The General Hospital Was The Third Asylum For The
Infirm Which The Bishop Had Founded.
Subsequently, came the Intendant de
Meules, who, toward 1684, endowed the eastern portion of the quarter with
an edifice (the Intendant's Palace) remarkable for its dimensions, its
magnificence and its ornate gardens.
Where Talon (a former Intendant) had left a brewery in a state of ruin and
about seventeen acres of land unoccupied, Louis XIV., by the advice of his
Intendant de Meules, lavished vast sums of money in the erection of a
sumptuous palace, in which French justice was administered, and in which,
at a later period, under Bigot, it was purchasable. Our illustrious
ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such
trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all
its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (corvees)
and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (lettres de cachet). What
did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna Charta signify
to them?
On this spot stood the notorious warehouse, where Bigot, Cadet and their
confederates retailed, at enormous profits, the provisions and supplies
which King Louis XV. doled out in 1758 to the starving inhabitants of
Quebec. The people christened the house "La Friponne," (The Cheat!!)
Near the sight of Talon's old brewery which had been converted into a
prison by Frontenac, and which held fast, until his trial in 1674, the
Abbe de Fenelon [119] now stands the Anchor Brewery (Boswell's).
We clip the following from an able review in the Toronto Mail, Dec.,
1880, of M. Marmette's most dramatic novel, "l'Intendant Bigot":
"In the year 1775 a grievous famine raged, sweeping off large numbers
of the poor, while the unscrupulous Bigot and his satellites were
revelling in shameless profligacy.
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