THE WALLS OF QUEBEC
After spending the night at a farmhouse in Château Richer, about a
dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city.
We stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, over the
_Chipré_,--for so the name sounded,--such as you will nowhere see in
the States, and asked the millers the age of the mill. They went
upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we
wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. I wanted
French to give him a piece of my mind. I had got enough to talk on a
pinch, but not to quarrel, so I had to come away, looking all I would
have said. This was the utmost incivility we met with in Canada. In
Beauport, within a few miles of Quebec, we turned aside to look at a
church which was just being completed,--a very large and handsome
edifice of stone, with a green bough stuck in its gable, of some
significance to Catholics. The comparative wealth of the Church in
this country was apparent; for in this village we did not see one good
house besides. They were all humble cottages; and yet this appeared to
me a more imposing structure than any church in Boston. But I am no
judge of these things.
Reëntering Quebec through St. John's Gate, we took a caleche in Market
Square for the Falls of the Chaudière, about nine miles southwest of
the city, for which we were to pay so much, besides forty sous for
tolls. The driver, as usual, spoke French only. The number of these
vehicles is very great for so small a town. They are like one of our
chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body,
with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad
leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and
keep children from falling out. They had an easy jaunting look, which,
as our hours were numbered, persuaded us to be riders. We met with
them on every road near Quebec these days, each with its complement of
two inquisitive-looking foreigners and a Canadian driver, the former
evidently enjoying their novel experience, for commonly it is only the
horse whose language you do not understand; but they were one remove
further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible
driver. We crossed the St. Lawrence to Point Levi in a French-Canadian
ferry-boat, which was inconvenient and dirty, and managed with great
noise and bustle. The current was very strong and tumultuous; and the
boat tossed enough to make some sick, though it was only a mile
across; yet the wind was not to be compared with that of the day
before, and we saw that the Canadians had a good excuse for not taking
us over to the Isle of Orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they
may be for not having provided any other conveyance. The route which
we took to the Chaudière did not afford us those views of Quebec which
we had expected, and the country and inhabitants appeared less
interesting to a traveler than those we had seen. The Falls of the
Chaudière are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the St.
Lawrence. Though they were the largest which I saw in Canada, I was
not proportionately interested by them, probably from satiety. I did
not see any peculiar propriety in the name _Chaudière_, or caldron. I
saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just
across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this
tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of
its arch. It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full
semicircle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as
usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as
substantial as an arch of stone. It changed its position and colors as
we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and
the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men
and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special
purpose beyond this, I know not. At the farthest point in this ride,
and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried
the frowning citadel of Quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird
of prey. We returned by the river road under the bank, which is very
high, abrupt, and rocky. When we were opposite to Quebec, I was
surprised to see that in the Lower Town, under the shadow of the rock,
the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while
the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad
daylight. As we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up
at a _maison de pension_ at Point Levi. The usual two-story stove was
here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a
fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. We could not understand their
French here very well, but the _potage_ was just like what we had had
before. There were many small chambers with doorways, but no doors.
The walls of our chamber, all around and overhead, were neatly ceiled,
and the timbers cased with wood unpainted. The pillows were checkered
and tasseled, and the usual long-pointed red woolen or worsted
nightcap was placed on each. I pulled mine out to see how it was made.
It was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other;
just such, it appeared, as I saw men wearing all day in the streets.
Probably I should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is
sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero.
When we landed at Quebec the next morning a man lay on his back on the
wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the
path of the horses, groaning, "O ma conscience!" I thought that he
pronounced his French more distinctly than any I heard, as if the
dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language. Having
secured the only unengaged berths in the Lord Sydenham steamer, which
was to leave Quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that I had
seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, I proceeded
to walk round the Upper Town, or fortified portion, which is two miles
and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as I could get to the
cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole; going round by the
southwest, where there is but a single street between the cliff and
the water, and up the long wooden stairs, through the suburbs
northward to the King's Woodyard, which I thought must have been a
long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the St. Charles,
where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loopholed
for musketry; so returning by Mountain Street and Prescott Gate to the
Upper Town. Having found my way by an obscure passage near the St.
Louis Gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper,--I
believe that I was the only visitor then in the city who got in
there,--I enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from within the citadel
itself, which I had explored some days before. As I walked on the
glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers' dwellings in
the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a
soldier's cat walking up a cleated plank into a high loophole designed
for _mus-catry_, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully
waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness
and all her paths were peace. Scaling a slat fence, where a small
force might have checked me, I got out of the esplanade into the
Governor's Garden, and read the well-known inscription on Wolfe and
Montcalm's monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the
purpose, undoubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received:--
MORTEM . VIRTUS . COMMUNEM .
FAMAM . HISTORIA .
MONUMENTUM . POSTERITAS .
DEDIT
(Valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument.)
The Government Garden has for nosegays, amid kitchen vegetables,
beside the common garden flowers, the usual complement of cannon
directed toward some future and possible enemy. I then returned up St.
Louis Street to the esplanade and ramparts there, and went round the
Upper Town once more, though I was very tired, this time on the
_inside_ of the wall; for I knew that the wall was the main thing in
Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money, and therefore I must make
the most of it. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have
in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is
true. Moreover, I cannot say but I yielded in some measure to the
soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it
best to examine the wall thoroughly, that I might be the better
prepared if I should ever be called that way again in the service of
my country. I committed all the gates to memory, in their order, which
did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the
hundred-gated city, there being only five; nor were they so hard to
remember as those seven of Bœotian Thebes; and, moreover, I thought
that, if seven champions were enough against the latter, one would be
enough against Quebec, though he bore for all armor and device only an
umbrella and a bundle. I took the nunneries as I went, for I had
learned to distinguish them by the blinds; and I observed also the
foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or
in the vicinity of the walls. All the rest I omitted, as naturally as
one would the inside of an inedible shell-fish. These were the only
pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. Quebec is
chiefly famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. The technical
terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a little at first, such
as _banlieue_, _esplanade_, _glacis_, _ravelin_, _cavalier_, etc.,
etc., but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn
the nature of your ground. I was surprised at the extent of the
artillery barracks, built so long ago,--_Casernes Nouvelles_, they
used to be called,--nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in
depth, where the sentries, like peripatetic philosophers, were so
absorbed in thought as not to notice me when I passed in and out at
the gates. Within are "small arms of every description, sufficient for
the equipment of twenty thousand men," so arranged as to give a
startling _coup d'œil_ to strangers. I did not enter, not wishing
to get a black eye; for they are said to be "in a state of complete
repair and readiness for immediate use." Here, for a short time, I
lost sight of the wall, but I recovered it again on emerging from the
barrack yard. There I met with a Scotchman who appeared to have
business with the wall, like myself; and, being thus mutually drawn
together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conversation _sub
moenibus_, that is, by an angle of the wall, which sheltered us. He
lived about thirty miles northwest of Quebec; had been nineteen years
in the country; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to
America after all, but found himself still under British rule and
where his own language was not spoken; that many Scotch, Irish, and
English were disappointed in like manner, and either went to the
States or pushed up the river to Canada West, nearer to the States,
and where their language was spoken. He talked of visiting the States
some time; and, as he seemed ignorant of geography, I warned him that
it was one thing to visit the State of Massachusetts, and another to
visit the State of California. He said it was colder there than usual
at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or
frock-coat, with him; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and
warm. That is the way we are always thinking. However, his words were
music to me in my thin hat and sack.
At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted
twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor,
with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,--there are said to
be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,--all
which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the
motto, "In time of peace prepare for war;" but I saw no preparations
for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.
Having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and
without, I went no farther by the wall for fear that I should become
wall-eyed. However, I think that I deserve to be made a member of the
Royal Sappers and Miners.
In short, I observed everywhere the most perfect arrangements for
keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on
it, which some think an ornament; but then I saw no cultivation nor
pasturing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly
forbidden to feed on the glacis under the severest penalties. Where
the dogs get their milk I don't know, and I fear it is bloody at best.
The citadel of Quebec says, "I _will_ live here, and you shan't
prevent me." To which you return, that you have not the slightest
objection; live and let live. The Martello towers looked, for all the
world, exactly like abandoned windmills which had not had a grist to
grind these hundred years. Indeed, the whole castle here was a
"folly,"--England's folly,--and, in more senses than one, a castle in
the air. The inhabitants and the government are gradually waking up to
a sense of this truth; for I heard something said about their
abandoning the wall around the Upper Town, and confining the
fortifications to the citadel of forty acres. Of course they will
finally reduce their intrenchments to the circumference of their own
brave hearts.
The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them;
they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day
they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The
very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become
old and dilapidated, as the word _barrack_ implies. I couple all
fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be
found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not
actually dismantled, it is because that there the intellect of the
inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near
Valdivia in South America, when a traveler remarked to him that, with
one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces,
gravely replied, "No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two." Perhaps
the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to
the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d'Acre, and the
days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a
clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun.
I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object
for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the
development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both
in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress
than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as
frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside
a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason
for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half
an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing
with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and
it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it
almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the
colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was
a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it
chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town
got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags,
as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country
village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting
only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a
man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of
broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his
business. Or is this an indispensable machinery for the good
government of the country? The inhabitants of California succeed
pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any
such institution. What use has this fortress served, to look at it
even from the soldiers' point of view? At first the French took care
of it; yet Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of
Quebec without experiencing any hindrance at last from its
fortifications. They were only the bone for which the parties fought.
Then the English began to take care of it. So of any fort in the
world,--that in Boston Harbor, for instance. We shall at length hear
that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself,
and both it and its inhabitants are always benighted. How often we
read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and
so the fort was evacuated! Have not the schoolhouse and the
printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?
However, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good repair. There are some
eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment goes
bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the
muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec. This universal
exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the
keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' claws. It was the English
leopard showing his claws. Always the royal something or other; as at
the menagerie, the Royal Bengal Tiger. Silliman states that "the cold
is so intense in the winter nights, particularly on Cape Diamond, that
the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are relieved at
the expiration of that time;" "and even, as it is said, at much
shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold." What a natural
or unnatural fool must that soldier be--to say nothing of his
government--who, when quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to
be quick, will stand to have his face frozen, watching the walls of
Quebec, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and
dishonest men all the world over have been in their beds nearly half a
century,--or at least for that space travelers have visited Quebec
only as they would read history! I shall never again wake up in a
colder night than usual, but I shall think how rapidly the sentinels
are relieving one another on the walls of Quebec, their quicksilver
being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile Wolfe may even
then be scaling the Heights of Abraham, or some persevering Arnold
about to issue from the wilderness; some Malay or Japanese, perchance,
coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to
assault the citadel! Why, I should as soon expect to find the
sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of Nineveh, which
have so long been buried to the world. What a troublesome thing a wall
is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it! Of course, if they
had no wall, they would not need to have any sentinels.
You might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with
substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred
Highlanders and Royal Irish who are required to keep them from
toppling down); stock and tools to go with the land if desired. But it
would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm-book.
Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older
country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All
things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain
rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust
of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of
Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some
cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was
on the inhabitants and their institutions. Yet the work of burnishing
goes briskly forward. I imagined that the government vessels at the
wharves were laden with rottenstone and oxalic acid,--that is what the
first ship from England in the spring comes freighted with,--and the
hands of the Colonial legislature are cased in wash-leather. The
principal exports must be _gun_ny bags, verdigris, and iron rust.
Those who first built this fort, coming from Old France with the
memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were
unquestionably behind their age; and those who now inhabit and repair
it are behind their ancestors or predecessors. Those old chevaliers
thought that they could transplant the feudal system to America. It
has been set out, but it has not thriven. Notwithstanding that Canada
was settled first, and, unlike New England, for a long series of years
enjoyed the fostering care of the mother country; notwithstanding
that, as Charlevoix tells us, it had more of the ancient _noblesse_
among its early settlers than any other of the French colonies, and
perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the Canadas
but 600,000 of French descent to-day,--about half so many as the
population of Massachusetts. The whole population of both Canadas is
but about 1,700,000 Canadians, English, Irish, Scotch, Indians, and
all, put together! Samuel Laing, in his essay on the Northmen, to
whom especially, rather than the Saxons, he refers the energy and
indeed the excellence of the English character, observes that, when
they occupied Scandinavia, "each man possessed his lot of land without
reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, without any local
chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was
due,--without tenure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior,
real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual
settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it,
by the same right as the King held his crown, by udal right, or
adel,--that is, noble right." The French have occupied Canada, not
_udally_, or by noble right, but _feudally_, or by ignoble right. They
are a nation of peasants.
It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the
aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada
as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists
in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay
here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the
Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad
citizen, probably a rebel, there,--certainly if he were already a
rebel at home. I suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much
rarer phenomenon there and in England than in the Northern United
States. An Englishman, methinks,--not to speak of other European
nations,--habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of
the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of
Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud
of it. But an American--one who has made a tolerable use of his
opportunities--cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is
advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of
man in these respects. It is a government, that English one,--like
most other European ones,--that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you
would naturally forget it; under which one cannot be wholesomely
neglected, and grow up a man and not an Englishman merely,--cannot be
a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! Give me a
country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a
government that does not understand you to let you alone. One would
say that a true Englishman could speculate only within bounds. (It is
true the Americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can
_speculate_ without bounds.) He has to pay his respects to so many
things, that, before he knows it, he _may_ have paid away all he is
worth. What makes the United States government, on the whole, more
tolerable--I mean for us lucky white men--is the fact that there is so
much less of government with us. Here it is only once in a month or a
year that a man _needs_ remember that institution; and those who go to
Congress can play the game of the Kilkenny cats there without fatal
consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short; but in
Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself
before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the
master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the
Champ de Mars and exhibits itself and toots. Everywhere there appeared
an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and otherwise transient
distinctions. In the streets of Montreal and Quebec you met not only
with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and
white, with Sisters of Charity gone into mourning for their deceased
relative,--not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the
fashion of a tear, of whom you heard,--but youths belonging to some
seminary or other, wearing coats edged with white, who looked as if
their expanding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. In
short, the inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two
fires,--the soldiery and the priesthood.