Canadian Houses
of Romance

by

I

ANGELIC PATRONAGE


1

AT the Château Frontenac the maître d’hôtel handed us to François, the head waiter, who suggested an admirable dinner. It was a splendid summer night and after the meal we went out on the Terrace as everyone delights to do….Here was the wide, crowded walk, twittering with French and English voices, the lighted kiosks and bandstand, the dark Citadel looming above, the dark river singing below and smiling to itself in a thousand reflected lights from Levis and Quebec.
     Leaning over the balustrade to look down on a labyrinth of little streets, we were joined by a friend from Quebec, whom some tourists had just singled out to inquire where they could find a guide for the Lower Town.
     “That is unnecessary, madame,” he had replied, “for everyone knows the way.”
     “They are not energetic, these travellers,” he said. “Do you know, they hardly venture as far as the Island!” He glanced back to the left where Isle d’Orléans lay asleep in the moonlight. “The Citadel, the Lower Town, St. Anne de Beaupré are very popular, but how few people know the spots that contain a little mystery—a little romance, one might [page 3] say! These still lie hidden. There is our small Sillery, for example, an ancient village, a handful of houses on an almost deserted road. It lies there in the old Cove just four miles to our right as we stand here. Do any of you, for instance, know this village?”
     Yes, we knew that the village of Sillery existed, and near at hand.
     “Nevertheless, my friends,” said the gentleman from Quebec, “if you will accompany me to a small table just under the awning there I shall order, with your permission, a bottle of Dubonnet, and while we drink it I shall have the pleasure of telling you something of the history of this ancient place of which, without doubt, you are unaware.”
     But by the time that we had made the length of the Terrace we found that the little tables under the awning were occupied, and the band was approaching its patriotic climax before we were served:

O Canada! Terre de nos aieux
Ton front est ceint de fluerons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l’épée,
Il sait porter la croix.

     “Il sait porter la croix! How true of Sillery! Do you realize, mes chéres amies, that this place, so near us, of which I speak, is a mystic spot and was, nearly three hundred years ago, placed under the protection of Saint Michael the Archangel as a religious penance for the worldly deeds of young Frenchman of whom I shall presently tell you?” [page 4]
     He waited for our confession of ignorance and went on.
     “Today it is a half forgotten story, even in France where Nöel Brulart de Sillery, a member of the Military Order of the Knights of Malta, and who had experienced a notoriously gay career, suddenly entered Holy Orders. That was in the year 1634. He had still before him a long life and immense wealth to devote to the expiation of his mad youth. The truth is he had come under the influence of the saintly Vincent de Paul, who was full of zeal for [page 5] the cause of mission work among the savage tribes of the new world, and de Paul had encouraged Nöel to leave France for America.”
     The moon was sailing towards us now across the southern path of the midsummer sky, and only isolated groups were scattered about the great Terrace. We drank the ruddy mild Dubonnet out of thick little glasses, and the story of Nöel Brulart de Sillery went on.
     “And so, close under this little Canadian fortress, there grew a mission, a tiny settlement; one might say the religious pet of military Quebec. It was a place of strange contrasts. The nuns of the Hôtel Dieu opened a hospital, and a parish church was erected. But the thick woods which surrounded the clearing were full of Indian camps. It was known that they were not always friendly, and anxiety was felt by the people of Quebec for the safety of the good nuns. One Reverend Father used to visit the Sisters each evening during the winter when, in the prevalence of snow storms that silenced the world, so many treacherous deeds were committed. He would make the journey of four miles from Quebec on foot, picking his way through the forest, his lantern in his hand, and sometimes, losing his foothold, would come rolling down the hill, and so arrive, breathless without doubt, but still faithful to his charge.”
     “The parish church and the hospital, founded by the Knight of Sillery, were in time augmented by a [page 6] fort, and then by the Manor House of the Jesuits. This is the first stone manor house ever erected in North America. With its heavy walls of grey stone, more than three feet thick, it stands on the village street to this day.”
     “Do you think, then,” he suggested, with that eagerness for its memory which a devoted friend might show for a companion long gone, “do you think that the little history I have related is of sufficient interest to lead you to visit this quiet settlement, where awaits much of which I have not yet spoken?…Well, then, together, perhaps, we may explore these green glades so famous in days of old!”

2

     And so the next morning we drove through Sillery’s modern Upper Town and descended, precipitously, a rock road that runs straight to the river. There, on a quiet little street, we found our manor house; of simple Norman structure and, except for a modern roof (made after the type of the first roof, steep and gabled to resist the pressure of snow), quite strong of wind and limb, a true type of the hardy French pioneer.
     Everything else of the earliest days is gone. On the site of the one-time church there is a monument to the first missionary in Canada, Father Ennemond Massé who was buried here in 1646. A great elm tree rises over the spot where the nuns had their [page 7] hospital, and along the curving road that was once the main street little semi-modern houses have arisen, some of them additions to “original” houses: country places where Quebec families used to fly from the “heat of the city” two hundred years ago. Here came Madame de Maisonneuve, who tried, perhaps pathetically, to make a French villa look happy in rude surroundings. And Madame Manse came too, and that austere aristocrat, the venerable Madame do Monceau, the mother-in-law of General Ruette d’Auteur.
     There are stories of how the gallants of the day, riding down from Quebec to pay their devoirs to these and other French ladies, were vastly interested in the surrounding woods, full of Indian wigwams where also summered beautiful black-eyed Montagnais and Algonquins.
     Those were Sillery’s brief days of splendour. Who, I wonder, holds the key to its subsequent obscurity? Not our kind host of this morning who possessed no inferiority complex whatever. “’Twas in the green glades of Sillery that the earliest lady novelist in Canada penned the first feminine romance,” he said, and quoted Sir James LeMoine who calls this spot the cradle of the English novel in the new world.
     “An empty cradle!” we thought, as we stood in the silent, mournful little street.
     “The lady who wrote this Canadian novel,” went [page 8] on our friend, “was none other than the well-known English writer Frances Brooke. Her husband received the appointment of Military Chaplain to the Garrison at Quebec, and she had secured, apparently, before she set sail, a commission from a London publisher for a book about her adventures in a savage land.
     Everything that we afterwards learned, through praiseworthy research, relating to this far-sighted lady was extremely piquant. The Quebec Herald, sometime in 1790, contains this anecdote:

     The evening before this distinguished author departed with her husband for Canada, she had a party at her apartments who met for the purpose of bidding her farewell. Miss Hannah Moore, Miss Seward, Mr. Keats, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell were among the visitors. As Dr. Johnson was obliged to take his leave early, he rose, and, wishing her health and happiness, went seemingly away. In a few moments a servant came to acquaint Mrs. Brooke that a gentleman in the parlor wished to speak to her. She accordingly went downstairs and who should it be but Dr. Johnson. “Madame,” says the doctor, “I sent for you downstairs that I might kiss you, which I did not choose to do before so much company.”

     I wonder if they were curious for intimate details in Quebec about Dr. Johnson, and his friend and subsequent biographer, Mr. Boswell—“that noisy, ugly, foolish drunken Scotish laird?” Had news of them and of other literati come languidly by sailing ship, from London drawing-rooms, and, by way of critics, half caustic, half friendly, to small [page 9] Canadian settlements at this time? At any rate Mrs. Brooke had interesting news to tell, and a fashionable lady novelist was in itself a daring innovation.
     One can imagine the flutter which the advent of such a being caused. It is said that she “danced divinely” and was ever ready to aid and abet all gaiety on foot in the fortress. Quebec hospitality even in those days was famous, and in “Emily Montague; her Life and Works” it was reported with a nimble and witty pen. Further, we are told that the author was “irresistibly attracted, pending the leafy months, to one of the cool Sillery retreats where, with her husband, she occupied an extremely pretty farm at the foot of the heights.”
     Of course we looked for that farm, but no one could give us a clue as to its whereabouts.
     And then, days after, a sentence in an old copy of one of LeMoine’s “Maple Leaves” suddenly arrested us. “It is generally supposed that the Brooke farm lay in the neighbourhood of Beauvoir, the Hon. R. R. Dobell’s picturesque manor.”
     But why should we return to find it?…Like the quaint village itself, the author of “Emily Montague; her life and Works” has passed along the dim street of oblivion—ghost of a street, where lights only appear to be lit, in windows that sometimes look almost as though they were real.
     On that summer day in Sillery, the caretaker who took us over the echoing barn-like manor house of [page 10] the Jesuits had said: “There are few people who would be interested now in a lot of empty rooms when there are real sights to be seen close by in Quebec. Indeed the manor is already private property. It was bought by a gentleman in the Upper Town. And if they ever grade the hill and put an asphalt pavement on the road they say that he will refurnish the house and rent it out.”
     And that saying made one pray that oblivion may indeed descend upon the place for good and all, for in the day of bathrooms and asphalt and Ford cars and tourists its Angelic Patronage will certainly be withdrawn….     One can only hope that Nöel Brulart has had time to work out his salvation, with no need of a modernized Sillery hanging about his soul as a penance for youthful worldly deeds. [page 11]

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