Meanwhile, the French were having their own troubles in the captured forts. War had broken out again, and was going against France in Marlborough’s victories. The French might hold the bay, but not a pound of provisions could be sent across seas on account of English privateers. The French garrisons of Hudson Bay were starving. Indians, who brought down pelts from the Pays d’en Haut or upcountry—could obtain no goods in barter and having grown dependent on the whiteman’s firearms, were in turn reduced to straits. Lagrange, a gay court adventurer, had come out in 1704 to Nelson, which the French called Bourbon, with a troop of pleasure-seeking men and women for a year’s hunting. For one year, the drab monotony of post life was enlivened by a miniature Paris. Wines from the royal cellars flowed like water. The reckless songs of court gallants rang among the rafters, and the slippered feet of more reckless court beauties tripped the light dance over the rough-timbered floors of the fur post. It was a wild age, and a wild court from which they came to this wilderness—reckless women and reckless men, whose God was Pleasure. Who knows what court intrigue was being hidden and acted out at Port Nelson? Poor butterflies, that had scorched their wings and lost their youth, came here to masquerade! Soldiers of fortune, who had gambled their patrimony in the royal court and stirred up scandal, rusticating in a little log fort in the wilderness! The theme is more romantic than the novelist could conceive.