Shadows on the Rock
Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock
eBooks@Adelaide
2010
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Table of Contents
- The Apothecary
- Cécile and Jacques
- The Long Winter
- Pierre Charron
- The Ships from France
- The Dying Count
Vous me demandez des graines de fleurs de ce pays. Nous en faisons venir de France pour notre jardin, n’y en ayant pas
ici de fort rares ni de fort belles. Tout y est sauvage, les fleurs aussi bien que les hommes.
Marie de l’Incarnation
(Lettre à une de ses soeurs)
Québec, le 12 août, 1653
Table of Contents Next
Last updated on Tue Jan 11 23:28:57 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather
Book One
The Apothecary
I
One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top
of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him. Empty, because an hour ago the flash of retreating sails
had disappeared behind the green island that splits the St. Lawrence below Quebec, and the last of the summer ships from
France had started on her long voyage home.
As long as La Bonne Espérance was still in sight, many of Auclair’s friends and neighbours had kept him company on the
hill-top; but when the last tip of white slid behind the curving shore, they went back to their shops and their kitchens to
face the stern realities of life. Now for eight months the French colony on this rock in the North would be entirely cut off
from Europe, from the world. This was October; not a sail would come up that wide waterway before next July. No supplies;
not a cask of wine or a sack of flour, no gunpowder, or leather, or cloth, or iron tools. Not a letter, even — no news of
what went on at home. There might be new wars, floods, conflagrations, epidemics, but the colonists would never know of them
until next summer. People sometimes said that if King Louis died, the Minister would send word by the English ships that
came to New York all winter, and the Dutch traders at Fort Orange would dispatch couriers to Montreal.
The apothecary lingered on the hill-top long after his fellow townsmen had gone back to their affairs; for him this
severance from the world grew every year harder to bear. It was a strange thing, indeed, that a man of his mild and
thoughtful disposition, city-bred and most conventional in his habits, should be found on a grey rock in the Canadian
wilderness. Cap Diamant, where he stood, was merely the highest ledge of that fortified cliff which was “Kebec,” — a
triangular headland wedged in by the joining of two rivers, and girdled about by the greater river as by an encircling arm.
Directly under his feet was the French stronghold, — scattered spires and slated roofs flashing in the rich, autumnal
sunlight; the little capital which was just then the subject of so much discussion in Europe, and the goal of so many
fantastic dreams.
Auclair thought this rock-set town like nothing so much as one of those little artificial mountains which were made in
the churches at home to present a theatric scene of the Nativity; cardboard mountains, broken up into cliffs and ledges and
hollows to accommodate groups of figures on their way to the manger; angels and shepherds and horsemen and camels, set on
peaks, sheltered in grottoes, clustered about the base.
Divest your mind of Oriental colour, and you saw here very much such a mountain rock, cunningly built over with churches,
convents, fortifications, gardens, following the natural irregularities of the headland on which they stood; some high, some
low, some thrust up on a spur, some nestling in a hollow, some sprawling unevenly along a declivity. The Château
Saint–Louis, grey stone with steep dormer roofs, on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the river, sat level; but just
beside it the convent and church of the Récollet friars ran downhill, as if it were sliding backwards. To landward, in a
low, well-sheltered spot, lay the Convent of the Ursulines . . . lower still stood the massive foundation of the Jesuits,
facing the Cathedral. Immediately behind the Cathedral the cliff ran up sheer again, shot out into a jutting spur, and
there, high in the blue air, between heaven and earth, rose old Bishop Laval’s Seminary. Beneath it the rock fell away in a
succession of terraces like a circular staircase; on one of these was the new Bishop’s new Palace, its gardens on the
terrace below.
Not one building on the rock was on the same level with any other, — and two hundred feet below them all was the Lower
Town, crowded along the narrow strip of beach between the river’s edge and the perpendicular face of the cliff. The Lower
Town was so directly underneath the Upper Town that one could stand on the terrace of the Château Saint–Louis and throw a
stone down into the narrow streets below.
These heavy grey buildings, monasteries and churches, steep-pitched and dormered, with spires and slated roofs, were
roughly Norman Gothic in effect. They were made by people from the north of France who knew no other way of building. The
settlement looked like something cut off from one of the ruder towns of Normandy or Brittany, and brought over. It was
indeed a rude beginning of a “new France,” of a Saint–Malo or Rouen or Dieppe, anchored here in the ever-changing northern
light and weather. At its feet, curving about its base, flowed the mighty St. Lawrence, rolling north toward the purple line
of the Laurentian mountains, toward frowning Cap Tourmente which rose dark against the soft blue of the October sky. The Île
d’Orléans, out in the middle of the river, was like a hilly map, with downs and fields and pastures lying in folds above the
naked tree-tops.
On the opposite shore of the river, just across from the proud rock of Quebec, the black pine forest came down to the
water’s edge; and on the west, behind the town, the forest stretched no living man knew how far.
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