Mystery surrounds the model of the Brezea 17th century warshipe century, which has been hanging for nearly 70 years in the vault of the Notre-Dame-des-Victoires church in Quebec City. A carbon-14 analysis should soon reveal the true nature of this scale model, which is just under three meters long.
According to tradition, the Breze was offered to the parish of Quebec in 1665 by the Marquis Alexandre de Tracy, a soldier who came to fight the Iroquois of Lake Ontario at the head of the Carignan-Salières regiment. This lieutenant-general of the French armies of North and South America would have wanted to thank the Virgin Mary for her protection during his crossing of the Atlantic aboard the Brezea powerful warship launched in Toulon in 1646.
Tracy’s ex-voto is said to have first been hung in the heights of the Quebec Cathedral, from where it fell following the British bombardments of General Wolfe in the summer of 1759. The smoky model was then stored in the attics of the Quebec Seminary, from which it miraculously emerged in the mid-1940s.
“After investigating, we’re not sure about all that,” explains the general director of the Notre-Dame de Québec parish, Gilles Gignac. “We realized that no one talked about the model before 1955. But of course, this boat came from somewhere!”
The alleged gift of the Breze by Tracy was not reported by his contemporaries. However, we know that the Marquis made another gesture of devotion by offering a painting to the church of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in 1666, between two military campaigns against the Iroquois.
Restoration
We have to wait until the middle of the 20th centurye century to find a first certain mention of the model of the Breze. The ship is then in the workshop of Clovis Plamondon, on rue De La Salle, in Quebec. The carpenter is busy there “repairing” the artifact given to him by Mr.gr Paul-Émile Gosselin. He devoted nearly 800 hours to him between 1947 and 1954.
“Plamondon may not have done it according to the rules of art, but he did a beautiful job nonetheless,” comments the former project manager of the Notre-Dame de Québec parish, Yves Garneau. “He was an artist, we don’t blame him for that!”
In the absence of plans, the “tinkerer” from the Saint-Roch district would have possibly turned to Hergé’s work to restore the ship, Garneau suggests. He would have thus taken up the broad outlines of the imaginary ship of Captain Haddock’s ancestor that we see in The Secret of the Unicorn published in 1943.
“Plamondon may have copied certain forms, that may well be true, but I have no proof of that,” Garneau specifies, recalling that The Unicorn by Hergé is itself inspired by the Brighta ship of the navy of Louis XIV which was launched at the very end of the 17th centurye century.
In any case, the number of miniature cannons embarked on board the ex-voto of Quebec does not correspond to a ship of the size of the Breze. “This model is very astonishing,” explains French historian Jean-Marie Kowalski in an exchange with The Duty. There are too many gun ports, both on the upper and lower batteries. The rigging is quite strange for a 17th century boat.e century, adds the specialist, in particular the bowsprit.
Exam
According to Yves Garneau, it is possible that the hull of the ship restored by Clovis Plamondon contains another, older one, like Russian dolls.
To be sure, the vessel was delicately removed from the vault of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires last summer. The deterioration of the artifact exposed to light and dust generated by tourists in Place Royale was then noted. “It’s giving way everywhere, the ropes are falling »observes Gilles Gignac.
The ship headed to the Quebec Conservation Centre, where they took paint samples with a scalpel. “They noticed that there was a part of the model that was very old,” explains Gignac. The results of the carbon-14 analysis should be known in October.
The fate of the Breze will depend on this expected report. “If it is really old, it will open up prospects for a complete restoration,” comments Gignac. “And if we realize that it does not date from Tracy’s time, we will still do a restoration. It is an artifact that we care about.”