Bildungsromans; Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction; Saint Lawrence River -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
In Wolfe's siege of Quebec this Ursuline Garden of ours was
everywhere torn up by the falling bombs, and the sisters were driven
out into the world they had forsaken forever, as Fanny has been
reading in a little French account of the events, written at the
time, by a nun of the General Hospital. It was there the Ursulines
took what refuge there was; going from their cloistered school-rooms
and their innocent little ones to the wards of the hospital, filled
with the wounded and dying of either side, and echoing with their
dreadful groans. What a sad, evil, bewildering world they had a
glimpse of! In the garden here, our poor Montcalm--I belong to the
French side, please, in Quebec--was buried in a grave dug for him by
a bursting shell. They have his skull now in the chaplain's room of
the convent, where we saw it the other day. They have made it
comfortable in a glass box, neatly bound with black, and covered with
a white lace drapery, just as if it were a saint's. It was broken a
little in taking it out of the grave; and a few years ago, some
English officers borrowed it to look at, and were horrible enough to
pull out some of the teeth. Tell Uncle Jack the head is very broad
above the ears, but the forehead is small.
The chaplain also showed us a copy of an old painting of the first
convent, Indian lodges, Madame de la Peltrie's house, and Madame
herself, very splendidly dressed, with an Indian chief before her,
and some French cavaliers riding down an avenue towards her. Then he
showed us some of the nuns' work in albums, painted and lettered in a
way to give me an idea of old missals. By and by he went into the
chapel with us, and it gave such a queer notion of his indoors life
to have him put on an overcoat and india-rubbers to go a few rods
through the open air to the chapel door: he had not been very well,
he said. When he got in, he took off his hat, and put on an octagonal
priest's cap, and showed us everything in the kindest way--and his
manners were exquisite. There were beautiful paintings sent out from
France at the time of the Revolution; and wood-carvings round the
high-altar, done by Quebec artists in the beginning of the last
century; for he said they had a school of arts then at St. Anne's,
twenty miles below the city. Then there was an ivory crucifix, so
life-like that you could scarcely bear to look at it. But what I most
cared for was the tiny twinkle of a votive lamp which he pointed out
to us in one corner of the nuns' chapel: it was lit a hundred and
fifty years ago by two of our French officers when their sister took
the veil, and has never been extinguished since, except during the
siege of 1759. Of course, I think a story might be written about
_this_; and the truth is, the possibilities of fiction in Quebec are
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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