whole country was infected.  Mgr. of Petraea was admirable in his devotion; he hardly left the hospital at all, and constituted himself the nurse of all these unfortunates, making their beds and giving them the most attentive care.  “He is continually at the hospital,” wrote Mother Mary of the Incarnation, “in order to help the sick and to make their beds.  We do what we can to prevent him and to shield his health, but no eloquence can dissuade him from these acts of self-abasement.”

In the spring of the year 1662, Mgr. de Laval rented for his own use an old house situated on the site of the present parochial residence at Quebec, and it was there that, with the three other priests who then composed his episcopal court, he edified all the colonists by the simplicity of a cenobitic life.  He had been at first the guest of the Jesuit Fathers, was later sheltered by the Sisters of the Hotel-Dieu, and subsequently lodged with the Ursulines.  At this period it was indeed incumbent upon him to adapt himself to circumstances; nor did these modest conditions displease the former pupil of M. de Bernieres, since, as Latour bears witness, “he always complained that people did too much for him; he showed a distaste for all that was too daintily prepared, and affected, on the contrary, a sort of avidity for coarser fare.”  Mother Mary of the Incarnation wrote:  “He lives like a holy man and an apostle; his life is so exemplary that he commands the admiration of the country.  He gives everything away and lives like a pauper, and one may well say that he has the very spirit of poverty.  He practises this poverty in his house, in his manner of living, and in the matter of furniture and servants; for he has but one gardener, whom he lends to poor people when they have need of him, and a valet who formerly served M. de Bernieres.”

But if the reverend prelate was modest and simple in his personal tastes, he became inflexible when he thought it his duty to maintain the rights of the Church.  And he watched over these rights with the more circumspection since he was the first bishop installed in the colony, and was unwilling to allow abuses to be planted there, which later it would be very difficult, not to say impossible, to uproot.  Hence the continual friction between him and the governor-general, d’Argenson, on questions of precedence and etiquette.  Some of these disputes would seem to us childish to-day if even such a writer as Parkman did not put us on our guard against a premature judgment.[1] “The disputes in question,” writes Parkman, “though of a nature to provoke a smile on irreverent lips, were by no means so puerile as they appear.  It is difficult in a modern democratic society to conceive the substantial importance of the signs and symbols of dignity and authority, at a time and among a people where they were adjusted with the most scrupulous precision, and accepted by all classes as exponents of relative degrees in the social and political scale.  Whether the bishop or the governor should sit in the higher seat at table thus became a political question, for it defined to the popular understanding the position of Church and State in their relations to government.”