François Xavier de Laval, Abbé de Montigny, was born in 1622, a scion of the great house of Montmorency. He was therefore of high nobility, the best-born of all the many thousands who came to New France throughout its history. As a youth his had come into close association with the Jesuits, and had spent four years in the famous Hermitage at Caen, that Jesuit stronghold which served so long as the nursery for the spiritual pioneers of early Canada. When he came to Quebec as Vicar-Apostolic in 1659, he was only thirty-seven years of age. His position in the colony at the time of his arrival was somewhat unusual, for although he was to be in command of the colony's spiritual forces. New France was not yet organized as a diocese and could not be so organized until the Pope and the King should agree upon the exact status of the Church in the French colonial dominions. Laval was nevertheless given his titular rank from the ancient see of Petraea in Arabia which had long since been _in partibus infidelium_ and hence had no bishop within its bounds. From his first arrival in Canada his was Bishop Laval, but without a diocese over which he could actually hold sway. His commission as Vicar-Apostolic gave him power enough, however, and his responsibility was to the Pope alone. For the tasks which, he was sent to perform, Laval had eminent qualifications. A haughty spirit went with the ultra-blue blood in his veins; he had a temperament that loved to lead and to govern, and that could not endure to yield or to lag behind. His intellectual talents were high beyond question, and to them he added the blessing of a rugged physical frame. No one ever came to a new land with more definite ideas of what he wanted to do or with a more unswerving determination to do it in his own way. It was not long before the stamp of Laval's firm hand was laid upon the life of the colony. In due course, too, he found himself at odds with the governor. The dissensions smouldered at first, and then broke out into a blaze that warmed the passions of all elements in the colony. The exact origin of the feud is somewhat obscure, and it is not necessary to put down here the details of its development to the war _à outrance_ which soon engaged the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the colony. In the background was the question of the _coureurs-de-bois_ and the liquor traffic which now became a definite issue and which remained the storm centre of colonial politics for many generations. The merchants insisted that if this traffic were extinguished it would involve the ruin of the French hold upon the Indian trade. The bishop and the priests, on the other hand, were ready to fight the liquor traffic to the end and to exorcise it as the greatest blight upon the New World. Quebec soon became a cockpit where the battle of these two factions raged. Each had its ups and downs, until in the end the traffic remained, but under a makeshift system of regulation.