CAMERON OF LOCHIEL

BY PHILIPPE AUBERT DE GASPÉ TRANSLATED BY CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS NEW EDITION With a frontispiece by H. C. EDWARDS

BOSTON L. C. PAGE & COMPANY MDCCCCV

Copyright, 1890 By D. Appleton and Company —— Copyright, 1905 By L. C. Page & Company (INCORPORATED)

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION

This leisurely and loose-knit romance of de Gaspé's, which he called "Les Anciens Canadiens," has for hero one who was not a Canadian, but a Scotch exile sojourning in Canada. It is on the creation of this character, consistently developed and convincingly presented, that the book must mainly base its claim to be called a work of fiction, rather than a volume of memoirs and folklore. I have ventured, therefore, at the suggestion of my publishers, to take a liberty with the author's title, and name the story after this young Scotch exile, "Cameron of Lochiel." I am the more willing to take this liberty because I feel that de Gaspé has not hitherto been granted the place he is entitled to in the ranks of Canadian fictionists. Considered purely as a romance, it seems to me that the sincerity, simplicity, and originality of this work quite outweigh its sprawling looseness of structure, and make it one of the unique ornaments of the composite literature which we are building up in Canada. If by so changing its title as to emphasize the fictional

character of the work I can the better call attention to the worth of de Gaspé's achievement, I feel that I am justified, even in the face of such anticipatory protest as may seem to be implied in the author's too modest introduction.

When all this has been said, however, the fact remains that it was not its many merits as a romance that induced me to translate this work, but the riches of Canadian tradition, folk-lore, and perished customs embalmed in the clear amber of its narrative, coupled with my own anxiety to contribute, in however humble a way, to the increase of understanding and confidence between the two great branches of the Canadian people. It is a beautiful and gracious life, that of old French Canada, as depicted in de Gaspé's lucent pages,—a life of high ideals, and family devotion, and chivalry, and courage. This is an atmosphere it is wholesome to breathe. These are people it is excellent to know; and the whole influence of the story makes for trust and a good understanding.

C. G. D. R.

Fredericton, N. B., May, 1905.

PREFACE.

In Canada there is settling into shape a nation of two races; there is springing into existence, at the same time, a literature in two languages. In the matter of strength and stamina there is no overwhelming disparity between the two races. The two languages are admittedly those to which belong the supreme literary achievements of the modern world. In this dual character of the Canadian people and the Canadian literature there is afforded a series of problems which the future will be taxed to solve. To make any intelligent forecast as to the solution is hardly possible without a fair comprehension of the two races as they appear at the point of contact. We, of English speech, turn naturally to French-Canadian literature for knowledge of the French-Canadian people. The romance before us, while intended for those who read to be entertained, and by no means weighted down with didactic purpose, succeeds in throwing, by its faithful depictions of life and sentiment among the early French Canadians, a strong side-light upon the motives and aspirations of the race.

In spite of the disclaimer with which the author begins, the romance of Les Anciens Canadiens is a classic. From the literary point of view it is markedly the best historical romance so far produced in French Canada. It gathers up and preserves in lasting formiv the songs and legends, the characteristic customs, the phases of thought and feeling, the very local and personal aroma of a rapidly changing civilization. Much of what de Gaspé has so vividly painted from his boyish reminiscences had faded out of the life upon which his alert eyes rested in old age. The origin of the romance, as given by his biographer, the Abbé Casgrain, is as follows:

When, in 1861, that patriotic French-Canadian publication the Soirées Canadiennes was established, its inaugurators adopted as their motto the words: "Let us make haste to write down the stories and traditions of the people, before they are forgotten." M. de Gaspé was struck with the idea; and seeing that the writers who were setting themselves the laudable task were all young men, he took the words as a summons to his old age, and so the book came to be written.

Patriotism, devotion to the French-Canadian nationality, a just pride of race, and a loving memory for his people's romantic and heroic past—these are the dominant chords which are struck throughout the story. Of special significance, therefore, are the words which are put in the mouth of the old seigneur as he bids his son a last farewell. The father has been almost ruined by the conquest. The son has left the French army and taken the oath of allegiance to the English crown. "Serve thy new sovereign," says the dying soldier, "as faithfully as I have served the King of France; and may God bless thee, my dear son!"

In the present day, when nationalism in Quebec appears rather given to extravagant dreams, it would be well for the distant observer to view the French Canadians through the faithful medium which de Gaspé's work affords him. Under constitutional forms of government it is inevitable that a vigorous and homogeneousv minority, whose language and institutions are more or less threatened by the mere preponderance of the dominant race, should seem at times overvehement in its self-assertion. A closer knowledge leads us to conclude that perhaps the extreme of Quebec nationalism is but the froth on the surface of a not unworthy determination to keep intact the speech and institutions of French Canada. However this may be, it is certain that the point of contact between the two races in Canada is at the present day as rich a field for the romancer as de Gaspé found it at the close of the old régime.

According to the Histoire de la littérature Canadienne of Edmond Lareau, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé was born in Quebec on the 30th of October, 1786. He died in 1871. He belonged to a noble French-Canadian family. At the manor of St. Jean-Port-Joli, of which he was seigneur, he passed a large part of his life; and there he laid the chief scenes of his great romance. He was educated at the seminary of Quebec, and then studied law in the city, under Sewell, afterward chief-justice. Only for a few years, however, did he devote himself to his profession—one from which so many a poet and man of letters has broken loose. He accepted the position of sheriff of Quebec, and afterward came misfortunes which Lareau passes over with sympathetic haste. His lavish generosity to his friends and the financial embarrassments into which he fell, his four years' confinement in the debtors' prison, his sufferings of soul and body, all doubtless contributed to the poignant coloring with which he has painted the misfortunes of M. d'Egmont, le bon gentilhomme. On his release from

prison he retired to his estate of St. Jean-Port-Joli, but not to the solitude and benevolent melancholy of D'Egmont. The romancer was of too sunny a disposition, he was too genuine and tolerant a lover of his kind, to runvi much risk of becoming a recluse. A keynote to his nature may be found in the bright Bonsoir la compagnie with which, in the words of an old French-Canadian song, he closed his literary labors at the age of seventy-nine, when the last page of the Mémoires was completed.

The story we have translated, under the title of The Canadians of Old, was published in 1862. It is accompanied in the original by a mass of curious information, in the shape of notes and addenda, such as would hardly interest the general reader. They will more than repay, however, the attention of any one who wishes to study the French-Canadian people as they were in their early days. The story itself has the air of being the product of a happy leisure. The style is quaint and unhurried, with no fear of the printer's devil before its eyes. The stream of the narrative, while swift enough and direct enough at need, is taught to digress into fascinating cross-channels of highly colored local tradition, or to linger felicitously in eddies of feast and song.

The work begun in Les Anciens Canadiens De Gaspé carried to completion in his second and last composition, the Mémoires, published in 1866. As the former work is a vivid epitome of life at the seigneuries and among the habitants of those days, so the latter reproduces and fixes for us the picturesque effects of life in the city of Quebec itself in the generation or two succeeding the conquest—a period during which the French-Canadian noblesse yet maintained, about the person of the English governor, something of the remembered splendor of the old vice-regal court.

C. G. D. R.

Windsor, Nova Scotia, 1890.

CONTENTS.

ix

FOREWORD.

As my story lays no claim to classicism, either in style or structure, this foreword may as well be made to play the part of a preface. My acquaintances will, doubtless, open their eyes on seeing me thus enter, at the age of seventy-six, on the perilous paths of authorship. Possibly I owe them an explanation. Although tired of reading all these years with so little profit either to myself or others, I yet dreaded to pass the Rubicon. A matter small enough in itself in the end decided me.

One of my friends, a man of parts, whom I met last year in St Louis Street, in our good city of Quebec, grasped me warmly by the hand and exclaimed:

"Awfully glad to see you! Do you know, my dear fellow, I have talked this morning with no fewer than eleven people, not one of them with half an idea in his noddle!" And he wrung my arm almost out of joint.

"Really," said I, "you are very complimentary; for I perceive by the warmth of your greeting that I am the exception, the man you—"

"Oh, yes, indeed," he cried, without letting me finishx my sentence, "those are the only sensible words I have heard this morning." And he crossed the street to speak to some one, probably his addle-pate number twelve, who was seeking to attract his attention.

"The devil!" thought I to myself, "if what I just said is in any way brilliant, it would seem easy enough to shine. Though I have never yet been suspected of it, I must be rather a clever fellow."

Much elated with this discovery, and congratulating myself that I had more brains than the unhappy eleven of whom my friend had spoken, I hurry to my library, I furnish myself, perhaps all too appropriately, with a ream of the paper called "foolscap," and I set myself to work.

I write for my own amusement, at the risk of wearying the reader who may have the patience to go through this volume. But, as Nature has made me compassionate, I will give this dear reader a little good advice. He had better throw away the unlucky book without taking the trouble to criticise it, which would be making it much too important, and would be, moreover, but wasted labor for the serious critic; for, unlike that old Archbishop of Granada, so touchy on the subject of his sermons, of whom Gil Blas has told us, I am, for my part, blessed with an easy humor, and, instead of retorting to my critic, "I wish you good luck and very much better taste," I will frankly admit that my book has a thousand faults, of most of which I have a lively consciousness.

As for the unfriendly critic, his work will be all in vain, debarred as he will be from the privilege of dragging me into a controversy. Let me say beforehand that I grieve to deprive him of his gentle diversion, and to clip his claws so soon. I am old and indolently content, like Figaro of merry memory. Moreover, I have not enough self-conceit to engage in any defense ofxi my literary productions. To record some incidents of a well-loved past, to chronicle some memories of a youth long flown—this is my whole ambition.

Many of the anecdotes, doubtless, will appear insignificant and childish to some readers. Let these lay the blame upon certain of our best men-of-letters, who besought me to leave out nothing which could illustrate the manners and customs of the early Canadians. "That which will appear insignificant and childish to the eyes of strangers," they urged, "in the records of a septuagenarian, born but twenty-eight years after the conquest of New France, will yet not fail to interest true Canadians."

This production of mine shall be neither very dull nor surpassingly brilliant. An author should assuredly have too much self-respect to make his appeal exclusively to the commonplace; and if I should make the work too fine, it would be appreciated by none but the beaux esprits. Under a constitutional government, a candidate must concern himself rather with the number than the quality of his votes.

This work will be Canadian through and through. It is hard for an old fellow of seventy to change his ancient coat for garb of modern pattern.

I must have also plenty of elbow-room. As for rule and precept—which, by the way, I am well enough acquainted with—I can not submit myself to them in a work like this. Let the purists, the past masters in the art of literature, shocked at my mistakes, dub my book romance, memoir, annals, miscellany, hotch-potch. It is all the same to me.

Having accomplished my preface, let me make a serious beginning with the following pretty bit of verse, hitherto unpublished, and doubtless now much surprised to find itself in such unworthy company:

xii

QUEBEC, 1757.

Let him who knows this Quebec of ours betake himself, in body or in spirit, to the market of the Upper Town, and consider the changes which the region has undergone since the year of grace 1757, whereat my story opens. There was then the same cathedral, minus its modern tower, which seems to implore the charitable either to raise it to its proper height or to decapitate its lofty and scornful sister.

The Jesuits' College, at a later date transformed into a barrack, looked much the same as it does to-day; but what has become of the church which stood of old in the place of the present halls? Where is the grove of venerable trees behind the building, which adorned the grounds, now so bare, of this edifice sacred to the education of Canadian youth? Time and the axe, alas! have worked their will. In place of the merry sports, the mirthful sallies of the students, the sober steps of the professors, the high philosophic discourse, we hear now the clatter of arms, the coarse jest of the guard.

Instead of the market of the present day, some low-built butchers' stalls, perhaps seven or eight in number, occupied a little plot between the cathedral and thexiii college. Between these stalls and the college prattled a brook, which, after descending St. Louis Street and dividing Fabrique, traversed Couillard and the hospital garden, on its way to the river St. Charles. Our fathers were bucolic in their tastes!

It is the end of April. The brook is overflowing; children are amusing themselves by detaching from its edges cakes of ice, which, shrinking as they go, overleap all barriers, and lose themselves at last in the mighty tide of the St. Lawrence. A poet, who finds "sermons in stones, books in the running brooks," dreaming over the scene, and marking the descent of the ice-cakes, their pausings, their rebuffs, might have compared them to those ambitious men who, after a restless life, come with little wealth or fame to the end of their career, and are swallowed up in eternity.

The houses neighboring the market-place are, for the most part, of but one story, unlike our modern structures, which tower aloft as if dreading another deluge.

It is noon. The Angelus rings out from the cathedral belfry. All the city chimes proclaim the greeting of the angel to the Virgin, who is the Canadian's patron saint. The loitering habitants, whose calashes surround the stalls, take off their caps and devoutly murmur the Angelus. All worshiping alike, there is none to deride the pious custom.

Some of our nineteenth-century Christians seem ashamed to perform before others an act of worship; which is proof, to say the least, of a shrinking or cowardly spirit. The followers of Mohammed, who have the courage of their convictions wherever they may chance to be, will seven times daily make their prayers to Allah under the eyes of the more timid Christians.

The students of the Jesuits' College, noisy enoughxiv on ordinary occasions, move to-day in a serious silence from the church wherein they have been praying. What causes this unusual seriousness? They are on the eve of separation from two beloved fellow-students. The younger of the two, who, being more of their age, was wont to share more often in their boyish sports, was the protector of the feeble against the strong, the impartial arbitrator in all their petty disagreements.

The great door of the college opens, and two young men in traveling dress join the group of their fellow-students. Two leathern portmanteaus, five feet long, adorned with rings, chains, and padlocks which would seem strong enough for the mooring of a ship, lie at their feet. The younger of the two, slight and delicate-looking, is perhaps eighteen years old. His dark complexion, great black eyes, alert and keen, his abruptness of gesture, proclaim his French blood. His name is Jules D'Haberville. His father is one of the seigneurs, captain of a company in the colonial marine.

His companion, who is older by two or three years, is much taller and more robust of frame. His fine blue eyes, his chestnut hair, his blonde and ruddy complexion with a few scattered freckles on face and hands, his slightly aggressive chin—all these reveal a foreign origin. This is Archibald Cameron of Lochiel, commonly known as Archie of Lochiel, a young Scotch Highlander who has been studying at the Jesuits' College in Quebec. How is it that he, a stranger, finds himself in this remote French colony? We will let the sequel show.

The young men are both notably good looking. They are clad alike with hooded overcoat, scarlet leggings edged with green ribbon, blue woolen knitted garters, a broad belt of vivid colors embroidered with glass beads, deer-hide moccasins tied in Iroquois fashion, thexv insteps embroidered with porcupine-quills, and, finally, caps of beaver-skin fastened over the ears by means of a red silk handkerchief knotted under the chin.

The younger betrays a feverish eagerness, and keeps glancing along Buade Street.

"You are in a hurry to leave us, Jules," said one of his friends, reproachfully.

"No," replied D'Haberville, "oh, no, indeed, my dear De Laronde, I assure you; but, since this parting must take place, I wish it over. It unnerves me; and it is natural that I should be in a hurry to get back home again."

"That is right," said De Laronde; "and, moreover, since you are a Canadian, we hope to see you again before very long."

"But with you the case is different, my dear Archie," said another. "I fear this parting will be forever, if you return to your own country."

"Promise us that you will come back," cried all the students.