It's been a while since I last visited Québec - 17 years! - and I was disappointed to learn that the place I found most diverting then - the Musée de l'Amérique Française, now known as the Musée de l'Amérique Francophone - is only open on weekends. No matter. The chapel to François de Laval (1623-1708), designed in 1993 for Québec's Basilica-Cathedral of Notre Dame, reproduces most of the map I found so délirant on the floor of the Musée. (Laval was beatified in 1980, canonized in 2014, but the map takes you back to late 17th century.) Here is a continent designated Nou[vell]e FRANCE. The only discordant note is a little corner in the northeast, Nouvelle Bretagne.
Québec seems all about the subjunctive contained here, a North America which need not have become anglophone, with just a little pocket of francophones in a northeastern corner! Tongue-in-cheek inversion of what actually happened? I was wittier in 2005, noting crisply in my diary that Québec was the "tip of the long since melted iceberg of Amérique Française." Of course the continent need not have been invaded by European saints and sinners at all. Tomorrow we learn more about the First Peoples of this area.
