“Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir!” now became the war-cry of his incensed comrades.
The hunt for the leaders began in earnest. Papineau, a lawyer of some repute, was then a man of about forty-eight years, of good average height, inclined to corpulency, certainly not the figure to imagine under small haystacks or at full length in ditches. His face was strongly marked with those features which proclaim a Jewish ancestor somewhere; dark very arched eyebrows, hair nearly black, the eye dark, quick and penetrating; an exterior of determination and force in keeping with the well-stored mind, conversational power, cultivation and gentlemanly address which marked the man. His eloquence had passed into a proverb. An unusually precocious Canadian child always had said of it, “C’est un Papineau.”
His followers had every excuse for their worship, and thought him equal, perhaps superior, to Washington. His father, “le père des patriotes,” who had not let his patriotism go the length of severance from Britain, frowned on the more advanced son, still keeping to feudal tenure and the Catholic religion as the priests taught. The Code Papineau junior had not much feudalism in it, and politics may be said to have been the son’s religion.
So also did Robert Nelson say that feudal nonsense was abolished forever, and the Church of not much more account. He and his brother Wolfred had their own interpretation of their relative’s saying that “England expects every man to do his duty.” Mrs. Wolfred Nelson’s grandfather, le Marquis de Fleurimont, was one of the French officers wounded in September, 1759; afterwards he took the oath of allegiance, and was again wounded in the repulse of Montgomery before Quebec. These Frenchified Englishmen seem to have been born for something better than treason, stratagem and spoils; they took none of the last and found the first two meant prison and expatriation. Wolfred Nelson was by far the best looking of the leaders, tall, with handsome features, and had moreover a brave and manly disposition. His proclamations were wonderfully worded, his Athanasian rendering declaring the Canadian Republic to be “one and indivisible.” Colonel Gore sought to take these prominent men, having heard that they were secreted at St. Hyacinthe. Accordingly a young officer and a picked party were told off, their sleighs without bells being timed to arrive after dark at the house where the leaders were supposed to be. The guide brought the sleighs there somewhere near midnight, and they found the usual comfortable French quarters, solid barns with yards and outbuildings. A chain of sentries was posted round the place and through the buildings; a knock brought madame, a most charming old lady, to the window; they were very welcome, and she showed them not only over the house, but she kept them seeking in many corners they would not have found for themselves, in cellars where stores of winter vegetables and fruit lay in rows, cupboards full of treasures, in cavernous depths beyond rafters which promised a reward for search, but only revealed much bacon and ham, flitches “the manifest product of a high-caste gramnivorous pig.” But Papineau, on the watch, had had time to get to a deep ditch which ran back into the fields, whence he made his way to a small bush near by. From there he escaped to the States; but Nelson was taken and lodged in Kingston gaol. Years afterwards, at an evening party, after his return from France, the charming, white-haired Papineau said to a gentleman who had been the soldier so prominent in the search, “I hear you are the officer who came to call on me at Madame ----’s, in ’37. You little know how nearly you took me.... You did your work admirably, for, though we were on the watch, I had only just time to run away down that wet ditch before your sentries met.” Among the effects then seized were many papers of value to the captors, one of them a letter from Papineau, finishing, “Continue to push it (the rebellion) as vigorously as you can,” and another, a schoolboy letter from Nelson’s son, a lad of fourteen, somewhat after the manner of Tom Sawyer: “I wish that it (the rebellion) will do well and without any noise, which I hate very much--except with the other side. I believe that the prediction of that man Bourgeoi will be accomplished, which is that the province will be all covered with blood and dead bodies.” A Montreal newspaper deplores “the fattening of Nelson for the gallows,” and considered that “death on the scaffold was the best example such a father could give to such a child.”