Ring of Fire III

2

Champlain felt his age when he awoke in the morning, when he knelt to pray, when he bent over a map that had once been so easy to see, and when he laid his tired bones for sleep-and a hundred other times during the day.

Whenever he returned to France, his friends and the courtiers in Paris would ask: why go back, Samuel? Why return to Nouvelle France, where the winters are cold and the nights are long?

You are not accorded the dignity of being named Governor. While the king and the cardinal- and there was only one cardinal, whenever the title was spoken- grant great seigneuries to everyone around them, you are left humble and modest, with no honors heaped upon you.

Why go back?

Why indeed, he often thought to himself. But the answer was always the same-when he first set foot upon land it reminded him: the pure, clean air, the incredible variety of colors…Nouvelle France was in his blood. It was here that he first realized what he was meant to do.

And it was here, not in some comfortable salon in Paris, in the heart of the world, where he would die. He knew it, just as the cardinal had known it two years earlier at an interview when he had learned of the great extent over which New France was to spread. All of America north of the Spanish possessions belongs to the crown of France, Richelieu had told him, and then granted him the title of lieutenant-general.

In the spring, seven months ago, a confidant in Paris had sent him a scrap of parchment-a sort of engraving, a perfect reproduction of an up-time book, somehow procured from the Americans. It was a page from a great encyclopedia; and it was about him.

According to the book of the future, there was a calamity awaiting him-an imminent one. He was to suffer something that the English text termed a “stroke”-his correspondent had translated it as congestion cerebrale, an affliction of the head. It was written that the disease lingered for some time, giving him the opportunity to settle his affairs and contemplate, during the time left to him, how he would approach the Lord of Hosts when his spirit passed from the world.

The book had been vague about the exact date of the event, placing it sometime in October though it did state that he was to die on Christmas Day. By his own reckoning, the fate that God had ordained for him should logically take place eighty days earlier: forty days from Ash Wednesday to Eastertide, he thought, and forty days from Easter to Pentecost-eighty days placed the event on October the fifth.

All during the summer, Champlain had made his preparations. Confiding the contents of the scrap of paper to no one, not even his confessor, the Jesuit Father Charles Lalemant, he made a number of revisions to his will, providing a number of additional bequests of cash and property and making provisions for the servants of his habitation, his Montagnais godson Fortune, and even the old greffier of Quebec, Jacques de Laville. Lalemant took all of these changes in stride, asking Champlain about his sudden decisions…and, to his shame, Champlain dissembled (even under the seal of the confessional; he told his beads many times for those minor sins).

He would face his death with dignity, with his affairs in order, with his mind clear and his debts and responsibilities discharged. God had vouchsafed him an opportunity to do it before the congestion cerebrale struck him down.

By the Feast of Saint Michael all was in readiness. There was by then nothing to do but wait.