Claude Allouez, who blessed the ceremony.  M. Colbert sent instructions to M. Talon, the intendant of New France, to grant titles of nobility to Groseillers’ nephew in order to keep him in the country.[12] On the Saguenay was a Jesuit, Charles Albanel, loyal to the French and of English birth, whose devotion to the Indians during the small-pox scourge of 1670 had given him unbounded influence.  Talon, the intendant of New France, was keen to retrieve in the North what D’Argenson’s injustice had lost.  Who could be better qualified to go overland to Hudson Bay than the old missionary, loyal to France, of English birth, and beloved by the Indians?  Albanel was summoned to Quebec and gladly accepted the commission.  He chose for companions Saint-Simon and young Couture, the son of the famous guide to the Jesuits.  The company left Quebec on August 6, 1671, and secured a guide at Tadoussac.  Embarking in canoes, they ascended the shadowy canon of the Saguenay to Lake St. John.  On the 7th of September they left the forest of Lake St. John and mounted the current of a winding river, full of cataracts and rapids, toward Mistassini.  On this stream they met Indians who told them that two European vessels were on Hudson Bay.  The Indians showed Albanel tobacco which they had received from the English.

It seemed futile to go on a voyage of discovery where English were already in possession.  The priest sent one of the Frenchmen and two Indians back to Quebec for passports and instructions.  What the instructions were can only be guessed by subsequent developments.  The messengers left the depth of the forest on the 19th of September, and had returned from Quebec by the 10th of October.  Snow was falling.  The streams had frozen, and the Indians had gone into camp for the winter.  Going from wigwam to wigwam through the drifted forest.  Father Albanel passed the winter preaching to the savages.  Skins of the chase were laid on the wigwams.  Against the pelts, snow was banked to close up every chink.  Inside, the air was blue with smoke and the steam of the simmering kettle.  Indian hunters lay on the moss floor round the central fires.  Children and dogs crouched heterogeneously against the sloping tent walls.  Squaws plodded through the forest, setting traps and baiting the fish-lines that hung through airholes of the thick ice.  In these lodges Albanel wintered.  He was among strange Indians and suffered incredible hardships.  Where there was room, he, too, sat crouched under the crowded tent walls, scoffed at by the braves, teased by the unrebuked children, eating when the squaws threw waste food to him, going hungry when his French companions failed to bring in game.  Sometimes night overtook him on the trail.  Shovelling a bed through the snow to the moss with his snow-shoes, piling shrubs as a wind-break, and kindling a roaring fire, the priest passed the night under the stars.