The Count was a man of method and despatch, clear-headed and singularly free from prejudice, ambiguity, or hesitation. He was honest and frank in council, as he was gallant on the quarter-deck. The Intendant was not a whit behind him in point of ability and knowledge of the political affairs of the colony, and surpassed him in influence at the court of Louis XV., but less frank, for he had much to conceal, and kept authority in his own hands as far as he was able. Disliking each other profoundly from the total divergence of their characters, opinions, and habits, the Governor and Intendant still met courteously at the council-table, and not without a certain respect for the rare talents which each recognized in the other. Many of the papers lying before them were on subjects relating to the internal administration of the Colony,--petitions of the people suffering from the exactions of the commissaries of the army, remonstrances against the late decrees of the Intendant, and arrêts of the high court of justice confirming the right of the Grand Company to exercise certain new monopolies of trade. The discussions were earnest, and sometimes warm, on these important questions. La Corne St. Luc assailed the new regulations of the Intendant in no measured terms of denunciation, in which he was supported by Rigaud de Vaudreuil and the Chevalier de Beauharnais. But Bigot, without condescending to the trouble of defending the ordinances on any sound principle of public policy, which he knew to be useless and impossible with the clever men sitting at the table, contented himself with a cold smile at the honest warmth of La Corne St. Luc, and simply bade his secretary read the orders and despatches from Versailles, in the name of the royal ministers, and approved of by the King himself in a Lit de Justice which had justified every act done by him in favor of the Grand Company. The Governor, trammelled on all sides by the powers conferred upon the Intendant, felt unable to exercise the authority he needed to vindicate the cause of right and justice in the colony. His own instructions confirmed the pretensions of the Intendant, and of the Grand Company. The utmost he could do in behalf of the true interests of the people and of the King, as opposed to the herd of greedy courtiers and selfish beauties who surrounded him, was to soften the deadening blows they dealt upon the trade and resources of the Colony. A decree authorizing the issue of an unlimited quantity of paper bills, the predecessors of the assignats of the mother country, was strongly advocated by Bigot, who supported his views with a degree of financial sophistry which showed that he had effectively mastered the science of delusion and fraud of which Law had been the great teacher in France, and the Mississippi scheme, the prototype of the Grand Company, the great exemplar.