“Oh, m’sieu, madame, what will you in one leetle week?”
But at the same time, a week in Lorette is a long time if one gives every moment to it, as we did, scarcely stealing a moment for déjeuner or diner.
The Indian Village that proves itself only partly French, despite its French name, since it utterly refuses to follow one long street, is neither all French nor all Indian, but resembles some little escaped English garden romancing as the capital city of the Hurons—nine miles by the Lake St. John Road out of the city of Quebec.
The English lanes of Indian Lorette all seem to convene at the old church. And that too, strangely enough, gives one the impression of an English village church. Perhaps it is the green in front, with the old George III. cannon, that village tradition says “came here after the Crimea”. At any rate “the English atmosphere” is there. But the resemblance blends into old Jesuit, once we cross the threshold. If Angleterre speaks in the cannon without, m’sieu, the dulcet voice of France charms as sweetly within. First, we must see “the little house of the Angels”, let into the wall, high above the altar. It is not very big but great significance attaches to it, for this little house was used as an object lesson by diplomatic missionary priests of the early days to drive home to the Indian mind the sanctity of the home and the value of the centralizing agency of a house as against the tepee.
“It is a little figure of the house of our Saviour and Mary, his mother,” an elderly Huron woman told us in a half-whisper, “and some bad men stole it, one time, and the people prayed and prayed; and one morning, they got up, and the little house was back. The Angels had brought it in the night.”
It is a dear little house in old dull blues; and somewhere about it, lines of ashes-of-roses melt in with the blue, and there’s a little touch of real old gold to give values. A bit of art in its simplicity, is this little house from France, the “house of the Angels”, that won a tribe to architecture and—higher things.
I think the Angels did bring it!
I think, too, they tempered the wind to the shorn lamb in sending “Louis D’Ailleboust, Chevalier, troisième gouverneur de la Nouvelle France” to be, as the crested tablet on the opposite walls says, “Ami et protecteur des Hurons”.
Born at Ancy in 1612, “the friend and protector of the Hurons” died at Ville Marie “en la Nouvelle France, en mai, 1660”. So reads the third Governor’s life history as here quaintly but all too briefly written.
One could spend hours in this little church, so French within, so English without; weaving with its souvenirs pages of history! For there are many treasures locked up carefully in the sacristy—anciennes pièces of hand-wrought church-silver from France, and many rich embroideries and a priest-robe wrought by the hand of court ladies and presented by the queen of Louis Quatorze. “Ah, oui, oui, madame, c’est magnifique!” In detail—but who cares for detail? It is sufficient that these valuable relics of olden days are here for our modern eyes to look upon on a summer day, greatly enriching our experience. Nevertheless, who would expect this sort of treasure in Indian Lorette?