larly to try the bars of the
window, and search the wall as though he thought my devices might be
found there.

Scarrat and Flavelle, the guards at my door, set too high a price on
their favours, and they talked seldom, and then with brutal jests and
ribaldry, of matters in the town which were not vital to me. Yet once
or twice, from things they said, I came to know that all was not well
between Bigot and Doltaire on one hand, and Doltaire and the Governor
on the other. Doltaire had set the Governor and the Intendant scheming
against him because of his adherence to the cause of neither, and his
power to render the plans of either of no avail when he chose, as in my
case. Vaudreuil's vanity was injured, and besides, he counted Doltaire
too strong a friend of Bigot. Bigot, I doubted not, found in Madame
Cournal's liking for Doltaire all sorts of things of which he never
would have dreamed; for there is no such potent devilry in this world
as the jealousy of such a sort of man over a woman whose vanity and
cupidity are the springs of her affections. Doltaire's imprisonment in a
room of the Intendance was not so mysterious as suggestive. I foresaw a
strife, a complication of intrigues, and internal enmities which would
be (as they were) the ruin of New France. I saw, in imagination, the
English army at the gates of Quebec, and those who sat in the seats of
the mighty, sworn to personal enmities--Vaudreuil through vanity,
Bigot through cupidity, Doltaire by the innate malice of his
nature--sacrificing the country; the scarlet body of British power
moving down upon a dishonoured city, never to take its foot from that
sword of France which fell there on the soil of the New World.

But there was another factor in the situation which I have not dwelt on
before. Over a year earlier, when war was being carried into Prussia by
Austria and France, and against England, the ally of Prussia, the French
Minister of War, D'Argenson, had, by the grace of La Pompadour, sent
General the Marquis de Montcalm to Canada, to protect the colony with a
small army. From the first, Montcalm, fiery, impetuous, and honourable,
was at variance with Vaudreuil, who, though honest himself, had never
dared to make open stand against Bigot. When Montcalm came, practically
taking the military command out of the hands of the Governor, Vaudreuil
developed a singular jealous spirit against the General. It began to
express itself about the time I was thrown int