e the
Recollet friars and the merchants supported Frontenac. Every ship
carried home to France a budget of letters filled with charges and
countercharges, until it became apparent to the Court that a bitter
civil strife was raging in the distant colony; and the King, unable to
judge between the antagonists, finally recalled them both.

The new Governor, La Barre, met with ill-omens on arrival. His
predecessor had scarce departed when Quebec was visited by the first
of those destructive fires which were destined to rage so often
through its winding streets. The summer of 1682 had been exceptionally
dry, and on the night of the 4th of August a fire began in the house
of Etienne Planchon and spread with dreadful speed over the whole of
Lower Town. Fifty-five houses were burnt to the ground on this
occasion, and Lower Town became a heap of ashes. One house alone
escaped, that of the merchant Aubert de la Chesnaye; and more than
half the wealth of Canada was destroyed.

If so be that misfortunes ever come singly, the history of Quebec at
least has never been able to afford an example; and as if destructive
fire were an insufficient visitation of angry fate, other misfortunes,
no less cruel, now came upon the city. In these years, indeed, it
seemed that Nature herself was leagued with the enemies of Quebec; for
in the _Jesuit Relations_ we have a circumstantial if highly
imaginative account of a violent earthquake which visited the
Province in 1663:--

"Many of the French inhabitants and Indians," says the
writer, "who were eye-witnesses to the scene, state that
a great way up the river of Trois Rivieres, about
eighteen miles below Quebec, the hills which bordered the
river on either side, and which were of a prodigious
height, were torn from their foundations and plunged into
the river, causing it to change its course and spread
itself over a large tract of land recently
cleared;...lakes appeared where none ever existed before;
mountains were overthrown, swallowed up by the gaping
earth, or precipitated into adjacent rivers, leaving in
their place frightful chasms or level plains....Rivers in
many parts of the country sought other beds, or totally
disappeared. The earth and mountains were violently split
and rent in innumerable places, creating chasms and
precipices whose depths have never yet been ascertained.
Such devastation was also occasioned in the woods, that