Québec—Je Me Souviens

Earlier this month my daughter and I spent a grand week in the province of Québec, a place we had long wanted to visit. I had often heard how lovely and cosmopolitan Montréal is, and how Québec City feels more European than any other city in North America. It’s true. Just three time zones away, Québec offers 400 years of European-influenced history plus thousands of years worth of aboriginal history and beautiful art created by the indigenous peoples of the province (and it’s one big province).

On a nearly four-hour train ride from Montréal to Québec City we enjoyed rolling along waterways and through vast, flat green fields dotted with golden hay rolls. The cities provided all the conveniences that a U.S. visitor could want but with distinctive French Canadian flavor and charm. We enjoyed trying to unravel the distinctly different variants of the French language. Using our French skills was more challenging than we’d hoped despite our recent French studies, but the very understanding Québecois slowed down or restated sentences when their ultra-turbo-speedy-and-slurred conversational Canadian French was too much for our uninitiated ears. The fabled friendliness of Canadians does indeed extend into French-speaking Québec. Those who suffer from the unfortunate and unfounded fear that the francophone folks up north might be snooty toward those who don’t share their language should be quickly disabused of this notion. We found them ever polite and helpful.

The cultural benefits of a strongly French-influenced region go beyond discovering so many variations on traditional French pastry and so many places to dine on crêpes and fine chocolate. (Though we would never denigrate the importance of finding the perfect French-style, pistachio-flavored chilled macarons on rue St-Jean in Old Quebec City, or the amazing mille-feuilles (what we in the U.S. call Napoleons), or the exquisite pastries with perfect glazed fresh strawberries and the best custard ever at Patisserie Le Croquembouche on rue St-Joseph in the city’s St-Roch district.) The strong French Catholic influence also inspired Québec’s plethora of gorgeous and grand churches, basilicas and cathedrals. One can hardly throw a stick without hitting a remarkable and historically important house of worship in both of the provinces’ grandest cities.

The art museums in both cities are also quite fine; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal is spread across two attractive buildings and includes a chic and well-done section on 19th and 20th century design. We were delighted to see the current show, an excellent retrospective of Yves Saint Laurent’s fashion, there. The Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec featured a sampling of fine arts on loan from the Louvre. Just as enjoyable as the art at Québec’s art museum was the walk through the surrounding Parc des Champs-de-Bataille (Battlefields Park), site of the Plains of Abraham, where the French lost to the invading British in 1759, setting up the events that led to the French losing control of the province to Britain. Pretty little Parc Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc Park) within the larger park is especially fine.

The walk back to the old city from there took us past many beautiful domes and spires of silver, gold and verdigris and down side streets full of bistros and sidewalk cafés, trendy boutiques and exquisite old churches. Walking through the portals of the old stone walls at rue St-Jean or rue St-Louis felt like walking into a novel by Hugo or Dumas—very much like Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.

Old Québec City is enchanting and looks remarkably like an 18th century French hill town, complete with cobblestone streets featuring 350-year-old houses and churches. This month marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec City, and we arrived just days after the actual anniversary, so the city was still inundated with tourists, almost all Canadian. There were costumed stiltwalkers, concerts and parades in very corner of the old walled city. Though hour-long waits standing in line to be seated at restaurants were no fun, the good humor of the visitors and locals despite the crowds and high heat and humidity were contagious.

After one long wait at a crêperie, we shared a table with a Québecois couple for dinner one evening and had a lively and enjoyable discussion about the Canadian military, things to consider when cremating people’s loved ones (our tablemate Claude was a former army officer and does cremations part-time), international politics and Québecois separatism. The latter is on the wane, with only about a quarter of Québecois now wanting a government separate from the rest of Canada, according to Claude. Most now feel pride in being both Québecois and Canadian and they’re mostly happy to work within the system. However, we did see a bust honoring Charles De Gaulle’s 1967’s “Vive le Québec Libre!” speech on a street in Montréal’s Mile End neighborhood while we were there; the speech was famous for inflaming Québecois separatists and angering the Canadian government of the time, which was trying to unite Canada’s francophones and anglophones.

Like its older sister Québec City, Montréal is rich with history, but it also has a number of well-designed modern buildings downtown and further afield. We did not visit but were able to see and photograph Buckminster Fuller’s Biosphère, a huge geodesic dome designed for the 1967 World’s Fair. Confusingly, the city boasts not only a Biosphère but also a Biodôme. The Biodôme, once the site of the velodrome built for the 1976 Olympics, is now the site of a huge indoor zoo made up of four completely different climate-controlled environments simulating the Laurentian Mixed Forest Province, the seaside, the Antarctic and the tropics. Most of the animals are able to move more freely and naturally in their homes, which means the visitors rather than the inhabitants grow uncomfortable, which is as it should be. Seeing birds goad caimans in the lower tropical area while golden monkeys preened in the treetops above them was great fun, even if the extreme heat and humidity of that part of the Biodôme made me woozy.

Like Paris, Montréal has a subway system named le Métro. Wisely, the city offers a great deal to visitors: for $50 Canadian (almost exactly the same as US$50 right now), a visitor can buy a Montréal Museums Pass and public transit tourist card package. This gives unlimited use of the Métro and full admission to as many of the over 25 major Montréal museums as one can manage within three days. We made good use of our cards and zoomed all around town, bopping into some museums for just a half hour to get a quick taste of different periods in the city’s history. Several museums are built over or around archeological excavations of the earliest European settlements, and the Pointe-à-Callière Archeological Museum features an early underground graveyard, with placards pointing out which graves were European and which were of Native Canadians, and which of the graves’ inhabitants had been known to have been put in those graves as a result of run-ins with indigenous people. (Rather a lot, actually.)

Montréal also has several chateaus from the 18th and 19th centuries (and even earlier) that now house historical fashions and home furnishings, allowing one to imagine what early European inhabitants’ lives were like. Less attention is given to aboriginal Canadians (also known as First Peoples) and their experiences, but they are mentioned. The McCord Museum houses some very interesting historical artifacts and a collection of Inuit art, and houses a well-regarded collection of historical fashions. The featured fashion exhibition that we enjoyed was titled “Reveal or Conceal?” which explored “historical perceptions of modesty and eroticism in women’s clothing.”

On our last day in Québec, my daughter Lily and I visited some of the antique shops on rue St-Paul in lower Old Québec City. The exquisite chandeliers and furniture were much larger and more expensive than we could afford, but we did manage to score a couple of vintage license plates as mementos. Québec has long featured car plates with the fleur-de-lys symbol on them, the traditional symbol of France which is also found on the Québecois provincial flag (four times over); the flag is even called the Fleurdelisé. For decades the fleur-de-lys has been a favorite symbol for generations of my family, representing, as it does, France, the Italian city of Florence, the iris (my mother's favorite flower) and the lily (my favorite flower, and also the name of my favorite person). Older license plates feature the line “La belle province,” which is certainly true. Their current motto is “Je me souviens”—I remember. Indeed, I will always remember our first visit to la belle province. Merci, belle Québec.