"On The Second And Last Day Of My Sojourn In Quebec I Went To The
Parade, Escorted By Colonels Durnford And Duchesnay.
I was pleasantly
taken by surprise when I found the whole garrison under arms.
The
commanding officers wished to show me their corps. On the right wing
stood two companies of artillery, then a company of sappers and
miners, after this, the Sixty-Eighth, and lastly, the Seventy-First
Regiment of Infantry. The last is a light regiment, and consists of
Scotch Highlanders; it appeared to be in particularly good condition.
This regiment is not dressed in the Highland uniform, which was only
worn by some of the buglemen. It has a very good band of buglemen, who
wear curious caps, made of blue woollen, bordered below with red and
white stripes. The troops defiled twice before me.
"On the 6th of September we set out in the steamboat for Montreal. Sir
Francis sent us his carriage, which was very useful to the ladies. On
the dock stood a company of the Sixty-Fifth Regiment, with their flags
displayed as a guard of honour, which I immediately dismissed. The
fortifications saluted us with 21 guns; this caused a very fine echo
from the mountains. Night soon set in, but we had sufficient light to
take leave of the magnificent vicinity of Quebec."
St. Vallier street is sacred to Monseigneur de St. Vallier; his name is
identified with the street which he so often perambulated in his visits to
the General Hospital, where he terminated his useful career in 1729. His
Lordship seems to have entertained a particular attachment for the
locality where he had founded this hospital, where he resided, in order to
rent his Mountain Hill Palace to Intendant Talon, and thus save the
expense of a chaplain. The General Hospital was the third asylum for the
infirm which the Bishop had founded. Subsequently, came the Intendant de
Meules, who, toward 1684, endowed the eastern portion of the quarter with
an edifice (the Intendant's Palace) remarkable for its dimensions, its
magnificence and its ornate gardens.
Where Talon (a former Intendant) had left a brewery in a state of ruin and
about seventeen acres of land unoccupied, Louis XIV., by the advice of his
Intendant de Meules, lavished vast sums of money in the erection of a
sumptuous palace, in which French justice was administered, and in which,
at a later period, under Bigot, it was purchasable. Our illustrious
ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such
trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all
its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (corvees)
and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (lettres de cachet). What
did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna Charta signify
to them?
On this spot stood the notorious warehouse, where Bigot, Cadet and their
confederates retailed, at enormous profits, the provisions and supplies
which King Louis XV. doled out in 1758 to the starving inhabitants of
Quebec.
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