THE WALLS OF QUEBEC.
After spending the night at a farm-house in Chateau 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 up stairs
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.
Re-entering 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, beside 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 traveller 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 cauldron. 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 key-stone 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 intently 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 tasselled, and
the usual long-pointed red woollen or worsted night-cap 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 loop-holed 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 cleeted plank into a high loop-hole,
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 nose-gays, 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_, &c., &c., 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 mœnibus_, 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 sha’n’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 wind-mills 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 traveller 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 Buccaneers. 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 school-house 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 travellers
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 rotten-stone 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, verdigrease, 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 its tools. 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.
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