September 10, 1935-Pyle Discovers That the British Never Captured Quebec
The Washington Daily News — Tuesday, September 10, 1935
Pyle Discovers That the British Never Captured Quebec
By ERNIE PYLE
QUEBEC — An old man on a boat told me once that there were only three cities in America with character—San Francisco, New Orleans and Quebec.
This old man was 76, and for 25 years he had done nothing but travel about the world on freighters. He had been every place you ever heard of; he was very intelligent, and very lovable. He was a man who could appreciate the finer shadings of a person or a city.
I could and did agree with him about San Francisco and New Orleans. Quebec I had never seen. But now I have. And the thing I say is: “Ah, Quebec!”
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San Francisco has its hills and its Old World air and its spirit of freedom. New Orleans has its Frenchness and its narrow streets and the romance of its Creole tradition.
But Quebec. It has San Francisco’s hills. It beats New Orleans for Frenchness. For Quebec is practically all French. It has the ephemeral, haunting, beckoning spirit of the other two. And it has a history and a tradition of warfare and tragedy that gives it a substance.
I can get very worked up about all three of these cities. In fact I do, and stay worked up till I remember their climates. San Francisco—damp fog. New Orleans—insufferable damp heat. Quebec—bitter cold. But I suppose you can’t have everything. Most of the really great people I know have had faces like horses.
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Quebec, like New Orleans and unlike Gaul, is divided into two parts. In New Orleans, one side of the city is French, the other side purely American. In Quebec, one side of the city is French. The other side is more so. One is the old, the lower town; the other is the new, up on the hills. But even the new part is old.
The houses and stores go right out to the sidewalk. The windows are shuttered. The doors and the knobs all shine with polishing, and give quite a contrast to the ancient walls of the houses themselves.
The streets are narrow and crooked. They don’t wind; they simply go a block and then go off in another direction. There is complete irregularity in everything.
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Quebec is beautiful. The view from the Citadel, the fortress whose peak is just a couple of blocks above the city streets, is one of the views of the world. Below, and up and down, the wide St. Lawrence. Away over on the other side, Levis and its background of green hills. A little to your left, Quebec. Dominated by the great Chateau Frontenac, and then the gray, patch-work rooftops of the city. And beyond, the hazy Laurentian mountains. Back of you, the historic Plains of Abraham, where the great battle was fought, and where in 1759 Gen. Wolfe, the British leader, was killed as his troops took Quebec from the French for the last time.
You think what a futile death was Gen. Wolfe’s. For altho his men raised the British flag over Quebec, and it has stayed there going on 200 years, the British no more took Quebec than I did. Quebec is still as French as a beret, and about the only thing British about it is the flag.
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I don’t care so much for Quebec in the morning, or in the bright sun of noon-day. But when 4 o’clock shadows start to fall, and the white light goes out of the little streets, and the evening church bells start their mournful tunes—then Quebec becomes a maze of mystery and sentiment and enchantment. You love to wander in its crooked streets, and go right thru and behind its dark, wooden doors, where there’s always life inside, and feel yourself as of the ages.
Among the many things that I want to do before I die, there are two that concern Quebec. One is to spend a summer here, living deep within the French aura, in an old house among the French people, learning their language and the volatile, excited placidity of their minds and the other is to sit in a room high on the hill over Quebec, before a fireplace, late some snowy night in the middle of December, and watch the first heavy snow come.
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