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Profane Present. In the evening, tourists swarmed into smoky, hot, low ceiling nightclubs like the Tic Toe (one of the owners once won $140,000 on a horse race) and the Chez Maurice. The grade of entertainment was low, but the legs of the long lines of scantily clad showgirls kicked high.
As in every city, there was gambling, at the luxurious Cote St. Luc House, where as much as $100,000 on weekends is waged at craps and roulette amid sumptuous decor—pale plush carpets, pale beige walls, right out of a Technicolor musical (the filet mignon is on the house, and busted gamblers get a free ride home). There was also gambling at scores of hideaways, at Montreal's own games, balbo and barbotte.* And, of course, there was bingo in many of the hundreds of churches, whose realistic cures regarded it as a painless way to supplement the collections.
The tourists invaded the handicraft shops for carved wooden curios, bright habitant shawls, blankets, hooked rugs, and furs. They rode in horse-drawn carriages to the quaint old marliet of Bonse-cours (Our Lady of Good Help) and up 753-ft. Mount Royal. They crowded into large Notre Dame Church (which seats 5,000) and St. James's Cathedral with its bronze baldachin over the altar, a replica of St. Peter's in Rome.
Just outside the city they climbed gingerly into narrow boats with toughened hulls, and shot the turbulent Lachine Rapids as the old voyageurs had 200 years before. To the north, in the rolling Laurentians and around Mont Tremblant, skiers' winter paradise, there would be deer and moose hunting in the fall, and fishing (for salmon and speckled trout).
Empty Pockets. As the flood of tourists poured dollars into his city, Montreal's Mayor Houde could well enjoy a Bingo! or two of his own. On & off for the past 18 years Mayor Houde, a 5 ft. 7½ in. 247-lb. human dynamo with a batrachian grin, has run Montreal with most of the uproar, fun and profit of a rip-roaring bingo game. He winked at the famed bordellos, shrugged off the gambling, and washed away municipal sins with a flood of Gallic wit, energy and superabundant good fellowship.
When political opponents charged that Mayor Houde liked his city profane because it had paid him thousands of dollars a week in graft, he expressively pulled out his empty pockets. (He is broke today.) He was also apt to make the shrewd point that tourists liked Montreal better that way.
Sometimes the brand of politics peddled by Montreal's mayor seemed more than unmoral; sometimes it seemed to smack of fascism. What tourists, and other Americans forgot—or never knew—was that the quaint old cities of Quebec had bred and fostered a fanatical nationalism that did have many of the trappings of fascism. Few Americans understood it or the reason for it. Houde did.
Joke Book. A ruthless political freebooter, he played this nationalism for all it was worth—just as he had turned everything else to account in politics, even his enormous red nose. He made the nose as famed in Canada as Jimmy Durante's in the U.S., proudly called it one "worthy of Cyrano." In combination with his foxy, small eyes and his vast expressive jaw, he looks like a cross between W. C. Fields and Fiorello LaGuardia.