QUEBEC

1871

I

A traveller who combines a taste for old towns with a love of letters

ought not, I suppose, to pass through "the most picturesque city in

America" without making an attempt to commemorate his impressions. His

first impression will certainly have been that not America, but Europe,

should have the credit of Quebec. I came, some days since, by a dreary

night-journey, to Point Levi, opposite the town, and as we rattled

toward our goal in the faint raw dawn, and, already attentive to

"effects," I began to consult the misty window-panes and descried

through the moving glass little but crude, monotonous woods, suggestive

of nothing that I had ever heard of in song or story, I felt that the

land would have much to do to give itself a romantic air. And, in fact,

the feat is achieved with almost magical suddenness. The old world rises

in the midst of the new in the manner of a change of scene on the stage.

The St. Lawrence shines at your left, large as a harbour-mouth, gray

with smoke and masts, and edged on its hither verge by a bustling

water-side _faubourg_ which looks French or English, or anything not

local that you please; and beyond it, over against you, on its rocky

promontory, sits the ancient town, belted with its hoary wall and

crowned with its granite citadel. Now that I have been here a while I

find myself wondering how the city would strike one if the imagination

had not been bribed beforehand. The place, after all, is of the soil on

which it stands; yet it appeals to you so cunningly with its little

stock of transatlantic wares that you overlook its flaws and lapses, and

swallow it whole. Fancy lent a willing hand the morning I arrived, and

zealously retouched the picture. The very sky seemed to have been

brushed in like the sky in an English water-colour, the light to filter

down through an atmosphere more dense and more conscious. You cross a

ferry, disembark at the foot of the rock on unmistakably foreign soil,

and then begin to climb into the city proper--the city _intra muros_.

These walls, to the American vision, are of course the sovereign fact of

Quebec; you take off your hat to them as you clatter through the gate.

They are neither very high nor, after all, very hoary. Our clear

American air is hostile to those mellow deposits and incrustations which

enrich the venerable surfaces of Europe. Still, they are walls; till but

a short time ago they quite encircled the town; they are garnished with

little slits for musketry and big embrasures for cannon; they offer here

and there to the strolling bourgeoisie a stretch of grassy rampart; and

they make the whole place definite and personal.

Before you reach the gates, however, you will have been reminded at a

dozen points that you have come abroad. What is the essential difference

of tone between street-life in an old civilisation and in a new? It

seems something subtler and deeper than mere external accidents--than

foreign architecture, than foreign pinks, greens, and yellows plastering

the house-fronts, than the names of the saints on the corners, than all

the pleasant crookedness, narrowness and duskiness, the quaint

economised spaces, the multifarious detail, the brown French faces, the

ruddy English ones. It seems to be the general fact of detail

itself--the hint in the air of a slow, accidental accretion, in

obedience to needs more timidly considered and more sparingly gratified

than the pressing necessities of American progress. But apart from the

metaphysics of the question, Quebec has a great many pleasant little

ripe spots and amenities. You note the small, box-like houses in rugged

stone or in stucco, each painted with uncompromising _naïveté_ in some

bright hue of the owner's fond choice; you note with joy, with envy,

with momentary self-effacement, as a New Yorker, as a Bostonian, the

innumerable calashes and cabs which contend for your selection; and you

observe when you arrive at the hotel, that this is a blank and gloomy

inn, of true provincial aspect, with slender promise of the "American

plan." Perhaps, even the clerk at the office will have the courtesy of

the ages of leisure. I confess that, in my case, he was terribly modern,

so that I was compelled to resort for a lodging to a private house near

by, where I enjoy a transitory glimpse of the _vie intime_ of Quebec. I

fancied, when I came in, that it would be a compensation for worse

quarters to possess the little Canadian vignette I enjoy from my

windows. Certain shabby Yankee sheds, indeed, encumber the foreground,

but they are so near that I can overlook them. Beyond is a piece of

garden, attached to nothing less than a convent of the cloistered nuns

of St. Ursula. The convent chapel rises inside it, crowned with what

seemed to me, in view of the circumstances, a real little _clocher de

France_. The "circumstances," I confess, are simply a couple of stout

French poplars. I call them French because they are alive and happy;

whereas, if they had been American they would have died of a want of

appreciation, like their brothers in the "States." I do not say that the

little convent-belfry, roofed and coated as it is with quaint scales of

tin, would, by itself, produce any very deep illusion; or that the

whispering poplars, _per se_, would transport me to the Gallic

mother-land; but poplars and belfry together constitute an

"effect"--strike a musical note in the scale of association. I look

fondly even at the little casements which command this prospect, for

they too are an old-world heritage. They open sidewise, in two wings,

and are screwed together by that bother--some little iron handle over

which we have fumbled so often in European inns.

If the windows tell of French dominion, of course larger matters testify

with greater eloquence. In a place so small as Quebec, the bloom of

novelty of course rubs off; but when first I walked abroad I fancied

myself again in a French seaside town where I once spent a year, in

common with a large number of economically disposed English. The French

element offers the groundwork, and the English colony wears, for the

most part, that half-genteel and migratory air which stamps the exiled

and provincial British. They look as if they were still _en

voyage_--still in search of low prices--the men in woollen shirts and

Scotch bonnets; the ladies with a certain look of being equipped for

dangers and difficulties. Your very first steps will be likely to lead

you to the market-place, which is a genuine bit of Europeanism. One side

of it is occupied by a huge edifice of yellow plaster, with stone

facings painted in blue, and a manner of _porte-cochère_, leading into

a veritable court--originally, I believe, a college of the early

Jesuits, now a place of military stores. On the other stands the French

cathedral, with an ample stone façade, a bulky stone tower, and a

high-piled, tin-scaled belfry; not architectural, of course, nor

imposing, but with a certain gray maturity, and, as regards the belfry,

a quite adequate quaintness. Bound about are shops and houses, touching

which, I think, it is no mere fancy that they might, as they stand, look

down into some dull and rather dirty place in France. The stalls and

booths in the centre--tended by genuine peasants of tradition,

brown-faced old Frenchwomen, with hard wrinkles and short petticoats,

and white caps beneath their broad-brimmed hats, and more than one

price, as I think you'll find--these, and the stationed calèches and

cabriolets complete a passably fashionable French picture. It is a proof

of how nearly the old market-women resemble their originals across the

sea that you rather resentfully miss one or two of the proper features

of the type--the sabots for the feet and the donkey for the load. Of

course you go into the cathedral, and how forcibly that swing of the

door, as you doff your hat in the cooler air, recalls the old tourist

strayings and pryings beneath other skies! You find a big garish church,

with a cold high light, a promiscuity of stucco and gilding, and a mild

odour of the seventeenth century. It is, perhaps, a shade or so more

sensibly Catholic than it would be with ourselves; but, in fine, it has

pews and a boarded floor, and the few paintings are rather pale in their

badness, and you are forced to admit that the old-world tone which

sustains itself so comfortably elsewhere falters most where most is

asked of it.

Among the other lions of Quebec--notably in the Citadel--you find

Protestant England supreme. A robust trooper of her Majesty, with a pair

of very tight trousers and a very small cap, takes charge of you at the

entrance of the fortifications, and conducts you through all kinds of

incomprehensible defences. I cannot speak of the place as an engineer,

but only as a tourist, and the tourist is chiefly concerned with the

view. This is altogether superb, and if Quebec is not the most

picturesque city in America, this is no fault of its incomparable site.

Perched on its mountain of rock, washed by a river as free and ample as

an ocean-gulf, sweeping from its embattled crest, the villages, the

forests, the blue undulations of the imperial province of which it is

warden--as it has managed from our scanty annals to squeeze out a past,

you pray in the name of all that's majestic that it may have a future. I

may add that, to the mind of the reflective visitor, these idle ramparts

and silent courts present other visions than that of the mighty course

of the river and its anchorage for navies. They evoke a shadowy image of

that great English power, the arches of whose empire were once built

strong on foreign soil; and as you stand where they are highest and look

abroad upon a land of alien speech, you seem to hear the echoed names of

other strongholds and provinces--Gibraltar, Malta, India. Whether these

arches are crumbling now, I do not pretend to say; but the last regular

troops (in number lately much diminished) are just about to be withdrawn

from Quebec, and in the private circles to which I have been admitted I

hear sad forebodings of what society will lose by the departure of the

"military." This single word is eloquent; it reveals a social order

distinctly affiliated, in spite of remoteness, to the society reproduced

for the pacific American in novels in which the hero is a captain of the

army or navy, and of which the scene is therefore necessarily laid in

countries provided with these branches of the public service. Another

opportunity for some such reflections, worthy of a historian or an

essayist, as those I have hinted at, is afforded you on the Plains of

Abraham, to which you probably adjourn directly from the

Citadel--another, but I am bound to say, in my opinion, a less inspiring

one. A battlefield remains a battlefield, whatever may be done to it;

but the scene of Wolfe's victory has been profaned by the erection of a

vulgar prison, and this memento of human infirmities does much to efface

the meagre column which, with its neat inscription, "Here died Wolfe,

victorious," stands there as a symbol of exceptional virtue.