which is said to
have cost them a hundred and eighty thousand men.

Three years later Frontenac received the appointment of Governor and
Lieutenant-General for the King in all New France. "He was," says
Saint-Simon, "a man of excellent parts, living much in society, and
completely ruined. He found it hard to bear the imperious temper of
his wife and he was given the government of Canada to deliver him from
her, and afford him some means of living." Certain scandalous songs of
the day assign a different motive for his appointment. Louis XIV was
enamored of Madame de Montespan. She had once smiled upon Frontenac;
and it is said that the jealous King gladly embraced the opportunity
of removing from his presence and from hers a lover who had
forestalled him.

Frontenac's wife had no thought of following him across the sea, a
more congenial life awaiting her at home....

Frontenac was fifty-two years old when he landed at Quebec. If time
had done little to cure his many faults, it had done nothing to weaken
the springs of his unconquerable vitality. In his ripe middle age he
was as keen, fiery, and perversely headstrong as when he quarreled
with Prefontaine in the hall at St. Fargeau.

Had nature disposed him to melancholy, there was much in his position
to awaken it. A man of courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of
a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the
earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the
splendors of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a
stern gray rock, haunted by somber priests, rugged merchants and
traders, blanketed Indians, and wild bushrangers. But Frontenac was a
man of action. He wasted no time in vain regrets, and set himself to
his work with the elastic vigor of youth. His first impressions had
been very favorable. When, as he sailed up the St. Lawrence, the basin
of Quebec opened before him, his imagination kindled with the grandeur
of the scene. "I never," he wrote, "saw anything more superb than the
position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future
capital of a great empire."

IV

THE DEATH OF ISAAC JOGUES[51]

(1646)

Late in the autumn a party of the Indians set forth on their yearly
deer-hunt, and Jogues was ordered to go with them. Shivering and
half-famished, he followed them through the chill November forest, and
shared their wild bivouac in the depths of the wintry desolation. The