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Happily for Marie de Sassenage, the Comte de Saint-Vallier died, as we know, in his embassy. The family did not become extinct.
No doubt she had been there some time; she was leaning from the window with her arms on a cushion; she was at her ease, and her old man seemed content. He, too, was laughing, the cursed hunchback! A few tears escaped the eyes of the young man; but when Marie de Saint-Vallier saw them she turned hastily away.
In the course of the same year Mgr. de Saint-Vallier obtained, moreover, from the sovereign the authority to open at Quebec in Notre-Dame des Anges, the former convent of the Récollets, a general hospital for the poor, which was entrusted to the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu.
Pale with joy and palpitating, the timid creature showed him, by the light of the lamp, Saint-Vallier lying in a bed about ten feet from her. We may well believe their burning silent kisses echoed only in their hearts. The next day, about nine in the morning, as Louis XI. was leaving his chapel after hearing mass, he found Maitre Cornelius on his path.
On receiving the king's permission he entered and announced the Comte and Comtesse de Saint-Vallier. Louis XI. made a sign. Marie appeared, followed by her old husband, who allowed her to pass in first. "Good-day, my children," said the king. "Sire," replied his daughter in a low voice, as she embraced him, "I want to speak to you in secret." Louis XI. appeared not to have heard her.
Ah! if he knew the man to whom he gave me, his anger would be terrible. I have not dared complain, out of pity for the count. Besides, how could I reach the king? My confessor himself is a spy of Saint-Vallier. That is why I have consented to this guilty meeting, to obtain a defender, some one to tell the truth to the king.
Laval learned with sorrow of this decision; he, who had always clung to the idea of union with his seminary and of having but one common fund with this house, beheld his successor adopt an opposite line of conduct. Another cause of division rose between the two prelates; the too great generosity of Mgr. de Saint-Vallier had brought the seminary into financial embarrassment.
Other reasons for sorrow he did not lack, especially when Mgr. de Saint-Vallier succeeded, on his visit to the king in 1691, in obtaining a reversal of the policy marked out for the seminary by the first bishop of the colony; this establishment would be in the future only a seminary like any other, and would have no other mission than that of the training of priests.
In case of mishap, he could not claim the privileges of his rank nor the protection of his friends without bringing hopeless ruin on the Comtesse de Saint-Vallier. If her husband suspected the nocturnal visit of a lover, he was capable of roasting her alive in an iron cage, or of killing her by degrees in the dungeons of a fortified castle.
The following letter does as much honour to him who wrote it as to him to whom such homage is rendered: "The noble house of Laval from which he sprang," writes Mgr. de Saint-Vallier, "the right of primogeniture which he renounced on entering upon the ecclesiastical career; the exemplary life which he led in France before there was any thought of raising him to the episcopacy; the assiduity with which he governed so long the Church in Canada; the constancy and firmness which he showed in surmounting all the obstacles which opposed on divers occasions the rectitude of his intentions and the welfare of his dear flock; the care which he took of the French colony and his efforts for the conversion of the savages; the expeditions which he undertook several times in the interests of both; the zeal which impelled him to return to France to seek a successor; his disinterestedness and the humility which he manifested in offering and in giving so willingly his frank resignation; finally, all the great virtues which I see him practise every day in the seminary where I sojourn with him, would well deserve here a most hearty eulogy, but his modesty imposes silence upon me, and the veneration in which he is held wherever he is known is praise more worthy than I could give him...."
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