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Updated: June 19, 2025
It is to be feared that the present generation at Malbaie is less devout, corrupted it may be by the heretic visitors' bad influence and example. But still the guide with whom one goes camping rarely neglects his evening devotions. In some families prayer sanctifies all the actions of the day. There is prayer at rising, prayer at going to bed.
In all Canada, rural and urban, there is probably not a Protestant parish to which are attached as many, or perhaps half as many, people as the five thousand who dwell in the parish of St. Etienne de la Malbaie, one of secondary importance in the Province of Quebec. In a whole diocese there are often not more than forty or fifty parishes. The life of the people centres in the Church.
Fishing at Malbaie. Trade at Malbaie. Farming at Malbaie. Nairne's marriage. Career and death in India of Robert Nairne. The Quebec Act and its consequences for the habitant. In the dining room of the Manor House at Murray Bay Nairne's portrait still hangs. It was painted, probably in Scotland, when he was an old man, by an artist, to me unknown.
He treated Northwick with a young fellow's comfortable deference for an elderly man, and helped him forget the hurts to his respectability which rankled so when he remembered them. He explained the difference between the two routes from Malbaie on, and advised him to take the longer, which lay through a more settled district, where he would be safer in case of any mischance.
There is little to record of the careers of curés at Malbaie subsequent to M. Compain. Often the annals of the good are not exciting and this is eminently true of these virtuous teachers. M. Charles Duchouquet was curé of Isle aux Coudres and served Malbaie in 1790. In 1791 he was succeeded by M. Raphael Paquet who lived at Les Eboulements.
It was rendered to one of the greatest rascals in New France, the Intendant Bigot, but he was a rascal who did his official tasks with some considerable degree of thoroughness and insight. He knew what were the conditions at Malbaie even if he did not mend them.
From Quebec to Malbaie came so-called friends, English who despised his treachery, French who hated his name, but courtiers all; and with them came an unbidden guest, an aged trapper, unshorn and roughly clad, who lurked in the shadows of the great hall, and whispered ever: "France! Pascal! Traitor!"
Coquart gives an estimate of the farming operations at Malbaie which is of special interest as showing that, if the old régime in Canada did not produce good results, it was not for lack of criticism. Better cattle should be raised, he says; at Malbaie one does not see oxen as fine as those at Beaupré, near Quebec, or on the south shore.
A further tithe he has: the twenty-sixth child born to any pair of his parishioners is by custom brought to the priest and he rears it; sometimes, strange to say, this tithe is offered! From his tithe on cereals the income is not large; at Malbaie it is probably never more than from $1000 to $1200 a year; sometimes much less. The average income of a curé is not more than $600.
One suspects that, in spite of their protests, the Highland costume was ill-suited to meet the severity of the climate; and, in any case, the army was ill-fed, ill-housed, and overworked. Malcolm Fraser kept a journal, but Nairne, the other future seigneur at Malbaie, the most methodical of men, was less ready with the pen and appears to have made no chronicle of those slow but momentous days.
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