Roman Catholic Bishop. Born in Grenoble to one of the highest ranking Dauphiné families, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix Chevrières de Saint Vallier was raised on his household's castle on the banks of the Rhône before entering the city's college run by the Jesuit Fathers, later heading to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Earning a licentiate in theology when just nineteen years of age, his strong family ties saw him named almoner to King Louis XIV four years prior to his priesthood ordination, which eventually took place in 1681. An ascetic man, who proved to be too austere and rather boring to King Louis, Chevrières would wear his cassock rather than assuming a court dress and little did he seem seduced by the court's excessive lifestyle. Founding a hospital out of his financial means in Saint Vallier, he paid regular visits to hospitals, prisons and country parishes. When due to health reasons, Saint François de Laval planned to resign the pastoral government of the see of Québec in New France, of which he was the first ordinary, he visited France in order to seek a successor, convinced that a younger and more robust bishop would do more good than he. With utmost care he chose Chevrières de Saint Vallier for the post, which he accepted in spite of his family's objections, knowing of the fate that such a then wretched and difficult mission would have ready for him. Yet for the young priest, no post seemed to be so onerous as this, and King Louis was more than happy to see the young rigorous man set for afar. Receiving his episcopal consecration at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on January 25, 1688 in his thirty fourth year, he left for Canada with the simple title of Bishop Laval's vicar general, as his bulls for the bishopric had not yet arrived from Rome. While Bishop Laval agreed to remain in office until the consecration of his successor, his idea of spending his remaining years in Québec feared authorities that his presence in the city would become in due time the source of quarrels and division between him and Chevrières de Saint Vallier. With Laval consenting not to intrude with Chevrières's once having become Monseigneur l'Ancien, realizing his successor's intention to alter profoundly the church's organization in New France, conflicts however soon began to arise, leading King Louis to forbid Laval from returning to Québec, where he wished to end his days. Eventually consenting to his desire, Laval arrived in Canada on June 3, 1688, followed by Saint Vallier on July 31, yet while Laval was received with great joy by the whole population, his successor soon found himself lacking any popularity, a point which affected him deeply. While being to successor to a saint in a juvenile created see on mission lands was no easy task, his arrival initiated a long period of crisis which lasted no fewer than sixteen years, started with a violent and inevitable quarrel between the bishop and his seminary. Undergoing a vast tour across Québec and Montréal, arriving up to Acadia, the fact he held a long meeting with the Jesuits at Québec's seminary behind closed doors, soon crumpled susceptibility among its priests, as none of them was invited to attend. The main subject of the bishop's quarrels with his priests was to be infact this seminary, that being Laval's most cherished venture, carried privileges that went beyond what was usual, leading Saint Vallier to resist such entitlements. His idea of reorganization however oversaw various tumultuous periods, varying from the denunciation of what was described to be as unbearable and tyrannical character to Jansenist presence among his entourage and to priests demanding his resignation. Going to France in person to seek arbitration from the sovereign, his arbiters concluded their decisions in his favour, causing the seminary to loose its privileges and fall under the usual rule for all such theological academies. Returning to his diocese in triumph, Saint Vallier's temperament led him however to fall out with practically every civil and religious entity of the city in a brief two year period, such that the diocese was soon in complete rise against its ordinary. Reports led King Louis to summon the bishop to France to justify himself. Obeying the sovereign's orders, Louis asked for his resignation but the bishop refused, pointing out to the facts that not only he oversaw to discipline and order through the diocese but had also founded the Hôpital Général, begun the construction of an episcopal palace and installed the Jesuits and Recollets at Montréal, projects that few if any bishops across the whole of France, could state to have undertaken in the same period. Refusing to hand out his resignation despite of the king's insistence, the bishop was ultimately allowed to return to Québec in 1697 after over two years of absence, but shortly thereafter, a new quarrel broke out with the Jesuits over the missions in the Mississippi country, for which the the Jesuits took revenge in a rather cruel way. Back in Paris to defend his position, the bishop would also pay a visit to Pope Clement XI in Rome, who cordially welcomed the first prelate from North America to have ever visited a pontiff. Victorious again on his adversaries, turmoil seemed to be ever present for the bishop for while en route back to Canada, his ship was attacked by the British fleet off the coast of the Azores amidst the War of the Spanish Succession and taken prisoner, for five years he lived in England in little towns on the outskirts of London, in total boredom, facing at times, physical suffering. Still refusing to give up his office, a prisoner exchange finally brought end to his captivity, but King Louis did not consent for his leaving to Canada until four years later, visiting in the meantime abbeys which his diocese owned in France in order to pass time. With King Louis eventually giving in, the bishop returned to his diocese after an absence of thirteen years, only to find it ravaged in vice, with people having difficulty in recognizing him, so much had he aged. No longer the once slender, peremptory young bishop, but a melancholy old man, in exchange for wheat for his city's poor who had been ravaged by epidemics from time to time, he yielded the parish of Neuville's beautiful canopy to help his people in their miseries. However, while in his last years he succeeded in reconciliating with the Jesuits and putting on good terms with various other religious congregations, diocesan priests and colonial authorities held on to several other grudges, including ones coming still from the seminary towards their ordinary. With King Louis appointing Father Louis-François Duplessis de Mornay OFM. Cap., as coadjutor bishop to the see of Québec due to Saint Vallier's old age and infirmities brought along with it, his coadjutor never went to New France, leading the old bishop to admit that should he have had done so, he himself would have personally ended in absolute desertion. Giving up his palace in order to live at the Hôpital Général which he had founded back in 1692, his habits worn, he spent his remaining years in a one room apartment, endowed only with few furnishings. In due time, he reached the point of selling his personal belongings brought over from France, including his linen and eventually his bed, while he served as chaplain of the hospital itself, visiting the sick, administering last sacraments to the dying, celebrating funeral masses and accompanying the dead to the little cemetery adjacent to the building. Growing weaker by the day, on his deathbed he said to the nuns of the Hôpital Général gathered around him, "Forget me, but do not forget my poor". Yet not even his death brought peace to his quarrelsome journey: with his body buried in secret at the church of the General Hospital in accordance with his wishes, this move enraged the capitular vicar, who for months barred the late bishop's confessor from administered such sacrament and lifted of her duties the mother superior, Mère M. Genevieve Duchesnay de Saint-Augustin. And although practically all ordinaries of Québec have been since removed to a specially constructed crypt beneath the city's cathedral, his remains lie still at the hospital's chapel as if nobody wants him. His entrails and heart, deposited in separate boxes, lie buried along with his body in the same vault.