Parliament Building

This guide to the Parliament Building in Quebec City starts with three carved words above its front door, Je me souviens, I remember, a motto nobody alive can say for certain the meaning of. It follows the self-taught architect Eugène-Étienne Taché, who added the phrase in 1884 without ever explaining it in writing, and the myth that grew up decades later claiming a longer, more pointed verse once accompanied it. You'll hear how historians eventually traced Taché's actual two mottos, and how the province stamped the shorter one onto every car plate in 1978. Look up at the twenty-six bronze statues filling the façade's niches, added across nearly a century of the building's life.