ack the army, was soon again, by consent of the British
government, in active service. Fortune smiled on him to the end. He died
a great noble and Marshal of France just before the Revolution of 1789;
but in that awful upheaval his widow and his two daughters perished
on the scaffold. Vaudreuil's shallow and vain incompetence did not go
unpunished. He was put on trial, accused of a share in the black frauds
which had helped to ruin Canada. The trial was his punishment. He
was acquitted of taking any share of the plunder and so drops out of
history. Bigot and his gang, on the other hand, were found guilty of
vast depredations. The former Intendant was for a time in the Bastille
and in the end was banished from France, after being forced to repay
great sums. We find echoes of the luxury of Quebec in the sale in France
of the rich plate which the rascal had acquired. There were, however,
other and even worse plunderers. They were tried and condemned chiefly
to return what they had stolen. We rather wonder that no expiatory
sacrifice on the scaffold was required of any of these knaves. Lally
Tollendal, who, as the French leader in India, had only failed and not
plundered, was sent to a cruel execution.

Under the terms of the surrender and of the final Treaty of Peace in
1763, civilians in Canada were given leave to return to France. Nearly
the whole of the official class and many of the large landowners, the
seigneurs, left the country. In Canada there remained a priesthood,
largely native, but soon to be recruited from France by the upheaval
of the Revolution, a few seigneurial families, natural leaders of their
race, a peasantry, exhausted by the long war but clinging tenaciously to
the soil, and a good many hardy pioneers of the forest, men skilled in
hunting and in the use of the axe. Out of these elements, amounting
in 1763 to little more than sixty thousand people, has come that
French-Canadian race in America now numbering perhaps three millions.
The race has scattered far. It is found in the mills of Massachusetts,
in the canebrakes of Louisiana, on the wide stretches of the prairie of
the Canadian West, but it has always kept intact its strong citadel
on the banks of the St. Lawrence. New France was, in reality, widely
separated in spirit from old France, before the new master in Canada
made the division permanent. The imagination of the Canadian peasant did
not wander across the ocean to France. He knew only the s