rovisional command in the colony, accusing the ecclesiastics of illicit
trade with the English.[106] Bonaventure reports to Ponchartrain that
Pere Felix, chaplain of the fort, asked that the gate might be opened,
in order that he might carry the sacraments to a sick man, his real
object being to marry Captain Duvivier to a young woman named Marie Muis
de Poubomcoup,--contrary, as the governor thought, to the good of the
service. He therefore forbade the match; on which the priests told him
that when they had made up their minds to do anything, nobody had power
to turn them from it; and the chaplain presently added that he cared no
more for the governor than for the mud on his shoes.[107] He carried his
point, and married Duvivier in spite of the commander.

Every king's ship from Acadia brought to Ponchartrain letters full of
matters like these. In one year, 1703, he got at least fourteen such.
If half of what Saint-Simon tells us of him is true, it is not to be
supposed that he gave himself much trouble concerning them. This does
not make it the less astonishing that in the midst of a great and
disastrous war a minister of State should be expected to waste time on
matters worthy of a knot of old gossips babbling round a tea-table. That
pompous spectre which calls itself the Dignity of History would scorn to
take note of them; yet they are highly instructive, for the morbid
anatomy of this little colony has a scientific value as exhibiting, all
the more vividly for the narrowness of the field, the workings of an
unmitigated paternalism acting from across the Atlantic. The King's
servants in Acadia pestered his minister at Versailles with their
pettiest squabbles, while Marlborough and Eugene were threatening his
throne with destruction.[108] The same system prevailed in Canada; but
as there the field was broader and the men often larger, the effects are
less whimsically vivid than they appear under the Acadian microscope.
The two provinces, however, were ruled alike; and about this time the
Canadian Intendant Raudot was writing to Ponchartrain in a strain worthy
of De Goutin, Subercase, or Bonaventure.[109]

FOOTNOTES:

[93] _Brouillan au Ministre, 6 Octobre, 1702._

[94] _Memoire de Subercase._

[95] _Memoire du Roy au Sieur de Brouillan, 23 Mars, 1700_; _Le Ministre
a Villebon, 9 Avril, 1700_.

[96] _Subercase au Ministre, 3 Janvier, 1710._

[97] Pioneers of France in the New World, 253.

[98] La Touche, _M