the modern city, hardly larger than the garden of a very modest house
indeed, that so many of the romantic memories of the old Montreal
cluster. With the great church that has thrust its giant shadow across
it for more than three quarters of a century, the Place d'Armes has been
the heart of Montreal since the days when it was a mere trading post, a
collection of huts at the foot of the lowest rapids of the mighty river.
Much of the old Montreal has gone, even the citadel at the west end of
the town gave way years ago to Dalhousie square, which in turn gave way
to the railroad yards of the Place Viger terminals. But the Place
d'Armes will remain as long as the city remains.
At its northwest corner is the colonnaded front of the Bank of Montreal,
one of the finest banking-homes in Canada.
"It is the great institution of this British Dominion," says a very old
Canadian, whom we sometimes meet in the little square. "It is the
greatest bank in North America."
Offhand, we do not know as to the exact truth of that sweeping
statement, but it is a certain fact that the Bank of Montreal is the
greatest bank in all Canada, one of the greatest in the world, with its
branches and ramifications extending not only across a continent four
thousand miles in width but also over two broad seas. To Montreal it
stands as that famous "old lady of Threadneedle street" stands to
London.
"And yet," our Canadian friend continues, "right across the Place
d'Armes here is an institution that could buy and sell the Bank of
Montreal--or better still, buy it and keep it."
Our eyes follow his pointing hand--to a long, low building on the south
side of the little square. It is very old and exceeding quaint. Although
built of the graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years to
almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well as of another
time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock-face and out-set hands is
redolent of the south of France or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem
a part and parcel of Our Lady of the Snows--and yet it is.
"You know--the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our Canadian friend. "It
was the original owner of the rich island of Montreal. No one knows its
wealth today, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. It
still holds title to thousands of acres and no one save the Gentleman of
the Corporation of St. Sulpice, themselves, knows the wealth of the
institution. To say that it is the richest ecclesiastical institution of
the Americas is not enough, for here is an organization that for
coherency, wealth and strength surpasses Standard Oil and forms the
chief financial support of the strongest church in the world."
And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the Place d'Armes is not
by any chance over-stepping the mark. In the quaint little Seminary that
stands in the half-day shadow of the second largest church on the
continent--a church that it easily builded in the first third of the
nineteenth century from its accumulated wealth--there centers much of
the mystery of Montreal, a mystery which to the stranger takes concrete
form in the high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered rumors of
this force or that working within the politics of the city, in the
so-called Nationalist movement, and flaunts itself in rival displays of
Union Jack and the historic Tricolor of France. There is little of
mystery in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who live
within those very, very old walls are hospitality itself--even though
their ascetic living is of the hardest, crudest sort. The only bed and
carpeted room within the building is reserved for the occasional visits
of bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden from the street
by the earliest part of the Seminary--almost unchanged since its
erection in 1710--and enclosed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like
stone buildings of the institution, is a most delicious garden with
old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of favored saints set in
its shaded place. We remember a garden of the same sort at the mission
of Santa Barbara, in California. These two are the most satisfactory
gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the rose-bushes in the
Seminary of Montreal that one gets a full idea of the size and beauty of
the exterior of the parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the
cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satisfactory view-point
from the street.
And yet Notre Dame is one of the most satisfying churches that we have
ever seen. It is not alone its size, not alone its wonderfully
appropriate location facing that historic Place d'Armes, not any one of
the interesting details of the great structure that comes to us, so much
as the thing which the parish church typifies--the intact keeping of the
customs, the language and the faith of a folk who were betrayed and
deserted by their motherland, more than a century and a half ago. One
rarely hears the word of English spoken in the shadowy and worshipful
aisles of Notre Dame. It is the babbling French that is the language of
three-quarters of the residents of Montreal.
For there stands French, not only entrenched in the chief city of
England's chief possession, but a language that, in the opinion of
unprejudiced observers, gains rather than loses following each
twelvemonth. There are reasons back of all this, and many of them too
complicated and involved to be entered upon here. Suffice it to say here
and now that the city school taxes are divided pro rata between
Protestants and Roman Catholics for the conduct of their several schools
of every sort. And that in most of the Catholic schools French is
practically the only language taught, a half-hour a day being sometimes
given to English, whenever it is taught at all. The devotion of these
French Canadians to their language is only second to their religion, and
is closely intermingled with it. There is something pathetic and lovable
about it all that makes one understand why the _habitans_ of a little
town below Montreal tore down the English sign that the Dominion
government erected over their Post Office, a year or so ago. And the
Dominion government took the hint, made no fuss, but replaced its error
with a French sign. Remember that there are more Tricolors floating in
lower Canada than British Union Jacks.
The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the street markers must
be in English, half in French, just as the city government that places
them divides its proceedings, half in one language, half in the other.
This even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, the
flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even so stolid a
British institution as the Harbor Commissioners giving the sides of its
brigade of dock locomotives evenly to the rival tongues.
To attend high mass in Notre Dame is to make a memory well-nigh
ineffaceable. It is to bring back in future years recollections of a
great church, lifted from its week-day shadows by a wealth of dazzling
incandescents, to be ushered past silent, kneeling figures to a stout
pew, by a stout _Suisse_ in gaudy uniform; to look to a high altar that
stands afar and ablaze with candles, while priests and acolytes, by the
hundreds, pass before it chanting, and the Cardinal sits aloft on his
throne silent and in adoration; to hear not a word of English from that
high place or the folk who sit upon the great floor or in the two
encircling galleries, but to catch the refrain of chant and of "Te
Deum;" these are the things that seem to make religion common to every
man, no matter what his professed faith. And then, after it is all over,
to come out of the shadows of the parish church into the brilliant
sunshine of the Place d'Armes, the place where they once executed
murderers under the old French law by breaking their backs and then
their lesser bones, and to hear Gros Bourdon sing his chant over the
city from the belfry of Notre Dame--this is the old Montreal living in
the heart of the new. They do not swing the great bell any more--for
even Notre Dame grows old and its aged stones must be respected--but
they toll it rapidly, in a sort of sing-song chant. We have stood in the
west end of the town, three miles distant from the Place d'Armes, and
heard the rich, sweet tones of his deep throat come booming over the
crowded city--a warning to a half a million folk to turn from worldier
things to the thought of mighty God.
* * * * *
Our best path leads west again from the Place d'Armes, past the newly
reconstructed General Post Office, more stately banks here concentrating
the wealth of the strong, new Canada; smart British-looking shops and
restaurants. In these last you may drink fine ales, munch at rare
cheeses, of which Montreal is _connoisseur_, and eat rare roast beef
done to a turn, with Yorkshire pudding, six days in a week. But you will
look in vain for real French restaurants with their delectable
_cuisines_. We have looked in vain in our almost innumerable trips to
the city under the mountain. We have enlisted our friend Paul, who
avers that he knows Montreal as he knows the fingers on his hand. Paul
is a reporter on a French paper. He works not more than fourteen
consecutive hours on dull days, at a princely salary of nine dollars a
week, and the rest of the time he is our entertainment committee--and an
immense success at that. Paul has taught us a smattering of Montreal
French, and he has shown us many curious places about the old city, but
he has never found us a French restaurant that could even compare with
some we know in the vicinity of West Twenty-seventh street in the city
of New York. Sometimes he has come to us with mysterious hints of final
success and we have girded our loins quickly to go with him. But when we
have arrived it has been a place white-fronted like the dairy lunches
off from Broadway, and we have never seen one of them without the
listing of breakfast foods from Battle Creek, Michigan, mince-pie or
other typical dishes from the States. And at Paul's rarest find we
interviewed _Monsieur le proprietaire_, only to have the dashing news
that he had once served as second _chef_ in the old Burnet House, in
Cincinnati. There is, after all, a closer bond between two neighboring
nations than either Ottawa or London is willing to admit and even Paul,
loyal to his language and to his traditions, admits that.
"Some day--some day," he dreams to us between cigarettes, "I am going
down to see the Easter parade on Fifth avenue. Last year twelve thousand
went from Montreal"--he chuckles--"and folks from Bordeaux ward looked
at the swells from Westmount and thought they were real New Yorkers."
And a little while later, between another change of cigarettes, he adds:
"And I may not come back on my ticket. I understand--that reporters get
fifteen or twenty dollars a week on the New York city papers."
Paul's collar is impossible and his appetite for cigarettes fiendish,
but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares the ambitions of the city which,
old in heart and traditions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks
forward to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all English great
possessions--a city filled with more than a million folk.
* * * * *
We pass through the splendors of Victoria square and up the steep turn
of Beaver Hall Hill into Phillips square and smart Ste. Catherine
street. In a general way, the French element have preëmpted the eastern
end of the city for themselves, while the English-speaking portion of
the population clings to the section north and west of Phillips square
and Ste. Catherine street right up to the first steep slopes of Mount
Royal. This part of the city looks like any smart, progressive British
town--with its fine Gothic Cathedral of the Church of England facing its
showy main street, its exclusive clubs and its great hotels. And
nowadays smart modern restaurants are also crowding upon Ste. Catherine
street, for modern Montreal will proudly tell you, and tell you again
and again, that it is more continental, far more continental than
London, which in turn is tightly bound down by the traditions of English
conservatism. Montreal is not very literary--Toronto surpassing it in
that regard--but it has a keen love of good paintings, good art of every
sort. It ranks itself next to New York and Boston and among North
American cities in this regard.
"We are more proud of our public and private galleries," says the
citizen of the town who sips tea at five o'clock with you in the lounge
of the Windsor, "than we are of our New Yorkish restaurants that have
imported themselves across the line within the past year or two. We have
smiled at our daughters drifting in here for their tea on matinée
afternoons, but dinners and American cocktails--well there are some
sorts of reciprocity that we decidedly do not want."
We understand. Montreal wants her personality, her rare and varied
personality, preserved inviolate and intact. That is one great reason
why she has cherished the pro-British habits of her press. New York is
well enough for a trip--Montreal delights in our metropolis, as she does
in our Atlantic City--as mere pleasure grounds, and the Easter hegira,
in which Paul is yet to join, grows each year. But New York is New York,
and Montreal must be Montreal. With her wealth of tradition, her
peculiarly unique conservatism of two languages and two great peoples
working out their problems in common sympathy, without conceding a
single heritage, one to the other, the city of the gray and green must
keep to her own path.
22
THE CITY THAT NEVER GROWS YOUNG
He stands, hat in hand, facing the city that honors his memory so
greatly. To Samuel de la Champlain Quebec has not merely given the glory
of what seems to us to be one of the handsomest monuments in America,
but here and there in her quiet streets she brings back to the stranger
within her walls recollections of the doughty Frenchman who braved an
unknown sea to find a site for the city, which for more than three
hundred years has stood as guardian to the north portal of America.
Other adventurous sea spirits of those early days went chiefly in the
quest of gold. Champlain had loftier ambitions within his heart. He
hoped to be a nation-builder. And not only Quebec, but the great
young-old nation that stands behind her, is his real monument.
Still, the artist's creation of bronze and of marble is effective--not
alone, as we have already said, because of its own real beauty--but also
very largely because of its tremendously impressive setting at the rim
of the upper town--facing the tiny open square that as far back as two
hundred and fifty years ago was the center of its fashionable life.
Champlain in bronze looks at the tidy Place d'Armes--older residents of
Quebec still delight in calling it the Ring--with its neat pathways of
red brick and its low, splashing fountain, as if he longed to return to
flesh and blood and walk through the little square and from it down some
of the narrow streets that he may, himself, have planned in the days of
old.
Or perhaps he would have chosen that once imposing main thoroughfare of
Upper Town, St. Louis street, which out beyond the city wall has the
even more distinctive French title of the Grande Allee. We have chosen
that main street many times ourselves, leading straight past the
castellated gateways of the Chateau, fashioned less than a score of
years ago by a master American architect--Mr. Bruce Price--and since
grown very much larger, quite like a lovely girl still in her teens. On
the other side of the street, close to the curb of the Place d'Armes, is
the ever-waiting row of Victorias and _caleches_, whose drivers rise
smilingly in their places even at the mere suggestion of a coming fare.
Beyond these patient Jehus stands the rather ordinary looking Court
House, somewhat out of harmony with the architectural traditions of the
town--and then we are plunged into the heart of as fascinating a street
as one may hope to see in North America. It is clean--immaculate, if you
please, after the fashion of all these _habitans_ of lower Canada--and
it is bordered ever and ever so tightly by a double row of clean-faced
stone houses, their single doors letting directly upon the sidewalk,
and, also after the fashion of all Quebec, surmounted by steep pitched
tin roofs and wonderfully fat chimneys, covered with tin in their turn.
Quebec seems to have a passion for tin. It is her almost universal
roofing, and in the bright sunshine, glittering with mirror-like
brilliancy of contrast against the age-darkened stone walls, it has a
charm that is quite its own.
One of these old houses of St. Louis street sets well back from the
sidewalk in a seeming riotous waste of front lawn, and bears upon its
face a tablet denoting it as the one-time home of the Duke of Kent. This
distinguished gentleman lived in Quebec many years before he became
father of Queen Victoria. In fact, Quebec remembers him as a rather gay
young blade of a fellow who had innumerable mild affairs with the
fascinating French-Canadian girls of the town. These things have almost
become traditions among the older folk of the place. Those girls of
Quebec town seem always to have held keen attractions for young blades
from afar. When you turn down Mountain Hill and pass the General Post
Office with its quaint Golden Dog set in the _façade_, they will not
only make you re-read that fascinating romance of the old Quebec, but
they will tell you that years after the Philiberts and the Repentignys
were gone and the English were in full enjoyment of their rare American
prize, that same old inn, upon whose front the gnawing dog was so
securely set, was run by one Sergeant Miles Prentice, whose pretty
niece, Miss Simpson, so captivated Captain Horatio Nelson of His
Majesty's Ship _Albemarle_ that it became necessary for his friends to
spirit away the future hero of Trafalgar to prevent him from marrying
her.
Beyond the old house of the Duke of Kent, St. Louis street is a narrow
path lined by severe little Canadian homes all the way to the city gate.
Many of these houses are fairly steeped in tradition. One tiny fellow
within which the ancient profession of the barber still works is the
house wherein Montcalm died. And to another, Benedict Arnold was taken
in that ill-starred American attack upon Quebec. A third was a gift two
centuries ago by the Intendant Bigot to the favored woman of his
acquaintance. Romance does creep up and down the little steps of these
little houses. They change hardly at all with the changing of the years.
[Illustration: Lower Town, Quebec--from the Terrace]
Here among them are the ruins of an old theater--its solid-stone façade
still holding high above the narrow run of pavement. It has been swept
within by fire--the evil enemy that has fallen upon Quebec again and
again and far more devastatingly than even the cannon that have
bombarded her from unfriendly hands.
"Are they going to rebuild?" you may inquire, as you look at the stolid
shell of the old theater.
"Bless you, no," exclaims your guide. "The Music Hall was burned more
than a dozen years ago. Quebec does not rebuild."
But he is wrong. Quebec does rebuild, does progress. Quebec progresses
very slowly, but also very surely. To a man who returns after twenty
years' absence from her quiet streets, the changes are most apparent.
There are fewer _caleches_ upon the street--those quaint two-wheeled
vehicles which merge the joys of a Coney island whirly-coaster and the
benefits of Swedish massage--although the drivers of these distinctive
carriages still supply the American's keen demand for "local color" by
shouting "_marche donc_" to their stout and ugly little horses as they
go running up and down the steep side-hill streets. Nowadays most
tourists eschew the _caleche_ and turn towards trolley cars. That of
itself tells of the almost sinful modernization of Quebec. It is almost
a quarter of a century since the electric cars invaded the narrow
streets of the Upper Town, and in so doing caused the wanton demolition
of the last of the older gates--Porte St. Jean. The destruction of St.
Jean's gate was a mistake--to put the matter slightly. It came at a time
when the question was being gently raised of the replacement of the
older gates that had gone long before--Palace, Hope and Prescott.
Nowadays but two of these portals remain, the St. Louis and the Kent
gates, and these are not in architectural harmony with the solid British
fortifications.
Indeed, that is one of the great crimes to be charged against the
modernization of Quebec. Other old towns in America have brought their
architects to a clever sense of the necessity of making their newer
buildings fit in absolute harmony with the older. They have clung
jealously to their architectural personality. Quebec has missed that
point. With the exception of the lovely Chateau which fits the
traditions of the town, as a solitaire fits a ring setting, the newer
buildings represent a strange hodge-podge of ideas.
Quebec herself rather endures being quaint than enjoys it; for in this
day of Canadian development she has dreamed of the future after the
fashion of those insistent towns further to the west. It has not been
pleasant for her to drop from second place in Canadian commercial
importance to fourth or fifth. She has had to sit back and see such
cities as Winnipeg, for instance, come from an Indian trading-place to a
metropolitan center two or three times her size, while her own wharves
rot. It is a matter of keen humiliation to the town every time a big
ocean liner goes sailing up the river to Montreal--her river, if you are
to give ear to the protests of her citizens whom you meet along the
Terrace of a late afternoon--without halting at her wharves, perhaps
without even a respectful salute to the town which has been known these
many years as the Gibraltar of America.
So she has given herself to the development of transcontinental railroad
projects. When one Canadian railroad decided to use her as the summer
terminal of its largest trans-Atlantic liners without sending those
great vessels further up to Montreal, Quebec saw quickly what that meant
to her in prestige and importance. When the railroads told her, as
politely as they might, that they could not develop her as a mighty
traffic center because of the broad arm of the St. Lawrence which
blocked rail access from the South, she put her wits together and set
out to bridge that arm with the greatest cantilever in the world. The
fall of the Quebec bridge five years ago with its toll of eighty lives,
was a great blow to the commercial hopes of the town. But they have
begun to arise once more. The wreckage of that tragedy is already out
of the way and the workmen are trying again, placing fresh foundations
for the slender, far-reaching span that is going to mean so very much to
the portal city of Canada.
* * * * *
But progress has not robbed Quebec of her charm. It seems quite unlikely
that such a brutal tragedy shall ever come. They may come as they did a
year or two ago and tear down the impressive Champlain market--one of
the very great lions of the Lower Town--but they do not understand the
_habitans_ from those back country villages around Quebec. Progress does
not come to those obscure communities--no, not even slowly. The women
still gather together at some mountain stream on wash-days and cleanse
their laundry by placing it over flat rocks by the waterside and
pounding it with wooden paddles, there are more barns roofed with thatch
than with shingles, to say nothing of farms where a horse is an unknown
luxury and men till the soil much as the soil was tilled in the days of
Christ. From those places came the _habitans_ to Champlain
market--within my memory some of them in two-wheeled carts drawn by
great Newfoundland dogs--and it was a gay place on at least two mornings
of the week. One might buy if one pleased--bartering is a fine art to
the French-Canadian and one dear to his soul--or one might pass to the
next stall. But one could never pass very many stalls, with their bright
offerings of food-stuffs or simple wearing apparels alike set in
garniture of the brilliant flowers of this land of the short warm
summer.