great, but who sees and narrates their vices and their crimes all the more frankly in that he is not very sure whether what he tells be good or bad; as indifferent to the honor of women as he is to the morality of men; relating scandalous things with no consciousness that they are such, and almost leading his reader into accepting them as the simplest things in the world, so little importance does he attach to them; terming Louis XI., who poisoned his brother, the good King Louis, calling women whose adventures could hardly have been written by any pen save his own, honnêtes dames."
Then he woke Robert and Willet, and they dressed quickly, but by the time they had finished Monsieur Berryer knocked on the door and told them breakfast was ready. The innkeeper's manner was flurried. He was one of the honnêtes gens who liked peace and an upright life.
People of a low, obscure education cannot stand the rays of greatness; they are frightened out of their wits when kings and great men speak to them; they are awkward, ashamed, and do not know what nor how to answer; whereas, 'les honnetes gens' are not dazzled by superior rank: they know, and pay all the respect that is due to it; but they do it without being disconcerted; and can converse just as easily with a king as with any one of his subjects.
Perhaps, if your letters are urgent, you would care to present them to the Intendant, Monsieur Bigot, a man of great perception and judgment." Robert turned his examining look with interest. Was he also one of Bigot's men, or did he incline to the cause of the honnêtes gens?
This mistake is very well ridiculed in the "Stratagem," where Scrub says, I AM SURE THEY TALKED OF ME FOR THEY LAUGHED CONSUMEDLY. A well-bred man seldom thinks, but never seems to think himself slighted, undervalued, or laughed at in company, unless where it is so plainly marked out, that his honor obliges him to resent it in a proper manner; 'mais les honnetes gens ne se boudent jamais'. I will admit that it is very difficult to command one's self enough, to behave with ease, frankness, and good-breeding toward those, who one knows dislike, slight, and injure one, as far as they can, without personal consequences; but I assert that it is absolutely necessary to do it: you must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down; for otherwise you avow the injury which you cannot revenge.
But I should not talk of these things to you who are our enemies, and who may soon be fighting us." He quit the subject abruptly, and talked in a desultory manner on irrelevant matters. But Robert saw that Quebec itself and the struggle between the powerful Bigot ring and the honnêtes gens was a much greater weight on his mind than the approaching war with the English colonies.
You have warrant enough if your Court friends are worth half a handful of chaff." "But they are not worth half a handful of chaff, Cadet. If I hung the Bourgeois there would be such a cry raised among the Honnetes Gens in the Colony, and the whole tribe of Jansenists in France, that I doubt whether even the power of the Marquise could sustain me." Cadet looked quietly truculent.
De Mézy looked puzzled, but at that moment de Courcelles and de Jumonville, wearing uniforms of white and silver, came forward to add their greeting to those of the count. They were all courtesy and the words dropped from their lips like honey, but Robert felt that their souls were not like the soul of de Galisonnière, and that they could not be counted among the honnêtes gens.
The bold denunciations by the preacher against the Honnetes Gens and against the people's friend and protector, the Bourgeois Philibert, caused a commotion in the crowd of habitans, who began to utter louder and louder exclamations of dissent and remonstrance.
"Yes," replied Angelique, "the Honnetes Gens do, who think themselves bound to oppose the Intendant, because he uses the royal authority in a regal way, and makes every one, high and low, do their devoir to Church and State." "While he does his devoir to none! But I am no politician, Angelique.
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