soldiers. When Comporté and half a dozen other hot-heads had listened to
his tale, they cried with one voice, "Let us go and demand the drum. He
must give it up." So at eight or nine o'clock at night they set out to
look for Bonneau. They came upon him unexpectedly in the streets of the
town. He was accompanied by seven or eight persons with whom he had
supped and all were armed with swords, pistols or other weapons. When
Lanoraye demanded the drum, Bonneau was defiant and told him to go away
or he should chastise him. The inevitable fight followed. Comporté,
whose own account we have, says that it lasted some time and the results
were fatal. Comporté declares that he himself struck no blows but the
fact remains that two of Bonneau's party were so severely wounded that
they died. Comporté and the rest of the Company soon went to Canada. In
their absence he and others were sentenced to death.

In Canada he appears to have behaved himself. In France a simple
volunteer, in New France he became an important citizen. Talon trusted
him and made him Quarter-Master-General. In 1672 Comporté received an
enormous grant of land stretching along the St. Lawrence from Cap aux
Oies to Cap à l'Aigle, a distance of some eighteen miles, including
Malbaie and a good deal more. About the same time he married Marie
Bazire, daughter of one of the chief merchants in the colony, by whom he
had a numerous family. So eminently respectable was he that we find him
churchwarden at Quebec. In time he retired from trade, in which he had
engaged, and became a judge of the newly established Court of the
Prévôté at Quebec. This was not doing badly for a man under sentence of
death. But over him still hung this affair in France and, in 1680, he
petitioned the King to have the sentence annulled. For this petition he
secured the support of the families of the men killed in the quarrel
fifteen years earlier. In 1681 Louis XIV's pardon was registered with
solemn ceremonial at Quebec, and at last Comporté was no longer an