"Among The Incidents," Says Mr. T. P. Bedard, "Which Claimed The Privilege
Of Exciting The Curiosity Of The Good Folks Of Quebec (Then 1680,
Inhabited By 1,345 Souls,) Was Reckoned The Case Of Jean Rathier, Charged
With Murdering A Girl Of Eighteen - Jeanne Couc.
The case had been tried at
Three Rivers, and Rathier sentenced to have his legs broken [95] with an
iron bar, and afterwards to be hung.
Judgment had been confirmed. An
unforseen hitch arose: the official hangman was dead; how then was Rathier
to be hung? The officers of justice cut the Gordian knot, by tendering to
Rathier, in lieu of the halter, the position, little envied, of hangman.
He accepted. Some years after, the wife and the daughter of Rathier were
accused and found guilty as accomplices in a robbery; the daughter, as the
receiver of the stolen goods, was sentenced to be whipped, but in secret,
at the General Hospital by the nun appointed Provost Marshal (Maitress
de Discipline), and the mother was also adjudged to be whipped, but
publicly in the streets of the city. This incident furnished the singular
and ludicrous spectacle of a husband publicly whipping his wife with
impunity to himself, as he was acting under the authority of justice." -
(Premiere Administration de Frontenac, p. 39.)
The whip and pillory did not go out with the old regime. The Quebec
Gazette of 19th June, 1766, mentions the whipping, on the Upper and Lower
Town markets, of Catherine Berthrand and Jeanotte Blaize, by the hand of
the executioneer, for having "borrowed" (a pretty way of describing petty
larceny), a silver spoon from a gentleman of the town, without leave or
without intention of returning it.
For male reprobates, such as Jean May and Louis Bruseau, whose punishment
for petty larceny is noted in the Gazette of 11th August, 1766, the
whipping was supplemented with a walk - tied at the cart's tail - from the
Court House door to St. Roch and back to the Court House. May had to whip
Bruseau and Bruseau had to whip May the day following, at ten in the
morning.
Let us revert to Captain Testu's doings. The plot was to strangle
Champlain, pillage the warehouse, and afterwards betake themselves to the
Spanish and Basque vessels, laying at Tadousac. As, at that period, no
Court of Appeals existed in "la Nouvelle France" - far less was a
"Supreme Court" thought of - the trial of the chief of the conspiracy was
soon dispatched says Champlain, and the Sieur Jean du Val was "presto
well and duly hanged and strangled at Quebec aforesaid, and his head
affixed to the top of a pike-staff planted on the highest eminence of the
Fort." The ghastly head of this traitor, on the end of a pike-staff, near
Notre Dame street, must certainly have had a sinister effect at twilight.
But the brave Captain Testu, the saviour of Champlain and of Quebec - what
became of him? Champlain has done him the honour of naming him; here the
matter ended. Neither monument, nor poem, nor page of history in his
honour; nothing was done in the way of commemorating his devotion. As in
the instance of the illustrious man, whose life he had saved, his grave is
unknown. According to the Abbe Tanguay, none of his posterity exist at
this day.
During the siege of 1759, we notice in Panet's Journal, "that the Lower
Town was a complete mass of smoking ruins; on the 8th August, it was
a burning heap (braisier). Wolfe and Saunders' bombshells had found
their way even to the under-ground vaults. This epoch became disastrous to
many Quebecers." The English threw bombs (pots a feu) on the Lower
Town, of which, says Mr. Panet, "one fell on my house, one on the houses
in the Market place, and the last in Champlain street. The fire burst out
simultaneously, in three different directions; it was in vain to attempt
to cut off or extinguish the fire at my residence; a gale was blowing from
the north-east, and the Lower Town was soon nothing less than a blazing
mass. Beginning at my house, that of M. Desery, that of M. Maillou, Sault-
au-Matelot street, the whole of the Lower Town and all the quarter Cul-
de-Sac up to the property of Sieur Voyer, which was spared, and in
short up to the house of the said Voyer, the whole was devastated by fire.
Seven vaults [96] had been rent to pieces or burned: that of M. Perrault
the younger, that of M. Tache, of M. Benjamin de la Mordic, of Jehaune, of
Maranda. You may judge of the consternation which reigned; 167 houses had
been burnt."
One hundred and sixty-seven burnt houses would create many gaps. We know
the locality on which stood the warehouse of M. Perrault, junior, also
that of M. Tache (the Chronicle Bureau), but who can point out to
us where stood the houses of Desery, Maillou, Voyer, de Voisy, and the
vaults of Messieurs Benjamin de la Mordic, Jehaune, Maranda?
It is on record that Champlain, after his return to Quebec, in 1633, "had
taken care to refit a battery which he had planted on a level with the
river near the warehouse, the guns of which commanded the passage between
Quebec and the opposite shore." [97] Now, in 1683, "this cannon battery,
erected in the Lower Town, almost surrounded on all sides by houses, stood
at some distance from the edge of the river, and caused some inconvenience
to the public; the then Governor, Lefebvre de la Barre [98] having sought
out a much more advantageous locality towards the Point of Rocks (Pointe
des Roches) west of the Cul-de-Sac, [99] and on the margin of the said
river at high-water mark, which would more efficiently command and sweep
the harbour, and which would cause far less inconvenience to the houses in
the said Lower Town," considered it fit to remove the said battery, and
the Reverend Jesuit Fathers having proposed to contribute towards the
expenses which would be incurred in so doing, he made them a grant "of a
portion of the lot of ground (emplacement) situated in front of the site
on which is now planted the said cannon battery, * * * * between the
street or high road for wheeled vehicles coming from the harbour [100] and
the so-called St. Peter street."
Here then we have the origin of the Napoleon wharf and a very distinct
mention of St. Peter street.
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