There was the usual friction between the temporal and the spiritual powers. "The Church," writes Subercase, "has long claimed the right of commanding here, or at least of sharing authority with the civil rulers."[105] The Church had formerly been represented by the Capuchin friars, and afterwards by the Recollets. Every complaint was of course carried to the minister. In 1700 we find M. de Villieu, who then held a provisional command in the colony, accusing the ecclesiastics of illicit trade with the English.[106] Bonaventure reports to Ponchartrain that Pere Felix, chaplain of the fort, asked that the gate might be opened, in order that he might carry the sacraments to a sick man, his real object being to marry Captain Duvivier to a young woman named Marie Muis de Poubomcoup,--contrary, as the governor thought, to the good of the service. He therefore forbade the match; on which the priests told him that when they had made up their minds to do anything, nobody had power to turn them from it; and the chaplain presently added that he cared no more for the governor than for the mud on his shoes.[107] He carried his point, and married Duvivier in spite of the commander. Every king's ship from Acadia brought to Ponchartrain letters full of matters like these. In one year, 1703, he got at least fourteen such. If half of what Saint-Simon tells us of him is true, it is not to be supposed that he gave himself much trouble concerning them. This does not make it the less astonishing that in the midst of a great and disastrous war a minister of State should be expected to waste time on matters worthy of a knot of old gossips babbling round a tea-table. That pompous spectre which calls itself the Dignity of History would scorn to take note of them; yet they are highly instructive, for the morbid anatomy of this little colony has a scientific value as exhibiting, all the more vividly for the narrowness of the field, the workings of an unmitigated paternalism acting from across the Atlantic. The King's servants in Acadia pestered his minister at Versailles with their pettiest squabbles, while Marlborough and Eugene were threatening his throne with destruction.[108] The same system prevailed in Canada; but as there the field was broader and the men often larger, the effects are less whimsically vivid than they appear under the Acadian microscope. The two provinces, however, were ruled alike; and about this time the Canadian Intendant Raudot was writing to Ponchartrain in a strain worthy of De Goutin, Subercase, or Bonaventure.[109] FOOTNOTES: [93] _Brouillan au Ministre, 6 Octobre, 1702._ [94] _Memoire de Subercase._ [95] _Memoire du Roy au Sieur de Brouillan, 23 Mars, 1700_; _Le Ministre a Villebon, 9 Avril, 1700_. [96] _Subercase au Ministre, 3 Janvier, 1710._ [97] Pioneers of France in the New World, 253. [98] La Touche, _Memoire sur l'Acadie_, 1702 (adresse a Ponchartrain).