QUEBEC.
_It is in Quebec...._
It is in Quebec, the Old World city so curiously transplanted from
sixteenth century France, and set down here on its commanding bluff,
above the Saint Lawrence, that one takes the road of romantic history.
Driving through the steep, narrow streets, our two-wheeled Caleche,
itself the voiture of other centuries, seems a talisman, unlocking the
gray, steep-roofed, admirably-preserved houses, churches, monasteries,
convents, colleges, public buildings, tiny shops, all of them of
unmistakably French aspect, which flank our goings up or down the steep
ascents, which are the Quebec streets.
Romance clings to the old in architecture. Nowhere does she more frankly
look out upon the Canadian world roundabout, than from the casement
windows of Old Quebec.
But, if she only leaned from the windows, she must be a creature to
worship afar off. But Romance believes in “close-ups”. In Quebec she
draws near, takes you by the hand, and leads you over the threshold of
La Basilique--the French Cathedral.
Within, she continues to act as guide, while, paradoxically enough, she
is the essence of the treasures, paintings, altars, crypt, etc., to
which she points.
She steps with you into the almost holy quiet of L’Hotel Dieu, the
hospital founded by Madame La Duchesse, the niece of the great Cardinal
Richelieu; herself one of the most helpful and romantic figures that
ever stepped into Nouvelle France. It is to her, that French-Canada owes
L’Hotel Dieu, one of the finest hospitals in present-day Canada, or, for
that matter, in America.
The soft-stepping Sisters, passing from one bedside to another in their
picturesque robes, gently administering to the suffering of twentieth
century Quebec, are the descendants in an unbroken line of the
“Hopitalieres” who came here with La Duchesse in 1639.
Between the Basilica and the Hospital an old gateway opens into the
quadrangle of the Quebec Seminary, founded by Monsignor Laval, the great
figure of the Church in pioneer Quebec. Here, in the yard below the
long, gray building with its rows of open, French windows and its thick
walls, the youth of present-day French-Canada, in uniforms of
blue-tailored, skirted coats, with emerald-green sashes--rush hither
and thither in their games, directed by willowy figures of
teacher-priests in round hats and clinging soutanes. Romance seems to
linger long here, and to treasure greatly the atmosphere of Laval
University adjoining. Here is youth and its enthusiasms, a miracle-play
of welling human interest giving life to these old walls and halls and
never suffering them to grow old in spirit despite their years.
Then the caleche sets us down at the door of the Ursulines, and there
one asks to see the skull of General Montcalm. A sister brings it.
Montcalm! Wolfe! One cannot think of one without thinking of the other.
And thinking of them both, from the perspective afforded by a century
and a half, what do you see but the hand of Destiny gradually
eliminating the players in the game for the possession of a country far
greater than either side had any idea of, until only these two were left
in the limelight, one wearing the Fleur des Lys, the other the Rose of
England; each a true knight; each defending to the death, “the cause” he
had espoused; each, poetic and romantic figures in whom a United Canada
now rejoices.
But the sister is drawn out to talk of the city, of its many points of
interest, and of its general atmosphere of romance; agrees with you that
it is a wonderful treasure-house of souvenir and story. And then you are
moved to compliment her on her fluency in English. And she laughs and
says “she ought to speak it easily seeing she was born in Providence,
Rhode Island.”
Then, with an unmistakable flash of Yankee humour, she inquires if we do
not think it strange that a “Yankee” should be guardian of the skull of
Montcalm in Quebec? And we counter back: “Not so strange, as--romantic,
Sister!”
In strolling along that renowned promenade, the Dufferin Terrace, which
affords a glimpse of the Saint Lawrence far below in such a panorama of
natural beauty as beginning at one’s feet stretches away mile after mile
till lost in the soft mist of distance, one looks down upon the Lower
Town, whose narrow, old streets, and market-squares call to one to
explore them.
And so some morning we find ourselves in Lower Champlain Street--one of
the queerest old streets in the world. It leaves the markets and docks
behind and doubles around the base of Cape Diamond between the river and
the cliff, until all the city is lost to view and its sounds as
completely obliterated as if you were miles away from any mart.
[Illustration:
THE RAG MAT.]
[Illustration:
SPINNING.]
It was down here, in houses looking like rookeries under the great
cliff, and facing the watered-ribbon of a street, that in the great day
of Quebec’s wooden shipbuilding, lived with their families the
shipwrights, Hibernians and others, who came out from the Old Country to
engage in the shipbuilding trade.
But the life of this street was paralyzed when the industry declined;
and now many of the old, home-roofs are caving in and the old sides
bulging, and only here and there an octogenarian stands in her doorway
knitting in hand. Such an old orphan of a dead-and-gone industry is Mary
Ann Grogan. You stop to speak with her. Her knitting needles click
faster on the sock in her old hand, a-tremble with excitement that
anyone should care to “hear about old times”.
At first her story is an epic of wooden hulls. Through her spectacles,
as it were, you look out there to the edge of the River, the River where
now rides the visiting fleet of the North American squadron, and you see
the low-lying keel, the up-standing ribs, and men everywhere. And the
picture calls up other craft a-building at Levis, and on the banks of
the Saint Charles. And so great is the power of suggestion, that you
even include in the vision the three long ships of Jacques Cartier
putting in that “first winter”. “Surely, this is a wonderful old face,”
you think.
From the ships, she goes on to the street itself, the picturesque little
church, the Sisters’ little school, where the youngsters of the
remaining families struggle with the three R’s. But her story becomes
more dramatic, when she tells of the great landslide of the cliff
itself, the historic landslide that carried such loss of life and
destruction of property in its wake. One might read about it forever and
yet not visualize it as one does when Mary Ann tells you that “the noise
of it”, still lives in her old ears; “that she was born here and lived
here, but never before nor since, has she heard or seen the likes of
that morning.”
* * * * *
The habitants of rural Quebec cling as tenaciously to the life and
atmosphere transplanted here from rural France more than three centuries
ago, as the inhabitants of Quebec city cling to the atmosphere of
ancestral French cities.
Here are the wayside ovens, the wayside crosses and shrines, the old
grist-mills, with water-wheel and upper-and-nether millstones. Here are
towers and windmills descended from Seigneurie times. Here are
century-old wool-carding mills with the ancient sign “Moulin a carde”
over the doorway.
Here are the little maisons with whitewashed sides and steep-curving
roofs whose birth-certificates date back to the days of the first
settlers. Hundreds of years old are these little habitant houses, but
because of the tender care they have received, they are, to-day, as
clean and fresh, within and without, as though built but yesterday.
Canada is rich in having in her possession such a sweet type of
architecture as these dear little farm-houses of the Province of Quebec.
She is rich, too, in the quaint French villages clinging to the
straggling, long highway, which as street culminates in _l’eglise_, or
the Parish church.
Quebec is especially rich in its atmospheric landscape, a landscape so
dear to the habitant heart that outstanding features have become
personalities. Thus, Montmorenci Falls is called “La Vache”--the Cow. A
landscape too, where peaceful church-spire is seldom out of sight of
church-spire. And all are within hail of some river--Saint Lawrence,
Richelieu, Saint Francois, or the Saguenay.
In the matter of place-names Quebec is not behind Newfoundland, except
that her taste runs to figures of the church rather than to figures of
the sea. Every Saint in the calendar must, we think, have a village
namesake in Quebec. On the north side of the Saint Lawrence, L’Ange
Guardien, Saint Anne, Saint Joachim, Saint Gregoire, strike a balance
with Saint Henri, Saint Fabien, Saint Hilaire on the south.
And if the villages be strung together aerially by church-spires, no
less are they united by the quaint roads, whereon oxcart and dog-cart
are as frequent as that of _le cheval_--roads flanked by the
roof-curving, French farm-houses homing the crafts of carding, dyeing,
spinning and weaving.
The spinning-wheel and the loom are not “has-beens” in the Quebec home,
by-gones relegated to the attic--but intimate pieces of furniture
actively a part of everyday life. And so when you step over one of these
thresholds, it is to find madame spinning--her clever fingers feeding so
fast from the distaff that the wheel flies around in a blur of motion;
or, to find her in the room under the eaves sitting at her loom, in her
hand the flying-shuttle, about her, everywhere, on chairs and boxes and
overflowing to the floor, balls of yarn of all sizes and colours.
And when Madame is not weaving her “_couverts_” or “_tapis_”, she is
toying with wool in some one of its preparatory stages from the sheep’s
back to the finished homespun. Or she may even be caring for the home
sheep, bringing up a lamb by hand or something of that sort. The
habitant women are never at a loss for work.
And when Madame is not thus engaged one may happen upon her in the shade
of some dooryard-tree, sitting before a homemade quilting-frame, busily
quilting her hand-pieced coverlets of artistic, original designs. On
these occasions she is accompanied by her little daughter of six or
seven years, daintily tracing the thread-line with her little fingers in
imitation of “Mama”.
In these habitant homes, Grandmere’s busy fingers take much of the
knitting for the _grand famille_ in hand. Grandmere it is, too, who
moulds the high-coloured peaches, grapes, apples, plums, “hands”, and
what-not figures, from the wax that is the by-product of the
honey-making, home-bees.
Whenever one turns in to these country yards, the geese, that are the
watch-dogs of the habitant farm-yards, herald your approach; but the
work of the day is not stopped, although M’sieu, Madame, the children,
one and all welcome the visitor, taking it for granted that the life and
industries connected with the running of these self-supporting farms
should prove entertaining to anyone.
Thrift is the keynote everywhere, but the habitant apparently never
hurries. Life has not changed much in the centuries, except that with
the growth of the times the habitant farms have increased in wealth,
represented in part by a larger stock. Cows, porkers and sheep are
everywhere. But behind the split-rail fences are the same little
pocket-handkerchief patches of growing tabac in cup-like shields of
white birch bark as M’sieu’s father and grandfather planted.
The passage of Time makes no radical changes. M’sieu is as handy a
craftsman as ever. Nor is there any appreciable line of demarcation as
to who shall do this or that, but all members of the family work
helpfully together. Madame goes into the fields with the children and
helps her husband to get in the hay. And, in his spare moments, M’sieu
picks over and lightens up the wool a-drying on the little balcony.
On Sundays the entire family gets into the roomy carry-all and drives to
Mass at the church. The weather must be bad indeed, which causes the
pious habitant to fail in his attendance at _La Messe_.
In keeping with his deep regard for the spiritual, one is not surprised
in Quebec, in more or less every household, to find, in a corner of the
living-room, on a neat, little handmade shelf, a large or smaller figure
of Christ, Mary, or Bonne Sainte Anne, with a tiny lamp burning before
it. The same figures give distinction to the little grocery-shops and
_boulangeries_ of the towns and villages, each figure lighted by its
little candle or incandescent bulb, smiling down, as in sweet
benediction, upon merchant and customer.
The demand for holy figures of this type creates a rare personality of
the Quebec gallery of _genre_ in the “Sculpteur”.
Strolling along some morning, one may chance to come upon the
“sculpteur” at work, at the window of his little shop in the outskirts
of some St. Lawrence town, the white figure of the Saviour with extended
arms in his hand, and on the table row after row of smaller figures, in
various stages of completion.
The use of the religious figure is not confined to the indoors of
Quebec, but over the barn-doors of the farms throughout the Province,
the carved figure of some guarding Saint sheds atmosphere upon the
churn, the wooden shoulder-yoke for bringing water or pails of maple-sap
in its season, or on milk-pails glistening in the sun, on the
fence-posts.
* * * * *
In travelling in Quebec, one cannot help but be struck by the harmony
between artistry and toil. This, doubtless is a French trait, curiously
and happily preserved through centuries of pioneer life. Seldom indeed,
if ever, in Quebec, is the most trifling thing wrought that is not made
in some simple way to have its own art-character. If Madame knits a sock
she combines some little thread of colour to give it character. The rag
mat, which the little daughter tresses in a long braid around the back
of a chair, though it may be put to hardest wear eventually, is made a
symphony in colour. It is the same when M’sieu chooses to paint the
little maison, he has a way of painting the ends of the house one colour
and the sides another, yet effecting by a combination of two harmonious
shades a whole that is--_charmant_.
* * * * *
In passing out of Quebec City the romantic road of history is not left
behind. Few villages of rural Quebec but have been the stage of some
outstanding historic event or personage. Beauport
[Illustration:
TADOUSAC HAS LOST NONE OF
ITS SCENIC BEAUTY.]
[Illustration:
AN OLD TRADING-POST
AT BAIE ST. PAUL.]
knew Montcalm. Montmorenci found the Duke of Kent so enthusiastic over
“la vache” that he has a villa built almost immediately on its banks.
Cape Rouge knew Cartier and Roberval. Tadousac knew the Basques and
Bretons who came to fish and to barter with the Indians for furs,
received some of the earliest missionaries, and to-day boasts a tiny
chapel founded by them in the early years of the seventeenth century,
one of the earliest Mission chapels in Canada, and dedicated to Sainte
Anne. To this little church Anne of Austria gave a bambino, still among
the church’s treasures.
Scattered here and there over the northern end of the Province one
happens on some old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. A house of more
pretentious dimensions with steeper roof than its neighbours, usually
remains as mute evidence that the great Company was once here. Such a
house stands at Baie St. Paul, behind a sentinel-like line of Lombardy
poplars and carrying over a door the date 1718.
Quebec is a piece of fine tapestry, in which multitudinous threads
combine to form the warp and woof of the perfect whole, a whole,
wonderfully woven under the hand of Romance.