« p. 112-121: Toronto, the English City
Montreal, the French City
p. 121-128
If you travel north from Buffalo to Toronto, it’s as if you’ve gone from America to Europe, but if you travel east from Toronto to Montreal, it’s as if you’ve gone from England to France. The mansions of Toronto look exactly like London’s charming suburb of Hampstead, but around Montreal’s Notre Dame (which a man called Schutzmann, whom I asked for directions, pronounces Natterdämm), you think you’ve been placed in the Parisian bondieserie quarter around St. Sulpice, Rue Madame, Rue Bonaparte.
Even on the St. Lawrence, as you travel by ship down the tame rapids from Toronto to Montreal, you say to yourself: France! Churches stand in great numbers along the shore, cathedrals of wood made to look like the stone ones of Normandy and Brittany. But the monasteries are good, stone houses and made of more durable material. Due to the grace of Combes and Clémenceau, monks and nuns stroll along the garden paths and walk down the shore in well-practiced tranquility.
I didn’t count the churches and cloisters in Montreal, because the trams don’t travel so close to them as in Toronto. All I can say is that I saw more than enough churches and cloisters in Montreal. All these people, who have been forced out of the real France, sit at the most beautiful spots in this most beautiful city, bravely toughing it out in the midst of old gardens and new buildings, making sure everything is going well in their fake France.
The English let them live in the same way they let everyone live within their borders (the Orient is an exception). The young giant Canada has a good stomach and digests the undigestable. After all, it puts a lot of meat on its bones.
In Montreal, someone explained to me each cobblestone that had been French territory before becoming an English dominion and told me about all the settlers. Maisonneuve, Cartier, Champlain, Frontenac are just some of the names of the history of Quebec. What production! And the French pronunciation Mantreohl sounds much better than the English.
Montreal is a French city. Of its 450,000 residents, about 350,000 are French-speaking Canadians. The exotic element so prominent in Toronto (and by that I mean Russians, Jews, Syrians, etc.) is completely resigned here, although the percentages are pretty much the same. The average French Canadian isn’t all that different from the small town folk of old France, whom the distinguished artist Charles Huard has so effectively outlined. The noxious influence of Catholicism on the race is noticeably unpleasant. Compared to the noble and hot-blooded confessors of the High Church and Methodism, they are a hypocritical people, composed of petty spendthrifts who spend their time in confessionals.
Their French sounds comical. Canadian French is a strange language. Even among the educated classes I spoke to, the French Canadians sound like the French comedians who satirize the broken French of tourists from England. Others speak the harsher dialect of Rouen or St. Malo, but with certain words and accents that have been worked into the idiom after centuries away from the motherland.
In Ottawa, I noticed a sign in a park:
Pick no flowers!
Ne cassez pas ces fleurs!
Isn’t that supposed to be cueillir? And the senators are referred to as:
The Honorable Messieurs!
Business signs, train signs, the stone writing on government buildings and monuments in Montreal come complete with French words. The language of business, education and the court is French. There are many places where the French tri-color waves peacefully next to the Union Jack. Every now and then, one or another of the Honorable Messieurs takes down the Union Jack with his left hand and sticks it in his pants pocket, so that he can grab the French flag with his right and wave it over his head.
I thought to myself that it would be interesting to examine this French Canadian national and race consciousness. And it wouldn’t be all that difficult to find Mr. Bourassa or Mr. Lemieux or, in case of emergency, an editor from the Patrie.
After I copied from the telephone book the addresses of Mr. Bourassa and the Patrie, I looked down from the window at the Place Viger as I brushed my hat. I saw in the Place Viger a man sitting on a bench with the clerical Presse in his hand. I decided to leave Bourassa and Lemieux and all the official nationalists alone. What could I get from them besides more prepared statements?
I went down to the beautiful old Place Viger, which, with its fountain and old houses and its slender flights of stairs, with its hotel and enormous trees, looks like an old palace in a province of Touraine. I sit on the bench next to the Presse reader and was soon in the middle of a conversation.
He was a man of the people, a brave old carpenter, born in Montreal from a family who had come over from France a long time ago. No one in the family has any money, but nobody wants to go back to the old country.
“It’s strange,” I said, “how you can immediately tell if somebody is French Canadian or not. Over in the Union, the Germans, Russians, Jews are americanized within a few years, and the children of these strange races come into the world with an American brain. But here the Frenchman has been entirely preserved.”
“We are no immigrants. Nous sommes chez nous.”
“But this is an English dominion, isn’t it?”
“That’s not the point. We live under the English flag and have absolute freedom. There really is no Canadian national question. The elections in the next month will be the first to touch on the national question -- the machinations of the gens de la politique!” He laughed and so did I. It’s strange that the reader of the clerical Presse and I share the same opinion regarding reciprocity!
“But what about the race conflict? You can’t reason that away.”
“It’s very mild here, with the exception of all this election agitation. Nous nesommes pas aigris! The economy is on the rise, trade and industry grow and prosper, our land is the richest on the earth and everything is going well. If things are going this well, people don’t ask very much about race.”
“But with all the old families, shouldn’t there be something like an aristocracy?”
“The old French families here don’t think about establishing an aristocracy. The lords coming from the old country centuries ago tried something like that and it didn’t take. Suppose that the Duke of Connaught gets shipped on over and tries to establish his own court. That is a mistake. The Duke will be disgraced in the shortest amount of time. This country is democratic through and through. We have two classes here -- those who work and those who don’t. We have it better here than in the Union, because here, anyone who works can make a lot of money much faster than in the states. That’s because we’re younger.”
“Don’t the French have any grudges against the English? For instance, would they prefer their carpentry done by a Frenchman rather than an Englishman?”
“That would be a big mistake. English wholesalers control nine-tenths of the trades. The people shop according to who has the better product, not according to who speaks their language. They pay attention to quality and not what the salesmen say to them.”
“But wouldn’t a French businessman prefer a French clerk in his business rather than an English one?”
He didn’t understand what I was saying. I repeated the question a different way: “What would a French businessman prefer: an English clerk who can speak French, or a French clerk who speaks and writes perfect English?”
“The one who works the hardest . . . but maybe he would pick the French one.”
We both laughed a bit, but then I pulled out my last piece of ammunition and pointed at the the Presse.
“But what about your clergy? You can’t deny that a French Catholic priest feels a little bit of French nationalism when he’s in an English government?”
“Yes, he does, but that’s just because Catholic priests love intrigue. The English let the Catholic and Mohammedans and sun worshipers practice however they want. Everything is in its place. We’re not really keeping a close eye on the states. We leave that to the conservatives. We hear enough about the political corruption over in the Union. Why would we want that? We have it better here.”
( ? ? After reading the morning and evening papers here for seven weeks, I don’t really know if the man got that right.)
Then he asks the stereotypical question: now that I’m in Canada for the first time, how do I like it? When I tell him that I came from Toronto, he asks me about the lacrosse match in-between the Tecumsehs and the national team last Saturday at Hanlon’s Point. I attended the event at the time and now I have to tell him everything about it. And now that the conversation is about sports, I notice how fussy the old man has become. This Frenchman has suddenly become an Englishman!