[Footnote 556:  Considerations sur l’Etat present du Canada.]

[Footnote 557:  Memoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie.  Bougainville, Memoire sur l’Etat de la Nouvelle France.]

[Footnote 558:  Bougainville, Journal.]

The transportation of military stores gave another opportunity of plunder.  The contractor would procure from the Governor or the local commandant an order requiring the inhabitants to serve him as boatmen, drivers, or porters, under a promise of exemption that year from duty as soldiers.  This saved him his chief item of expense, and the profits of his contract rose in proportion.

A contagion of knavery ran through the official life of the colony; and to resist it demanded no common share of moral robustness.  The officers of the troops of the line were not much within its influence; but those of the militia and colony regulars, whether of French or Canadian birth, shared the corruption of the civil service.  Seventeen of them, including six chevaliers of St. Louis and eight commandants of forts, were afterwards arraigned for fraud and malversation, though some of the number were acquitted.  Bougainville gives the names of four other Canadian officers as honorable exceptions to the general demoralization,—­Benoit, Repentigny, Laine, and Le Borgne; “not enough,” he observes, “to save Sodom.”

Conspicuous among these military thieves was Major Pean, whose qualities as a soldier have been questioned, but who nevertheless had shown almost as much vigor in serving the King during the Ohio campaign of 1753 as he afterwards displayed effrontery in cheating him.  “Le petit Pean” had married a young wife, Mademoiselle Desmeloizes, Canadian like himself, well born, and famed for beauty, vivacity, and wit.  Bigot, who was near sixty, became her accepted lover; and the fortune of Pean was made.  His first success seems to have taken him by surprise.  He had bought as a speculation a large quantity of grain, with money of the King lent him by the Intendant.  Bigot, officially omnipotent, then issued an order raising the commodity to a price far above that paid by Pean, who thus made a profit of fifty thousand crowns.[559] A few years later his wealth was estimated at from two to four million francs.  Madame Pean became a power in Canada, the dispenser of favors and offices; and all who sought opportunity to rob the King hastened to pay her their court.  Pean, jilted by his own wife, made prosperous love to the wife of his partner, Penisseault; who, though the daughter of a Montreal tradesman, had the air of a woman of rank, and presided with dignity and grace at a hospitable board where were gathered the clerks of Cadet and other lesser lights of the administrative hierarchy.  It was often honored by the presence of the Chevalier de Levis, who, captivated by the charms of the hostess, condescended to a society which his friends condemned as unworthy of his station.  He succeeded Pean in the graces of Madame Penisseault, and after the war took her with him to France; while the aggrieved husband found consolation in the wives of the small functionaries under his orders.[560]