Most of them wore the laced coat and waistcoat, chapeau, boots, lace
ruffles, sash, and rapier of the period--a martial costume befitting
brave and handsome men. Their names were household words in every
cottage in New France, and many of them as frequently spoken of in
the English Colonies as in the streets of Quebec.
There stood the Chevalier de Beaujeu, a gentleman of Norman family,
who was already famed upon the frontier, and who, seven years later,
in the forests of the Monongahela, crowned a life of honor by a
soldier's death on the bloody field won from the unfortunate
Braddock, defeating an army ten times more numerous than his own.
Talking gayly with De Beaujeu were two gallant-looking young men of
a Canadian family which, out of seven brothers, lost six slain in
the service of their King--Jumonville de Villiers, who was
afterwards, in defiance of a flag of truce, shot down by order of
Colonel Washington, in the far-off forests of the Alleghenies,
and his brother, Coulon de Villiers, who received the sword of
Washington when he surrendered himself and garrison prisoners of
war, at Fort Necessity, in 1754.
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