Strangers might have imagined he was crying over his lost opportunities, but he wasn’t; it was just his way. “Time is apt to and ought to modify our judgments of our fellowmen. Let it be said for Raymond Préfontaine by one who generally disagreed with his plans and disapproved of his public actions that among his qualities were some decidedly good ones. He was a man of his word and a man of ideas and infinite resource. He was the first public man to set about systematic modernizing and development of Montreal. When he talked about electric cars and electric lighting, he was laughed to scorn by the ‘Noble Minority’ in the Council and the rest of the nobility outside the Council. He went in for street widening and permanent paving (no doubt at an expensive rate) and he added to the size of the debt as well as to the size of the city. He was, in fact, Montreal’s Baron Haussmann. The Baron was ‘fired’ by the Olivier government for his financial extravagance; he only borrowed a hundred million dollars, from 1865 to 1869; but he made the modern Paris. “The Noble Thirteen and their admirers, like the coloured troops in the American Civil war fought nobly against Mr. Préfontaine’s schemes and predicted unmerciful disaster if the City Passenger Railway were electrified. To the plea that electric railways were a success elsewhere the opposition replied triumphantly and without fear of contradiction ‘but New York isn’t Montreal’--and neither Alderman Préfontaine nor any of his followers ever dared to take up the challenge and prove that New York was Montreal. “Then the Noble Thirteen had its own troubles. One, at least, lost his patent of nobility by voting wrong on the gas question; another was laid out on the City Passenger Railway Monopoly; a third was promoted to the retired list because his popularity threatened to make him a dangerous rival to another nobleman in a parliamentary election. Strenuous opponents of ‘monopoly’ in street railways became first lukewarm, then indifferent, then apologetic, and finally strenuous supporters of Monopoly with the biggest ‘M’ in the printer’s upper case. Most of the Noble Thirteen have gone to a better world, which is a good thing for them, because if they were still in the Council, they would miss the old admiration dreadfully.”