Three-Day Blur in Montreal

Montreal brought Barcelona to mind. Nine months ago we arrived in the Catalunyan capital just in time for the annual St Jorge day extravaganza: Barcelona’s wide streets were Amazons of human traffic, principally the young and the full-of-beans. In Montreal it was another patron saint—Jean Baptiste—that brought young people into the streets in their thousands.

We had three full days in the great city, the first devoted to all an-day walkabout in gloriously warm, sunny weather. We climbed Mount Royal, managing all 256 steps of the escarpment staircase. We were impressed by the masses of people who were out there with us bright and early.

War memorials were a principal draw—whew, there’s a surprise—in our Montreal stopover. Nowhere else in Canada offered me the prospect of so many new-to-me monuments in one area, a good number of them by sculptors I consider to be the best of those doing war memorial work in the decade after the Great War: Coeur de Lion MacCarthy, George Hill, and the inestimable Emanuel Hahn. I had marked a city map with several I considered reachable in a day of walking. In the result we probably rambled close to 20 km and on this holiday Sunday and found ourselves rubbing elbows with masses of other saunterers.

The acme came on the lower eastern slopes of Mount Royal Park where Hill’s colossal George-Etienne Cartier monument was the focal point of what we subsequently learned is a regular summer event in Montreal, the every-Sunday tam-tam drumming festival. Scores of drummers hammered a steady, relentless beat as thousands of young people danced, lolled, smoked weed, sold crafts from blankets arrayed around the edges of the square. The thought occurred that we might be the oldest people in a crowd of several thousand.

Given the heat we thought it might be good to take an afternoon break at an open-air cafe offering chilled Molson’s and high-quality patates-frites. At Dorchester Square we found not one but two George Hill works, including his dynamic, flamboyant Boer War monument. The square featured other bronzes, of Robert Burns and Wilfred Laurier that were improved in a way I do not cherish but likely dear to the heart of dedicated nationalistes: their cheeks adorned with bleu-blanc-et-rouge flags.

We navigated our way to the corner of Ontario and Clark streets, where Doris Irene Bowles lived her early life, but saw very little that would have been familiar to little Dodie when she was just ten. In the place of the tenement where she spent her tender years there is now a park that serves as home to the Francofolies music festival. On Sunday night we elbowed our way into the margins of a crowd of thousands and listened to an orchestra of 30 or 40 backing chanteurs singing nationalist songs—en francais of course.

On the Monday we decided to give the feet a rest, bought day passes for the subway system and traveled underground to more distant monuments, a MacCarthy in Verdun, a Hill in Westmount, a Hahn in St Lambert. We also learned the ropes of the elaborate bus system operating on the opposite side of the St Lawrence and managed to get ourselves to Longueueil and Brossard.

When I was 11 and 12 I spent the summers with my grandmother—Doris’s mum—at Domville Street in Notre-Dame-du-Sacre-Coeur. Both municipality and street names are vanished but I negotiated a path through the mists of time to the site of her little house, which of course is also long gone, replaced in 1983 by something flashier, more durable. We chatted up the owner-occupiers of the new domicile and heard a précis of what’s happened these past 55 years.

Back in Montreal we enjoyed a thali of good north Indian vegetarian fare at a hole in the wall on Milton Street then wandered on foot to Old Montreal, mingled in the madding crowd, listened to street musicians, ate ice cream, watched night fall, reveled in the ambiance. As Jan observed, it was hard to imagine we were in North America.

My gentle reader will agree that after two days of indulging my quest to see, study and photograph bronze soldiers, it was only fair that Jan should determine the agenda for the third day. And so she did. She thought it a good idea to start the day off at the Museum of Fine Art and, in particular, its special exhibition of Faberge objects. I admit to being an ignorant oaf, not even understanding that the great jeweler was not a French national, but a Russian. The lavish exhibit was headlined by four of the fifty famous Faberge Easter eggs fashioned for the Russian tsar and his family late in the 1800s and in the years culminating in 1918 when the tsar and his whole family were liquidated by people possessed of different values.

Lest anyone think Jan’s third-day program was a tedious bore to your loyal correspondent, have another thought. Like everyone else wandering about the exhibit I was taken captive by the precious objects and fascinated by the story of Faberge and the Romanov royals.

There were additional rewards: the museum has many treasures in its permanent collection. We checked as many galleries as we could in the time allotted and even found a few pieces by ‘my guys’, the aforementioned memorial sculptors: a George Hill bust here, a quartet of Henri Hebert figures there. In the end we stayed until nearly closing time. On the way out I bought Jan a bauble, an egg-shaped pendant featuring Swarovski crystal, traces of gold and silver, all of it fashioned not in a Chinese sweatshop I’ll have you know but in Virginia by Russian émigré jewelers. (I am not entirely a turd.)

All the while we were inside it had been raining chats-et-chiens out-of-doors. The rain relented a little as afternoon morphed into evening. The Boss decided that for the last supper a greasy spoon or sidewalk cafe would not do. She demanded and got a venue with tablecloth and good silverware, a French restaurant whose offerings of food and wine were entirely worthy of the tablecloth and cutlery.

Our just-around-the-corner digs were on the third floor of a little old hotel on Sherbrooke Street whose charms included no elevator and hot water that was insistent on taking six minutes to appear when summoned. The hotel’s other charms, including its friendly and helpful hostess, were compensatory: we departed after four nights feeling nothing but good will and good cheer toward the domicile and the entire city. Merci, Montreal. C’est si bon.