Note 82 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

[“In the dual government of Canada the governor represented the king, and commanded the troops; while the intendant was charged with trade, finance, justice, and all other departments of civil administration. In former times the two functionaries usually quarrelled; but between Vaudreuil and Bigot there was perfect harmony” (Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, ii. 18). Foremost among the creatures of Bigot, serving his purposes of plunder, were Joseph Cadet, a butcher’s son whom Bigot had made commissary-general, and Marin, the Intendant’s deputy at Montreal, who repaid his principal by aspiring for his place. It was not till February, 1759, when Montcalm was given a hand in civil affairs, that the beginning of the end of this abandoned coterie appeared (see Ibid., ii. 37, for sources). Upon the interior history of Canada, from 1749 to 1760, there is a remarkable source in the Mémoires sur le Canada, which was printed and reprinted (1873) by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. It reached the committee from a kinsman of General Burton, of the army of General Amherst, who presumably received it from its anonymous author, and took it to England for printing. Smith, in his History of Canada (1815), had used a manuscript closely resembling it. Parkman refers to a manuscript in the hands of the Abbé Verreau of Montreal, the original of which he thinks may have been the first draught of these Mémoires. This manuscript was in the Bastille at the time of its destruction, and being thrown into the street, fell into the hands of a Russian and was carried to St. Petersburg. Lord Dufferin, while ambassador to Russia, procured the Verreau copy, which differs, says Parkman, little in substance from the printed Mémoires, though changed in language and arrangement in some parts (Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, ii. 37). The second volume of the first series of the Mémoires of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec also contains a paper, evidently written in 1736, and seemingly a report of the Intendant Hocquart to Cardinal Fleury, the minister of Louis XV. In the same collection is a report, Considérations sur l’état présent du Canada, dated October, 1758, which could hardly have been written by the Intendant Bigot, but is thought to have been the writing of a Querdisien-Trémais, who had been sent as commissioner to investigate the finances, and who deals out equal rebuke upon all the functionaries then in office.—Ed.]