At Quebec he convoked the council, made them a speech, and
administered the oath of allegiance. [Footnote: _Registre du Conseil
Souverain._] This did not satisfy him. He resolved that all Quebec
should take the oath together. It was little but a pretext. Like many
of his station, Frontenac was not in full sympathy with the
centralizing movement of the time, which tended to level ancient
rights, privileges, and prescriptions under the ponderous roller of
the monarchical administration. He looked back with regret to the day
when the three orders of the state, clergy, nobles, and commons, had a
place and a power in the direction of national affairs. The three
orders still subsisted, in form, if not in substance, in some of the
provinces of France; and Frontenac conceived the idea of reproducing
them in Canada. Not only did he cherish the tradition of faded
liberties, but he loved pomp and circumstance, above all, when he was
himself the central figure in it; and the thought of a royal governor
of Languedoc or Brittany, presiding over the estates of his province,
appears to have fired him with emulation.

He had no difficulty in forming his order of the clergy. The Jesuits
and the seminary priests supplied material even more abundant than he
wished. For the order of the nobles, he found three or four
_gentilshommes_ at Quebec, and these he reinforced with a number of
officers. The third estate consisted of the merchants and citizens;
and he formed the members of the council and the magistrates into
another distinct body, though, properly speaking, they belonged to the
third estate, of which by nature and prescription they were the head.
The Jesuits, glad no doubt to lay him under some slight obligation,
lent him their church for the ceremony that he meditated, and aided in
decorating it for the occasion. Here, on the twenty-third of October,
1672, the three estates of Canada were convoked, with as much pomp and