But if the reverend prelate was modest and simple in his personal
tastes, he became inflexible when he thought it his duty to maintain the
rights of the Church. And he watched over these rights with the more
circumspection since he was the first bishop installed in the colony,
and was unwilling to allow abuses to be planted there, which later it
would be very difficult, not to say impossible, to uproot. Hence the
continual friction between him and the governor-general, d'Argenson, on
questions of precedence and etiquette. Some of these disputes would seem
to us childish to-day if even such a writer as Parkman did not put us on
our guard against a premature judgment.[1] "The disputes in question,"
writes Parkman, "though of a nature to provoke a smile on irreverent
lips, were by no means so puerile as they appear. It is difficult in a
modern democratic society to conceive the substantial importance of the
signs and symbols of dignity and authority, at a time and among a people
where they were adjusted with the most scrupulous precision, and
accepted by all classes as exponents of relative degrees in the social
and political scale. Whether the bishop or the governor should sit in
the higher seat at table thus became a political question, for it
defined to the popular understanding the position of Church and State in
their relations to government."

In his zeal for making his episcopal authority respected, could not the
prelate, however, have made some concessions to the temporal power? It
is allowable to think so, when his panegyrist, the Abbé Gosselin,
acknowledges it in these terms: "Did he sometimes show too much ardour
in the settlement of a question or in the assertion of his rights? It is
possible. As the Abbé Ferland rightly observes, 'no virtue is perfect
upon earth.' But he was too pious and too disinterested for us to
suspect for a moment the purity of his intentions." In certain passages
in his journal Father Lalemant seems to be of the same opinion. All men