In rear of and parallel to St. Peter street, a new and wide street, called after one of the Governors of Canada—Dalhousie street—was opened recently, and promises to be before long the leading commercial artery. Several extensive warehouses have been erected on Dalhousie street since it was opened to the public, in 1877, by the city Corporation purchasing from St. James street to St. Andrew's wharf a strip of land, of 60 feet in breadth, from the landed proprietors of this neighbourhood. At the south- western extremity a noble dry goods store has just been erected by Mr. George Alford; it is four stories high, 155 feet long and 72 feet wide, and faces on Dalhousie, Laporte, Union Lane and Finlay Market. It is occupied by a wealthy and ancient dry goods firm, founded in Montreal about 1810, with a branch in Quebec, in 1825. The original founders were Messrs. Robertson, Masson & Larocque; this firm was subsequently changed to Robertson, Masson, Strang & Co., to Masson, Bruyère, Thibaudeau & Co., to Langevin, Thibaudeau, Bruyère & Co., to Thibaudeau, Thomas & Co., to Thibaudeau, Généreux & Co., and finally to Thibaudeau Frères & Co., at Quebec; Thibaudeau Bros. & Co., Montreal; Thibaudeau Bros. & Co., London, Manchester and Manitoba.
In the early days of the colony, the diminutive market space, facing the front of Notre Dame Church, Lower Town, as well as the Upper Town Market, was used for the infliction of corporal punishment, or the pillory, or the execution of culprits.
On the area facing the Lower Town Church on Notre Dame street, the plan of the city, drawn by the engineer, Jean François or Jehan Bourdon, in 1641, shows a bust of Louis XIII., long since removed; this market, which dates from the earliest times of the colony, as well as the vacant area (until recently the Upper Town market, facing the Basilica), was used as a place for corporal punishment, and for the exhibition in the pillory of public malefactors.
"Among the incidents," says Mr. T. P. Bédard, "which claimed the privilege of exciting the curiosity of the good folks of Quebec (then 1680, inhabited by 1,345 souls,) was reckoned the case of Jean Rathier, charged with murdering a girl of eighteen—Jeanne Couc. The case had been tried at Three Rivers, and Rathier sentenced to have his legs broken [95] with an iron bar, and afterwards to be hung. Judgment had been confirmed. An unforseen hitch arose: the official hangman was dead; how then was Rathier to be hung? The officers of justice cut the Gordian knot, by tendering to Rathier, in lieu of the halter, the position, little envied, of hangman. He accepted. Some years after, the wife and the daughter of Rathier were accused and found guilty as accomplices in a robbery; the daughter, as the receiver of the stolen goods, was sentenced to be whipped, but in secret, at the General Hospital by the nun appointed Provost Marshal (Maitress de Discipline), and the mother was also adjudged to be whipped, but publicly in the streets of the city. This incident furnished the singular and ludicrous spectacle of a husband publicly whipping his wife with impunity to himself, as he was acting under the authority of justice."— (Première Administration de Frontenac, p. 39.)
The whip and pillory did not go out with the old régime. The Quebec Gazette of 19th June, 1766, mentions the whipping, on the Upper and Lower Town markets, of Catherine Berthrand and Jeanotte Blaize, by the hand of the executioneer, for having "borrowed" (a pretty way of describing petty larceny), a silver spoon from a gentleman of the town, without leave or without intention of returning it.
For male reprobates, such as Jean May and Louis Bruseau, whose punishment for petty larceny is noted in the Gazette of 11th August, 1766, the whipping was supplemented with a walk—tied at the cart's tail—from the Court House door to St. Roch and back to the Court House. May had to whip Bruseau and Bruseau had to whip May the day following, at ten in the morning.
Let us revert to Captain Testu's doings. The plot was to strangle Champlain, pillage the warehouse, and afterwards betake themselves to the Spanish and Basque vessels, laying at Tadousac. As, at that period, no Court of Appeals existed in "la Nouvelle France"—far less was a "Supreme Court" thought of—the trial of the chief of the conspiracy was soon dispatched says Champlain, and the Sieur Jean du Val was "presto well and duly hanged and strangled at Quebec aforesaid, and his head affixed to the top of a pike-staff planted on the highest eminence of the Fort." The ghastly head of this traitor, on the end of a pike-staff, near Notre Dame street, must certainly have had a sinister effect at twilight.
But the brave Captain Testu, the saviour of Champlain and of Quebec—what became of him? Champlain has done him the honour of naming him; here the matter ended. Neither monument, nor poem, nor page of history in his honour; nothing was done in the way of commemorating his devotion. As in the instance of the illustrious man, whose life he had saved, his grave is unknown. According to the Abbé Tanguay, none of his posterity exist at this day.
During the siege of 1759, we notice in Panet's Journal, "that the Lower Town was a complete mass of smoking ruins; on the 8th August, it was a burning heap (braisier). Wolfe and Saunders' bombshells had found their way even to the under-ground vaults. This epoch became disastrous to many Quebecers." The English threw bombs (pots à feu) on the Lower Town, of which, says Mr. Panet, "one fell on my house, one on the houses in the Market place, and the last in Champlain street. The fire burst out simultaneously, in three different directions; it was in vain to attempt to cut off or extinguish the fire at my residence; a gale was blowing from the north-east, and the Lower Town was soon nothing less than a blazing mass. Beginning at my house, that of M. Desery, that of M. Maillou, Sault- au-Matelot street, the whole of the Lower Town and all the quarter Cul- de-Sac up to the property of Sieur Voyer, which was spared, and in short up to the house of the said Voyer, the whole was devastated by fire. Seven vaults [96] had been rent to pieces or burned: that of M. Perrault the younger, that of M. Taché, of M. Benjamin de la Mordic, of Jehaune, of Maranda. You may judge of the consternation which reigned; 167 houses had been burnt."
One hundred and sixty-seven burnt houses would create many gaps. We know the locality on which stood the warehouse of M. Perrault, junior, also that of M. Taché (the Chronicle Bureau), but who can point out to us where stood the houses of Desery, Maillou, Voyer, de Voisy, and the vaults of Messieurs Benjamin de la Mordic, Jehaune, Maranda?