Germain-des-Pres, had his vision that led to the founding of Montreal,
whose consecration was celebrated also within that same circumference at
the Cathedral of Notre Dame; within that circle La Salle lodged in Rue de
la Truanderie, awaiting his fateful commission that should give him leave
to make real his dream of a wilderness empire; not a stone's throw away
from the Rue de la Truanderie ran the street having its beginning or end
in Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, in which the thousands jostled and
fought from morning till night for the purchase of stock in that same
wilderness empire; and it was finally within that same circle that the
wilderness dream, seen for a moment again by Napoleon, grew into the
vision of a republic--a republic that might be found, as Napoleon said,
"too powerful for Europe in two or three centuries," but in whose bosom
dissensions, as he prophesied, could be looked for in the future. A
wilderness, with a radius of nearly a thousand kilometres, was evoked from
the envisioning, praying, adventuring, and enduring of a few Frenchmen,
led by fewer Frenchmen, who stood sooner or later all within the narrow
circle that sweeps around the Sorbonne, but four kilometres in diameter.
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