The City of Quebec has been loved by generations of Canadians. Like some beautiful old native song there is hidden in her, quaint repetitions and the racial themes that link her, decade by decade, with the past and the present. She has been the priceless subject of many a picture, song and story. Most pictures reflect the tones of spring and summer, when the St. Lawrence runs deep blue and the Laurentians are wrapped in purple.
But Quebec in midwinter is less familiar. A Canadian artist, Horatio Walker, who has depicted this aspect with great beauty, says: “I live in the midst of difficulties, hemmed in by snow on the deserted Island of Orleans, but cannot leave the wonder of Quebec in winter.” Snow in Ontario towns often means a sort of gray gloom. But Quebec under a white cloak is a place set high in air, crystal clear and full of sunshine. The railway route from Montreal runs in places through glittering barbaric jungles of what appear to be enormous silver ferns sometimes changing to avenues of innumerable arches of diamonds, crossing [page 17] and recrossing in the sparkling air—frozen larches, bent into fantastic curves by the weight of snow.
It is enchanting to arrive in a winter twilight when a fading sun is on Point Levis. As we drove to the Château Frontenac, our horses lashed with the native fury of a French-Canadian cocher, the shadows in the city had deepened so that we were not prepared for the beauty of sunset from the Terrace. The rosy light on Levis had dyed itself into deep crimson, and there was an afterglow on the Laurentians and the blossoming of electric stars in buildings far away across the river.
From the Château Frontenac, set in a great open space below the Citadel and commanding the St. Lawrence, Levis, and the Laurentians beyond, one glimpses a life altogether Canadian, in the far early sense. The low French sleighs, piled with fur rugs; the driver in his coonskin coat, belted with a gay woolen scarf, standing erect as he drives; nuns in their black robes; friars in dull brown, with careful galoches over what we know are sandaled feet; children, many of them in the gay blanket tobogganing-suits that passed out of existence in other provinces decades since, sailing down and climbing up the slides; all these figures are apt to appear and disappear as you stand by your window and watch the ice blocks pass on the wintry river, silent and inevitable as Fate. [page 18]
Below, in the city, a strange unknown life is progressing. Here the Ursuline Convent stretches out its long stone walls. Just below is Laval, more like a mediæval palace than a modern university. Suddenly [page 19] a sun ray strikes the dome of the Basilica; within are the endless whispers of prayers.
If I could paint my Quebec in sound it would be to the ringing of bells, the laughter of French children and the almost inaudible, incessant whisper of prayers.
The romance of Quebec is like charm in an individual, a thing of endowment. From out some hidden spring of being and by long conspiracy of the ages, this place where Canada began possesses beauty that is in itself a heritage.
Three centuries ago the city was founded by Champlain. But nearly a hundred years before that, Jacques Cartier saw and loved Stadacona, (an Indian village ruled by its chief, Donnacona, the “Lord of Canada”) which lay at the meeting of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles, a stone’s throw from the present city.
The faith of Cartier in his vision of a Canada to be, faith which counted death as nothing, is a memory more keen than the mature affection of Champlain, who succeeded where Cartier had failed to place France in the new world. Yet when Champlain arrived, a century later, there was still need for the courage of a great dream. “When Alexander built Alexandria he could draw with the might of a master upon the resources of three continents. When Constantine built Constantinople he brought to it the [page 20] treasures of the ancient world—the marbles of Corinth, the serpent of Delphi, and the horses of Lysippus. But from no such origin does the life of Canada proceed. Champlain, in rearing his simple habitation at Quebec, had no other financial support than could be drawn from the fur trade. His hungry handful of followers subsisted largely upon stale pork and smoked eels. Everything that was won from the wilderness cost heroism, self-sacrifice and faith.”
“La Grande Mère of Canadian cities,” her story from her birth in 1608 is alive with incident. French, until the Battle of the Plains of Abraham closed what has been called “the grand but insecure pageant of French Dominions on the shores of the St. Lawrence,” the record is one of hotly contested sieges, blockades and battles. A coveted prize, Quebec for a century and a half was wooed, seized, tossed about from hand to hand and country to country. Five times, from 1608 to 1775, she was in actual warfare against England and New England, not to speak of perpetual skirmishes with the Indians.
With the British conquest her most picturesque pages closed. An era of progress began:—municipal government, military tribunals, adjustment of laws and languages, newspapers, a Literary and Historical Society with a Royal Charter. And then, hundreds of [page 21] English ships in the harbour looking for Canadian pine and spruce, because continental ports were closed during the Napoleonic wars. Twenty-five years later the launching, at the Island of Orleans, of the two first large Canadian ships.
To-day one may read the romance of Quebec on a dozen different pages. The streets hold a key to her history, from Little Champlain, which bears the marks of the turbulent centuries, to the Grande Alleé of modern residences. The churches and convents are a story in themselves, and the monuments to Champlain, Montcalm, Wolfe, Lavallée, Mercier and a long line of heroes, picture to the mind eras and events.
More fascinating to travelers with a sense of mystery than the rocky precipice up which struggled Wolfe and his companions, the Plains of Abraham themselves, or even the Fortress at Citadel Hill gallantly defended by Montcalm, are the narrow old world streets of the Lower Town. Little Champlain, for instance, where they used to ‘crimp’ the sailors for loot in the bad old days, is a place where you feel that almost anything might happen as the day draws in to twilight.
“Mon Dieu!”, says the guide, “when they take down these houses so old, what will remain? A graveyard—older still.” [page 22]
Encircling the public square in front of the Basilica, run the lines of the clanging trolleys, and the ubiquitous motor car is of course in evidence. Big Business goes on in Quebec, and naturally she will become more and more absorbed by it. At the same time there is no resisting the fact that she is, inherently, a spiritual force. Everywhere you feel the hand of the church.
Once I chanced upon a strange shrine in the chapel of the Church of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Here candles burn forever before an altar at which two nuns in white robes are always at prayer. The shrine is built like a miniature church, separated from the rest of the chapel by a high grille of iron, through the open-work of which are seen four silent forms: two who bow at the altar, and two who kneel in prayer near them. When the moment strikes, the latter move forward to relieve their sisters, another pair entering to take their places. Hence, year in, year out, the light before the altar is unceasing, the shrine is never for a moment deserted, the worship goes on forever. To sit in that church, and in the stillness to watch those motionless figures, is to feel the very hand of eternity in the midst of time.
The Basilica, where hangs the red hat of the Cardinal, is full of ritualistic splendour and wonderful [page 23] music on a Sunday evening…But nearby, in the palm room of the Château, a string orchestra is playing, people are grouped about little tables having coffee and cigarettes. Presently dancing begins. Soon you realize that not even in Paris is there more grace and beauty to be discovered, in like surroundings, than here, among these charming young French-Canadians.
St. Louis is one of the delightful old streets. It was the fashionable thoroughfare of Quebec two hundred years ago. But for a century before that it was a “street,” along which Indians padded silently, along which the good Nuns walked and about which romance has always hovered. It lies on the way from the Ursuline Convent to the Citadel, and is narrow and stony. Each house is apparently set directly on to the pavement. The entrances are mysterious, but certain houses and buildings are known even to the casual tourist. Here is the little low house of the cooper, Gaubert, where Montgomery’s body was laid out for burial, and the old officers’ quarters, an ancient building which long before garrison days was presented by the Intendant, Bigot, to his beautiful mistress, Angelique de Meloise. A step farther is Kent House, where Queen Victoria’s father lived for a time in residence, and there is another well-known building which served in 1812 as a place of detention for American [page 24] prisoners taken at Detroit; also the little Ursuline chapel, built now on the site of the famous house of Madame de la Peltrie.
Then—if you know modern Quebec—you may be permitted to ring the door-bell of some old stone house. A French maid will open. “Montez, s’il vous plait!”. In a moment one is back in the heart of to-day. Here is a drawing-room in chintz and French wallpaper, with the latest books lying on the centre table. And there is tea and toast and excellent talk…Meeting well-known French-Canadians, hearing the music of their speech, feeling in them the sensitive spirit of an inherently poetic race, one cannot believe that the flame of their genius will expire in modern days.
As for the literary traditions of Quebec, they are precious and unique. We are told by French historians that between 1764 and 1830 there existed “a small literary world in Quebec.” Poems were written which circulated in manuscript for want of a printing office, and a public library was opened in 1785. Dramatic Associations also existed in both Montreal and Quebec. They played Molière and some light comedies of the time of Louis XV. His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, accompanied by Lieutenant-Governors, Clark and Simcoe, attended the performance of “La Comtesse de Escarbagna” and “Le [page 25] Médecin Malgrè Lui” in Quebec, in 1792. “There was a spirit of literature in the air” says Mr. Benjamin Sulte writing of these times, “and this came not only by reading but by the more important practice of conversation and ‘causerie de salon’ which is so thoroughly French.”
From 1832 to 1837 we find young French-Canadian poets writing songs after the manner of Beranger. Garneau was a genuine poet, full of national spirit. And there is a low-raftered room on Buade Street where Octave Crémazie used to spend hours in his brother’s book shop. That was about the year 1864. “Le Drapeau de Carillon” is perhaps his best-known and best-loved poem. Probably the most truly national among the French-Canadian poets of the last century was Louis Honorè Fréchette. His greatest work, the tragedy of Papineau, was crowned by the French Academy in 1881. Pamphile Le May is another well-known singer. The mystical pathos of the verse belies his spring-like name.
Out on the Ste. Foye Road are two interesting houses. Spencer Grange, the home of Sir James Le Moine, and the adjacent Spencerwood, Government House for the Province of Quebec. Both places are full of mellow, unaffected charm. There is nothing institutional about the simple and dignified hospitality of Spencerwood; and in the library of the picturesque, [page 26] century-old Grange, whose master is the author of many volumes on the history and legendary lore of the St. Lawrence, the fortunate guest will find a precious collection of Canadiana in old volumes, prints of Quebec, and bric-a-brac.
Quebec people are proud of the work in prose and verse of their fellow-citizen, Canon Frederick George Scott, who was the well-loved “Padre” of thousands of Canadian soldiers.
Perhaps the keen romance of Quebec lies in the fact that in her history extremes have always met:—the natural extremes of a climate that can be bitterly cold and also sun-warm to the core, and extremes of temperament in two races far as the poles apart in their expression of feeling. So the generations find and leave it, town of old dreams and desires, looking out on the river and the hills from under its rock Citadel over which two flags have flown—Quebec, an immortal city of the new world. [page 27] |
