Of those appointed to the new council, their enemy Dumesnil says that they were "incapable persons,” and their associate Gaudais, in defending them against worse charges, declares that they were “unlettered, of little experience, and nearly all unable to deal with affairs of importance.” This was, perhaps, unavoidable; for, except among the ecclesiastics, education was then scarcely known in Canada. But if Laval may be excused for putting incompetent men in office, nothing can excuse him for making men charged with gross public offences the prosecutors and judges in their own cause; and his course in doing so gives color to the assertion of Dumesnil, that he made up the council expressly to shield the accused and smother the accusation. ** The two persons under the heaviest charges received the two most important appointments: Bourdon, attorney-general, and Villeray, keeper of * Dumesnil here makes one of the few mistakes I have been able to detect in his long memorials. He says that the name of the niece of Gaudais was Marie Nau. It was, in fact, Michelle-Therese Nau, who married Joseph, son of Robert Giffard, on the 22d of October, 1663. Dumesnil had forgotten the bride’s first name. The elder Giffard was surety for Repentigny, whom Dumesnil charged with liabilities to the company, amounting to 644,700 livres. Giffard was also father-in-law of Juchereau de la Ferte, one of the accused. ** Dumesnil goes further than this, for he plainly intimates that the removing from power of the company, to whom the accused were responsible, and the placing in power of a council formed of the accused themselves, was a device contrived from the first by Laval and the Jesuits, to get their friends out of trouble. the seals. La Ferté was also one of the accused. * Of Villeray, the governor Argenson had written in 1059: “Some of his qualities are good enough, but confidence cannot be placed in him, on account of his instability.” ** In the same year, he had been ordered to France, “to purge himself of sundry crimes wherewith he stands charged.” *** He was not yet free of suspicion, having returned to Canada under an order to make up and render his accounts, which he had not yet done. Dumesnil says that he first came to the colony in 1651, as valet of the governor Lauson, who had taken him from the jail at Rochelle, where he was imprisoned for a debt of seventy-one francs, “as appears by the record of the jail of date July eleventh in that year.” From this modest beginning he became in time the richest man in Canada. **** He was strong in orthodoxy, and an ardent supporter of the bishop and the Jesuits. He is alternately praised and blamed, according to the partisan leanings of the writer.