THE BOURGEOIS PHILIBERT.
The Bourgeois Philibert, after an arduous day's work, was enjoying in his armchair a quiet siesta in the old comfortable parlor of his city home.
The sudden advent of peace had opened the seas to commerce, and a fleet of long-shut-up merchantmen were rapidly loading at the quays of the Friponne as well as at those of the Bourgeois, with the products of the Colony for shipment to France before the closing in of the St. Lawrence by ice. The summer of St. Martin was lingering soft and warm on the edge of winter, and every available man, including the soldiers of the garrison, were busy loading the ships to get them off in time to escape the hard nip of winter.
Dame Rochelle sat near the window, which to-day was open to the balmy air. She was occupied in knitting, and occasionally glancing at a volume of Jurieu's hard Calvinistic divinity, which lay upon the table beside her. Her spectacles reposed upon the open page, where she had laid them down while she meditated, as was her custom, upon knotty points of doctrine, touching free will, necessity, and election by grace; regarding works as a garment of filthy rags, in which publicans and sinners who trusted in them were damned, while in practice the good soul was as earnest in performing them as if she believed her salvation depended exclusively thereupon.
Dame Rochelle had received a new lease of life by the return home of Pierre Philibert. She grew radiant, almost gay, at the news of his betrothal to Amelie de Repentigny, and although she could not lay aside the black puritanical garb she had worn so many years, her kind face brightened from its habitual seriousness. The return of Pierre broke in upon her quiet routine of living like a prolonged festival. The preparation of the great house of Belmont for his young bride completed her happiness.
In her anxiety to discover the tastes and preferences of her young mistress, as she already called her, Dame Rochelle consulted Amelie on every point of her arrangements, finding her own innate sense of the beautiful quickened by contact with that fresh young nature.
She was already drawn by that infallible attraction which every one felt in the presence of Amelie.
"Amelie was too good and too fair," the dame said, "to become any man's portion but Pierre Philibert's!"
The dame's Huguenot prejudices melted like wax in her presence, until Amelie almost divided with Grande Marie, the saint of the Cevennes, the homage and blessing of Dame Rochelle.
Those were days of unalloyed delight which she spent in superintending the arrangements for the marriage which had been fixed for the festivities of Christmas.
It was to be celebrated on a scale worthy of the rank of the heiress of Repentigny and of the wealth of the Philiberts. The rich Bourgeois, in the gladness of his heart, threw open all his coffers, and blessed with tears of happiness the money he flung out with both hands to honor the nuptials of Pierre and Amelie.
The Bourgeois was profoundly happy during those few brief days of Indian summer. As a Christian, he rejoiced that the long desolating war was over. As a colonist, he felt a pride that, unequal as had been the struggle, New France remained unshorn of territory, and by its resolute defence had forced respect from even its enemies. In his eager hope he saw commerce revive, and the arts and comforts of peace take the place of war and destruction. The husbandman would now reap for himself the harvest he had sown, and no longer be crushed by the exactions of the Friponne!
There was hope for the country. The iniquitous regime of the Intendant, which had pleaded the war as its justification, must close, the Bourgeois thought, under the new conditions of peace.
The hateful monopoly of the Grand Company must be overthrown by the constitutional action of the Honnetes Gens, and its condemnation by the Parliament of Paris, to which an appeal would presently be carried, it was hoped, would be secured.
The King was quarreling with the Jesuits. The Molinists were hated by La Pompadour, and he was certain His Majesty would never hold a lit de justice to command the registration of the decrees issued in his name by the Intendant of New France after they had been in form condemned by the Parliament of Paris.
The Bourgeois still reclined very still on his easy chair. He was not asleep. In the daytime he never slept. His thoughts, like the dame's, reverted to Pierre. He meditated the repurchase of his ancestral home in Normandy and the restoration of its ancient honors for his son.
Personal and political enmity might prevent the reversal of his own unjust condemnation, but Pierre had won renown in the recent campaigns. He was favored with the friendship of many of the noblest personages in France, who would support his suit for the restoration of his family honors, while the all-potent influence of money, the open sesame of every door in the palace of Versailles, would not be spared to advance his just claims.
The crown of the Bourgeois's ambition would be to see Pierre restored to his ancestral chateau as the Count de Philibert, and Amelie as its noble chatelaine, dispensing happiness among the faithful old servitors and vassals of his family, who in all these long years of his exile never forgot their brave old seigneur who had been banished to New France.
His reflections took a practical turn, and he enumerated in his mind the friends he could count upon in France to support, and the enemies who were sure to oppose the attainment of this great object of his ambition. But the purchase of the chateau and lands of Philibert was in his power. Its present possessor, a needy courtier, was deeply in debt, and would be glad, the Bourgeois had ascertained, to sell the estates for such a price as he could easily offer him.