sent to New France, and the company was placed under
special obligation to maintain three priests in each
settlement until the colony could support its own clergy.

Champlain was now sixty years of age, and he had suffered
much. Suddenly there burst forth this spontaneous enthusiasm
of Richelieu the all-powerful. Was Champlain's dream of
the great city of Ludovica to come true after all?

Alas, like previous visions, it faded before the glare
of harsh, uncompromising facts. The year in which Richelieu
founded his Company of New France was also the year of
a fierce Huguenot revolt. Calling on England for aid, La
Rochelle defied Paris, the king, and the cardinal.
Richelieu laid siege to the place. Guiton, the mayor,
sat at his council-board with a bare dagger before him
to warn the faint-hearted. The old Duchesse de Rohan
starved with the populace. Salbert, the most eloquent
of Huguenot pastors, preached that martyrdom was better
than surrender. Meanwhile, Richelieu built his mole across
the harbour, and Buckingham wasted the English troops to
which the citizens looked for their salvation. Then the
town yielded.

The fall of La Rochelle was a great personal triumph for
Richelieu, but the war with England brought disaster to
the Company of New France. At Dieppe there had lived for
many years an Englishman named Jarvis, or Gervase, Kirke,
who with his five sons--David, Lewis, Thomas, John, and
Jamesknew much at first hand about the French merchant