[Illustration: BIENVILLE (Governor of Louisiana, 1732)]
To-day, walking down Palace Hill and turning near the bottom into the Rue St. Vallier, you will find yourself close to the site of the ancient intendancy, where the official ruin of New France began. Here it was that François Bigot, the evil genius of Quebec, held corrupt sway in the guise of a royal minister. Here stood, in mordant comment, the Palais de Justice, so wickedly profaned by the last of the intendants. Through several fires and two sieges of later generations parts of this ancient structure persisted in surviving. Only a few years ago the heavier timber still hanging together was called "The King's Wood-yard." But nothing now remains of it, and imagination only summons the haunting spirit of this creature of La Pompadour, whose mischievous influence lost Louis XV his colonial empire, and whose infamies sealed the fate of the Bourbons.
François Bigot arrived at Quebec in 1748, a year in which the fortunes of New France had reached so low an ebb that nothing but the most loyal administration might now save her. Even then a strong honest man might possibly have weathered the storm already lowering over this New World dominion; but, with pitiable perverseness, every trait in Bigot's character helped it on to ruin. In private life vain, selfish, heartless, extravagant to the point of folly; in public life mercenary and venal beyond shame--such were the characteristics of the man whom Louis's favourite chose to be civil administrator at Quebec, where the patriotic faith and labour of a gallant and high-hearted people were rewarded by plunder, mis-rule, and that neglect which gave them at last into the hands of the conqueror.
[Illustration: DE BOUGAINVILLE (General under Montcalm, 1759)]
On his arrival, the Intendant speedily surrounded himself by sycophants and knaves who joined him in the reckless pursuit of pleasure, and became ready instruments to further his darker designs. A man of ability, adroitness, and culture, Bigot might have won public favour, but his habits instantly estranged the better people of the colony. The _honnêtes gens_, a party which included the great Montcalm, the brave Bougainville, La Corne de St. Luc, M. de Lévis, and M. de Saint-Ours, would have nothing to do with him, and he was left in the hands of servile flatterers, ready enough to serve him. Deschenaux, his _fidus Achates_, was a cobbler's son, whom experience alone had educated and fate and unscrupulousness had advanced. Cadet, his commissary-general, was the gross son of a butcher, and had spent his dissatisfied youth in the pasture-fields of Charlesbourg. Hughes Péan was the town major of Quebec, but his chief hold on Bigot lay in the beauty of his wife, the charming Angélique des Meloises. This woman, whose beauty, wit, and _diablerie_ are a subject of popular tradition, possessed a fascination which gave her an influence at the intendancy analogous to that exerted at Versailles by her notorious contemporary, La Pompadour.