The Work of Francis Parkman: The old regime in Canada

Framsida
Little, Brown, 1897

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Sida 179 - These young ladies, especially those of a higher rank, get up at seven, and dress till nine, drinking their coffee at the same time. When they are dressed, they place themselves near a window that opens into the street, take up some needlework, and sew a stitch now and then; but turn their eyes into the street most of the time. When a young fellow comes in, whether they are acquainted with him or not...
Sida 109 - The bush-rangers, or coureurs de hois, were to the King an object of horror. They defeated his plans for the increase of the population, and shocked his native instinct of discipline and order. Edict after edict was directed against them; and more than once the colony presented the extraordinary spectacle of the greater part of its young men turned into forest outlaws.
Sida 189 - One great fact stands out conspicuous in Canadian history, — the Church of Rome. More even than the royal power she shaped the character and the destinies of the colony. She was its nurse and almost its mother ; and, wayward and headstrong as it was, it never broke the ties of faith that held it to her. It was these ties which, in the absence of political franchises, formed under the old regime the only vital coherence in the population. The royal government was transient ; the church was permanent....
Sida 112 - The new-comers were bedizened with a strange mixture of French and Indian finery; while some of them, with instincts more thoroughly savage, stalked about the streets as naked as a Pottawattamie or a Sioux. The clamor of tongues was prodigious, and gambling and drinking filled the day and the night. When at last they were sober again, they sought absolution for their sins ; nor could the priests venture to bear too hard on their unruly penitents, lest they should break wholly with the Church and...
Sida 68 - that the Goddess of Justice is more chaste here than in France, but at any rate, if she is sold, she is sold more cheaply. In Canada we do not pass through the clutches of advocates, the talons of attorneys, and the claws of clerks. These vermin do not as yet infest the land. Every one here pleads his own cause. Our Themis is prompt, and she does not bristle with fees, costs, and charges.
Sida 41 - The king would preserve it there, because with its teeth drawn he was fond of it, and because, as the feudal tenure prevailed in Old France, it was natural that it should prevail also in the New. But he continued as Richelieu had begun, and moulded it to the form that pleased him. Nothing was left which could threaten his absolute and undivided authority over the colony. In France, a multitude of privileges and prescriptions still clung, despite its fall, about the ancient ruling class. Few of these...
Sida 22 - King's gift," was exclusive of the dowry given by him to every girl brought over by his orders. The dowry varied greatly in form and value ; but, according to Mother Mary, it was sometimes a house with provisions for eight months. More often it was fifty livres in household supplies, besides a barrel or two of salted meat. The royal solicitude extended also to the children of colonists already established.
Sida 113 - At least, he is picturesque, and with his red-skin companion serves to animate forest scenery. Perhaps he could sometimes feel, without knowing that he felt them, the charms of the savage nature that had adopted him. Rude as he was, her voice may not always have been meaningless for one who knew her haunts so well, — deep recesses where, veiled in foliage, some wild shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where...
Sida 79 - Such assemblies, so controlled, could scarcely, one would think, wound the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was evident distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of self-government is seen no more. The syndic, too, that functionary whom the people of the towns were at first allowed to choose, under the eye of the authorities, was conjured out of existence by a word from the King. Seignior, censitaire, and citizen were prostrate alike in flat subjection to the royal...
Sida 110 - The famous Du Lhut is said to have made a general combination of the young men of Canada to follow him into the woods. Their plan was to be absent four years, in order that the edicts against them might have time to relent. The intendant Duchesneau reported that eight hundred men out of a population of less than ten thousand souls had vanished from sight in the immensity of a boundless wilderness. Whereupon the King ordered that any person going into the woods without a license should be whipped...

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