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merits of the Lower Saint Lawrence : a veteran of the 

 Napoleonic wars, bent with years, but still jauntily 

 sporting the medals and decorations awarded him by 

 the Petit Gaporal, for Wagram, Iena or Austerlitz. 



Let us translate : " I advise, says M. de Gaspe, per- 

 sons visiting Kiviere-du-Loup, to call on Monsieur 

 Louis, a relic of the French army, decorated with the 

 St. Helena medal; and they will thank me. Our friend 

 Monsieur Louis (he has as many friends as he has 

 acquaintances) is a fine-looking old man, with face 

 ruddy, simple manners, and a ready, taking address, 

 recalling ingeniously, — but leaving out, the creditable 

 part played in them by himself — the events of which 

 he has been an eye-witness. This Nestor of the French 

 army, through the kindness of a church sexton, a friend 

 of his father, saw Louis XVI, and his family assist at 

 a low mass in a chapel, the name of which I have for- 

 gotten. From his father's farm, two leagues out of Paris, 

 he remembers hearing the boom of the great guns at 

 the taking of the Bastille. Every respectable person in 

 France, he says, shuddered at the sight of the horrors 

 committed on French soil. But stupor had seized hold 

 of the population, no one dared raise a voice. 



Monsieur Louis had made the first Italian campaign 

 under the great Napoleon and laid down his sworcl only 

 after the disaster of Waterloo. He was then serving 

 under General Grouchy ; he does his utmost to excul- 

 pate his chief for not appearing in time on that battle- 

 field, so disastrous to France. " The roads, says M. 

 Louis, were so horrible that the Prussians had aban- 

 donned their artillery and their heavy baggage and 

 Grouchy was naturally led to believe that Blucher 

 could not have reached the battle field before night." 



" There is nothing strange, in Canadians of old, retain- 

 ing before the French revolution of '89, their liking for 

 France; their intercourse with their French compatriotes 

 had not been much interrupted. Since the conquest, 

 in 1759, several Canadian gentlemen, Messrs. de Sala- 



