uebec, he landed
and drove to the city. It is the most beautiful country in the world,
he writes, highly cultivated, with many houses, the peasants living
more like the lesser gentry of France than like peasants, and speaking
excellent French. He found the hospitality in Quebec such that a
Parisian would be surprised at the profusion of good things of every
kind. The city was, he thought, like the best type of the cities of
France. The Canadian climate was health-giving, the sky clear, the
summer not unlike that of Languedoc, but the winter trying, since the
severe weather caused the inhabitants to remain too much indoors. He
described the Canadian ladies as witty, lively, devout, those of
Quebec amusing themselves at play, sometimes for high stakes; those of
Montreal, with conversation and dancing. He confessed that one of
them proved a little too fascinating for his own peace of mind. The
intolerable thing was the need to meet and pay court to the Indians whom
the Governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, regarded as valuable allies.
These savages, brutal, changeable, exacting, Montcalm from the first
despised. It filled him with disgust to see them swarming in the streets
of Montreal, sometimes carrying bows and arrows, their coarse features
worse disfigured by war-paint and a gaudy headdress of feathers, their
heads shaven, with the exception of one long scalp-lock, their gleaming
bodies nearly naked or draped with dirty buffalo or beaver skins. What
allies for a refined grand seigneur of France! It was a costly burden
to feed them. Sometimes they made howling demands for brandy and for
bouillon, by which they meant human blood. Many of them were cannibals.
Once Montcalm had to give some of them, at his own cost, a feast of
three oxen roasted whole. To his disgust, they gorged themselves and
danced round the room shouting their savage war-cries.

The Governor of Canada, Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, belonged
to one of the most ancient families of France, related to that of Levis.
He had been born in Canada where his father was Governor for the long
period of twenty-two years, from 1703 to 1725, and in his outlook and
prejudices he was wholly of New France, with a passionate devotion to
its people, and a deep resentment at any airs of superiority assumed by
those who came from old France. A certain admiration is due to Vaudreuil
for his championship of the Canadians and even of the savages of the
land of his birt