Most summertime events have concluded so life has slowed to allow us to just explore aimlessly... which is one of our favorite travel activities.

The newly built house had been designed for a successful Québec merchant by famous architect Joseph-Ferdinand Peachy (whose surname people switched to the more French-sounding “Piché”). Here, Peachy, a former student of Charles Baillargé, borrowed the Neoclassical style highly popular with the era’s merchant class.

The house is really famous because of its one-time occupant. On the night of February 2, 1866, historian François-Xavier Garneau suffered a fatal epileptic seizure. Barely 56 years old, Garneau had sealed his reputation among Québec’s intellectual elite despite his lack of formal training and his spotty education. In response to the Durham Report of 1839, which described French Canadians as “a people with no literature and no history,” a young Garneau wrote the first complete history of French Canada, a work that earned him the title of national historian.

I'm not quite sure what this roof eave adornment was about. I'll have to find its story.

This book has been recommended to me my numerous people at the Literature & Historical Society's Morrin Centre. I decided I had to buy it and read it while I'm here. I couldn't be happier that I did.

Its author, Louise Penny, a Canadian, has penned numerous mystery novels set in the Canadian province of Quebec centered on the work of francophone Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Bury Your Dead takes place here and its locations are incredibly familiar to me. The synopsis reads, "As Quebec City shivers in the grip of winter, its ancient stone walls cracking in the cold, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache plunges into the most unusual case of his celebrated career. A man has been brutally murdered in one of the city's oldest buildings - a library where the English citizens of Quebec safeguard their history (the aforementioned Morrin Centre). And the death opens a door into the past, exposing a mystery that has lain dormant for centuries...a mystery Gamache must solve if he's to apprehend a present-day killer." It is beyond cool that the characters walk down our street. They grab coffee in places we have dined and they have introduced us to new places we plan to discover. Dinner was at one such place.

"The two men and Henri set out along rue St-Jean, past the restaurants and tourist shops, to a tiny side street called rue Couillard, and there they found Chez Temporel. They'd been coming to this café for fifteen years, ever since Superintendent Émile Comeau had retired to old Québec City, and Gamache had come to visit, to spend time with his mentor, and to help with the little chores that piled up."

"Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There's a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in."

- Louise Penny