Bienvenue à Québec

Bienvenue à Québec
Bienvenue à Québec

Friday, June 20, 2014

Art, History and some Ghosts!

It has been a busy week so far. After settling into the language classes during the first couple of days, everyone is now into the routine and looking forward to the week-end. We have been on several interesting excursions. The Musée de Beaux Arts de Québec is within walking distance of the Collège and we took advantage of half-price admission on Wednesday evening. In addition to featuring four prominent Québécois artists: Jean-Paul Riopelle, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Lemieux and Alfred Pellan, there is a rich collection of Inuit and First Nation Art. The museum is housed partly in a former prison and they have very creatively preserved the cells in the middle of the galleries. The current temporary exhibition spotlights two French Canadian painters, Morrice and Lyman, who spent most of their career traveling and painting in France, the Maghreb and the Caribbean. They became friends and disciples of Henri Matisse and the museum has borrowed a few Matisse paintings to include in this collection. I very much enjoyed this exhibition and did not know these two Canadian artists before.
I gave an informal tour of Le Château Frontenac on Thursday afternoon. The hotel used to offer guided tours led by costumed guides and we could get inside rooms and little known corridors of the hotel. But, alas, this is no more since 2012 when the hotel found it to be too disruptive. So, this year, we talked about the history of the hotel, its place in Québec City culture and as a Canadian icon as well as visited some key areas of the hotel, such as the room where Hitchcock's 1953 film I Confess with Montgomery Clift was filmed. Many celebrities have stayed in le Château over time including members of the royal family, Paul McCartney, Steven Spielberg among others. The hotel was built in 1893 by New York architect Bruce Price who was commissioned by William Van Horne, general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR) as a way to encourage luxury tourism across Canada. It is now part of the Fairmont Hotel chain which includes such other iconic Canadian hotels as the Banff Springs, Château Lake Louise and the Hotel Vancouver. The Frontenac has expanded over the decades, adding on additional wings, towers and gardens. It was built on the original site of Château St. Louis, the first governor's mansion in New France in the 1600s. The view from la Basse Ville is spectacular!
Each year on the program, it has been a tradition to participate in a Promenade des Fantômes where we walk the streets at night with a costumed guide and hear tales of the dark side of Québec. We heard stories of murder, sorcery, innocent men sent to the gallows and ghosts that haunt some of Québec's most famous buildings and streets. We had an excellent, very dramatic guide this year and the tour finished with a visit inside a very dark, very haunted cathedral, from which we managed to escape just after 10:00 p.m.!

4 comments:

  1. That was a full day! We were all so exhausted when we arrived back at the residence. That's how you know you're doing this immersion thing the right way!!

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  2. Are tours led in English by any chance? This is right up my alley, but my French is so poor, I wouldn't know a fantôme from a diable.

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  3. So excited that you visited the room in I Confess! Very cool.

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