In
its day it was called the Hermitage; though the uses to which it was
applied savored nothing of asceticism. Tradition connects it and its
owner with a romantic, but more than doubtful, story of love, jealousy,
and murder.
[Footnote 546: De Gaspe, _Memoires_, 119.]
The chief Canadian families were so social in their habits and so
connected by intermarriage that, along with the French civil and
military officers of the colonial establishment, they formed a society
whose members all knew each other, like the corresponding class in
Virginia. There was among them a social facility and ease rare in
democratic communities; and in the ladies of Quebec and Montreal were
often seen graces which visitors from France were astonished to find at
the edge of a wilderness. Yet this small though lively society had
anomalies which grew more obtrusive towards the close of the war.
Knavery makes strange companions; and at the tables of high civil
officials and colony officers of rank sat guests as boorish in manners
as they were worthless in character.
Foremost among these was Joseph Cadet, son of a butcher at Quebec, who
at thirteen went to sea as a pilot's boy, then kept the cows of an
inhabitant of Charlebourg, and at last took up his father's trade and
prospered in it.[547] In 1756 Bigot got him appointed commissary-general,
and made a contract with him which flung wide open the doors of peculation.
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