PARK AND CEMETERY. 
39 
“THE MA.ISONNEUVE MONUMENT, MONTREAL.” 
The best monument in the city of Montreal is 
that in the Place d’Armes, erected to the memory 
of Maisonneuve, the founder of the city. This work 
is by Philippe Hebert, a French Canadian artist, 
whose studio at the present time is in Paris. The 
monument was unveiled on July i, 1895. It is con- 
sidered Hebert’s masterpiece. We have nothing 
better in the United States, I believe, unless it be 
Augustus St. Gauden’s Shaw memorial in Boston. 
As one of the orators said on the day of the inaug- 
uration of the Maisonneuve monument, “This 
monument is a poem, that of the heroic period of 
Canadian history, not sung in Homeric hexameters, 
but reproduced in 
bronze and granite, 
to speak to the eyes 
and forever engrave 
on the heatts of the 
people the memory 
of the virtues of that 
handfull of heroes 
and saints who left 
their country, fami- 
lies, and repose, to 
cross the ocean on 
frail barks and 
plunge into the 
wilderness, in the 
midst of savage 
tribes, with the sole 
purpose of glorify- 
ing God and making 
themselves useful 
to their fellow-men.” 
The artist rose to 
the height of his 
subject, and has 
given us a noble, 
picturesque and 
stirringembodiment 
of the courage, chiv- 
alry, dash and nerve of the French pioneers in the 
New World. The figure of Maisonneuve himself is a 
perfect and typical plastic expression of the Gallic 
explorer, soldier, and gentleman of the seventeenth 
century. It is superbly spirited, buoyant, graceful, 
gallant, and elegant without effeminacy. It is the 
figure of a man of action, fearless and hardy. The 
flowing lines and picturesque folds of the costume 
of 1642 lend themselves most aptly to the statuary’s 
ends. Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve is 
worthy of a monument; he is of that illustrious 
group which comprises Jacques Cartier and Samuel 
de Champlain, the heroes of New France, 
story of his exploits reads like a romance. 
The 
Placed 
at each of the four corners of the base of the monu- 
ment, is a subsidiary figure, belonging to the 
history of that remote period, one of the little com- 
pany of colonists which came out from France 
with Maisonneuve, and helped him to found the 
great metropolis of Canada. At the South-East 
corner we see the virile and admirable crouch- 
ing figure of Lambert Closse, the scout, holding 
back his too eager French dog Pilotte with one 
hand, and grasping his pistol in the other hand, 
ready to fight the swarming Iroquois whose thou- 
sands of braves were held at bay through so many 
years by the little squad of dauntless Frenchmen 
in their fort on the St. Lawrence. What a superb 
figure! What an 
eagle glance, and 
what an indomitable 
type of bravery ! At 
tlie south-west cor- 
ner, is the crouch- 
ing figure of Jeanne 
Mance, the first sis- 
ter of charity i n 
America, dressing 
the wound of a 
squirming little In- 
dian boy. Nothing 
could be more ex- 
quisitely beautiful 
than the unspeak- 
able tenderness , 
firmness and skill 
with which this 
lovely woman min- 
isters to the astound- 
ed Savage; it is a 
memorable, an al- 
most unequalled 
thing. At the north- 
east angle we have 
a squatting figure of 
Charles LeMoyne, 
the first colonist of Ville Marie, holding in his right 
hand a sickle, and in his left a handful of grain, but 
with a rifle slung behind his back. Linally, at the 
north-west angle, there is the lithe, muscular, and 
elastic form of an Iroquois brave in ambush, a re- 
markably imposing and life-like type of the North 
American savage. The pose is a striking example 
of suspended action, stealthy, cat-like, and full of 
the sense of latent power and activity. It has the 
dramatic quality of the recoil, the gathering to- 
gether of the muscular forces, the suspense and 
breathless silence of the moment before the spring 
of the beast of prey upon his victim. Such is the 
masterpiece of Hebert, and the monument which 
THE MAISOXNEDVE MONUMENT, MONTREAL. 
