Sehnsucht

Quebec City & the St. Lawrence River, 1722

"'I wish you and I could go very far up the river in Pierre Charron’s canoe, and then off into the forests to the Huron country, and find the very places where the martyrs died.  I would rather go out there than — anywhere.'  Rather than go home to France, she was thinking.
     "But perhaps, after she grew up, she could come back to Canada again, and do all those things she longed to do.  Perhaps some day, after weeks at sea, she would find herself gliding along the shore of the Îsle d’Orléans and would see before her Kebec, just she had left it; the grey roofs and spires smothered in autumn gold, with the Récollect flèche rising slender and pure against the evening, and the crimson afterglow welling up out of the forest like a glorious memory."

     Cécile Auclair to little Jacques Gaux, in Willa Cather's Shadows on the rock (1931) V.iv =Library of America edition, p. 612, underscoring mine.  Cécile and her father, the apothecary Euclid Auclair, will not return to France after all.  But Cécile has been told that they will, and is here preparing to say goodbye to the New France of a very happy childhood, and its people.