in the town.  Lanoraye had been marching through the streets with a drum beating, in order to secure recruits, when one Bonneau, the local judge, attacked him, and took away the drum.  Lanoraye rushed to arouse his fellow soldiers.  When Comporte and half a dozen other hot-heads had listened to his tale, they cried with one voice, “Let us go and demand the drum.  He must give it up.”  So at eight or nine o’clock at night they set out to look for Bonneau.  They came upon him unexpectedly in the streets of the town.  He was accompanied by seven or eight persons with whom he had supped and all were armed with swords, pistols or other weapons.  When Lanoraye demanded the drum, Bonneau was defiant and told him to go away or he should chastise him.  The inevitable fight followed.  Comporte, whose own account we have, says that it lasted some time and the results were fatal.  Comporte declares that he himself struck no blows but the fact remains that two of Bonneau’s party were so severely wounded that they died.  Comporte and the rest of the Company soon went to Canada.  In their absence he and others were sentenced to death.

In Canada he appears to have behaved himself.  In France a simple volunteer, in New France he became an important citizen.  Talon trusted him and made him Quarter-Master-General.  In 1672 Comporte received an enormous grant of land stretching along the St. Lawrence from Cap aux Oies to Cap a l’Aigle, a distance of some eighteen miles, including Malbaie and a good deal more.  About the same time he married Marie Bazire, daughter of one of the chief merchants in the colony, by whom he had a numerous family.  So eminently respectable was he that we find him churchwarden at Quebec.  In time he retired from trade, in which he had engaged, and became a judge of the newly established Court of the Prevote at Quebec.  This was not doing badly for a man under sentence of death.  But over him still hung this affair in France and, in 1680, he petitioned the King to have the sentence annulled.  For this petition he secured the support of the families of the men killed in the quarrel fifteen years earlier.  In 1681 Louis XIV’s pardon was registered with solemn ceremonial at Quebec, and at last Comporte was no longer an outlaw.

He had plans to settle his great fief.  Working in his brain no doubt were dreams of a feudal domain, of a seigniorial chateau looking out across the great river, of respectful tenants paying annual dues to their lord in labour, kind, and money, of a parish church in which over the seigniorial pew should be displayed his coat of arms.  But if these pictures inspired his fancy and cheered his spirit, they were never to become realities.  In 1687 he was, apparently, in need of money, and he resolved to sell two-thirds of his interest in the seigniory of Malbaie.  The price was a pitiful 1000 livres, or some $200, and the purchasers were Francois Hazeur, Pierre Soumande and Louis Marchand of Quebec, who were henceforth