Nor was this impecunious _noblesse_ merely a passive burden to New France, for the dignified hardships of their estate soon bred active conditions equally distressing to those in authority. Having no inducement to remain peacefully at home, the sons of the seigneurs took to the woods, often enticing the more unsettled of their own _habitants_ to follow them thither to a life of unbridled freedom and outlawry. Reckless bushrangers, they carried on an illicit trade with the Indians, diverting peltries from the fur company at Quebec, and demoralising the savage proselytes of the missions. In this unfortunate way the _gentilhomme_ and his children compromised with labour and managed to keep body and soul together. Harsh edict and cruel ordinance were repeatedly launched against the practices of these well-bred offenders, but the ready covert of the forest made the evasion of the King's justice an easy matter. Moreover, the Church, while it suffered much from such children, did not venture to reprove too strongly their flagrant excesses, lest they should thenceforth dispense altogether with her sacraments; for a furtive life in the wild woods did not prevent the superstitious _coureurs de bois_ from occasionally coming to confession or to Mass. [Illustration: OLD BISHOP'S PALACE (AT THE TOP OF MOUNTAIN HILL)] A royal edict ordered that any person going into the woods without a license should be whipped and branded for the first offence, and sent for life to the galleys for the second; while a third offence was punishable by death. The whole criminal code of Quebec was, indeed, of a piece with this; and an obvious feature was the quasi-religious character of most of the offences. The edict against blasphemy read as follows: "...All persons convicted of profane swearing or blaspheming the name of God, the most Holy Virgin, His Mother, or the Saints, shall be condemned for the first offence to a pecuniary fine according to their possessions and the greatness and enormity of the oath and blasphemy; and if those thus punished repeat the said oaths, then for the second, third, and fourth time they shall be condemned to a double, triple, and quadruple fine; and for the fifth time they shall be set in the pillory on Sunday or other festival days, there to remain from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, exposed to all sorts of opprobrium and abuse, and be condemned besides to a heavy fine; and for the sixth time they shall be led to the pillory, and there have the upper lip cut with a hot iron; and for the seventh time they shall be led to the pillory and have the lower lip cut; and if, by reason of obstinacy and inveterate bad habit, they continue after all these punishments to utter the said oaths and blasphemies, it is our will and command that they have the tongue completely cut out, so that thereafter they cannot utter them again."[8]