Claude Glennon Bryan

“ MURRAY AND DE LÉVIS
Within the beleaguered city the sights and sounds of battle caused sickening excitement. An enemy who had gained the heights by such determined valour was destined for victory; and the weary garrison and townsfolk, as they watched and waited anxiously on the ramparts, were more than half prepared for the view presently to meet their eyes. A fresh wind lifting the thick clouds of smoke from the battlefield revealed the scattered legions of France in flight before a conquering army, wildly dashing towards the city gates or the bridge of boats crossing the St. Charles. ”

“ Lower Town huddles in artistic chaos at the foot of the sheltering cliff, and, as aforetime, the overhanging fort protrudes its protecting muzzles. Spires and antique minarets which looked down upon a French settlement struggling with foes in feathers and war-paint, still gleam from the towering rock on which their stable foundations are laid; and after five sieges and the passing of two and a half centuries the mother city of the continent remains a faithful survivor of an heroic age, on historic ground sacred to the valour of two great races. ”

“ To the colony it proved salvation. The Iroquois had had fighting enough. If seventeen Frenchmen and a handful of Indian allies, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone? For that year they thought no more of capturing Quebec and Ville Marie, but returned to their villages dejected and amazed, to howl over their losses, and nurse their dashed courage for a day of vengeance. ”

“ Enlarged understanding between the two peoples of the country will produce a national life marked by courage, energy, integrity, and imagination. Though Quebec has ceased to be an administrative centre of the nation, the influence of the people of her province grows no less, but is woven more and more into the web of the general progress. The Empire will do well to set an enduring value on that New France so hardly won from a great people, and English Canada will reap rich reward for every compromise of racial pride made in the interests of peace, equality, and justice. ”

“ Fifty-five houses were burnt to the ground on this occasion, and Lower Town became a heap of ashes. One house alone escaped, that of the merchant Aubert de la Chesnaye; and more than half the wealth of Canada was destroyed.
If so be that misfortunes ever come singly, the history of Quebec at least has never been able to afford an example; and as if destructive fire were an insufficient visitation of angry fate, other misfortunes, no less cruel, now came upon the city. In these years, indeed, it seemed that Nature herself was leagued with the enemies of Quebec ”

“ From first to last there entered into the life of the French trader and adventurer an element of patriotism and romance—conquest for conquest's sake and for the glory of French enterprise. He must ever remain the more eloquent, the more picturesque figure, the more admired pioneer of the Far North. But his rival, the Briton, had qualities which outwore him, and the patriarchal and stable methods of the Hudson's Bay Company prevailed in the end. ”

“ To-day grass grows on the Grand Parade, and daisies blow upon the turf-grown bastions; but who may pick his way over those historic mounds of earth without a sigh for the buried valour of bygone years!
In the Richelieu valley, meanwhile, the armies of England and France had met in even fiercer conflict. Montcalm lay intrenched at Carillon at the head of the battalions of La Sarre, Languedoc, Berry, Royal Roussillon, La Reine, Béarn, and Guienne, three thousand six hundred men in all. ”

“ These early establishments have, however, justified themselves by a continuous and permanent history, and Quebec is now, as it was nearly three centuries ago, a city of churches and convents. The bells rang then, as now, from morning till night, Gregorian chants streamed out through convent windows, and the black-robed priest was the soul of all.
Montmagny rebuilt in stone the fort on the precipice, and spared nothing to give the place a formidable appearance. For safety the church and presbytery of the Jesuits stood close to the parapet. ”

“ The period which immediately succeeded the capitulation of Canada is known as the règne militaire; but the administration so sternly named was remarkable for the most careful equity. Allowing for circumstances which made military rule a necessity, it was in fact an era of almost unexampled tenderness; for though still on the threshold of her colonial empire, England already realised that the lightest yoke is the longest borne. She had annexed the vast domain of Canada, and the sentiment of its seventy thousand French inhabitants was her first concern. ”

“ He then crossed from Fort Frontenac, ravaging and burning their villages and towns. Not only the Senecas but the whole Iroquois confederacy burned to avenge the terrible warfare of Denonville. In small bands they ranged the woods round about Quebec and the river settlements, darting to and fro like silent shadows, so that for months the French suffered daily the anguish of battle, murder, and sudden death. Disciplined soldiers were helpless against this stealthy warfare, and a man walked in danger of his life even within the palisades. ”

“ Summer warmed their enthusiasm anew, and the dauntless explorer now thought only of pressing on westward to Cathay. To further this project, he consented to ally himself with the Hurons and Algonquins in an attack upon the Iroquois, and for several days their dusky allies swarmed in and around Quebec. At length, towards the end of June, the war-party set out. Champlain embarked in a shallop with eleven men, armed with arquebuse and match-lock, sword and breast-plate; and the painted, shrilling foresters swarmed up the river in their bark canoes. ”

“ This desertion by the army was a cruel blow to those who still manned the ramparts of the city. For more than two months they had mended the breaches and fought the fires kindled by the guns of Point Lévi; they had stood by their feeble batteries for weary weeks, toiling night and day on half-rations. [Pg 304] And now ignominious abandonment was their reward! Of the total population within the walls, twenty-six hundred were women and children, ten hundred were invalids, while the able-bodied defenders, all told, numbered less than a thousand, and even these were worn out by privations. ”

“ Their ardent Relations were sent regularly to France, and the hearts of princesses in the Faubourg St. Germain, and of nuns in the convents of Montmartre were alike fired with zeal for the Canadian mission.
"Is there no charitable and virtuous lady," pleaded Le Jeune, "who will come to this country to gather up the blood of Christ by teaching His word to the little Indian girls?" Thirteen nuns in a single convent straightway vowed their lives to the far-off mission; but the touching appeal of the Jesuit father sank deepest of all in the heart of the fever-stricken Madame de la Peltrie. ”

“ Up the terrible glacis they still strove to climb in the face of a splashing downpour of bullets. At that moment the sky became overcast, and from the pall of cloud hanging over Beauport a wild storm of rain broke over the battlefield. It was impossible to scale the slippery rocks, the powder was drenched and useless. Seeing the madness of further attack, Wolfe now sounded a retreat. A force of less than a thousand men had attempted to storm a bristling cliff whose double line of defence consisted of the muskets of Canadian sharpshooters and the bayonets of Béarn, Guienne, and Royal Roussillon ”

“ Its trade was lethargic, its traders were timid or slothful, its people possessed none of that audacity and adventure which had sent Frenchmen like Du Lhut and La Vérendrye into the wilds intent on territory or trade. They yawned and were content with the trade which came their way. It seemed as though they smugly counted on their business virtue to attract, and their yearly gifts and patronage to allure the fur-hunting tribes. A world lay spread around them, and they remained at the doors of their posts and forts. ”

“ They share faithfully in the national development, and honourably serve the welfare of the whole Dominion—sometimes with a too careful and unsympathetic reserve—but within their own beloved province they retain as zealously and more jealously than the most devoted Highland men their language and their customs, and faithfully conserve the civil laws which mark them off as clearly from the English provinces as Jersey and Guernsey are distinguished from the United Kingdom. ”

“ Charles, while a third belched impotent fire across the river from Point Lévi. From the cupola of the Intendant's Palace a body of riflemen continued to pick man after man off the ramparts, until Sir Guy Carleton at last trained his guns upon it. It was a hard thing for the Governor to destroy perhaps the finest building of all Quebec, but the rigours of the siege seemed to leave him no alternative; and soon the venerable building lay in ruins, having witnessed the chequered history of the city since the days of the great Talon. ”

“ With British rule all this was changed. In Quebec the Tiers État awoke to its latent destiny thirty years before the same realisation came to Paris; and it was the new principles of government which achieved this bloodless revolution. The rights of man were no longer confined to the Governor, Intendant, and the Sovereign Council; and the plainest citizen felt a new pulse within him as soon as he saw the trend of the English system. ”

“ Again, apart from this natural affinity with the chiefest enemy of England, material causes operated yet further to strain their faith; for the enterprise of Montgomery and Arnold was about to be resumed; and the French must choose either to suffer the terrors of a hostile invasion, or to join the armies of the United States in driving the British power for ever from the Continent. Finally, as if these tests of loyalty were not enough, the port of Quebec was invaded by English press-gangs, who terrorised the quays of the Lower Town and kidnapped able-bodied youths of both races. ”

“ Corruption and divided counsels no longer paralysed the government, and the Great Commoner, healthy minded, rugged, and enthusiastic, now stood to middle-class England as an embodiment of strength and purpose, which sent new blood coursing through her veins and braced her for the gathering storm. ”

“ There still the influence of a faithful priesthood, and a university in some respects more distinguished than any on the American continent, keep burning those fires of high tradition and a noble history which light [Pg 470] the way to national grace of life, if not to a sensational prosperity. Apart from the hot winds of politics—civic, provincial, and national—which blow across the temperate plains of their daily existence, the people of the city and the province live as simply, and with as little greedy ambition as they did a hundred years ago. ”

“ General Carleton escaped in the guise of a peasant through the provincial lines, and paddled to Quebec in a canoe. There his first step was to purge of treason the city upon which the hope of all Canada now rested. Citizens suspected of disaffection were banished beyond the walls; and though the garrison numbered only eighteen hundred men, French and English, the loyalty of all was secure, begetting confidence in their power to meet the attack. ”

“ The air is excellent, and this is a terrestrial paradise, where the difficulties and troubles of life come so lovingly, that the more one is piqued, the more one's heart is filled with amiability."
Behind all this gaiety, however, brooded the Church; for even in her lightest moments Quebec never strained far on her sacred leash. From its foundation as a mission trading-post to its consecration as an episcopal see, the rock city remained a fortress of the faith. ”

“ Day and night the cannon on the ramparts answered the enemy's howitzers, and once again the river gorge echoed back the roar of artillery. Shells and grenades burst continually in the streets, and as weeks wore away the citizens became inured to the dangers of battle or sudden death by roundshot, grape, and canister. Outside the walls, the enemy suffered in like manner, running the gauntlet of Carleton's artillery and exposed to the musketry of the garrison. One day as Montgomery dashed over the snow-covered plain in a carriole his horse was killed by a cannon shot. ”

“ Up to the Conquest, the citizens of Quebec had been no more than cogs in the wheel of State, driven fast or slow according to the spasmodic interest felt by the Home government in her always troublesome colony—a land which had first claimed consideration as the gateway to Cathay, and presently appeared to be nothing better than a "thousand leagues of snow and ice." This decline from the equator of enthusiasm to the north pole of neglect indicated the unstable fortunes of the colony. National spirit was left to fill up the ranks of her army when danger threatened the frontiers ”

“ Lawrence, though the people who had fought and toiled under its protection were to hold to their birthright and sustain their language through the passing generations, faithful to tradition and origin, but no less faithful to the Canadian soil which their fame, their labour, and their history had made sacred to them. Frenchmen of a vanished day they were to cherish their past with an apprehensive devotion, and yet to keep the pact they made with the conqueror in 1759, and later in 1774 when the Quebec Act secured to them their religious liberty, their civic code, and their political status. ”

“ Lawrence was the centre of the web of missions, which slowly spread from the dark Saguenay to Lake Superior. The fearful tragedies of Indian warfare had their birth in the early policy of Quebec. The fearless voyageurs, whose canoes glided into unknown waters, ever westward—towards Cathay, as they [Pg xxi] believed—made Quebec their base for exploration. And as time went on, the rock-built stronghold of the north became the nerve-centre of that half-century of conflict which left the flag of Britain waving in victory on the Plains of Abraham. ”