Scarrat and Flavelle, the guards at my door, set too high a
price on their favours, and they talked seldom, and then with
brutal jests and ribaldry, of matters in the town which were not
vital to me. Yet once or twice, from things they said, I came to
know that all was not well between Bigot and Doltaire on one hand,
and Doltaire and the Governor on the other. Doltaire had set the
Governor and the Intendant scheming against him because of his
adherence to the cause of neither, and his power to render the
plans of either of no avail when he chose, as in my case.
Vaudreuil's vanity was injured, and besides, he counted Doltaire
too strong a friend of Bigot. Bigot, I doubted not, found in Madame
Cournal's liking for Doltaire all sorts of things of which he never
would have dreamed; for there is no such potent devilry in this
world as the jealousy of such a sort of man over a woman whose
vanity and cupidity are the springs of her affections. Doltaire's
imprisonment in a room of the Intendance was not so mysterious as
suggestive. I foresaw a strife, a complication of intrigues, and
internal enmities which would be (as they were) the ruin of New
France. I saw, in imagination, the English army at the gates of
Quebec, and those who sat in the seats of the mighty, sworn to
personal enmities--Vaudreuil through vanity, Bigot through cupidity,
Doltaire by the innate malice of his nature--sacrificing the
country; the scarlet body of British power moving down upon a
dishonoured city, never to take its foot from that sword of France
which fell there on the soil of the New World.
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