A citizen who had the temerity to eat meat during Lent without priestly permission was condemned to be tied three hours to the public stake, then led to the door of the church, there on his knees to ask pardon of God and the King. For approving of the execution of Charles I. by his English subjects, one Paul Dupuy was held to have libelled the monarchy and to have encouraged sedition. He was condemned to be dragged from prison by the public executioner, led in his shirt, with a rope about his neck and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the fort, there to beg pardon of the King; thence down Mountain Hill to the pillory of Lower Town to be branded on the cheek with a fleur-de-lis, and set in the stocks. Poor Dupuy's crime was not yet expiated, for, according to the remainder of the sentence, he was to be "led back to prison and put in irons till the information against him shall be completed."[9] Convicts and felons were sometimes tortured before being strangled. The execution usually took place at _Buttes-à-Neveu_, a little hillock on the Plains of Abraham,--afterwards to become more justly celebrated and less notorious,--and the dead body, enclosed in an iron cage, was left hanging for months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children and a gruesome warning to evildoers. [Footnote 8: _Edit du Roy contre les Jureurs et Blasphémateurs_, 1666.] [Footnote 9: _Jugements et Délibérations du Conseil Supérieur_.] [Illustration: NEW PALACE GATE] The people of Quebec were regularly apprised of the laws under which they lived. On Sundays after Mass the ordinances of the Intendant were read at the doors of the churches. These related to any number of subjects--regulations of inns and markets, poaching, sale of brandy, pew-rents, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes, domestic servants, quarrelling in church, fast driving, the careful observance of feast days, and so on. Law-breakers were tried by the Superior Council, which met for that purpose every Monday morning in the ante-chamber of the Governor's apartment at Fort St. Louis. The Governor himself presided at the Round Table, the bar of justice; on his right sat the bishop, and on his left the Intendant, the councillors sitting in order of appointment. Such at least was the _venue_ until about 1684, when the old brewery which Talon had built in Lower Town on the bank of the river St. Charles was transformed into a _Palais de Justice_. The altered structure served also as a residence for the King's judicial proxy, and was commonly known as the Palace of the Intendant.[10] It was an imposing mixture of timber and masonry, and at the close of the seventeenth century was the most considerable building in Quebec. While lacking the glorious site of the Castle of St. Louis, in point of interior decoration it far eclipsed this château of the Governor. [Footnote 10: The declivity above its site is still known as Palace Hill.] [Illustration: INTENDANT'S PALACE]