food as having
superior flavor. He scolded his equals as if they were naughty children.

Yet there was genius in this showy court figure. In 1669, when the
Venetian Republic had asked France to lend her an efficient soldier
to lead against the rampant Turk, the great Marshal Turenne had chosen
Frontenac for the task. Crete, which Frontenac was to rescue, the Turk
indeed had taken; but, it is said, at the fearful cost of a hundred
and eighty thousand men. Three years later, Frontenac had been sent
to Canada to war with the savage Iroquois and to hold in check the
aggressive designs of the English. He had been recalled in 1682, after
ten years of service, chiefly on account of his arbitrary temper. He
had quarreled with the Bishop. He had bullied the Intendant until at
one time that harried official had barricaded his house and armed his
servants. He had told the Jesuit missionaries that they thought more of
selling beaver-skins than of saving souls. He had insulted those
about him, sulked, threatened, foamed at the mouth in rage, revealed a
childish vanity in regard to his dignity, and a hunger insatiable for
marks of honor from the King--"more grateful," he once said, "than
anything else to a heart shaped after the right pattern."

France, however, now required at Quebec a man who could do the needed
man's tasks. The real worth of Frontenac had been tested; and so, in
1689, when England had driven from her shores her Catholic king and,
when France's colony across the sea seemed to be in grave danger from
the Iroquois allies of the English, Frontenac was sent again to Quebec
to subdue these savages and, if he could, to destroy in America the
power of the age long enemy of his country.

Perched high above the St. Lawrence, on a noble site where now is a
public terrace and a great hotel, stood the Chateau St. Louis, the scene
of Frontenac's rule as head of the colony. No other spot in the world
commanded such a highway linking the inland waters with the sea. The
French had always an eye for points of strategic value; and in holding
Quebec they hoped to possess the pivot on which the destinies of North
America should turn. For a long time it seemed, indeed, as if this
glowing vision might become a reality. The imperial ideas which were
working at Quebec were based upon the substantial realities of
trade. The instinct for business was hardly less strong in these keen
adventurers than the instinct for empire. In promise of