Ah, but a man was a man then; there were no mythic gods to guide
or to thwart him; and he rose or fell according to the might of his arm
and the length of his sword. Hate sought no flimsy pretexts, but came
forth boldly; love entered the lists neither with caution nor with
mental reservation; and favor, though inconsiderate as ever, was not
niggard with her largess. Truly the mariner had not to draw on his
imagination; the age of which he was a picturesque particle was a brave
and gallant one: an Odyssey indeed, composed of Richelieus, sons and
grandsons of the great Henri, Buckinghams, Stuarts, Cromwells,
Mazarins, and Monks; Maries de Medicis, Annes of Austria, Mesdames de
Longueville; of Royalists, Frondeurs, and Commonwealth; of Catholics,
Huguenots, and Puritans. Some were dead, it is true; but never a great
ship passes without leaving a turbulent wake. And there, in the West,
rising serenely above all these tangles of civil wars and political
intrigues, was the splendid star of New France. Happy and envied was
the mariner who could tell of its vast riches, of its endless forests,
of its cruel brown savages, of its mighty rivers and freshwater seas.

New France! How many a ruined gamester, hearing these words, lifted
his head, the fires of hope lighting anew in his burnt-out eyes? How
many a fallen house looked longingly toward this promised land? New
France! Was not the name itself Fortune's earnest, her pledge of
treasures lightly to be won? The gamester went to his garret to dream
of golden dice, the fallen noble of rehabilitated castles, the peasant
of freedom and liberty. Even the solemn monk, tossing on his pallet,
pierced with his gaze the grey walls of his monastery, annihilated the
space between him and the fruitful wilderness, and saw in fancy the
building of great cities and cathedrals and a glittering miter on his
own tonsured head.

In that day there was situate in the Rue du Palais, south of the
harbor, an inn which was the delight of all those mariners whose
palates were still unimpaired by the brine of the seven seas, and whose
purses spoke well of the hazards of chance. Erected at the time when
Henri II and Diane de Poitiers turned the sober city into one of
licentious dalliance, it had cheered the wayfarer during four
generations. It was three stories high, constructed of stone, gabled
and balconied, with a roof which resembled an assortment of fanciful
noses. Here and there the b