A note about Tadoussac

We found this place very appealing and parked first at the top of the hill so that I could try for a photo of the scene captured in 1935 by the artist Charles Comfort. My camera, unlike his paintbrush, flattened this exaggerated, bird's eye view (partly hidden by mist and trees from where I was standing), but the headland still looks whale-like, and the chapel and hotel roofs are still bright red. There had been a Victorian hotel here since the mid-19th century; in the 1940s its replacement was built, still grandiose, with whitewashed walls, crowned with a cupola and fronted by formal gardens. On the other side of the road is a pretty little graveyard with a pathway through it to the so-called Chapelle des Indiens, apparently the oldest wooden church in Canada (1747), built by Jesuit missionaries in their attempts to convert the Montagnais. It's now a museum.

Chris and I went for a hike down the promenade steps and along the beach, fascinated by the traces of mist still rising from it and making footsteps on the "grey wet sand," reminding us of Charlotte Mew's poem Sea Love (though she was probably thinking of the Isle of Wight):

Tide be runnin' the great world over:
'Twas only last June month I mind that we
Was thinkin' the toss and the call in the breast of the lover
So everlastin' as the sea.

Here's the same little fishes that sputter and swim,
Wi' the moon's old glim on the grey, wet sand;
An' him no more to me nor me to him
Than the wind goin' over my hand.

Chris set this to music once.

We passed a few live and dead fishes, scrambled up and down the rocks at the end of the bay where the "No trespassing" signs were and returned the way we'd come, under the steep sandy slopes, thick with trees. It's hard to remind yourself that the St. Lawrence is still, strictly speaking, a river at this point. A few minutes downstream from Tadoussac is an area of sand dunes which we also went to find, really big and extensive sand dunes which gave me a funny turn because they reminded me of a recurrent nightmare in which I try to scrabble my way up an increasingly impossible sandy gradient. Out here the ATV boys have fun on them, weaving around the birch trees.