Truly the mariner had not to draw on his imagination; the age of which he was a picturesque particle was a brave and gallant one: an Odyssey indeed, composed of Richelieus, sons and grandsons of the great Henri, Buckinghams, Stuarts, Cromwells, Mazarins, and Monks; Maries de Medicis, Annes of Austria, Mesdames de Longueville; of Royalists, Frondeurs, and Commonwealth; of Catholics, Huguenots, and Puritans.

Some were dead, it is true; but never a great ship passes without leaving a turbulent wake.

And there, in the West, rising serenely above all these tangles of civil wars and political intrigues, was the splendid star of New France.

Happy and envied was the mariner who could tell of its vast riches, of its endless forests, of its cruel brown savages, of its mighty rivers and freshwater seas.
New France! How many a ruined gamester, hearing these words, lifted his head, the fires of hope lighting anew in his burnt-out eyes?
How many a fallen house looked longingly toward this promised land?
New France! Was not the name itself Fortune's earnest, her pledge of treasures lightly to be won?
The gamester went to his garret to dream of golden dice, the fallen noble of rehabilitated castles, the peasant of freedom and liberty.

Even the solemn monk, tossing on his pallet, pierced with his gaze the grey walls of his monastery, annihilated the space between him and the fruitful wilderness, and saw in fancy the building of great cities and cathedrals and a glittering miter on his own tonsured head.
In that day there was situate in the Rue du Palais, south of the harbor, an inn which was the delight of all those mariners whose palates were still unimpaired by the brine of the seven seas, and whose purses spoke well of the hazards of chance.