the work of the regiment had been finished, Talon suggested to the King that it be disbanded in Canada, that the officers be persuaded to accept seigneuries, and that the soldiers be given lands within the estates of their officers.  The Grand Monarque not only assented but promised a liberal money bonus to all who would remain.  Accordingly, more than twenty officers, chiefly captains or lieutenants, and nearly four hundred men, agreed to stay in New France under these arrangements.

Here was an experiment in the system of imperial Rome repeated in the New World.  When the empire of the Caesars was beginning to give way before the oncoming Goths and Huns, the practice of disbanding the legions on the frontier so that they might settle there and form an iron ring against the invaders was adopted and served its purpose for a time.  It was from these praedia militaria that Talon got the idea which he now transmitted to the French King with the suggestion that “the practice of these sagacious and warlike Romans might be advantageously followed in a land which, being so far away from its sovereign, must trust for existence to the strength, of its own arms.”  In keeping with the same precedent, Talon located the military seigneuries in that section of the colony where they would be most useful as a barrier against the enemy; that is to say, he placed them in the colony’s most vulnerable region.  This was the area along the Richelieu from Lake Champlain to its confluence with the St. Lawrence at Sorel.  It was by this route that the Mohawks had already come more than once on their errands of massacre, and it was by this portal that the English were likely to come if they should ever attempt to overwhelm New France by an overland assault.  The region of the Richelieu was therefore made as strong against incursion as this colonizing measure could make it.

All who took lands in this region, whether seigneurs or habitants, were to assemble in arms at the royal call.  Their uniforms and muskets they kept for service, and never during subsequent years was such a call without response.  These military settlers and their sons after them were only too ready to rally around the royal oriflamme at any opportunity.  It was from the armed seigneuries of the Richelieu that Hertel de Rouville, St. Ours, and others quietly slipped forth and leaped with all the advantage of surprise upon the lonely hamlets of outlying Massachusetts or New York.  How the English feared these gentilshommes let their own records tell, for there these French colonials put many a streak of blood and fire.

But not all of the seigneuries were settled in this way, and it was well for the best interests of the colony that they were not.  Too often the good soldier made only an indifferent yeoman.  First in war, he was last in peace.  The task of hammering spears into ploughshares and swords into pruning-hooks was not altogether to his liking.  Most of the officers gradually grew tired of their role as gentlemen of the wilderness, and eventually sold or mortgaged their seigneuries and made their way back to France.  Many of the soldiers succumbed to the lure of the western fur traffic and became coureurs-de-bois.  But many others stuck valiantly to the soil, and today their descendants by the thousand possess this fertile land.