Southern Québec(1) is like an irregular right triangle with the 90 degree angle in the northwest. There, at James Bay--an extension of Hudson Bay--the old boundary once followed the Eastmain River upstream and east, then cut over to where today's Labrador's southwest corner is. The rest of the area's east bound follows current provincial limits. The remainder of the north bound is set by Labrador's south until it reaches the sea at the Strait of Belle(2) Isle--the second point of the triangle. The hypotenuse follows the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the river upstream to Lake St. Francis. The third corner is very rounded, cutting up to the Ottawa River and following it upstream to 79 degrees west. The triangle's west side follows 79 degrees up to the head of James Bay, then the bay's eastshore back to the mouth of the Eastmain.
Most of the land is within the Canadian Shield, a vast low lake-studded plateau bounded southeast along the St. Lawrence (Laurent) River by the Laurentian(3) Mounains. There are three exceptions: I. Near the head of James Bay is a small piece of the Arctic(4) Coastal Plain. II. Going downstream until about Québec City the valley lands near the St. Lawrence River(5) are part of the continent's interior lowlands. III. The Appalachian Mountain system extends along the Quebéc-New Hampshire and Québec-Maine borders to the end of the Gaspé(6) Peninsula where they are known as the Notre Dame(7) range.
About nine in ten speakers use French as a first language; most of the remainder, English. More than a third are bilingual. Almost everyone is a Christian, with most of the French speakers Catholic, and the English speakers Protestant.
There is one large city, Montréal, on an island in the St. Lawrence River not far from the province's southwest corner. This, the world's second largest French-speaking city, makes urban winter's more tollerable by linking downtown buildings with underground passages.
The provincial capital, Québec, while smaller than Montréal is still significantly populous. It's also on the river; downstream where a small tributary joins, sitting on a cliff that divides the city into lower and upper parts.
People arrived perhaps 30,000 years ago from the west and northwest.
All the residents before Europeans arrived spoke Amerindian languages in two categories: I. Algonquian, specifically Cree, Montagnais, Algonkin, Malecite and Micmac; and II. Iroquoian. The latter lived in the St. Lawrence valley and cultivated beans, corn, squash and tobacco. The last of these plants held religious significance. Because they lived in denser communities than the Algonquians, they succumbed faster to European diseases like smallpox. So many died that the valley became nearly empty and Algonquians, hunter-gatherers, moved in.
The French were the first Europeans to stay. They were conquered by the English and many French speakers were then deported from coastal lands to this area. The English arrived in larger numbers when the United States of American gained independence and Loyalists to the mother country fled north. Their numbers continued to grow until about World War III when policy changes favoring French cultural autonomy within Québec discouraged Anglophones. In recent decades they have been proportionately declining.
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(1) Note that the census designation of Nord du (Northern) Québec includes more of what I'm calling the south.
(2)Translates as beautiful.
(3) Les Laurentides in French.
(4) Arctic here is not meant to imply that the lands are anywhere near the Arctic Circle, nor that the Hudson Bay is part of the Arctic Ocean; it is generally considered Atlantic; the area is however frigid.
(5) North America's fourth longest.
(6) Officially de la Gaspésie.
(7) Translates as Our Lady, a Christian religious term.