The people were fond of music, and seem to have obtained great enjoyment from their rasping, home-made violins. Every parish had its fiddler. But the popular repertoire was not very extensive. The Norman airs and folk-songs of the day were easy to learn, simple and melodious. They have remained in the hearts and on the lips of all French Canada for over two centuries. The shantyman of Three Rivers still goes off to the woods chanting the Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre which his ancestors sang in the days of Blenheim and Oudenarde. Many other traits of the race have been borne to the present time with little change. Then as now the habitant was a voluble talker, a teller of great stories about his own feats and experiences. Hocquart was impressed with the scant popular regard for the truth in such things, and well he may have been. Even to-day this trait has not wholly disappeared. Unlike his prototype, the censitaire of Old France, the habitant never became dispirited; even when things went wrong he retained his bonhomie. Taking too little thought for the morrow, he liked, as Charlevoix remarks, 'to get the fun out of his money, and scarcely anybody amused himself by hoarding it.' He was light-hearted even to frivolousness, and this gave the austere Church fathers many serious misgivings. He was courteous always, but boastful, and regarded his race as the salt of the earth. A Norman in every bone of his body, he used, as his descendants still do, quaint Norman idioms and forms of speech. He was proud of his ancestry. Stories that went back to the days when 'twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings' were passed along from father to son, gaining in terms of prodigious valour as they went. His versatility gained him the friendship and confidence of the Indian, an advantage which his English brother to the south was rarely able to secure. Much of the success which marked French diplomacy with the tribes was due to this versatility. Beneath an ungainly exterior the habitant often concealed a surprising ability in certain lines of action. He was a master of blandishment when he had an end thereby to gain. Dealings which required duplicity, provided the outcome appeared to be desirable, did not rudely shock his conscience. He had no Puritan scruples in his dealings with men of another race and religion. But in many things he had a high sense of honour, and nothing roused his ire so readily as to question it. Unstable as water, however, he did not excel in tasks that took patience. He wanted to plough one day and hunt the next, so that in the long run he rarely did anything well. This spirit of independence was very pronounced. The habitant felt himself to be a free man. This is why he spurned the name 'censitaire.' As Charlevoix puts it, 'he breathed from his birth the air of liberty,' and showed it in the way he carried his head. A singular type, when all is said, and worthy of more study than it has received. CHAPTER VI