'Artaguette had deceived him, being no better than Bienville himself.
La Salle further declared that Barrot, the surgeon of the colony, was an
ignoramus, and that he made money by selling the medicines supplied by
the King to cure his Louisianian subjects. Such were the transatlantic
workings of the paternalism of Versailles.

Bienville, who had been permitted to resume his authority, paints the
state of the colony to his masters, and tells them that the inhabitants
are dying of hunger,--not all, however, for he mentions a few
exceptional cases of prosperity. These were certain thrifty colonists
from Rochelle, who, says Bienville, have grown rich by keeping
dram-shops, and now want to go back to France; but he has set a watch
over them, thinking it just that they should be forced to stay in the
colony.[302] This was to add the bars of a prison to the other
attractions of the new home.

As the colonists would not work, there was an attempt to make Indian
slaves work for them; but as these continually ran off, Bienville
proposed to open a barter with the French West Indies, giving three red
slaves for two black ones,--an exchange which he thought would be
mutually advantageous, since the Indians, being upon islands, could no
longer escape. The court disapproved the plan, on the ground that the
West Indians would give only their worst negroes in exchange, and that
the only way to get good ones was to fetch them from Guinea.

Complaints against Bienville were renewed till the court sent out La
Mothe-Cadillac to succeed him, with orders to examine the charges
against his predecessor, whom it was his interest to condemn, in order
to keep the governorship. In his new post, Cadillac displayed all his
old faults; began by denouncing the country in unmeasured terms, and
wrote in his usual sarcastic vein to the colonial minister: "I have seen
the garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a
terrestrial paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three
seedling apple-trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with
seven bad plums on it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches
of grapes, some of them withered or rotten and some partly ripe, about
forty plants of French melons, and a few pumpkins. This is M.
d'Artaguette's terrestrial paradise, M. de Remonville's Pomona, and M.
de Mandeville's Fortunate Islands. Their stories are mere fables." Then
he slanders the soil, which, he declares, will p