"And yet," our Canadian friend continues, "right across the Place d'Armes here is an institution that could buy and sell the Bank of Montreal--or better still, buy it and keep it."
Our eyes follow his pointing hand--to a long, low building on the south side of the little square. It is very old and exceeding quaint. Although built of the graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years to almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well as of another time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock-face and out-set hands is redolent of the south of France or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem a part and parcel of Our Lady of the Snows--and yet it is.
"You know--the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our Canadian friend. "It was the original owner of the rich island of Montreal. No one knows its wealth today, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. It still holds title to thousands of acres and no one save the Gentleman of the Corporation of St. Sulpice, themselves, knows the wealth of the institution. To say that it is the richest ecclesiastical institution of the Americas is not enough, for here is an organization that for coherency, wealth and strength surpasses Standard Oil and forms the chief financial support of the strongest church in the world."
And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the Place d'Armes is not by any chance over-stepping the mark. In the quaint little Seminary that stands in the half-day shadow of the second largest church on the continent--a church that it easily builded in the first third of the nineteenth century from its accumulated wealth--there centers much of the mystery of Montreal, a mystery which to the stranger takes concrete form in the high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered rumors of this force or that working within the politics of the city, in the so-called Nationalist movement, and flaunts itself in rival displays of Union Jack and the historic Tricolor of France. There is little of mystery in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who live within those very, very old walls are hospitality itself--even though their ascetic living is of the hardest, crudest sort. The only bed and carpeted room within the building is reserved for the occasional visits of bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden from the street by the earliest part of the Seminary--almost unchanged since its erection in 1710--and enclosed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like stone buildings of the institution, is a most delicious garden with old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of favored saints set in its shaded place. We remember a garden of the same sort at the mission of Santa Barbara, in California. These two are the most satisfactory gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the rose-bushes in the Seminary of Montreal that one gets a full idea of the size and beauty of the exterior of the parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satisfactory view-point from the street.