Innocents Abroad

(See Cover)

It was fill-'er-up-and-let's-go time, and Americans were gadding about as never before. They were off to Albuquerque, Minneapolis and Montauk, to Eagle River, Nantucket and Oconomowoc.

Some millions of them were headed for Canada--green, fresh, cool and twice as big as all outdoors. By road, rail and rattletrap they went. In the hot August sun their cars headed north around Lake Champlain and Memphremagog, or along the orange-colored cliffs of Lake Superior and the blue water of Puget Sound.

Ahead lay the lake-speckled pine woods of Ontario, the island-dotted Lake of the Woods, the breath-taking Canadian Rockies, Banff and Lake Louise. But for two out of every five of the tourists, the goal was French Canada, the province of Quebec (bigger than Texas, Oklahoma, California and Utah together).

There tourists were at home abroad. They tried out their high-school French on the traffic cops (who politely answered in English) and on the garage mechanic (who jabbered back happily in French). They found countryside that might be Normandy, cities that recalled Rouen.

Everything had a picture-postcard look: the walled city of Quebec, brooding on its cliff above the St. Lawrence; the Maxfield Parrish mountains of the Gaspe; storybook hamlets, and fishing fleets lying like a school of minnows in the bay. There were oxcarts and outdoor ovens, pea soup and acres of cod drying in the sun. And there was Montreal, second biggest French city in the world, with the biggest black market in Canada.

Like Manhattan, Montreal is a portal city, the doorway to French Canada. It has tourist attractions, too--the best French food and the gayest nightclubs (it also had the best bordellos).

Sacred Past. Once Montreal had been the doorway to all of North America. Out of the "sacred city," founded in 1642, went Marquette, Champlain, La Salle, Du Luth, Joliet and many another to explore the New World and baptize the heathen Indians.

Montreal is still a sacred city, with 360 churches and 126 streets named after saints. But it is also a worldly metropolis (pop. 1,138,835). This week, Montreal's seams were splitting with the greatest crop of tourists ever. Out of the 23,000,000 pouring into Canada from the U.S. this year, some 9,000,000 would pass through the gateway of Montreal into French Canada. All told, they would spend about $1,800,000,000.

In Montreal they found the prices comparatively low, the fun high. They crowded into the famed Au Lutin Qui Bouffe (The Greedy Imp) on St. Gregoire Street, where a baby porker ran around nuzzling the legs of diners, and apple pie arrived flaming in rum at the tables. They gobbled up the bread sticks, vin ordinaire (and extraordinaire) and hors d'oeuvres at the Cafe Martin, Chez Ernest and Chez Stien.

A few might even find their way to La Tour Eiffel, a blue-painted, mirrored and muraled restaurant of Montreal's sophisticates. It was officially opened only a few weeks ago by what many Montrealers consider their best attraction, and their most entertaining floor show: Mayor Camillien Houde (rhymes with comedian good).

Profane Present. In the evening, tourists swarmed into smoky, hot, low ceiling nightclubs like the Tic Toe (one of the owners once won $140,000 on a horse race) and the Chez Maurice. The grade of entertainment was low, but the legs of the long lines of scantily clad showgirls kicked high.

As in every city, there was gambling, at the luxurious Cote St. Luc House, where as much as $100,000 on weekends is waged at craps and roulette amid sumptuous decor--pale plush carpets, pale beige walls, right out of a Technicolor musical (the filet mignon is on the house, and busted gamblers get a free ride home). There was also gambling at scores of hideaways, at Montreal's own games, balbo and barbotte.* And, of course, there was bingo in many of the hundreds of churches, whose realistic cures regarded it as a painless way to supplement the collections.

The tourists invaded the handicraft shops for carved wooden curios, bright habitant shawls, blankets, hooked rugs, and furs. They rode in horse-drawn carriages to the quaint old marliet of Bonse-cours (Our Lady of Good Help) and up 753-ft. Mount Royal. They crowded into large Notre Dame Church (which seats 5,000) and St. James's Cathedral with its bronze baldachin over the altar, a replica of St. Peter's in Rome.

Just outside the city they climbed gingerly into narrow boats with toughened hulls, and shot the turbulent Lachine Rapids as the old voyageurs had 200 years before. To the north, in the rolling Laurentians and around Mont Tremblant, skiers' winter paradise, there would be deer and moose hunting in the fall, and fishing (for salmon and speckled trout).

Empty Pockets. As the flood of tourists poured dollars into his city, Montreal's Mayor Houde could well enjoy a Bingo! or two of his own. On & off for the past 18 years Mayor Houde, a 5 ft. 7 1/2 in. 247-lb. human dynamo with a batrachian grin, has run Montreal with most of the uproar, fun and profit of a rip-roaring bingo game. He winked at the famed bordellos, shrugged off the gambling, and washed away municipal sins with a flood of Gallic wit, energy and superabundant good fellowship.

When political opponents charged that Mayor Houde liked his city profane because it had paid him thousands of dollars a week in graft, he expressively pulled out his empty pockets. (He is broke today.) He was also apt to make the shrewd point that tourists liked Montreal better that way.

Sometimes the brand of politics peddled by Montreal's mayor seemed more than unmoral; sometimes it seemed to smack of fascism. What tourists, and other Americans forgot--or never knew--was that the quaint old cities of Quebec had bred and fostered a fanatical nationalism that did have many of the trappings of fascism. Few Americans understood it or the reason for it. Houde did.

Joke Book. A ruthless political freebooter, he played this nationalism for all it was worth--just as he had turned everything else to account in politics, even his enormous red nose. He made the nose as famed in Canada as Jimmy Durante's in the U.S., proudly called it one "worthy of Cyrano." In combination with his foxy, small eyes and his vast expressive jaw, he looks like a cross between W. C. Fields and Fiorello LaGuardia.

Like both of them, he is a shrewd buffoon, clowns as naturally as others converse. He likes to slump in a chair so he can waggle his feet in the air, mug furiously. He has always been willing to do anything for a laugh--and his Montrealers have loved him for it.

When Britain's King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Montreal, he entertained them with a stream of jokes, persuaded the King to sing the rollicking song of the coureur de bois, Alouette. He defined it as God Save the King (which the French Canadians stubbornly refuse to sing) and added slyly, "after midnight."

People's Heart. Yet he works hard at his job. He is up early in his modest grey stone home at St. Hubert Street, where he lives quietly with his wife (his second) and daughter. Usually he walks the three miles to the mayoral office at no Notre Dame Street East, in the old part of Montreal, arriving about 9:30 a.m.

There, surrounded by a platoon of aides and his tools of office--a brass spittoon, a silver shovel for sod turning, and three telephones (one gold-plated)--he talks to a steady stream of people in his fast French and slow, accented English, ducks out frequently for stump speeches. (He spoke at 66 gatherings last June.)

Mayor Houde usually wears striped trousers, a pale grey waistcoat, an ascot tie, a black coat. Sometimes his exuberance blossoms out in color: pale green pants, bright green tie, green and white herringbone tweed jacket with orange flecks. For ice skating, his favorite sport, he prefers a natty ceinture flechee (a colorful belt). A heavy smoker (two packs a day) and chain coffee drinker (ten cups), he is a semivegetarian, eats no red meat, never takes a drink--and is never at a loss for an answer, or a cynical quip.

Once when a visitor seriously asked him about the atom bomb, he replied: "Yes, because of the bomb, decentralization is essential for cities like Montreal." Then, after a pause, he added: "Particularly if we can decentralize the debt at the same time."

He did more than anyone else to pile up that debt. But it has had no political effect for Houde. Why? Answered Houde: "Because I've got the heart of the people."

Butcher Boy. He is one of them. What a tourist spent in a day would have kept the Houde family for weeks.

Camillien was born on Aug. 13, 1889, in a two-room tenement flat on the Rue St. Timothee, the only one of ten children to live beyond his second year. He went to work part time for a butcher at $1 a week when he was nine, got a job in a bank at 16, was branch manager at 26. But at 33, he was earning only $40 a week. Then a fortune-telling friend read his hand; she saw him "talking triumphantly on a street corner and shaking thousands of hands." Camillien, who had an itch for politics anyway, joined the Conservative Club in Montreal's St. Mary constituency, was elected to the provincial legislature, won a name with his quick tongue.

When Alexandra Taschereau, then Quebec premier and scion of one of Quebec's old families, twitted Houde for his lack of culture, he retorted: "I may not have everything that was given to the honorable prime minister. [But] if he had started where I started he would not be where he is today, nor would he be where I am. I am the beginning. He is the end of a race."

In Again, Out Again. He fought with his party, but in 1928 was elected Mayor of Montreal anyway--chiefly because his friends outdid the opposition in voting the names of non-voting oldsters and invalids.

Houde lost out in 1932, but the depression brought the "man of the people" back in 1934. He pleased the people by spending $40,000,000 on public works in Montreal in two years. Comfort stations, called "Camilliennes," burgeoned the length & breadth of the city.

He went out but was in again when war came, and this time he made his big mistake: he publicly advised citizens not to register for conscription. Three days later, a squad of Mounties drove him off to the internment camp at Petawawa, where he stayed for four years.

Characteristically, he made the most of his time by boning up on world history and becoming the camp champion at Chinese checkers, ice skating, long distance walking, woodcutting. He bore the federal government no rancor. Said he: "I am enraged." But he added: "I am coolly enraged." He knew he still had the heart of the people.

Bloc Populaire. On his release he was met at Montreal's Windsor station by 10,000 wildly cheering citizens. They escorted him to his home in triumph. Four months later they elected him mayor by a thumping majority.

In Houde's absence Montreal's city fathers had clipped his wings. They had supplemented his one-man rule with a 99-man City Council, which had cleaned up the city. At least, it had pulled down the shades on its more flamboyant sights.

Gone was Madame Baby's; gone was Lillian Russell (whose sleekly gowned and strategically bulging figure was not unlike her namesake's); her menage at 92 Ca-dieux Street could entertain whole conventions of tourists at once. Gone also was Madame Cesar's in the more exclusive West End. Only a memory was Madame Alice's where employes and customers alike had been required to wear evening dress.

Less important to tourists but more so for Camillien Houde were other changes. His strident French-Canadian nationalism, with its emphasis on "racism," big families and close ties of church and state, seemed to have lost some of its appeal. Nevertheless, he joined the Bloc Populaire, a catch-all of all nationalistic slogans, to extend his power beyond Montreal. In two election tests, the second last month, the Bloc was soundly trounced. For the time being, at least, the Bloc was a dead political duck.

Old Sights. Camillien Houde had to adjust his ideas to a new generation of French Canadians. But to tourists' eyes, at least, the country of the seigneurs still looked the same.

Down the St. Lawrence, 150 miles from the doorway metropolis, lay Quebec City; its great grey stone citadel, whose guns had once guarded the New World for France, still frowned down on the narrow twisting streets of the Old Town. The habitant women in their dusty-black Sunday clothes still knelt to pray in ancient Chapelle des Augustines. With devout Americans they still trudged the 21 miles to the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre on pilgrimage.

Out on the Gaspe the fishing boats still put out from the coves for cod and halibut. Tourists could also put out from the little bays for a day of deep-sea fishing for swordfish and tuna. Perce Rock still stood, angular and orange, out of the blue water. The thousands of birds still nested on Bonaventure Island.

In the Baie de Chaleur, touring fishermen could still catch salmon, measured in feet, not inches. At Murray Bay's swank Manoir Richelieu, the service was still superb, and there was more than enough fun to go around.

New Sounds. But there had been a change in the picturesque land. In old Quebec Province, the conservative, independent, devoutly Catholic habitant had developed his own culture on his farms. Its cornerstones were the church and the big family, an economic necessity in the rural economy.

Never forgetting that they were a defeated group, they had fanatically defended their right for 200 years to speak their own language, to keep from being absorbed by English Canada. They felt no ties for either France (the France they remembered was that of the 18th Century) or Britain. And when English Canada, feeling those ties in the war, had tried to conscript the French Canadians to fight abroad, there had been riots and bitterness.

But the habitant's world had not been able to keep the world out. World War II brought new factories and industries to Quebec. The tourist, his eye out only for the quaint, would miss them--the huge new power plant on the Saguenay, the new plywood plant at St. Therese, the new plastic plant at Brownsburg.

These new industries have caused a profound change in old Quebec's 17th Century culture. As the world came in, much of the old, fanatical nationalism and isolationism with its distrust of English Canada has gone out. Now, there is a greater feeling of cooperation between French and English Canada than ever before.

The 3,000,000 French Canadians, over one-third of Canada's population, can afford to take the long view. The best protection for their culture lies in something no tourist can miss--the swarms of children that play about the old outdoor ovens and the creaking, great-winged windmills. Quebec's birthrate, which has long outstripped the rest of Canada's, may some day make the French Canadians the majority in the Dominion. The habitant calls it the "victory in the cradle." Time, and the long winter nights, are on French Canada's side.

*Barbotte is a fast-action dice game in which the players bet against each other, with the house taking a cut from each bet. Balbo, a variation of barbotte, is played with cards instead of dice.

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