In those days I had a store of spirits. I was seldom dismayed, for life had been such a rough-and-tumble game that I held to cheerfulness and humour as a hillsman to his broadsword, knowing it the greatest of weapons with a foe, and the very stone and mortar of friendship. So we were gay, touching lightly on events around us, laughing at gossip of the doorways (I in my poor French), casting small stones at whatever drew our notice, not forgetting a throw or two at Chateau Bigot, the Intendant’s country house at Charlesbourg, five miles away, where base plots were hatched, reputations soiled, and all clean things dishonoured. But Alixe, the sweetest soul France ever gave the world, could not know all I knew; guessing only at heavy carousals, cards, song, and raillery, with far-off hints of feet lighter than fit in cavalry boots dancing among the glasses on the table. I was never before so charmed with her swift intelligence, for I never had great nimbleness of thought, nor power to make nice play with the tongue. “You have been three years with us,” suddenly said her father, passing me the wine. “How time has flown! How much has happened!” “Madame Cournal’s husband has made three million francs,” said Doltaire, with dry irony and truth. Duvarney shrugged a shoulder, stiffened; for, oblique as the suggestion was, he did not care to have his daughter hear it. “And Vaudreuil has sent bees buzzing to Versailles about Bigot and Company,” added the impish satirist. Madame Duvarney responded with a look of interest, and the Seigneur’s eyes steadied to his plate. All at once by that I saw the Seigneur had known of the Governor’s action, and maybe had counseled with him, siding against Bigot. If that were so--as it proved to be--he was in a nest of scorpions; for who among them would spare him: Marin, Cournal, Rigaud, the Intendant himself? Such as he were thwarted right and left in this career of knavery and public evils. “And our people have turned beggars; poor and starved, they beg at the door of the King’s storehouse--it is well called La Friponne,” said Madame Duvarney, with some heat; for she was ever liberal to the poor, and she had seen manor after manor robbed, and peasant farmers made to sell their corn for a song, to be sold to them again at famine prices by La Friponne. Even now Quebec was full of pilgrim poor begging against the hard winter, and execrating their spoilers. Doltaire was too fond of digging at the heart of things not to admit she spoke truth. “La Pompadour et La Friponne! Qu’est que cela, mon petit homme?” “Les deux terribles, ma chere mignonne, Mais, c’est cela-- La Pompadour et La Friponne!” He said this with cool drollery and point, in the patois of the native, so that he set us all laughing, in spite of our mutual apprehensions. Then he continued, “And the King has sent a chorus to the play, with eyes for the preposterous make-believe, and more, no purse to fill.”