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crossed over to Isle St. Jean (Prince Edward Island). 

 In 1752, he extended his peregrinations to Quebec, 

 Three-Rivers, Montreal, Lake St. Sacrement ; during 

 his three years stay in Canada, he visited and reported 

 on innumerable forts. It is some of the memoirs he 

 wrote about this time, I purpose to examine and com- 

 ment. 



In 1754, Franquet returned to Louisbourg in com- 

 pany with the Chevalier de Dru court to put in order 

 the old works of defence, and carry out the instructions 

 of the French king as to new works. Franquet was 

 even more than an experienced engineer officer; his 

 memoirs exhibit him as possessed of literary attain- 

 ments ; he evidently was a close observer of men and 

 things generally, though his timely reports to the king 

 on existing abuses and needed reforms seem to have 

 remained unheeded in those degenerate days, in which 

 coming events were already, though dimly, casting their 

 lurid shadow before them. 



New France in 1751-4 was administered by the 

 Marquis Duquesne. Duquesne de Menneville, a captain 

 in the Royal Navy, was a descendant of the famous 

 admiral Duquesne, who had shed lustre on the reign of 

 Louis XIV. He was brave and able, but a blight 

 affected the colony : the profuse expenditure and in 

 some cases, the wholesale pilfering of some of its high 

 officials. A burthen to France it was even in 1751, 

 losing gradually its former prestige. Was the Marquis 

 gifted with a species of second sight ; and when in 1754, 

 he asked for his recall, could he even then detect on the 

 wall faint tracings of an ominous hand pointing to its 

 loss to France a few years later ? Some are inclined to 

 think so. 



In 1754, however, there were yet but distant mutter- 

 ings of the gathering storm, and even Madame de 

 Pampadour, the royal concubine, would have shrunk 

 from daring to rejoice openly at the possible loss of 

 Canada to France. 



