[Footnote 678:  Memoire sur le moyen d’entretenir 10,000 Hommes de Troupes dans les Colonies, 1759.]

No pains had been spared to keep up the courage of the people and feed them with flattering illusions.  When the partisan officer Boishebert was tried for peculation, his counsel met the charge by extolling the manner in which he had fulfilled the arduous duty of encouraging the Acadians, “putting on an air of triumph even in defeat; using threats, caresses, stratagems; painting our victories in vivid colors; hiding the strength and successes of the enemy; promising succors that did not and could not come; inventing plausible reasons why they did not come, and making new promises to set off the failure of the old; persuading a starved people to forget their misery; taking from some to give to others; and doing all this continually in the face of a superior enemy, that this country might be snatched from England and saved to France."[679] What Boishebert was doing in Acadia, Vaudreuil was doing on a larger scale in Canada.  By indefatigable lying, by exaggerating every success and covering over every reverse, he deceived the people and in some measure himself.  He had in abundance the Canadian gift of gasconade, and boasted to the Colonial Minister that one of his countrymen was a match for from three to ten Englishmen.  It is possible that he almost believed it; for the midnight surprise of defenceless families and the spreading of panics among scattered border settlements were inseparable from his idea of war.  Hence the high value he set on Indians, who in such work outdid the Canadians themselves.  Sustained by the intoxication of flattering falsehoods, and not doubting that the blunders and weakness of the first years of the war gave the measure of English efficiency, the colonists had never suspected that they could be subdued.

[Footnote 679:  Proces de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Memoire pour le Sieur de Boishebert.]

But now there was a change.  The reverses of the last campaign, hunger, weariness, and possibly some incipient sense of atrocious misgovernment, began to produce their effect; and some, especially in the towns, were heard to murmur that further resistance was useless.  The Canadians, though brave and patient, needed, like Frenchmen, the stimulus of success.  “The people are alarmed,” said the modest Governor, “and would lose courage if my firmness did not rekindle their zeal to serve the King."[680]

[Footnote 680:  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Avril, 1759.]

“Rapacity, folly, intrigue, falsehood, will soon ruin this colony which has cost the King so dear,” wrote Doreil to the Minister of War.  “We must not flatter ourselves with vain hope; Canada is lost if we do not have peace this winter.”  “It has been saved by miracle in these past three years; nothing but peace can save it now, in spite of all the efforts and the talents of M. de Montcalm."[681] Vaudreuil himself became thoroughly alarmed, and told the Court in the autumn of 1758 that food, arms, munitions, and everything else were fast failing, and that without immediate peace or heavy reinforcements all was lost.