Nearly all his wages are used in the support of his family. He has three
grown-up daughters who help in carrying on the establishment, and a boy
for the stables. The best paid of these gets only 50 livres (about $10)
a year; she should get at least 80 livres, M. Coquart thinks. Dufour has
on the farm eight sheep of his own but even of these the King takes the
wool, and actually the farmer has had to pay for what wool his family
used. Surely he should be allowed to keep at least half the wool of his
own sheep! If it was the policy of the Crown to grant lands along the
river of Malbaie there are many people who would like those fertile
areas, but there is danger that they would trade with the Indians which
should be strictly forbidden. So runs M. Coquart's report. It was
rendered to one of the greatest rascals in New France, the Intendant
Bigot, but he was a rascal who did his official tasks with some
considerable degree of thoroughness and insight. He knew what were the
conditions at Malbaie even if he did not mend them.

After 1750 the curtain falls again upon Malbaie and we see nothing
until, a few years later, the desolation of war has come, war that was
to bring to Canada, and, with it, to Malbaie, new masters of British
blood. After long mutterings the war broke out openly in 1756. In those
days the farmer at Malbaie who looked out, as we look out, upon the
mighty river would see great ships passing up and down. Some of them
differed from the merchant ships to which his eye was accustomed. They
stood high in the water. Ships came near the north shore in those days
and he could see grim black openings in their sides which meant cannon.
Already Britain had almost driven France from the sea and these French
ships, which ascended the St. Lawrence, were few. Then, in 1759,
happened what had been long-expected and talked about. Signal fires
blazed at night on both sides of the St. Lawrence to give the alarm,
when not French, but British ships, sailed up the river, a huge fleet.