And yet Dr. O’Callaghan could write from over the border, “If you are to blame for the movement, blame then those who plotted and continued it, and who are to be held in history responsible for it. We, my friends, were the victims, not the conspirators; and were I on my deathbed I could declare before heaven that I had no more idea of a movement of resistance when I left Montreal and went to the Richelieu River with M. Papineau than I have now of being bishop of Quebec. And I also know that M. Papineau and I secreted ourselves for some time in a farmer’s house in the parish of St. Marc, lest our presence might alarm that country and be made a pretext for rashness.... I saw as clearly as I now see the country was not prepared.” Dr. O’Callaghan, the _fidus Achates_ of Papineau, the editor of the _Vindicator_, was not likely to have been as innocent as he afterwards remembered himself.
Another who managed to hide safely but nearer home, after the battle of St. Charles, was George Cartier. With his cousin Henri he passed the winter at the house of Antoine Larose, in his native village of St. Antoine, and the person destined to be his father-in-law was in hiding not far off. The future Sir George, to make sure of a quiet resting-place, wrote, and had published in a Montreal newspaper: “George E. Cartier, advocate, a young man of great ability and talent, was found frozen in the woods by his father. He might have served his Queen in the highest councils of his country had he not been brought up in a line of politics which led to his untimely end.” He read his self-description and epitaph, and handed it to his cousin, remarking, “At present, my dear Henri, we can sleep tranquil.” But he reckoned, not without his host, who was incorruptible, but without his host’s servant-maid. The maid had an admirer, and the admirer grew jealous of the two young men who enjoyed advantages superior to those granted him, made a scene with his fiancée, threatened to inform on them and to denounce M. Larose to the authorities for harbouring rebels. So the two young men, nephews many times removed of the celebrated Jacques, had to decamp to the less confined neighbourhood of les États Unis. In after years, when Mackenzie with questionable taste treated the episode of the rebellion as a comedy, he met M. Cartier, in parliamentary obstructive debate, and twitted him that they had both been “out” on the wrong side, and that the Government had shown its appreciation of the comparative values of their heads. He referred to the price of a thousand pounds set on his own, and only three hundred on that of the young man whose sudden demise from hunger and cold in the woods of Verchères had spoilt “une brilliante carrière.”