# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/The Golden Dog

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THE GOLDEN DOG
UNLESS it may be the citadel, nothing is better known in Quebec than the Golden Dog. It is a gilded relief representing a dog, of doubtful pedigree, lying on the ground and gnawing a bone. An accompaniment of text informs us, on the animal's behalf,—
Which has been fairly done into English in this manner:—
The builder of the place was Nicholas Philibert, a Bordeaux man, who was seeking his fortune here as a trader. He was a decent sort of fellow, but, like every one else who had money or the hope of it, he was wronged and swindled by Bigot, the Royal Intendant, the thirteenth and last who held that office. This Bigot was a curious mixture of craft and tyranny, greed and recklessness. His principal aim in life was to get money, but he gave a good many hours a day to spending it. The splendor of the entertainments in his palace, with its four hundred and eighty feet of front, and his generosity to his favorites, were in strange contrast to the stony indifference he showed to suffering ​among his soldiers and the poor. So constant were his drafts on the royal treasury that the Queen of France innocently asked if the walls of Quebec were made of gold. Although another man was the ostensible manager of it, Bigot was the owner of the great shop and warehouse where food and furs were bought low and sold at extortionate prices, and which, bearing its ill reputation as widely as the town itself was known, was called "The Cheat." In times of famine he fattened in proportion as the country starved.
The owner of the Chien d'Or was outspoken in his condemnation of the governor, and he refused to help him in any schemes of plunder. Bigot resorted to sly and small punishments. Whatever the injury he did to Philibert, the victim feared him too much to retaliate at once, yet the threat implied in his golden dog was more courageous than direct assault, because it published his enmity and invited repression. He gnawed but a dry bone of revenge to the last, and never had a chance to fix his teeth in the throat of his tormentor, for one of Bigot's officers, who had been quartered upon Philibert as an annoyance, picked a quarrel on a trifle, and spitted him with a rapier on his own door-step. One version of the tale has it that Philibert's widow placed the golden dog above her door as a threat and an advertisement of the wrong she had suffered. Be that as it may, Philibert's brother—some say his son—came from Bordeaux ​to visit his wrath on the assassin. The murderer had fled, but, getting upon his trail, he followed him up and down the earth, spending months in the quest, until he had run him to his hiding-place in Pondicherry, in the East Indies. There he challenged the slayer, and, falling upon him with a fury that was the wilder for its long repression, he cut his heart in two. Nor had things gone well with Bigot, for the reports of his misdoings were not long in reaching King Louis, who had him sent home in arrest, clapped him into the Bastille, and appropriated the wealth for which Bigot had sinned so industriously. The governor had among his considerable harem a certain Madame P., whose husband had been sent abroad to discover riches, and after his release from the Bastille this woman allowed to the fallen magnate a small pension, which sufficed to keep body and soul together. So the once powerful and greedy and splendid representative of France came to his end meanly, with time and reason for repentance.