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Shadows on the Rock

Willa Cather

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    As I have been mentioning recently, The University of Adelaide in Australia decided in January, 2020 to discontinue their digital library, at the same time the wildfires were raging there, so I don't know if there was a connection, or if they were hassled because people like myself in the U.S. were downloading books still under copyright here. Everyone else's copyrights seem to expire much earlier than in the U.S., having, no doubt, much to do with greed and royalties. C'mon, this novel was written in 1931 and Willa Cather is long-deceased. Anyways, I am glad I downloaded all the books that I did. Had I known they were going to discontinue them—and I still don't know what they did with them, but I would hope they did not just discard all that hard work—I would have spent ample time going through their library and collecting many more volumes. They had so much that no one else had, including translations of foreign language books into English and obscure volumes. However, I am delighted to say, so far, I've been able to find other free digital sources for these books, since there are more and more sources available now. I was very excited to find Faded Page, a free eBook source out of Canada, which has copyright laws similar to Australia. Their Main Page announces that they now have 6162 books available, and may be searched in numerous ways. I went through all 6162, and was delighted to find books I never thought would be digitized and free. Discoveries like this bring a ray of light to me in a world growing increasingly dark. As with Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive, they can be read online, or downloaded in different formats.
    I like Willa Cather's works, but she's not one of my favorites, nor are her books page-turners, (nor are they meant to be). She, like other authors, such as Sarah Orne Jewett, wrote about the settling and lifestyle of early America. Her writing is gentle, though the lives of her characters are not. Being a pioneer required great strength and courage. This historical novel, Cather's specialty, and one of my favorite genres, is no exception. You may read all my Willa Cather book reviews on her Index Page. I have only one more novel to go, plus some short stories and collections, and one essay that I just discovered on Faded Page, then I will have read her complete works. When she died in 1947, she was writing another novel, but as she had requested before her death, her partner, Edith Lewis, destroyed the manuscript.
    Unlike most of Cather's other historical, pioneer novels, this one heads farther north to the early settling of Quebec by the French and their Catholic Church. The one aspect of it that I found not so likable was its over-exaggerated Catholicism, although, no doubt, the people in the 1600s did accept everything the Church said as being true, including odd "miracles." The same can be said for many Christians today who prefer to do what they're told rather than think for themselves. The thing is, Death Comes for the Archbishop was about as Catholic as it gets, but it was by far and wide my favorite Cather book, rating number 61 in Modern Library's top 100 English-language novels in the 20th century, the only Cather work to make that list. So I'm not sure why I found this one so annoying at times. But still, I liked it, and learned a great deal about the settling of that part of Canada, of which I knew almost nothing.
    The story centers mainly around two people, Euclide Auclair and his daughter, Cécile, age twelve. He is an apothecary, which, in that era, also involved medical treatment of patients as a physician. He was an expert in healing herbs, and collected varieties not available in France. Of course he made medicines, plus was also progressive for his time, not supporting the use of techniques accepted by others which, at best, did little to nothing to heal disease, and at worst, could be dangerous.
    And so Book One of the story, "The Apothecary," begins in 1697, as Euclide stands upon Cap Diamant on the St. Lawrence River. It is October, and he watches as the last ship from France, La Bonne Espérance, sails away. It will be July before the settlers on this cold and lonely rock are visited by France once again. Unlike the British, who sailed to their settlements in America year-round, Quebec was alone and isolated for most months of the year. The only exception would have been, it was believed, that if King Louis XIV died, word would be sent by an English or Dutch vessel.
    Euclide and his daughter have been in Quebec for eight years. His wife is now deceased, but she taught her daughter how to do house chores, such as cooking and needlework very well before she died. Though Euclide longs for the day they will return to France—hopefully when the ships arrive the next year, Cécile, who remembers no other home, is quite happy in the peaceful and quiet beauty that surrounds them. In the end, it all works out for the best.
    Some of the other characters include a disfigured man called Blinker, who many people are afraid of, but the Auclairs give him soup every night, and he helps them with chores. The Pigeons, the bakers nearby, also take care of him, in exchange for him keeping their wood fires stoked during the night along with tending the ovens. They supply him with clothing and bread.
    The story goes back in time to catch us up on how the apothecary's family ended up on this deserted rock. Euclide came from a family line of apothecaries. Their old shop in France was on the Quai des Célestins, where he grew up and also where Cécile was born. "It was a narrow wedge, that shop, built in next to the carriage court of the town house of the Frontenacs."
    He remembers the day the Count returned home after a long absence, and everything was alive again. Count Frontenac, was a real person—a soldier and "Governor General of New France in North America from 1672 to 1682 and from 1689 to his death in 1698."

The Count was out of favour at Versailles, his estate on the Indre had run down during his absence in Canada, and he had not the means to repair it, so he now spent a good deal of time in the house next door. His presence there, and his patronage, eased the strain of the Auclairs' position. Moreover, he restored to Euclide the ten years' rent for the shop, which had been scrupulously paid to the Count's agent while he was away.

    It was the second time the king appointed him governor of Quebec that the Euclide, now established but not thriving, his wife and Cécile, age four, sailed with the Count as his physician, to the New World. Frontenac was then seventy years old. He had also been a soldier, and engaged in battles against the English and the Iroquois. And though he was a courtier, the king did little to support him, and in the end, denied his return to France on the promised date. He died in Quebec at the end of the story, (and in real life). The Auclairs always held him in highest regard, as a patron and as a good and caring person.
    The remainder of Book One gives us a description of how life must have been in this sometimes brutal environment. Cécile, at age twelve, was as skilled as her mother in housekeeping, and in addition, when her father was out on calls, she was able to dispense the more common supplies that people came to the shop to buy.
    The settlement was built on different levels of the rock, and the father and daughter take a walk together each evening.

Their walk was nearly always the same. On a precipitous rock, scored over with dark, uneven streets, there were not many ways where one could stroll with a careless foot after nightfall. When the wind was not too biting, they usually took the path up to the redoubt on Cap Diamant and looked down over the sleeping town and the great pale avenue of river, with black forest stretching beyond it to the sky. From there the Lower Town was a mere sprinkle of lights along the water's edge. The rock-top, blocked off in dark masses that were convents and churches and gardens, was now sunk in sleep. The only lighted windows to be seen were in the Château, in the Bishop's Palace, and on the top floor of old Bishop Laval's Seminary, out there on its spur overhanging the river. That top floor, the apothecary told his daughter, was the library, and likely enough some young Canadian-born Seminarians to whom Latin came hard were struggling with the Church Fathers up there.

Bishop Laval is the senior Bishop and a real person, who lived in extreme poverty because he gave everything to the poor. He is held in reverence, unlike the younger arrogant one who has been chosen to take over when the elderly Laval dies. He is Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrière de St. Vallier, also a real person. In addition, there are numerous women religious established there, including the Ursuline Convent, now called the Ursuline Monastery of Quebec City, and was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1972.
Book Two, called "Cécile and Jacques" is about a little boy who is the neglected son of a local whore. But he goes to church to pray, and is a good boy. The Auclairs, especially Cécile begin to look after him, making sure he is clean, and has clothing. The Count pays to have a pair of shoes made for him. Though his worthless mother is angry, claiming she can take care of him, but does not, eventually he becomes more a part of the Auclair household and activities.
In this section, we also see everyone preparing for the long cold winter. I will quote two paragraphs here at the creative ways these people stocked up for the winter. Of course, I would do without the game and farm meat, but I found the growing of vegetables in the cellars intriguing. And the walls of these houses were built of stone four feet thick.

This was an important market day, and Auclair went down the hill early. The black frosts might set in at any time now, and today he intended to lay in his winter supply of carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, beetroot, leeks, garlic, even salads. On many of the wagons there were boxes full of earth, with rooted lettuce plants growing in them. These the townspeople put away in their cellars, and by tending them carefully and covering them at night they kept green salad growing until Christmas or after. Auclair's neighbour, Pigeon the baker, had a very warm cellar, and he grew little carrots and spinach down there long after winter had set in. The great vaulted cellars of the Jesuits and the Récollet friars looked like kitchen gardens when the world above ground was frozen stark. Careless people got through the winter on smoked eels and frozen fish, but if one were willing to take enough trouble, one could live very well, even in Quebec. It was the long, slow spring, March, April, early May, that tried the patience. By that time the winter stores had run low, people were tired of makeshifts, and still not a bud, not a salad except under cold-frames.
The market was full of wood doves this morning. They were killed in great numbers hereabouts, were sold cheap, and made very delicate eating. Every fall Auclair put down six dozens of them in melted lard. He had six stone jars in his cellar for that purpose, packing a dozen birds to the jar. In this way he could eat fresh game all winter, and, preserved thus, the birds kept their flavour. Frozen venison was all very well, but feathered creatures lost their taste when kept frozen along while.

Yuk.
The activities of the characters often included conversations of legends of religious miracles that had taken place. Cécile believes everything, but her father is more practical (and less gullible)! Soon All Soul's Day rolls around, and with it, more legends. As mentioned above, miraculous tales were an important element in the book, but I suppose during that era, especially living in a settlement whose religious orders were essential in its founding, and the settlers themselves were nearly all Catholic, it would be expected that religion would play such a major role.

On such solemn days all the stories of the rock came to life for Cécile; the shades of the early martyrs and great missionaries draw close about her. All the miracles that had happened there, and the dreams that had been dreamed, came out of the fog; every spire, every ledge and pinnacle, took on the splendour of legend. When one passed by the Jesuits', those solid walls seemed sentinelled by a glorious company of martyrs, martyrs who were explorers and heroes as well; at the Hôtel Dieu, Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin and her story rose up before one; at the Ursulines', Marie de l'Incarnation overshadowed the living.

Soon the inevitable snow comes down hard, and the days darken. That takes us to Book Three, called, "The Long Winter," which begins between Christmas and New Year's Day. It is here where we realize how much the younger Monseigneur, de Saint-Vallier is out of touch with the needs of the colony.

During the stay in France from which he had lately returned, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier had induced the King to reverse entirely Laval's system for the training and government of the Canadian clergy, thus defeating the dearest wishes of the old man's heart and undoing the devoted labour of twenty years. Everything that made Laval's Seminary unique and specially fitted to the needs of the colony had been wiped out. His system of a movable clergy, sent hither and thither out among the parishes at the Bishop's discretion and always returning to the Seminary as their head and centre, had been changed by royal edict to the plan of appointing curés to permanent livings, as in France,—a method ill fitted to a new, wild country where within a year the population of any parish might be reduced by half. The Seminary, which Laval had made a thing of power and the centre of ecclesiastical authority, a chapter, almost an independent order, was now reduced to the state of a small school for training young men for the priesthood.

I found this next paragraph interesting because of the healing ingredients that are found all over in nature. We certainly have strayed far from that, haven't we?

After Epiphany, Auclair was away from home a great deal. The old chirurgien Gervaise Beaudoin was ill, and the apothecary went to see him every afternoon, leaving Cécile to tend the shop. When he was at home, he was much occupied in making cough-syrups from pine tops, and from horehound and honey with a little laudanum; or he was compounding tonics, and linaments for rheumatism. The months that were dull for the merchants were the busiest for him. He and his daughter seldom went abroad together now, but their weekly visit to the Hôtel Dieu they still managed to make. One evening at dinner, after one of these visits, Cécile spoke of an incident that Mother Juschereau had related to her in the morning.

    And this incident was about Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin who converted a heretic into a Christian by grinding up a bit of Father Brébeuf's skull and putting it in his gruel! Cécile's father's chuckling reply to her was that if it had been a little more she might have killed him!
    All throughout the novel are stories within stories. We hear the tale of Jeanne Le Ber, the beautiful and only daughter of the richest merchant in Montreal, Jacques Le Ber, whose most favored suitor was Auclair's friend Pierre Charron. But Jeanne believed she had another calling, which was to join the convent. Her father's despair prevented it, so she requested "domestic retreat," and for five years locked herself away in her room, neither seeing, nor speaking to anyone. At the end of five years, she renewed her vow of seclusion for another five. After that, she was able to accomplish a cherished dream: to build a chapel for the Sisters of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin, where she had a cell constructed for herself behind the high alter. She lived there alone and in extreme austerity.
    One has to wonder about choices like this, and if they really accomplish something positive. In the story, word circulates that a miracle took place, and she was visited by an angel. But later in the story, there is another conflicting point of view from Pierre Charron, who hid in the chapel when it was being locked so he could catch a glimpse of her, and it was hardly angelic.
    In Book Four, "Pierre Charron," he takes Cécile to the Île d'Orléans, where she has wanted to go for a long time. But the trip turns out to be a nightmare, and is cut short. The family they stay with are dirty and vulgar, and Cécile barely eats or sleeps. (She is supposed to sleep in the same bed with the little girls which is filthy, and they are encrusted with mud.) Charron, being a fur trapper, is not bothered. He has eaten dog meat with blueberries with the Native Americans, and at this point, nothing bothers him. But he takes her home a day earlier than planned.
    I also want to point out something that bothers me, and it is that the last three books I've read have referred to these people as savages, which I realize was a term used back then, but I find it offensive.
    In Book Five: "The Ships from France," for the first time, Cécile's father becomes distant from her, and ignores his responsibilities. All he can think about is preparing for the trip back to France. He does not stock his food, and is ill-prepared for what is coming. Then comes the disappointment. The king has not released the Count from the governorship, but Frontenac offers Auclair money enough to send him and Cécile home, plus set him up in a new practice. However he cannot leave the Count. The last ship sails without them. His dreams are shattered, and his support is gone.
    Book Six: "The Dying Count," ends the story, and while it may seem like the Auclairs are lost and not ready for the long harsh winter, things have a way of working out for the best. There is a very happy ending which we learn about in the Epilogue.
    Though there were aspects of this novel I didn't like, what I did like very much is the historical part, and the adventure that pioneers, everywhere experienced, and often just plain endured. I always learn something new about the world—its people, its geography—its history, of course, from historical novels, making them one of my favorite genres. Therefore, I definitely would recommend reading this one, which is free from Faded Page.
    Below is Cap Diamant, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River, as it appears today.

Cap Diamant, Quebec