Never was colony founded under more pious auspices; for some time past the Recollects had been zealously laboring for the conversion of unbelievers; seconded by the Jesuits, who were before long to remain sole masters of the soil, they found themselves sufficiently powerful to forbid the Protestant sailors certain favorite exercises of their worship:  “At last it was agreed that they should not chant the psalms,” says Champlain, “but that they should assemble to make their prayers.”  A hand more powerful than that of Madame de Guercheville or of the Jesuits was about to take the direction of the affairs of the colony as well as of France:  Cardinal Richelieu had become premier minister.

The blind gropings and intestine struggles of the rival possessors of monopolies were soon succeeded by united action.  Richelieu favored commerce, and did not disdain to apply thereto the resources of his great and fertile mind.  In 1627 he put himself at the head of a company of a hundred associates, on which the king conferred the possession as well as the government of New France, together with the commercial monopoly and freedom from all taxes for fifteen years.  The colonists were to be French and Catholics; Huguenots were excluded:  they alone had till then manifested any tendency towards emigration; the attempts at colonization in America were due to their efforts:  less liberal in New France than he had lately been in Europe, the cardinal thus enlisted in the service of the foreigner all the adventurous spirits and the bold explorers amongst the French Protestants, at the very moment when the English Puritans, driven from their country by the narrow and meddlesome policy of James I., were dropping anchor at the foot of Plymouth Rock., and were founding, in the name of religious liberty, a new Protestant England, the rival ere long of that New France which was Catholic and absolutist.

Champlain had died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635, after twenty-seven years’ efforts and sufferings in the service of the nascent colony.  Bold and enterprising, endowed with indomitable perseverance and rare practical faculties, an explorer of distant forests, an intrepid negotiator with the savage tribes, a wise and patient administrator, indulgent towards all, in spite of his ardent devotion, Samuel de Champlain had presented the rare intermixture of the heroic qualities of past times with the zeal for science and the practical talents of modern ages; he was replaced in his government by a knight of Malta, M. de Montmagny.  Quebec had a seminary, a hospital, and a convent, before it possessed a population.

The foundation of Montreal was still more exclusively religious.  The accounts of the Jesuits had inflamed pious souls with a noble emulation; a Montreal association was formed, under the direction of M. Olier, founder of St. Sulpice.  The first expedition was placed under the command of a valiant gentleman, Paul de Maisonneuve, and of a certain Mademoiselle Mance, belonging to the middle class of Nogent-le-Roi, who was not yet a nun, but who was destined to become the foundress of the hospital-sisters of Ville-Marie, the name which the religious zeal of the explorers intended for the new colony of Montreal.