15: Part 2: Chapter V
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Poutrincourt, we have seen, owned Port Royal in virtue of a grant from
De Monts. The ardent and adventurous baron was in evil case, involved in
litigation and low in purse; but nothing could damp his zeal. Acadia
must become a new France, and he, Poutrincourt, must be its father. He
gained from the King a confirmation of his grant, and, to supply the
lack of his own weakened resources, associated with himself one Robin, a
man of family and wealth. This did not save him from a host of delays
and vexations; and it was not until the spring of 1610 that he found
himself in a condition to embark on his new and doubtful venture.
Meanwhile an influence, of sinister omen as he thought, had begun to act
upon his schemes. The Jesuits were strong at court. One of their number,
the famous Father Coton, was confessor to Henry the Fourth, and, on
matters of this world as of the next, was ever whispering at the facile
ear of the renegade King. New France offered a fresh field of action to
the indefatigable Society of Jesus, and Coton urged upon the royal
convert, that, for the saving of souls, some of its members should be
attached to the proposed enterprise. The King, profoundly indifferent in
matters of religion, saw no evil in a proposal which at least promised
to place the Atlantic betwixt him and some of those busy friends whom at
heart he deeply mistrusted. Other influences, too, seconded the
confessor. Devout ladies of the court, and the Queen herself, supplying
the lack of virtue with an overflowing piety, burned, we are assured,
with a holy zeal for snatching the tribes of the West from the bondage
of Satan. Therefore it was insisted that the projected colony should
combine the spiritual with the temporal character,—or, in other words,
that Poutrincourt should take Jesuits with him. Pierre Biard, Professor
of Theology at Lyons, was named for the mission, and repaired in haste
to Bordeaux, the port of embarkation, where he found no vessel, and no
sign of preparation; and here, in wrath and discomfiture, he remained
for a whole year.
That Poutrincourt was a good Catholic appears from a letter to the Pope,
written for him in Latin by Lescarbot, asking a blessing on his
enterprise, and assuring his Holiness that one of his grand objects was
the saving of souls. But, like other good citizens, he belonged to the
national party in the Church, those liberal Catholics, who, side by side
with the Huguenots, had made head against the League, with its Spanish
allies, and placed Henry the Fourth upon the throne. The Jesuits, an
order Spanish in origin and policy, determined champions of ultramontane
principles, the sword and shield of the Papacy in its broadest
pretensions to spiritual and temporal sway, were to him, as to others of
his party, objects of deep dislike and distrust. He feared them in his
colony, evaded what he dared not refuse, left Biarci waiting in solitude
at Bordeax, and sought to postpone the evil day by assuring Father Coton
that, though Port Royal was at present in no state to receive the
missionaries, preparation should be made to entertain them the next year
after a befitting fashion.
Poutrincourt owned the barony of St. Just in Champagne, inherited a few
years before from his mother. Hence, early in February, 1610, he set out
in a boat loaded to the gunwales with provisions, furniture, goods, and
munitions for Port Royal, descended the rivers Aube and Seine, and
reached Dieppe safely with his charge. Here his ship was awaiting him;
and on the twenty-sixth of February he set sail, giving the slip to the
indignant Jesuit at Bordeaux.
The tedium of a long passage was unpleasantly broken by a mutiny among
the crew. It was suppressed, however, and Poutrincourt entered at length
the familiar basin of Port Royal. The buildings were still standing,
whole and sound save a partial falling in of the roofs. Even furniture
was found untouched in the deserted chambers. The centenarian Membertou
was still alive, his leathern, wrinkled visage beaming with welcome.
Pontrincourt set himself without delay to the task of Christianizing New
France, in an access of zeal which his desire of proving that Jesuit aid
was superfluous may be supposed largely to have reinforced. He had a
priest with him, one La Fleche, whom he urged to the pious work. No time
was lost. Membertou first was catechised, confessed his sins, and
renounced the Devil, whom we are told he had faithfully served during a
hundred and ten years. His squaws, his children, his grandchildren, and
his entire clan were next won over. It was in June, the day of St. John
the Baptist, when the naked proselytes. twenty-one in number, were
gathered on the shore at Port Royal. Here was the priest in the
vestments of his office; here were gentlemen in gay attire, soldiers,
laborers, lackeys, all the infant colony. The converts kneeled; the
sacred rite was finished, Te Deum was sung, and the roar of cannon
proclaimed this triumph over the powers of darkness. Membertou was named
Henri, after the King; his principal squaw, Marie, after the Queen. One
of his sons received the name of the Pope, another that of the Dauphin;
his daughter was called Marguerite, after the divorced Marguerite de
Valois, and, in like manner, the rest of the squalid company exchanged
their barbaric appellatives for the names of princes, nobles, and ladies
of rank.
The fame of this chef-d'aeuvre of Christian piety, as Lescarbot gravely
calls it, spread far and wide through the forest, whose denizens,—
partly out of a notion that the rite would bring good luck, partly to
please the French, and partly to share in the good cheer with which the
apostolic efforts of Father La Fleche had been sagaciously seconded—
came flocking to enroll themselves under the banners of the Faith. Their
zeal ran high. They would take no refusal. Membertou was for war on all
who would not turn Christian. A living skeleton was seen crawling from
hut to hut in search of the priest and his saving waters; while another
neophyte, at the point of death, asked anxiously whether, in the realms
of bliss to which he was bound, pies were to be had comparable to those
with which the French regaled him.
A formal register of baptisms was drawn up to be carried to France in
the returning ship, of which Pontrincourt's son, Biencourt, a spirited
youth of eighteen, was to take charge. He sailed in July, his father
keeping him company as far as Port la Have, whence, bidding the young
man farewell, he attempted to return in an open boat to Port Royal. A
north wind blew him out to sea; and for six days he was out of sight of
land, subsisting on rain-water wrung from the boat's sail, and on a few
wild-fowl which he had shot on an island. Five weeks passed before he
could rejoin his colonists, who, despairing of his safety, were about to
choose a new chief.
Meanwhile, young Biencourt, speeding on his way, heard dire news from a
fisherman on the Grand Bank. The knife of Ravaillac had done its work.
Henry the Fourth was dead.
There is an ancient street in Paris, where a great thoroughfare
contracts to a narrow pass, the Rue de la Ferronnerie. Tall buildings
overshadow it, packed from pavement to tiles with human life, and from
the dingy front of one of them the sculptured head of a man looks down
on the throng that ceaselessly defiles beneath. On the fourteenth of
May, 1610, a ponderous coach, studded with fleurs-de-lis and rich with
gilding, rolled along this street. In it was a small man, well advanced
in life, whose profile once seen could not be forgotten,—a hooked
nose, a protruding chin, a brow full of wrinkles, grizzled hair, a
short, grizzled beard, and stiff, gray moustaches, bristling like a
cat's. One would have thought him some whiskered satyr, grim from the
rack of tumultuous years; but his alert, upright port bespoke unshaken
vigor, and his clear eye was full of buoyant life. Following on the
footway strode a tall, strong, and somewhat corpulent man, with
sinister, deep-set eyes and a red beard, his arm and shoulder covered
with his cloak. In the throat of the thoroughfare, where the sculptured
image of Henry the Fourth still guards the spot, a collision of two
carts stopped the coach. Ravaillac quickened his pace. In an instant he
was at the door. With his cloak dropped from his shoulders, and a long
knife in his hand, he set his foot upon a guardstone, thrust his head
and shoulders into the coach, and with frantic force stabbed thrice at
the King's heart. A broken exclamation, a gasping convulsion,—and then
the grim visage drooped on the bleeding breast. Henry breathed his last,
and the hope of Europe died with him.
The omens were sinister for Old France and for New. Marie de Medicis,
"cette grosse banquiere," coarse scion of a bad stock, false wife and
faithless queen, paramour of an intriguing foreigner, tool of the
Jesuits and of Spain, was Regent in the minority of her imbecile son.
The Huguenots drooped, the national party collapsed, the vigorous hand
of Sully was felt no more, and the treasure gathered for a vast and
beneficent enterprise became the instrument of despotism and the prey of
corruption. Under such dark auspices, young Biencourt entered the
thronged chambers of the Louvre.
He gained audience of the Queen, and displayed his list of baptisms;
while the ever present Jesuits failed not to seize him by the button,
assuring him, not only that the late King had deeply at heart the
establishment of their Society in Acadia, but that to this end he had
made them a grant of two thousand livres a year. The Jesuits had found
an ally and the intended mission a friend at court, whose story and
whose character are too striking to pass unnoticed.
This was a lady of honor to the Queen, Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de
Guercheville, once renowned for grace and beauty, and not less
conspicuous for qualities rare in the unbridled court of Henry's
predecessor, where her youth had been passed. When the civil war was at
its height, the royal heart, leaping with insatiable restlessness from
battle to battle, from mistress to mistress, had found a brief repose in
the affections of his Corisande, famed in tradition and romance; but
Corisande was suddenly abandoned, and the young widow, Madame de
Guercheville, became the load-star of his erratic fancy. It was an evil
hour for the Bearnais. Henry sheathed in rusty steel, battling for his
crown and his life, and Henry robed in royalty and throned triumphant in
the Louvre, alike urged their suit in vain. Unused to defeat, the King's
passion rose higher for the obstacle that barred it. On one occasion he
was met with an answer not unworthy of record:—
"Sire, my rank, perhaps, is not high enough to permit me to be your
wife, but my heart is too high to permit me to be your mistress."
She left the court and retired to her chateau of La Roche-Guyon, on the
Seine, ten leagues below Paris, where, fond of magnificence, she is said
to have lived in much expense and splendor. The indefatigable King,
haunted by her memory, made a hunting-party in the neighboring forests;
and, as evening drew near, separating himself from his courtiers, he
sent a gentleman of his train to ask of Madame de Guercheville the
shelter of her roof. The reply conveyed a dutiful acknowledgment of the
honor, and an offer of the best entertainment within her power. It was
night when Henry with his little band of horsemen, approached the
chateau, where lights were burning in every window, after a fashion of
the day on occasions of welcome to an honored guest. Pages stood in the
gateway, each with a blazing torch; and here, too, were gentlemen of the
neighborhood, gathered to greet their sovereign. Madame de Guercheville
came forth, followed by the women of her household; and when the King,
unprepared for so benign a welcome, giddy with love and hope, saw her
radiant in pearls and more radiant yet in a beauty enhanced by the wavy
torchlight and the surrounding shadows, he scarcely dared trust his
senses:—
"Que vois-je, madame; est-ce bien vous, et suis-je ce roi meprise?"
He gave her his hand, and she led him within the chateau, where, at the
door of the apartment destined for him, she left him, with a graceful
reverence. The King, nowise disconcerted, did not doubt that she had
gone to give orders for his entertainment, when an attendant came to
tell him that she had descended to the courtyard and called for her
coach. Thither he hastened in alarm:
"What! am I driving you from your house?"
"Sire," replied Madame de Guercheville, "where a king is, he should be
the sole master; but, for my part, I like to preserve some little
authority wherever I may be."
With another deep reverence, she entered her coach and disappeared,
seeking shelter under the roof of a friend, some two leagues off, and
leaving the baffled King to such consolation as he might find in a
magnificent repast, bereft of the presence of the hostess.
Henry could admire the virtue which he could not vanquish; and, long
after, on his marriage, he acknowledged his sense of her worth by
begging her to accept an honorable post near the person of the Queen.
"Madame," he said, presenting her to Marie de Medicis, "I give you a
lady of honor who is a lady of honor indeed."
Some twenty years had passed since the adventure of La Roche-Guyon.
Madame de Guercheville had outlived the charms which had attracted her
royal suitor, but the virtue which repelled him was reinforced by a
devotion no less uncompromising. A rosary in her hand and a Jesuit at
her side, she realized the utmost wishes of the subtle fathers who had
moulded and who guided her. She readily took fire when they told her of
the benighted souls of New France, and the wrongs of Father Biard
kindled her utmost indignation. She declared herself the protectress of
the American missions; and the only difficulty, as a Jesuit writer tells
us, was to restrain her zeal within reasonable bounds.
She had two illustrious coadjutors. The first was the jealous Queen,
whose unbridled rage and vulgar clamor had made the Louvre a hell. The
second was Henriette d'Entragues, Marquise de Vernenil, the crafty and
capricious siren who had awakened these conjugal tempests. To this
singular coalition were joined many other ladies of the court; for the
pious flame, fanned by the Jesuits, spread through hall and boudoir, and
fair votaries of the Loves and Graces found it a more grateful task to
win heaven for the heathen than to merit it for themselves.
Young Biencourt saw it vain to resist. Biard must go with him in the
returning ship, and also another Jesuit, Enemond Masse. The two fathers
repaired to Dieppe, wafted on the wind of court favor, which they never
doubted would bear them to their journey s end. Not so, however.
Poutrincourt and his associates, in the dearth of their own resources,
had bargained with two Huguenot merchants of Dieppe, Du Jardin and Du
Quesne, to equip and load the vessel, in consideration of their becoming
partners in the expected profits. Their indignation was extreme when
they saw the intended passengers. They declared that they would not aid
in building up a colony for the profit of the King of Spain, nor risk
their money in a venture where Jesuits were allowed to intermeddle; and
they closed with a fiat refusal to receive them on board, unless, they
added with patriotic sarcasm, the Queen would direct them to transport
the whole order beyond sea. Biard and Masse insisted, on which the
merchants demanded reimbursement for their outlay, as they would have no
further concern in the business.
Biard communicated with Father Coton, Father Coton with Madame de
Guercheville. No more was needed. The zealous lady of honor,
"indignant," says Biard, "to see the efforts of hell prevail," and
resolved "that Satan should not remain master of the field," set on foot
a subscription, and raised an ample fund within the precincts of the
court. Biard, in the name of the "Province of France of the Order of
Jesus," bought out the interest of the two merchants for thirty-eight
hundred livres, thus constituting the Jesuits equal partners in business
with their enemies. Nor was this all; for, out of the ample proceeds of
the subscription, he lent to the needy associates a further sum of seven
hundred and thirty-seven livres, and advanced twelve hundred and
twenty-five more to complete the outfit of the ship. Well pleased, the
triumphant priests now embarked, and friend and foe set sail together on
the twenty-sixth of January, 1611.
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