ead that the ruffler was
furnishing sport for the Bostonnais. So it was with a beating heart but
no apprehension that he alighted from the caleche with his friends, and
went into the palace to meet the Intendant.

The interior of the great building was a singular mixture of barbaric
and civilized splendor, the American forests and the factories of France
alike being drawn upon for its furnishings. The finest of silken
tapestries and the rarest of furs often hung close together. Beyond the
anterooms was a large hall in which the chosen guests danced while the
people might look on from galleries that surrounded it. These people,
who were not so good as the guests, could dance as much as they pleased
in a second hall set aside exclusively for their use. In another and
more secluded but large room all kinds of games of chance to which Bigot
and his followers were devoted were in progress. In the huge dining-room
the table was set for forty persons, the usual number, until the war
came, when it was reduced to twenty, and Bigot gave a dinner there
nearly every evening, unless he was absent from Quebec.

Robert felt as soon as he entered the palace that he had come into a
strange, new, exotic atmosphere, likely to prove intoxicating to the
young, and he remembered the hunter's words of warning. Yet his spirit
responded at once to the splendor and the call of a gayer and more
gorgeous society than any he had ever known. Wealth and great houses
existed even then in New York and upon occasion their owners made full
use of both, but there was a restraint about the Americans, the English
and the Dutch. Their display was often heavy and always decorous, and in
Quebec he felt for the first time the heedless gayety of the French,
when the Bourbon monarchy had passed its full bloom, and already was in
its brilliant decay. Truly, they could have carved over the doorway,
"Leave all fear and sorrow behind, ye who enter here."

There were lights everywhere, flaming from tall silver candlesticks, and
uniforms, mostly in white and silver, or white with black or violet
facings, were thick in the rooms. Ladies, too, were present, in silk or
satin billowing in many a fold, their powdered hair rolled high in the
style made fashionable by Madame Jeanne Poisson de Pompadour. From an
inner room came the music of a band softly playing French songs or airs
from the Florentine opera. The air was charged with odors of perfume.

It _was_ intoxicating