He was but twenty years old when he stepped into the shop where the old tombstone-cutter had worked for forty years.

Picking up the hammer and chisel which the old man had dropped when he fell dead at the end of a long hot day's labour, he finished the half-carved tombstone, and gave the price of it to the widow.

Then, going to the Seigneur and Cure, he asked them to buy the shop and tools for him, and let him pay rent until he could take the place off their hands.
They did as he asked, and in two years he had bought and paid for the place, and had a few dollars to the good.

During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day.
It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered.

They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them--as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper.