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[Lady Tweedsmuir to Queen Mary]
21st July, 1936.
Madam,
We are now settled down at Quebec, where we are enjoying a very varying type of weather. The days begin with brilliant sunshine and usually end with a thunderstorm. I think that Your Majesty would much appreciate the charm of the Citadel. The walls are as much as six feet thick. The rooms are barrel-vaulted, and the passages long and narrow. One side of the house looks out on to a terrace built four hundred feet above the river, while the other forms one side of the barrack square. This bristles with the guns of a past age and is shaded by some very charming willow trees. Your Majesty will be amused to hear that there is still a trail of mauve all over the house, left over from the days of Lady Willingdon!
I have visited several convents, and conversed with a great many nuns. The Ursulines have put all their treasure together into an exhibition. They are anxious to raise money for one of their nuns to go on a mission to Japan. This exhibition is designed to attract the American tourists. The collection consists mainly of small objects and books placed behind a very heavy grille, and I should think the ordinary tourist would find it very difficult to see much of the objects arranged inside. I am told, however, that the Americans get great pleasure from looking through the grille. As the wife of His Majesty's representative I was
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allowed to go behind it, and found that they had several seventeenth century statues and pieces of embroidery of great beauty, brought from France by the foundress of the Ursalines in 1641.
All the religious buildings, which are not post-War and gim-crack, have a great solidity and dignity. They were built in the days when the Indian terror was ever present. To turn to the more modern side of things, I have been very much interested in the Ecole des Arts Domestiques which is run by the Government for the Province of Quebec. The idea is to give the farmers and farm-hands something to do in the winter months. During the last few years they have parted with most of the nice things they inherited from their forebears - old furniture and so on; and the Ecole des Arts Domestiques is trying to teach them to weave and make charming things for their own houses. In some cases this has been so successful that the country people are selling the surplus work. You see rugs and mats hung along all the roads leading to show-places like St. Anne de Beaupre. I was very much struck by the care and artistic feeling with which they are doing the work, and I especially admired a set of maple wood furniture, very well designed, which had for seats woven stuff called here catalogne, in differnet coloured stripes. The furniture had been made by a group of farmers; the catalogne had been woven from the wool from their own sheep, and they had dyed it themselves with vegetable dyes. The work of the Ecole des Arts Domestiques is steadily increasing, and is really
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filling a long-felt want. I should think, from what I hear, that a similar thing in the West of Canada would be a very excellent idea.
My husband has had a return of an old gastric trouble contracted during the Great War, which comes back now and again in the most tiresome way. On the doctor's advice he went into a clinic in Montreal, where he underwent every kind of X-ray test. He returned full of admiration for the skill and wisdom of the doctors there. They are quite convinced that they have got to the bottom of his trouble, and that rest and diet will put him right. He is most anxious to be completely well for the visit of the President of the United States, and for the tour in the West.
May I express the hope that Your Majesty is enjoying the best of health.
I have the honour to be, Madam,
Your humble and devoted servant,
