But he is wrong. Quebec does rebuild, does progress. Quebec progresses very slowly, but also very surely. To a man who returns after twenty years' absence from her quiet streets, the changes are most apparent. There are fewer caleches upon the street—those quaint two-wheeled vehicles which merge the joys of a Coney island whirly-coaster and the benefits of Swedish massage—although the drivers of these distinctive carriages still supply the American's keen demand for "local color" by shouting "marche donc" to their stout and ugly little horses as they go running up and down the steep side-hill streets. Nowadays most tourists eschew the caleche and turn towards trolley cars. That of itself tells of the almost sinful modernization of Quebec. It is almost a quarter of a century since the electric cars invaded the narrow streets of the Upper Town, and in so doing caused the wanton demolition of the last of the older gates—Porte St. Jean. The destruction of St. Jean's gate was a mistake—to put the matter slightly. It came at a time when the question was being gently raised of the replacement of the older gates that had gone long before—Palace, Hope and Prescott. Nowadays but two of these portals remain, the St. Louis and the Kent gates, and these are not in architectural harmony with the solid British fortifications.
Indeed, that is one of the great crimes to be charged against the modernization of Quebec. Other old towns in America have brought their architects to a clever sense of the necessity of making their newer buildings fit in absolute harmony with the older. They have clung jealously to their architectural personality. Quebec has missed that point. With the exception of the lovely Chateau which fits the traditions of the town, as a solitaire fits a ring setting, the newer buildings represent a strange hodge-podge of ideas.
Quebec herself rather endures being quaint than enjoys it; for in this day of Canadian development she has dreamed of the future after the fashion of those insistent towns further to the west. It has not been pleasant for her to drop from second place in Canadian commercial importance to fourth or fifth. She has had to sit back and see such cities as Winnipeg, for instance, come from an Indian trading-place to a metropolitan center two or three times her size, while her own wharves rot. It is a matter of keen humiliation to the town every time a big ocean liner goes sailing up the river to Montreal—her river, if you are to give ear to the protests of her citizens whom you meet along the Terrace of a late afternoon—without halting at her wharves, perhaps without even a respectful salute to the town which has been known these many years as the Gibraltar of America.
So she has given herself to the development of transcontinental railroad projects. When one Canadian railroad decided to use her as the summer terminal of its largest trans-Atlantic liners without sending those great vessels further up to Montreal, Quebec saw quickly what that meant to her in prestige and importance. When the railroads told her, as politely as they might, that they could not develop her as a mighty traffic center because of the broad arm of the St. Lawrence which blocked rail access from the South, she put her wits together and set out to bridge that arm with the greatest cantilever in the world. The fall of the Quebec bridge five years ago with its toll of eighty lives, was a great blow to the commercial hopes of the town. But they have begun to arise once more. The wreckage of that tragedy is already out of the way and the workmen are trying again, placing fresh foundations for the slender, far-reaching span that is going to mean so very much to the portal city of Canada.
*****
But progress has not robbed Quebec of her charm. It seems quite unlikely that such a brutal tragedy shall ever come. They may come as they did a year or two ago and tear down the impressive Champlain market—one of the very great lions of the Lower Town—but they do not understand the habitans from those back country villages around Quebec. Progress does not come to those obscure communities—no, not even slowly. The women still gather together at some mountain stream on wash-days and cleanse their laundry by placing it over flat rocks by the waterside and pounding it with wooden paddles, there are more barns roofed with thatch than with shingles, to say nothing of farms where a horse is an unknown luxury and men till the soil much as the soil was tilled in the days of Christ. From those places came the habitans to Champlain market—within my memory some of them in two-wheeled carts drawn by great Newfoundland dogs—and it was a gay place on at least two mornings of the week. One might buy if one pleased—bartering is a fine art to the French-Canadian and one dear to his soul—or one might pass to the next stall. But one could never pass very many stalls, with their bright offerings of food-stuffs or simple wearing apparels alike set in garniture of the brilliant flowers of this land of the short warm summer.
And now that the sturdy Champlain market is no more—literally torn apart, one stone from another—a few of these folk—typical of a North American race that refuses to become assimilated even after whole centuries of patient effort—still gather in the open square that used to face the market-house. They do not understand. There are only a few of them, and their little shows of wares are still individually brave, still individually gay. But even these must see that the folk with money no longer come to them. Perhaps they see and with stolid French-Canadian indifference refuse to accept the fact. Such a thing would be but characteristic of a folk, who, betrayed and forgotten by their home-land for a little more than one hundred and fifty years, still cling not merely to their religion, but to traditions and a language that is alien to the land that shelters them. In Montreal the traveler from the States first finds French all but universal, the hardy Tricolor of France flying from more poles than boast British Union Jacks. In Quebec that feeling is intensified. We hunted through the shops of the town for a British standard, and in vain. But every one of the obliging shop-keepers was quick to offer us the flag of France. And the decorative motif of the modern architecture of new Quebec lends itself with astonishing frequency to the use of the lilies of old France.
"It is that very sort of thing that makes Britain the really great nation that she is," an old gentleman told us one afternoon on the Terrace. We had been discussing this with him, and he had told us how the city records of Quebec—a British seaport town—were kept in French, how even the legislative proceedings in the great new parliament building out on the Grande Allee beyond the city wall were in that same prettily flavored tongue. "Yes, sir," he continued, "we may have a King that is English in title and German in blood, sir, but here in Canada we have one who through success and through defeat is more than King—Sir Wilfred Laurier—our late premier, sir."
We liked the old gentleman's spunk. He was typical of the old French blood as it pulses within the new France. We liked the old gentleman, too. To us he was as one who had just stepped from one of Honoré Balzac's stories, with his mustaches, waxed and dyed into a drooping perfection, his low-set soft hat, his vast envelope of a faded greatcoat, his cane thrust under his arm, as Otis Skinner might have done it. We had first met him one morning coming out of the arched gateway of the very ancient whitewashed pile of the Seminary; again as he stepped from his morning devotions out through the doorway of the Basilica into the sunlight of what was once the market-square of the Upper Town—after that many more times. Finally we had risked a little smile of recognition, to be answered by the salute courtly. We had conquered. We knew that romance personified was close to him. Perhaps our old gentleman was an army man; he must have been able to sit on the long porch of the Garrison Club, that delectable and afternoon-teable place that looks out upon the trim grass-carpeted court-yard, and tell stories at least as far back as the Crimea.
"A Frenchman?" you begin, as if attacking the very substance of our argument of romance, "fighting the battles of the English Queen?"