The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the last.
As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for years.
When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his côte down the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of him no more.
Jacques and Louise remained in possession of St. Bernard, and on that island their stout-legged children played, or learned contented thrift, or followed their father in his sowing; their delight being the real priest who came with his glowing altar to teach them religion, and their terror the pretended priest in the top apartment of their house. For Mademoiselle de Granville lived many years, so indulged in her humors that the story went among neighboring seigniories that she had an insane brother whom she imprisoned on St. Bernard out of tenderness towards him, instead of sending him to some asylum in France.[13]
Rather because her memory was a spot of tenderness within themselves always on the point of bleeding, than because of their ignorant dread of law’s intermeddling, Jacques and Louise never told about Dollard’s bride. The marriage had taken place in Quebec. Dollier de Casson, who celebrated it, made no record of the fact in connection with his account of Dollard’s exploit. The jealousies and bickerings then rising high between Quebec and Montreal clouded or misrepresented or suppressed many a transaction. And honest Dollier de Casson, who no doubt learned by priestly methods the fate of the bride, may have seen fit to withhold the luster of her devotion from the name of Laval, since the bishop pressed no inquiries after his impulsive young relative. News stretched slowly to and from France then. Her name dropped out of all records, except the notarial one of her marriage, and a faint old clew which an obscure scribe has left embodying a scarcely credited tale told by the Huron deserters. Without monument, what was once her beautiful body has become grass, flowers, clear air, beside the hoarse rapids. She died, as many a woman has died, silently crowning the deed done by a man, and in her finer immortality can perhaps smile at being forgotten, since it is not by him.