After thirty years France at length grew tired of the incompetence of the Company and in 1663 made a radical change.  The great Colbert was already the guiding spirit in France and colonial plans he made his special care.  Louis XIV too was already dreaming of a great over-sea Empire.  The first step was to take over from the trading Company the direct government of the colony.  The next was to get the right men to do the work in New France.  An excellent start was made when, in 1665, Jean Talon was sent out to Canada as Intendant.  He had a genius for organization.  Though in rank below the Governor he, with the title of Intendant, did the real work of ruling; the Governor discharged its ceremonial functions.  Talon had a policy.  He wished to colonize, to develop industry, to promote agriculture.  In his capacious brain new and progressive ideas were working.  He brought in soldiers who became settlers, among them the first real seigneur of Malbaie.  An adequate military force, the Carignan regiment, came out from France to awe into submission the aggressive Iroquois, who long had made Montreal, and even Quebec itself, unsafe by their sudden and blood-thirsty attacks.  Travelling by canoe and batteau the regiment went from Quebec up the whole length of the St. Lawrence, landed on the south shore of Lake Ontario, and marched into the Iroquois country.  With amazement and terror, those arrogant savages saw winding along their forest paths the glittering array of France.  Some of their villages were laid low by fire.  The French regiment had accomplished its task; with no spirit left the Iroquois made peace.

A good many officers of the Carignan regiment, with but slender prospects in France, decided to stay in Canada and to this day their names—­Chambly, Vercheres, Longueuil, Sorel, Berthier and others are conspicuous in the geography of the Province of Quebec.  Malbaie was granted to a soldier of fortune, the Sieur de Comporte, who came to Canada at this time, but apparently was not an officer of the Carignan Regiment.  His outlook at Malbaie cannot have been considered promising, for Pierre Boucher, who in 1664 published an interesting account of New France, declared the whole region between Baie St. Paul and the Saguenay to be so rugged and mountainous as to make it unfit for civilized habitation.  But Philippe Gaultier, Sieur de Comporte, was of the right material to be a good colonist.  Born in 1641 he was twenty-four years of age when he came to Canada.  Already he had had some stirring adventures, one of which might well have proved grimly fatal had he not found a refuge across the sea.  Comporte, then serving as a volunteer in a Company of Infantry led by his uncle, La Fouille, was involved in one of the bloody brawls of the time that Richelieu had made such stern efforts to suppress.  The Company was in garrison at La Motte-Saint-Heray in Poitou.  On July 9th, 1665, one of its members, Lanoraye, came in with the tale of an insult offered to the company by a civilian