Where Talon (a former Intendant) had left a brewery in a state of ruin and about seventeen acres of land unoccupied, Louis XIV., by the advice of his Intendant de Meules, lavished vast sums of money in the erection of a sumptuous palace, in which French justice was administered, and in which, at a later period, under Bigot, it was _purchasable_. Our illustrious ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (_corvées_) and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (_lettres de cachet_). What did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna Charta signify to them? On this spot stood the notorious warehouse, where Bigot, Cadet and their confederates retailed, at enormous profits, the provisions and supplies which King Louis XV. doled out in 1758 to the starving inhabitants of Quebec. The people christened the house "_La Friponne_," (_The Cheat_!!) Near the sight of Talon's old brewery which had been converted into a prison by Frontenac, and which held fast, until his trial in 1674, the Abbé de Fénélon [119] now stands the Anchor Brewery (Boswell's). We clip the following from an able review in the Toronto _Mail_, Dec., 1880, of M. Marmette's most dramatic novel, "_l'Intendant Bigot_": "In the year 1775 a grievous famine raged, sweeping off large numbers of the poor, while the unscrupulous Bigot and his satellites were revelling in shameless profligacy. It is midnight of Christmas, when an old officer, M. de Rochebrune, pressed with cold and hunger to the last point, resolved to pawn his St. Louis Cross of gold at the Intendant's Palace stores. On the way thither the officer and his young daughter, a young girl of fourteen, are startled at the blaze of light illuminating the Palace windows, during one of the Intendant's festivals. The pleasures of the evening are suddenly interrupted and shaded by the entry of the aged, suffering M. de Rochebrune and his wan-visaged but beautiful daughter. Words of galling truth are addressed to Bigot before his painted courtezans and his other depraved attendants, whose hearts are too hard and whose consciences are too seared to be tortured by either misery or reproof, and the ruffian varlets eject both father and daughter to the furies of the midnight blast. The ball ended, Bigot leads Madame de Pean to her vehicle, when she tumbles over an object which, when torches are brought, was found to be the corpse of the suppliant rebuker of a few hours previous, alongside of which lay the unconscious form of his daughter, half buried in the drifting snow. '_Mon Dieu_,' exclaimed Madame de Pean, '_Il ne dormira pas de la nuit, c'est bien sûr._' This tragic event is narrated with thrilling effect, in the author's best style." P. B.