Museum of Civilization

This guide to the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City starts beneath its floor, where a 1750s stone cellar from a Lower Town merchant's house survives inside Moshe Safdie's design. It follows that merchant, Guillaume Estebe, from his rise as the king's storekeeper and a councillor on New France's Superior Council to his arrest in the Bastille after the colony's fall, accused of selling goods to the Crown at inflated prices. Run a hand along the vaulted stone, and remember it once belonged to a man on trial for his life in Paris.