Saint Anne. By the way, Saint Anne holds not only an esteemed but an adventurous enshrinement in the heart of French Canada. It was she who protected the early navigators, she who encouraged, sheltered, finally havened the Breton sea-adventurers in the bays and coves of the Lower St. Lawrence. And the farther seaward reach the highways of this part of Canada to-day, the more popular appears Saint Anne for wayside shrines. She is a personality with a very human and approachable heart to all fishermen; and every little boat dancing in and out of Baie de Chaleur feels the eye of Ste. Anne upon her. La Protectrice de Pecheurs! Every fisherman carries a little figure of the saintly woman whose specialty is navigation, fishing, storms, boats, la morue, and a thousand-and-one angles of his life; and then, as if fearing something might be overlooked, clinches all with du Canada.
Therefore, where the abrupt Laurentians fling their beetling brows to the wild gales and dun sea-fog, there on la montagne at Percé, at the very top, as if to see well the little boats balanced in calm majesty on the quarter-deck of the continent, is a life-size figure of the Saint.
Many a time, lingering after the long steep climb, under the shadow of this figure-of-the-ages looking down upon the weathered arms of the cross upon the headland, I have been struck by the force of allegory brought into being by these two figures in juxtaposition. Out of the heart of the one, protective, evolve the protecting arms of the other. Yet there was no motif or thought of this behind the erection of these two figures. The cross is simply the cross of the Recollet Fathers and pioneer missionaries, renewed continually through the centuries whenever age and decay or some sudden storm made a new one necessary. Bonne Sainte Anne sur la Montagne was set up by the local fishermen of a generation ago.
All these things are written on the south side of the St. Lawrence, and as we take the shore-road west many a shrine and highway cross continue the tale of rural piety and peace. But it is possibly the north shore of the St. Lawrence including Ile d’Orleans where the shrine takes on clear-cut historic importance.
The most famous shrine in all America is situated at Saint Anne de Beaupré. Here Ste. Anne comes in close touch, laying her healing power yearly upon the spirits and ill-bodies of thousands of pilgrims hailing from widely separated regions of Canada and the United States, with a sprinkling from every other quarter of the globe.
One would think that a region overshadowed, as it were, by so dominant a force as Ste. Anne de Beaupré might easily show poverty in the matter of the simple farmers’ crosses and wayside and garden shrines of which we write, but along the Montmorenci and the Beaupré road quite the contrary is to be observed.
Remarking on this and the surprising frequency of the wayside crosses in this region, to a prominent Quebecquois, he assured us, to his thinking, there were not so many now as of old. “Why,” said he, “when I was a boy every house had one.” However their popularity may have decreased in the eye of the old-timer, backed by a memory reaching back more than three score years, they still recur frequently enough to-day to notch every mile of the twenty-one between Quebec City and Sainte Anne de Beaupré village. So that to the visitor, without such perspective, it is evident that the habitant of these parts had no intention of relinquishing his personal and intimate belief in the mascot of the Cross, Sacre Coeur, and bonne Ste. Anne for his farm, garden, mill, meadows or bit of roadway, because the world has a shrine at Beaupré that rivals Lourdes.
Nor do these milestones cease at the church. Rather they are to be happened on all along the road east to Saint Joachim, and peep out at intervals along the Cap Tourment road into the heart of the Laurentides at ’tite de Cap, St. Feréol, St. Tetes, etc., as far as the road and the habitant home pushes back into the heart of Northeastern Quebec.
In the wayside crosses of this north shore, however, we have fancied finer work in execution, though perhaps not so strong and bold a concept, as a rule, as in the sea-coast cross. This finer handiwork is no doubt traceable to the influence of the art in the basilica of Saint Anne with which the people hereabouts are in almost constant contact. At least the church gets the credit till one remembers that these wayside crosses are the handiwork of a long line of carvers dating back into Normandy and Brittany, and that to the Tremblays, Gigueres, Couchons, Desbarats, Gagnons, as well as other families, the Beaupré wood-carving of sacred figures and symbols “runs in the blood” and is an inherited talent handed down from generation to generation.
Whether the inspiration comes from within or at the suggestion of the beauty in The Great Shrine, it is certain these wayside crosses, crucifixes, chapels and shrines of this Laurentian highway stand out among Canada’s finest landmarks. Seldom one of the crosses but has simple wood-carved symbols of the Crucifixion attached—cup, ladder, hammer, hands, nails, the crown of thorns. Not all are present on the very old-timers, but an absent cup, a wind-blown hammer, a broken nail gives them a greater grip, especially when about the weather-worn “foot” a wild rose has sprung up and been spared by the scythe of the mower. This same St. Lawrence section is also the rambling playground of the tiny garden shrine. It is as if the hand of an aviator had scattered from the clouds these miniature niches of the saints; so that one or more dropped into every garden far and near.