Читать книгу Canadian Footprints - Melvin Ormond Hammond - Страница 22

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CLAUDE DE RAMEZAY was a dashing young French officer who took 800 men from Montreal to Quebec to help Frontenac beat off the English fleet of Sir William Phips in 1690. Scarcely had the enemy disappeared round Isle Orleans before de Ramezay led to the altar Marie-Charlotte Denys, daughter of one of the richest families of New France, and one of the belles of Quebec who had smiled upon and encouraged the city’s defenders.

De Ramezay returned to Montreal and steadily advanced until he became Governor of the town and district in 1703. Two years later he built the Chateau, a low, rambling structure, but so strong that it has endured in constant and varied use to the present. It faces Notre Dame Street, near the Nelson Monument, and is adjacent to Bonsecours Church and market. In early days this was the fashionable centre of Montreal, and down the hill the view was clear to the St. Lawrence. Today the roar of truck and trolley car spells another era, but from the neighbouring market place come shouts in the same tongue heard and used by de Ramezay and the scores of leaders of New France whose portraits look down from the walls of the Chateau museum.

Many of the greatest and best figures of the continent have crossed the threshold of the Chateau. De Ramezay was a lavish entertainer, but his door was as open to the Indian and his squaw as to the Governor-General and the Intendant. Governor de Ramezay died in 1724 and the Chateau was sold in 1745 to the French fur-trading organization, the Compagnie des Indes, who bartering with uncouth Indians and coureurs-des-bois, held it till the cession of Canada to Britain in 1763. A little later it was bought by the British Government and used as a Government House until 1849.

Here came in 1775-76 the leaders of the revolting United States, who sought to make Canada their “fourteenth colony.” General Richard Montgomery, on taking Montreal before his attack on Quebec, made the Chateau his headquarters, and in the following Spring Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase, delegates from Congress itself, lived here while they vainly wooed the French-Canadians. From a printing press installed in the basement came alluring appeals, but the clergy turned a deaf ear, and the “Continental” paper money brought to pay their bills about town was rejected, thus probably leading to the phrase, “not worth a Continental.” Governor Carleton defeated the retreating invaders at Three Rivers and the attempted capture of Canada collapsed.

The brilliant Benedict Arnold, who had survived the attack on Quebec, was in possession of the Chateau when a messenger burst upon him with the news that his retreat was being cut off. He loaded his 300 men into bateaux and fled to Laprairie and St. Johns, barely escaping capture.

The Chateau had another “crowded hour of glorious life” in 1849. Lord Elgin signed the Rebellion Losses bill and drove home through a shower of stones, while the mob returned and burned the Parliament House on McGill Street. Elgin a few days later addressed from the Chateau a dispassionate letter to London, defending his course and disapproving the mob, but Montreal was penalized by losing the capital.

Chateau de Ramezay, Montreal