Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan & Co., 1883)/Quebec
XIX.
QUEBEC.
1871.
I.
A traveller who combines a taste for old towns with a love of letters ought not, I suppose, to pass through "the most picturesque city in America" without making an attempt to commemorate his impressions. His first impression will certainly have been that not America, but Europe, should have the credit of Quebec. I came, some days since, by a dreary night-journey, to Point Levi, opposite the town, and as we rattled toward our goal in the faint raw dawn, and, already attentive to "effects," I began to consult the misty window-panes and descried through the moving glass little but crude, monotonous woods, suggestive of nothing that I had ever heard of in song or story, I felt that the land would have much to do to give itself a romantic air. And, in fact, the feat is achieved with almost magical suddenness. The old world rises in the midst of the new in the manner of a change of scene on the stage. The St. Lawrence shines at your left, large as a harbour-mouth, gray with smoke and masts, and edged on its hither verge by a bustling water-side faubourg which looks French or English, or anything not local that you please; and beyond it, over against you, on its rocky promontory, sits the ancient town, belted with its hoary wall and crowned with its granite citadel. Now that I have been here a while I find myself wondering how the city would strike one if the imagination had not been bribed beforehand. The place, after all, is of the soil on which it stands; yet it appeals to you so cunningly with its little stock of transatlantic wares that you overlook its flaws and lapses, and swallow it whole. Fancy lent a willing hand the morning I arrived, and zealously retouched the picture. The very sky seemed to have been brushed in like the sky in an English water-colour, the light to filter down through an atmosphere more dense and more conscious. You cross a ferry, disembark at the foot of the rock on unmistakably foreign soil, and then begin to climb into the city proper—the city intra muros. These walls, to the American vision, are of course the sovereign fact of Quebec; you take off your hat to them as you clatter through the gate. They are neither very high nor, after all, very hoary. Our clear American air is hostile to those mellow deposits and incrustations which enrich the venerable surfaces of Europe. Still, they are walls; till but a short time ago they quite encircled the town; they are garnished with little slits for musketry and big embrasures for cannon; they offer here and there to the strolling bourgeoisie a stretch of grassy rampart; and they make the whole place definite and personal. Before you reach the gates, however, you will have been reminded at a dozen points that you have come abroad. What is the essential difference of tone between street-life in an old civilisation and in a new? It seems something subtler and deeper than mere external accidents—than foreign architecture, than foreign pinks, greens, and yellows plastering the house-fronts, than the names of the saints on the corners, than all the pleasant crookedness, narrowness and duskiness, the quaint economised spaces, the multifarious detail, the brown French faces, the ruddy English ones. It seems to be the general fact of detail itself—the hint in the air of a slow, accidental accretion, in obedience to needs more timidly considered and more sparingly gratified than the pressing necessities of American progress. But apart from the metaphysics of the question, Quebec has a great many pleasant little ripe spots and amenities. You note the small, boxlike houses in rugged stone or in stucco, each painted with uncompromising naïveté in some bright hue of the owner's fond choice; you note with joy, with envy, with momentary self-effacement, as a New Yorker, as a Bostonian, the innumerable calashes and cabs which contend for your selection; and you observe when you arrive at the hotel, that this is a blank and gloomy inn, of true provincial aspect, with slender promise of the "American plan." Perhaps, even the clerk at the office will have the courtesy of the ages of leisure. I confess that, in my case, he was terribly modern, so that I was compelled to resort for a lodging to a private house near by, where I enjoy a transitory glimpse of the vie intime of Quebec. I fancied, when I came in, that it would be a compensation for worse quarters to possess the little Canadian vignette I enjoy from my windows. Certain shabby Yankee sheds, indeed, encumber the foreground, but they are so near that I can overlook them. Beyond is a piece of garden, attached to nothing less than a convent of the cloistered nuns of St. Ursula. The convent chapel rises inside it, crowned with what seemed to me, in view of the circumstances, a real little clocher de France, The "circumstances," I confess, are simply a couple of stout French poplars. I call them French because they are alive and happy; whereas, if they had been American they would have died of a want of appreciation, like their brothers in the "States." I do not say that the little convent-belfry, roofed and coated as it is with quaint scales of tin, would, by itself, produce any very deep illusion; or that the whispering poplars, per se, would transport me to the Gallic mother-land; but poplars and belfry together constitute an "effect"—strike a musical note in the scale of association. I look fondly even at the little casements which command this prospect, for they too are an old-world heritage. They open sidewise, in two wings, and are screwed together by that bothersome little iron handle over which we have fumbled so often in European inns.
If the windows tell of French dominion, of course larger matters testify with greater eloquence. In a place so small as Quebec, the bloom of novelty of course rubs off; but when first I walked abroad I fancied myself again in a French seaside town where I once spent a year, in common with a large number of economically disposed English. The French element offers the groundwork, and the English colony wears, for the most part, that half-genteel and migratory air which stamps the exiled and provincial British. They look as if they were still en voyage—still in search of low prices—the men in woollen shirts and Scotch bonnets; the ladies with a certain look of being equipped for dangers and difficulties. Your very first steps will be likely to lead you to the market-place, which is a genuine bit of Europeanism. One side of it is occupied by a huge edifice of yellow plaster, with stone facings painted in blue, and a manner of porte-cochère, leading into a veritable court—originally, I believe, a college of the early Jesuits, now a place of military stores. On the other stands the French cathedral, with an ample stone façade, a bulky stone tower, and a high-piled, tin-scaled belfry; not architectural, of course, nor imposing, but with a certain gray maturity, and, as regards the belfry, a quite adequate quaintness. Round about are shops and houses, touching which, I think, it is no mere fancy that they might, as they stand, look down into some dull and rather dirty place in France. The stalls and booths in the centre—tended by genuine peasants of tradition, brown-faced old Frenchwomen, with hard wrinkles and short petticoats, and white caps beneath their broad-brimmed hats, and more than one price, as I think you'll find—these, and the stationed calèches and cabriolets complete a passably fashionable French picture. It is a proof of how nearly the old market-women resemble their originals across the sea that you rather resentfully miss one or two of the proper features of the type—the sabots for the feet and the donkey for the load. Of course you go into the cathedral, and how forcibly that swing of the door, as you doff your hat in the cooler air, recalls the old tourist strayings and pryings beneath other skies! You find a big garish church, with a cold high light, a promiscuity of stucco and gilding, and a mild odour of the seventeenth century. It is, perhaps, a shade or so more sensibly Catholic than it would be with ourselves; but, in fine, it has pews and a boarded floor, and the few paintings are rather pale in their badness, and you are forced to admit that the old-world tone which sustains itself so comfortably elsewhere falters most where most is asked of it.
Among the other lions of Quebec—notably in the Citadel—you find Protestant England supreme. A robust trooper of her Majesty, with a pair of very tight trousers and a very small cap, takes charge of you at the entrance of the fortifications, and conducts you through all kinds of incomprehensible defences. I cannot speak of the place as an engineer, but only as a tourist, and the tourist is chiefly concerned with the view. This is altogether superb, and if Quebec is not the most picturesque city in America, this is no fault of its incomparable site. Perched on its mountain of rock, washed by a river as free and ample as an ocean-gulf, sweeping from its embattled crest, the villages, the forests, the blue undulations of the imperial province of which it is warden—as it has managed from our scanty annals to squeeze out a past, you pray in the name of all that's majestic that it may have a future. I may add that, to the mind of the reflective visitor, these idle ramparts and silent courts present other visions than that of the mighty course of the river and its anchorage for navies. They evoke a shadowy image of that great English power, the arches of whose empire were once built strong on foreign soil; and as you stand where they are highest and look abroad upon a land of alien speech, you seem to hear the echoed names of other strongholds and provinces—Gibraltar, Malta, India. Whether these arches are crumbling now, I do not pretend to say; but the last regular troops (in number lately much diminished) are just about to be withdrawn from Quebec, and in the private circles to which I have been admitted I hear sad forebodings of what society will lose by the departure of the "military." This single word is eloquent; it reveals a social order distinctly affiliated, in spite of remoteness, to the society reproduced for the pacific American in novels in which the hero is a captain of the army or navy, and of which the scene is therefore necessarily laid in countries provided with these branches of the public service. Another opportunity for some such reflections, worthy of a historian or an essayist, as those I have hinted at, is afforded you on the Plains of Abraham, to which you probably adjourn directly from the Citadel—another, but I am bound to say, in my opinion, a less inspiring one. A battlefield remains a battlefield, whatever may be done to it; but the scene of Wolfe's victory has been profaned by the erection of a vulgar prison, and this memento of human infirmities does much to efface the meagre column which, with its neat inscription, "Here died Wolfe, victorious," stands there as a symbol of exceptional virtue.
II.
To express the historical interest of the place completely, I should dwell on the light provincial—French provincial—aspect of some of the little residential streets. Some of the houses have the staleness of complexion which Balzac loved to describe. They are chiefly built of stone or brick, with a stoutness and separateness of structure which stands in some degree in stead of architecture. I know not that, externally, they have any greater charm than that they belong to that category of dwellings which in our own cities were long since pulled down to make room for brown-stone fronts. I know not, indeed, that I can express better the picturesque merit of Quebec than by saying that it has no fronts of this luxurious and horrible substance. The greater number of houses are built of rough-hewn squares of some more vulgar mineral, painted with frank chocolate or buff, and adorned with blinds of a cruder green than we admire. As you pass the low windows of these abodes, you perceive the walls to be of extraordinary thickness; the embrasure is of great depth; Quebec was built for winter. Door-plates are frequent, and you observe that the tenants are of the Gallic persuasion. Here and there, before a door, stands a comely private equipage—a fact agreeably suggestive of a low scale of prices; for evidently in Quebec one need not be a millionaire to keep a carriage, and one may make a figure on moderate means. The great number of private carriages visible in the streets is another item, by the way, among the Europeanisms of the place; and not, as I may say, as regards the simple fact that they exist, but as regards the fact that they are considered needful for women, for young persons, for gentility. What does it do with itself, this gentility, keeping a gig or not, you wonder, as you stroll past its little multicoloured mansions. You strive almost vainly to picture the life of this French society, locked up in its small dead capital, isolated on a heedless continent, and gradually consuming its principal, as one may say—its vital stock of memories, traditions, superstitions. Its evenings must be as dull as the evenings described by Balzac in his Vie de Province; but has it the same ways and means of dulness? Does it play loto and "boston" in the long winter nights, and arrange marriages between its sons and daughters, whose education it has confided to abbés and abbesses? I have met in the streets here little old Frenchmen who look as if they had stepped out of Balzac—bristling with the habits of a class, wrinkled with old-world expressions. Something assures one that Quebec must be a city of gossip; for evidently it is not a city of culture. A glance at the few booksellers' windows gives evidence of this. A few Catholic statuettes and prints, two or three Catholic publications, a festoon or so of rosaries, a volume of Lamartine, a supply of ink and matches, form the principal stock.
In the lower class of the French population there is a much livelier vitality. They are a genuine peasantry; you very soon observe it, as you drive along the pleasant country-roads. Just what it is that makes a peasantry, it is, perhaps, not easy to determine; but whatever it is, these good people have it—in their simple, unsharpened faces, in their narrow patois, in their ignorance and naïveté, and their evident good terms with the tin-spired parish church, standing there as bright and clean with ungrudged paint and varnish as a Nürnberg toy. One of them spoke to me with righteous contempt of the French of France—"They are worth nothing; they are bad Catholics." These are good Catholics, and I doubt whether anywhere Catholicism wears a brighter face and maintains more docility at the cost of less misery. It is, perhaps, not Longfellow's Evangeline for chapter and verse, but it is a tolerable prose transcript. There is no visible squalor, there are no rags and no curses, but there is a most agreeable tinge of gentleness, thrift, and piety. I am assured that the country-people are in the last degree mild and peaceable; surely, such neatness and thrift, without the irritability of the French genius—it is true the genius too is absent—is a very pleasant type of character. Without being ready to proclaim, with an enthusiastic friend, that the roadside scenery is more French than France, I may say that, in its way, it is quite as picturesque as anything within the city. There is an air of completeness and maturity in the landscape which suggests an old country. The roads, to begin with, are decidedly better than our own, and the cottages and farmhouses would need only a bit of thatch and a few red tiles here and there to enable them to figure creditably by the waysides of Normandy or Brittany. The road to Montmorency, on which tourists most congregate, is also, I think, the prettiest. The rows of poplars, the heavy stone cottages, seamed and cracked with time, in many cases, and daubed in coarse, bright hues, the little bourgeois villas, rising middle-aged at the end of short vistas, the sunburnt women in the fields, the old men in woollen stockings and red nightcaps, the long-kirtled curé nodding to doffed hats, the more or less bovine stare which greets you from cottage-doors, are all so many touches of a local colour reflected from over the sea. What especially strikes one, however, is the peculiar tone of the light and the atmospheric effects— the chilly whites and grays, the steely reflections, the melancholy brightness of a frigid zone. Winter here gives a stamp to the year, and seems to leave even through spring and summer a kind of scintillating trail of his presence. To me, I confess it is terrible, and I fancy I see constancy in the brilliant sky the hoary genius of the climate brooding grimly over his dominion.
The falls of Montmorency, which you reach by the pleasant avenue I speak of, are great, I believe, among the falls of the earth. They are certainly very fine, even in the attenuated shape to which they are reduced at the present season. I doubt whether you obtain anywhere in simpler and more powerful form the very essence of a cataract—the wild, fierce, suicidal plunge of a living, sounding flood. A little platform, lodged in the cliff, enables you to contemplate it with almost shameful convenience; here you may stand at your leisure and spin analogies, more or less striking, on the very edge of the white abyss. The leap of the water begins directly at your feet, and your eye trifles dizzily with the long, perpendicular shaft of foam, and tries, in the eternal crash, to effect some vague notation of its successive stages of sound and fury; but the vaporous sheet, for ever dropping, lapses from beneath the eye, and leaves the vision distracted in mid-space; and the vision, in search of a resting-place, sinks in a flurry to the infamous saw-mill which defaces the very base of the torrent. The falls of Montmorency are obviously one of the greatest of the beauties of nature; but I hope it is not beside the mark to say that of all the beauties of nature, "falls" are to me the least satisfying. A mountain, a precipice, a river, a forest, a plain, I can enjoy at my ease; they are natural, normal, self- assured; they make no appeal; they imply no human admiration, no petty human cranings and shrinkings, head -swimmings and similes. A cataract, of course, is essentially violent. You are certain, moreover, to have to approach it through a turnstile, and to enjoy it from some terribly cockneyfied little booth. The spectacle at Montmorency appears to be the private property of a negro innkeeper, who "runs" it evidently with great pecuniary profit. A day or two since I went so far as to be glad to leave it behind, and drive some five miles farther along the road, to a village rejoicing in the pretty name of Château-Richer. The village is so pretty that you count on finding there the elderly manor which might have baptized it. But, of course, in such pictorial efforts as this Quebec breaks down; one must not ask too much of it. You enjoy from here, however, a revelation of the noble position of the city. The river, finding room in mid-stream for the long island of Orleans, opens out below you with a peculiar freedom and serenity, and leads the eye far down to where an azure mountain gazes up the channel and responds to the dark headland of Quebec. I noted, here and there, as I went, an extremely sketchable effect. Between the road and the river stand a succession of ancient peasant-dwellings, with their back-windows looking toward the stream. Glancing, as I passed, into the apertures that face the road, I saw, as through a picture-frame, their dark, rich-toned interiors, played into by the late river light and making an admirable series of mellow tableaux de genre. The little curtained alcoves, the big household beds, and presses, and dressers, the black mouthed chimney-pieces, the crucifixes, the old women at their spinning-wheels, the little heads at the supper-table, around the big French loaf, outlined with a rim of light, were all as warmly, as richly composed, as French, as Dutch, as worthy of the brush, as anything in the countries to which artists resort for subjects.
I suppose no patriotic American can look at all these things, however idly, without reflecting on the ultimate possibility of their becoming absorbed into his own huge state. Whenever, sooner or later, the change is wrought, the sentimental tourist will keenly feel that a long stride has been taken, roughshod, from the past to the present. The largest appetite in modern civilisation will have swallowed the largest morsel. What the change may bring of comfort or of grief to the Canadians themselves, will be for them to say; but, in the breast of this sentimental tourist of ours, it will produce little but regret. The foreign elements of eastern Canada, at least, are extremely interesting; and it is of good profit to us Americans to have near us, and of easy access, an ample something which is not our expansive selves. Here we find a hundred mementoes of an older civilisation than our own, of different manners, of social forces once mighty, and still glowing with a sort of autumnal warmth. The old-world needs which created the dark-walled cities of France and Italy seem to reverberate faintly in the steep and narrow and Catholic streets of Quebec. The little houses speak to the fancy by rather inexpensive arts; the ramparts are endued with a sort of silvery innocence; but the historic sense, conscious of a general solidarity in the picturesque, ekes out the romance and deepens the colouring.