A Gentleman, Who Had Just Arrived From England,
Declared That "Quebec Was A Horrid Place, Not Fit To Live In.
" A few days
after he met the same individual to whom he had made this uncomplimentary
observation, and confided to
Him that he thought Quebec "the most
delightful place in the whole world; for, do you know," he said, "I have
got a muffin."
With the afternoon numerous riding parties are formed, for you cannot go
three miles out of Quebec without coming to something beautiful; and calls
of a more formal nature are paid; a military band performs on Durham
Terrace or the Garden, which then assume the appearance of most
fashionable promenades. The evening is spent in the ball-room, or at small
social dancing parties, or during the winter, before ten at night, in the
galleries of the House of Assembly; and the morning is well advanced
before the world of Quebec is hushed in sleep.
Society is contained in very small limits at Quebec. Its élite are
grouped round the ramparts and in the suburb of St. Louis. The city until
recently has occupied a very isolated position, and has depended upon
itself for society. It is therefore sociable, friendly, and hospitable;
and though there is gossip - for where is it not to be found? - I never knew
any in which there was so little of ill-nature. The little world in the
upper part of the city is probably the most brilliant to be found anywhere
in so small a compass. But there is a world below, another nation, seldom
mentioned in the aristocratic quarter of St. Louis, where vice, crime,
poverty, and misery jostle each other, as pleasure and politics do in the
upper town. This is the suburb of St. Roch, in whose tall dark houses and
fetid alleys those are to be found whose birthright is toil, who spend
life in supplying the necessities of to-day, while indulging in gloomy
apprehensions for to-morrow - who have not one comfort in the past to cling
to, or one hope for the future to cheer.
St. Roch is as crowded as the upper town, but with a very different
population - the poor, the degraded, and the vicious. Here fever destroys
its tens, and cholera its hundreds. Here people stab each other, and think
little of it. Here are narrow alleys, with high, black-looking, stone
houses, with broken windows pasted over with paper in the lower stories,
and stuffed with rags in the upper - gradations of wretchedness which I
have observed in the Cowgate and West Port at Edinburgh. Here are shoeless
women, who quiet their children with ardent spirits, and brutal men, who
would kill both wives and children if they dared. Here are dust-heaps in
which pigs with long snouts are ever routing - here are lean curs,
wrangling with each other for leaner bones - here are ditches and puddles,
and heaps of oyster-shells, and broken crockery, and cabbage-stalks, and
fragments of hats and shoes. Here are torn notices on the walls offering
rewards for the apprehension of thieves and murderers, painfully
suggestive of dark deeds. A little further are lumber-yards and wharfs,
and mud and sawdust, and dealers in old nails and rags and bones, and
rotten posts and rails, and attempts at grass. Here are old barrel-hoops,
and patches of old sails, and dead bushes and dead dogs, and old
saucepans, and little plots of ground where cabbages and pumpkins drag on
a pining existence. And then there is the river Charles, no longer clear
and bright, as when trees and hills and flowers were mirrored on its
surface, but foul, turbid, and polluted, with ship-yards and steam-engines
and cranes and windlasses on its margin; and here Quebec ends.
From the rich, the fashionable, and the pleasure-seeking suburb of St.
Louis few venture down into the quarter of St. Roch, save those who, at
the risk of drawing in pestilence with every breath, mindful of their duty
to God and man, enter those hideous dwellings, ministering to minds and
bodies alike diseased. My first visit to St. Roch was on a Sunday
afternoon. I had attended our own simple and beautiful service in the
morning, and had seen the celebration of vespers in the Romish cathedral
in the afternoon. Each church was thronged with well-dressed persons. It
was a glorious day. The fashionable promenades were all crowded; gay
uniforms and brilliant parasols thronged the ramparts; horsemen were
cantering along St. Louis Street; priestly processions passed to and from
the different churches; numbers of calashes containing pleasure-parties
were dashing about; picnic parties were returning from Montmorenci and
Lake Charles; groups of vivacious talkers, speaking in the language of
France, were at every street-corner; Quebec had all the appearance, so
painful to an English or Scottish eye, of a Continental sabbath.
Mr. and Mrs. Alderson and myself left this gay scene, and the constant
toll of Romish bells, for St. Roch. They had lived peacefully in a rural
part of Devonshire, and more recently in one of the prettiest and most
thriving of the American cities; and when they first breathed the polluted
air, they were desirous to return from what promised to be so peculiarly
unpleasant, but kindly yielded to my desire to see something of the shady
as well as the sunny side of Quebec.
No Sabbath-day with its hallowed accompaniments seemed to have dawned upon
the inhabitants of St. Roch. We saw women with tangled hair standing in
the streets, and men with pallid countenances and bloodshot eyes were
reeling about, or sitting with their heads resting on their hands, looking
out from windows stuffed with rags. There were children too, children in
nothing but the name and stature - infancy without innocence, learning to
take God's name in vain with its first lisping accents, preparing for a
maturity of suffering and shame. I looked at these hideous houses, and
hideous men and women too, and at their still more repulsive progeny, with
sallow faces, dwarfed forms, and countenances precocious in the
intelligence of villany; and contrasted them with the blue-eyed, rosy-
cheeked infants of my English home, who chase butterflies and weave May
garlands, and gather cowslips and buttercups; or the sallow children of a
Highland shantie, who devour instruction in mud-floored huts, and con
their tasks on the heathery sides of hills.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 74 of 128
Words from 74740 to 75817
of 129941
