u have honoured me. I have blessed God that He has
preserved you for His glory and the good of the Church in Canada in a
period of deadly mortality; and I pray every day that He may preserve
you some years more for His service and the consolation of your old
friends and servants. I hope that you will maintain towards them to the
end your good favour and interest, and that those who would wish to make
them lose these may be unable to alter them. You will easily judge how
greatly I desire that our Fathers may merit the continuation of your
kindness, and may preserve a perfect union with the priests of your
seminary, by the sacrifice which I desire they should make to the
latter, in consideration of you, of the post of Tamarois, in spite of
all the reasons and the facility for preserving it to them...."

The mortality to which the reverend father alludes was the result of an
epidemic which carried off, in 1700, a great number of persons. Old men
in particular were stricken, and M. de Bernieres among others fell a
victim to the scourge. It is very probable that this affliction was
nothing less than the notorious influenza which, in these later years,
has cut down so many valuable lives throughout the world. The following
years were still more terrible for the town; smallpox carried off
one-fourth of the population of Quebec. If we add to these trials the
disaster of the two conflagrations which consumed the seminary, we shall
have the measure of the troubles which at this period overwhelmed the
city of Champlain. The seminary, begun in 1678, had just been barely
completed. It was a vast edifice of stone, of grandiose appearance; a
sun dial was set above a majestic door of two leaves, the approach to
which was a fine stairway of cut stone. "The building," wrote Frontenac
in 1679, "is very large and has four storeys, the walls are seven feet
thick, the cellars and pantries are vaulted, the lower windows have
embrasures, and the roof is of slate brought from France." On November
15th, 1701, the priests of the seminary had taken their pupils to St.
Michel, near Sillery, to a country house which belonged to them. About
one in the afternoon fire broke out in the seminary buildings. The
inhabitants hastened up from all directions to the spot and attempted
with the greatest energy to stay the progress of the flames. Idle
efforts! The larger and the smaller seminary, the priests' house, the
chapel barely completed, were all consumed,