The success of the society, which was quite amazing, was due largely to an early decision of the founders. Instead of beginning with a great fanfare and an open appeal for support, they kept their affairs secret, believing they could best employ their influence by avoiding all publicity. None save the members knew where or when the society met. None of the members mentioned it or acknowledged affiliation. Members never signed the letters they sent out. Secrecy can become a more potent weapon than publicity. All France began to whisper about the society, to speculate as to who belonged and about the real aims back of it. In time they even began to fear it.
Certainly the society grew to have tremendous power, and in the early stages it did a very great deal of good. It has been said that the beloved “Monsieur Vincent,” who was canonized as St. Vincent de Paul, was one of the members. There is no proof of this, but the society was of great assistance to him in the noble work he did with his Congregation of the Missions.
The success of the Compagnie de Saint-Sacrement was so great, and public interest in it was fanned so briskly by its self-imposed cloak of secrecy, that inevitably it drifted from its true course. After the original members died, it became an instrument of punishment rather than charity and devoted itself largely to the detection and suppression of heresy. Becoming known in time as La Cabale des Devôts, it was suppressed in the next reign by Cardinal Mazarin.
Such, then, was the Duc de Ventadour, who now took into his hands the reins of the viceroyalty. He was already convinced that religious teaching in New France should be exclusively in the hands of the Jesuits. It has been said, in fact, that it was on the advice of Father Philibert Noyrot, his confessor and a Jesuit, that he had assumed the post. Shortly thereafter Father Noyrot joined the Jesuit group in Canada, where the work was still being shared with the Récollets and where, moreover, the Huguenot influence was strong because of their predominance in the company membership. When Father Lalemant, the Jesuit Superior in Canada, sent Noyrot back he wrote to Ventadour, “… in order to finish what he has started. He is the most capable one for this affair.” It had been apparent for some time that the Récollets were not strong enough to carry on the work in Canada unaided, and Ventadour saw to it that the burden was transferred to the willing shoulders of the black-cassocked Jesuits.
Three truly remarkable men formed the Jesuit advance guard, Charles Lalemant, Jean de Brébeuf, and Enemond Masse. Filled with courage and burning with a zeal which nothing could daunt, they were to play great parts in the early history of New France. They arrived without ostentation and found that no provision had been made for their reception, Champlain being in France and the Huguenot Emery de Cȧėn acting in his place. It was necessary for them to take up their quarters temporarily with the Récollets on the St. Charles River. Although the kindly friars knew that they would be relegated to a secondary part, they welcomed the newcomers cordially.
The vigorous intent of the order became apparent soon thereafter when two more priests arrived with ample supplies provided by the unfailing purse of the widowed marquise and accompanied by a corps of workmen. They then proceeded to build themselves a simple but stout house behind a palisade of tall timbers in the neighborhood of the Récollets. Impatient to be about the work which had brought them to the New World, and thirsting perhaps for the martyrdom which beckoned, the staunch fathers set forth into the wilds as soon as their base had been established. Lalemant and Brébeuf went to live with the Hurons, where they labored and suffered for many years. Soon Brébeuf was writing to the General of the Society in Rome: “They [the Indians] are frightened by the torment of hell. Enticed by the joys of paradise, they open their eyes to the light of truth … We have baptized more than 90.”
This expressed much of the philosophy which governed the activities of the Jesuits. They were avid for results and at all times showed a keen interest in the statistics of conversion. One of the lesser-known priests, Father Raymbaut, who struck far north and lived among the Nipissings, was at the point of death and said to one of the natives about him: “Magouch, thou seest well that I am about to die; and at such a time I would not tell thee a lie. I assure thee that there is down below a fire that will burn the wicked forever.” Magouch replied, “Beyond a doubt, I must obey God.” He became thereafter one of the most convinced and eloquent of converts.
Because of the nature of the work they were doing, the Jesuits in the wilderness felt themselves close to God. The solitude in which they existed added to their mysticism. Even Father Brébeuf, who was a giant physically and a man of simple and gentle spirit, began to have visions. Once he saw a great cross in the sky. This was in 1640, when the Iroquois had declared open war on the French and were stalking the forests. The cross was in the south, above the land where the men of the Long House dwelt. It seemed to be moving toward him.
He called his comrades and told them what he could see. “How large is it?” asked one after gazing in the direction indicated and seeing nothing.
Father Brébeuf did not reply at once. He continued to stare up into the sky and finally he sighed deeply.
“It is large enough,” he said in a low voice, “to crucify all of us.”
The missions in the Huron country had much success. It was at Brébeuf’s direction that they decided to center their activities at Ihonatiria, and here they built a chapel which was a constant source of wonder to the dark-skinned people. It was thirty feet long, sixteen wide, and twenty-four high, and the vestments were costly and beautiful. In the otherwise bare house of the priests were many objects which caused astonishment among the credulous men of the woods. There was, for instance, the clock which they began to call the Captain. The priests were willing to capitalize on the effect produced by the striking of the clock. If it happened to be ten they would cry out immediately after the tenth stroke, “Stop!” and when the Captain obeyed, the red men would slap their thighs with horny palms and shake their heads in delighted wonder. “What does it eat?” they asked, convinced that the mechanism was alive. Some years before a young Huron who was called Savignon had been taken to France as a hostage when Etienne Brulé remained in Indian hands. Savignon came back full of awe and reported that he had seen the golden cabin of the French King rolling along the ground, pulled by eight moose without horns, and that he had also seen a machine which spoke and told the time of day. Here was a proof of his veracity and one of the reasons why the Hurons examined the clock with particular interest.
The Captain proved very useful to the hard-worked priests. They told the Hurons that each stroke conveyed a command and that when it reached four in the afternoon the order was “Go home!” At four o’clock, therefore, all the Indians would rise obediently and leave the lodge.
Every piece of equipment the mission contained was equally potent, a magnifying glass in particular. The dusky visitors never tired of looking through it and crying out when the figures of ants and bugs grew to an unbelievable size before their eyes. They watched the magnet with due awe, believing that a manatu of great power dwelt within it and compelled objects to draw near.
There was one occasion when, like the Connecticut Yankee at the court of King Arthur, the Jesuits made capital of an eclipse. There was this difference in the two incidents, that far up in the Huron country it was the light of the moon and not the sun which was conveniently dimmed. This happened during the night of December 31, 1638. The priests consulted their books and told the members of their flock to watch for what was coming. The fading out of the light of the moon at the moment predicted raised a panic among the natives; and ever after they believed the Black Gowns capable of commanding the coming and the going of light. This anecdote was contained in a letter written by Father François Joseph le Mercier from the Huron village of Ossossané.
The history of these early years is based to a great extent on the long letters which the priests faithfully indited and sent to their superiors in France and Rome. It is from these priestly epistles, written with weary fingers after the Cap
tain at four o’clock had ordered the natives to depart, when the cares of the day, beginning always at four in the morning, were over, that most of the story of the long and ferocious Indian wars are drawn. They told the blood-chilling incidents of a great Huron victory. The northern warriors did not follow the Iroquois custom of giving notice of the number of prisoners captured with a loud halloa for each as the canoes came within sounding distance of the home villages. This would have been difficult on the occasion in question, for the number of Iroquois who had been brought back as prisoners was so great that the woods would have echoed and re-echoed to the signals of triumph. The Hurons, however, had a custom of their own. They carried upright sticks in their canoes to signify the number, and for good measure they placed on the ends of the sticks the scalps they had taken. The exultant squaws and the stay-at-home old men and children were driven to a frenzy of excitement by the fact that one hundred poles had been raised in the canoes of the victorious party!
A sequel to this must be told. The torturing of the prisoners began at once, and as each man died his remains were roasted and devoured. The priests strove desperately to stop the slaughter but found their charges so carried away over their victory that they paid no attention. The Jesuits protested so long that finally the Indians became angry and tossed the hand of one of the victims through the door of the mission lodge. The Jesuits had been allowed to baptize each prisoner before he was led out to the stake, and so the hand was sorrowfully buried in consecrated ground.
The most regular correspondent was Father Paul le Jeune, who became the Superior at Quebec. Father le Jeune had the capacity to convey in what he wrote the fervor which animated the men in the field. His letters, filled with stories of their trials and triumphs, began to attract attention in France. This gentle priest had a sense of humor as well as a burning zeal and he told many stories which added to the interest in his reports. He did not hesitate, for instance, to tell of one difficulty the Jesuits encountered in learning Indian languages. A habit of some interpreters caused them much trouble, a tendency to teach obscene words in place of the right ones, which resulted in the unwitting priests sending their listeners into spasms of mirth. He told also of the Indian tendency to interrupt all discourses. In the middle of an address one of the elder statesmen would be likely to interject some such remark as: “Listen, young men, do you understand clearly what the father is telling us? You are not doing right; mend your ways!” When they approved of what was being said, the whole company would wag their heads and declaim, “Ho, ho!” or “Mi hi,” which meant “That is good,” or even “Me ke tiang,” “We will do that.”
The priests had no conception at first of the interest these epistles were creating in France, not knowing of a daring experiment which had been decided upon by the Superior of the Society in France. The latter made up his mind that the letters of Father le Jeune should be published so that they would be made available to everyone, and accordingly he effected an arrangement with Sébastien Cramoisy, the most prominent of the printers of Paris. The Cramoisy colophon was known as La Marque aux Cicognes, two storks, one feeding the other in flight. The printers proceeded to produce the letters with the utmost care in vellum-bound volumes, small octavo in size, and put them on the market at twenty sols. The sales proved nothing short of phenomenal. The distribution was so great, in fact, that it was decided to put out a volume a year and to call the series the Relations. Publication was kept up for over forty years, the scope of the series being extended to take in all letters from priests and many incidental papers relating to affairs in Canada. Cramoisy continued as publisher and printer most of that time. After his death his grandson carried on the work under the firm name of Sébastien Fabre-Cramoisy.
Not since the publication of the Imitatio Christi two hundred years before had such a wave of spiritual fervor been evidenced.
The writer of the letters, Paul le Jeune, received his first intimation of what was happening when a vessel from France arrived at Quebec and delivered to him huge packets of letters. He began to open them in wonder and discovered that they were from people who had read the Relations and whose concern in the work of the missions had been so stimulated thereby that they desired to help. They carried the signatures of men and women of the highest rank, of great diplomats and soldiers, of men prominent in the administrative departments, of priests and nuns, of lowly people who could not be of financial help but had felt impelled to write through feelings of gratitude. It was made evident that in every religious college in France, in monastery and nunnery, ardent souls were thirsting for a chance to join in the work.
To his great astonishment, Father le Jeune discovered that he had become famous. Everyone was reading his letters, everyone was talking about him and about the work he depicted so graphically. That he was gratified goes without saying, but at the same time he was clearheaded enough to realize that a checkrein was going to be needed. He wrote to the Father Provincial in France, “They [the Ursuline mothers] write me with such ardor … that if the door were open a city of nuns would be formed and there would be found ten sisters to one pupil.” He was equally well aware of the poor quality of the settlers who were being sent out to the colony. On this point he wrote, “Every year the ship brings us many people; this number like coin is of mingled gold and base alloy; it is composed of choice and well-selected souls, and of others indeed base and degraded.”
The success of the Relations stimulated the missionaries to further efforts. More priests were sent out to join the hard-worked fathers in the field. Sometimes workmen were sent with them. An outstanding example of the collaboration which developed was the importation into the Huron country of nearly a score of artisans to build the chapel at Ihonatiria. The carpenters and joiners went in canoes over the water trails for many hundred leagues, carrying their tools and some of the materials with them.
It was thus made abundantly clear that, of all men, the Jesuits were the best fitted for missionary work among the Indians. Individually they were brave, resolute, unflinching, and ready for any sacrifice. As a body they were backed by great wealth and influence.
Quebec had continued to grow in the meantime, but very slowly. The population was now slightly in excess of one hundred, but the settlement had not learned to be self-supporting. Champlain, adroit and resourceful though he was, could not make useful citizens out of the dregs who were sent to him by his profit-mad partners. These misfits and unfortunates hunted and fished sporadically; they loafed, they drank, they diced, and continued as hostile to honest toil as they had been when plucked from the stews and prisons of Paris.
The truth of the situation finally reached the one man in France who was capable of finding the solution. Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, the young Bishop of Luçon, had left his mean episcopal palace and had attached himself to the service of the lumpish, lazy, and vindictive Queen Regent. Although the fall of her favorites, the Concinis, to whom Richelieu had paid lip service, set him back for several years, he was soon in the saddle again and in full charge of foreign affairs. A man of such relentless will and transcendent ability could not be checked once he was in a position to display his gifts. Richelieu, who had now received the red hat from Rome and was called thereafter the cardinal, moved with consummate skill through the conspiracies of the corrupt court and in time gained a complete ascendancy over the weakling son of Henry IV who had succeeded to the throne as Louis XIII.
The once sickly and sullen son of the great King had grown up into a very strange and far from healthy young man, as different from his illustrious sire as any human being could be. He took little interest in affairs of state, except for sudden gusts of unpredictable energy which made it necessary for the cardinal to exercise all his skill in order to retain his hold on the reins. Ordinarily the capricious young King concerned himself with boyish fancies. He was very much interested in cookery and became quite expert in the making of garlic spreads for bread and salades with sauce rousse. In a court noted for the bea
uty and immorality of its women, the young King showed no tendency to emulate the gallantry of his father. He took little or no interest in New France.
Richelieu soon became convinced that the control of the French colony must be assumed by the government and he acted then with characteristic vigor.
2
A frail man in the red robe of a cardinal sat behind his desk on a gusty day which the calendar registered as April 29, 1627. Before him lay a document from which the title seemed to spring out and command the eye.
Acte pour l’Etablissement de la Compagnie des Cent Associés.
The Company of One Hundred Associates! This organization with the euphonious name which has impressed itself firmly on the pages of Canadian history was the answer which Richelieu was supplying for the problem of Canada.
The man behind the desk was thin and austere. His face fell away from a fine wide brow to a chin so delicate and pointed under its small beard that it suggested a sensitive nature (which was completely misleading); and the result would have been to give his ample nose too much prominence if it had been possible to notice anything about this extraordinary man but the uncanny power of his unblinking pale eyes. The Richelieu eyes, it was currently believed, could look through anything: the most astute politician who might face him, the walls which surrounded him, the knotty problems he had to solve. His hands had an almost feminine daintiness, but in their capacity to seize and hold and rend they more nearly resembled the talons of a bird of prey. There was uncanniness also in this man’s gift for knowing everything that went on about him, for knowing instinctively the right course to pursue, for the perfection of his choice of words in convincing those about him, for his unerring judgment of men. He was utterly unscrupulous and, of course, without kindness or pity. No other great minister of state ever quite equaled him; not Wolsey or Fouquet or Colbert, not Bismarck or Disraeli.
The White and the Gold Page 13