Robert felt his breath coming a little more quickly, and in the dusk, Willet did not see the glow that appeared in his eyes.  They might try to “bait the bear” but he would be ready.  The new powers that he had found in himself not only accepted the challenge, but craved it.  He was conscious that he was not deficient in wit and quickness himself, and if any follower of Francois Bigot, or if the great Bigot himself tried to make sport of him he might find instead that the ruffler was furnishing sport for the Bostonnais.  So it was with a beating heart but no apprehension that he alighted from the caleche with his friends, and went into the palace to meet the Intendant.

The interior of the great building was a singular mixture of barbaric and civilized splendor, the American forests and the factories of France alike being drawn upon for its furnishings.  The finest of silken tapestries and the rarest of furs often hung close together.  Beyond the anterooms was a large hall in which the chosen guests danced while the people might look on from galleries that surrounded it.  These people, who were not so good as the guests, could dance as much as they pleased in a second hall set aside exclusively for their use.  In another and more secluded but large room all kinds of games of chance to which Bigot and his followers were devoted were in progress.  In the huge dining-room the table was set for forty persons, the usual number, until the war came, when it was reduced to twenty, and Bigot gave a dinner there nearly every evening, unless he was absent from Quebec.

Robert felt as soon as he entered the palace that he had come into a strange, new, exotic atmosphere, likely to prove intoxicating to the young, and he remembered the hunter’s words of warning.  Yet his spirit responded at once to the splendor and the call of a gayer and more gorgeous society than any he had ever known.  Wealth and great houses existed even then in New York and upon occasion their owners made full use of both, but there was a restraint about the Americans, the English and the Dutch.  Their display was often heavy and always decorous, and in Quebec he felt for the first time the heedless gayety of the French, when the Bourbon monarchy had passed its full bloom, and already was in its brilliant decay.  Truly, they could have carved over the doorway, “Leave all fear and sorrow behind, ye who enter here.”

There were lights everywhere, flaming from tall silver candlesticks, and uniforms, mostly in white and silver, or white with black or violet facings, were thick in the rooms.  Ladies, too, were present, in silk or satin billowing in many a fold, their powdered hair rolled high in the style made fashionable by Madame Jeanne Poisson de Pompadour.  From an inner room came the music of a band softly playing French songs or airs from the Florentine opera.  The air was charged with odors of perfume.

It was intoxicating, and yet it was pleasant.  No, “pleasant” was not the word, it was alluring, it played upon the senses, it threw a glow over the rooms and the people, and the youth saw everything through a tawny mist that heightened and deepened the colors.  He was glad that he had come.  Nor was “glad” the word either.  Seeing what he now saw and knowing what he now knew, he would have blamed himself bitterly had he stayed away.