tempt a Frenchman of rank to expatriate himself; and yet some, at least, of the governors came out to the colony for the express purpose of mending their fortunes; indeed, the higher nobility could scarcely, in time of peace, have other motives for going there. The court and the army were their element, and to be elsewhere was banishment. We shall see hereafter by what means they sought compensation for their exile in Canadian forests. Loud complaints sometimes found their way to Versailles. A memorial addressed to the regent duke of Orleans, immediately after the king’s death, declares that the ministers of state, who have been the real managers of the colony, have made their creatures and relations governors and intendants, and set them free from all responsibility. High colonial officers, pursues the writer, come home rich, while the colony languishes almost to perishing. * As for lesser offices, they were multiplied to satisfy needy retainers, till lean and starving Canada was covered with official leeches, sucking, in famished desperation, at her bloodless veins. The whole system of administration centred in * Mémoire addressé au Régent 1716 the king, who, to borrow the formula of his edicts, “in the fulness of our power and our certain knowledge,” was supposed to direct the whole machine, from its highest functions to its pettiest intervention in private affairs. That this theory, like all extreme theories of government, was an illusion, is no fault of Louis XIV. Hard-working monarch as he was, he spared no pains to guide his distant colony in the paths of prosperity. The prolix letters of governors and intendants were carefully studied; and many of the replies, signed by the royal hand, enter into details of surprising minuteness. That the king himself wrote these letters is incredible; but in the early part of his reign he certainly directed and controlled them. At a later time, when more absorbing interests engrossed him, he could no longer study in person the long-winded despatches of his Canadian officers. They were usually addressed to the minister of state, who caused abstracts to be made from them, for the king’s use, and perhaps for his own. * The minister or the minister’s secretary could suppress or color as he or those who influenced him saw fit. In the latter half of his too long reign, when cares, calamities, and humiliations were thickening around the king, another influence was added to make the theoretical supremacy of his royal will more than ever a mockery. That prince of annalists, Saint-Simon, has painted Louis XIV. ruling his realm from the bedchamber of Madame de * Many of these abstracts are still preserved in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies.