The old possessing dream!
This young man (but twenty-five years of age) was a scion of an old and
rich family of Rouen. As a youth he showed unusual traits of intellect and
character and (it is generally agreed) doubtless because of his promise,
he was led to the benches of the Jesuits. Whether this be true or not, he
was an earnest Catholic. But his temperament would not let him yield
unquestioned submission to any will save his own. For it was will and not
mere passion that mastered his course. "In his faults," says a sympathetic
historian, "the love of pleasure had no part." At twenty-three he had left
Rouen, and securing a seigniory, where we have just seen him, in the "most
dangerous place in Canada," he made clearing for the settlement which he
named the Seigniory of St. Sulpice (having received it from the seminary
of St. Sulpice), but which his enemies named, as they named the rapids,
"La Chine."
There tutored in the Indian languages and inflamed of imagination as he
looked day after day off to the west, his thoughts "made alliance with the
sun," as Lescarbot would have said, and dwelt on' exploration and empire.
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