to serve under him.  Madame de Vaudreuil wanted to put in her word.  I said:  ’Madame, saving due respect, permit me to have the honor to say that ladies ought not to talk war.’  She kept on.  I said:  ’Madame, saving due respect, permit me to have the honor to say that if Madame de Montcalm were here, and heard me talking war with Monsieur le Marquis de Vaudreuil, she would remain silent.’  This scene was in presence of eight officers, three of them belonging to the colony troops; and a pretty story they will make of it.”

These letters to Bourlamaque, in their detestable handwriting, small, cramped, confused, without stops, and sometimes almost indecipherable, betray the writer’s state of mind.  “I should like as well as anybody to be Marshal of France; but to buy the honor with the life I am leading here would be too much.”  He recounts the last news from Fort Duquesne, just before its fall.  “Mutiny among the Canadians, who want to come home; the officers busy with making money, and stealing like mandarins.  Their commander sets the example, and will come back with three or four hundred thousand francs; the pettiest ensign, who does not gamble, will have ten, twelve, or fifteen thousand.  The Indians don’t like Ligneris, who is drunk every day.  Forgive the confusion of this letter; I have not slept all night with thinking of the robberies and mismanagement and folly. Pauvre Roi, pauvre France, cara patria!” “Oh, when shall we get out of this country!  I think I would give half that I have to go home.  Pardon this digression to a melancholy man.  It is not that I have not still some remnants of gayety; but what would seem such in anybody else is melancholy for a Languedocian.  Burn my letter, and never doubt my attachment.”  “I shall always say, Happy he who is free from the proud yoke to which I am bound.  When shall I see my chateau of Candiac, my plantations, my chestnut grove, my oil-mill, my mulberry-trees? O bon Dieu!  Bon soir; brulez ma lettre."[677]

[Footnote 677:  The above extracts are from letters of 5 and 27 Nov. and 9 Dec. 1758, and 18 and 23 March, 1759.]

Never was dispute more untimely than that between these ill-matched colleagues.  The position of the colony was desperate.  Thus far the Canadians had never lost heart, but had obeyed with admirable alacrity the Governor’s call to arms, borne with patience the burdens and privations of the war, and submitted without revolt to the exactions and oppressions of Cadet and his crew; loyal to their native soil, loyal to their Church, loyal to the wretched government that crushed and belittled them.  When the able-bodied were ordered to the war, where four fifths of them were employed in the hard and tedious work of transportation, the women, boys and old men tilled the fields and raised a scanty harvest, which always might be, and sometimes was, taken from them in the name of the King.  Yet the least destitute among them were forced every winter to lodge soldiers in their houses, for each of whom they were paid fifteen france a month, in return for substance devoured and wives and daughters debauched.[678]