lic
stake, then led to the door of the church, there on his knees to ask
pardon of God and the King. For approving of the execution of Charles
I. by his English subjects, one Paul Dupuy was held to have libelled
the monarchy and to have encouraged sedition. He was condemned to be
dragged from prison by the public executioner, led in his shirt, with
a rope about his neck and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the
fort, there to beg pardon of the King; thence down Mountain Hill to
the pillory of Lower Town to be branded on the cheek with a
fleur-de-lis, and set in the stocks. Poor Dupuy's crime was not yet
expiated, for, according to the remainder of the sentence, he was to
be "led back to prison and put in irons till the information against
him shall be completed."[9] Convicts and felons were sometimes
tortured before being strangled. The execution usually took
place at _Buttes-a-Neveu_, a little hillock on the Plains of
Abraham,--afterwards to become more justly celebrated and less
notorious,--and the dead body, enclosed in an iron cage, was left
hanging for months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children
and a gruesome warning to evildoers.

[Footnote 8: _Edit du Roy contre les Jureurs et Blasphemateurs_,
1666.]

[Footnote 9: _Jugements et Deliberations du Conseil Superieur_.]

[Illustration: NEW PALACE GATE]

The people of Quebec were regularly apprised of the laws under which
they lived. On Sundays after Mass the ordinances of the Intendant were
read at the doors of the churches. These related to any number of
subjects--regulations of inns and markets, poaching, sale of brandy,
pew-rents, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes, domestic servants,
quarrelling in church, fast driving, the careful observance of feast
days, and so on.

Law-breakers were tried by the Superior Council, which met for that
purpose every Monday morning in the ante-chamber of the Governor's
apartment at Fort St. Louis. The Governor himself presided at the
Round Table, the bar of justice; on his right sat the bishop, and on
his left the Intendant, the councillors sitting in order of
appointment. Such at least was the _venue_ until about 1684, when the
old brewery which Talon had built in Lower Town on the bank of the
river St. Charles was transformed into a _Palais de Justice_. The
altered structure served also as a residence for the King's judicial
proxy, and was commonly known as the Palace of the Intendant.[10] It
was an imposing mixt