Within, she continues to act as guide, while, paradoxically enough, she is the essence of the treasures, paintings, altars, crypt, etc., to which she points.
She steps with you into the almost holy quiet of L’Hotel Dieu, the hospital founded by Madame La Duchesse, the niece of the great Cardinal Richelieu; herself one of the most helpful and romantic figures that ever stepped into Nouvelle France. It is to her, that French-Canada owes L’Hotel Dieu, one of the finest hospitals in present-day Canada, or, for that matter, in America.
The soft-stepping Sisters, passing from one bedside to another in their picturesque robes, gently administering to the suffering of twentieth century Quebec, are the descendants in an unbroken line of the “Hopitalieres” who came here with La Duchesse in 1639.
Between the Basilica and the Hospital an old gateway opens into the quadrangle of the Quebec Seminary, founded by Monsignor Laval, the great figure of the Church in pioneer Quebec. Here, in the yard below the long, gray building with its rows of open, French windows and its thick walls, the youth of present-day French-Canada, in uniforms of blue-tailored, skirted coats, with emerald-green sashes—rush hither and thither in their games, directed by willowy figures of teacher-priests in round hats and clinging soutanes. Romance seems to linger long here, and to treasure greatly the atmosphere of Laval University adjoining. Here is youth and its enthusiasms, a miracle-play of welling human interest giving life to these old walls and halls and never suffering them to grow old in spirit despite their years.
Then the caleche sets us down at the door of the Ursulines, and there one asks to see the skull of General Montcalm. A sister brings it.
Montcalm! Wolfe! One cannot think of one without thinking of the other. And thinking of them both, from the perspective afforded by a century and a half, what do you see but the hand of Destiny gradually eliminating the players in the game for the possession of a country far greater than either side had any idea of, until only these two were left in the limelight, one wearing the Fleur des Lys, the other the Rose of England; each a true knight; each defending to the death, “the cause” he had espoused; each, poetic and romantic figures in whom a United Canada now rejoices.
But the sister is drawn out to talk of the city, of its many points of interest, and of its general atmosphere of romance; agrees with you that it is a wonderful treasure-house of souvenir and story. And then you are moved to compliment her on her fluency in English. And she laughs and says “she ought to speak it easily seeing she was born in Providence, Rhode Island.”
Then, with an unmistakable flash of Yankee humour, she inquires if we do not think it strange that a “Yankee” should be guardian of the skull of Montcalm in Quebec? And we counter back: “Not so strange, as—romantic, Sister!”
In strolling along that renowned promenade, the Dufferin Terrace, which affords a glimpse of the Saint Lawrence far below in such a panorama of natural beauty as beginning at one’s feet stretches away mile after mile till lost in the soft mist of distance, one looks down upon the Lower Town, whose narrow, old streets, and market-squares call to one to explore them.
And so some morning we find ourselves in Lower Champlain Street—one of the queerest old streets in the world. It leaves the markets and docks behind and doubles around the base of Cape Diamond between the river and the cliff, until all the city is lost to view and its sounds as completely obliterated as if you were miles away from any mart.