Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (53 page)

The transportation of military stores gave another opportunity of plunder. The contractor would procure from the Governor or the local commandant an order requiring the inhabitants to serve him as boatmen, drivers, or porters, under a promise of exemption that year from duty as soldiers. This saved him his chief item of expense, and the profits of his contract rose in proportion.

A contagion of knavery ran through the official life of the colony; and to resist it demanded no common share of moral robustness. The officers of the troops of the line were not much within its influence; but those of the militia and colony regulars, whether of French or Canadian birth, shared the corruption of the civil service. Seventeen of them, including six chevaliers of St. Louis and eight commandants of forts, were afterwards arraigned for fraud and malversation, though some of the number were acquitted. Bougainville gives the names of four other Canadian officers as honorable exceptions to the general demoralization,—Benoît, Repentigny, Lainé, and Le Borgne; “not enough,” he observes, “to save Sodom.”

Conspicuous among these military thieves was Major Péan, whose qualities as a soldier have been questioned, but who nevertheless had shown almost as much vigor in serving the King during the Ohio campaign of 1753 as he afterwards displayed effrontery in cheating him. “Le petit Péan” had married a young wife, Mademoiselle Desméloizes, Canadian like himself, well born, and famed for beauty, vivacity, and wit. Bigot, who was near sixty, became her accepted lover; and the fortune of Péan was made. His first success seems to have taken him by surprise. He had bought as a speculation a large quantity of grain, with money of the King lent him by the Intendant. Bigot, officially omnipotent, then issued an order raising the commodity to a price far above that paid by Péan, who thus made a profit of fifty thousand crowns.
⁴
A few years later his wealth was estimated at from two to four million francs. Madame Péan became a power in Canada, the dispenser of favors and offices; and all who sought opportunity to rob the King hastened to pay her their court. Péan, jilted by his own wife, made prosperous love to the wife of his partner, Penisseault; who, though the daughter of a Montreal tradesman, had the air of a woman of rank, and presided with dignity and grace at a hospitable board where were gathered the clerks of Cadet and other lesser lights of the administrative hierarchy. It was often honored by the presence of the Chevalier de Lévis, who, captivated by the charms of the hostess, condescended to a society which his friends condemned as unworthy of his station. He succeeded Péan in the graces of Madame Penisseault, and after the war took her with him to France; while the aggrieved husband found consolation in the wives of the small functionaries under his orders.
¹

Another prominent name on the roll of knavery was that of Varin, commissary of marine, and Bigot’s deputy at Montreal, a Frenchman of low degree, small in stature, sharp witted, indefatigable, conceited, arrogant, headstrong, capricious, and dissolute. Worthless as he was, he found a place in the Court circle of the Governor, and aspired to supplant Bigot in the intendancy. To this end, as well as to save himself from justice, he had the fatuity to turn informer and lay bare the sins of his confederates, though forced at the same time to betray his own. Among his comrades and allies may be mentioned Deschenaux, son of a shoemaker at Quebec, and secretary to the Intendant; Martel, King’s storekeeper at Montreal; the humpback Maurin, who is not to be confounded with the partisan officer Marin; and Corpron, a clerk whom several tradesmen had dismissed for rascality, but who was now in the confidence of Cadet, to whom he made himself useful, and in whose service he grew rich.

Canada was the prey of official jackals,—true lion’s providers, since they helped to prepare a way for the imperial beast, who, roused at last from his lethargy, was gathering his strength to seize her for his own. Honesty could not be expected from a body of men clothed with arbitrary and ill-defined powers, ruling with absolute sway an unfortunate people who had no voice in their own destinies, and answerable only to an apathetic master three thousand miles away. Nor did the Canadian Church, though supreme, check the corruptions that sprang up and flourished under its eye. The Governor himself was charged with sharing the plunder; and though he was acquitted on his trial, it is certain that Bigot had him well in hand, that he was intimate with the chief robbers, and that they found help in his weak compliances and wilful blindness. He put his stepson, Le Verrier, in command at Michillimackinac, where, by fraud and the connivance of his stepfather, the young man made a fortune.
²
When the Colonial Minister berated the Intendant for maladministration, Vaudreuil became his advocate, and wrote thus in his defence: “I cannot conceal from you, Monseigneur, how deeply M. Bigot feels the suspicions expressed in your letters to him. He does not deserve them, I am sure. He is full of zeal for the service of the King; but as he is rich, or passes as such, and as he has merit, the ill-disposed are jealous, and insinuate that he has prospered at the expense of His Majesty. I am certain that it is not true, and that nobody is a better citizen than he, or has the King’s interest more at heart.”
¹
For Cadet, the butcher’s son, the Governor asked a patent of nobility as a reward for his services.
²
When Péan went to France in 1758, Vaudreuil wrote to the Colonial Minister: “I have great confidence in him. He knows the colony and its needs. You can trust all he says. He will explain everything in the best manner. I shall be extremely sensible to any kindness you may show him, and hope that when you know him you will like him as much as I do.
³

Administrative corruption was not the only bane of Canada. Her financial condition was desperate. The ordinary circulating medium consisted of what was known as card money, and amounted to only a million of francs. This being insufficient, Bigot, like his predecessor Hocquart, issued promissory notes on his own authority, and made them legal tender. They were for sums from one franc to a hundred, and were called
ordonnances
. Their issue was blamed at Versailles as an encroachment on the royal prerogative, though they were recognized by the Ministry in view of the necessity of the case. Every autumn those who held them to any considerable amount might bring them to the colonial treasurer, who gave in return bills of exchange on the royal treasury in France. At first these bills were promptly paid; then delays took place, and the notes depreciated; till in 1759 the Ministry, aghast at the amount, refused payment, and the utmost dismay and confusion followed.
⁴

The vast, jarring, discordant mechanism of corruption grew incontrollable; it seized upon Bigot, and dragged him, despite himself, into perils which his prudence would have shunned. He was becoming a victim to the rapacity of his own confederates, whom he dared not offend by refusing his connivance and his signature to frauds which became more and more recklessly audacious. He asked leave to retire from office, in the hope that his successor would bear the brunt of the ministerial displeasure. Péan had withdrawn already, and with the fruits of his plunder bought land in France, where he thought himself safe. But though the Intendant had long been an object of distrust, and had often been warned to mend his ways,
⁵
yet such was his energy, his executive power, and his fertility of resource, that in the crisis of the war it was hard to dispense with him. Neither his abilities, however, nor his strong connections in France, nor an ally whom he had secured in the bureau of the Colonial Minister himself, could avail him much longer; and the letters from Versailles became appalling in rebuke and menace.

“The ship ‘Britannia,’ ” wrote the Minister, Berryer, “laden with goods such as are wanted in the colony, was captured by a privateer from St.-Malo, and brought into Quebec. You sold the whole cargo for eight hundred thousand francs. The purchasers made a profit of two millions. You bought back a part for the King at one million, or two hundred thousand more than the price for which you sold the whole. With conduct like this it is no wonder that the expenses of the colony become insupportable. The amount of your drafts on the treasury is frightful. The fortunes of your subordinates throw suspicion on your administration.” And in another letter on the same day: “How could it happen that the small-pox among the Indians cost the King a million francs? What does this expense mean? Who is answerable for it? Is it the officers who command the posts, or is it the storekeepers? You give me no particulars. What has become of the immense quantity of provisions sent to Canada last year? I am forced to conclude that the King’s stores are set down as consumed from the moment they arrive, and then sold to His Majesty at exorbitant prices. Thus the King buys stores in France, and then buys them again in Canada. I no longer wonder at the immense fortunes made in the colony.”
¹
Some months later the Minister writes: “You pay bills without examination, and then find an error in your accounts of three million six hundred thousand francs. In the letters from Canada I see nothing but incessant speculation in provisions and goods, which are sold to the King for ten times more than they cost in France. For the last time, I exhort you to give these things your serious attention, for they will not escape from mine.”
²

“I write, Monsieur, to answer your last two letters, in which you tell me that instead of sixteen millions, your drafts on the treasury for 1758 will reach twenty-four millions, and that this year they will rise to from thirty-one to thirty-three millions. It seems, then, that there are no bounds to the expenses of Canada. They double almost every year, while you seem to give yourself no concern except to get them paid. Do you suppose that I can advise the King to approve such an administration? or do you think that you can take the immense sum of thirty-three millions out of the royal treasury by merely assuring me that you have signed drafts for it? This, too, for expenses incurred irregularly, often needlessly, always wastefully; which make the fortune of everybody who has the least hand in them, and about which you know so little that after reporting them at sixteen millions, you find two months after that they will reach twenty-four. You are accused of having given the furnishing of provisions to one man, who, under the name of commissary-general, has set what prices he pleased; of buying for the King at second or third hand what you might have got from the producer at half the price; of having in this and other ways made the fortunes of persons connected with you; and of living in splendor in the midst of a public misery, which all the letters from the colony agree in ascribing to bad administration, and in charging M. de Vaudreuil with weakness in not preventing.”
³

These drastic utterances seem to have been partly due to a letter written by Montcalm in cipher to the Maréchal de Belleisle, then minister of war. It painted the deplorable condition of Canada, and exposed without reserve the peculations and robberies of those intrusted with its interests. “It seems,” said the General, “as if they were all hastening to make their fortunes before the loss of the colony; which many of them perhaps desire as a veil to their conduct.” He gives among other cases that of Le Mercier, chief of Canadian artillery, who had come to Canada as a private soldier twenty years before, and had so prospered on fraudulent contracts that he would soon be worth nearly a million. “I have often,” continues Montcalm, “spoken of these expenditures to M. de Vaudreuil and M. Bigot; and each throws the blame on the other.”
¹
And yet at the same time Vaudreuil was assuring the Minister that Bigot was without blame.

Some two months before Montcalm wrote this letter, the Minister, Berryer, sent a despatch to the Governor and Intendant which filled them with ire and mortification. It ordered them to do nothing without consulting the general of the French regulars, not only in matters of war, but in all matters of administration touching the defence and preservation of the colony. A plainer proof of confidence on one hand and distrust on the other could not have been given.
²

One Querdisien-Tremais was sent from Bordeaux as an agent of Government to make investigation. He played the part of detective, wormed himself into the secrets of the confederates, and after six months of patient inquisition traced out four distinct combinations for public plunder. Explicit orders were now given to Bigot, who, seeing no other escape, broke with Cadet, and made him disgorge two millions of stolen money. The Commissary-General and his partners became so terrified that they afterwards gave up nearly seven millions more.
³
Stormy events followed, and the culprits found shelter for a time amid the tumults of war. Peculation did not cease, but a day of reckoning was at hand.

N
OTE
.—The printed documents of the trial of Bigot and the other peculators include the defence of Bigot, of which the first part occupies 303 quarto pages, and the second part 764. Among the other papers are the arguments for Péan, Varin, Saint-Blin, Boishébert, Martel, Joncaire-Chabert, and several more, along with the elaborate
Jugement rendu,
the
Requêtes du Procureur-Général,
the
Réponse aux Mémoires de M. Bigot et du Sieur Péan,
etc., forming together five quarto volumes, all of which I have carefully examined. These are in the Library of Harvard University. There is another set, also of five volumes, in the Library of the Historical Society of Quebec, containing most of the papers just mentioned, and, bound with them, various others in manuscript, among which are documents in defence of Vaudreuil (printed in part), Estèbe, Corpron, Penisseault, Maurin, and Bréard. I have examined this collection also. The manuscript
Ordres du Roy et Dépéches des Ministres,
1751-1760, as well as the letters of Vaudreuil, Bougainville, Daine, Doreil, and Montcalm throw much light on the maladministration of the time; as do many contemporary documents, notably those entitled
Mémoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie, État présent du Canada,
and
Mémoire sur le Canada
(Archives Nationales). The remarkable anonymous work printed by the Historical Society of Quebec under the title
Mémoires sur le Canada depuis
1749
jusqu’à
1760, is full of curious matter concerning Bigot and his associates which squares well with other evidence. This is the source from which Smith, in his
History of Canada
(Quebec, 1815), drew most of his information on the subject. A manuscript which seems to be the original draft of this valuable document was preserved at the Bastille, and, with other papers, was thrown into the street when that castle was destroyed. They were gathered up, and afterwards bought by a Russian named Dubrowski, who carried them to St. Petersburg. Lord Dufferin, when minister there, procured a copy of the manuscript in question, which is now in the keeping of Abbé H. Verreau at Montreal, to whose kindness I owe the opportunity of examining it. In substance it differs little from the printed work, though the language and the arrangement often vary from it. The author, whoever he may have been, was deeply versed in Canadian affairs of the time, and though often caustic, is generally trustworthy.