In 1665 Canada had only three settled districts:  Quebec, Three Rivers, and Ville-Marie or Montreal.  Quebec, the chief town, bore the proud title of the capital of New France.  Yet it contained barely seventy houses with about five hundred and fifty inhabitants.  Then, as now, it consisted of a lower and an upper town.  In the lower town were to be found the king’s stores and the merchants’ shops and residences.  The public officials and the clergy and members of the religious orders lived in the upper town, where stood the principal buildings of the capital—­the Chateau Saint-Louis, the Bishop’s Palace, the Cathedral, the Jesuits’ College and Chapel, and the monasteries of the Ursulines and of the Hotel-Dieu sisters.

Francois de Laval de Montmorency, bishop of Petraea and vicar apostolic for Canada, was the spiritual head of the colony.  He had arrived from France six years earlier, in 1659, and was destined to spend the remainder of his life, nearly half a century, in the service of the Church in Canada.  Because of his noble character and many virtues, his strong intellect, and his devotion to the public weal, he will ever rank as one of the greatest figures in Canadian history.  His vicar-general was Henri de Bernieres, who was also parish priest of Quebec and superior of the seminary founded by the bishop in 1663.  The superior of the Jesuits was Father Le Mercier.  The saintly Marie de l’Incarnation was mother superior of the Ursulines, and Mother Saint Bonaventure of the Hotel-Dieu.

It may be interesting to recall the names of some of the notable citizens of Quebec at that time, other than the high officials.  There were Michel Filion and Pierre Duquet, notaries; Jean Madry, surgeon to the king’s majesty; Jean Le Mire, the future syndic des habitants; Madame d’Ailleboust, widow of a former governor; Madame Couillard, widow of Guillaume Couillard and daughter of Louis Hebert, the first tiller of the soil; Madame de Repentigny, widow of ‘Admiral’ de Repentigny, to use the grandiloquent expression of old chroniclers; Nicolas Marsollet, Louis Couillard de l’Espinay, Charles Roger de Colombiers, Francois Bissot, Charles Amiot, Le Gardeur de Repentigny, Dupont de Neuville, Pierre Denis de la Ronde, all men of high standing.  The chief merchants were Charles Basire, Jacques Loyer de Latour, Claude Charron, Jean Maheut, Eustache Lambert, Bertrand Chesnay de la Garenne, Guillaume Feniou.  Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye, the stalwart Quebec trader of the day, was then in France.

In the neighbourhood of Quebec were a few settlements.  According to the census of the following year there were 452 persons on the Island of Orleans, 533 at the Cote Beaupre, 185 at Beauport, 140 at Sillery, and 112 at Charlesbourg and Notre-Dame-des-Anges on the St Charles river.