"26th January, 1776. Eighty loaded sleighs passing towards Menut's. Two field-pieces placed at the door; people passing and repassing between that house and the General Hospital; some of our shots went through Menut's house; we fired a long time at that object; at last we perceived a man coming towards the town in a cariole, carrying the old signal; he passed their guard-house and waved with his handkerchief; we took no notice of him, but fired away at Menut's, he turned about and went back. … Perhaps, they find Menut's too hot for them.— (from Journal of an officer of the Quebec Garrison, 1775-6, quoted in Smith's History of Canada, Vol. II.)
"21st February, 1776. Fired at their guard-house and at Menut's.
"23rd February. About four this morning we heard the enemy's drum at Menut's, St. Foix. Sentries saw rockets in the night."
Prince Edward street, St. Roch, and "Donnacona" street, near the Ursulines, the latter thus named about 1840 by the late Rev. Messire Maguire, then Almoner of the Ursuline Convent, bring up the memory of two important personages of the past, Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, an English Prince, and Donnacona, a swarthy chief of primitive Canada, who welcomed Jacques Cartier.
The vanquisher of Montcalm, General Wolfe, is honoured not only by a statue, at the corner of Palace and St. John's streets, but again by the street which bears his name, Wolfe street. In like manner, his illustrious rival Montcalm claims an entire section of the city, "Montcalm Ward." Can it be that the susceptible young Captain of the Albemarle, Horatio Nelson, carried on his flirtation with the captivating Miss Mary Simpson, in 1782, in the street which now rejoices in his name?
NELSON IN QUEBEC—1782.
"C'est l'amour qui fait le tour de la ronde."—OLD SONG.
"Though the "Ancient Capital," ever since 1764, rejoiced in an organ of public opinion—a chronicle of daily events, fashions, city gossip, the Quebec Gazette,—one would look in vain, in the barren columns of that journal, for any intelligence of an incident, in 1782, which, from the celebrity in after-life of the chief actor, and the local repute of the reigning belle of the day, must have caused a flutter among the F. F. Q. of the period. We mean the tender attachment of Horatio (Lord) Nelson, commanding H. M. frigate Albemarle, 28 guns then in port,—his romantic admiration for Miss Mary Simpson, the youthful and accomplished daughter of Saunders Simpson (not "James," as Dr. Miles asserts), the cousin of James Thompson, Sr., one of Wolfe's veterans. Traditions, venerable by their antiquity, told of the charms divine, of the conquests of a marvellously handsome Quebec beauty in the latter part of the last century: the Catullus of 1783 thus begins his inspired lay in the Quebec Gazette of that year:
'Sure you will rather listen to my call,
Since beauty and Quebec's fair nymphs I sing.
Henceforth Diana in Miss S—ps—n see,
As noble and majestic is her air;
Nor can fair Venus, W—lc—s, vie with thee,
Nor all thy heavenly charms with thee compare.'
"It was our fate first to attempt to unravel the tangles of this attractive web. In the course of our readings, in 1865, our attention had been drawn to a passage in the life of Nelson by the Laureate of England, Robert Southey, [132] and enlarged on by Lamartine in the pleasant sketch he gave of the naval hero. Our investigations were aided by the happy memory of an old friend, now deceased: the late Lt.-Col. John Sewell, who had served in the 49th under General Brock, and whose birth was nearly contemporary with the visit of Nelson to our port in September, 1782. It was evident the chief biographers of the gifted sea captain ignored the details of his youthful attachment on our shores.