tality, since, in the week before Lent, forty guests supped
every evening at his table, and dances, masquerades, and cards consumed
the night.[545]

[Footnote 545: Franquet, _Journal_.]

His chief abode was at Quebec, in the capacious but somewhat ugly
building known as the Intendant's Palace. Here it was his custom during
the war to entertain twenty persons at dinner every day; and there was
also a hall for dancing, with a gallery to which the citizens were
admitted as spectators.[546] The bounteous Intendant provided a separate
dancing-hall for the populace; and, though at the same time he plundered
and ruined them, his gracious demeanor long kept him a place in their
hearts. Gambling was the chief feature of his entertainments, and the
stakes grew deeper as the war went on. He played desperately himself,
and early in 1758 lost two hundred and four thousand francs,--a loss
which he will knew how to repair. Besides his official residence on the
banks of the St. Charles, he had a country house about five miles
distant, a massive old stone building in the woods at the foot of the
mountain of Charlebourg; its ruins are now known as Chateau Bigot. In
its day it was called the Hermitage; though the uses to which it was
applied savored nothing of asceticism. Tradition connects it and its
owner with a romantic, but more than doubtful, story of love, jealousy,
and murder.

[Footnote 546: De Gaspe, _Memoires_, 119.]

The chief Canadian families were so social in their habits and so
connected by intermarriage that, along with the French civil and
military officers of the colonial establishment, they formed a society
whose members all knew each other, like the corresponding class in
Virginia. There was among them a social facility and ease rare in
democratic communities; and in the ladies of Quebec and Montreal were
often seen graces which visitors from France were astonished to find at
the edge of a wilderness. Yet this small though lively society had
anomalies which grew more obtrusive towards the close of the war.
Knavery makes strange companions; and at the tables of high civil
officials and colony officers of rank sat guests as boorish in manners
as they were worthless in character.

Foremost among these was Joseph Cadet, son of a butcher at Quebec, who
at thirteen went to sea as a pilot's boy, then kept the cows of an
inhabitant of Charlebourg, and at last took up his father's trade and
prospered in it.[547] In 1756 B