In Quebec, a few bursts of fall
The last hours of our stay take place under perfect sunshine, which allows us to appreciate the city of Lévis where the ferry ends from the port of Quebec, with its very imposing religious school against the cathedral on the plateau.
At the foot of it, a large section of wall illustrates in a very large fresco the history of Lévis, in a more playful way than those of the Lower Town of Quebec, with a representation of a different style, a 2nd degree staging bias and therefore a few winks. The theme is that of passage (time, seasons, wood ...)
It is called the Desjardins fresco of Lévis , probably because it was developed with the patronage of this bank, of which we can see modern buildings on this portion.
Very pretty, well-maintained houses are brightly illuminated by the now well-supported nuances of the glow maple trees. The festival begins.
We are now on our way to St-Vallier.
We leave the Jean Lesage highway to take the avenue Rousseau, a long road that crosses the countryside here rather on a plateau, heading towards St-Charles-de-Bellechasse, a small nearby village of a crossroads, and without major interest.
There too along the way, the groves and forests are vigorously preparing to face the ordeal. and explode in scarlet, carmine, ruby, and all gradations between green, deep red through the golden brown. The edges of the road themselves, the edge of the woods usually so banal dress for the party before putting on naked, or should we rather say before stripping ... without the manner of Crazy Horse.
For the shimmering pleasure of passers-by, who can see in it a message of challenge and resistance, all is first prepared with a few keystrokes and then suddenly spreads and explodes. It is then a festival, a fascinating and motionless fireworks display with the sun crossing.
But also the ultimate sign of life before extinction, sleep, little death, winter.
St-Vallier in Quebec
At the entrance to St-Vallier , where the 132 joins the rue Principale, there is a curious and amusing montage, a work perhaps to the glory of the little queen, assembly of bicycles of all kinds and bicycle wheels, distributed over a very large metallic circle (the mother wheel).
So unusual that we could first take this work for a perfectly original bicycle parking! Which would have given him a perhaps more imperishable character.
By taking route 132 this time towards the South, returning to Lévis, here is the very charming village of St-Michel-de-Bellechasse .
On the banks of the St.Lawrence, near the chapel and the presbytery, along the path leading to the shore are some very beautiful and often old residences, just above the shore released by low tide, barely uncovering a little mud on the worn rocks.
The village of St-Vallier owes its name to one of the bishops of Quebec whose family was from St-Vallier in the Drôme in France, on the Rhône. Its full name alone is worth a detour: Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrières de St-Vallier (1653-1727); breathe!
In fact, in 1720, our bishop acquired part of the great seigneury attributed in 1672 to a Breton officer Olivier-Morel de la Durantaye.
Just above the small corniche road stands the church, rebuilt "in non-combustible materials" in the 1950s after the fire of the previous one which succeeded another earlier church.
Very close by is located on the roadside a very beautiful and old house, that of Dr. Joseph Côté, erected between 1839 and 1848, whose architectural qualities have earned it a classified heritage building. For specialists, it is " a fine example of a Regency-style cottage .... with its hipped roof with rolled-up slopes and arched cutters, ... a portal made up of Doric columns supporting an entablature surmounted by a cornice with modillions, molded platbands, patterned corner pilasters as well as octagonal chimneys with bead plates. ... "
Excuse the little, and admire the richness of specialized vocabulary. Something to be crazy about on "moditron octoniches" or "corgonales" with mitrillons ".
But still constrained by time (which passes), we will not have seen the mill of 1747, nor the Museum of horse-drawn carriages.
St-Michel-de-Bellechasse in Quebec
The beautiful panoramic view of the St.Lawrence with its small wooden gazebo at the end of a spit of stones jutting out on the river-sea, Île d'Orléans just opposite, and beyond the gloomy profile of the Laurentians, a fresh air sweeping the river, it doesn't take much to crane your neck towards the swollen sails of a caravel ... who does not come; desires of other departures and adventure.
And we still force-feed ourselves, without ever being satisfied, with other autumn colors, as if there was an urgent need to see, to savor.
A few hundred meters along the 132, a house exhibits miniatures of houses and a very successful Quebec church, in free -visual- offering to the passer-by. Maybe a nostalgic architect or a talented carpenter lover of the wife of the first?
Olivier Morel de la Durantaye was born in 1640 in Notre-Dame-de-Gâvre currently in Loire Atlantique in France, from a lineage of local nobility of the Duchy of Brittany.
No other trace of this character other than Quebec, where he arrived in 1665 as commander of one of the twenty companies of the Carignan-Salières regiment. He's coming back from the West Indies where we attempted to drive out the Dutch.
We see him here fighting the Iroquois, allying with other Amerindians, trading furs, fish, masts, and even controlling the actions of Cavelier de la Salle around 1682.
The seigneury of Durantaye was attributed to him in 1672 (see above); it forms with the neighboring seigneuries a very large parish in 1678. Besides the seigneury, in 1681, " he owns two guns and two cows ".
Then the seigneury of Durantaye became an autonomous parish in 1693 and took the name of St-Michel de la Durantaye in 1698. Olivier Morel died in 1716.
St-Vallier broke away from the parish between 1714 and 1720.
A little before the Conquest, in 1754, the widow of the Lord of Péan was authorized to establish there a village, which will take shape only 40 years after the Conquest.
In fact, the English army did not find a real market town there in 1759, but only a church built in 1730 and a presbytery erected in 1739, the latter still present and said to be one of the oldest on the south coast of the St. Lawrence.
Then in the 2nd part of the 18th century, its population was enriched by craftsmen then Acadians, Amerindians from neighboring regions, exile other Acadians fleeing the deportation of 1755, "the great disturbance".
The village takes all its local administrative dimension from the abolition of the seigneurial regime between 1845 and 1855, and its current name in 1854.
It is also said that most of the houses in St-Michel, which date from around the 19th century, have retained a dominant white color which makes them one of the charms.
Beaumont in Quebec
And now here is Beaumont , another very beautiful village that we cross as we approach Lévis on the vast south shore. The old houses there seem more opulent, more prosperous still.
Their perfect state of conservation owes much to a municipal councilor of the municipality, Robert Lamontagne, for his remarkable actions in favor of the safeguard of the heritage buildings of the whole of the county of Bellechasse. A craftsman carpenter and restorer of old houses, he has worked tirelessly since the 1960s and for more than 25 years. Another artisan architect also contributes, Rosaire St-Pierre. Both actively participated in the repair of two water mills, that of Beaumont and the one called Vincennes (built in 1733), which we won't even see.
I can see why, 50 years ago , the country, the habitat, seemed less attractive to me : in this period only began the first modern efforts to maintain and restore the ancient heritage.
The history of Beaumont stands out from that of the seigneury of Durantaye: in fact, in 1672 its beneficiary was the grandson of Louis Hébert (the 1st settler-land clearer of Quebec City) and is called Charles-Thomas Couillard des Islets, also known as Charles de Beaumont et des Islets.
In 1681 he owns " two rifles, two pistols, five horned animals and ten arpents of land in value . ”Is that all his fortune?
The parish of Beaumont was founded in 1692, but did not shelter more than 30 people in 1730. The State prohibited indeed to build buildings on land whose area does not exceed 1.5 arpent (?) on 30 arpents, which excludes building in the center of the village, which is then called St-Etienne-de-Beaumont.
The current church, on the central road, opened in 1733 (one of the oldest in Quebec), after having been built on the site of a first wooden church, itself erected in 1694. The presbytery was built in stone in 1722 and is the oldest on the south shore, even if it was the result of a partial reconstruction in 1988 after a fire in 1979 (then what about that of St-Martin-de-Bellechasse which also claims to be the oldest? ?).
Colonel Monckton posted on the door of the church in June 1759 General Wolfe's proclamation announcing the future capture of Quebec.
After the Conquest, the population reached 1000 inhabitants in 1824, and continued to progress around the trades of agriculture and water mills, craftsmen, but also rentiers attracted by the beauty of the site.
In any case, beyond the fifteen houses of Norman origin built in the 18th century, in the 19th century, other houses were added whose configuration evolved according to the "climatic experience" acquired in particular on the nearby Ile d'Orleans.
It was not until 1998 that the parish of St-Etienne-de-Beaumont became the municipality of Beaumont.
At a run, we will hardly see of the village except the beautiful old church and some superb houses, cottages, all framed by the flamboyant colors of the dawning autumn.
The old Péan mill, the small chapels, the fort, the winding configuration of the village marrying that from the cliff ... it will be for another time.
We note, as a permanent illustration of the first steps of colonization, that the old houses are built obliquely to the central path, but in fact perpendicular to the axis of the "rows", these plots of land cut in a rectilinear manner, perfectly parallel to each other, and stretched out towards the river, whose current heritage is evident in an excerpt from Google Earth of the region.
the rank is a method of dividing rural land into New France , from French diet .
Established by Giffard in 1628, which comes from Perche and precedes Charles de Beaumont here, it was used until the latest agricultural developments in Quebec.
The rows are positioned around the rivers, the only means of communication of the time and thus guarantee the survival of the inhabitants.
The concessions are very elongated rectangles, perpendicular over the water. Of course, the changing profile of the banks means that here the rows are already oblique in relation to the river. It all depends on where the shore reference is taken.
Compared to Anglo-American canton, a square of about 160 arpents out of 160, each concession of a row is here small (3 or 4 arpents wide but 30 to 40 arpents long, i.e. deep), but promotes mutual aid and strong social cohesion: the buildings are closer together since they are only about 200 m along the public highway, in these early times of great insecurity.
When row n ° 1, the one bordering the waterway is completely conceded, a straight path is drawn behind. Then we attribute the lands facing this path, and it is the rank n ° 2. And so on.
With the multiplicity of rows (n ° 1, 2, 3 ...) are created along the straight paths which delimit them from real streets with spaced houses, characteristic of the Quebec landscape.
1 arpent = 58.47 meters .
We see below a map of the attributions of the ranks established by Jean Bourdon in 1641 for the Beaupré region, facing the Île d'Orléans, which could have been in this region the cadastral reference in relation to the river.
Up to 10,000 ranks were counted in Quebec.
And so it was with regret that a too short stay in the Belle Province ended. Our GPS does not yet know the new Pierre Laporte suspension bridge, by which we cross the river towards the airport, and which doubles in parallel the only old metal bridge that I knew 50 years ago .
However, it was inaugurated in November 1970, 2 years before my return to the narrow hexagon, but barely a month after the death of this Quebec minister to whom he pays homage.
This does not fail to remind me of this inglorious episode of the death of this Minister of Labor of the Bourassa government of those years, when he was kidnapped by the Front de Liberation du Québec in October 1970, a revolutionary and extremist emanation. founded circa 1963.
While in parallel with my arrival here, in 1968 the Parti Québécois was created.
Tomorrow will be another day after a night on the plane. and a twilight under a sky painted with broad lines combed with abstract shreds.
