The morning train out of Montreal West rushed down the wide, valley of the St. Lawrence through the villages of the splendid names – Laval des Rapides, Pointe-du-Lac,- Champlain, Grondines, Pont Rouge and many another– and I felt as lonesome as a stranger coming on a foreign land.

I had to remind myself sharply that, being Canadian, I was really still at home. 

Autumn had bled the last wild color from the low hills. In many a villager's yard the smoke was curling from piles of burning leaves. 

The signs and billboards in the small towns fled by Fumez les Players, Taverne, Repas Complets, Magasin a Kayons, Buvez Coca-Cola, Defense de Stationer. 

An Invisible Barrier 

Across the fields and across the great river in the clusters of hamlets the early winter sunlight glinted on the aluminum-p a i n t e d spires of the churches. 

A single file of schoolboys walked along a low stone wall, led by a black-robed priest. He stopped and waved at the train and all the small boys stopped and waved as well until they went from sight.

 The conductor asked for my ticket. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd asked for my passport and visa. 

That was some three weeks ago. I was beginning an assignment that seemed ludicrously simple: "Find out what kind of people the French-Canadians really are. 

 'Fight for Rights' 

Suddenly it wasn't looking simple at all.

I was remembering some voices from across the invisible Great Divide that separates Quebec from the rest of us. 

There was the voice of a Montreal advertising executive, transplanted in Vancouver, offering advice when he heard of my trip:

 "Some of my best friends are French-Canadian, I assure you.  But, as a race, they're hopeless. They feel you owe them a living. They're ignorant. 

 They have families of 15, 16  or more kids. They're completely under the thumb of their church." 

 There was the voice of a senior Army officer: "They'll fight you all the way for their bloody rights. We put out a booklet for our troops up north called 'How to Survive in the Arctic' or something like. We didn't write it in French, as we usually do with our manuals, because there aren't more than a handful of pea-soupers up there. 

"Well, the pressure was terrific. The Quebec politicians and priests never let up on us."

There was the voice of the operator of a cocktail lounge in Ottawa: 

"Twelve out of the 14 men who work my bar are French-Canadians. Sure, they're good workers. They'll stick with the job because they're not very ambitious. 

"Trouble is, they talk French among themselves all the time. Now, if it were New York that would be some local colour. It would be an asset But, here, the customers don't like it. They figure the waiters  may be talking about them. 

"I'd make a rule about it, but, brother, you do that and you're liable to wake up and find nobody working for you." 

I had wondered then, as I wonder now; how such isolated incidents could sow the harvest of suspicion and distrust, embracing some four million French-Canadians, that you hear all too frequently when "English are exposed to French. 

Works Both Ways

The advertising executive , who had said, "They're hopeless." He's an Intelligent man who can be angry and articulate on the subject of intolerance against a minority in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

 The army officer who called them "pea soupers"? He would never think of calling an Italian a "wop,". ' 

The bar-operator who was disturbed by his help talking their own language? As it happens, he's a proud and orthodox Jew. 

But it works both ways. I hadn't been in Quebec two days before I'd a note-book full of such anecdotes in reverse.

 A civic official in Hull, his normally precise enunciation thick with a sudden French accent, told me of a certain English-Canadian firm which had asked the Quebec city to locate a site for a manufacturing plant. 

Orange Trick 

 The city had " gone ahead with negotiating for some desirable property when the company backed down and issued what was apparently a face-saving statement charging lack of co-operation by the city.

"That was dirty. Dirty!" the official said. He was pink with anger. "That was the trick of an Orangeman!" 

Here is an outstanding young engineering student at Laval University in Quebec City. Cultured, sophisticated, friendly. "Certainly we can have unity," he says, "but I will tell you this: it will be a long time before I ever go to Toronto again.

The language problem? "Call it the language situation," said Mr. Jodoin. 

Premier Maurice Duplessis ant-union muzzles? "Call them legislative difficulties," said Mr. Jodoin. 

When I ventured that the whole subject of Quebec seems might ticklish with him, Canada's top labor leader smiled, shrugged and agreed. "That is the word, my boy." 

On Defensive

I had begun to suspsect that I would get frankness only from those who were not involved in some sort of manoeuvres, but in Quebec City, at every level, I found straight talk. 

Many spoke defensively. As many more–and particularly the outspoken members of the Catholic clergy who like to live dangerously with their convictions–seemed to find it refreshing to trade views with cantor. I found a response of gratitude to any faint understanding of the French-Canadian attitude. 

When a reporter from the influential Le Soleil interviewed me I apologized for my shortage of French, said I felt as guilty as those English speaking bathers on an Ontario beach last summer who ignored the shouts for help from a drowning French-Canadian boy simply because they didn't understand him. 

Makes News

I said that if language was really the last barrier between us then we English-speaking Candadians had to shoulder our share of the responsibility. 

The head on the story next day read, "Les Canadians Francis on fait plus queen la moitie du chemic," which loosely translates as, "We've come more than half way." 

One of the editors said, "You made news. I never heard one of your people say anything like that before." 

There are a few in Quebec who, because of a broad idealism, are inclined to brush aside the obvious differences as unimportant. 

One of these is Roger Lemelin, the author of "The Town Below" and of "La Famille Plouffe" television series which, in Quebec, appears only slightly less compulsive than Catholicism. 

"God, I won't forget going Into a little shop there this summer to buy an ice cream cone. I asked for vanilla. The girl did not understand me. 'Vanilla,' I said.  She snook her head, not understanding. 'Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, I said.

You Foreigners

"I was very - angry and ashamed because of my poor English. The girl looked at me crossly and said! 'Don't shout. That's the first thing you foreigners ought to learn.' It ruined Toronto for me.'" 

The civic official in Hull who had used that' old-fashioned word, "Orangeman"'?  He took me to dinner and we enjoyed each other's company to the fullest.

 The young Laval student who hated Toronto because of an ice cream cone? He dreams of working one day on great projects in northern British Columbia. 

It didn't take me long, either, to find a suffocating reticence about bringing such differences out in the open. 

St. Laurent Ducks

In Ottawa, remembering the words of a writer who had observed, "one wonders what Louis St. Laurent thinks about it all," I'd tried to see the former prime minister. 

His secretary was affable and full of promise until I administered my own kiss of death by saying that I sought his boss for some opinions on French Canada. 

Mr. St. Laurent, a figure who is as close as we've come to understanding each other, could not spare five minutes in the next five days. 

I went to see Claude Jodoin, the president of the Canadian Labor Congress, who ought to know what it means to be an ambitious French-Canadian. 

It was the most unsatisfactory interview I've had since I questioned Eko and Iko, the Barnum and Bailey sheep-headed boys. 

Parries Questions

A powerful, heavy-jowled, thick-bodied man, affluent-looking with his broad gold watch band and gold cuff links, Mr, Jodoin parried every question with a stolid, bland expression or a burst of hearty chuckles. 

1On matters of Quebec labor troubles he searched delicately for every word as if each was a bomb that might explode before our horrified eyes. 

No Quaint Habitants

Bruce Hutchison called him, at not much over 30 years of age, "the authentic interpreter of his race. In Quebec City they've named a street for him, he makes $85,000 a year and he looks like all Three Musketeers rolled' into one. Wearing a pearl-grey cor duroy smoking jacket and striding up and down his taste ful, book-lined study, Lemelin admonished me. "Bon't come down here to write about the quaint habi tants or the parish priests or the maple syrup trees or any of that bunk, he bellowed. "What we need is tor some one to look at us as human beings. 'You do that and you will find you and ms are just the same except for our lan guage. "All we want Is to make a buck and live a good life." I mentioned this two or three days later to a Quebec businessman as we lunched at the Restaurant Le Vendome which looks out across the jumble and genteel poverty of Lower Town from wnich Lem elin, riding his big talent, rose to the heights. HEART IN RIGHT PLACE "Roger's heart Is in the right place," he said. "It wouW be nice if he were right. But will tell you now a little story about Les Plouffes that is more realistic." - . . When 'the program first came on the air, he said, it was sponsored by the Imperial Tobacco Company over the French Canada network. It became instantly popular. Sales ' of Players ' cigaretes soared beyond the wildest dreams of their makers. They decided then to put out an English-language ver sion which, in turn, vas suc cessful. But, as its 'viewing ratings steadily went ' Up in English-Canada, sales of Play ers went steadily and inexpli cabily downward. SALES DROP "Why did the sales go down?" the businessman asked in the dramatic, Gallic way. It was purely a rhetorical question. "They went down because English viewers were associ ating the Imperial Tobacco Company with French-Canada "So they dropped It and the Colgate-Palmolive people took it over because, yf course, nobody would attach thMstig- of of

ma of French-Canada to them. Surely that is the kind of evi dence to show that we are not as close as the wishful thinkers would have it." So began an innocent's edu cation into the contradictions that are Quebec. There was the contradiction of a church that, its critics say, keeps its people in a kind of feudal bondage. Yet the men who represent it, the men met, are bold and progres sive educators, men with freewheeling, stimulating, unec- clesiastical ideas. Quebec might be lost without them. There was the contradiction of Premier Maurice Duplessis, extravagantly hated as a demagogue and Incipient fascist and just as extravagantly worshipped as the savior of the French-Canadian way of life. Both, I was to find, are myths. To me the most delightful description of "le chef" will always be that of Michel Chartrand, the newly elected leader of Le Parti Social Democratique du Canada', which is another way of say ing CCF, whose dream of ousting Duplessis within 10 years seems about as likely as him becoming king of outer space. LOTS OF ILLUSIONS Chartrand looks like a youth ful Groucho Marx. He has a lot of malice burning in him for old Uncle Maurice. In Montreal, when I asked him to sum up Duplessis' unique character, Chartrand had terrible time finding just the right word in English, Finally he said, "Duplessis is a ... a ... a political hobo! There was the contradiction of the comfortable illusion of French-Canadians grimly cling ing to an . ancient culture, singing "Alouette" and wear ing toques and making canoe portages, and the reality of flourishing creative arts in every field In the theatre, in literature, in painting, in tele- vision which, by comparison makes English-Canada seem like a race of prlmtive peas ants. There is, finally, the con tradiction of a people who, we think, ought to be true to type, to look and talk and act in a very certain way, and who persist, so unreasonably, In being all manner of rugged individualists. "Funny, pitiful, exciting, on dog ing air-conditioned magnificent Quebec," one of its biographers called it. You're hardly off the train before you begin to understand