Madame d’Aillebout, and in which that father declared that he, Queylus, was waging war on him and his brethren more savagely than the Iroquois. * “He was as crazy at sight of a Jesuit,” writes an adverse biographer, “as a mad dog at sight of water.” ** He cooled, however, on being shown certain papers which proved that his position was neither so strong nor so secure as he had supposed; and the governor, Argenson, at length persuaded him to retire to Montreal. *** The queen mother, Anne of Austria, always inclined to the Jesuits, had invited Father Le Jeune, who was then in France, to make choice of a bishop for Canada. It was not an easy task. No Jesuit was eligible, for the sage policy of Loyola had excluded members of the order from the bishopric. The signs of the times portended trouble for the Canadian church, and there was need of a bishop who would assert her claims and fight her battles. Such a man could not be made an instrument of the Jesuits; therefore there was double need that he should be one with them in sympathy and purpose. They made a sagacious choice. Le Jeune presented to the queen mother the name of François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, Abbé de Montigny. Laval, for by this name he was thenceforth known, belonged to one of the proudest families of Europe, and, churchman as he was, there is * Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1657. ** Viger, Notice Historique sur l’Abbé de Queylus. *** Papiers d’Argenson. much in his career to remind us that in his veins ran the blood of the stern Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency. Nevertheless, his thoughts from childhood had turned towards the church, or, as his biographers will have it, all his aspirations were heavenward. He received the tonsure at the age of nine. The Jesuit Bagot confirmed and moulded his youthful predilections; and, at a later period, he was one of a band of young zealots, formed under the auspices of Bernières de Louvigni, royal treasurer at Caen, who, though a layman, was reputed almost a saint. It was Bernières who had borne the chief part in the pious fraud of the pretended marriage through which Madame de la Peltrie escaped from her father’s roof to become foundress of the Ursulines of Quebec. * He had since renounced the world, and dwelt at Caen, in a house attached to an Ursuline convent, and known as the Hermitage. Here he lived like a monk, in the midst of a community of young priests and devotees, who looked to him as their spiritual director, and whom he trained in the maxims and practices of the most extravagant, or, as his admirers say, the most sublime ultramontane piety. ** The conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists was then at its height. The Jansenist doctrines of election and salvation by grace, which sapped the power of the priesthood and impugned the authority of the Pope himself in his capacity of holder of the keys of heaven, were to the Jesuits * See Jesuits in North America, chap. xiv.