Delphi complete works of.., p.750
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 750
On such a Sunday morning the silence seems to fall all the deeper with each successive snow that blocks the narrow streets, buries the sign-boards, and mantles in frozen billows, ready to fall, the edge of every roof, the projection of every cornice. On such a day the footsteps of the rare passengers seen here and there upon the streets fall noiseless on the snow. They too seem ghosts, moving, as it were, nowhere. There is no sound or movement except that at each successive service the deep bells of the Notre Dame parish church echo the hours, and the parishioners flock to and fro across the Place d’Armes to the office of the Mass. Yet somehow they too — as different from the businessmen of the weekdays as the Iroquois themselves, wrapped and muffled against the cold — have taken on the air of old French Canada itself, as if a part of the ghost picture.
To make it still more real there stands Maisonneuve’s statue in the Place d’Armes in front of the church, its pedestal and its pedestral figures half buried in snow. The crouching form of Major Lambert Closse, his pistol ready to fire, looks out, more vigilant than ever, from under his canopy of snow. Here projects from under its white mantle the treacherous arm of a buried Iroquois, there the sickle of a habitant settler.
In such a place and in such a company we can build up again the town that was. Here, still plain enough, is its plan and outline. This St. James Street — the Rue St. Jacques — still runs its full length along the upper side of the town. Notre Dame is still there just below it, and St. Paul, broken with many crossings and intersections and little squares punched out of it, still staggers its unsteady course lower along the slope. But the values of these streets are all reversed. St. Jacques was the least of them. Notre Dame, the first street really laid out with a surveyor’s line (1672), was the main street, the street of quality and fashion, the chief road of entry by land. St. Jacques was a smaller, later street which there was just room to squeeze in between Notre Dame and the sharp slope of the hill behind, where the land fell to the marsh and river.
In the old French town on the Rue St. Jacques we should have found ourselves close beside the fortification wall, looking down into the hollow and across it to the snow-covered gardens and woods and mountainsides above. St. Paul, of course, was the oldest street in another sense, for it was the first pathway, the track through the trees, that connected Maisonneuve’s fort (on the other side of the Rivière St. Pierre, the Lachine Canal of today) with the buildings by the riverside, Maisonneuve’s own house, the Hotel Dieu, and those built later. Presently the fort was demolished, the town itself built along St. Paul and Notre Dame Streets, and the old French town of which we now speak, the fortified wall with its bastions and river gates, passed along just below St. Paul. Hence St. Paul too had a grandeur of its own, looking down on the Common (Commune) along the riverside, on the landing places, and across the river, and having on it the Château de Vaudreuil, the residence of the Governor General of New France when in residence. In front of this residence was the aristocratic grandeur of the Marine Parade. Thus St. Paul held the water gates while Notre Dame held the main entry by land.
We can thus see the plan and scope of the old town in this frozen, ghostly outline of silent stone. Yet perhaps it would be better if we could somehow wave a magic wand over it and see it, not in the death of winter of today, but in the warm life of the summertime two hundred years ago. Such a wand by good fortune we possess in the description of Montreal and its surroundings that was written in the summer of 1749 by Peter Kalm, a visiting Swedish naturalist. We open the pages of the English (1771) edition of Kalm’s Travels, its very print and its form giving a sympathetic touch of antiquity, and in a moment (for Mr. Kalm possesses the unconscious art of interest) we are transported to a place so different from our ghost city that we realize we have substituted a skeleton for a living being. This is no longer a stone city cramped behind its narrow fortifications. This is a large, spacious place with trees and gardens everywhere. The place seems too large if they ever had to defend it. And this town is not built of stone. There are indeed beautiful stone houses like the château that M. de Ramezay built or the Château de Vaudreuil itself, but most of the houses are still of wood. Mr. Kalm will presently tell us that this is very different from Quebec, where most of the houses are of stone. Indeed the difference ran all through the French Canada of 1749, all through its rows of farms that now reach along the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Montreal, and along the Richelieu, and from the Richelieu to Montreal, and all around the islands of Montreal and Jesus. Wherever these river courses could reach there were now the seigneuries and the river farms of New France. But beyond that were only forts — that of Cataraqui (Kingston), a fort at Niagara, and the Fort Rouille that was to give place to Toronto. Of these houses some were built of stone and some of wood, and this — Peter Kalm guessed it as cleverly as we do — was because they built with whatever came best to hand. But all the houses ran to the same ground plan, the flat front, the small windows, and the tall pointed roof.
But let us, however, view Montreal with Peter Kalm’s own eyes. It may be explained that Kalm was a Swedish naturalist, described as a Professor of Oeconomy (whatever that is; certainly not Economics) at the University of Aobo in Swedish Finland (wherever these are). He was mainly interested in studying plants and gathering seeds, and his journeys took him to the British provinces of North America and into and through New France. Kalm’s London editors of 1771 seem to think he showed an anti-British bias which they correct in meticulous footnotes. It is hinted that he was peeved at the British ownership of the once Swedish colony that became New Jersey.
But as that conquest had happened a hundred years before and was made by the Dutch, not the British, such peevishness would seem extreme even in a professor. Kalm’s picture of New France is certainly idyllic. But he saw it under idyllic circumstances, in the glow of a Canadian summer and in the halcyon days of Canadian autumn, a scene as peaceful as ever contemplated by a kingfisher on a bough. For the latest final peace, that of Aix-la-Chapelle, had come in 1748, and all North America smiled like a garden. Especially for Peter Kalm, for when the Governor of Quebec (M. de la Galissonnière) and the Governor of Montreal heard of Kalm’s garden mission, they insisted that he must be the guest of the King of France, paying for nothing. Royal government is able to do things in a royal way.
Far different was the country that Peter Kalm saw around Montreal from what Father Charlevoix had seen a generation before. There had not, it is true, been that extraordinary transformation that a hundred years later changed all the best of Upper Canada from wilderness to farmstead within forty or fifty years, for that was the work of many hands, when dense forests fell before axes that multiplied every year, working in peace and security. But even in New France the change is notable. Beautiful it all seemed indeed to the traveling Peter Kalm in 1749, arriving with certain fellow Swedes by the Lake Champlain route. He was rowed across on a July morning from La Prairie, the walls and houses and spires of Montreal visible all the way over. They landed below one of the water gates. “We found,” he writes, “a crowd of people at the gate . . . very desirous of seeing us . . . because Swedes were a people of whom they had heard something but whom they had never seen.” This was flattering, but still more so was the arrival of a captain to take Kalm to the house of the Governor, the Baron de Longueuil. “He received me more civilly and generously than I can well describe and showed me letters from the Governor General at Quebec, the Marquis de la Galissonnière, which mentioned that he was to supply me with whatever I should want, as I was to travel in this country at the expense of His Most Christian Majesty.”
After this first visit to Montreal Peter Kalm went down to Quebec, where he was received with great courtesy by M. de la Galissonnière. He came up the river again, still the guest of the King of France, in a boat with six rowers, what sailors would call a gig, with a canopy over his head to keep his precious brains from the Canadian sun. Everyone in Canada seems to have greatly appreciated Kalm’s horticultural mission as a benefit both ways. He was in Montreal again for a month that autumn, so that much of his description of the town is made after his return and compares the two localities of Quebec and Montreal.
Kalm notes the fine buildings surrounded with beautiful trees and ample gardens. “Some of the houses of the town,” says Kalm, “are of stone, but most of them are of timber though very neatly built. Each of the better sort of houses has a door toward the street with a seat on each side of it for amusement and recreation in the morning and evening. The streets are broad and straight [Kalm is here thinking of city streets in the Europe of 1749] and divided at right angles by the short ones. Some are paved but most of them are very uneven.”
Peter Kalm’s pictures of the life of the town are of special interest, preserving for us what no maps or official records can recall. “Every Friday is market day, when the country people come to town with provisions . . . the only market day of the whole week. On that day likewise a number of Indians come to town to sell their goods and buy others. . . . There is not anything, however dear to them,” says Kalm, “that they would not sell for brandy.”
Peter Kalm, for all that he is a professor and a naturalist, has a keen eye for the ladies of French Canada and devotes several pages to them, attempting to classify them as only a naturalist would. He distinguishes the French ladies from France and those native to Canada; the later are subdivided into ladies of Quebec and ladies of Montreal. Class I (French ladies) “possess the politeness of the French nation.” Class IIA (Quebec ladies) “are equal to the French ladies in good breeding, having the advantage of frequently conversing with French gentlemen and ladies.” Class IIB (Montreal ladies) — some of these, indeed, seem to have laughed at Peter’s French. Having no opportunity to hear bad French, an opportunity grown larger in Montreal with the centuries, it sounded funny to them. Kalm takes his vengeance when he says that “they are accused of partaking too much of the pride of the Indians and of being much wanting in French good manners.” Kalm’s picture of Montreal and its environs is one of peace and plenty. There are bountiful gardens, fruit in abundance, and all about the town the wheat fields, as his visit drew on, bathed the landscape in yellow. He visited La Chine (so he spells it), a “fine village with a fine church of stone and farmhouses lying along the river about four or five arpents from each other.” An arpent then, as now, was a French measure either “long” or “square”; as length, 192 feet, hence as surface (roughly), four fifths of an acre. Kalm tells the familiar story of how “M. Salee (La Salle) talked of nothing but his new short way to China,” and hence, “the place got its name, as it were, by way of a joke.” This is the sole joke in Kalm’s three volumes. He visits also the Sault de Recollet, a little settlement where even the church is built of wood, but with cornfields, meadows, and pastures all around it, but the old people said they remembered it as all forest.
Kalm left New France in 1749. He saw nothing of the Canadian winter. Nor could he have realized how the peace and relative plenty all around him in that golden autumn were to change to the carnage, the distress, the desolation of ten years later.
For people of curious mind and for economists, we may here attempt to form some idea of how the economic side of life under the Old Regime in Montreal and in French Canada may be compared with that of later times and of today. Were the people, the plain people, better off than those of today? It is very difficult to give a tabulated answer since life in those days depended greatly on barter, on exchange of services, and on self-support. The people, says Peter Kalm, “all seem poor.” But elsewhere he notes that “it is easy for anyone to set up as a farmer and live well at small expense.” The daily drink of the plain people was water. Kalm tells us that they brewed no beer. The glory of John Molson was yet to come. The rich drank imported wine, none being made in the country. Indeed the only manufactured drink was the seasonal spruce beer.
It is very hard to give any adequate notion of money and prices. The nominal scale of money was based on the livre. This in origin had meant a pound weight of silver but had gone down and down by the depreciation of French coinage, so that it presently reached practically the same level as a quite separate unit called a franc, and the two words became interchangeable. A livre was divided into twenty sous. Three livres made an écu, a word commonly translated as crown but not really equal to it. Compared with foreign money, the British pound of those days was supposed to equal twenty-two livres. The shilling in England, where it existed as a coin, went at twenty to the pound sterling. The great unit of New World trade was the Spanish dollar. At this time the amount of silver in a dollar made a pound sterling worth four dollars and forty cents. But in the American provinces there were no shillings as actual coins but only as a way of counting. In New York Province and in North Carolina they counted eight shillings to a dollar (the “York shilling” of old-time Ontario that some of us still recall); in New England and Virginia, six shillings; in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, seven and sixpence. Hence a penny, the twelfth part of a shilling, was about the hundredth part of a colonial dollar; hence the use of “penny,” still current in the United States for a cent, or “centavo.” Thus, in summary, twenty-two livres, or two hundred and forty sous, were worth a pound sterling, or four dollars and forty cents; roughly a sou was two “cents”; a livre or franc was twenty cents. A New York shilling, being worth twelve and one half cents or pennies, was equal to six sous.
All of this by way of account. French Canada had no circulating coins except a few sous and battered pieces of mixed metal. Circulating money was paper. The Intendant issued government bills to pay for government purchases, in sums down to as little as one livre or less. These passed from hand to hand. In October, before the last ships went out, all who wished cashed these bills in with the Intendant for bills on France to buy goods for import. The government also at various times printed “card money” and other issues. The whole currency was a mess till after the conquest.
Using these units as best we can, we find that in Montreal at the close of the regime current wages of plain labor stood at thirty to forty sous (sixty to eighty cents) a day; skilled labor, four livres (eighty sous). Servants’ wages seemed very high to European visitors; a footman received one hundred and fifty livres a year, a maid one hundred. In spending these wages fifty livres (twelve days’ skilled work) bought a cow; in 1880 it would have taken at least twice as much; one hundred to two hundred livres bought a horse; six livres bought a sheep; a hog was worth, live weight, one tenth of a livre, or two sous a pound; a day’s plain labor was worth twenty pounds of live hog (in 1880 about ten pounds). Eggs sold in Montreal at three sous a dozen, a pound of butter at fifteen to twenty sous, a minot of wheat, the old term for a boisseau, or bushel, sold at forty to sixty sous. No cheese was made. People smoked their own tobacco. They made their own maple sugar. They largely made their own shoes, clothes, candles, and moccasins. Anything that they didn’t have they went without. Things not yet invented they never missed. Judging by the conditions as remembered by the author of this book of farm life in Ontario in the 1870s, they were better off.
The profits of trade it is difficult to compute. At its uninterrupted best it would mean greater opportunity than now. But it was never uninterrupted. Montreal sold to the Indians muskets, powder and shot, coarse white cloth, blue and red cloth for fancy petticoats, hatchets, knives, needles and steel for flints, kettles, earrings, vermilion to paint their faces red and verdigris to paint them green, looking glasses, burning glasses, and glass beads. In return they brought down all sorts of furs, and in particular beaver, elk, deer, bearskins, otter, foxskins (black and gray and red), muskrat, marten, and a list that seems interminable. All these had prices attached in Montreal (beaver, three livres; fox, three; otter, five; bear, two, etc.), but with the Indians they went as trade. If an Indian exchanged, as he did, a black foxskin, which with us might represent hundreds of dollars a skin, for a few glass beads worth with us about ten for a cent, it is hard to make any commercial comparison. Each party to the bargain got a lot for a little.
The rich lacked only the opportunity to buy. Kalm quotes a price of 250-300 francs a hogshead (sixty-three gallons or, roughly, a livre a bottle) as representing an extreme wartime price for French wine in Montreal.
Such is the picture of Montreal in the last years of the French Regime, a picture not without its shadows, but with bright and happy tints that only needed peace and good will to deepen them to enduring color.
It was not to be.
Within a few years the colony was to be racked with the war that ended with the capitulation of Montreal and the cession of Canada.
FOOTNOTES:
Ida Greaves, Slavery in Canada, 1927.
C. Bertrand, Histoire de Montréal, 1935.
Altitudes in Canada, Commission on Conservation, 1915.
A. F. Dodd, History of Money in the British Empire and the United States, 1911.
CHAPTER VI. The Capitulation of Montreal
1760
VAUDREUIL SURRENDERS MONTREAL. The Close of the Seven Years’ War. The Capitulation. Military Government in Montreal. General Murray and the King’s New Subjects. Civil Government in 1764. Conflicting Elements. The Quarrel between Britain and America. The Quebec Act.
