Fear's Folly/(Les demi-civilises) 9780773573352

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FEAR'S FOLLY (les demi-civilisks) Jean-Charles Harvey Translated by John Glassco Edited and Introduced by John O'Connor

Carleton University Press Ottawa - Canada 1982

THE CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES A series of original works, reprints, translations, and new collections of source material relating to Canada, issued under the supervision of the Editorial Board, Carleton Library Series, Carleton University Press, Ottawa, Canada. GENERAL EDITOR

Michael Gnarowski EDITORIAL BOARD

Marlyn J. Barber (History) Bruce Cox (Anthropology) John de Vries (Sociology) David Knight (Geography) Maureen A. Molot (Political Science) Margaret H. Ogilvie (Law) T.K. Rymes (Economics) Warleton University Press Inc., 1982 Ottawa, Canada. ISBN 0-88629-004-X (Carleton University Press Paperback) Printed and bound in Canada. Distributed by: Oxford University Press Canada 70 Wynford Drive DON MILLS, ONTARIO, Canada, M3C IJ9. (416) 44 1-2941

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Harvey, '~ean-~harles, 1891- 1967 [Les demi-civilisCs. English] Fear's folly (Carleton library series ; no. 127) Translation of: Les demicivilisCs. ISBN 0-88629-004-X I. Title. 11. Title: Les demi-civilisbs. English. 111. Series: The Carleton Library ; no. 127.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE This translation was made from the final edition of Les demi-civilisis as revised by the author and published in 1966, just prior to his death. It has been collated with the original edition of 1934, and with the translation by Lukin Barette published in 1938. J.G. Foster, Que. August 1980

Introduction

The extent of Jean-Charles Harvey's contribution to the defence of individual freedom in Quebec has long been underestimated. In his fifty-year career as writer and journalist, he was repeatedly the subject of controversy and much criticism; and in time he acquired a number of descriptive and revealing titles: in 1962 Jean Park remembered him as "Bootlegger d'intelligence en pkriode de prohibition''; three years later Pierre Chalout saluted Harvey as "grand-p6re de la rkvolution tranquille"; and shortly after Harvey's death, Marcel-Aimk Gagnon examThe ined his life and work as "pricurseur de la rkvolution tranq~ille."~ fact that each of these observations is directly related to Harvey's views in his second novel, Les Demi-civilisis, reminds us that its publication in 1934 was a turning-point in the evolution of Quebec culture in this century. Harvey himself has provided additional insight into the true nature of his struggles; on 9 May 1945, in his address to the Institut Dkmocratique Canadien in Montreal on the subject of "La Peur," Harvey outlined to his listeners the accuracy of La Fontaine's fable "Conseil tenu par les rats" as a description of their own situation. He saw Quebec's clergy as the fearsome predatory cat Rodilardus, in need of belling, and the Qukbkcois as the frightened rats who agree that the bell must be hung, though none will take the risk. (The fable is all the more fitting because of the unmistakable ecclesiastical overtones in La Fontaine's diction.) The gatheringin May 1945 may be seen as a comparable but meeting, and Harvey as "leur Doyen, personne fort pr~dente,"~ with this significant difference: while La Fontaine's Dean only talks well, Harvey also acts. His own life and work provide considerable evidence that "le grelot a Ctk attach6 par quelques-uns d'entre nous qui portent encore les cicatrices des morsures reques."' Indeed, his entire career may be viewed as a persistent and courageous confrontation with

Quebec's clerical cats, from which he emerged scarred but indomitable. None of these clashes was more critical than the one following the publication of Les Demi-civilisb,and never was Harvey more audacious or outspoken than in his defiant challenge of Rodilardus in "La Peur." The biography of Jean-Charles Harvey closely parallels the evolution of Quebec journalism in the twentieth century. Born in La Malbaie in November 1891 to descendants of Scot and Norman stock, Harvey later described himself as "Doublement Canadien, parce que je porte en moi, 4 la fois I'ame des pionniers et I'drne des conquerants, la chair et le sang des premiers dkfricheurs et des soldats victorie~x."~His father and grandfather had much in common with those of Max Hubert, protagonist-narrator of Les Demi-civilisis, though Harvey's mother was a far stronger and more positive figure than Max's. Madame Harvey taught her son the value of courage, truth, and honesty as well as a love of liberty and nature; these lessons all recur as central themes in his work. Following the death of his father in 1897, Jean-Charles and his family lived penuriously for many years. But Harvey's indomitable mother was determined that her son would receive an education. In 1905, therefore, the young Jean-Charles was sent to the SCminaire de Chicoutimi for three years of instruction in HumanitQ, Versification, and BellesLettres-an education that largely ignored science and mathematics in favour of intensive study in classical languages and religion, with strong emphasis on matters of faith and race. This training was immediately followed by further classical studies when Harvey enrolled at the age of seventeen as a Jesuit seminarian in Montreal. There Harvey's exposure to the powerful Jesuit influence affected him profoundly; throughout his career it surfaced repeatedly in the unmistakable preaching tone of his articles and novels. Withdrawing from the Jesuit order in January 1915, Harvey completed his formal education after a brief study of law at the UniversitC de Montrhl. But the hardest lessons were yet to follow, and would be learned over the span.of a half century in the fields of journalism and literature. After a brief apprenticeship at La Pattie, Harvey moved for two years to La Presse in 1916, where fellow-novelist Rodolphe Girard had worked a decade earlier, and where Albert Laberge was then a colleague. Employed for three years after the First World War in public relations in Montmagny, Harvey subsequently moved to Le Soleil, where he served a seven-year term as editor-in-chief until 1934, when he was fired in response to clerical outcry over Les Demi-civilisis. After an interlude of a little more than two years as Director of the Office of Statistics in

Quebec City, Harvey was again fired after the defeat of Alexandre Taschereau's Libenls and the election of Maurice Duplessis' Union Nationale. Undaunted by these setbacks, Harvey immediately set about establishing his own newspaper, Le Jour, considered by many the foremost Quebec weekly during its nine-year history (1937-1946). For a time at this point in his life Harvey developed a passing interest in Marxism, but by the late 1940s he had become an outspoken anti-Communist, most notably in his third novel, Les Paradis de sable (1953). Throughout the war and afterward, Harvey worked actively as a public lecturer, then became a radio commentator and director of two papers, Le Petit Journal and Le Photo Journal, until his retirement in 1966. In every public forum he staunchly defended the merits of federalism and bilingualism, and opposed all separatist attitudes and groups, including the Rassemblement pour I'IndCpendance Nationale (R.I.N.). Alongside this very active career as journalist, he conducted a second life as a creative writer of books, including: three published and two unpublished novels, three collections of short stories, one volume of poetry, six works in the field of literary criticism and political essays, and a detailed autobiography, still unpublished. Early in his career he was widely acclaimed as a promising new talent, so much so that he was awarded the Officier de I'AcadCmie frangaise medal in 1928, and the Prix David in 1929. At the same time, Harvey led a very full family life, during which he married three times and fathered seven children, before his death in January 1967. For Harvey the professions of journalist and creative writer were interdependent and often inseparable. Thus, both Max in Lzs Demicivilisb and AndrC in the unpublished Andrk lepossesseur follow the two careers chosen by Harvey. In the "Prbface" written by Harvey for the latter,$e explains the novelist's responsibility to document his own time and place: "A la fantaisie et i la fiction, il doit joindre les dons d'expression du peintre et de I'historien d'une Cpoq~e."~ Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Harvey's best work is his journalism, where his trenchant analysis of current political and moral issues displays his skill as a social historian and critic. It is hardly surprising, then, that all his novels unfold as sermons or political essays rather than as works of sustained creative imagination. Although Harvey considered creative fiction superior to factual history, he nevertheless used Quebec history extensively in his works as a basis for exploring his central themes: individual liberty; man and nature; Quebec's colonial mentality; truth, beauty and goodness; the causes of Quebec's economic inferiority; servitude to the clergy; and anti-Communism.

A number of Harvey's recurrent themes are presented in Les Demicivilishs, his novel of manners about Quebec life in the 1920s. Despite its limitations, there are redemptive features in the work both as historical document and as literary text. Above all, the novel is a manifestation of his courage in challenging the ruling Clite of his province with all the risks suggested by Part's description of him as "bootlegger d'intelligence en ptriode de prohibition." In the novel itself Max is similarly brave, but foresees the consequences of opposing "un crktinisme puantW6when he is told in a dream, "Les bootleggers de I'intelligence s'exposent ii des peines sdveres en ce monde et dans I'autre. Ils sont rares. Aussitdt qu'une intoxication par I'idie ou par I'influence d'un homme de gdnie se manifeste quelque part, nos espions nous renseignent et nous administrons aux coupables un astringent qui guCrit le cerveau de toute tentative de crdation." @. 59)

This satirical comment, like many others in the novel, is a remarkably accurate description of Harvey's treatment when he dared to confront the clerical cat on 6 April 1934 with the publication of Les Demicivilisis. While Harvey later noted modestly that "Par la suite, c'est le hasard qui a voulu que ma vie ressemble au dtroulement du roman,"' his contemporary Louis Dantin was much more impressed than Harvey by this feature of the novel. In a letter of 1 May 1934 to his colleague Louvigny de Montigny, he pointed out that Harvey had "dtcrit en dttail dans son livre m&metoute I'aventure qui lui arri~e."~ In examining the English translation of the novel, too, one reviewer argued that this unusual feature of Harvey's text made it "particularly notable as a fictional autobiography written before the events. What happened to Harvey after its publication has a curious correspondence to what had happened to the fictional character whom he had ~reated."~ Undoubtedly, Harvey could predict so accurately the response to an enterprise like his own because he was such a keen observer of Quebec's cultural, social, and political worlds, and because he understood that the "power behind the throne"1° in each case was the organized Catholic ~ recalls that Church and its clergy. Looking back to the 1 9 3 0 ~Harvey "C'Ctait le temps oh I'Eglise, encore plus que de nos jours, jouissait d'une autoritC et d'un prestige incontestks aussi bien aprhs du pouvoir civil que dans la masse des croyants."ll Thus, at a time when the work of James Joyce, who also knew a good deal about church control firsthand from his Jesuit training, was winning a signal anti-censorship found itself victory in the United States, Harvey's Les ~emi-civilis~s emphatically and absolutely banned a scant nineteen days after publication. In the cultural arena, Harvey struggled against the same opponent

faced in 1904 by Rodolphe Girard's Marie Calumet and, to a degree, by Albert Laberge's La Scouine (1918). Like them, Harvey insisted on challenging the false and outdated portraits of Quebec life perpetuated by the icole du rerroir, and remained determined to promote the need for uncompromising realism and truth. Thus, Harvey repeatedly expressed his admiration for Louis HCmon for his courageous effort to modernize Quebec fiction, and issued "une veritable dtclaration de guerre au terroir"12 in both his first novel, Marcel Faure (1922), and his first collection of criticism, Pages de cririque (1926). The reservations about both expressed by Chanoine Lionel Groulx and Monseigneur Camille Roy prompted Harvey's continued assaults on "la terroirornanie"" in Les Demi-civilisPs. Above all, Harvey was determined to demonstrate that the Quebec of the 1920s and 1930s was a society undergoing a radical transition among its common people, however serene and submissive it appeared to its rulers. In the words of Gerard Tougas, Harvey was one of the first Quebec writers "A vouloir riveiller ses compatriotes de leur rtve patriarcal."I4 It was imperative to do so, Harvey believed, since the rural population was flocking to the city, and the factory chimney was fast becoming a more familiar part of their experience than the rustic plough. In his crusade to update Quebec's view of itself, Harvey was always a rebel and revisionist more than an iconoclast, one who could look to the future without abandoning his heritage. But because he considered the suffocating rule of the clergy and the rise of a bourgeois Clite as faithless distortions of the past and restrictive impediments to the future, he could not remain silent. The publication of Les Demicivilisb, which "s'efforpit de peindre certain milieu petit-bourgeois de Quebec et autres lieu^"'^ and which "satirisait les travers et les vices de petits bourgeois du Quebec ainsi que les inepties de notre Cd~cation,"'~ once again invoked the wrath of Rodilardus, as the organized church moved from behind the political throne to pounce on this impudent challenger of its authority. In early April 1934 Jean-Charles Harvey enjoyed a position of prominence and influence in Quebec politics. As editor-in-chief of Le Soleil, he was the confidant of both Liberal Premier Taschereau and Liberal M.P. Ernest Lapointe, Mackenzie King's chief lieutenant in Quebec. As an astute journalist in Quebec City, he witnessed firsthand the graft, corruption, and patronage in the capital, and the pervasive influence of the Church in its political life. Thus, despite Harvey's services to the party, neither Taschereau nor Lapointe could long support him and expect to survive politically, once he became the clergy's declared enemy. For, here especially, the power of the Church was insurmount-

able; it was, Harvey saw, "un Etat dans 1*Etat"I7and would brook no disloyalty from politicians of whatever religion. In the years following the appearance of Les Derni-civilisks Harvey witnessed little change; as he notes in his unpublished autobiography, aucun homme en vue ne peut, sur aucune question importante, diffkrer publiquement d'opinion avec la caste clericale sans etre privk A jamais de toute situation inttressante et comme exilt dans son propre milieu. . . . C'est pour cette raison que pas un seul h i v a i n canadien de langue franqtise, vivant dans le Qukbec, n'a jamais pu dire la veritk sur les problemes essentielsde son pays natal. . . . C'est pour les mCmes raisons encore que nos reprtsentants politiques A Ottawa, aussi bien qu'i Quebec, sont souvent forcks de se mentir B eux-mimes et de mentir A tout le monde.lU

In such a climate, the response of Premier Taschereau, Le Soleifs owner Jacob Nicol (a Protestant senator), and its managing editor Henri Gagnon to Cardinal Villeneuve's ban was a foregone conclusion. On 25 April 1934, less than three weeks after the publication of Les Demi-civilisis, J.-M.Rodrigue Cardinal Villeneuve officially placed Harvey's novel on the Index. His condemnation was published the following day in La Scmaine religieuse de Qukbec: DECLARATION CONDEMNA'I'ION DU ROMAN "LES DEMI-CIVILISES"

Le roman L.es demi-civilists, de Jean-Charles Harvey, tombe sous le canon 1399, 3O, du Code de Droit canonique. Consequemment, ce livre est prohibk par le droit commun de I'Eglise. Nous le dklarons tel et le condamnons aussi de Notre propre autoritt architpiscopale. I1 est donc d0fendu, sous peine de faute grave, de le publier, de le lire, de le garder, de le vendre, de le traduire ou de le communiquer aux autres. (Can. 1398, I)'*

However, article 1399,3O, of the Code of Canon Law says books should be banned when they "purposely attack religion or good moral^,"'^ which Les Demi-civilisPs does not, for it is neither immoral nor irreligious, but only uncompromising in its determination to defend truth and condemn hypocrisy and injustice. It is clear that Harvey's real crime was saying publicly what everyone knew privately; he was vociferously opposed by the clergy because his staunch defence of liberty posed a threat to the clerical minority's tyranny over all aspects of Quebec life. Moreover, as Harvey suspected, there were ulterior motives for this ban; it could serve as revenge against the all-toocritical editor of Le Soleil as well as a means of improving the fortunes of its rival, L'Action cathol i q ~ e . Still, ~ ' the Index had its effect on Harvey, who thereafter repeatedly refuted its specific charges in print and in person. In a September 1941 editorial in Le Jour, he declared,

I1 ne m'inttresse nullement d'ttre cltrical ou anticlerical. Je ne suis ni I'un ni I'autre. J'aime le vrai, le beau, le bien, et je dtteste I'hypocrisie sous toutes ses formes. Je n'attiique jamais la religion et la morale. Je fais toujours la part des principes et des hommes qui repksentent ces p r i n c i p e ~ . ~ ~

Soon after, Le Jour was censured by the Catholic Church for its recurrent attacks on the clergy. Undaunted, Harvey insisted again, in his lecture in Montreal in 1945 on the subject of fear, that he did not oppose religion and morality in either his personal or his professional life. The irrepressible courage Harvey displayed in his address on fear recalls his immediate response to the banning of Les Demi-civilist!~. On the evening of 25 April 1934 Harvey had just delivered a strong anticlerical talk on Voltaire to a group of friends at a meeting of their "Anticrkin" Club when he received news that his novel had been placed on the Index. With great joy at this sign that his arrows had found their mark he raised his glass and exclaimed, "C'est le plus beau jour de ma vie!"23 Nonetheless, Villeneuve's ban soon had less pleasant consequences for Harvey's private and public life. The following day, after conferring with Taschereau and Nicol, Le Soleirs managing editor demanded Harvey's resignation, promising him six months' leave with pay followed by a civil service job in the provincial government; Gagnon also insisted that Harvey publicly withdraw his book. Reprehensible as such a retraction was to Harvey, as the father of six children in the middle of the Depression he had no choice; but he finally agreed to Gagnon's proposals only because the copies of the novel were no longer his p r o p erty, and thus could not really be withdrawn by him. With this legal distinction in mind, the following day Harvey wrote to L'Action catholique: Aprts la declaration de Son Eminence le cardinal Villeneuve, publik hier, je consens 3 retirer du march6 mon dernier roman LPS Demi-civifisks, et je prie les libraires et iditeurs de vouloir bien en tenir compte.*'

Although the choice of "consens" made it clear that Harvey's action was dictated to him, he noted nearly thirty years later, "Je ne me suis pourtant jamais pardonnt de m'ttre prttC A cette ~ o m t d i e . "To ~ ~some extent, he, too, was compelled to acknowledge fear and helplessness when struggling against the formidable power of the clergy. A consideration of public response to Les Demi-civilisb reveals a similar fear and frustration among his colleagues and other members of the cultural establishment, and proves ironically how correct Harvey was in his assessment of the absence of intellectual freedom in Quebec. While the Index resulted in a sell-out of the novel's 3,000 first-edition copies within a few weeks, and gave his book "des heures de cC1C-

britC,"26 it also gave its author many years of notoriety and harassment. Others, unwilling to risk public approval of the text for fear of reprisal, offered praise to Harvey in private letters, but dared not declare their support openly. Typical of their reaction are the letters of Jean BruchCsi and Alfred Desrochers. The former wrote to Harvey on 2 May 1934: J'ai lu ton roman, les Demi-civilistis, avant la condamnation. Ma conscience est bien tranquille!!! Je me proposais d'en parier aux lecteurs de la Revue moderne. Je doute fort que ce soit possible mai~~tenant.~'

Desrochers' response was longer and angrier but, finally, no less timid. While he actively promoted the sale of the book as a private agent, and denigrated the cretinous bourgeois Clite of Quebec, the essence of his public response was enraged silence: J'ai lu ton livre, et si j'avais le droit d'icrire, sans rnettre en danger de crever de fairn ceux qui dipendent de moi, je dirais que ton livre prouve I'inanitd des IibertOs individuelles pour quoi se battent ou s'efforcent de se batlre ceux A qui convicnt le titre d'intellectuels au Canada.ls

Like Louis Dantin, Desrochers found Harvey's treatment lamentable and declared freedom to think and write non-existent in the Quebec of 1934; but neither said so publicly. Harvey, however, did not forget their silence, and made a pointed reference to it in his lecture on fear: "Quand un pauvre diable est chasse d'un poste important pour avoir prononck des propos dits hkritiques ou icrit un mauvais roman, c'est encore votre devoir de vous porter A sa dCfen~e."~~ Inasmuch as Harvey received such support it was limited to decrying his dismissal from Le Soleif's editorship after his letter of retraction. A few who supported Harvey's book objected strenuously to his "consent" to withdraw it, seeing such capitulation as a useless and fearful surrender, especially in the light of his subsequent removal as editor. Finally, there were some mixed reviews of the novel, notably Berthelot Brunet's, and negative reaction in others, pai-ticularly Lucien Parizeau's, both of which appeared in L'Ordre in response to "L'affaire Harvey." The latter went so far as to defend Villeneuve's banning of Les Derni-civilisb and to suggcst that Harvey rework the novel "avec I'autorisation du cardinal-archkveque de QuCbe~."~~ It is possible that Harvey had Pgrizeau in mind when, a year later, he recalled some of the reactions to the novel as "opinions contradictoires et parfois cocasses qui avaient accueilli mon dernier roman" and noted Recalthat "L'Ccrivain n'es t pas responsable de la sottise du le~teur."~' ling that, as a novelist, his duties to his reader were not identical to those of a journalist, he showed little sympathy for readers who confused the

two-almost an inevitability given his position at Le Soleil and the fact that his protagonist, Max Hubert, is both writer and journalist. At this time Harvey was practising neither profession, for he had become a provincial civil servant in the fall of 1934, at half his former salary. Here again, the cardinal's influence as the clerical power behind the political throne manifested itself, for Taschereau had initially offered Harvey the post of provincial librarian on condition that the cardinal agree. To Father Chamberland, a friend of Harvey who acted as intermediary, Villeneuve's reply was unequivocal and incontrovertible: "Faites savoir au premier ministre que je n'ai aucune objection B ce qu'il confie B M. The Harvey toutes les fonctions qu'il voudra . . sauf la bibli~th&que."~~ solution was as ridiculous as it was inevitable:

.

De 1 ce compromis: B la bibliotheque, M. Taschereau nomma le colonel Marquis, statisticien depuis vingt ans, et, A Harvey, krivain et joumaliste depuis toujours, il confia la statistique. Le premier ne connaissait rien aux livres et le second ignorait tout de la statistique."

In this employment Harvey was effectivelyshackled, "condamnk au rille de sourd, muet et aveugle"" much as his sympathetic but silent friends were. Of course, Harvey could not then foresee how unjustified was his anxiety that he was trapped there without recourse until retirement, or how soon he would owe his unexpected but ultimately fortuitous deliverance not to his longtime Liberal allies but rather to their political rival, Maurice Duplessis. For, with the accession to power, in the provincial election of 17 August 1936, of the Union Nationale, the winds of political patronage shifted direction and soon swept Harvey out of the Office of Statistics. While Harvey himself has left conflicting accounts the principal details do agree: during the early weeks of of the in~ident,'~ 1937 Harvey learned quite indirectly that he had been fired (which he had been expecting). Duplessis*hand may have been forced at that time by articles in the pro-separatist La Nation that falsely condemned Harvey as a Communist. The following year Duplessis is said to have admitted privately that the firing was a result of the writing of Les Demi-civilisd sand the exertion of external pressure. By the time the dismissal was made public, Harvey was already. engaged in planning his next campaign of opposition to clerical control. Louis Dantin had been correct in guessing that the repression of Les Demi-civilisis would become "le signal d'une rC~istance,"~~ a resistance that was consolidated and made visible with the launching of Harvey's weekly newspaper, Le Jour, in September 1937. No longer "sourd, muet et aveugle," Harvey re-emerged as a polemical opponent, but now he

had the same freedom enjoyed by Max Hubert in the operation of his periodical, Le VingtiPme Sikle. Once again life was imitating art. Moreover, as he later told Jean Par6 in an interview, one of his collaborators at Le Jour, a Frenchman named Jean Lebret, by "Pure coincidence," was "l'image mtme du Hermann Lillois des 'Demicivilists.' "37 In his work at Le Jour, Harvey received substantial financial support and personal encouragement from Senator Raoul Dandurand, who shared Harvey's belief in the need for widespread educational reform in Quebec. Still, while an attack on the church's exclusive control over nearly all aspects of Quebec's educational system was officially the newspaper's central concern, Harvey's principal objective remained a defence of individual liberty. For this reason, his weekly also fought against racism, nationalism, Communism, and Nazism; in his editorials Harvey insisted that French-Canadians were their own worst enemies, and actively campaigned for widespread social and political reform. It is clear, then, that the attack launched in 1934 in Les Demi-civilisi!~ was not terminated by the cardinal's ban, only temporarily interrupted in the form of Harvey's two-year interlude as civil servant. Le Jour was, in his own words, a b'journalde combat" that permitted him to advance "une libiration plus prdcieuse que I'indCpendance nationale elle-meme, la libiration de I'e~prit."~*Combative artist Harvey was and would remain, as suggested by the revealing title of another work published the same year, Art cStcombat, where Harvey characterized himself as a man "qui ne fait pas mCtier de flatter et qui suit la ligne droite de sa conscience et I'impulsion de son c o e ~ r . " ~ ~ Harvey followcd this straight line and this impulse to the end of his life, for his efforts to secure individual freedom in Quebec by challenging Rodilardus did not end with the founding of Le Jour or with his lecture on fear. The cardinal's ban in 1934 effectively limited Les Demicivilisb to a single edition of 3,000 copies for more than a quarter of a century. During this period, Harvey carried the stigma of clerical opposition, and remained unduly slighted or ignored in numerous studies of Quebec literature. Not surprisingly, the second edition of the novel, published by Les Editions de I'homme in 1962, was received very differently from its predecessor. Only an offended cleric like Romain Ligard could continue to see in the book a "nouveau et cinglant difi au clergi," and condemn its "inopportune rdddition en 1962."'O A more typical reaction noted that Harvey himself had helped to create the altered climate in which his book now appeared outmoded, and wondered at the sensibility of an age that could have respgnded with such inappropriate vehemence to the first edition. From the perspective of the 1960s

Les Demi-civilisks appeared unrealistic, sentimental, and poorly constructed. While to a few it might seem to be, in Brunet's image, "cette salade oir vous ne manquerez pas de trouver trois ou quatre bouchCes assez savoure~ses,"~~ for GCrard Tougas little flavour remained: "Les romans de Jean-Charles Harvey sont parmi les plus indigestes de Of these novels, Les Demi-civilisks is la IittCrature ~anadienne."~~ unquestionably the best and the most important. In Gilles Marcotte's view, the work appears "ratde, mais avec une certaine splendeur," and remains "un des livres-clCs de la IittCrature canadienne-fran~aise.**~~

...

While the publication of Les Demi-civilisis was undeniably a turningpoint in the development of Quebec fiction, it is now clear that its importance stems less from action in the novel than from reactions to it, both favourable and derogatory, for they signalled early rumblings of the quiet revolution. It is, therefore, worthwhile to consider the merits of the novel in its original form, those features that give it "une certaine splendeur." For the 1934 text of the novel stands at the very centre of Harvey's work; it is a height of land to which his previous writings provide approaches and from which his subsequent ventures flow. The novel is both a distillation of his earlier concerns and a kind of prophetic vision about his own future and that of his province. Its publication was an act of courage, a defiant rebuke to the half-civilized hypocrites and tyrants of Quebec society. In short, Harvey dared to bell the clerical cats. Through a selection of episodes in the life of Max Hubert, Harvey has conveyed important lessons in the ways of the Quebec world of the prohibition period. In the novel he vividly evokes the topography of Quebec City and its people, showing their dissipated life through a series of vignettes on decadent "wild parties," government balls, and selfindulgent orgies among the ruling class, where selfishness and hypocrisy are rampant. These portraits provide.Harvey with numerous opportunities to display his satiric wit and ironic humour in dealing with the self-serving ruses of the American "Little Lady Vagabond," and the pathetic account of cultural czar NicCphore Gratton's derangement following a devastating attack on his terroir literary pieces. Through these entertaining sketches Harvey offers a penetrating analysis of halfcivilized and often uncivilized behaviour. Using Lucien Joly as his spokesman, the novelist presents unforgettable portraits of the greedy, foolish bourgeois class, including one man who puts his own name on the spine of classic literary texts, and another who sues the transport company for breaking and losing the arms of his copy of VCnus de Milo! Equally memorable are brief sketches of Toronto puritans and the irony

of a hostile Charity League threatening violence under a banner proclaiming their motto: "Aimez-vous les uns les autres" (p. 136). Harvey's trenchant criticism is equally effective when it extends to other professions, notably law, teaching, journalism, and the religious life. Les Demi-civilisis is never excessively anti-clerical, and never immoral or irreligious. It is human failings that Harvey attacks, not the institution itself, clericalism and not religion, in his wide-ranging look at moral weakness and the inhumane treatment of people; especially noteworthy are Max's nightmare in response to pressures to join the priesthood; DorothCe's criticism of convent life and her flight from its restrictions; the refusal to bury the kind-hearted but unorthodox Maxime in consecrated ground; and the smuggler Luc Meunier's purchase of church honours. But Harvey also practises restraint, for no criticism is offered by Max when he leaves the unspecified religious order, and the positive virtues of religious devotion are presented both in Lucien's qualified praise of nuns' selflessness and in Hermann Liilois* spirited defence of Christ in contrast to the corrupt modern church. Indeed, Harvey's approach to his subject often seems to be by way of dialectic, for he deliberately sets Max's namesake, Maxime, in opposition to thc Church in the nightmarish vision at the end of chapter I, and further exposes both deficiencies and excesses of character and the limited wisdom of public opinion by explicit contrasts between Baillard and Valade (chapter 7), Bouvier and Max (chapter lo), and Lucien and Hermann (chapter 17). Throughout, Harvey's clearest portraits emerge from such juxtapositions, most notably in the final example, where he contrasts a "civilisb" and a "tropcivilisC." Of course, Lucien's character immediately recalls that of Maxime, for both represent "le bon sens" and prove to be wise counsellors for Max, although their advice is often misunderstood. It is Lucien, more than Max, who embodies the ideal civilized man in the novel: generous, compassionate, intelligent, fair-minded, courageous, and loyal. He is presented as a faithful husband, responsible father, and trustworthy friend who never loses hope that good men will prevail. Capable of spirited verbal defences of the future of civilization and the central role of art in human affairs, he is also a man of action who bravely protects his friend Hermann from physical abuse at the hands of a mob. By giving Max such a confidant and colleague, Harvey is able to explore through dialogue the significance of Le Vingtiime Siicle as an "entreprise de libbration" (p. 81) where "une idCe juste prbvaudra toujours, it la longue, contre mille idCes fausses" (p. 81). Significantly, it is the impetuous Hermann rather than the prudent Lucien who provokes the wrath of Quebec's ruling class by blunt criticism of their failings. In a

similar way, it is Lucien, not Hermann, who sees the bourgeoisie as the tragically uprooted, and who accompanies Max back to his grandfather's abandoned house. There, the two friends praise the common rural people as the most civilized, and condemn the bourgeois Clite as merely half-civilized. This conversation, which explains Harvey's choice of title, is the culmination of many earlier reflections by Max on his love of nature and respect for the virtues of his ancestors-the pioneers, coureurs de bois, the stalwart opponents to British rule in 1775, adventurers, and discoverers-down to his grandfather's generation, beside whom the present race of cowardly, self-serving QuCbCcois seems like "poussins couvQ par des faucons" (p. 178). Of all the characters in the novel, Lucien most fully embodies the spirit of these ancestors. It is he who adds a certain splendour to the novel; it is his observations and insights that make the novel an important text in the development of modern Quebec fiction. However, the prominent role Lucien Joly plays as ideal civilized man underlines a fundamental problem in characterization in Les DemicivilisPs: a secondary character assumes primary importance, and significantly overshadows the nominal protagonist. The novelist has thus unwittingly subverted his own design, so that Max Hubert exists in an indeterminate world somewhere between the half-civilized bourgeoisie and Lucien's ideal state. Perhaps Harvey sensed Max's inadequacies and consequently modelled his character's life on his own only in the early chapters of the work, where Max is a far more credible and sympathetic figure, and where Lucien has not yet been introduced to overshadow him. These and other shortcomings in Les Derni-civilist!~ noted by GCrard Tougas are just as apparent to us, and were so, presumably, to Harvey as well, for he admitted thirty years after its publication, "J'abordai le roman de moeurs et le roman social, un peu maladroitement, sans doute"; "J'ai Ccrit moi-mCme un tas de choses superficielles et faciles. Because the protagonist's role in Les Demi-civilisis is shared by Lucien and Max, and because the novel itself is divided between the romance of Max and DorothCe and a number of polemical attacks on many segments of Quebec society, Harvey's work never achieves unity or coherence in design or execution, and lacks any authentic sense of dynamic inner tension, especially in the haphazard allusions to Quebec history, which are never satisfactorily integrated. Episodic and uneven in its vacillation between trite sentimentality and angry polemic, the novel repeatedly offers us poorly motivated action, shallow characterization, and clumsy plot construction as well. Les Demi-civilisks is a book made up of the flashes of wit and insight characteristic of a clever journalist's essay. A curious alloy of autobiography,

roman ci clP, and invented narrative, it therefore does remain suspended among personal memoir, social history, and creative fiction, despite Harvey's early protests against such a reading: "N'ai-je pas failli me faire kcorcher vif parce qu'une partie du public voulait & tout prix que mes "Derni-civilisPs" fussent de I'histoire et non du roman? Des malins ont dbignC, dans ce livre, une cinquantaine de personnes auxquellesje n'avais jamais p e n ~ k . " ~ ~ Harvey's handling of characterization displays a central weakness in the writing of the novel: a failure to exercise a more rigorous discipline over the potentially bland features of his material. DorothCe is a case in point. Her words and actions range on many occasions from the incredible (on love) to the unbearably sentimental (her account of burning Max's love letters and saying a final farewell to her beloved pony). Moreover, she rarely emerges as a women of flesh and blood, remaining an ethereal being for Max and for us, nowhere more so than in the novel's final chapters, where she rejects "1'Autre" as her convent bridegroom and pursues a vision of her god Max through a blizzard, ending with a delirious dream of their marriage among the stars. Other examples of melodrama, sentimentality, and unassimilated conventions are apparent in the intrigue surrounding Abel Warren's death, the suicides of Thomas Bouvier and Dumont's young lover, the furniture and tools that speak to a tearful Max when he returns to his grandfather's farm, and the long-delayed revelation of DorothCe's true parentage. Nor are the main characters alone inadequately handled. Secondary characters like Marthe, Dumont, Kathleen, and Frangoise, who seem to be presented expressly to highlight some feature of the principal characters, have no substantial life of their own. None of these characters or incidents is portrayed in an original or convincing way. Contradictions in the actions of Max and DorothCe are rarely explored, and an essential dramatization of their supposed virtues is conspicuously absent. Moreover, we never see the wife and children to whom Lucien is said to be devoted, and are therefore much surprised by his anomalous presence at Pinon's "wild party" and his uncharacteristic pettiness at the Governor's ball. His heroic stature is further diminished when he fails to defend Max in his debate with the half-civilized (chapter 27), hardly a likely response from the man who earlier faced a hostile mob to defend his other friend, Hermann Lillois. The latter, a "trop civilid," is a shadowy character throughout, a staunch defender of free expression in life and art whose French background and determination to tell the truth about the Quhbhcois recall features of Louis HCmon as remembered by Kathleen Ross. Moreover, although Hermann Lillois, whose name is almost an anagram of .Louis HCmon, writes an explicit sex novel with all the audacity

of a D.H. Lawrence, this intriguing aspect of his character is never sufficiently explored. At first glance the novel seems more satisfactory from a technical standpoint: structure, handling of time, use of dreams, etc. We note, for example, the symmetry of the novel, which begins and ends in winter, as it moves from the childhood of Max to the childlike simplicity of Dorothke, from the death of Maxime's sons in a blizzard to Dorothee's prolonged struggle against a similar fate. The opening and closing chapters balance Max's nightmare of confinement to the priesthood against Dorothke's delirium after her escape from the convent. We have already noted a comparable balance in several contrasting pairs of characters and in Max's relationship with Maxime and Lucien. Furthermore, the references to time within the novel are consistent, and Harvey displays much skill and originality in his use of dream-vision to convey a satiric portrait of a tree-city where Liberty is almost hanged. But on closer inspection it is apparent that even in these areas the novel's shortcomings are manifest. A second dream-vision, following Dorothte's break with Max, in which he wanders in a dark wood where the trees cry out in pain like living creatures, is transparently derived from Dante's account of the wild forest of the suicides in Canto XI11 of the Inji?mo. However, Harvey's text is not allusive, and no use is made of the original context; certainly, Max is not consciously contemplating suicide here. Moreover, some irregularities in verb tense make it unclear if Max is expressing opinions he held at the time of particular events or at the time of recollection, and we are given no clue to the temporal relationship between Max's experiences and the perspective in time from which he is surveying his early life. in a similar way, cxamples of skill in the structure of the novel are overshadowed by a number of clumsy transitions throughout the novel and by many implausibilities; for example: the coincidental meeting between Max and Kathleen on the train to New York (chapter 20); the two voices of Max's subconscious (chapter 22) that debate matters of Quebec history-an inappropriate technique that simply makes a convenience of Max's character for purposes of an unintegrated lesson on the past; the shadowy presence of Lucien and Hermann in the novel's final scene; and the confusing shift to the present tense in the novel's conclusion. Other inconsistencies suggest still greater inattention on Harvey's part: so distracted is Max by his disillusionment over journalism that he is oblivious to everything around him, but he then lists all the things that he supposedly fails to notice (chapter 8); twice in Max's narration (chapters 10 and 34) Harvey stumbles awkwardly in his handling of point of view, since these accounts of Dorothte's actions could not possibly be narrated by Max; and finally, there

is DorothCe's startling suggestion at the end of the novel that her love relationship with Max has been wholly platonic-a revelation very much at odds with the apparent liberalism of her thinking earlier in the novel (chapter 13). Furthermore, unmotivated action and superficial characterization are presented through improbable dialogue in an inflated prose style that struggles too earnestly to convey its message. Harvey shows the instincts and style of a combative journalist, not the grace and discipline of an accomplished artist. It is difficult to agree with his instructor in "BellesLettres" at Chicoutimi who wrote: "M. Harvey est un favori des Mu~es,"'~for Les Demi-civilishs is, in the final analysis, a flawed novel whose significance rests primarily on external impact rather than internal merit. Indeed, the novel itself provides models against which it can be measured and found wanting. Despite Harvey's comments to the contrary,'" Les Demi-civilishs is decidedly not like the novel by Hermann Lillois, who "avait CtC le premier, dans un roman vigoureux, ii dicouvrir et ii dissCquer I'amour en sa complexitC charnelle comme en ses mystiques Clans ver le sur-humain idCal" (p. 82). Nor is it similar to Kathleen Ross's roman ci cf&about the scandalous habits of the bourgeois class in Quebec, for Harvey does not name names. Harvey's novel is also far more timid than Hermann Lillois' fearless article on the lack of modernday Christs among the clergy-a brutal and explicit attack. Finally, it is only to a limited extent that the contents of Le Vingtiime Siicle resemble Les Demi-civilisks, for Max's review has a wider focus and readership, as well as greater success and more prudence in its gradual march toward liberalism. Each of these texts-Lillois' novel and article, Kathleen's novel, and Max's review-reminds us of Harvey's objectives in writing Les Demi-civilishs, but none of them resembles his own achievement very extensively. We have seen that Harvey, too, was aware of shortcomings in his novels. After restating the themes of Les Demi-civilishs a decade later in "La Peur," Harvey returned to his novel and made substantial revisions to it for the second edition. Moreover, despite the advice of' Lucien Parizeau in his review of the first edition, Harvey did so without the assistance or authorization of cardinal or clergy. Nevertheless, an indication of such clerical approval would at least have served some purpose in announcing a new edition to a critic such as Marcel-Aim6 Gagnon, who seems oblivious to the major revisions in the 1962 text. Because he considers the 1934 and 1962 texts to be one and the same, there are serious errors of interpretation in his discussion of Les Demi-civifisds in Jean-Charles Harvey: Prhcurseur de la rbvolution tranquille. The nature of Harvey's revisions for the second edition varies a great

deal. While the second edition silently corrects some typographical errors, it introduces others, and overlooks at least one passage (in chapter 6) that makes Jean Vernier's advice to Max unintelligible in the 1962 text. Along with many substitutions of single words (especially verbs) in the second edition, Harvey also abbreviates many descriptions of Dorothee's attractions and eliminates many similes and redundancies. The result is a more forceful prose style and a less abstract characterization that strengthen some of the weak points in the first edition. In general, the revised text is more economical and dramatic in its presentation, and Max emerges as a less volatile and egocentric personality by appropriating some of Lucien's virtues. Certainly Harvey was aware that Quebec's social climate had changed radically in the twentyeight years since the publication of the tirst edition-a change partly wrought by Les DemicivilisPs itself. By the early 1960s Rodilardus had much mellowed, and was no longer a menace in need of belling; the period of prohibition was past, and Harvey's society had become far more tolerant in matters of sexuality. The text, then, needed to be mfdernized to be palatable to readers of a later day. Thus, in the 1962 edition the reference to ~ a t h leen Ross's gangster family is eliminated; thoughts are now dispensed in bottles offlrry ounces; a man of wealth now is worth a half-million dollars rather than one hundred thousand; and Arctic missionary work is acknowledged. In other adjustments Harvey levels more specific criticism at the Ligue du SacrC-Coeur and at a seminarian at Laval (rather than a professor at MontrCal), and reworks the scene in which Max's two voices debate the 1775 invasion of Quebec as an overheard conversation, thereby greatly improving the text and his handling of Max's characterization. But Harvey's lack of subtlety once again clutters his text when he insists on overstating the obvious by declaring the moral lessons to be learned. The sentences he adds at the end of chapters 15 and 17 in the 1962 edition are superfluous. Like the ironic comment on a journalist's lot interpolated into chapter 8, such additions weaken the overall impact of the writing and further demonstrate Harvey's encumbering lack of restraint. A similar lack of restraint (though appropriate in this case) is particularly apparent in Harvey's more daring treatment of sex in the second edition, where he substitutes "girls de burlesque" for "ballerines russes," adds a witty aside about a critic's wife who remains a virgin after twenty years of marriage, and expands the discussion of "burning love'' between Max and Maryse. But it is particularly in the treatment of DorothCe and Max's relationship that the revisions are significant; at the same time he eliminates the annoying inconsistencies of the first edition. Harvey leaves no doubt that the relationship is a sexual one

when he changes their meeting-place from Max's office to his apartment, and adds: "Pendant qu'elle laissait tomber une B une les pi6ces de son vCtement" (chapter 16). This clause substantially alters our interpretation of accompanying details and necessitates a major revision of the ending, where DorothCe no longer says that no man has ever removed her dress or that Max will find her beautiful. The effect of such adjustments is positive, for they create a more consistent character and a more credible love relationship. At the same time Harvey eliminates from the last two chapters all direct references to DorothCe's imminent death, apparently wishing to retain the possibility of her reviving in order to provide a happy ending. However, such tampering works against the logic of the book, and thus creates a new problem. This difficulty was not resolved in 1966, when Les Editions de l'homme reset the book for a third edition, the last produced during Harvey's lifetime. Its text is substantially the same as the 1962 edition (including the oversight in chapter 6), with some minor revisions in style and a few substitutions (e.g., a squirrel coat becomes a buffalo coat). The sentimental talking by household items (chapter 31) and Bouvier's speech to Max (chapter 32) are abbreviated somewhat, and Harvey continues the practice, found in the second edition, of adjusting verb tenses to clarify the time-frame of Max's observations. In many cases, past tense is replaced by present in an attempt to suggest, for example, the enduring qualities of rural people and a continuity between past and present. In summary, it is clear that Harvey was largely satisfied with the revisions to the second edition, and with only minor adjustments, wished it to stand as his final version. Thus, in the only edition of the novel to appear since Harvey's death (a paperback published by Les Editions de I'Actuelle in 1970), the 1966 text is largely retained in the resetting of the novel. It is clear, then, that this third edition is now the most authoritative, and should therefore serve as the basis for any current translation into English. That the novel, in its first as well as final version, would be of interest to more than francophone readers was immediately recognized, as indicated by Cardinal Villeneuve's declaration that "11 est donc ddfendu. . . de le traduire." No doubt Harvey's friend Alfred Desrochers had this remark in mind when he wrote to Harvey on 30 April 1934: "En apprenant la nouvelle du pronunciamento, je me suis immidiatpment mis B la tiche de traduire ton roman en a n g l a i ~ . "The ~ ~ fate of this translation is unknown, but it seems unlikely that it was ever completed. Four years later, in the fall of 1938, Harvey negotiated for a time with a New York

publisher interested in Les Demi-civilisPs, but its first English translation, by Lukin Barette, was finally published by Macmillan late that year under the title Sackclothfor Banner. It was reviewed three times in the early months of 1939. In the first of these, published in The New York rimes Book Review, Jane Spence Southron praises the novel profusely, especially "The 'De profundis clamavi' with which the book quietly and beautifully closes."4y She concludes by saluting both Harvey and his translator because the "writing, even in translation, has the gracious clarity peculiarly characteristic of classic French prose."50 Southron's view concurs with the opinion of Harvey's "Belles-Lettres" instructor, but cannot be corroborated by a reading of either the novel or its first translation. She is clearly unaware of the significant alterations Barette has made to Harvey's novel; indeed, the De profundis clamavi she so much admires is completely Barette's invention. The other reviews of Sackcloth were published in The Canadian Bookman and The Canadian Forum. In the former, J.S. Will echoes some of Southron's views and speaks of Harvey's book as "a novel unparalleled in Canadian literature," "a sign of the times, a vision, a realization and a prophe~y."~'Will argues convincingly that the book's importance stems from Harvey's courageous act in publishing it. At the same time the reviewer notes that Barette's text is "a frequently defective translation" of Les Demi-civilisbs under "the unrecognizable title Sackclothfor Banner."s2 By contrast, in The Canadian Forum Helen Marsh calls it "one of the far too rare French-Canadian novels in English translation" (here, too, Harvey was a precursor), and praises "the able translation of M. Lukin Barette."s3 In fact, her review is no more astute than Southron's; for, unlike J.S. Will, neither has compared Les Demi-civilisb to Sackcloth jor Banner. However, a juxtaposition of the two texts reveals many significant variations, a great deal of gratuitous addition and deletion, and several major deviations from Harvey's text. Sackclothfor Banner is, indeed, a "frequently defective translation." Barette's work very often lacks rigorous fidelity to the sound and sense of Harvey's text, and imperfectly reflects its merits. In the final analysis, Barette's translation is only an approximation of the original. Thus, Les Demicivilisis and Sackcloth for Banner are not one work in two languages, but rather two roughly. similar works. In an introduction such as this, it is not possible to outline in the detail of a variorum edition all the alterations made by Barette, but some general sense of the changes can be indicated. These include particularly the following: the changing of names, especially of Maxime to P&reJos and of Lucien to Claude; major rewriting at the end of the confrontations between Max and Gratton (chapter 12) and between Max and

Bouvier (chapter 14); the invention of dialogue about Lillois' novel (chapter 17); the omissionaf two sentences in Dumont's conversation with his lover (chapter 21) and two paragraphs in Max and Dorothie's balcony meeting (chapter 23); the addition of a full paragraph to Max's reflection on the 1775 invasion (chapter 22) and three-quarters of a page on the threat posed to Le 'Vingti2me Si2cle (chapter 28). Nevertheless, none of these shortcomings in the translation is as serious as Barette's major rewriting of the final two chapters. By coincidence, a few of his omissions correspond to those made by Harvey in his own rewriting of these scenes for the 1962edition. On the whole, however, the translation is a very unreliable English version of either the first or the second editions of the original. Barette has added and deleted many details of Dorothie's struggle against the blizzard, and Max's anxious response to her wasted condition. On the last page, the translator invents a paragraph on the doctor's examination and plan to call a priest, as well as the entire final paragraph describing Doroth&e'sdeath and the priest's gentle De profindis clamavi that so impressed Jane Southron, the New York Times reviewer. In the light of these fundamental changes in the original, it is regrettable that Southron and her colleagues did not pay more attention to Barette's ending; in his "Foreword" he concludes by praising Harvey's work, and adds: "May his plea be heard with symBecause Sackpathy in spite of the shortcomings of his tran~lator."~~ clothfir Bunner is only an imperfect echo of Les Demi-civilisis, H?rvey9s plea may be heard with sympathy through Barette's work, but it cannot be heard with precision or with certainty. In view of the substantial inadequacies of Lukin Barette's Sackcloth for Banner and the major revisions made by Harvey before his death in 1967, a new and accurate translation of the final, definitive version of Les Demi-civilids is clearly in order. Readers of Quebec fiction in translation can now welcome the appearance of such a text, especially since the new English version is the work of so accomplished a craftsman and veteran translator as the late John Glassco. As the final work of his distinguished career, this book is a worthy addition to his many excellent translations of Quebec literature. Blending great sensitivity to the nuances of language with a careful rendering of Harvey's meaning, Glassco has in fact produced in Fear's Folly a work that surpasses not only Barette's translation but also Harvey's original. In this new English version of Les Demi-civilisis Glassco has skilfully avoided the pitfalls of both slavish literalism and carefree licence; in so doing, he has achieved the twin ideals of all translations: a graceful style and consistent reliabil-

ity. The manifest limitations of Harvey's text, even in its final form, havc not daunted this translator. Glassco's readers can rest assured that only his assiduous fidelity to the content of the French text has prevented him from making still greater improvements. While at times he prefers a reading found in the original edition, Fear's Folly is, as Glassco indicates in his "Translator's Note," almost exclusively a translation of the 1966 edition. It is entirely fitting that English readers can now become acquainted with an accurate and articulate rendering of the revised novel, and that, after half a century,attention will once again be paid to Harvey's great courage and penetrating insights. In summary, we might inquire more generally into Harvey's achievement in Les Demi-civilisis and its lasting impact. His assessment of the novel as a kind of "parat~nnerre"'~can be substantiated, since no Quebec novelist since 1934 has suffered a similar repression. But what of Harvey's promise as a novelist, as demonstrated in Les Demi-civilisks? Solely on the basis of the imperfect echo and reflection of Barette's translation, Southron was prepared to speculate on Harvey's future: "When he finds his pen no longer needed for fiery polemics, Harvey may well turn out to be the realistic modern novelist for whom the Canadian scene has long been waiting,"56 an observation that reflects her limited understanding of both Canadian fiction in general and Harvey's novel in' particular. Late' in his life Harvey regretted the amount of' time and .energy he had had to devote to "l'interminable bataille pour les IibertCs spirituelles sans lesquelles aucune littkrature n"est possible"; otherwise, he noted, he might have written "ce grand livre que mon pays attend enc~re."~'In retrospect Harvey knew that Les Demi-civilisis was not the longawaited "great book." But, unlike some QS his reviewers, he did know its true merits as well as its deficiencies. Harvey indicated this awareness at the time of the publication of the second edition, when Jean Part asked him if he would write Les Demicivilisis again: "Pas sous forme de roman," Harvey replied. "J'ai peutttre eu tort de mClanger les genres. J'Ccrirais plut6t un essai: c'est une forme qui permet B dire vraiment et clairement ce qu'on a B dire."s8 Of course, Harvey had already written such an essay, "La Pew," in 1945. This passionate defence of individual liberty and the need for courage, and the publication of Les Demi-civilisc!~a decade earlier remain the two highest points in a long and committed career. The echoes of Harvey's passionate outcry still reverberate in Quebec literature. Thus, it can be argued that the link between Max's passing comment about Don Quixote's relevance to Quebec life (chapter 30) and the major exploration of

that connection and significance in Victor-Levy Beaulieu's Don Quichotte de la dimanche forty years later is hardly coincidental. For, as Gagnon's sub-title indicates, and as GCrard Tougas has argued,5YHarvey's work has prepared the way fbr Quebec novelists of a later generation, who build skilfully on the secure foundation he has erected for them. He is a prominent ancestral presence, too often undervalued. He was, indeed, "grand-p&re de la rCvolution tranquille," a daring "bootlegger d'intelligence en pCriode de prohibition" with the courage and tenacity to bell Quebec's clerical cats.

NOTES I. Park, "1934: Bootlegger d'intelligence en piriode de prohibition," Le Nouveau Journal, 20 janv. 1962, p. 3; Chalout, "Harvey, qui fut grand-#re de la rdvolution tranquille," La Patrie, 18 fev. 1965, p. 6; Gagnon, Jean-Charles Harvey: Prkurseur de la rivolution tranquille (Montrial: Beauchemin, 1970). 2. Jean de la Fontaine, "Consei! tenu par les rats" (Il.ii), hbles choisies (Paris: Larousse, 1934). 1. 37. 3. "La Peur," Feuilles DPmocratiques, I, I (I sept. 1945). 8. 4. Quoted in Guildo Rousseau, JeanCharles Hurvey er son oeuvre romanesque (Montreal: Centre Educatif el Culturel, 1969). p. 157. 5. Quoted in Antoine Naaman, "Priface" to Rousseau, JeanCharles Harvey, p. 14. 6. Les Demi-civilisis (Montr6al: Editions du Totem, 1934). p. 59. All further references are to this edition of the novel and will be cited in the text. 7. Quoted in Jean Pa& "1934: Bootlegger d'intelligence en Nriode de prohibition," p. 3. 8. Rdginald Hamel, Cd., "20 lettres inaites de Louis Dantin A Louvigny de Montigny," Le Devoir, 8 avril 1965, p. 23. 9. Jane Spence Southron, "In French Canada," 7he New York Times Book Review, 8 Jan. 1939, sec. 6, p. 12. 10. "La Peur," p. 6. I I. "Introduction," Les Demi-civilisis,' 2e id. (Montrhl: Les Editions de I'homme, 1962). p. 7. 12. "Opinion canadienne sur le roman," tibertt. VI, 4 (nov.-dic. 1964). 447. 13. Ibid., p. 446. 14. Histoire de la IittPrature canadienne-frannpise, 4e id. (Montrbl: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). p. 139. 15. "lntroduction," Les Demi-civilisis, p. 7. 16. "Opinion canadienne sur le roman," p. 450. 17. "La Peur," p. 7.

.18. Quoted in Marcel-Aim6 Gagnon, Jean-Charles Harvey, p. 67. 19. "Dklaration," Lo Semaine religieuse de Quc'bec, 46e an&, no. 34 (26 avril 1934). p. 531. 20. P. Charles Augustine, trans., A Commentary on the New Code oj' Canon Law (St. Louis and London: B. Herder Book Co., 1921). VI, 469. Augustine's text also includes the Latin and English versions 01' Canon 1398, 1 (p. 403) and the Latin text for Canon 1399. 3' (p. 466). 21. Harvey proposes this view of the ban in his interview with Jean Pad, "1934: Bootlegger d'intelligence en #node de prohibition," p. 3. 22. Quoted in Gagnon, p. 244. 23. Ibid., p. 65. 24. Quoted in Rousseau, p. 148. 25. "lntroduction," Les Demi-civilisPs, p. 9. 26. Ibid. 27. Quoted in Rousseau, p. 151. 28. Ibid., p. 165. 29. "La Peur," p. 7. 30. "Le roman de Jean-Charles Harvey," L'Ordre, 1 mai 1934, p. I. 31. "La Psychologie des lecteurs," IdPes. ltre annte, I1 (juillet 1935). 47, so. 32. "lntroduction," Leu Demi-civilisPs, p. 9. 33. Ibid., p. 10. 34. Ibid. 35. See "lntroduction" to the second edition of Les Demi-civilisis, p. 10; Notes autobiograplriques, quoted in Gagnon, p. 67; and "Conlession sans ferme propos," Le Jour, I, 1 (16 sept. 1937). 2, quoted in Rousseau, p. 149. 36. RCginald Hamel, Cd., "20 lettres in&ites de Louis Dantin A Louvigny de Montigny," p. 23. 37. "1934: Bootlegger d'intelligence en pCriode de prohibition," p. 3. 38. "lntroduction." Les Demi-civilisis, p. 10. 39. "Preface," Art et combat (Montrbl: Editions de I'Action canadienne-frangise, 1937). p. 9.

40. "Le Mue clans le roman canadienfranpis," Culrure, XXIV, 1 (mars 1963). 6-7. 41. "Quand Quibec sc dessale." L'Ordre. 25 avril 1934. p. 4. 42. Histoire (le 10 litrdrarure canat-.8enne-/ianqaise, p. 139. 43. Une litr&ruture qiti se &it (Montrkal: H M H . 1962). p. 2.5. 44. "Opinion canadienne sur le roman," pp. 447, 450. 45. "La Psychologie des lectuurs," p. 52.46. Quoted in Gagnon, p. 28. 47. See "La Psychologie des Iecteurs," p. 51; and ParC, "1934: Bootlegger d'intelligence en pCriode de prohibition," p. 3. 48. Quoted in Rousseau, p. 165. 49. Southron, "In French Canada," p. 12.

50. Ibid. 51. "Canadian Courage," The Canadun Bookman, XX, 6 (Feb.-Mar. 1939). 65. 52. Ibid. 53. "Semi-Civilization in Quebec," The Canadian Forum, XVIII (Feb. 1939). 348. 54. "Foreword," Suckcloth for h n e r (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938), p. vi. 55. "Introduction," Les DemicivilisPs. p. I I. 56. "In French Canada," p. 12. 57. "Opinion canadienne sur le roman." p. 451. 511. "1934: Bootlegger d'intelligena en pkriode de prohibition," p. 3. 59. Ifistoire de la IirrPruture cunadienne-Jrancaise, p. 155.

My name is Max Hubert. In my blood the native Norman strain is mixed with that of Highlander, Marseillais and American Indian, creating a constant friction between the strong, slow passion of Normandy, the sensibility of the Scot, the mercurial temperament of the Midi and the adventurous instinct of the coureur de bois. My character is thus a compound of levity and reflection, of cynicism and naivete, of reasonableness and contradiction. I have no judgment in practical matters, and a great contempt for Mammon and his worshippers. Apart from intellect, beauty and love-those truly vital elements of human existencenothing has any value for me. That anyone can pursue money rather than joy baffles my understanding. I am one of those who consider a fine sunrise and a tender emotion as things beyond price, and who despise all bloodless casters of accounts. During a childhood made up of poverty and dreams, I lived with my mother in a region of mountains and rivers, among kindly and cheerful country folk who, reeking of their barn-yard animals, would greet me with the frank smiles of honest people. I was very fond of them. The villagers, less likeable but more talkative, delighted me with their stories and gossip. In summertime I would roam along the shores of the river or climb the steep banks of the brooks, accompanied by my little playmates, a barefoot, ragged crew with the native cunning of animals; with their instinct of hounddogs, they were unequalled at hunting, fishing or robbing orchards. The winters were less agreeable. We had often to plunge through waistdeep snow to reach the church or school. The wind would sweep through the chinks in our cottage, and in the mornings one had to use one's fist to break the ice on the drin king-water in its wooden bucket. It

was a harsh, demanding cquntry, where the will to live was sharpened by the need to struggle and conquer. Yet heaven lay above those hard winters. Between the clear, cold sky, luminous as crystal, and thc spotless white expanse of a land streaked by the dark mysterious lines of firs-those eternal trees of the northlandthe country folk saw nothing but their God. Since for seven months everything seemed dead, without one flower blooming nor a single blade of grass to brighten the hillsides, they sought a life in the unseen. I remember one Christmas Eve when the air was so clear, the fields so white, the voice of the bells so loud and pure, that one had the impression of a land that was weightless, ethereal and wholly made of the stuff of dreams. Far off in space, the stars seemed to be trembling in concert with the church belfry, as if under a conductor's baton, each beu-stroke resounding from the sky with the clangour of a metal star. Such nights would sweep my childish spirit to the very threshold of the infinite. One Sunday, as we were coming out of church, an old woman-very sweet and very good, like all the old women in those parts--said to my mother who was with me, "Max hears Mass with so much devotion, I'm sure he'll become a priest." My mother smiled. It was her secret wish that I become a parish priest and be the support of her old age. Widowed years ago, poor but courageous, she worked long hours for me and applied all her slender means to my education. As I walked at her side that day I kept repeating to myself, "11' 1 be a priest! 11' 1 be a priest!" For years this idea obsessed me to the point of hallucination: I fancied myself driven by my destiny to enter the priesthood. Yet I was then only ten, and already looking with guilty pleasure at the pretty country girls whose legs, rounded and hardened by trudging over hill and dale, were beginning to stir my imagination. These were painful moments. I rebelled against the fate that, by consigning me to celibacy, would never allow me to rest my head on a woman's shoulder. I scrupulously hid these guilty thoughts from my mother: a boy never confides such secrets to his mamma. To free myself from my obsession with them, I plunged into a kind of morbid piety, forcing myself to feel for the Creator the love which his female creatures inspired in me and against which I fought-though even then with a presentiment of being finally defeated. I felt the power of nature, stronger than my conscious will, bearing me ever farther from the Divine Embrace. The older 1 grew, the fonder I became of the physical world. I loved all its manifestations, living or inanimate, with that childish sensibility which eventually brands the soul with so many scars. Indeed, I remember certain dawns in autumn better even than the possession of

my first mistress. Ah, those beautiful mornidgs ! A sun, such as one sees no longer, it would seem, emerged fresh and dripping from its bath of darkness and sleep and poured its flood of gold, silver and jewels over the St. Lawrence, while the mountains, stripped of their colour by the night, shivered as they reclothed themselves. I was walking at the edge of the woods. Birch-trees, struck by the waxing light, flaunted the sheen of their skin, pale and rosy under their heads of light blond hair. At my feet, a partridge flew up; a hare, still warm, was hanging from the end of a branch, its neck strangled by a copper wire, and its earthen colour blended with the orange tones of the dead leaves. Everywhere there was an odour of rotting vegetation, a disturbing odour that I was to liken, much later, to that of a big blue room where the act of love had just taken place. How good all that had been! It was all a part of myself, at an age when life is enjoyed without thought or comprehension. My paternal grandfather, a tall white-bearded old man, lived in a house which stood on the heights overlooking the river. I had made for him, in my heart, the place left empty by my father's death. What happy hours 1 spent with him! Listening to his stories, I could hear at the same time my uncles and aunts humming country airs, and I was filled with peace and affection. The evenings of that time which I remember best were those when I, a barefoot urchin, took part with my grandfather in the sardine catch under the cliffs of Cap Blanc. The sun would be going down, and the water was covered with a kind of many-hued moire, of moires of every shade shining on an immense sheet of liquid silk. That shimmering silk clothed the whole river, and looking at its long gentle undulations, broken here and there by the shapes of porpoises, I had the impression of the slow respiration of a mighty woman's breast that stretched to the very horizon. The fishermen, all of whom I knew by name-squat, broad-shouldered seamen, hairy and foul-mouthed-had spread offshore the long semi-circular dragnet of corded mesh whose cork floats danced to the rhythm of the waves. Strong arms then pulled the net shorewards: the semi~irclenarrowed until the meshes, now stretched to bursting, were hauled on to the sand with a sudden heave. What myriads of tiny fishes! It was a boil of silver and phosphorus, a sound like a rainstorm, a quivering agony in a bath of brilliants and pearls breathing an odour of seaweed. When the fishing ended at nightfall, Grandfather would tell me gently, "You'd better get home before dusk, or your mother will worry." As he kissed my cheek, his white beard would tickle my neck. On the way home I would stroll along the beach, stopping sometimes to talk to an old sailor who spoke to me of matters rather beyond my

age. Wrinkled, decrepit and jovial, facing the sea he loved, he drew interminably on a blackened pipe as he spun yams about his travels. We called him Pike Maxime. He would tell us how, thirty years ago, he had lost two of his sons. One stormy night his little schooner had split on a reef off the North Shore. A roaring nor'easter, laden with snow, made the waves look like an immense herd of buffalo stampeded by the hunters' arrows. The three shipwrecked men, swimming blindly, had been roughly washed up on a little island where there was no shelter, not even a tree-nothing but icecovered rock. Two days and nights, with no way of making a fire, they had shivered under the open sky. On the third day the two boys died of cold. Starving, halfconscious, his teeth chattering, he himself had held out. At last a ship, happening to pass by, had picked him up just as he was at death's door. As he recalled this disaster, P&reMaxime's eyes would still fill with tears. "Dead men, drowned men, the sea's full of them," he told me one day. "On my last trip out, not so long ago, we were just leaving Sept-Iles when what do I see coming out of the water, hooked on the anchor I'm raising? A corpse! I called my mates and we got the body aboard with the boat hooks. I looked: it was Abel Warren, a bootlegger I'd seen only the week before. I knew him by his moustache and the ring on his little finger. That death has always bothered me. Abel had good sea-legs. A real seaman like him doesn't get drowned so stupidly. I still think Abel met his Cain." Old Maxime also transported us to seas of sun and silver where no icebergs ever came, seas whose coasts were clothed in flowers in January and whose beaches, at low tide, bore coral-tinted shells as big as skulls. He had dropped anchor in ports where roses bloomed in mid-winter and nearly naked women sported in the blue waters. I asked him once why he hadn't settled down in one of those places. "As for settling there, not for me!" he replied. "You see, a man can't give up the snow. You don't know yet how the snow gets hold of you once you've grown up with it. Seeing all that green stuff, flowers, bright birds all the time, it's like when you've eaten too much and want to throw up. When I was a kid I had my sled out two months before the first snow, and every day I'd say, 'Screw this summer weather!' I still feel that way, like a kid." Sometimes the old man would ask me about myself, my plans for the future. One day I confided to him that I was going to be a priest. "Don't make me laugh, my boy," he said. "Your folks are the only ones around hcre that never turned out a preacher. It's not in your blood. Your Uncle Benjamin-he died before your time, you know-he lost his faith. And on your old man's side the men were all skirtchasers,

known for it all over the township. You take after them, I can see it in your eye. And look at your head! Is that a priest's noggin your mother gave you, for God's sake? Come on, my boy, grow up like every one else, make your own way, be a real man, and then get married. You'll have fine kids who'll take after you-only don't let them go to sea or you'll lose them on some goddamned island." His words troubled me. "Surely," I thought, "he's blaspheming." Some time later I told my mother of my frequent meetings with Maxime. Her face expressed alarm. "You'd better not talk to him any more," she said. "He doesn't go to Mass." After that I would make long detours to avoid seeing the old seaman, though it struck me to the heart to do so. Maxime had seemed so good, so gentle, so sensible! He kept drawing me like a magnet, and a voice within me kept saying, "You love one of the damned! You love one of the damned!" On Sundays, when I was telling my beads, I fancied I saw the old man's wrinkled face coming between mine and the Blessed Virgin's. Then at night, as I was drifting off to sleep, my imagination would begin conjuring up a host of phantoms which had all the air of reality. Solemn processions, headed by great banners and made up of long files of choristers and acolytes, would precede a huge gold monstrance borne by a youthful priest to the rhythms of the psalms. This priest finally became myself, and I felt the sacred burden growing so heavy that I was afraid of dropping it in the dusty road. As we proceeded, the temptation to drop it became stronger and more imperative, and then in one of these dreams the grinning face of P&re Maxime appeared before me: "Come on now, throw that thing down, stupid!" My hands opened, the monstrance crashed down at my feet, and instantly the white-surpliced choristers turned into red-surpliced devils, while the acolytes began to dance an infernal jig while yelling blasphemies. One demon, taller than the rest, seized the monstrance and hurled it away with a howl of laughter. I awoke, crying out in fright and arousing my mother who asked me if I was unwell. She never knew the cause of my terror. Such things mean little to a grown man. To a boy they mean a great deal. The innocent child magnifies his notions, feelings and sensations out of all proportion. What would be insignificant or negligible in the adult's eyes seems prodigious to a twelve-year-old. My own experience is the proof of this, for I know that even after so many years the memory 01' these things still affects me deeply. I know that I owe everything in me that is tender, dreamy, passive-and also, I admit, deeply passionateto that little village church of ours. I also know that I have taken from

Maxime, to some degree, the part of me that is rational, reflective, ironical and dissatisfied. Without my knowing it, he sharpened my powers of observation and my critical faculty by implanting in me the spirit that reacts and .transforms: the spirit of contradiction. I bless him for it. Ah, how little it takes to determine the course of a man's life!

In such simple and peaceful surroundings as ours, the slightest scandal explodes like a bomb in the silence of the night. I remember a young woman called Marthe, very blonde and very pretty, who came to stay in a small hotel on the beach and was to cause a commotion that is still talked of in those parts. On days when the weather and tide were favourable I would see her on the beach, usually alone and wearing a flowered dressing-gown which delighted me with its bright colours. She would walk to within a few feet of the water, and then, letting her wrap fall, stand before me, tall and slim-waisted in a bathing-suit which was closely moulded to the curves of her body. For me, who had never seen anything but countrywomen in their heavy clothes, the sight was a relevation that left me gazing open-mouthed. After her swim, if it was sunny, she would stretch out to dry on the warm sand. One day she beckoned to me. At first I was so abashed by the gaze of her great blue eyes that I couldn't answer her questions, but a few pennies and candies soon overcame my shyness. I began to run errands for her in the village and became her chosen messenger; soon she entrusted me with all her mail, and I was not slow to notice that she wrote daily to a man in the city-always the same one. Every weekend a gentleman whom she called her brother would pay her a visit, staying at the same hotel. He was well dressed, rather thin, and had a somewhat furtive look. I didn't care for him at all, but my fair friend seemed so glad to see him that I pretended to share her pleasure. Together they would walk slowly along the beach, arm in arm, speaking to each other of a hundred things I didn't understand, often Ath bursts of laughter. Marthe's blonde hair would be floating on the shoulder of this mysterious brother, filling me with childish jealousy. I noticed that they always found some pretext to send me away when

they approached Cap Blanc. Sometimes I was given a few cents and told to go and buy myself some candy; sometimes I was despatched to the village store a mile away to get cigarettes. I hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards before the two of them disappeared along a narrow footpath that wound up the cliff. Monsieur Gilles-that was how he was known-was on his fifth visit and taking his usual walk about nine o'clock in the evening with Marthe, when a young man and a woman from the city arrived at Marthe's hotel. They made some pertinent inquiries about the hotel guests there, and were answered in all innocence. "And where are they now?" asked the woman. I was standing by, and wanted to help. "I know where they are," I said. "Just foIlow me, madame." On the way, I could see the woman was becoming excited. I even thought I could hear her muttering threats. "The snakes!" she was saying. "The hypocrites!" As the way grew longer she kept repeating, "Hurry up! Hurry now, or we'll never get there!" Reaching the path which the other two had taken, I stopped. "Here it is," I said. "Nice work, my boy. Now just stay where you are, we're going on alone. We want to give them a surprise. Not a word, now! Not a sound, you understand?" The path climbed an almost perpendicular hill strewn with boulders. To follow it without a bad fall you had to cling to the overhanging branches. The newcomers had been gone only a few minutes before I heard a woman's scream overhead, then another, followed by a succession of cries and groans. I realized there wds a fight going on, and my blood ran cold. My fair friend must be in danger. Her cries of pain struck me to the heart. Then I was terrified by the sound of a body rolling down the stones of the path. A woman fell a few steps from me. It was Marthe. "Mam'selle Marthe!" I cried, running to her. Her mouth was bleeding, her cheeks were covered with scratches. She made no answer. Prone, motionless on the sand, she kept moaning and sobbing, like a little girl. "Who are these people?" asked. "What have they done to you?" She contined to sob. Then I saw the two strangers coming dovm. The woman, as she passed Marthe, hissed through her teeth, "Bitch!" Without another word, without even looking back, she walked away with her companion.

Monsieur Gilles was the next to appear. "Marthe! Are you hurt?" he asked. "Go away! Go away!" quavered my friend. "You make me sick!" "Is it my fault if that she-cat managed to trail me? And you, you stupid brat, why did you lead them here?" "It's not Max's fault," said Marthe. "How could he know what it was all about? How could he tell? But you-you were right there. Why didn't you protect me?" "My wife's brother was there too. He threatened to kill me." "There are times when a man of honour doesn't think of his own life. The least a woman can expect from a man is that he show himself a real man.?' Marthe spoke these simple words, without anger, through the blood from her mouth which was dripping on her dress. "I'm not going back with you," she added. "Max will take me. We won't meet again-ever. Is that clear?" "Very well. I'll go back to Quebec tonight." And he strode away, shrugging his shoulders. "I didn't know he was such a coward," Marthe whispered as if to herself. I went with her, in silence, terrified. I understood nothing of what had happened. As we approached the hotel she said to me in a low voice, "My little Max, promise me you won't tell anyone about this. I'm going away tomorrow. I don't think 1'11 ever come back." My heart was wrung. This was the first time I had come in contact with one of the miseries of mankind. I did not know that the gentlest, the most beautiful and sensitive beings are the first to be drawn into the orbit of distress and suffering. When my blonde beauty had gone her way, wicked talp were whispered about her. My imagination worked painfully on what I heard, and I came to understand vaguely that there are some men and women, born to love each other, who cannot do so openly without having their reputations, and indeed their very souls, wounded and laid waste.

Some time later my mother asked me about that evening when I had witnessed the scene of marital jealousy. "You remember," she said, "that night when people near the beach heard a woman screaming? Soon after, you know, Mademoiselle Marthe came back to the hotel with her face bleeding and her dress in tatters. I was told you were with her. What happened?" "Nothing." "Surely something happened. What bothers me is that you should have any secrets from your mother." "I promised not to tell." "You promised. Very well then, keep your word. But from now on, my little Max, I must ask you to be more careful in choosing your friends. You should always be on your guard against strangers. I don't want you to get mixed up with dishonest people. I'm too fond of you for that!" "Mademoiselle Marthe was very nice." "I'm sure she was, but she was not an honest woman." "Why, what did she steal?" "Her best friend's husband." "HOWcan you steal a man?" "I'll explain all that to you some time. But just now I want you to remember that such things don't happen in our families. You'll be leaving for boarding-school soon, where they'll teach you duty, order, proper behaviour. For the present, you must learn that no one has the right to disturb his neighbour's happiness and to break up his family life, even in the name of love. Married people aren't allowed to give their hearts to anyone else, or to admit the love of outsiders into their home. Do you see what I mean?"

The lesson was beyond my grasp, but I pretended to understand, and nodded my approval of these sentiments. "Do you imagine," she wentvon, "that your father would have left home for days on end to keep company with another woman fifty miles away? And Monsieur Savard, who lives next door, can you imagine him gallivanting in secret with some hussy?" Indeed I could not. The very thought made me smile. The Savards! He, who was about forty-five, worked from dawn to dusk to support a family of fifteen children. At sun-up he was already busy in the stables, feeding his horses, his cows, sheep, pigs and chickens. And at ploughing and seeding time his industry became incredible. With the help of his two eldest boys, he tore open the earth, sowed corn and oats, checked the pastures, dug up the kitchen garden, mended the fences and supervised everyone. Under the pointed roof of his big farm-house there was nothing but cleanliness, virtue and peace. His wife, still young despite her annual childbearing, smiled and sang all day long. It was said that she had been, in her day, the prettiest girl in the whole township. And this was easy to believe when you Iookcd at her eldest daughter, a charming girl whose rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, shapely limbs and graceful carriage were already having their effect on the village striplings. No, it was inconceivable that Monsieur Savard had ever done any wenching. The very idea was preposterous. He had neither the time nor the inclination, and even if he had I knew he would have had no appeal to a woman like Marthe. Thus, unconsciously, I was already contrasting the elegance and refinement of city folk with the simple rusticity of our own people. My feeling for the latter was one of esteem, but for the former it was one of fascination. I confusedly felt there was more solidity, kindness, good sense and probity among our countrymen, but the curled hair, painted lips, plucked eyebrows, slender fingers and polished nails of a Marthe were irresistibly seductive. Already, a certain artistic sense was wakening in me, and doing so at the expense of my heart and my conscience.

One August evening, just before I went off to boarding-school, I was fishing in a brook that was all rapids, falls and backwaters. The speckled trout, sleek and active, were leaping at the fly which I played from side to side against the current. A light twist of the wrist, and all at once I felt the pull of the spirited prey that was clearly bent on a bitter fight for its life. I delighted in allowing my victim a long struggle at the end of my line, letting it come nearly to my feet, then dash off in an attempt to break free as it sped to the right, to the left and in all directions, twisting and spinning its body as one does in order to break off a branch. I could never tire of this cruel game, this prolongation of the death-throes of a living thing. I forget what philosopher it was who said that when man discovered fishing he had reached the height of savagery. I was revelling in these moments, foreseeing that I would never live them again: from now on my adolescence was to be devoted to studies in the forcing-house 01' education. The freedom of the woods and waters, of unbounded space, the natural play of my muscles matched against the powerful and enthralling forces of nature, the very silence so propitious td my dreams, all that active, bounteous life which filled the lungs with an air scented by alder and sedge-all this I would soon be leaving behind; I would no longer be guided, as on this day, by the whims of the little savage I then was; these would be replaced by the yoke which the schoolmaster lays on the neck of the thirteen-year-old, I keep leaping from rock to r6ck. The rumbling of the waters, monotonous and deafening, filled my ears with its endless song. Looking without pause at the current, I experienced a strange drowsiness, as if the water were drawing me to itself and I was being liquefied and made one with the restless foam of the river itself. I was only awakened from this trance by the shrill cry of a kingfisher as it skimmed the surface with

its wing. And at that moment a sharp bend in the river brought me face to face with old Maxime, who was also fishing. "Hello there, my boy! Having any luck?" "Look," 1 said proudly, showing him my well-loaded withy. "Nice going. You're a real man. I always said good fishermen are real men." He laughed in his pleasant way. "Funny beasts, these fish," he went on. "I've come across guys who wouldn't fish becuase they thought it wasn't right to catch defenceless things. People like that don't know the first thing about life. Fishes waste no pity on flies, butterflies or minnows. The big ones swallow the little ones everywhere, in the water and over it--and on land, too. You'll learn that as you grow older. Not to be a little one, that's what matters. It's the fly's bad luck to be a fly: it would like to be a fish. As for the fish, it would like to be a man. And the weak man wants to be the strong one. Unless you're the strong one yourself, you'll always end up by being eaten. There's no getting away from it." We followed the river. The setting sun darted its slanted beams on the turbulent water, dazzling our eyes. The old man continued to philosophize. "I hear you're leaving for the seminary in a couple of weeks. That's a good thing. You'll learn a lot of things I never heard about. You'll be a man of education, see? What I used to dream of being when I was your age. But I've seen enough educated people who've lost all their common sense to make me just as happy, now, in my ignorance. You see, my boy, common sense is what most people lack who've learned about life from schoolbooks. When you've lost that, you're not good for much. When I see something white, I say it's white, and I'd be cut in pieces before I'd say it was anything else. But I've known lots of what they call professional men who saw something white and said it was black. They believed everything they'd been told, everything they'd read. They wouldn't believe what they saw right under their noses, or even what they thought. They put faith in everything except themselves." We kept on along the river. Sometimes the branches barred our way and we had to wade through the water. I kept silent, remembering what my mother had said to me about old Maxime, but in spite of this his talk still held me. I thought of the countless things which this old man, who had ranged over oceans and continents, must know, things of which so many others were ignorant. And this thought drew me to the old reprobate, along with the curious sense that some disaster would overtake us. "Why're you so quiet today, my boy?" "I don't know." "You don't know? Well, you were more of a talker last year, as I

remember. Nowadays you don't ever stop in to see me. Once a kid grows up he's got no more use for old people, I guess." "It's not like that, Ptre Maxime." "Something else, then. Tell me. "My mother's forbidden me to-to-" "To see me? Well, I suspected that. Your mother's right, though. You see, I've got my own notions. And she has hers. You'd better stick with hers. I've not had a life like everyone else has. I've thought different. My family and my friends never got along with me because we couldn't see things the same way. I didn't care any the less for them just because I happen to think the most important thing in life is to be honest and straightforward. A man mustn't lie to anyone, even to himself. I've never lied to myself, 1 can tell you that. And I never did anyone any harm. When I had a few dollars to spare I gave them to people who needed them more than me. I've worked all my life. I haven't been spared any sorrow, neither. My two kids died right under my eyes. I've just kept on saying to myself, 'Stick it out, Maxime!' I've been ship's captain on some pretty long trips, by the way. One day we were wrecked, with passengers aboard too. I stuck to the ship, right to the end, then after the last lifeboat pulled away I went down with the ship. They managed to fish me out. All the same, I was staking my own life. I guess that was a good deed, and not the only one I've done. Now I'm old, and one of these mornings I'll be found dead. Two or three times a week I get these dizzy spells. The other day I passed out and I must have lain on the floor for a whole hour. Nobody was around to help me. I almost died like a dog." A silence followed, and the old man came to a halt. I saw that he had grown pale. I asked him what was the matter. "It's nothing," he said. "Just another spell. It'll go away." We \\ere in the middle 01 the stream, just above some small rapids. "If only," he faltered, "if only I could make it to shore . . . " With these words he staggered and fell headlong into the rapids, where he remained prone, his face in the water. I rushed to help him, plunging in waist-deep. But he was too heavy for a small boy of thirteen. I managed to lift his head olit of the current. He was unconscious, but his heart was still beating. I shouted at the top of my voice, but there was no answer. Was there no help at hand? My tired arms were giving way. Heaven alone knows how heavy a man's head can be! I felt my strength leaving me, and then I lost consciousness altogether. I recovered my senses on the bank, staring in horror at the pitiful corpse of Maxime as it bobbed and swayed in the current. Three days later the old seaman, laid out in a spruce coffin, was borne

. . ."

to his grave-unattended but for two of his brothers, countrymen who clearly felt the disgrace of having to inter their older brother in unconsecrated ground. Old Maxime had been denied a Catholic burial. Trying not to be seen, I followed at some distance the last journey of the old friend whose dying words had been addressed to me alone.

I was half-way through college when my mother, driven by our poverty, moved to Quebec City. I was then seventeen. We took a sordid lodging in a neighbourhood swarming with children and vermin. Rats, furtive and sinister, slunk past our back door after rifling the garbage cans. The frantic pace of life, the constant noise, the presence of the crowds, the grim and anxious faces in the street-all this, seen from my window, had the aspect of a nightmare. I was both awestricken and bewildered. The four previous years of my life had been spent between boardingschool and our village. Hitherto I had known only boys, priests and farmers, whose appearance, names, habits, gestures, speech and even tone of voice were all familiar. And now I was suddenly dropped into a maddened mob reeking of the slaughterhouse, for at dusk, when they crowded out of the stores, mills and factories, these human beings assumed, in my eyes, the appearance of gloomy herds of cattle driven from vast stockyards. It was amidst the ugliness of this fetid crowd, this boiling sewer of pleasures and vices, of sombre resignation and stark despair, that I met my first sweetheart. She seemed like a marsh-flower rising miraculously from a quagmire towards the purity of the light: a girl of fifteen whose long copper-coloured hair framed her blue eyes with its shining light; a figure like that of some great savage cat; firm little breasts which gave this child the bosom of a woman. A boy whose acquaintance I had made the day before introduced me to her; she was his sister, and her name was Maria. She had held out her hand, and as I took it awkwardly the contact of her tapering fingers, so different from the workroughened hands of country ghls, made my heart skip a beat. With a perfect ease of manner she asked my name, age and occupation. I answered in embarrassed monosyllables, feeling ridiculous and wretched.

Thereafter, for three long weeks, I would take up my post on the sidewalk every day in order to see her pass. I would bow to her, and she would smile back. I never spoke to her, but she was in my thoughts day and night. I kept telling myself that she and she alone held the key to my happiness, that my life would be meaningless without this girl. Her body did not rouse my desire, for I worshipped her like an idol. "If only," I sighed, "I could kiss the hem of her dress!" One evening while I was waiting for her, concealed behind a lamppost, she was accompanied by a young girl to whom she was talking with animation. "Why," she said, "that little Max isn't here tonight! Isn't he funny with that habitant air of his and those baggy trousers!" At that moment she caught sight of me and gave a little cry. I was red with shame. She walked away, smothering a laugh, and I slunk homeward like a whipped dog. This was the first heartbreak of my life. I could bear anything but the mocking laughter of this Maria for whom I would have liked to possess the elegance of a dandy. There was no sleep for me that night. All the other sorrows of my short existence were joining to crush me. For at boarding-school I had been the poorest pupil of all, dressed in coarse and patched clothes, darning my own heavy stockings, wearing a cap much too small for my big head, suffering the silent contempt of the rich boys and enduring the snubs of a few servile teachers. All the success of my scholastic progress did not spare me the jeers of these snobs. My contempt for my schoolmates had armoured me against the implied or expressed insults. My quickness to learn and my facility of expression had given me a good opinion of myself, and I could disregard their stupid raillery. The day would come, I told myself, when I would have my revenge. But with Maria it was different. Lacking the final resource of my own pride, I sank into despair. I kept asking myself, "Why can't this girl love me?' And an inner voice answered , "Because you're shy, awkward and badly dressed. A pretty girl has no use for shy, awkward, badly dressed boys." I felt as naked and ashamed as Adam after his first sin. At that moment, if Maria had come to me with open arms and proffered lips I would have wanted to sink into the ground, so worthless and miserable did I 'feel before this girl who was so inaccessible. After the exhaustion of the night I managed to summon up the selfrespect that tempted me, some time later, however, to see her again. Her parents ran a small store selling tobacco, candies and soft drinks. I went there, ostensibly to buy cigarettes. The shop was empty and apparently my arrival went unheard since no one came to serve me. I was looking around, when I discerned through the half-open door a coppercoloured

head nestling against a man's waistcoat. My curiosity,stronger than my pride, rooted me to the spot. I wanted to see more, and I tried to identify the person capable of such an act of sacrilege. I made out his features at last: he was quite young, but ugly and coarse. Then I went out quickly. My experience of life was beginning.

Disappointment in love often leads to a fit of religiosity. I did not fail to undergo such a reaction. Although still in my teens, I joined a religious order. The years that followed rise before me now like a long panoramic dream: the dream o!' a spacious garden full of flowers, fruits and birds, the serenity of monks interminably reading prayers or telling their beads amid the chirping of crickets and the fragrance of apple trees; of whitehaired priests dispensing spiritual guidance to young men assailed by temptations worthy of a Life of St. Jerome; of puerile grey-beards, at once serious and simple-minded, adept at making mountains out of molehills and at disarming everyone by their charming candour; of novices seized by homesickness whenever they turned back, like Lot's wife, to look at the world they had forsaken, the home they had left, the young girl whom they had loved and whose image still tormented their sleepless nights; of the scourgings designed to drive out the demon of burning lust from their bodies; of the steel-pointed bracelets that encircled their suffering flesh-and then, at last, of the return of my own thoughts to humanity, to the firm ground beneath my feet, to the good and beautiful world through which a man travels but once and where he can taste the fruit of life before draining the cup of death. I was twenty-one when I had exhausted these experiences. Penniless, simple and unapt for life though I was, 1 returned to a secular existence unspoiled, with a few illusions, and even with some self-confidence. I was now without either parents or fortune, for my mother had died a few years earlier, leaving me nothing but the memory of her poverty and courage; however, the serenity of the cloister, the absence of worldly distractions, the habit of daily meditation and the serious study of

languages, the classics and philosophy, had furnished me with an intellectual equipment that gave me some confidence in my future. Strangely enough, my long seclusion had left my character unchanged: I had retained my own essential personality. The monastic discipline had, at the most, regulated nothing but my outward movements. In spite of myself, in spite of my feelings of remorse and loyalty to my superiors, reason and intellect had won the day. In this struggle of influences brought to bear on my character, the remorse and loyalty had been no more effective than a lead bullet against armour plate. I am making this declaration to demonstrate clearly that my individuality is the product of my nature and not of my conscious volition. In other words, my character is stronger than the power of my will. My adult life began with my studies in law at the University. There is nothing notable in this period of my life except the friendship I formed with a Quebec lawyer, Jean Vernier, a man of intelligence and judgrnenta childhood friend of my father's. A few days before my Bar examinations he outlined for me, in sombre strokes, the career on which I was embarking. "These examinations," he said grimly, "will only let another fifty lawyers loose on our society. In this little city of ours there are already more than a hundred who are living on their debts. Since they can't subsist on the dregs of the legal market left to them by the three or four big ofices that have a monopoly on everything, they're obliged to chase after clients with a shameless persistence. I foresee the day when these starvelings will be stufing their bellies with the pages of their Civil Codes." "All the same," I countered, "I think I've enough stuff in me to make a place for myself, even in this overcrowded field. I don't lack the grit to pull through, in any case. And I've always understood that in a crowd of weaklings the strongest will come out on top." "Yes, but you could do better at something else." "What about you, sir? Hasn't the practice of law made you rich and respected?" "That's just what I was driving at. Twenty-five years ago I was in your position. After I won the Prince of Wales Prize-and since I've been gifted with a certain fluency-I thought a legal career was the most brilliant course that life had to offer. I was also inspired by the love of art, of beauty in all its forms, by a sense of justice and an ideal of equity. It would be easy, I told myself, to reconcile the demands of professional life with those cultivated tastes which really do honour to mankind. "I was soon disabused. My dealings with the men of law taught me that most of them could not have chosen a calling more apt to deform

their minds. Acting in accordance with the texts which they saw as the sole authority, realizing that more suits are decided according to the letter than to the spirit of the laws, that defending cases where justice and common sense are defeated by formulas and resorting to shady tricks instead of honest plain-speaking are de rigueur, they ended by acquiring what I may call a legalized brain. Legality! What a horrible word! "Once you're in that groove," he went on, "you can say goodbye to all literature, art, intellectual activity--even to love. Either you marry a dowry to avoid vegetating for too long, and lose your independence, or else you start off on the wrong foot, get into a slump, and end up by prostituting whatever talent you have. "Of all the sidelines that will tempt you, the most miserable, the most oppressive, often the most sordid, is politics. It seems, at first, to be a short cut to a larger practice and a wider circle of friends. But at what a price! Sometimes, I tell you, the price of your own soul. If we were still living in the days when people sold their souls to the devil, it's to the dregs of public life that Mephisto would lure our young lawyers. The corruption of some of our most brilliant minds began in just that way. "Do you want names? Well, what happened to Marius Pharand? He was highly talented and full of promise. His former professors all recognized his genius. I can still see him as he was at twenty, with that godlike head crowned with curling yellow hair! He had only to open his mouth to electrify a crowd, to make it laugh, cry, stamp its feet or yell its head off. He was a hero before he was fully grown. When he spoke of patriotism his whole young soul glowed in his face and transformed him into a symbol of his beloved country. His name blazed across the headlines, and all our young men walked in his footsteps as if he were the Messiah. And what did he amount to in the end? Nothing much. His speeches today are the same as they were a quarter of a century ago: schoolboy orations on the lips of an old man-for he was already senile at the age of fifty. The time he should have devoted to the cultivation of his mind and heart, to the improvement of his admirable character, he gave away to clubs, to the hustings, to electioneering, skullduggery, ballot-stuffing and other dirty tricks. Now look at him, a seedy, shabby parody of his former self. He has almost lapsed into mendicity! His empty brain and exhausted strength can, at best, only remind us of the great destiny that might have been his. "I could add a score of other instances. Less well-known, of course, but no less deplorable. I've only spoken of the most notorious one. In his downfall, Pharand at least retained some degree of pride and inde-

pendence. But what can one say of the others, the bootlickers, tricksters, exploiters of the crowd's venality, givers and takers of graft?" "But you've picked on the worst examples," I rejoined. "Why do you overlook our truly great men to whom the legal profession opened up an honourable place in history?" "I don't overlook them. What I'm saying is that it's been our bad luck to have been nearly always led by lawyers. The success that a few of them had in crossing the political swamp has only enticed almost all their colleagues to get stuck in it." Just then a client came in, and I took my leave, intending to come back later. Reaching the street, I felt rather downhearted. I had dreamed so much of becoming a lawyer and a politician! The newspapers spoke of little else but them. As I walked along I thought over what I had just heard. And I began to wonder if it weren't time for me to revise all my judgments, to reexamine one by one all the truths I had been taught, and to learn everything all over again. A ravenous appetite for knowledge, rather than belief, suddenly possessed me. The heavy load of prejudices and errors under which I had been labouring seemed already to become lighter with the coming of this doubt: it even brought me a kind of painful joy. I went up to Dufferin Terrace. The softness and peace of the day eased my bitterness. A light breeze tempered the hot sun by the July afternoon, and the waters of the St. Lawrence, turquoise at the foot of the bluff, turned further out to a peacock blue, then to pale green. Transparent clouds, pierced by glimpses of blue sky, glided across the heavens. Big ships with red funnels were lumbering by, belching black smoke above which the bright seagulls soared. Off the Ile d'OrlCans two great schooners were tacking, looking like great wounded swans spreading their wings to the breeze. Between these banks, lined with buildings and stained by the marks of human industry, rose emanations out of the past. "Just here," I thought, "our ancestors landed, on the day of their arrival from an already effete world. They were young, handsome, brave. Small boats, bearing the human seed from which we were all to sprout, were lowered from brigantines anchored at the mouth of the St. Charles River. Most of these pioneers were escaping from the repressive conditions of their homeland, to enjoy the freshness of a new continent and the freedom of the wilderness. With hearts full of hope and audacity they invaded the forest, fearing neither toil, fatigue nor death: all they feared had been slavery. For a century and a half they were only a handful, hardly more than a few thousand. But they explored the whole of North America,

now the home of over a hundred million people. Ranging from Hudson's Bay down to Louisiana, those tough, muscular, hairy fellows were to be found everywhere. Strong and splendid men they were-the offspring of the healthiest women in the world. And here I was, descendant of a people who had become miserably domesticated. For once the English had conquered the country and the Indians had fallen victim to the vices of Europe, our vanquished Frenchmen-ignorant, rough and quite unprepared for a quiet and regulated existence-had nothing to do but congregate in little groups of gossips and organize a communal life. They could soon be taken for well-tended animals, penned up in their zoo, well fed and content to be stared at, as objects of curiosity, by other nations. Such were my thoughts when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned quickly and found myself facing Lucien Joly, an old schoolmate. He was accompanied by an attractive brunette. "Let me introduce you to Mademoiselle Dorothte Meunier," he said. She turned a warm glance on me, which I found disturbing. The three of us made for the western end of the terrace. Dorothte walked between us, talking slowly in a musical, compelling voice. After the introductory commonplaces, she said to me, "I've often passed you in the street, Monsieur Hubert. You struck me as interesting, you were so unlike everyone else. In your eyes I believed I could see a certain quality of thought. I've becn eager to hear you talk." "And now that you have?" . "Why, I find that your voice is also full of thought." "But I've said almost nothing. Meeting a woman like you for the first time leaves me speechless-with admiration." "Indeed. Well, I cannot bear talkative men. They are always brainless. That's why I don't enjoy the company of women, either." I was charmed by such talk from a girl of nineteen. It revealed a truly feminine temperament, for I have found that real women care little for the conversation of other women. Dorothte was so slim, so supple and so smartly dressed that she appeared to be tall in spite of her small structure. Her strange, direct gaze compelled all one's attention. Her eyelids, slightly slanted in an oriental fashion and hooding fine prominent eyes, possessed a subtle charm. And such a mouth! A full-fleshed mouth whose lower lip, at once soft and disdainful, was full of a splendid sensuality. "Do you really maintain," I went on, pursuing the conversation, "that the outstanding talents of your sex are for gossip and malicious tale-bearing?" "Ah, let's not go so far as that! I do have a few women friends who

are discreet, sincere, open-minded, reasonable-in other words, who resemble men "Thank you for the comparison-and the compliment!" "Don't thank me too soon. I never said that either of you two were really men. You're barely twenty-five. Children! Ah, you find that amusing, coming from a girl of nineteen? Do you know that women of twenty are the equals of men of thirty? That's why you see so many girls ignoring boys of their own age and becoming attached to mature men." "What do you mean by 'mature'?" "From thirty-five to sixty." "Good heavens!" "I mean it. Even at sixty, a man can look down on a youth. And this opinion of mine was confirmed only the other day, when I saw that movie "Broken Wings", which was written by some idiot or other. The author wanted to show us that an old Don Juan must inevitably find his wings broken by some youngster. He sets up a father and his son as rivals for the love of a woman. The father is fascinating, the son a strong handsome brute, but insignificant and absurd. In this silly story the son wins her, but as for myself, I tell you frankly I would have chosen the father." With these words Dorothte turned away from us to join her own father who was just emerging, freshly shaved, from the barber shop of the ChAteau Frontenac. "They must be an interesting family," I said to Joly. "The daughter certainly is, as you can see. As for her father, he's a retired mining broker who has had his ups and downs and now lives in great style. A lucky fellow! He got out of the market just before the crash and in time to escape a court case, after having ruined hundreds of small investors. His house on the rue des Bernihes is a real palace. You should see the outlandish luxury he's gone in for! Wrought-iron chandeliers, marble bathrooms, sculptured doors, a cellar full of champagne, a dozen servants. He's a typical success story, is old Luc Meunier! A workman's son, he left school at twelve; was bell-hop in a hotel at thirteen, waiter at sixteen, chauffeur at eighteen, bootlegger at twenty. For five years he ran liquor between St. Pierre-Miquelon, Quebec and other river ports, always lucky and managing to keep clear of the customs officers, the government coastguard and the shotguns of his competitors. From common deck-hand on a yacht he rose to pilot, captain and then owner. He finally quit the business with enough cash to open a brokerage office and pile up millions during the next fifteen years. "Now he's rich, looked up to, feared. He's given lavishly right and left to various good causes, and that's brought him a number of resounding

."

titles: chevalier of the Legion of Honour, knight of the Order of St. Gregory, Companion of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. Just now he's pouring money into his party's warchest as the price of a seat in the Senate. The day will come, you'll see, when he'll become a real knight: Sir Luc Meunier-like Sir Wilfrid Laurier. "There've been some tales told of a nasty episode in his historywhen his old smuggling partner disappeared on the high seas. The mystery has never been cleared up, but to infer his guilt seems to me to be going too far. I find that kind 01' talk is simply malicious. Rich people are always the target of envy. "Well, in any case, the daughter more than makes up for the father. And the father, for his part, has mellowed into a delightful old fellow, in spite of his nouveau-riche tastes. Money and travel, like music, have charms to smooth the roughest men-or so it would appear."

VII

During the days following this encounter I divided my time between thoughts of Dorothie and considerations of the world I lived in, the world in which I wished to make my way. I consulted several of my friends. Lucien, noticing my indecision, introduced me to an elderly professor at the University, Siraphin Delorme. "Try and make friends with him," Lucien advised me. "He has a wide influence in University circles, and if you make a hit with him you could easily get a doctorate in either political economy or the fine arts." The Delormes lived on rue St.-Louis, in a house more than a hundred years old, which evoked the old French bourgeoisie as vividly as if it had been taken out of a family album. With its sloping roofs, its two wide chimneys, massive oaken doors and narrow many-paned whdows, it was much relished by tourists who were weary of Americanstyle bungalows; they liked those sober, pure lines that are still to be found here and there inside the old city walls, that add to its arcr~aic charm. My first visit to this old couple was brief and marked by a purely conventional warmth. I happened to meet them again the next day, in the street near the St.-Louis Gate, and they asked me to walk with them. On that radiant summer morning we strolled slowly along the flowerbanked lawns surrounding the Parliament Buildings whose tower was bathed in floods of sunlight. The bronze statuary shone brightly: there was the historian Garneau, in the ridiculous pose of a shopassistant; there was Mercier, gesturing with false grandiloquence; there was La Virendrye, in a shabby outfit and,looking like a half-witted fireman. Among so many pieces of bad sculpture the splendid group of savages actually dominated the grounds, instinct as they were with the triple vitality of symbol, history and myth.

Grande Allie was like a river of light, an immoderate, insolent light that flowed under the St.-Louis Gate and licked the faqade of the Garrison Club, thus connecting the past with the present. And there was the Lieutenant-Governor's car itself! At the wheel was a chauffeur in a white-braided uniform. In the back sat the pretty, sparkling chatelaine of Spencerwood, Madame Baril, bowing and smiling. "Charming, is she not?'said Madame Delorme. "She does the honours with all the grace of a queen. Oh, you should have been at last winter's ball. It was like a fairyland! A pity, though, that she's so extravagant." Finding myself that morning in a mood of contradiction and paradox, I replied, "But a pretty chatelaine who wouldn't throw a little money around might be thought niggardly. So let her be prodigal, and she'll be the more fondly remembered. In any case, there's always some beggar around to catch the coins thrown out of a window. What strikes me as more to the point is that there should be a representative of the King stationed in Quebec." "Why?" asked Delorme, taken aback. "Perhaps because I don't understand certain diplomatic protocols. But I've been asking myself for some years now, ever since I've had any grasp of history, why a king without any real power, a kind of shadow king with no administrative rights or duties, the cipher of an outworn tradition, should beget so many representations of himself all around the world." "You have some old notions, my boy. I am all for tradition and the prerogatives of the Crown. In fact, I don't think one should even joke about such things." "Look," said the old lady. "There's ThCrbe Michel in her runabout!" An insolently beautiful girl was weaving through the traffic at forty miles an hour. "That's the way she throws poor Benjamin's dollars around," said the professor. David Benjamin, a wealthy lumber merchant, was keeping ThCr6se as his mistress. He was sixty years old, she twenty-five. Their love-affair had begun in an office on rue St.-Pierre, between the dictation and the typing of a business letter and under the pretext of a lesson in spelling. It was now carried on so openly that it was a matter of common knowledge. "Who wouldn't lose his head over a woman like that?" I replied in the quizzical tone I had adopted to shock this worthy couple. "That'll do!" cried Madame Delorme. "Why, she's only a little typist

whose mother takes in washing in the faubourg! No social standing, no education. . . ." "What about him?" "He has a lot of money." "Is that all?" At this moment a luxurious Packard, driven by a liveried chauffeur, rolled by as we were passing the Church of Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. "That young fool!" exclaimed Madame. "Which one?" I asked. '!Why, that Paul Baillard! The hare-brained fellow who's ruining himself. He's clever, but a spendthrift. The dollars melt in his fingers like butter on the fire. His friends exploit him shamefully. And all the tarts in the city are fighting over him, and he loves it." "Who is he? Where does he come from?" "Heaven only knows. He came here from the old country not more than three years ago. It's not even sure that he belongs to the church. Foreigners of his type, you know, play havoc among the younger generation here." "I'd like to make his acquaintance." "Ah, one must shun evil companions like the plague." "But who's to say there isn't some good in him? In any case, he can't be any more tiresome than a member of the League of the Sacred Heart." We had come opposite the monument to Montcalm. At its foot, below that noble martyr who lies under the sheltering wings of glory, an old man with a furrowed brow was walking. "Poor Valade," said Delorme, "he's had a hard time of it. The public doesn't know the whole story. True, his crazy speculations have ruined several families who'd entrusted all their savings to him, like the widow Charlot who is now left penniless with eight children, the eldest only sixteen. But he's really an honest man at heart." "He is indeed," said his wife. "He's a good Catholic, after all. He has never missed Mass or failed to subscribe generously to the charitable works of his parish. The Pope has even decorated him." "So," I interposed, "if an irreligious young man squanders his own fortune, without ruining anyone, you call him a profligate, but if a man piously robs widows to enrich himself and appeases the divine wrath with a few dollars, you call him an honest man at heart." Indulging in this kind of bantfr, we reached the rue Cartier. The St.-Louis apartment building raised skyward its architectural insult to good taste; nearby, the Dominicans' church and monastery reproduced,

on a smaller scale, the severe and inappropriate lines of its mediaeval design. The whole scene was shimmering in the heat. At last we came to the battlefield, undoubtedly one of the finest parks in North America. The short walk had furnished me with a condensed history of half of the leading families of Quebec City. I knew that Mr. So-and-so had caught his wife in the very act of adultery, and thrown her out of his house, and taken her back a week later; that Mademoiselle X had nightly assignations with a taxi-driver; that Mr. Y took Holy Communion every morning, while Mr. Z did not even perform his Easter duty; that the young N's practised birth control; that Mademoiselle L had syphilis; and Dr B the obstetrician encouraged future lyingsin by lighting a candle every morning at low Mass before the statue of the Virgin; that Mademoiselle P, in common with several other girls in society,. had acquired the appropriate name of Quidonneroutexcept&a. The-girl-who-stops-short. As the amiable professor and his wife continued to retail this gossip I made it a point to excuse, even to praise, the foibles and weaknesses of all these people. The old couple maintained their unruffled calm, for they were well bred and knew, like all their set, how to conceal their true feelings. Madame Delorme confined herself to saying, as we parted, "You've cultivated a spirit of contradiction, I'see. I rather like the pose: it certainly enlivens conversation. After all, it's a good way of making oneself interesting." I thanked hey for the compliment, and the professor resumed his discourse at the sight of the Wolfe monument. "Not so bad, that column, eh? True, it marks a French defeat, but nowadays everyone agrees it was all for the best. What would have become of us under the rule of a revolutionary France?" "At least," I replied, "we wouldn't have been a conquered race, a servile herd." "Now you are childish," he laughed, holding out his hand. I told him, as swiftly as I could, of my ambition to become a professor at the University. "I'll be happy to recommend you," he said. "But if ever you get in, beware of belittling people and institutions. Anything that betokens independence of character or emancipation from accepted principles has no place in the University, which is the jealous guardian of tradition . . and indeed of truth itself."

.

VIII

"I'd advise you to try journalism. You have imagination, energy, the critical faculty and a good style. That's where you'd find the best outlet for your talent." This was Lucien Joly's advice as we came out of a little theatre where they were showing the film L'Enfant Martyr, an abominable title substituted, for the benefit of the mob, for Poi1 ce Carotte. Lucien, no more experienced than I, had not yet grasped the nature of our leading newspapers. I had the same illusions, and believed I could bring some intellect to bear on Canadian journalism. I laboured for a whole evening fashioning a sound article where I tried to show that moral liberty is the keystone of civilisation, the prime condition subserving the improvement of man's personality, and the foundation of both the individual's and society's uncertain progress. The next day I hastened to submit my essay-which I considered to be well conceived and well written-to the editor of a self-styled independent newspaper. This eminent person read my effort in silence, and then murmured, as if to himself, "Too bad that sincere people are so lacking in judgment." "What do you mean'!" "I mean that you couldn't have found a deadlier weapon against my newspaper than this article of yours. I'm rejecting it. Only think of the shock to our subscribers when they learned that we were harbouring a young whippersnapper who, over and above his command of grammar and common sense, goes so far as to put forward original ideas!" 1 bowed my head in guilt, With trembling lips I stammered, "So you're quite sure it's wrong to have ideas?" "Ideas, young man, obey the law of supply and demand. Has anyone asked you for your ideas? No? Then keep them to yourself. You see, you

must begin by creating a market for them, the way a businessman does when he's opening up a market for a new product. Besides, you're peddling principles which are too clear, too simple and elementary to be understood, much less followed. The masses care only for what is incredible, and only understand what is absurd. As you know, there are absurdities that were born thousands of years ago and will last for thousands more. Therefore become absurd yourself, and you will be venerated like the totem of some savage clan. You possess great talent, my friend. Why not devote it, like mine, to a noble cause?" "What cause is that?" "The cause of popular error." "I did not expect such cruel irony from you." "In a career like ours, my dear Hubert, irony is the last refuge of talent." I left his office with a sense of humiliation, and walked through the city in a mood of great bitterness, fuming, cursing, biting my lips. I passed through a park full of flowers I must have seen, of odours I must have smelled, of birds I must have heard, of alluring women who did not arouse me. I was as if consumed by my disillusionment. The face of nature itself now seemed less inviting, less beautiful, for a man's whole viewpoint can be obscured by his misery. A stupefying sunlight, brutal and intrusive, pierced to the very depths of my eyes, its rays like fingers of lead: seeking relief from it, I sank on a bench shaded by a maple tree. I looked up at the foliage, and had the impression that this mass of greenery was drinking the light like a sponge, that all I had to do was squeeze it with both hands to make drops of sunlight rain down on my shoulders. Before long I saw the tree undergoing the most fantastic change. All this vegetable matter was displaced and arranged anew, as if in a kaleidoscope. The trunk against which I was leaning ceased to support me and became a great boulevard crowded with people; every branch turned into a path or street or lane, while the leaves, gathering in an immense cluster, were transformed into a city that extended to the limits of the horizon. I was as if lost in this fantastic vision. Only a few hundred yards were between me and this magic city. I got up and made my way directly to the blocks of houses that bordered the road. A low gate which barred my way opened to let me through, closing behind me of itself. A few steps away a great garish poster bore these words:

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO TALK UNLESS FOR THE PURPOSE OF DISGUISING THOUGHT It was a witticism, I thought vaguely, which I had already read somewhere else. "The people in this country," I said to myself, "must have an odd sense of humour to engrave a joke like this on a plaque of solid gold." I was approaching a street comer when, in the most awkward manner, 1 stepped on the foot of a ravishingly beautiful woman whose smile alone would have re-animated Methuselah. "I love you!" she cried in a toneless voice. "Oh, how I love you!" Overcome by this unexpected avowal, I lost all sense of place and propriety and tried to kiss this fair unknown. Whereupon she punched me smartly in the nose, and while I was wiping the blood from my nostrils she called a policeman. He ordered me to follow him to the station. "But that woman solicited me!" I protested. "Solicited? You mean to tell me that the most beautiful and chaste woman in this country solicited you, you young scoundrel! How did she do it?" "She said, 'I love you, friend! How I love you!' She not only said it, she cried it out." The officer emitted such a burst of laughter that I was dumbfounded. "What are you laughing at?" I asked. "You must either be a stranger in this country, or you must be mad. In our language, the words spoken by this lady whom you have just insulted mean, '1 detest you! Idiot, how I detest you!"' I was released at once, as a foreigner, and immediately hastened away from this country where it would be impossible for a lout like myself to keep out of prison. Some distance away an eccentric person was dancing up and down and chuckling as he kept crying, "How happy I am! God in heaven, how happy I am! What a stroke of luck I've had, old fellow. Only think, my father, my mother, my wife and my childrcn have just been murdered by my best friend!" I ran wildly towards a second gate, and stepped through it with a sigh of relief. The scene which met me was far from refreshing. Between gloomy houses, in streets no wider than cow-paths, gangs of rickety pasty-faced children were tumbling around amidst piles of rotting garbage. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light I made out the following public notice:

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO THINK HERE, UNDER PENALTY OF IMPRISONMENT Beneath these words was the following information: Lawful thought is availabb in forty-ounce bottles at authorized stores of the Brain Commission only

Impelled by both compassion and curiosity, I kept on my way until I came to a store which-touchingly symbolic of the wares it held-was very low, long and narrow. From its door streamed a crowd of sickly creatures bearing coloured bottles sealed with official stamps. I asked a passer-by the meaning of this sinister procession. "It is not a sinister procession at all," he replied. "It is only the people's daily pilgrimage to the fountains of human thought. That building belongs to a trust which enjoys the exclusive right to bottle and sell the purest thought. A law, enforced by the most severe penalties, absolutely forbids the consumption of any intellectual products but these." "What measures are taken to prevent any such cheating? Are you not afraid of thought being smuggled?" "Thought-smugglers are liable to the most drastic punishment," he replied, "both in this world and the next. ~ortunatelythere are not many of them. As soon as any symptoms of poisoning by the ideas or influence of a man of genius appear anywhere, our spies report to us and we dose the culprits with a constipating medicine which cures the brain of any form of creativity." "Ah," I replied, speaking half to myself, "now I understand why all the faces I see filing by are stamped with an expression of such incurable cretinism." At these words my informant, bubbling with rage, called a police constable who was nearby and ordered him to arrest this young man who had just insulted, as he put it, "our race." I was locked in a cell to await trial. But I managed by some miracle to break one of the bars on my window and escape under cover of darkness. At dawn I entered a horrible quarter where nothing pleased my eye. Here there were no trees, no monuments, no songs. Before me there stretched out a kind of bare, vacant lot which appeared to be a public square. The ground was covered with women in rags, each of them busily scratching in the earth with as much care and concentration as if she were picking lice from a child's head.

"What are you doing?" asked one of them. "You don't know? Really? Why, we are uprooting, one by one, every blade of grass that is trying to grow in this public park. An ancient and venerable law prohibits the growth of any vegetable matter within our walls. Because, you see, there is actually life in a blade of' grass." "Has the world gone mad?" asked myself. I passed on. Countless posters dominated the streets as thickly as telegraph-poles. Every fifty feet I stopped to read proclamations like the following: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO BE A POET. IMAGINATION LEADS ONLY TO DEPRAVITY. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DISTURB ANYONE'S PEACE OF MIND WITH MUSIC. ONLY THE TOM-TOM IS PERMITTED. ARTISTS ARE FORBIDDEN TO PAINT THE HUMAN FIGURE AS GOD MADE IT. SCULPTORS ARE FORBIDDEN TO REPRESENT THE THE HUMAN FIGURE IN SUCH A WAY AS TO AROUSE IMPURE THOUGHTS. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO SEE PLAYS WHICH ARE NOT BORING. AFFLICTED OR UNHAPPY PERSONS ARE FORBIDDEN TO DRINK WINE TO ASSUAGE THE HARDSHIPS OF LIFE. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO WRITE BOOKS THAT CAN BE READ WITHOUT YAWNING. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ADMIRE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IF SHE HAS THE MISFORTUNE TO BE SO. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN LOVE. Trembling with fright, I was looking around to find some escape from this nightmare when I caught sight of a pale old man lying lip-deep in a court-yard full of excrement and a mass of refuse swarming with flies and worms. I offered to pull this wretch from his filthy hole. He refused with indignation. "Away with you, young man!" he cried. "You horrify me with your healthy, cheerful face!" "Then you actually wish to rot alive in this mire?" "Rot alive? It is the duty of all my people. I am amazed that you can swagger brazenly through the streets, as if you were expecting to find some joy in life. You object to my words, eh? You are fond of liberty, I

suppose. Well, just climb that hill over there and see what my children have done to her." I turned away in disgust from this old man, as complacent amidst his carrion and garbage as a courtesan lolling among her perfumes and cushions. I reached the little hill he had pointed out. It was surrounded by a group of jeering lepers who, covered with a scaly yellow skin like that of a smoked herring, were shaking their fists at the sky. On a rocky ledge I then saw a gallows from which a beautiful woman was suspended by her feet. Men and women who appeared demented were lashing her breast with whips, while filthy children swung, as if in a playground, from her luxuriant hair which trailed its bloody strands on the ground. I recognized the woman hanging there. She was Liberty! Overcome by a superhuman rage and conscious of an irresistible strength in all my limbs, I charged on these assassins, forced my way through them with my fists, and cut the rope from which the martyr was hanging. She was still living, and smiled at me in spite of her wounds. I took her by the hand and led her through the damnable country I had just crossed. In our wake trees grew again, the grass rose up, flowers bloomed, the idiotic monuments crumbled and fell, and the infamous posters fluttered in pieces to the ground. As if by enchantment all the plagues fled away, and thought, art, beauty and joy sprang up from a regenerated earth. Liberty turned to me and asked if I was satisfied with her work. "Not yet," I replied. "Near the place of your torment I saw an old man racked by fever and wallowing deliberately in his own offal. He was inveighing against you. Come with me now! We will compel him to resume the condition of a human being." "Never!" she said. "But he has disowned and insulted you!" "That matters little. The slightest compulsion, even against my enemies, would be against my nature. If this old man has chosen to take rottenness unto himself, even though it lead him to death, he is as free to do so as you are to reject it. I am his liberty as much as yours." I bowed to the ground. I had discovered tolerance and goodness! When I raised my head the beautiful woman had disappeared. I uttered a loud cry, seeking to call her back; then I gave a start and awoke to find myself at the foot of the tree beneath which I had fallen .asleep an hour ago.

A dog, wandering by and brushing against my legs, had knocked my rejected manuscript to the ground, and the stained sheets were fluttering like demented doves in the warm breeze of this perfect day.

While I was chasing these scattered papers I heard a voice that was already dear to me. "How do you do, Monsieur Hubert?" It was Dorothie, on horseback. She came straight towards me, smiling divinely. The breeze was ruffling her horse's flowing mane as well as her own black hair; the effect was delightful. "YOUseem to be rather out of sorts," she said. "I've been sleeping." "You've chosen a good place to sleep in-a flower-garden, singing birds everywhere. . ." "And with a charming girl passing by." "Thank you! But you're not telling me the whole truth. You are not happy today." "How could I be? I wanted to be a lawyer, and was told thatthe legal profession is overcrowded. I wanted a professorship at the University, and was told that freedom of expression and a professorship don't mix. This morning I have just offered my services to a newspaper; the article I'm picking up now was what I submitted, and I was told that my ideas would stampede most of the readers into cancelling their subscriptions." "If 1 should take'things up with my father. . . ." "He would suggest some business or other. I'd 'rather starve." "In that case, what do you want?" "I want to owe nothing to anyone, to write in accordance with my convictions and my tastes, to be successful and then, to crown it all, to win the love of a beautiful woman." "Work, independence, success and then love! That's a tall order. And it would be much too good for you. Why, what a child you are! Can't you be more explicit? Come on, even if it's only to humour me."

.

"Very well. For the past hour, ever since I was taught the brutal lesson that I couldn't live in this city without denying the best part of myself, without debasing what I prize most in myself, without aping the morally lame, paralytic and gouty-in short, without imitating every legless cripple in sight and all the invalids of official cretinismever since then I've been tempted to ask nothing more from anyone. Nothing! So that then, trusting in my own powers alone, I could demolish whatever I wished, construct whatever I wished, worship whatever I wished, and in doing so enrich the personality of others as well as my own." "What childish rant! Your personality, indeed. What makes you think you have one? You don't answer? Well, you do have one, young as you are. But what a show of pride! You're in love with yourself-as if you were your own mistress. Pure narcissism, that's all. Don't raise your hands in denial! You're quite satisfied with yourself, aren't you?" "Indeed I am. When I compare myself with. . . ." "'1 hat's enough. You may be right, after all. I've heard a lot of good things about you. In any case, your self-confidence should bring you success with the ladies." Spurring her horse, which wheeled about sharply, Dorothk was gone before I had time to say anything more. "If only," I reflected, "she doesn't class me as one of her nodding acquaintances!" She galloped around the park in splendid style, and as she passed me again called out tauntingly: "Don't worry, 1-11 find something to suit your personality!" I merely laughed, but loudly enough for her to hear. I thought she was either joking or simply laughing at me. But I r e a l i ~ dthat her words had increased the sum of my perplexities. More clearly than ever I understood that I was a rebel. But whence came this spirit of rebellion? It was from my refusal to disown my ego, that ego which assumed such great dimensions whenever, in a spirit of either contempt or pity, I compared myself to the sick or insignificant people around me. The revolt had begun on that day when, throwing off the yoke of the cloister, stripping myself of the miserable frock which covered my true manhood like an outworn cuirass, dashing to the ground at my feet the shattered fragments of my feigned abasements, my adulterated virtues, my unreasoning obedience; the day when, tearing the three bloody monastic vows from my throat, my breast and my loins, I had thrown open the heavy portals of darkness, and then, facing the boundless horizons of liberty, had cried out with all my strength, "Now at last, 0 sun of thought, sun of nature, sun of love, I will walk in thy radiance!" 66

From the Meunier town house one could look down, that morning, on the lawns and flowers of the Plains of Abraham. Robins, hopping over the grass, were pulling huge worms from the humid earth-worms which resisted, writhing and contracting, before suddenly yielding like sprung bows and causing the birds to tumble and pirouette like clowns. Dorothke, seated on the verandah and wearing a maroon dressinggown adorned wit11 hand-painted daisies, stretched her supple, feline little body, yawning as if intoxicated by the languorous heat of the day. Luc Meunier emerged from the front door, cigar in mouth, and strolled towards his daughter. Dressed in a light grey linen suit made for just such warm weather, he looked cool, comfortable and well satisfied. He had hard blue eyes and the tanned complexion of an old seaman, while two deep lines creased his forehead and surmounted a broad nose, thin, dry lips and a long, protruding and brutal jaw. The harshness of his character appeared when his face was in repose, but in the warmth of conversation, especially in the presence of his beloved daughter, his manner became easy and jovial, a little vulgar, but not devoid of charm; in addition, he diffused a pleasant odour of eau de Cologne. "Hello there, Mathte!" This was his contraction of "ma Dorothte". "Feeling good this morning? You know, you're lucky to be living like this, just loafing around, warming your legs in an easy chair and ruminating like a young heifer in the sun." Dorothte laughed at her father's attempt to tease her. "Well, 1can't say I blame you," he added. "It's all this loafing around that makes you the prettiest girl in Quebec." "Please, father, don't boast about me as if I were some merchandise of yours. Especially in front of a lot of spiteful people the way you did

the other day at the Delormes'! You're always bragging about your money, your horses, your daughter." "That's just silly, Mathie. I never rank my horses above my daughter. Come on, get dressed now and come out with me. I have to pay a call." "No, no paying calls till I've asked a favour of you." "More money, I suppose?" "Perhaps, but not for myself." "For someone else, then. Who? To hell with people like that! Let them make their own money. Like I did." "It's not a charity. Just a project I'm interested in." "A market tip, I bet. Mathie, you'll find out all market tips are worthless. All those stocks were wiped out in the crash." "It's nothing like that. You'll never guess. It's for a young man who claims he can do great things. He's got plenty of talent, but he can't get started because no one will give him a hand." "And what do you want me to do for this young man of yours?" "Nothing at all. Just listen to me, instead of talking all the time. I want to try an experiment, just for the fun of it. I'd like to know how an oddball like this can make the most of an opportunity. Give me a chance to find out." "1 don't get you';:You want me to recommend him to my friends in the cabinet?" "More than that. I want your tinancia1 backing for a scheme where he'll have a free hand and the chance of proving himself. . . The scheme? Well, it's a magazine where he could write whatever he wants, where we'd give him his head altogether-enough rope, perhaps, to hang himself." "What kind of a dream is this, MathCe? You remind me of some little girl who's only half awake and keeps on talking in her sleep. Start a magazine for a young man'? Just who is this scamp?" "This scamp is a particular friend of mine. 1 liked him at first sight. His name is Max Hubert." "Who?" "Max Hubert." Luc searched his memory. He knew no family of that name. The man, thereforc, wasn't in the upper crust. He repeated with a wry expression, "Hubert . . . Hubert . don't know him. By the way, MathCe, 1 can't say 1 approve of your taking up with young men without position or family background." "1-'amily background'? Did you have any when you started in?" "No, but that's beside the point. The point is, I don't like the idea. I'd back any smart guy who came to me with a real business proposition, r,

:.'

something with a chance of a good profit and a certainty of recovering my capital and interest. But a magazine! To help out a youngster who writes, eh? I've never met a writer with a cent to his name. Writing, it's a mug's game." He paused, then said abruptly, "Let's forget it for now. Tomorrow will do. I've barely time to get to Bouvier's place. He's expecting me." "I'm none too fond of your Thomas Bouvier," said Dorothie. "I've never understood why you're such friends with that drunken bum. Nor can anyone else." "You shouldn't believe that kind of talk." "I believe what I can see for myself. I've run across him often enough when he was drunk, or doped up, or with women no better than tarts." "I know all about that side of him. But Bouvier and me, we've been ~hroughtoo much in the past for me to drop him now. He was my pal back in the tough old days when we were at sea in all kinds 01' weather, rain, wind, cold, snow, when our little 35-footer carried stuff from Newfoundland to Quebec and Montreal. That's when we learned what rough seas and hard times really were. Bouvier was a lot younger than me, almost a kid. I felt I had to look after him in return for his pluck and what he went through during our runs. As soon as I struck it rich, I let him share my luck. He's made a poor hand of it, but nobody can say Luc Meunier ever Icft a friend in the lurch." "You've certainly been open-handed with him. At least four times, to my own knowledge, he'd have ruined himself in crazy schemes if you hadn't bailed him out." "1 admit he's cost me plenty, that guy." "I'm not running you down for being generous, even to a good-fornothing like him. But here's the point: how can you be so good to a common sponger like Bouvier, a man who doesn't deserve the half of what you've done for him, and refuse to help an honest young man who's both gifted and decent?" "So you're really taken with this young writer, eh, my little MathCe? Well, you always have the last word. I'll think it over. So long!" Meunier took a few steps, then suddenly turned and said, "You're not coming with me? Every time I go to see Bouvier he complains I don't bring you with me." "I'll never set foot in his house." "You really hate him, eh?" "I don't hate him, he's not worth my hate. But I can't put up with his attentions." "How's that1?" "Why, the gentleman has taken it on himself to tell me he's been in

love with me for years, that he's stayed single up to now, just waiting for me, that I'm his whole life, his dream, his undying flame. And 1 can't stand it. The man revolts me." "I see. Of course of course, that kind of thing's-well-out of the question. All I ask you is to keep your distance without being rude." "Very well, Papa, I'll not be rude, for your sake. But 11' 1 be more than distant." On his way to his friend's house, Meunier re-lived the many long sea-trips he had taken with Abel Warren and Thomas Bouvier. Abel was tough, enterprising and ambitious; at that time Thomas was just the scullion and mess-boy. Warren and Meunier, sharing equally in their smuggling operations, had pulled off more than one daring job under the very nose of the Mounties or the surveillance of the coast-guard. In their white yacht, its engine purring sofily, they had covered the whole fir-covered, birdhaunted Gasp6 peninsula. Luc remembered it all: the way the scene at twilight around PercC took on the appearance of a fantastic vision, with the sails of the fishing-boats gliding against a sky of mauve, the tints of purple shifting on the surface of the water that was like a grcat body breathing with the rhythm of the sea itself, and across the bay, on the cliffs of the bird sanctuary, thc fluttering of millions of wings; while PercC Rock, with its'arched portal, that arcade wrought by the divinity of the Gulf, rose up like a very cathedral of storm and wind, and out beyond the bay the dolphins gambolled happily in the waves. The meeting-place was off the castern promontory of the arm, beyond the twelve-mile limit. There, in the dead of night and generally in foul or foggy weather, the partners, in high spirits even though shivering and soaked to the skin, hove alongside a black hulk lurking in the darkness-a schooner hailing from the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. The cargo-ten thousand gallons every time-was quickly transhipped, and the yacht was off again on its hazardous course. To outwit the patrols they would return at night, often under cover of a thick fog. It was great sport, in its way. Then came an overwhelming memory, that of the stormy night when Warren, numbed by the cold damp and howling winds of October, was standing his deck watch. Nothing could be heard above the funereal groaning of the sea, the gale and the rain, when suddenly the air was rent by the desperate shout of Warren as he fell overboard. At that moment young Bouvier was in his bunk. Could he suspect therc had been a crime? Why had Luc Meunier kept an eye on him ever since, held him under his very hand? Was it because the boy, like a part of his conscience, might have been witness to a murder? He had let him

.. .

share in his wealth, had put up with his drunkenness and prodigality, had several times rescued him from ruin, treating him like one of those cruel deities whom the negroes load with sacrificial offerings in order to appease them or control their powers for evil. It was to Bouvier's he was going that morning, on one of his almost daily visits. Was this an act of atonement or one of the marvels of a genuine friendship?

The image of DorothCe had haunted me ever since our meeting in the park. It was with her in mind that I was not reading Shakespeare's Othello. From time to time my gaze would leave the page and wander over the books that lined my library shelves, and at last I ended by giving over my reading and sinking into a reverie wherein I seemed to see, through the smoke of my cigarette, Shakespeare himself-awesome, by turns sensitive and violent, tender and brutal, hurling at the world, in clouds torn by lightning or tinged with gold, all the dreams and drama, all the cruelty and compassion of mankind. Then came the pale face of Goethe, surrounded by Hermann and Dorothea, by Marguerite and the rejuvenated Faust,' a group behind which lurked the crafty face and sinister smile of Mephisto. Next came Molih, smiling bitterly as with one mighty hand he gripped Tartuffe and with the other tore out the very entrails of this bloated hypocrite. Now Balzac displayed his great skull, a skull as transparent as a crystal ball and as wide as the nave of a church, where one saw the vanity and goodness of Birotteau, the envy and intrigue 01' Cousine Bette, thc lechery and cowardice of Baron Hulot, the tenderness of Benassis and the whole troop of that bourgeoisie spawned by the Revolution as they whirled about, grimaced, wept, laughed, loved and hated. Then the aged Lamartine, noble, seedy and still sublime even as he wandered through Paris in his threadbare clothing. And floating above his visionary panorama of men of genius a mighty song could be heard, distant at first, then growing ever louder, swelling like a torrent in the rain until, borne on a great wave of harmony, appeared the head of Wagner. Others, and still others, peopled my dream. Then its aspect changed: the concourse of great minds was transformed into a huge bed of flowers which exhaled a thousand scents amid the songs of birds; it seemed

that all the sweetness of' things was breathed out by this garden, and that the cruel and barbarous world would long ago have foundered in the pit ot' an inferno were it not for the saving grace of these immortal minds. This dazzling and fugitive vision made me understand that the ultimate perfection 01 man depcndcd on such art and science, on such sunshine and flowers. Whoever plumbed the secret depth of people and grasped the reflection of beauty in all thought, action and things, would be the best of men. That was what I craved to be, but I did not know the way. "You must also be all love," a voice within me answered. All love! The image of DorothCe returned. And at that moment thc telephone rang. "This is Mademoiselle Meunier speaking." "What a pleasure to hear your voice!" "Would you care to come to my house on rue des Bernitres this evening? It is to discuss a matter that concerns you very closely. May I expect you'!** "But of' course. And thank you." At nine o'clock that night I entered the Meunier mansion. I was shown across a hall and down a staircase leading to a sumptuous soussol walled with panels of multi-coloured marble where grey, pink and blue prevailed. A mosaic bearing the most outlandish and fantastic designs covered the floor. At the far end of this room Dorothk and her father, ensconced in great armchairs of red leather, were waiting for me. No sooner had we been introduced than Meunier, a practical man not given to beating about the bush, Icd straight into the subject. "My daughter," he said, "who barely knows you, takes a great intcrest in your future. Are you aware of this?" "I am moved and flattered by such a mark of her confidence." "Bah! The girl has fallen for you, and you know it! Congratulations, young man. You must be a good rider, for Dorothie's not an easy filly to manage." "Now, papa, no more about my nasty disposition, if you please. Monsieur Hubert, I want to try an experiment with you. You won't be offended if I make you my guinea-pig for a while, will you?" "I could have no objection to thus satisfying a woman's curiosityand even her cruelty." "Splendid. You see, I want to find out what kind of stuff you have in you." "That's being frank." "Yes, and it*s amusing also." "Have you two finished ribbing each other?" said Meunier. "Good.

Then let me explain. I'm illso acting under my daughter's orders. She claims that you want to write, that you're talented and well worth being helped. It's a matter of whether you'd consider founding a magazine-" "A review," corrected Dorolhte. "All right, a review-expressing what my daughter calls the ideas of the younger generation. Personally, I don't care a damn about the ideas 01' the younger generation. You're just a bunch of hot-heads and window-smashers. Growing up will put some ballast in your canoeand in your heads. When you find out there's no money in writing or gabbing, you'll return to the sensible old satisfaction of toeing the line and making the most of cvery chance of keeping out of the poor-house. However, coming back to this idea of a magazine, I'll underwrite it-to please my daughter. Will fifty thousand dollars be enough?" I'he bluntness, the contradiction betwecn his opening words and his concluding offer, so surprised me t h a ~I wondered if he was not pulling my leg. Then I looked at him and saw he was quite serious. "I mustn't let him get me hog-tied," I thought. "I would agree," I said, "on one condition." "Hey! I'm putting up the cash, and you'rc making conditions'?' "Only one, but it's a tough one." "Let's have it then." "If I take your money, will you vest full control of the review in me and my associates'?" "You seem to overlook the fact that it's old man Meunier who's footing the bill." "Not at all. It's only that I don't think we can carry out our aims or follow a straight course of action if we haven't an absolutely free hand." "But it might be advisable for Iiie to keep an eye on your finances. You may have plenty of brains and still be no businessman." "I see your point. You're entitled to see where your money goes. That's why I haven't raised a finger to get your help. It's Mademoiselle Meunier who has made the first move. I'm grateful to her, but I'm afraid her plan is impracticable after all." "You're a bull-headed fellow, all right-and no businessman at all! If I were you I'd have jumped at an offer like this! Your notions of independence won't get you very tar. There's no place in life for the loners!" Meunier had reason on his side, and his logic conquered me. I was determined to refuse, but said no more for fear of exasperating him further. Dorothke, who hadn't joined in the discussion, now interposed. "Papa, you show a lot of sense when you talk business, but when it comes to ideas you're hopeless. You won't be giving your money to

Monsieur Hubert, but to me. I'll found the review. It'll belong to me and I'll be free to dispose of it to whomever I choose. For the time being, here's my associate." She pointed to me. "He'll be accountable to me alone. How will that be, Monsieur Hubert'?" "Even under those conditions," I said, "I'm not sure. I might be subject to a woman's whims." "Max Hubert," she exclaimed, "don't you know what you want? Will you accept a partner, yes or no? And sincc you must have partners in a project like this, what does it matter what sex they are?" The three of us looked at each other, and burst out laughing. The game was won. Meunier rang for the butler. "Champagne! And glasses," he ordered.

Three years after the founding of The Twetttierh Cenrury I had succeeded, with the help of a few brilliant and courageous collaborators, in gathering from twelve to fifteen thousand subscribers who enthusiastically supported us in the project of liberalizing the ideas ol'our country. Thus for the first time, in this archaic atmosphere of anonymity and deceit, where officially approved ideas alone held'sway, a genuinely free publication had appeared: open to all shades of intelligent opinion, it had undermined the spirit of conformity which for the past century and a half had been imposed on a people either servile, or terrified. In the fields of art and literature, of sociology, politics and economics, we enjoyed the unique advantage of not being tied to any party or iqstitution. Reason was almost always on our side. Alone against all comers, we easily won every polemic, for lucid and straightforward thinking will always prevail against obfuscation and falsehood. But we made no headway among the masses. Truth has indeed seldom appealed to them. If you teach them plain, unvarnished and selfevident things, they will not listen; offer them fictions, fairy-tales and a philosophical system based on tenuous abstractions, and you may count not only on their instant belief but on their gratitude for ages to come. We must not censure mankind for this. Such an anomaly may well be part of nature's plan. Let us rely on the calm impassive light of reason to spread slowly, very slowly, in the furtherance of its work of regeneration. For it is enough to throw open for a fcw thousand minds thosc windows which look out on the clear horizons of the world; the rest, still pcnned up in darkness and breathing the rnouldy and pernicious effluvia of ignorance, will also, in their own good time, finish by embracing the light. We had to sustain some odd controversies. It is well known that the

-literature of this country has never admitted the existence of physical love or of a great passion. The various published attempts to do so have heretofore been limited to sentimental platitudes, to bucolics copied from Vergil or tile Abbe Delisle, or to descriptions worthy of schoolboys and to sermons in the style of Savonarola. Hermann Lillois, a gifted young man who later joined our review, was the first author in French Canada who, in a vigorous novel, dared to uncover and analyse the passion of love under its sensual complexity as well as in its mystic flight towards a supernatural ideal. A theological student at the University of' Laval, the critic of the day, had at once in a college journal condemned the work on the grounds of immorality. He admonished all young people to shun it, reserving for elderly mendoubtless of the same temper as those who cast their eyes on Susannathe privilege of feasting on the warm and vivid pages into which Lillois had breathed his ardent spirit. 77ze Twentieth Century took up the cudgels on Lillois' behalf. In our rebuttal of the professor we faced the moral issue squarely and inquired what would be the fate of the world's art if it were required to satisfy the dcmands of high priests. If it were, we pointed out, nearly all Greek and Latin literature, forming the basis of all classical studies, would have to be suppressed; we would also have to do away, either in whole or in part, with Rabelais, Montaigne, Moli&re,Shakespeare and Goethe, as well as three quarters of the eighteenth century-and, for good measure, Balzac, Hugo, Musset, the Daudets, father and son, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Verlaine, Flaubert, Anatole France, d'Annunzio, Byron, Shelley, Tolstoy, Ibsen and a hundred other writers of genius. The Bible itself would have to be placed on the Index, on account of many crude passages likely to bring a blush to the cheek of the least prudish of readers; the museums of Paris, Rome, Florence, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York and elsewhere must be torn down, and the remains of Greek statuary, all in the nude, reduced to powder; a thousand immortal pictures, created from the period of the Renaissance to the present, must be burnt; even a good portion of the work of many musicians must be destroyed. In short, the adoption of the rigid precepts of a few of our domestic puritans would spell ruin for the whole world's artistic wealth and subject the greatest monuments of beauty, the most marvellous memorials of bygone civilizations, to the hammers and torchcs of barbarians. But this, we alfirmed, had not happened and never would happen, simply because mankind and nature scoff at the puny judgments of men in the same way as Cape Eternity defies the four winds of heaven. In the course of thousands of years no sectarian interdict had succeeded in

suppressing the creation of art. For although this ferment of the soul had never ceased to be the plague and despair of the enemies of life, artistic creation had survived, always more beautiful and admired, imperishable as the reflection of God Himself, while the world scorned or forgot the men devoted to its destruction. Arguments like these, and many others, roused the ire of the literary cliques and small coteries where it was maintained that Chapman, the Poet of the terroir, and Tardivel, the QuCbCcois ultramontanist, had after all existed. Our friends and foes at last showed their hands, and we held steadily on our own course. Some time after this occurred an incident which caused me both pain and disquiet. Prominent among the pundits of Quebec literature was NicCphore Gratton, the brahmin of Canadian letters, a sickly little man, bilious and myopic, who ha published poems, novels, tales and biographies, at the same time strewing his prose through three or four rightminded periodicals. / For years the critics hf been building up his apostolic position. To refer to him in the pre s without the honorific epithets of "gifted," "superior." "fecund," ':'powerf'ul" and "irresistible" was simply not done. He had managed to demonstrate, in five volun~es of three hundred pages each, that the good receive their just reward, even in this world, and that the wicked are punished. This extensive work had been awarded the Lieutenant-Governor's Medal. Several of his poems, The Bridge in Our W a g e (in three hundred heroic couplets), nte Pine-Tree by the Old GFey House (a sonnet sequence), and The Cackling oj' illy Father's Hens, had won for him the crown of Prince of Poets, a title he bore with becoming modesty. Two of his novels, Back to the Farm and The Inferno of Urban Sprawl, had each brought him the prize of a thousand dollars awarded every three years by the government. His was indeed a glory almost deific. His friends had even undertaken to export his renown to the AcadCmie Frangaise itself, which under the imprimatur of its Secretary Monsieur RenC Doumic, had given his works its official blessing. A review copy of his latest work, a novelized History of Sainte-Rosedu-/)e'gPIb,happened to arrive on my desk. For the first time I had the privilege of passing judgment on the prodigious NicCphore. The book opened with an invocation of our ancestral spirits: Souls of our grandsires, buried/orevermore in the soil watered by your hallowed sweat, inspire the words of a grateful son who wouldfain immortalize your toil, your sufferings and your glory! The rest was in the same vein. It was as if all the windbags in the province had gathercd together to inflate and dilute the national style,

P

and the final chapter concluded with the first stanza of 0 Canada!, those verses from the Muse of Mr. Justice Routier which had always impressed me with their hackneyed solemnity. , I conscientiously demolished the author and his book. "All Monsieur Gratton's ideas," I wrote, "could be contained in a thimble, and it would still be empty. As for his style, it would be excellent if the author had learned ordinary grammar and if, unlike a fish, he had anything but cold blood in his veins. But as it is, the style is that of a eunuch." A literary battle ensued. The right-minded newspapers took me violently to task. A university review covered me with abuse and enjoined me, with the direst threats, to define exactly what I meant by the term "eunuch." I replied as best 1 could, giving such definitionsas I knew and explaining my unstinted admiration lor the author's personal virility, for I was well aware that despite his physical handicaps and personal repulsiveness he boasted constantly of his amatory prowess-even though his wife, according to malicious reports, was still a virgin after twenty years of marriage. Unfortunately there are people who cannot endure irony. All too well accustomed to the incense of adoration, Niciphore received my articles like so many strokes of a club. He was laid low. After spending two weeks of sleepless nights, he was heard to cry out in his sleep, "Murder! Murder!" By this time he had quite lost his wits. One morning he came to our olfice, gloomy and haggard. His thick spectacles, pimply nose and tousled tiair presented an odd appearance. "What brings you here at such an early hour?" I asked. "I have been sent by the blessed Birard Rosemond," he said. "He orders you to return to him the Kingdom of Canada, which you have just reft from our literary heritage." I thought he was joking. "But I had the impression," I replied, "that your kingdom was not of this world." "Woe betide ye who laugh today," he cried, "for ye shall weep tomorrow." I studied him more closely. The fiery light in his eyes warned me that he was delirious. "Away with you!" he cried. And with these words he pulled a revolver from his pocket and tried to point it at me. I leapt on him and disarmed him. That evening he was committed to a mental hospital, muttering over and over, "Woe betide you! Woe betide you! The Blessed BCrard Rosemond is with me!" Thus fell the author of so many masterpieces. The following day the word went around that I had performed a moral assassination. "We French-Canadians," it was added, "have no luck with our geniuses. Sooner or later they all go mad."

Episodes like this fascinated Dorothk, who called daily at the editorial office and was always ready to talk shop. Later, towards evening, we would often drive to some spot in the Laurentians. The very first of these little trips, which marked the beginning of our friendship, gave me such pleasure that the remembrance of it still haunts . River by the me. We had left by the lower town, crossed the ~ iCharles Limoilou bridge, passed through the sedate middle-class d'Assise quarter, and at last driven through Charlesbourg straight towards the mountains. All QuCbCcois know the opportunities for pleasure scattered along this road bordered by the zoo, by the graceful chapel sf Notre-Damedes-Laurentides, and by the blue of Lac Clement. Our car soon arrived at the tiny village af Stoneham, lying in the foothills and close to the rustic bridges built over their rippling waterfalls. At that point the road swerves towards Tewkesbury: we followed it. Night, alrcady closing in, was softening the tones of orange, gold, mauve, red and purple that tinged the trees, and a translucent veil-was slowly f'alling over the distant mountain-tops, a veil woven of infinitely fine threads of dust suffused by the light. Nearer at hand, the lesser heights were crowned with a hazy green; nearer still, a harsh, cold wind was re-warmed in patches by the glowing colours of the dead foliage. Above all these hues the western sky shone with a tawny brightness, a torrent of fire that formed the triumphant salute of day to the approaching night. Dusk had already fallen when we reached the Tewkesbury woods, where we alighted to pick the scarlet-leaved maple branches. DorothCe was walking at my side, her hair brushing my shoulder. Looking at her, I was suddenly overcome by an intense longing. In the dim shelter of the trees, where light and shade were subtly blended, it seemed that this

woman was the embodiment of nature itself, the expression of all the life that was teeming around us. This was the first time I had been alone with her. 1 took her in my arms, drawing her supple form to me so closely that our bodies were moulded to each other tiom head to foot. "Max," she said, "I feel that I have never known a man who possessed a soul like yours. I adore you-your mind, your heart, all the play of your intellect and the harmony of your being. You are my father, my mother, my brotker, my sister, my child-and more. I have made so intimate a place for you in my heart that to see you fail would ruin my whole life." "DorothCe, my dearest," I said, "I cannot assume the qualities of a god." "But that is what you mean to me. A god. I need an earthly god by my side, a god of flesh and blood to whom I can dedicate my life." "We are only perfect," I murmured, as if speaking to myself, "through our minds and our hearts. Through thought and love. You must recognize the greatness of such an ideal." "To think, to love, yes! And then to model our deeds on such thought and love. That is the whole aim of life. If you are true to me in those things which are the principle of all lofty conception and all noble action, I will never cease to love you. Whatever happens, I will be one wit11 you-as heat is one with light. Even your infidelity would not turn me from you, for I know that such lapses would not alter your heart. If you have the strength ro despise the conventions and the false gods which require the sacrifices of millions of men, I also will have the courage to trample on the artificial sentiments which falsehood makes for us, and so will realize myself in you-in all ways, in body and soul." "I swear that I will do so." "And now, Max, may I ask you a question?" "Of course." "Do you believe that we must marry in order to give ourselves to each other?" "Obviously not." "Then, if you will, shall we wait a few years before assuming that chain?" "Really," I said with a smile, "such expressions in the mouth of a young girl fill me with astonishment." "I speak like this because I'm so attached to the liberty we already enjoy, the liberty of belonging to each other without any compulsion or formal agreement. Never forget, the day when one of us can say to the other, 'You no longer have the right not to love me,' on that day. . . ."

"On that day, the demands of duty might override those of love, and love would resist." "Indeed it would. And then, I'm barely twenty-two. I was eighteen when I left the convent. The nuns wcre more like great ladies of the seventeenth century than women of the twentieth. They re-created around us the world of de SkvignC and f.knelon.They taught us to drop a curtsey ci la Maintenon which would have convulsed all North America with laughter. Living in this atmosphere of constraint, forbidden to think for myself, I became a passive, inert and purely receptive being. On Sundays, in the room set aside for visits, I saw my parents through an iron grating, and to kiss them I had to thrust my lips through little openings that were so cold . . Brrr! Give me time to discover myself. 1 will not change. If I should ever cease to love you it would be to cease believing in everything, even my own existence." The more I listened to Dorothke, the more amazed I was to discover in her a woman totally different from the one I had first known. Impulsive, headstrong and domineering at that time, she now seemed delicate, dreamy, almost mystical.

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XIV

One night that winter I had taken Dorothhe and her friend Maryse Gauty to the annual Dog Derby Ball, the highlight of the Winter Carnival. After a few intoxicating dances we had briefly entertained the winning driver, a man named Girardin, at our table. He was a short, stocky man with swarthy, weather-beaten features, whose hard life in the woods and on the traplines had taken their toll of him, though he was not old. To my congratulations on the success of his team, he replied in a voice already thickened by liquor: "You know, me an' my dogs are pals. That's why we win. A yell from the boss-that's me-puts the fire in their ass. Look, first I hitch my six dogs and then 1 use my bitch Nelly as leader. I yell, 'Giddyap, for crissake!' and they lean into the collar and go like hell! All dogs like to run after a bitch. But Nelly doesn't give them a chance. She pulls harder than a horse. Now and then she turns round and shows the dogs her teeth, with her tongue hanging out just like she was laughing at them. Then she's off again: 'Catch me if you can!' "That's my life all winter in the woods. Those dogs sure know me! If you saw the goddamn portages they can make in one day! You wouldn't believe it! I don't use them all at once, only two at a time. But Nelly's almost always along. Without her, you know, I'd have croaked long ago. One day I was taking a short cut across Lac des Vases, north of St. Raymond, when all at once a big sheet of snow gives way under the sled. I can see I'm going to sink into a pool more than fifteen feet deep--a warm pocket that hadn't frozen. I yell like I'm going to split my lungs, 'Nelly! Hee-ya!' You could have heard me three miles off. Nelly catches on. She gives one good kick behind, she jumps, she pulls, and in a second I'm out of that hole. Jesus, she saved me! I put my arms around her neck, and give her a real bear-hug. And she keeps licking my face

and slobbering all over qe, she's so glad! By Jesus, a dog like that's better than any guy you can name!" During this account, made more graphic by the mimicry of the narrator, I was looking at Maryse, studying with pleasure the cast of her features. She was beautiful: not so beautiful as DorothCe, but in a different way. Did Dorothie notice my interest? I believed so at the lime, though events were to prove me wrong. Maryse was witty, wellread and had the gift of pleasing. She talked well. She was familiar with French poetry, especially of the modern school, while the novels of the day held no secrets for her. With such a literary background, she possessed also an elegancc of expression and a knowledge of psychology that enabled her to maintain a delicate balance between boldness and coquetry. Culture and taste thus made up for her want of originality. She was twenty-eight, a blonde with a delicate oval face, a slim boyish figure, and large blue eyes full of an engaging candour; behind those eyes there lurked, however, a certain disturbing hardness. As the night wore on the ball became more lively. The orchestra was now playing the frenzied music of Negro jazz. The Negro's revenge on white America has been to inflict on it his primitive a n , his capering and his cries 01' an animal in heat. The dancers whirled through the coloured beams of powerful spotlights that threw a mosaic of luminous reflections on each couple: red, the hue of love, streamed over the crowd like a wave of fire; then blue, the blue of moonlight, bathed them like the rapture of a midnight dream; then followed a sudden shower, like livid rain, of the crudest green. The faces of the dancers who were tired were like the cadaverous features of saints in ecstasy; the laughing ones seemed to be making Satanic grimaces. The countenances of love and death, always inseparable, were floating before my eyes. The guests were now returning to their tables for the midnight supper. Americans, men and womcn both, already tipsy, were noisily uncorking bottles of champagne. When the reports were not.loud enough for them, they mimicked the sounds with their lips. Everywhere resounded the cry, "Sham-payne! Sham-payne!" These people had never learned to drink in a civilized manner: they did not taste, they ingurgitated. A big clown from Boston climbed on a table, among the plates-a feat to which he seemed well accustomed-delivered an unintelligible diatribe against the abuse of hard liquor and at last, bellowing, "Hurrah for Prohibition!", he suited the deed to the word, downed a full tumbler and fell off the table in the midst of the cutlery and broken china. During this performance a young and remarkably pretty American

woman nudged me in the back. "I hope," she said, "this shindig ends up with everyone cockeyed." "The prospects are good," I replied. Dorothie and Maryse were surprised and amused by such informality. We had quite made up our minds not to respond to these too friendly advances, but the stranger elbowed me again. "Say," she said, "won't you folks have a glass of champagne with us?" "Thank you," I answered, "but this cognac is enough for us." The American girl was not to be put off. "Can't you see that my friend and I are just dying to join you? And now you'll find this funny-I'm beginning to see everything turning around-tables, people-the ceiling too--every darn thing! Funny stuff, this French wine . . . Pretty soon, we'll be making love like the French do. When you drink wine, it's Paris that gets into your blood." Introductions followed, perforce. We learned that the young American girl's name was Kathleen Ross and her companion's Jack Murphy. "I'm also called 'Little Lady Vagabond'," added Miss Ross with a laugh. "That's because I get around so much." Mr. Murphy said nothing, merely looking at the two girls beside me in a kind of stupor mixed with admiration. After a few moments of silence he simply murmured, "Lucky Frenchman! Lucky Frenchman!" "You know," said Kathleen in English, "Jack's a bit of a wolf. But I'm not the jealous type." The conversation began sliding down the endless slope of jealous bickering when a woman from the ranks of Quebec's social Clite staggered drunkenly across the dance floor, screaming, "Where's Thomas? Where's that bastard gone? Leaving me to sit all alone like Saint Anne in her niche." At that moment a man, around forty and possessing a certain elegance, stalked from the end of the room, seized her by the wrist and roughly forced her to sit down. "I hate that man," said Dorothie. "Who is he?" asked. "Thomas Bouvier, a friend of my father's." To our amazement the man now made for our table. He had been drinking heavily, and his bloodshot eyes were squinting rudely at us. "Well, look who's here!" he called out to Dorothie. "Luc Meunier's little girl! Did you see that lush making a scene just now? As if I had to lug her around with me to all my friends' tables!" We were all taken aback. He kept on talking loudly. "I can't see why you, Dorothie," he said, "such a rich man's girl, go

around with that young bum." He pointed a finger at me. "Come on now, have the next dance with me! Aren't I your old man's best friend? After that 11' 1 see you home. I've got some interesting things to say to you. . . As for this boy friend of yours, you can leave him with the Gauty girl. She's the right sort of thing for him." Dorothie turned to me with an expression of disgust and appeal. I felt myself flushing with anger. "You'll do me the favour," I said to him, "of going back to your own table, and right away too. When you've sobered up I'll give you a piece of my mind." "You got the nerve to tell me I'm tight? Me, Thomas Bouvier? This'll show you how 1 carry my liquor!" He drew back his fist. But I had just gotten my own hands up when Jack, who hadn't opened his mouth all this time, caught Bouvier flush on the chin with an uppercut that sent him sprawling on the floor ten feet away. As bedlam broke loose the drunken man picked himself up, his face red and swollen. The maitred'hbtel nodded to two waiters. "Take him out," he ordered. On his way out Thomas was shouting, "As for you, Hubert, you'll pay for this! Anyway, you'll never get Luc's little girl! 11' 1 see to that!"

Dorothk, by now in great distress, said that she wished to leave. Did she sense trouble? "That man will stop at nothing," she said. "He's madly jealous. He has been after me ever since I left boarding-school. I've been hiding from him like a mouse from a hawk! Only the other day I overheard him telling my father that he'd have married long ago if only he could have had a girl like me." "That boor! How could he dare?" "Daring would have gotten him nowhere, Max. All the same, I'm frightened of his hold over my father. Papa has always given in to him." We said goodnight. The next morning I received the following note from her: it was like the stroke of a club. Dearest Max, Be as brave as I am trying to be. There is a disaster hovering over us. Something has happened since last night, something you simply must not know, and I must entreat you to see me no more. Do not ask me the reason for this. I cannot explain anything. A secret is involved-a secret more important than my very life. Please believe me when I say that you are in no way to blame, and that I love you more than anything in the world. And I shall never love anyone else. God willing, I may be able to prove this to you some day. My poor dear Max. . . I have just burst into tears. I adore!- you, Max-but do not come near me!--~oodbye.Your Dorothie

The shock of this note must have made my pulse slacken. At first I felt nothing but a numbed stupor: not a violent reaction, but rather the kind of inner silence that greets the final act of a tragedy. How long did this last? I have no idea. I thought I was dreaming. Turning this horrible letter over and over in my fingers with a feeling that it was a decree of fate, 1 wondered when I would awaken. I tried to face the reality of it, but the next moment brought fresh doubts and the suspicion that I was the victim of a cruel joke. I thought of telephoning, but at once realized that such questions are not resolved by telephone. It would be better to write. I covered a sheet of paper with insane words, rcproaching DorothCe for her incomprehensibledecision and ended by placing the issue squarely before her: "Either you do not love me or you are keeping some terrible secret from me. Tell me this secret, if there is one-or else admit frankly that you no longer care for me." This letter was dispatched by a messenger with instructions to wait for a reply. An hour later he returned with an envelope addressed to me. I tore it open with trembling fingers and read: "It is better for me to admit that I do not love you." That was all. The wording of the note should have shown me that Dorothde wiis writing under some form of duress. In my excitement I read the last words only, hardly seeing the rest. I fell into despair. It seemed that my life was ebbing, oozing away from me, that I was being drained of my substance. My powers of thought, of energy, of imagination -they had all ceased to exist. I was foundering in darkness. It was the end of everything. That night I threw myself on my bed at an early hour. I began to sob: the floodgates had burst. Once the crisis was over, my head was splitting with pain, and a thousand vagaries, each more absurd than the last, rushed through my throbbing brain. I wanted to bellow, like a beast, to dispel these agonizing thoughts. At last, utterly exhausted, I had recourse to a sleeping draught. The dreams in which I was soon plunged took the form of nocthmal wanderings which culminated in a series of grisly visions. I was lost in a dark wood. A man was walking beside me, a tall, gaunt, bony man draped in a robe that seemed as heavy as a cope of steel. He vaguely resembled Thomas Bouvier. But for his eyes, enormous and of a strange violet colour, his face was barely visible. Mesmerized by his compelling gaze, I followed him, knowing that he was leading me towards a scene of morbid grandeur he himself had

devised out of his own wicked perversity, something inhuman but possessing a certain tragic beauty. We were walking along a path bordered by irises and orchids to the edge of a clear blue lake. On the opposite shore some children appeared-tiny, pallid children-who began walking to the water's edge where they at last lined up like condemned prisoners. They held gladioli in their frail, wasted hands. At a sign from my companion, they waded into the water-slowly, very slowly. Their faces showed as much sorrow as beauty; their mauve eyes stared fixedly before them. Little by little, they were engulfed. First their knees disappeared, then their waists, then their breasts, their shoulders, their melancholy mouths, then their foreheads. Soon the only objects visible, floating like water-lilies on the surface, were their yellow curls; then these too disappeared in turn, while their motionless little hands, still above the water, clutched the gladioli. A little girl of seven had remained standing on the shore. Now she too came forward and waded in, all by herself; when nothing of her remained above the surface but her small tremulous hands, all the other little hands were drawn down and disappeared. My companion went on his way impassively, and I followed him into a wood that grew even darker. Great vines, as white as naked arms, stretched over our heads from tree to tree. Touching one of these vines by accident, my fingers felt the palpitation of living nerves. These branches were of flesh, endowed with the feeling of human limbs. The trees from which they sprang lived and suffered like creatures of flesh and blood. My companion playfully twisted them as he passed, and under his brutal grip each tree uttered a cry of pain: it was like the sound of funeral music. Reaching a clearing, we rested for a while among the iris and gladioli. The night had become inky dark, but we could perceive, as if by some magic, surrounding objects. Another man had stolen up to us. He wore a black garment, shaped like a sack, which showed only his head and finger-tips. And suddenly, as if by enchantment, four other men like him were at our side. Then the moon appeared, and the five mysterious men slowly peeled the skin from their faces and rolled it up like a glove in their palms. They were now nothing but skeletons whose bloody finger-tips held the crumpled skin of their faces. Laughing in a way to make one's blood run cold, they ordered my cruel companion to sacrifice himself in the same way as he had caused the little children to die. He showed no astonishment and remained impassive.

The others, having slipped the skin back over their faces so that it stuck once more to the bones, grinned hideously, thus resuming their humanity. They pulled back the curtain of trees from before us and made way for us under an arch of vegetable flesh. A thousand jeering voices now. issued from the tree-trunks. The five men in sack-like garments then stood in a row on the shore while my horrible companion, holding a sheaf of gladioli, slid slowly into the lake. When the water, bubbling with his last breath, had covered his head, the five spectators burst into fits of laughter. The same small children whom the lake had swallowed up, now lifeless, reappeared on the surface, still clutching their flowers. Among these little corpses 1 thought I recognized Dorothie. My nightmare was suddenly put to flight by the rays of the sun. As my eyes opened the shameful vision disappeared. Exhausted by this night, 1 rang for my old housekeeper, Philomkne, and asked for my coffee. Ordinarily I never spoke to her except to give her my orders. But this time 1 broke my rule. "Philomkne," 1 said, "life's a bad business, isn't it?" "Believe me, sir, it surely is. There are some folks who are the death of others. But you, Monsieur Hubert, you're a real good fellow." "Thank you, Philomkne. That smile of yours has destroyed a horrible dream I had last night-a dream where innocence and beauty were victims of all the evil in the world."

XVI

The following month was the most painful I had ever known. How could 1 face the prospect of never seeing my beloved DorothCe again? During the past months we had almost lived a n existence in common. Three times a week she had come to my apartment, where we talked for hours. Perched on my desk, she would disarrange my papers, smoke her cigarettes, laugh at my feeblest jokes, then all a t once resuming her serious air, she would ask me the most unexpected questions. Now that she no longer came, I recalled those long conversations. One of them in particular kept recurring to me, since it had taken place during the last days of our love. While she was letting fall, one by one, the articles of her clothing, she had said, "Do you really find me beautiful?" "Am I not always telling you so?' "And you love me because you find me beautiful, don't you?" "A little for your beauty, and much more for other reasons. If you were dull and stupid I wouldn't love you, even if you were beautiful as Cleopatra. " "Let me put the matter in another way. If I were as ugly as LContine, the little hunchback, and carried in my hump all the wit of Madame de SCvignC and the poetic gifts of Anna de Noailles, would you love me just the same?" in a different way. "Of course I woiild. Of course I would love you But you're not a hunchback, and your hypothesis is quite absurd-as well a s being unfair." "Now I've caught you, Max! By your own admission, ugly women repel you. I've always known it. You are mad about beautiful things. Your fondness for beauty is enough to make any woman tremble if she hopes t o appeal t o you. You allow no ugly creature near you, not even

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in a painting by a master; a misplaced ornament in your room upsets you; you turn away from old women in the street because you're afraid of seeing before you what is in store for all women. Am I not right?" "Perhaps . What of it, my dear?" "What of it? Listen: what is the first thing anyone sees when he enters your place? Pictures of gorgeous women, breathing youth and joy, women who are slender, supple, elegant. Tall, slim-waisted blondes, with full cheeks and sensual lips, women who demand plenty of love and promise to return it . . . For instance, look at that picture there, of the woman with the wolfhounds which the painter has entitled Joie de Vivre . And what about those women bathing, laughing and baring their little teeth like wanton gourmands, are they not simply enticing? Even that old tree in whose shade they're bathing, hasn't it the very expression of one of those elders who spied on Susanna? And look at Faust's Marguerite too, the modest Margot, fingering her prayer-book as she ogles her seducer with an air of furtive complicity. Your taste even approves that provocative nude by Greuze, La Douleur,whose attitude could well have another name altogether. . ." "What are you driving at, Dorothte?' "This: it's not the appreciation 01' great art that governs your choice of pictures, but the fascination of beautiful young women. That is why you prefer second-rate painters to the masters." "There is some truth in what you say. But what does it prove except that you yourself are very beautiful--since with such tastes I treasure you more than anything else?" "1 shall not always be beautiful. I'll grow old. Once everything that goes to make up my . .my physical beauty has disappeared, you won't even care to look at me." "Dorothte, you're asking me a question which no woman should ask-above all a woman like you who is standing on the threshold of twenty years of beauty, youth and love." "And when those twenty years are up?" "We'll have grown old together. By then, we'll have spent on each other and for each other all the treasures of our youth. The ardour of springtime may no longer fire our blood, but we shall live in a friendship so strong and so tender, in a state of such serene sweetness and bliss that we will walk towards the common end of all men, hand in hand and with our hearts like two urns overflowing with the perfume of our memories. . And now let's talk no more about this." "But I cannot help thinking of it--and often, too. I wonder what we should do to keep our love as it is now, with all its fire and richness.

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Who knows? If I should suddenly vanish, in full bloom a s it were, leaving you nothing but the remcrnbrance of what I a m today, might you not stay in love with me for the rest of your life?" "Yes, I would stay in love with you. But I would rather you remained with me yourself." I had thought, a t the time, she was merely indulging a fancy. Now that she had indeed left me, a s she had said she might, I began t o consider her words more seriously.

XVII

Bereft of their primary object, my affections began to expand. The circle of my connections became wider, and my success as journalist and man of letters brought me many new acquaintances, so that I had now the widest choice of friends. I was especially drawn to those who seemed most in love with life or who could satisfy my intellectual curiosity. One of my colleagues at The Twentieth Century, the Hermann Lillois whom I have already mentioned, was much sought after in society. Thanks to his polished manners and brilliant conversation his social prestige in the city quite overshadowed my own. Following the break-up of my liaison with DorothCe, it was he who guided me through various circles where I became involved, not without a certain perverse fascination, in the minor scandals of the well-to-do middle class. Hermann had breeding and a natural charm. I was very fond of him in spite of his many shortcomings, of which the most outstanding was a lack of all idealism-the end-result of his withering cynicism. Tall, slim, a brilliant talker who mixed logic and paradox, full of wit and stocked with amusing anecdotes, uniting grace with virility and with a manner at once aristocratic and unaffected, he immediately captivated men and women alike. He possessed the handsome head of an intellectual and aesthete; with his blue eyes, half veiled by long, thick eyelashes, he personified the attitude of those who are weary of life and are yet capable of grasping everything without the slightest effort. He was a guest at all fashionable dinner-parties, and present at all celebrations. Several times a week he, the penniless magnifico, gambled with the wealthiest men in town, winning and losing large sums with an unchanging smile; nothing could disturb his aplomb. What a contrast between the Lillois of today and the one I had fished out of the backwaters of the unemployed! Carrying a letter of recom-

mendation from the French consul, he had appeared before me as a threadbare aristocrat, one of those eternal charmers whose supple and well-proportioned frame could impart an elegance to rags. "You see me," he said simply, "down to my last suit of clothes and my last shirt. They are all I possess in this world. I'm in need of work." "What kind of work have you done up to now?" "None." "What can you do?" "Nothing." "What do you want me to do for you?" "All or nothing. You'll have to take a chance. I've read a great deal, travelled a lot, seen everything. I came out of school loaded with medals, prizes and diplomas. Since then I've hob-nobbed with intellectuals, writers, artists, scholars, even cabinet ministers in my own country. Intensive living may have been the best schooling I have ever had." I asked him what he meant by intensive living. This was an invitation to receive his confidences. And he began to speak of his past in such choice terms and with such an attractive voice that I could not help listening. "I have lived," he said. "That's the sum and substance of it. You must know what that means: to have given full scope to every faculty, to all one's powers of thought, imagination, feeling and affection. To have run through the whole gamut of sensations, from the thrill of art to the foretaste of suicide . . . Paris, ice, Monte Carlo, Deauville, fashionable beaches, gatherings of artists, the solitude of mountain fastnesses, the favours and reverses of love and fortune-all these have filled my last ten years. "When I'd had enough of Parisian life, I would take the Blue Train and speed southwards. I would stake half of all my resources in a single night, lose or win with the same indifference, and come home at dawn with jolly fellows who turned my apartment upside down to amuse their mistresses. I belonged, as you can see, to that generation of young madmen .who had been through the war and were trying to make up for the time we'd lost in the suffering, tension and boredom of the trenches. . . I once took the fancy to charter a splendid yacl~twith a crew of eight. Ah, those cruises in the Mediterranean! Like a dream! My guests were charming couples from Paris, New York, Vienna. Sometimes we talked art and philosophy; sometimes we watched the two chorus-girls we had brought along dancing in the moonlight; sometimes we passed whole hours sunning ourselves in silence, each of us absorbed in a favourite book. Then the talk was resumed, with more spirit than ever. Ah, how well we could talk in those days! Imaginc the wealth of original ideas

that sprang from the paradoxes put forward by highly cultured men and women of boundless wit. "One day I became aware that my finances were in a bad way. Trusting in my lucky star, I plunged into speculation with my last million francs. I was lucky. My boldness now knew no bounds, and I doubled my stake. This boldness cost me dear: I lost everything. Completely ruined, I contemplated the classic way out: suicide. But the woman I loved dissuaded me. It was she who advised me to go to America, and forget what I had been. "On arriving in Canada two years ago, I sank my last thousand-franc note in the stock market, where it disappeared. After that I left for the north country with a mining prospector who promised me, in all sincerity, riches beyond the dreams of avarice. This putative saviour of my fortunes died in my arms, on a bunk in a lumber-camp, after a five-day bout with pneumonia. Too poor to make my way back to civilization at once, I hired out as a tumberjack at fifty cents a day. Since I was unable to fell a tree in less than half a day, I was forthwith appointed kitchen scullion. That was where I learned to peel potatoes. It was only last spring that I came out of the bush, filthy, skinny, in rags, without a cent and, oddly enough, in excellent spirits. I had enjoycd the adventure: it had been great fun. I felt as happy as Candide. After being frightened to death, bewildered, nonplussed, battered and shaken, I could still tell myself, like him, 'All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds'." He had told me his whole history, and was waiting for my response. After a few minutes' silence to give myself time to reflect, I said, "Candide, you will report for duty tomorrow on the staff of The 'liventieth Century. Perhaps you will find there the best of all possible worlds." He gave me a warm handclasp and left. Was this worn-out ex-playboy-with his face at once weary and interesting-to be envied or pitied? "These professional Bohemians," I thought, "are endowed with such a bland philosophy, their understanding of things is so broad, their tolerance so complete, that they come to relish poverty as a kind of display. They are free from all the meanness, bigotry and irritating pedantry of petty people. They are, in a word, human; and to be human one must be civilized." But Hermann was the over-ripe fruit of a too-forward civilization. He had its vices as well as its virtues. The Fameuse* apple attains the height of its flavour just before decay sets in. This was the case with the man who had just taken leave of me. Enthusiasm, excitement, any form of idealism-all were once-famous variety of apple, now almost extinct. Translator's note.]

[*A

beyond his reach. He had, at best, a deep appreciation of beauty, but also a cold passion for playing with ideas, as one would with a football. For him life had become little more than a sport or a stimulant. His keen sense of the precariousness of existence, of the uncertainties of the morrow and of the need to make the most of the passing moment lest death snatch him away at the next, prevented him from taking any thought for an unsure or nonexistent future. And in this way he was wasting his extraordinary talent. He was over-civilized, too forwardbut how attractive! In my other colleague at the review, Lucien Joly, a quiet happiness, nurtured by a firm and mature civilization, was apparent. He was married to a beautiful and intelligent woman, and the fond father of three delightful children. Much less lively, less superficial and less egotistical than Lillois, Joly was nonetheless far from bourgeois. With his great height, and with broad shoulders somewhat stooping and not unlike those of a countryman, his presence was imposing. His large blue eyes were profound and serene. Reasonable and cultured, with a spirit combining philosophy and moderation, he had rare powers of observation and a swift and accurate judgment of men. Imbued with frankness and loyalty, he was the embodiment of harmony. Whenever drawn into an argument, he generally had the last word, the deciding voice, because he always clung to common sense. This fellow understood everything, guessed everything and judged all conduct with unusual lenience and kindness. These qualities had made him my most trusted adviser. A few days alter my inexplicable rupture with DorothCe, I had told him the whole story. His reaction was typical. "DorothCe," he said, "is not the kind of girl to make such an important decision lightly. She loved you and I can see no reason why she shouldn't continue to love you. Sincere, outgoing and wilful as I know her to be, she would have told you everything had it been possible. There must be some extraordinary secret involved, since she has sentenced herself to silence and caused such grief to you whom she adores. Be patient! Some day you will know the truth." His explanation struck me at the time as commonplace, merely the condolence of a friend who wished to staunch a wound in a delicate manner. Later events so fully confirmed Lucien's diagnosis that I was to see him as a prophet. This farmer's son had evolved for himself a personal morality and a philosophy that lackcd all dogmatism. One day when I asked him for the secret of his cogent logic, he explained. "When I graduated from college at the age of twenty-two," he said,

"Louis Latour, one of my lay professors, took me aside and spoke to me: 'For the past three years I've been following your progress, step by step. I have taught you only what I was allowed to teach you. In this intellectual prison, this school of,restriction, I would be stripped of my livelihood if 1,ventured beyond certain limits. Do you understand? I have not taught you everything I should. Keep telling yourself that you know next to nothing and that the efforts of a lifetime would not be enough to give you what you lack. " 'When you walk out of here you can embark upon proper studies, studies that will be really your own and not those of others. You will become your own guide, and that will,be for the better. You have the right stuff in you, your intelligence is equal to any demand you make on it. It will be up to you to take advantage of your gifts and show yourself to be head and shoulders above the crowd of nonentities produced by institutions devoted to the levelling down of everyone. "'All the ideas, opinions, scientific theories, dogmas and history which have been hammered into you tbr the past fifteen years-you must gather them all together, scrape them from every nook and cranny of your brain, rake them together in a heap before you, and then study them. Examine each of them carefully in the light of pure reason, as if you were putting it under a magnifying-glass. You will find some of them wholesome and valuable, some of them inept and cumbrous, some of them simply putrid. Retain only those which, after long and hard consideration, seem to conform to your own ideas and judgment. Reject all those that outrage your common sense. Accept generously all that appeals to your sense of the fitness of things. Consign the rest to the screening process of honest doubt or to the garbage-heap of absurdity. When in doubt, have the hardihood to remain so until new insights deliver you from that condition. Do not forget that doubt is the basis of all knowledge, and is an essential condition of the pursuit of truth. A man never pursues anything in which he completely believes. You have Doubt is been taught: Do not doubt! I tell you now: Doubt, alw~aysdoubt! the sheet-anchor of the intellect, the waterline of every rational being. Cultivate within yourself that fine and courageous restlessness which will keep you always alert and lead you on to splendid discoveries. " 'Thought is what creates a man's superiority. Not the thought of others, but his own, the thought that issues from his own understanding as the branch issues from the tree. Without that, no true personality can develop. You are told, at times, that free thinking is forbidden. The authors of such an infamous doctrine are guilty in the last degree. No surer way could be chosen in order to stifle individual excellence in favour of,sorne nondescript collective mediocrity designed for the sole

benefit of a caste that operates under the cloak of order, tradition and authority.' "These words of my teacher made such a profound impression on me that every sentence was engraved, as if in metal, on my mind. "I freed myself from the cobweb of influences which had heretofore clung to my brain, from the veil of conformity that had darkened all my personal judgments, from the reeking vapours which had poisoned the breathing of my soul. I became, at last, myself." Listening to Lucien, I was happy to see that he was probably the most intelligent man I would be privileged to meet in my lifetime. He had been brought up at MCtis, a small village on the lower St. Lawrence, whcre his boyish gaze would linger dreamily on the foamblue wakes of the fishing-boats. One day, when he was making sandcastles on the shore, he was joined by a pretty and coquettish little girl whose parents were summer residents at a nearby cottage. They became good friends, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes even exchanging little slaps, but always making up with bursts of noisy tenderness. Among the tourists whom they saw passing by, they ,were particularly attracted by a pair of newlyweds who fascinated them with their air of serene happiness, a happiness which they seemed to diffuse like a magnetic wave. The little girl, who sensed such things vaguely, said to her little friend, "Lucien, when we're grown up and married, that's how I'd like us to be." This was only a child speaking-as she faced the sea, the briny sea with its smell of iodine, the singing sea, luminous and serene, which fans a woman's ardour and a man's passions. Lucien never forgot these words of his little playmate as they faced the bewitching waves. Sixteen years later, he married his childhood sweetheart. He had never loved another woman. I understood that this man's rare intellectual balance depended on the perfect harmony that existed between him and his beloved.

XVIII

Before long my two associates became good friends. In spite of the contrast of their characters and ways of life, they had the common bond of culture. It was in their cqmpany that I sought-in vain-to forget Dorot hCe. One evening Hermann had arranged for Lucien and me to attend a wildparty at the Pinons' house. What is a wildparty? A sort of blow-out staged by little groups of the well-to-do, where the gucsts indulge in all the excesses of eating, drinking and making love. These private revels usually take place on week-ends, between ten o'clock on Saturday night and seven on Sunday, at which time everyone goes to church to expunge the sins of the night. Pinon, a former cabinet minister though still young enough to sow a few wild oats, was witty, intelligent and frivolous, but still remained something of a college student. His wife had a voracious appetite for literature without knowing anything about it. She liked playing hostess to groups of young men whom she pompously referred to as "intellectuals." That night we had with us the poet Louis Dumont, a small swarthy foul-mouthed man who passed easily from the coarsest obscenities to flights of mysticism; Paul Meilleur, a writer who disavowed in private almost everything he wrote for the public and flaunted a cynicism blended with fatuity; Pinon's mistress, the ripe and passionate Michtle Vivier; Maryse Gauty, the little bluestocking already mentioned and whom I was now pursuing; Franqoise Dufort, a graduate of the Sorbonne looking for adventures; and, finally, that intriguing young American Kathleen Ross, alias Little Lady Vagabond, a captivating journalist from New York in search of spicy items of society gossip. Cocktails, scotch, gin and punch being a necessary accompaniment to this kind of party, all restraint was soon abandoned. With each round of

drinks a fresh layer of decency was peeled away, and the conversation assumed a freedom of expression that would have brought a blush to the cheeks of the two heroic bronze firemen on the Place Georges V. By a series of innuendoes Meilleur was parading his success with women. Like many of his fellow townsmen, he had the words "sex" and "the fair sex" always on his lips, to such an extent that Maryse audibly observed that this kind 01' talk was both stupid and in poor taste. He ignored her and kept on. By his own account he was the terror of all the husbands and mothers on the Grande Allke. Lucien whispered in my ear, "I've good reason to believe that he has distinguished himself mainly by his amours below stairs. He has always had housemaids for mistresses. Once, in a mood of candour induced by strong drink, he confided to somebody or other that society women tended to snub him." Hermann Lillois was looking at Meilleur with a smile of tolerant amusement and contempt. When he saw the other well launched on his subject, he deliberately interrupted. "If your conquests were as many as you claim," he said, "do you know what we must think? You don't? Well, it's clear that the women you had were either quickly tired of you, or they were only whores. You would seem to lack the stuff of which great lovers are made. Don Juan was a prodigy who could drain a woman, body and soul, in a single night; but the race of Don Juans is pretty well extinct. His imitators are only poor copies of a fine painting." "Oooh!" cried Maryse, with an expression of mock terror, "I wouldn't risk falling into the hands of your Don Juan. Who wants to be devoured like that, by such a woman-eater?" "Have you never known any maneaters?'countered Hermann. "No. And as for myself, I am strictly kosher." There was a burst of laughter. The riposte was not original, but it was well timed. "Some people are unaware of their own capacities," said Hermann, capping her reply. "He never spoke a truer word," Lucien murmured to me. "Maryse is just that: a man-eater. For all her airs of a quivering sensitivity, I would say she was incapable of a lasting attachment. In that delicate body of hers, which is almost masculine in its slimness and straightness of line, I suspect there lie ambitions, interests and cold-blooded calculations, but no capacity for love." "I cannot agree with you," I said. For, with her candid gaze and sorrowful airs, Maryse struck me as an Iphigenia rather than a Cleopatra.

"I will bet," Lucien went on, "that you cast DorothCe in the role of someone more dominating, more her own mistress, than this other little girl, simply because DorothCe displayed more boldness, more gaiety. But you were mistaken." At the sound of Dorothie's name my heart felt a twinge. I put her out of my mind by asking Maryse to dance. The radio was bringing us from Chicago the languid and voluptuous wail of saxophones. We fox-trotted in silence around a table covered with glasses, listening to the conversation of the other guests. Dumont, who was drinking heavily, had the floor. "All my life," he was saying, "I've been nothing but a miserable sinner. I wallow in sin, and then scourge myself with remorse. I love my faults because they give me the opportunity to abase myself, to rub my nose in the dirt and beat my breast while telling myself I'm only a bum. All you highfalutes here, you've never known the experience of remorse at being a shit, because you've never had the courage to see the beast in yourselves." Then, suddenly addressing me: "As for you, Max, your life's too clean to be complete. You haven't even known the disgrace of having to practice the solitary vice, because the women have fallen in love with you before you had the chance to torment yourself with unsatisfied desire. You don't know that kind of suffering. And all you good people listening to me now, why those shocked faces'? You're ready to steal your best friend's wife on the sly, but you've got neither the strength nor the guts to distinguish yourself by committing a good rape." "He's plastered!" hissed Michhle in disgust. "Mich6le," retorted Dumont, "you're just a high-class whore, and you're good for nothing." Pinon's mistress had indeed had her share of troubles. Deflowered at the age of sixteen, she had been forced to marry her seducer to maintain the family honour. Her husband, a drunkard and an adulterer, goodfor-nothing, superstitious, jealous and personally unclean, had been the despair of every employer upon whom he had been foisted. As a last resort he had been sent, with his young wife, to a lumber-camp in the woods, where Michhle found herself, in the final stages of her first pregnancy, among a gang of lumberjacks who spent their spare time gambling, cursing, telling dirty stories and smoking tobacco that smelled of pig manure. She lived in a log cabin with a leaking roof from which, whenever the snow melted, drops of dirty water splashed on her blonde hair while she was nursing her new-born child. For four years she had

endured a life like this; then, feeling the need to live rather than to exist, she had thrown off the marital yoke. "1 know a woman who has eaten more shit than you have," Dumont went on. "Three years ago I happened to meet a young country girl who was visiting friends in the city. I found her pretty. I kept after her, I wanted her. One night she surrendered; she was a virgin, I swear to that. The next day I felt so guilty that I went to confession. I had the feeling of having committed murder. You know, my conscience has always suffered these qualms- and may God preserve all you here, you miserable creatures, from smothering your consciences! Anyway, the girl went back to her family, all a-quiver. She wrote me passionate letters. I replied to them in the same tone. She came back several times. The more intimate we got, the more indifferent I felt towards her. Soon she meant nothing at all to me. So as not to hurt her, I pretended I still loved her. That couldn't last, of course, and finally I told her to stay home, that I didn't want to see her again. Since then I've met her in the street. She's become a walking skeleton. I had taken her soul away. Yesterday, she wrote me that she wanted to die." "Now all you have to do," said Kathleen ironically, "is to drive her to suicide. With a dramatic catastrophe like that you could have the finest sensations of remorse in your life." "That's an idea. It hadn't occurred to me." We were still dancing. Maryse said to me in a low voice, "Don't you think that guy's disgusting?" "That man interests me. By his very madness. He's capable of anything. I'd like to see how far he can go." "You agree, though, that he's just a lout." "Yes, if you like . . . Have you noticed how Pinon is eyeing that little American girl?" "Well, there's something intriguing about her." "She even calls herself Little Lady Vagabond. Why all this mysterious tramping around'.? Nobody knows. She's made her way into several prominent families in town. You know how many houses are open to her. She herself has thrown some parties, right in the Chiteau, which degenerated into orgies." It was midnight when Pinon decided to adjourn the festivities to his lodge a few miles out of town. "If you don't mind," said Maryse, "let's not go on there. I'd rather be alone with you, go outside somewhere, anywhere, but not there." The night was full of stars. We drove through the dark streets, and the cool air coming past the windshield brushed our faces like a caress. We crossed the Plains of Abraham, went down to Wolfe's Cove and fol-

lowed the shoreline road as far as the Quebec Bridge. Now and then we stopped to admire the pencil-lines of light gliding northwards on the silky waters of the St. Lawrence and creeping towards us as if on a carpet of diamonds. Maryse's blonde head nestled against my shoulder, and I was filled with all the poetry of love and the night. "Maryse, do you see those fiery roads spanning the abyss? I feel so light that I could walk on them. Will you come with me?" "Yes. Towards the source of light, towards the hearth that will set us both on fire." "You mean, towards a burning love?" We closed our eyes for a fcw moments, listening to these vague words we uttered which had no meaning but which carried within them the dangerous music of our own voices. As we drove on we could see, here and there, parked cars which held embracing couples. Everywhere the joy of love was seeking the darkness. All these lovers came from the city's centre were, after midnight, silence has the force of a dogma and even the dust cannot settle on the pavement without being overheard. They had sallied forth, these lovers, into the air of night, to seek the only consolation permitted by the stern virtue of a city which pretends that covert lust does not exist. On certain evenings the whole outskirts of Quebec are nothing but countless hiding-places for lovers. Moonlight, starlight, the river banks, the innumerable lakes and varied paths nearby, the woods and thickets, the welcoming Laurentians-your nights have heard all summer long, from the perfumes of June to the enchantments of autumn, more amorous sighs than all the houses of our towns! "It's getting late," said Maryse. "Let's turn back." In front of my apartment on chemin St.-Louis I instinctively came to a stop. "Let's go in," I said. "Not here?"

XIX

On the following Monday Hermann came into my office, rubbing his hands; I realized at once that he had a good story to tell. "How did you finish the night?" I asked. "Oh, in grand style. You can't imagine what happened! From the moment we entered the lodge-a splendid place, by the way, surrounded by trees and bushes, and overlooking a starlit lake-Kathleen didn't let our former cabinet minister off the leash. Someone lit the fire in the fireplace and we all gathered around it. I was near Pinon and the American girl and overheard a few snatches of their conversation. "She was saying to him, 'You people, you Canadians-you don't know the first thing about love. You're so half-baked in everything that you haven't even any real vices. Any kind of passion is beyond your reach. And you're such hypocrites you can't enjoy anything openly.' " 'All the same,' he kept on telling her, 'you know how much I love you.' '"If you really love me, now's the time to really prove it-not with words and little presents. First of all, you'll give the boot to that broad Michele who's only after your name and your money anyway. Besides, haven't you noticed the woman never washes? Just look under her arms. Her boyfriends all tell me she's so scared of water she never takes a bath. Not like a good clean American girl. I can't see how a man can go to bed with a girl who's got B.O.' "'You're pretty hard on poor Mich6le,' he told her. "'All's fair in love and war,' she said. 'Now, if you really mean all those things you've been telling me, you'll not only throw her out but right afterwards, when everyone's lit, you'll get rid of the whole lot of them, clear the place right out-so the two of us can be alone.'

"'You must be kidding! What about my wife? You know I can't do that in front of my wife . . I mean, to my wife!' " 'Sure you can. Give your wife the air, just like the rest of them. I've had enough of all this bourgeois stuff! Be a man for once in your life. You know, Pinon, you're just a sissy. You don't even love that woman you're married to, and you shake in front of her like a jelly. Pooh! What a flat tire you turned out to be!' "Pinon downed another drink and put on a portentous look. I could see from his face that something was in the wind. "The fire was bathing the whole room in a kind of flickering red light. With every spurt of the flames I could see Dumont crawling on his hands and knees towards the women. And everyone kept on drinking. "The climax came when the poet turned tragic. He stretched out at full length on the floor and began rolling around among the chair-legs and the people's feet, howling the names of his wife and -children: " 'Anna! My Anna, my own martyr! I have sinned, my God! How I have sinned! My children! My children! Accursed be the day when I became your father, because I was unworthy to beget you . . . Back! Back! Retro me, all you thousands of demons who stoke the fire of my vices! I shall die, yes, die of shame. . .Ah, shame, the shame of remorse, I crave you! And you, my friends, hie you to the fountain and bring me a goblet of remorse! Can't you see I am dying of thirst? What, you won't? Then you are all accursed, simply accursed! Some day I will indite your history, I will crucify you all on your own dunghill.' "At this point Pinon exploded: 'Out with you!' he began yelling. 'Get out, you drunken bum! I've had enough insults in my own house!' "He hustled Dumont to the cdge of the lake. Then he came back and told the rest 01' us, 'And you too, all of you, get out! Leave me alone, do you get me? I'm staying here with Kathleen--alone.' "He pushed all of us to the door. Michtle and his wife were weeping with rage. Lucien and I were choking with laughter. "Since then Pinon and Kathleen have given no sign of life. They're still up there in the woods. The word is going around. Michhle has lost no time in spreading the news. I sense trouble ahead."

.

Kathleen had played her part of Little Lady Vagabond in masterly fashion. She had come in search of profitable scandal, and she found it. She spent five whole days with Pinon, during which he became more and more besotted with this perverse and exotic beauty who was deliberately playing on him. By the third day his wife, ready to forgive him on all counts, blamed everything on the demon rum and sent her father as an ambassador to her husband. The ambassador was not even given the chance to parley: he was shown the door. On the morning of the sixth day, while Pinon was asleep, Kathleen slipped out of the lodge, leaving the following note: "The play is over. You're just an idiot and a sucker." Three months later, the explanation of her prolonged stay in the heart of' Quebec society was brutally clear. She announced the publication, under her signature, of a roman ii clef in which she depicted the morals of the old capital in the most scandalous manner, with unmistakable clues identifying the most notorious members of Quebec society by a description ol'their characters, appearance and the principal events of their lives. The interested parties made common cause and despatched an emissary to Kathleen in New York, proposing to pay whatever price she might name to withdraw her book from circulation. A deal was made. The American girl, who was only after money, had had the forethought, before putting her book on sale, to send a copythere were only a thousand printed-to each of her victims. The complete edition was then brought to Quebec, and for a whole week helped to heat the furnaces of a number of houses.

One day when I was travelling by train from Montreal to New York, I noticed a young woman sitting nearby and skimming through the pages of a magazine. It was Kathleen. Acknowledging my greeting with a smile, she invited me to sit beside her. In the course of our conversation I brought up the subject of hcr book. "Why did you do a thing like that?" asked. "Well," she answered, "on a trip I was taking to the Lac St. Jean district, not so long ago, 1 noticed how everyone detested Louis HCmon because he had described them exactly as they were. I wanted to see if I mightn't have the same effect on several of your fellow townsmen, with a book which would sketch nakedly their whims and quirks . . . And anyway, I needed the money so much!"

XXI

In the hectic life I was now leading, Maryse Gauty soon became my dearest companion; but the moment I found myself alone my thoughts would revert to Dorothke, with whom I was still in love. After such a mysterious and apparently causeless breaking-off, any forgetting was out of the question. Maryse could not supplant Dorothke; the first and strongest of my desires outweighed my possession of any other woman. Yet Maryse had thc gift of making herself loved. Few women could surpass her in feigning the most delicate, intense and profound sentiments. The sadness which she simulated so expertly, her pose of being the misunderstood maiden, aroused my pity. I ended by becoming genuinely attached to her. Intellectual and literary, she was too clear-sighted to believe in her own talent, and too adroit to venture on her own into a profession for which she was not qualified. Knowing that her limited gifts prevented her from producing any long or demanding work, she had hitched her wagon to my star in order to achieve the celebrity which her ambition preferred to love. To think that I, who took such pride in my psychological acumen at that time, saw none of this! One day she said to me, "What about you and me, Max, writing a novel togethcr? Our two names linked in life and death! Your genius would confer immortality on me." "I've no objection. But don't forget, it's more important to live than to describe life." Together we produced a novel of which I wrote several chapters. I worked much more eagerly in the belief that I had a living inspiration in the person of my coauthor. The book was finished in three months. A month later it was on sale in the bookstores, with Maryse's name alone as its author. m e Twen-

tieth Century greeted the work with a laudatory review that set the tone

for all the newspapers and critics. Talk about Rabelais' sheep of Panurge! The book became a best seller. The verdict of "A superlative work" from the press even influenced officialdom so favourably that the budding author obtained a scholarship enabling her to go abroad and furbish her talent. From that moment, Maryse becamc less interested in the man who had drawn her out of obscurity. She gave me the cold shoulder. And since she knew how to manipulate puppets so well, she set in motion more than one of my successors. Eventually she left for the United States. She could have written to all of us, like Kathleen, "The play is over. You're only an idiot." I was seized by a cold fury of rage, the fury of the dupe who knows he has been duped. When Dorothke had thrown me over it had caused me such suffering as I believed would kill me. Now, it was my pride that had been flicked on the raw. I despised all womankind. I even had the presumption to believe I could take my revenge through contempt and promiscuity. This was only another of youth's illusions. A few weeks later I had forgiven the uhole sex. I could feel life being reborn in me, smiling and bidding me to its endless feast. On one of those mornings, as I woke up, a sheaf of flowers was delivered to me: roses, carnations, narcissi. My whole room was scented by their perfume. Nestling in the midst of this bouquet was a card with the following message, typewritten and unsigned: "To one whom I know is lonely and sad, on this anniversary. . ." I glanced at the calendar: it was my birthday. My mother gave birth to me one night around the beginning of this century. I arrived on our tiny planet, bringing nothing to it, and I will leave it withoutfaking anything away. What a strange business, this life and death! It is a pity no one can remember the moment he came out of the void nor the one when he returned to it. The two ends of our span of life join and disappear in a pitiless silence. These are the two most crucial and most dreadful moments of our existence, and they are removed from our consciousness. Man's supreme sensation, that of being, is lost. What woman could be sending me flowers?Asking myself this question, I felt a revival of hope, a hope which frightened me with its promise of incipient dissipation. I recalled the women whom I had known recently. And there came to my mind a conversation with Franqoise Dufort during a dance. I remembered her distinctly: a woman with auburn hair and large brown eyes. She had said to me, "You would like to pin me on the butterfly board, Max. That's not a

nice thing, you know. Have you ever visited an entomological museum? In their glass cases, hundreds of rigid and magnificent insects display their colours. Some are blue, others are red, green, spotted, white, black, grey, gilded and rainbow-coloured. What a mosaic of colours and wings! Nature and life have deployed all their coquetry in arranging these subtle particlcs of earth and air in the most seductive patterns. And don't they have the oddest names? Red Admiral, Viceroy, Monarch, Sphinx, Swallowtail, Luna Moth, Mourning Cloak and so forth? You look at them, at first in a mood of happy surprise, then with grief at seelng them so motionless, stiff, fastened down forever. They are all dead, these little butterflies that turned their gilded wings towards the sun; they died, besotted by the scent of some flower just when a man with a net was on the watch. "One by one," she went on, "they have been crucified, to gratify a whim or flatter a conceit. You too, Max Hubert, are developing into a collector. If you should happen to capture me, you would label me then and there, and I would remain on the fringes of your memory-a name, a pair of wings." "Don't you know that I'm a one-woman man?" "You are fooling yourself. I don't know how many women you have had. You're a long way from your first conquest, at any rate. You told each of them she was your dream, the life of your life, the heart of your heart. Must I believe you were lying to them all? You were saying to me yesterday what you said not so long ago to DorothCe. When will you stop lying to women?" For Franqoise's benefit I resorted to the time-worn paradox of men when they're reproached for being false of heart. "We always tell the truth," I said, "at the moment we are speaking. Every new love-affair, however casual or fleeting, has its instant of truth. A man believes the words that his passion brings to life, and that passion is always true. Change of heart, you say? Ah, Fran~oise,as we grow older we must realize that changelessness exists only in the frozen stance of death. There is always an enormous disproportion between desire and its object, and that is the illusion which makes us ask so much from life. And it will never give us the hundredth part of what we expect and require from it. That is why man is the eternal seeker. He craves the infinite, and finds thc finite. Our wings always break and fail us in midflight !" The flowers I had received recalled that conversation with Franqoise, as well as the perfume she affected.*Theyalso brought before me the falseness of my argument. I had believcd I was on firm ground in reason-

ing thus. Later, I was to understand that there are loves which nothing can eradicate from the soul. My pure passion for Dorothde, for instance, never left me, and even while I was stultifying myself with the vile philosophy of libertines, it was only in an attempt to dispel the image of her who would never leave my thoughts. Some of the theories held by Hermann, intelligent and sympathetic as he was for all his cynicism, had a great inlluence on me at this time. "The romantic authors," he told me, "have represented woman as a mystery, tragic and terrible, a species of humanity set apart from us, and shadowed by fatality. Out of this fragile and adorable creature they have created an imaginary deity, at once cruel and gentle, a prodigy of malice and goodness, beside whom men are children and inferiors. My own feasting, as a youth, on certain romantic works had filled me with the kind of fears, superstitions and veneration towards her that turn one into a weakling. I believe that a man who reads such books exclusively is doomed to defeat in life-unless experience restores him to reality. "The fact is," he went on, "that women are creatures of fragility and enchantment above all else. Born to be conquered, dominated and broken in, they have a physical need of servitude. Yet the very moment you seem to admit they can get the better of you, their boldness knows no limits and can amount to tyranny. There are no creatures more ready to take advantage of your submission or the weakness of your character. I would like to give this advice to every man: 'You love women? Good! Love them, love them to distraction! But never worship them. You are the master; act as the master. Possess a woman wholly; show her, now and then, that your life does not depend on her. Keep her as long as she pleases you, but always preserve enough independence of spirit to be the one to break off the relationship. Those whom you leave of your own free will, without rhyme or reason, will love you forever."' This was the conclusion to which a wealth of experience had led Hermann, a conclusion I was tempted to adopt. By following his lead, one thing would be clear: love, not the great and splendid passion of romance, but a passing love, light as a flower-petal, would come easily to whoever did not wish to take it seriously. Ordinary women seldom appreciate the tragic mien assumed by the Werthers and Rends. They wish for life, movement, the promise of pleasure. As soon as they sense in a free man the full joy of living, they are half won. But when they suspect that the suitor puts a high price on their conquest and loses himself in a morass of timid desires, they can possess-by instinct rather than by reflection-the art of making themselves difficult to win, and find in themselves endless powers of resistance and procrastination. More than man, woman tends to live up to the opinion one holds of her.

Once I had assumed this attitude, I saw more than one female face flit through my life. During that stupefying winter, with its dizzy round of parties, I was like a lamp in the darkness, a lamp that drew all the moths of night to beat against it. At that time Franpise's words about the brilliant crucified insects recurred to me. All that wanton collection dances through my memory, beating their wings. Franpise herself had been the first, and had lasted a couple of weeks. Her parting words were friendly. "At least," she said, "you won't remember that I clung to you. No vows or scenes between us! Goodbye, Max!" She was succeeded by a little brunette with marvellously white and shining teeth; who had such a clear, high-pitched laugh that it spread gaiety all around .her. Then @me that poetess, tall and slender, with green eyes, who had the wit to be the first to laugh at her own verses and And how many others! Poor valued real life above the life of poetry scattered faces, loves of a single night, all renounced with heartache and weariness. With your ephemeral charm, there were among you some beautiful beings. All of you were looking for love, you put your trust in it, and it fled your arms which were too weak to keep it and hold it fast. It was not long before I understood that I was betraying my own nature. Resolved as I was not to commit myself in any way, each time my breath blew out a flame I had the impression of killing something which might have become exquisitely beautiful, just as the cold-blooded ending of a certain kind of novel leaves in the reader's heart an echo of the remorse felt by the fictional killer for his crime. My moral qualms came to a head at the beginning of the summer, when I was told in confidenceof a horrible tragedy. It will be recalled that the poet Dumont, when in his cups, often spoke of a little country girl whom he had seduced and who never ceased thereafter to importune him with her love; and that Little Lady Vagabond had suggested to him, with a mischievous perversity, "Why don't you drive her to suicide? That would make a first-class drama." One morning Dumont came into my office, sat down and stared at me through reddened eyes, haggard and speechless. "What has happened?" I asked. "I've killed somebody!" he replied, with a sob in his throat. "I am a murderer! A murderer!" "You're drunk, old fellow! How can you say such things? Go home and don't let anyone see you till tomorrow." "I'm as sober as this piece of pager," he said, crumpling an unused sheet of blotting-paper with trembling fingers. "Here, smell my breath! Tell me, do I smell of liquor?"

...

True enough, he smelt only of tobacco and bad teeth. "You're right," I said. "Then you must be mad." raving mad! You remember that little country girl of "Yes, mad mine? For years she kept torturing me with her whining. The worse I treated her, the more tightly she clung. A damnable notion settled in my brain, grew until it was spreading like an oil-stain. A real fantasy. 'Suppose I make her die for me? I thought. And day and night, waking and sleeping, a voice kept whispering in my ear, 'She must die for you, to redeem your sins.' I've always believed in an immanent justice that dispensed suffering and death for the atonement of wickedness." "You're talking like a Gothic-style monster," I said. "Explain yourself. Make it fast, eh?" "The little girl came to see me a month ago, and wept in my arms for two whole hours. I became very impatient with her. She told me she couldn't survive my leaving her, that she'd sacrificed her life, reputation, honour and health to me, that she was stifling in the puritan atmosphere of her country parish, that she thought of me night and day, that she couldn't endure life without me and would end it all by killing herself. "She was pathetic, pitiable. In spite of myself, my sympathies were winning me over, and I hardened myself to avoid being conquered. As soon as I'd gained the victory over myself I said to her, "You'd really be willing to die for me?" " 'Yes,' she replied, 'since you're my whole life, and you're leaving me.' " 'YOUmust have read those words in some old-fashioned love story.' " 'I mean them.' " 'Then if I tell you that I can't belong to you, that I must leave you hopelessly and forever, what will you do?' "'I think I will kill myself.' "'Kill yourself?' I said. 'You would? Then-after all, why not? I would be in love forever with the woman who gave me such a proof of her love. If, one of these days, you were to throw yourself in the river, I think I would give you, once you were dead, the love I couldn't give you when you were living. Don't you see? I would build in my heart an altar of porphyry, fire and gold to her who would have done this for me, this act which is everything, which is so final that one cannot imagine anything greater, lovelier and more terrible.' " 'You would d o this, dear love? Then kiss me once, for the last time, and I swear that within two weeks I will be dead.' '"Wait!' I said. 'Let us touch each other no more. When you are dead, I think I should disinter you from your tomb, to give you this kiss, this final kiss, in your endless night.'

.. .

" 'You frighten me!' she cried. 'How horrible! But no, I love youlove you so much that at the very touch of your lips on mine my icy corpse will shudder with all the passion that will still be in it.' "She left me then, sobbing, this mean, pitiful creature who had been disgusting me for so long, and I felt myself tremble from head to foot, feeling that I would never see her again." Dumont did not continue. He was like one stricken and speechless. "And then?" I asked, pressing him. "Here," he said, "read it for'yourself." And he handed me the morning.paper where I read: "Last night, around ten o'clock, Mademoiselle X, while bathing alone off the beach at Berthier, drowned a few feet from the shore." Further details of the tragedy followed. No explanation could be found.

XXII

Three weeks went by without my accepting any invitation or making a single assignation. My heart was aching. I was sickened by life. One night I was obliged to attend the Lieutenant-Governor's Ball at the Citadel. Cabinet ministers, senators, members of Parliament and of the Legislative Council,judges, high civil servants and representatives of the professions, commerce and industry, all in tails and white gloves, filed past Their Excellencies. The Lieutenant-Governor, an Englishman of the ruling caste, had sharp features and the head of a Russian wolfhound. He smiled with fitting dignity at this crowd with whom he was trying-and with great success-to pass for the most democratic of men. His wife assisted him ably. Dressed with great simplicity, she had a pleasant word for every woman she knew. The ability of these English aristocrats to adapt to every occasion was well displayed towards the end of the night, when they gave the signal for the last dances and beat time with their hands-to encourage everybody. These democratic manners of modern England are especially popular with colonials, who tee1 their own importance enhanced by such condescension. Lucien Joly made his way towards me from the far end of the ballroom. He was in great form, and proffered the liveliest comments on various personages who were present. "Look at Alderman Tranchemontagne!" he said. "He's the man who, having read nothing but Mother Seigel's almanac, ordered a magnificent library of books, all of them bound in full morocco and bearing on their spines his own name in gilt letters." "You mean, as if he had written them all himself?" "Exactly. You ought to go to his'house and look at them. On one shelf you can read the title Oraisons funibres, and under it the name 'Emile Tranchemontagnc'. Bossuet? He's never heard of him. the same

thing with certain famous memoirs which, instead of Chateaubriand's name, bear that of our municipal genius. . . Oh, and there's Brisefer of the National Assembly! He's the one who bought a likeness of the Venus de Milo in Europe and sued the steamship company for having broken two of the lady's arms. . . And here comes another distinguished gentleman who asked my bookseller last week for a novel by Paul Bourget, saying, 'You know, I like to encourage our own authors-as part of the Buy Canadian campaign'. Look! That man shaking hands with the Lieutenant-Governor is the famous Couvk. When he went into politics all he had to his name were his pants, and they weren't paid for. Today he's worth half a million. He's a political boss, the king of patronage. . . Just look at that other fellow with the face of a frightened weasel: that's MarCchal. A smart fellow, all the same. He's been elected by acclamation three times in a row, and boasts of it. Of course he forgets to say how much he paid the opposing candidate, each time, to withdraw." The procession went on. Lucien had a fling at everybody. Only three or four were spared. These were the intelligent, dedicated and sincere leaders, who had to drag along behind them a dead weight of nonentities, braggarts, yes-men and, in some cases, downright liars. "You might think this sorry state of affairs would turn me against democracy," he added. "You'd be wrong. In the wilderness of parliaments some first-rate men always appear, to dominate the others by their brains and energy and keep the imbeciles in order. One man in a government, two at most, is enough. Even the clods are useful in tending their own little patch of the electorate. Fear is their master. It's fear that forces them to display a kind of selfish devotion to their party from one New Year's Day to the next. That's how democracies are kept happy.. . But let's forget politics and look at the women! Aren't they lovely tonight'?" A face appeared in the crowd, almost drawing a cry from me. It was Dorothke, more beautiful than ever in a low-cut gown of pale green which set off the beauty of her complexion and the delicate mould of her shoulders. She was not smiling. Her dark-brown eyes, those eyes I so loved for the life that had once sparkled in them, were sad. When the dancing began one could see an unbroken line forming at the buffet. Groups of young men and women were tossing off champagne in such greedy haste that many were already losing their balance. DorothCe passed before me at intervals on the arm of some unknown partner; she was so elegant, so graceful, that I was seized by an infinite regret and longing.

"I must have a dance with her," I thought. "This evening I'll havean explanation, or never at all. She has been avoiding me far too long." I took advantage of a moment when she was crossing the ball-room to accost her and murmur, "Dorothke, may I not have the favour of the next dance? I would so like to talk to you." "Why hello, Max!" she said with affected indifference. "I didn't know you were here. How are you? You haven't changed. You want to have a chat? Not just now, though, if you don't mind." "The dance after the next, then?" "I'm sorry, but it's promised . and so are the two following. The fourth one will be yours. Wait for me on the verandah, on the side overlooking the river. I'll join you there." The fresh air braced me. I needed it, for my heart was pounding. Looking over the balustrade of the broad gallery, I could see the black water swirling at the foot of Cape Diamond. A ship rode at anchor in the port; little else but her red and green riding lights at prow and stern could be seen. The Levis ferry-boat, with its lights like a mass of stars, clove the channel. At my feet, on the walk that encircles the Citadel, belated couples were passing, and I could hear their muffled voices, mingled with the wails of the dance music from the ball-room. Memories of our history swept over me, as if like restless ghosts the3 were crawling up the cliff and moving towards the sounds of these festivities. I recalled that it was at the foot of this very rock, slightly to my left, that on the last day of the year 1775, at four o'clock in the morning, the American General Montgomery had lost his life in a vain effort to bring liberty to the French-Canadians. Two strangers a few feet from me were talking in the darkness and during my long wait for Dorothdc I could overhear their conversation. "Montgomery," one of them was saying, "was advancing towards the foot of the cape with seven hundred men. But King George's faithful subjects were on sentry-go and guarding the fort. Just as the enemy general came within range, Chaboo, who was in charge of a battery of five field-guns, opened fire and killed him. Thanks to one small and mndom bullet, Canada did not disappear into the American meltingpot." "That makes me think of another story," the other voice replied. "Once upon a time there was a poor devil who had been torn from his home and carried into another house where he was compelled to change his name and become a servant. Hearing of this injustice, some rich and powerful friends of his beset that house, reached the victim and said to him, 'Join us, and regain your liberty!' The servant replied, 'Away with you, tempters that you are! It's true that I'm not free here and must be a

..

dishwasher, a mucker-out of stables and a drawer of garbage cans. I could be worse ofT. Far from being satisfied just to let me live, they feed me, lodge me and look after me. I'd be an ungrateful monster if I left such good masters." "That's a good story," said the first speaker. "But what are you driving at?" "That it's more monstrous to kill those who offer us liberty. At the time when a young America was taking the oath of independence and arousing the admiration of the world, at the very moment when La Fayette was drawing his sword in her cause, it was shameful for Frenchmen to treat as enemies the men who in a single night could have welded them into a nation that was to become the richest, freest and most powerful in the world." "The resistance," replied the other, "was decreed in high quarters. The ruling class in Quebec led the people, and it knew very well what it was doing. If the American Congress had made itself the master of Canada, we would have been promptly assimilated. The three million inhabitants of New England would soon have swamped the one hundred thousand which we then numbered. Once united with us politically, those enterprising, busy, daring Yankees would have made themselves at home in our house in no time, taken possession of the master's room and slept in our beds. Under the pretext of emancipating us, they would have torn up the Quebec Act of 1760 and created in our midst institutions completely a t variance with our traditions and ways of life. That's why I applaud the resistance we made, not only as an act of loyalty but as a display of the most enlightened patriotism." "But," protested the other, "what might not our people have become if they had joined the Americans in a common struggle for liberty? We do not know. And we will never know. That is the mystery of circumstances, of events which did not occur-and since they didn't occur we can only make guesses. But I can draw upon established facts for grounds on which to condemn that patriotism you so admire. The French in this country had been conquered in 1760, only fifteen years before the arrival of Montgomery. The English were still their enemies by the laws of blood and war, by the very law of nature. The generation which had been conquered and subjected to its masters was still living. The subjected must never be zealous in maintaining his subjection. If he does, he is a coward." "What, our ancestors were cowards?" "No, they were not. And here's the proof. Nearly all the rural population, from Montreal to Kamouraska, from the Richelieu Valley to the Beauce, were ready to march together in the cause of liberty against

their conquerors of a few years before. Our country folk and farmersthe most solid, sensible and hardy people in the land acclaimed the promised liberation. What prevented these brave people from going into action? Their hands were tied by their natural leaders. Those leaders may not have been traitors, I am not saying that, but I believe that some of them had already accepted too many favours, others were frightened, still others simply foolish. That is how we were prevented from joining the future masters of the world. "Today we are the poor relations of North America, one of the most backward peoples of all the white races in the world. That loyalty of ours has cost us dear. We have the paltry consolation of having kept our word; we forget that wc gave this word with a knife at our throats." "Well," said the.other, "liberty is not the only good that a people should pursue. I don't think there was any justification for plunging a crowd of simple and docile people into suffering and poverty in support of what was then a very doubtful cause. You see, I am looking at the situation from the viewpoint of 1775. Fortunately, time has worked well for us. Today our people, enjoying complete liberty, speaking our own tongue, masters of our own institutions and natural resources, have escaped the usual fate of the conquered." This dialogue, which I found most disturbing, was continuing when I heard footsteps approaching. It was Dorothk.

XXIII

"I can't give you more than five minutes," she said. "Tell me quickly, what is it you wisl~?" "Only to see you, and hear your voice." "Thank you! I was afraid you were going to ask for explanations. But you are as discreet as I judged you to be. You know there are some things that can never be explained." Her voice was as musical as ever, but noticeably changed. Her affectation of unconcern could not hide her distress. "I'm sure you would have explained everything long ago," I said, "if it had been possible. 11' 1 say nothing more, except that I've been unable to forget you. I tried. . . ." "So I saw. You did try. And I have thought of you too. Even if I had wanted to thrust all memory of you from my mind, there were always worthy souls who undertook to keep me posted on your successes ...in certain quarters." "What do you mean?" "You know as well as I. You are tabbed as a light-hearted, fickle man about town. 1 hope it is not true. But it might be, and that disturbs me." "Why should it disturb you, since I mean nothing to you?" "At one time you meant a great deal. I had a very high opinion of you, and you were never found unworthy of it. One is always disturbed when somebody one has admired ceases to be admirable." "Could you not be more specific?" "Surely you understand. Since we broke off, ten women have figured in your lile. Some of them loved you, that was clear, and perhaps they were worthy of being loved. At times you must have been sincere, but as soon as you felt they also were sincere you gave them up-because once

you had possessed them there was nothing more to expect. Isn't that true?" "It was you, only you, that I was looking for in them," I said, at once deeply moved and a little resentful. "Even if it was, you were not obeying the best part of yourself. You say you were looking only for me. Do you really think that was the way to find me?" Then, as if speaking to herself, she added-this time without irony, "Will you never cease this philandering? What good does it do you, this endless roving? What good, I ask you! So much thought, such energy, so many precious hours, all wasted in this chasing after women!" She raised her head and looked me straight in the eye. "Tell me," she said, "am I not right? I, a young girl, tell you these things because I know they are true and because I have your good at heart. I am much more sensible than you." "Dorothie, it was you yourself who broke up my whole life. This doesn't absolve me from what I've done, but it explains it, as you must have the honesty to admit." She made no reply. My heart was throbbing with anger, love and resentment. "You have no right," I said, "to censure me when it is you who are responsible. Only remember the circumstances of our breaking off. "Of our separation." "It amounts to the same thing. Remember! The very day before you told me you had nothing more in common with me, you spoke these words: 'If I ever lost you, life would mean nothing more to me!' For years you had gratified me with your love, your declarations, your promises. Countless favours, attentions and memories bound us together. We were as one, for our lives were so closely interwoven they made a single web. With one stroke you cut it apart, and now you expect me to repeat the same process with every woman who crosses my path, and play the same role of puppet, of dupe." "Max! Max! Don't say such things! I can't bear it." "Then tell me I was not your dupe. Tell me that!" "NO, you weren't. I swear it." "What was I, then?" "Let's say no more, I beg you! Shall we go? I'll be expected f o the ~ next dance." Her voice was so broken that I began to tremble with delight. "No," I said, taking her arm. "You shan't leave before you've heard me out."

. ."

"Let me go!" "Not yet. I must tell you that you have taken my whole youth and killed it. That you've even stripped me of my illusions. Once a man has lost his faith in love, what has he left to live for? And it's you who destroyed that faith." "Let me go, Max! Please!" I released her arm. She took a faltering step towards me and then, burying her face in my breast, burst into tears. I closed my arms around her and sought her lips. We kissed. It was the first kiss of true love I had known since she kissed me last. "DorothCe, you still love me." "I must not! I must not! Listen: perhaps we are never to meet again." "Why not?" "Quite soon, I shall be out of this world." "You mean-die?" "No. I will bc in a convent." The words were hardly spoken before she fled. From the dark port the heavy groan of a ship's foghorn pierced the darkness.

XXIV

"Lucien, I saw DorothCe yesterday." "Did you speak to her?" "Yes. She told me she was entering a convent." "Do you believe it?" "It seems incredible. With her ideas, she could not-unless she has changed radically. And Meunier himself wouldn't let his only daughter take the veil-for the pleasure of leaving his immense fortune to a religious order." "Meunier?" said Lucien. "Don't you know he has spent the last twenty years of his life buying ecclesiastical titles and Papal decorations? Didn't he buy from Rome, for more than their weight in gold, two or three resounding orders which entitle him to be addressed as Excellency? Every year he has been one of the canopy bearers in the Corpus Christi procession, where he appears in a melodramatic costume. He would like, they say, to steal the show from the Cardinal's red hat itself. While our needy schools, universities and hospitals are destitute of almost everything, he has smothered a few second-rate charities with banknotes so that he can pin on his lapel one of those thousand and one badges given out by the powers that be to indulge the donor's vanity." "All the same, he's the founder of a free and independent magazine like ours." "True enough. But he wasn't doing that for you, but for his daughter. He loves his Dorothde. It's his one good point. But for her, he'd be nothing but an influential oaf-like threequarters of the nabobs in this young country. Culture, intellect, breadth of view, you don't find any of that in tradesmen who've grown rich by luck or penny-pinching, but only in a few poor devils who are proscribed in their own country because they've dared to behave like real human beings, and literally

outlawed themselves by their intellectual superiority, as well as by preferring poverty to submission." "I know. But, coming back to DorothCe, you knowthere's nothing of the St. Marguerite Alacoque about her." "That's another story. There's a real riddle there. As I've already told you, a woman like DorothCe Meunier wouldn't take such a step without very serious reasons. You don't cut yourself off from life unless you're filled with either infinite hope or complete despair. Dorothke doesn't go in for that kind of infinite hope. If she sacrifices herself, it's because life has lost all meaning for her." "You think so?" I murmured. Once more I recalled Dorothie's words, "If I ever lost you, life would mean nothing more to me." "In a country like ours," Lucien went on, "the religious life is almost the only escape from certain sorrows. Your friend has chosen the most dignified way of leaving a world in which she is stifling. I admire her strength of mind. But she will have to pluck her woman's heart out of her breast and throw it in the ditch; and then, if she sees it still beating, she must trample it in the mud with both feet. After that, chastity will wither her body, and obedience will take over her soul and personality. You know the Jesuits*motto: 'To obey like a corpse, like the stick in the hand of an old man.' " "Please! Spare me any more." "I will admit," he went on, ignoring the interruption, "that the cloister contains much moral grandeur. All those little women who-work, suffer and love without any worldly thoughts or interest and withno feeling except for abstract or insensible objects, are capable of the m s t heroic actions which they repeat with a constancy that is almost unknown outside of religious institutions. Their patience and devotion in caring for orphans, nursing the sick, relieving the sufferings of the poor, the crippled, the feeble-minded, are prodigious. They tend the wretched not with any maternal warmth, but with that kind of constrained kindness which bespeaks the resolve to perform a duty without yielding to any instinctive emotion. They abhor nature, which they look on as sinful, and they deny all its incentives. They begin by repressing in themselves every impulse which binds them to the world. They go so far as to compress their bodies in order to lessen their beauty. They even seek to supernaturalize, as it were, the tenderest, gentlest and most earthly sentiment that any being in this world can feel-the love of a child for its parents. I was once witness of a scene where a young nun, receiving without any warning the news of her mother's death, remained absolutely unmoved, maintaining a cold and collected gaze, silent and serene. Self-control could go no further. I cannot help seeing in this a

certain beauty. I forgot to mention that these women are not impervious to all emotion. It is well known that certain-mystics,by contemplatinga crucifix, experience raptures as powerful as those of any passionate woman.*' "That is their affair," 1 said. "But I cannot accept the idea of Dorothte dying to the world in that way, destroying in herself all the beauty that I know so well. I want this little creature to remain as alive, as vital, as vibrant as I know her to be, and to keep that matchless beauty of hers." As if wishing to turn the knife in the wound, Lucien went on: "Some mystics are known to have carried self-abnegation to the point of praying God to deprive them forever of His presence if this could increase His glory. You know those counsels that St. John of the Cross gives to the spiritual elect: "'Seek not the easiest, but the most difficult; 'Not the most flavourful, but the most insipid; 'Not what is attractive, but what is repulsive; 'Not consolation, but affliction; 'Not repose, but fatigue; 'Not the most, but the least; 'Not the most precious and most elevated, but the vilest and most humble; 'Not appetence, but indifference; 'Not regard, but contempt.' " As I listened to these words I felt my heart sink. I pictured my fragile DorothCe, she whom I thought was made for all the joys of life, giving up her body to such macerations. As a civilized man, I could not face this inhuman prospect, and a violent protest rose in the depths of my being. "No!" I cried. "No, it is unthinkable! I will not allow it!" Lucien looked at me with a smile. He seemed to understand my feelings so well that I resented him for being so intelligent, so well poised, so reasonable. 0 good old friend of mine, whom I must still thank for having read my soul so clearly in those dark hours! "Max," he said, "I know that Dorothbe is part of you, body and soul. Other women have come into your life lately. If they have meant nothing to you, it was because you were really constant to her who left you. Even if she takes the veil you will not cease loving her, and that is what disturbs me when I consider your future. But now, would you like to know what I really think?" "Do not take too long. Unless you are bent on torturing me further."

"No, Max, that is not my intention. I've given you a true picture of the cloister, simply because I wanted t o prepare you for this question: d o you think Dorothte was made for that kind of existence?" "No. D o you?" "I d o not. She will not live for long in a convent, but the strength of her will might well lead her t o die there."

xxv A messenger brought me a copy of The Twentieth Century, fresh from the press room. An article by Lillois caught my eye. It was entitled "No Stone Whereon to Lay His Head." It had escaped my editorial supervision and was now headed, beyond recall, for the four corners of the land. Hermann began by speaking of Our Lord with love and veneration: the poorest of the poor, sleeping under the stars on the sands of Judaea; wearing a coarse dress, eating crumbs from the tables of the rich; walking-thin, pale and fair-in the company of a crowd of dirty and infected wretches, slaves, lepers, beggars and malcontents; pointing the way to the Kingdom of Heaven through humility, abnegation and hope; fleeing the wealthy, the Pharisees, the court of Herod; blessing the woman taken in adultery and the publican; cursing alike the hypocrite and the scribe, the formalist, the expounder of the letter of the law and the exploiter of prejudice and superstition. This Christ seemed endowed with the gentleness and delicacy of a woman, with the strength and majesty of a lion, human in everything common to all men with their blend of weakness, fear, heroism and terror in the face of death, human in the tcars He shed on the tomb of Lazarus and in his final cry, "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" Leaping over whole epochs of history, Hermann then tried to picture a twentieth-century Christ amidst the magnificent temples built with money wrung from the poor by the threat of damnation; amidst the vast holdings of corporations that paid no tribute to Caesar-that despised Caesar to whom poor Jesus tendered his allegiance and his penny; amidst the monopolists of learning, education and institutions; amidst the comfort, luxury and riches derived from the tithes of peasants and fishermen; facing the triple alliance of capital, civil power and church

authority, all upheld by the autocracy of a dogma that stifled all independent thinking and remained indifferent to the ruin in which it involved poor devils guilty of nothing more than having dared to cry out the truths that were seething in them; facing the importance of the clergy, its power, gifts, bequests, its takings at births, marriages and deaths; facing the silent slavishness of a people used to bending the knee. . . What figure would be cut, the poor Jesus of the publicans and sinners, amidst so much of the goods of this world? Then, in closing, Lillois paid homage to the apostles of the humble and the suffering, to the few green cassocks living in shacks deep in the woods or in the icy Arctic so that they might hold up the lamp of immortal hope before the submissive eyes of pioneers, settlers and savages. For he admired those who suffer with the suffering, remain poor among the poor, humble with the outcasts, and who with bleeding feet walk also the thorny path that leads to eternity. Hermann had written these pages with such intensity that I trembled for the existence of the enterprise which we had been striving for years to establish. We had made our way towards independence with great caution. We had shown that world history need not be summed up as a contest between Michael and Lucifer; that art is a matter of humanity rather than of doctrine; that criticism and literary biography must not be wholly subservient to apologetics; that the privilege of instruction cannot, without endangering the mind, heart, judgment and knowledge of man, be totally engrossed by a caste that chooses to spurn the contemporary; that philosophy is not necessarily confined to a few textbooks written in bad Latin; and that the blossoming of opinions is as indispensable to civilization as air to the lungs. We had put forward these truths and many others, but in a style of moderation, mildness and muted colours. We had launched no direct attacks, and had dealt none of those sharp blows that cut like a whiplash. I called Hermann in and said to him, "This article will get us into trouble. You can expect a call to arms. Your authorship of this will not only bring down on you' the insults of the whole press but will close the doors of many houses to you. Seeing you, mothers of families will cross themselves and say to their little ones, 'Here comes the Devil in person !' " "Do you really believe it's that serious?'he asked. "If I glorify the Christ of the Gospel, whom I love, in order to set Him up against the flaccid prosperity of His representatives today, how can I be blamed? We've already gone further than that, and we're still very much alive. Look at me: am I not the picture of health?"

He was indeed, this big fellow with his imposing height, his sristocratic features and his air of freedom and vitality. "Well, old man," I said, "I've learned from bitter experience that some people are more afraid of the word than the thing. You can attack a power without naming it, and you'll be left alone because the people involved will pretend not to understand you. Make the mistake of naming it, and you'll bc crushed." "In that case, I can no longer identify with the race that produced Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal and Moli&re." "MoliGre? An excellent case in point. It's forbidden to play Tartuffe here. Why? Because the local Tartuffes would recognize themselves. In all countries of the British Empire the most highly regarded citizens are Tartuffes. We QuCbCcois have a real affinity with the puritans of Toronto who consider playing bridge on Sunday a sin, but think nothing of passing all Sunday drinking in a room behind drawn curtains." "But what do you expect of me, Max? I spent my youth in Paris, the forum of all ideas, ways of living, philosophies, utopias and theories. I associated with journalists, professors, men in all the professions, writers, thinkers, painters, musicians, poets, rightists, leftists and revolutionaries. They all expressed freely and openly their convictions and their ideals, they all contradicted each other frankly and loudly, never questioning each other's right to his way of thinking, feeling and speaking. I've always been a little homesick for that Parisian atmosphere, for those who are more alive, healthier, more refreshing-in a word, more human. What a marvellous meeting-place of minds!" "Well, don't worry, old man. I bear you no ill will. The party might get a bit rough in a few days, but if we can survive for a few weeks everything may blow over."

XXVI

Of course the bombshell burst. Two days later a journalist abused Lillois in an editorial. After borrowing a few typical expressions from Louis Veuillot-that most vigorous, skilful, fanatical and sectarian of nineteenth-century polemicists-he repeated the famous phrase of Montalembert: "We are the sons of the Crusaders, we will not retreat before the sons of Voltaire." Upon which Lucien remarked, "The son of the Crusader who used this quotation was hiding out in the woods in 1917 to escape conscription." The editorial continued in the same tone, pointing out, among other novelties, that Lillois did not represent the admirable France of St. Louis or Louis XIV, but the France of rottenness and filth, of the Encyclopaedists,the Diderdts, the dVAlemberts,the Arouets and the Terrorists, the France of Renan, Anatole France, Gide and that dung-beetle Zola, as well as of all the nightclubs and profligates of Montmartre, in short, the France of all the vices that put those of Sodom and Gomorrah in the shade. The following Sunday, denunciations were hurled from every pulpit in the land. Five hundred villages heard the same anathema launched at the infamous foreigner who had dared pass judgment on FrenchCanadians. On all sides, on city streets and dusty country roads, rang the refrain, "The damned Frenchy! The damned Frenchy!" And all the echoes repeated, "Damned Frenchy!" Birds in the trees kept chirping, "Damneddamneddamned Frenchy!" Even the dogs seemed to understand the insult to their masters and barked their righteous francophobia as they paused beside the telephone poles whose wires, stretched like those of a piano, modulated the same curses in the wind. Crazes like this have the most powerful effect on people who hang

Both my men got through. The stature and personality of Lucien had quelled the storm. The police, arriving with a great noise of sirens, cleared the place. The victim of my friend's knockout blow was picked up unconscious. He was later identified as the young man whom the League had once delegated to tear down some theatre posters showing a woman in dCcollet6 with her arm around a horse's neck. Our troubles did not end there. From all quarters of the city and the province The Twentieth Century was returned to us with the single word, Refused. The university professors, doctors, lawyers and engineers, all those whose ideas we knew to be the same as our own, shunned the guilty magazine. They were trembling for their positions or their practice. It was even worse in the country. Not one villager, fearing the sharp noses of his neighbours, dared be found in possession of the diabolical review. All the members of the Legislative Assembly returned it to us, expressing their regret at being unable to keep it in view of the forthcoming election. When the next issue came out the postmasters in several municipalities, acting on orders from certain officials, refused to deliver our periodical and returned it to us unopened and in bulk. Barely five thousand faithful subscribers were left: these were the poorest and most cultivated. The richest and most influential abandoned us. The struggle, the real struggle for existence, was beginning for me. Lillois had been attacked personally, but he was known to be working under my direction. I was held responsible; denying nothing, I shouldered the responsibility, which I valued as highly as its personal cost to myself. Our largest advertisers, depending for their livelihood on sensitive customers, withdrew their advertisements. Our income dropped sharply. Though now an outcast, I was not totally bereft of consolation. Three thousand letters piled up on my desk within a few days.'Young students, young girls, men and women of all ages and in all walks of life, wrote me expressing their sympathy and urging me to stand firm. These testimonials could not, howevcr, make up for our losses. They were a comfort to us, revealing as they did the existence, in the very heart of the intellectual colonialism in which we lived, of a few thousand stronger and more courageous beings who despite their surroundings had not lost the qualities that make one love mankind. Could we ask for more? It was hardly to be hoped that a population on which a kind of moral castration had been performed would abandon overnight their terrors and prejudices. Lillois, who had wished to resign from our staff on account of his

their brains, rather than their hats, on a peg-believing that'the head is an organ not only superfluous but harmful. Two or three hundred members of the Morality League, armed with sticks and howling, "Blissfully they reapw-their most original marching song-mustered in front of our building. I opened my window and heard the cry, "Hey there, Lillois! Let's see your mug, so we can break it for you!" A large placard, carried on a raised stick, bore the League's motto, LOVE ONE ANOTHER. I called Hermann and said to him, "Listen, this mob is really after you. Please don't .move from here until I've called the police." "Me? Nothing doing! I'm going out right now." "You're not going to risk it. Take it easy." "I am going. The damned Frenchy's going to stand up to the crusaders' sons!" He picked up his hat and stick and went down the stairs, our ofices being on the third floor. Seeing this, Lucien followed him, saying over his shoulder, "I'm not leaving a comrade alone to face those young half-wits." While I was telephoning the chief of police I heard savage yells, the noise of broken glass, the trampling of feet. After hanging up I ran to the window. Hermann had just crossed the threshold. A strapping redfaced fellow, wearing a beret, hurled some idiotic term of abuse at him. Lillois, who knew a little about boxing, knocked him off his feet with a single punch. A shower of stones fell against our door. Lillois, who was fighting with fists and feet to force a passage through the crowd, was struck in the forehead by a stone. He staggered. At this moment Lucien stepped out. He towered menacingly above the crowd. Anger had increased his strength tenfold. His shoulders were broad, his neck thick and muscular, and when he raised his huge hand towards the fanatics there was a moment of silence and astonishment. Lucien was known to all these youngsters not only as the most congenial of men but also as a fine athlete. "Don't touch this man!" he roared, pointing to Hermann who ww blinded with blood. "If you do, watch out! If you want to.settle this business with your fists, any one of you can step up. Your fathers, a few years back, greeted the genius of Sarah Bernhardt with rotten eggs. Today, you uphold your ideas with stones. I congratulate you!" With these words he took Hermann by the arm and plunged into the mob which, already wavering, opened instinctively before him. A young giant tried to bar their passage, and was laid low by Lucien, his skull giving out a hollow sound as it struck the pavement.

article, and whose departure I had strenuously resisted, spoke of our adventure with his usual spirit. "We have," he said, "served the cause of art, letters, history, science and politics under their loftiest and most attractive aspects. We have lifted a corner of the veil covering the genius of France, Germany, Russia, Italy, England and Scandinavia. And after spreading such intellectual feasts before the masses, here we are under the stroke of ostracism. All the powers are against us. We are five thousand against a million. But are we not, after all, dealing with overgrown children? Offer a five-year-old the choice between a bunch of brightly coloured balloons and the richest gem in the British crown; the youngster will choose the balloons." Hermann was airing these reflexions as he stood before the window. Across the street, we could see the sign-board of a little magazine whose mission was to organize pilgrimages and collect alms for a Sunday school for negroes in Africa. "The editors of that magazine are happy men," said Hermann. "They are taking no chances." "The tide will turn, Hermann," I rejoined. "Among all the forms of nature, animate or inanimate, action provokes an equal and opposite reaction." "Well, I must say you people here haven't got very active reflexes," he laughed. "It's as if you had the blood of seals in your veins. Can't you be a little more cheerful, more lighthearted, more natural. Try drinking wine, for God's sake!"

XXVII

Some time later Lucien and I were invited to the house of my friend's former professor, Louis Latour. Now a judge of the Supreme Court, Latour was in a position to befriend The Twentieth Century with impunity. He and his wire gave us a hearty welcome; the other guests greeted us coolly; some were barely civil. Sensing the hostility around me, I determined to retaliate by attacking the convictions of some of those present. In the course of the evening, while a game of bridge was in progress, a heavy-set businessman said to me with a certain air of condescension, "You fellows don't seem to care much for the members of your own race. You crack down on everything they do. Perhaps you know the English saying that 'it's a dirty bird that fouls its own nest."' "My compliments to you, sir, on being so ready with proverbs. There are some really fine ones. But a proverb never proves anything. On the other hand, haven't you noticed that a country's complainers, its critics, are often the most attached to its people?" "You'll admit that your own complaints are pretty strong." "Well, are you satisfied with things as they are? Satisfied with yourself, satisfied with everybody and everything?You're proud of your own generation?' "Our history should be enough for us." "We talk too much about our history. We're like those backward, filthy, lice-ridden, ignorant Hindus who try to persuade themselves, by reading old texts, that they're the equals of the Europeans who lord it over them and kick their backsides. While the English and the Americans surpass us in enterprise, wealth, the arts and science, to say nothing of health and physical strength, we take cover behind our history like frightened kids behind their mothers' skirts."

A small dark woman, of pretentious and sickly appearance, piped up from the far end of the drawing-room: "But aren't you a French-Canadian too?" "Indeed I am. But it's better not to let yourself be possessed by your loyalty to a clan, or to its bigotry. To measure a nation's real worth, you must have a broad appreciation of human values. Otherwise you're like the owl who told the eagle that her little owlets could be recognized because they're cute." The small dark woman assumed her most important air and, flushed with indignation, stated solemnly, "We are quite as refined as you are. There are people who think differently from you, and they are just as good as you." This was the most telling argument brought out that night. The rest of the backward people present were enthralled by the reasoning power of the lively little brunette. "China also," I went on, "has a splendid history. And so have Egypt, Syria and Persia, to name only a few. But while they rest on their glorious laurels the Japanese, the English and other powers who aren't always talking of their past when it's time for present action, teach them the cruel lesson that energy and enterprise are better safeguards of independence than all the feats of their glorious dead." The dark woman did not quit the fray. She was quite convinced of her mental superiority. "According to you, then," she cried, "people should no longer be taught history." "No, I am saying the past should not constitute our sole claim to fame. A history which the living cannot sustain is a stigma rather than an honour, because it is a sign of decadence. With that reservation, I admire the mcn who built this country as much as you, if not more. True, I'm not enamoured of those church-window characters created by our textbooks, but I have a passionate admiration for our explorers and adventurers, for our pioneers who, musket in hand, never far from ambush and death, cleared the land which supplied food to our ancestors; for the coureurs de bois, those epic gypsies of nature, seeking unattainable goals like sublime poets; and for those mighty visionaries whose dreams led to the foundation of an empire. What have we made of that wonderful heritage? Are we not like chicks hatched by an eagle?" The telephone rang in the next room. The call was for me and I went to take it. "Don't let anybody hear you utter my name," said the voice. "This is Dorothk speaking. I must see you tonight, and nobody must know. It's

now eleven o'clock. Where can you meet me in twenty minutes?" "At my apartment." "Oh but " "It's the only place where no one will see you, especially'at this late hour." "Very well. I'll be there."

.. .

...

XXVIII

"Your place is as lovely as ever," said Dorothtk as she came in. "So warm and intimate! Our house is so huge, silent, cold." "YOU have only to come more often." "That's out of the question, dear Max. Even tonight I'm taking a chance. If I were seen . . . " "Have no fear. I'll keep watch on the street. You'll be able to slip out unnoticed." "Good. 1'11 tell you in two words why I'm here. Tonight my father had a conversation with an important person on the subject of you and your magazine. They were both in the big drawing-room. I was in the next room, pretending to read, but as soon as I heard your name I took the liberty of listening. "'I have it on good authority,' this important person was saying, 'that this pernicious publication was launched with your funds.' "'Nonsense!' said my father. 'Someone's been slandering me.' " 'There's no use your denying it. My information has been checked. Not that I'm taking you to task for it! You knew nothing of the aims of these young men, one of whom, Max Hubert, your prottgt, could well pass for a decent fellow. But after a while you and your daughter thought it best to keep him at arm's length, which is all to your credit. I lay no blame at your door.' "'I don't know what you're talking about.' "'Yes, you do. Now listen. You've been unknowingly drawn into a dangerous enterprise. You can now, quite knowingly, withdraw from it." "'I don't really see . . ' " 'These young fellows who've undertaken to disturb people's consciences by spreading subversive ideas and an ethic of loose morals have

.

had a double incentive: the craving for independence-only natural at their age-and the prospett of exploiting a vein that they think will lead them on to fame and fortune.' "'That's just what I think.' "'Exactly! It strikes me that if only you were to go to them, remind them of the help you've given them and ask thcm, as a personal favour, to modify their attitude in the direction of a more traditional outlook, they would be bound to listen to you.' " 'I do not think so. They have the advantage of an education I don't possess. With me, they assume airs of superiority and condescension that make short work of any influence I might have.' "'That's not the whole story. I represent interests who will guarantee financial compensation to each 01' them on the day they accept a policy to be directed by us.' "'They'll say they're not for sale and show me the door.' "'Who do you mean, "they"? You'll be dealing with only one of them, the editor. The talk will be confidential. It won't be the man you'll be buying, but the magazine. That's right, don't be surprised. We've decided to take over The Twentieth Century for the good of everyone concerned.' "The conversation lasted some time longer," Dorothte went on. "It was a question of dollars-1 didn't catch the exact figure--of sound doctrine, of national danger and I don't know what else. In the end, I gathered that my father gave in and was to see you tomorrow morning. Before agreeing, he asked this man, 'Do you really think these young men will accept a sum of money in return for giving up their daily work?' "'I've thought of that. The whole editorial staff of The Twentieth Century will be retained.' " 'How can you expect them to deny tomorrow, over their own signatures, what they write today?' "'That's common among journalists. Think nothing of it. You've no idea how fast the public at large can forget. I've even thought of how we could easily provide an outlet for their critical propensities by offering them a few fairly controversial subjects to tackle, as a kind of transition. For instance, I'd gladly allow them to attack, as violently as they wished, the dearth of proper instruction in our classical colleges, as well as the poor quality of the teachers and the curriculum itself. Someone of our way of thinking might well show them the way by initiating such criticism. I myself fully realize that our educators have fallen asleep on the job and that we're not turning out many worthwhile men. You see?

Wouldn't that be an excellent way of saving the faces of these talented young men while ingeniously safeguarding our own interests? "That's what I overheard," Dorothte concluded. "I don't know any more about it." She paused. She had related the conversation in detail, though a few minor points might have escaped her. I was gazing at her with fascination, with my whole soul. She had still those finely cut features so full of expression and originality. And what elegance there was in her costume! The same elegance which had so delighted me from the first days of our friendship. Since it was now October and the nights were cold, she was wearing a coat with a wide mink collar, and the soft fur, draping her like a shawl, moulded her'shoulders and back as far as the waist. She had that erect, delicate, firm posture which is, in a woman, the sign of a proud lineage. I was so happy simply looking at her that I dared not speak for fear of breaking the spell. I felt that nothing in the world existed beyond this creature who could have filled ten lives like mine. Memories of our former intimacy came flooding over me. All the tender words she used to speak or write came back to me. One day, in a burst of feeling, she had said to me, "I would like to possess the hcarts of all the women in the world, so I could love you as much as I wish." That was the moment, I thought, when our love had become too exalted, too boundless, too burning and urgent for human language to express. After a long silence she asked, "What do you intend to do?" "What would you do in my place?" "I? Oh, you know very well that I would never give in! Never!" "Do you think I would be any weaker than you?" "It was only to make sure that I took the risk of coming here tonight." "Risk?" "Please, Max, do not ask me any more questions. Before I leave here for good I only want you to preserve the independenceof your personality and your work. If everything which you are, everything which I loved and shall always love, if any of that should change or wither away, it would be as if I had never loved anything true in this world, had been mistaken in everything that was strongest and most tender in my being. I cannot endure such a thought." "Dear DorothCe, you fiery, mystical, complex little soul, do not play at tragedy with me, with your own Max who knows that our love is not dead. Be once more your old gay, confident, exuberant self. You used to embody the joy of life. Wherever you went your smile gladdened people's hearts. Your eyes, with their gaze as soft as the breath of roses,

spread perfume wherever they fell. Be yourself again, Dorothie!" "I will never be like that again." "This is our first meeting at night since our break-up! Let us forget that you have a secret and that I've been unfaithful. This night is ours, serene and kindly, the night which from the depths of its calm.eternity is lending its soft mantle to all lovers." "When you speak like that, Max, I love to listen. It's as if you had a voice that was made for love. 1 understand how so many women have shared a part of your life. Your soul, your heart, your passion, all of you comes alive in your eyes, your voice, your smile, your sadness. You have a magnetism which no one can resist, which no one, I think, has ever resisted. I did not want to tell you then, lest you should know your power too well. I can tell you now, because you're older, more serious at least, and because it's the last time we shall see each other." "You're still thinking of the convent?" "Yes, Max. I will be there in two days." "You won't! I won't allow it! No! You know perfectly well you're not fitted for that kind of life. In a few months you'll come out again, lost, confused, broken ." "I will not come out alive. You don't know me yet. I have the willpower of all the Meuniers. Today I said goodbye to many things dear to me. This morning, very early, 1 took out the mahogany box where I had locked all your love letters, those letters you wrote so beautifully and which I used to read and re-read twenty times. I lit a fire in the grate, and I burned them--slowly, one by one-relishing my torment. A part of myself was going up in smoke. When I came to the last one of all I looked through a corner of the envelope, just a little, and read, 'Sweetheart, my dearest love. .' I remembered the sound of your voice when you used to say 'my dearest love,' and I began to weep. During the morning I went for a ride on my lovely little grey horse, who loves me so much. He crushed the dead leaves so joyfully under his little hooves, in the midst of the brilliant autumn colours which shone so brightlyin the morning sunlight-+ sunlight such as I'll perhaps never see again. I spoke to him, patting his neck, 'Jack, this is your last ride with Dorothbe. You'll never surprise her again, your Dorothbe, by pushing your long head over my shoulder.' He seemed to understand. He slackened his pace and turned his great sad eyes on me. As soon as we were back home . . . Max, excuse me. She was unable to go on. Her sobs were choking her. I barely had time to bend over her, to take her in my arms, before she leapt up in a single movement and fled to the door, crying out through her tears, "Goodbye, Max!"

.

. . ."

XXIX

It was such a changed, decrepit creature that walked into my office that I could hardly believe it was Meunier. He, the arrogant, purse-proud man I had known, with harsh features that only the sight of his daughter could soften-how broken he was! The first time I had seen him his hair was very thick and scarcely going grey. Now the-crown of his head was almost bare. It was an old man who stood beforti me; yet he was under sixty. To put him in a good humour I told him he was looking better than ever. He smiled, sighing, "It's no easy thing, you know, to stay young." From his altered mien I inferred that he had received a shock at some time during the past few years. "Probably a financial setback," I thought. 'In a roundabout way he came at last to the object of his call. Since I had been forewarned, I listened to him calmly, without showing any surprise. This reception emboldened him. "The proposition seems fair enough to me," he said. "You're being offered fifty thousand dollars for a magazine that's' been reported to have lost at least seventy-five per cent of its subscribers within the last few weeks. It's true, though, that the purchasers hope to regain lost ground through a .change in the spirit of its articles." "Where do you expect to find your editors?" asked. "And what kind of spirit will you require of them? Don't you know that on the day you transform the publication into a replica of the Sainte-EuphPmieMonthly Messenger, not one of the present subscribers will want to look at it?' Even those who dropped us after the Lillois affair will have no use for you."

"The group I represent," he replied, "fully intends to keep you all on as editors-you, Lucien and the Frenchman. That's one of the conditions of the deal. You'll have enough talent, enough--enough versatility to face about so no one will notice. It would be unwise to drop your scoffing attitude overnight. There are quite enough objects you can attack without touching anything essential. A man makes more headway, you know, by tacking than by taking in sail." "Since I've never been a seaman, I don't know how to tack. And I might as well tell you right away, it won't work. We prefer poverty to that kind of treason. What you're proposing to me is not only a degrading compromise but the abandonment of four or five thousand sound, genuine friends for the sake of a gang of sharpers who'll treat us with the scorn that all turncoats deserve." "Young man, you exaggerate. I've known more important men than you to change course-in politics, journalism, everywhere. They can soon make others forget what they used to be. Why don't you follow thcir example, if only out of consideration for me? Didn't I found your magazine with my own capital? I gave you that money-yes, gave it! And 1 never asked you how you used it." "Now you grudge it?" "I'd never have grudged it if it hadn't been leaked, to certain higherups;that I was responsible for your-your pranks. Now I'm in a fine mess. To think that I've many times been decorated, honoured, the support of a crowd of charities, director of a dozen respectable societies, and today I'm looked on as a renegade!" "Rather than accept your proposition, I'd prefer to lose everything. You want to kill 77ze Twentieth Century? Then go ahead!" And then, carried away by indignation, I said, "Give me a few weeks, and I'll return your fifty thousand dollars." Meunier exploded. His air of former days, rough and violent, suddenly revived. "Money? Me, you offer me money? You think I come here for money? Who needs it most, you or I? When 1 picked you up you hadn't a cent and no one even knew who you were. If it weren't lor me, you'd be nothing!" "It's just because I don't care to hear you prating any more about your generosity that I'm offering to pay you back. A man with any self-respect can't ,afford to remain your debtor on those terms." "A man with any self-respect shouldn't lay traps for a man like me. How could I know what was going to happen? Your views, your 'ideas,' what did I have to do with them, when I was getting along perfectly well without them? And on top of it all, the two of you-you and my

.

Dorothie-got together to deceive me, to toss me into this kettle of fish. You led her on to force my hand, you and this girl who's the dearest thing in the world to me. My daughter! She's been well paid for it! Abandoned! In a convent!" Meunier was a pitiable sight. He had uttered his daughter's name with a sudden change of tone, no longer one of anger but of such genuine distress that I took pity on him. All at once I saw his hand go to his heart. "Ah-h! Ah-h!" he groaned. "It's hurting, here!" He fell back in his chair, his face congested, sweat covering his forehead, his teeth clenched. "An attack . . . " he mumbled."Loosen my collar! . . . Air, give me air! . . . Open the window! I'm choking." I was terrified and rang for my secretary. "Quick, a doctor for M. Meunier!" . "No need now," gasped Meunier. "It's easingoff. I'm feeling better. .. . Wait . . I'll be all right in a few minutes. God that was tough! That's the third time it's happened. . . They say it's angina." Recovering his composure, he left almost immediately, muttering, "When you're old yourself, you'll see what a burden life can be."

.

.

XXX

"Dorothie has just entered the convent," I said to Lucien. "As if that weren't enough, there's the debt of honour I owe her father. My heart is broken, and I'm ruined. My run of misfortune is complete." "Pooh! It's only a matter of keeping your courage up. A man isn't really beaten until he thinks so himself." "I feel I've been beaten on cvery front: in my love life, in my intellectual life, even in my material life. What can I fight with, totally disarmed as I am? I undertook to ventilate the spiritual atmosphere of this country I love, to make it breathable, and they've managed to smother us. I couldn't imagine the existence of intellectual leadership without independence of spirit. Independence! That hollow word! I see now that people always depend on what surrounds them. I wonder if we haven't been dreaming, if we haven't been simply at the foot of a Jacob's ladder o r in the sails of a windmill. Don Quixote had as much sense as we had, the poor fool!" For five minutes nothing was said. We were both weighed down-not so much by our defeat as by the flight of all we had hoped for. Lucien broke the silence. "Have you never asked yourself," he said, "why we're surrounded by such moral and intellectual poverty? Why the development of a true culture has been so slow among us? Why our middle class, which constitutes our aristocracy, so quickly acquired the vices and decrepitude of older civilizations without absorbing any of their science, art, thought and tolerance?" "Perhaps I haven't. What is your explanation?" "To begin with, our lower middle class is composed of deracinated folk. Go back one or two generations, no farther, and you find the

peasant. The whole base of our people is that peasant stock. As long as they live on the farm, close to nature, they possess the richest of human gifts: honesty, gentleness, sense of order, abnegation, unselfishness, purity of faith and morals. Our country owes everything to them. But take them from the land and try to introduce them to the intellectual life after their three centuries in the fields and woods, and you turn them into misfits. Among their fields they think sensibly and their ideas don't overstep the bounds set by authority-not because they're dupes or sheep but because they realize one must obey someone in this world. It's a submission prompted by common sense. This is the spirit which has magnified them and made them perform incredibly courageous and noble deeds. Now, when it comes to educating these men who are so close to the soil, if you're not qualified to lead them to the highest cultural level and the most rigorous intellectual honesty, you turn them into a generation of ineffectuals; you build up in their minds an artificial condition which, in older nations, would be considered as a first stage in their development, but which, with us, is all too often the utter end of the formative process. A transient phase of education thus becomes a crystallized formation, the 'finished article.' In less backward countries, the individual who is material for an elite, and who begins his intellectual training early, no sooner enters the artificial stage I've spoken of than he hastens to escape from this state of relative deformation and goes further, much further, in thc development of his mind, till he returns eventually to nature, to that nature which is the beginning and the end of all human values carried to their peak. The trouble in this country, I repeat, is that most people remain stuck in the artificial period. More than ninety-nine per cent of educated French-Canadians are no better than schoolboys. After they're twenty-they learn nothing more than the old empirical routine and think of nothing but what they're told to think. They simply dry up. Don't you see how serious a situation this is? Ow elite--or whatever we can call it without laughingbears proudly aloft its little store of the world's history, customs, philosophy and art. It's as if an elephant were hitched to a child's wheelbarrow. All spiritual nourishment carries in itself the ferment of a moral dissolution, and it is that dissolution to which our pseudo-intellectuals react. That is why they show so many symptoms of a premature degeneracy. I much prefer the old stock of peasants, who have retained moderation, common sense and balance." Listening to Lucien, I saw my own childhood once again. I too had issued from the land. I had trodden in the furrows behind my grandfather, that white-bearded old man who toiled from dawn to sunset,

who preserved till his death his youthful heart, and whose face was never clouded by one evil passion. "I'd like," I said to my friend, "to see once more my old family homestead. 1 need it to brace me. Will you come with me?"

XXXI

The mountain air! How good it is to breathe! And there is grandfather's little house, still perched prettily on the height overlooking the salty river. It was meant to be there, indeed, and to be seen from all around, its whitewashed walls shining in the sun, throwing its many-paned windows open to the sky. It had nothing to hide, for everything it held was pure and innocent. It is greatly changed. I had seen it full of boys and girls, and now they are all gone. The stranger who bought the farm has not seen fit to occupy this dwelling which saw the birth, life and death of four generations of honest folk. I am just as glad to see it empty, this venerable homestead, as filled with unknown faces. On my way up the path leading to this empty ruin I paused by a wide flat stone which stood beside what used to be the garden. "The last time I saw grandfather," I said to Lucien, "he was sitting on this stone. It was here that he put his arms around me, saying, 'My little Max, I'm getting old. I shan't see you again. Always be an honest man.' He had tears in his eyes. I can still see his gentle blue eyes, his face still young, almost unwrinkled and as ruddy as when he was twenty, his long beard behind which he smiled with such candour." We were nearing the beloved threshold itself when the notion came to me that such old houses have a peculiar modesty, and I said to my companion, "If you don't mind, I'll go in alone. I'd rather feel, all by myself, the sentiments which are only meant for a grandson." The door was bolted, the windows boarded up. Removing one of the boards, I stepped inside through the empty frame. I walked through the damp semi-darkness as if through a cemetery. So many dead objects, all at once, met my eyes! I quickly got used to the half-light and made them out more clearly.

Here was the big room where meals were served to as many as twelve persons. Grandfather used to sit there, at the far end, slicing a great loaf of black bread which he held under his arthritic arm. Grandmother carried from the stove to the table the wholesome and nourishing dishes whose flavour of aromatic herbs I thought I could still smell after nearly twenty years. Four pretty girls and five husky fellows, eating heartily, talked about the crops or the flock of turkeys. In the right-hand corner, near the window, was the dough-box, redolent of flour and yeast. In the opposite corner I had often enjoyed watching the eldest girl spinning wool. On some days the spinning-wheel gave place to the warping machine. Nearby was a strongly made loom for weaving the warm, heavy stuff for which-thecountryside was known. All around this room were bedrooms. The first one I entered contained an old bedstead with. out a spring, which I recognized as the poor couch on which my father . had died, before. my eyes, at the age of thirty-three. About to breathe his last, he had turned on me his widened eyes, already filled with the vision of death and seeming to say-I can remember it as if it were yesterday"My dear little one, I am leaving you nothing but life. Make good use of it. I'll be watching over you!" And 1 believe that he has indeed watched over his son from hisseat of immortality. He loved me so much! In the adjoining room slept my grandfather and his wife. There they had loved, procreated, conceived; there were born all those who were dear to me and who had loaded me with their affection. A little further on had lain, sleeping .and waking, a woman of over ninety who had once drudged from morning till night. Almost all these folk were dead. Last of all, at the other end, was the parlour, a room kept scrupulously closed three hundred days a.year, carpeted with fine homemade rugs and graced by a grandfather clock which never slept and struck the hours all night long. What an abode of the dead! I went up the steep staircase. My childhood room was still there, under the roof. A glimmer of light fell on the remains ot'the straw bed which had been mine and where I had had my dreams of beauty and terror. Opening a door, I found myself in the attic. There lay an old spinning-wheel, a dismantled sewing-machine, a gutted dough-box, grain bins, three-legged chairs, rusty bedsprings-a whole detritus of ruin crumbling in the dust, like bones disinterred from some ancient tomb. Each of these objects bore, I knew, the print of the hands which had touched it. It even seemed that they breathed the sour smell of laborious sweat, that animal smell I knew so well as a child. I was choking with emotion, a powerful, irresistible emotion that rose from my breast into my throat and then fell back on my heart in great waves. I wanted to escape this grip of the past, and ran down the

staircase. As I did so I had the distinct impression that all this dear abandoned debris had wakened from its long sleep, had come to life and was following me. Yes, the whole house was alive. "I held the bread that fed you," said the dough-box. "Don't leave me! Please don't leave me!" The spinning-wheel sang, "I spun the wool that clothed you when you were only that high. Why should you be ashamed of me?" And the voices kept on. "I am the good wheat you used to reap with your sickle." "I am the warm little bed where you slept so snugly on a mattress of sweet-smelling straw." I hastened on, moving faster, feeling that all these things were walking behind me in a sad procession, wishing to draw me back to themselves, to make me share in their death, and begging for a little of the life they had given me. The words became more human. The walls held the echoes of familiar specch. They all spoke at once: "Do you remember the fat partridges we used to hunt in the orchard?" "Do you remember when I picked you up in my arms to pitch you up on a load of hay?" "Do you remember, my son, when I looked at you for the last time?' "Do you remember grandfather telling you about 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'?" "Do you remember me, your uncle who sang funny songs to you when you were feeling unhappy?" "Do you remember your little auntie who played at being a bride?" "Do you remember being in love?" "Do you remember your dead?" I clearly heard the big old clock striking, striking so loudly that it sounded like the knell of a church bell. With my forehead pressed to the wall, I felt a rush of such tenderness and terror that I burst into sobs. And as my tears fell, pouring unchecked down my cheeks, I felt two gentle arms clasping me to a soft breast and heard the violent beating of its heart. "Max! My poor little Max," said a soothing voice-my mother's. When I came out of the house my eyes were red. "I see you've been crying," said Lucien. "If you knew what these ruins meant to me. .My whole life lies here. I remember everything as if it were yesterday. Look, in that barn a few yards away, swallows used to build their nests. Over there to the left, not far away,.there wps a well where we used to cool the milk before skim-

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ming it. Down there to the north, at the foot of that little hill, there was a pond where we caught frogs and tadpoles. Behind the hill was a hollow where a brook ran between two rows of alders. Higher up, on the far side of the hollow, were great fields of wheat and oats divided by patches of'woods. That's where I learned to hunt and where I caught my first rabbit, a splendid beast which I carried home on my back as a trophy. Those were good days!" "How beautiful, grand and calm it all is!" said Lucien. Half-way down the valley, on the flat ground, stood the village, centred by its church whose straight slender spire stood up like a sentinel. The llouses were grouped in semi-circular rows around the vast expanse of water. The effect was that of an immense theatre with an audience of houses, woods, the living and the dead, all engrossed in the ever-shifting scenery and drama of the sea. The river, wide as an ocean gulf, was blazing with light, and here and there shone the dazzling white sails of schooners. All along the shore were clumps of trees, green spruce alternating with birches already gilded by autumn, purple cherry-trees and scarlet maples stained here and there with violet. Great splashes of red, spotting the whole landscape, made the surface of the earth appear like the body of a wounded giant bleeding from his four limbs. Was it not as if the autumn, to bring out these colours on the skin of our soil, had subjected it to a pitiless flagellation? "1 was brought up in this rugged country," I said, "where the purity, strength and wildness of nature instil a hatred of servitude in the men it supports. I sucked from the breasts of this land my craving for liberty and independence. I also drew from it my respect for the virtues that flourished here, among the truest, simplest and sanest of men and women. "My grandfather had four daughters and five boys. He bore the burdens of life without complaint. He was a purebred. He knew that one must submit, work, love, produce offspring, be forsaken, and then die, unknown by all, sinking into oblivion and leaving no other trace but the children who would soon forget him and be forgotten in their turn. "The whole of our nation is built upon these obscure folk, almost the only ones who have suffered in order to keep it alive. They did not proclaim their accomplishment from the rooftops; they did not publish it in print or shout it in parliaments. They did it out of simple duty, without hope of human reward. Deserted after the conquest, they coniinued to till the soil and produce children without any thought for their new masters. They did what they were told. They never grumbled; they accepted everything without question, put up with everything, endured everything. Yet they remained proud, intelligent, original, sensible and

'

individual. It strikes me, indeed, that our peasantry is the most civilized in the world. They form the foundation on. which we are constantly building. It's not among them that you find the malady of backwardness, it's among our elite." Lucien looked at me shrewdly. "That's the right word, Max," he said. "Backward. Our social structure is like a triangle. The farmers are the base, the working-class are the sides, and the half-civilized, backward ones are at the peak. The few really civilized people among us are outside this triangle. A day will come, however, when there will be enough of the latter to pry open the vice that pinches at the top and make a fourth line so that we'll have a proper rectangle. But until then, we'll go on cutting a sorry figure-a sick people." Talhing thus, we left these scenes of my childhood. In the distance a slow, deep voice was singing: "lsabc0au spypromine. . . " On the side of the hill overlooking the river, two grey horses were drawing a plough to the rhythm of this old ballad. A ploughman, trudg-' ing behind, guided the glittering share along the autumn furrow, accompanying himself with airs learned from his mother. And I remembered that, twenty years before, in the same setting, at the same season and in the same place, the same song had risen on the evening air.

XXXII

#Atshe end of January, while a.snowstorm was raging, Meunier died from an attack of angina. A-maid;&ringmghis.morning coffee as usual, himself alone had stumbled on his lifeless body in his bedroom.'~indin~ in the final throes, he had probably .tried to call .for help. Everyone +aroundwas sleeping. To be heard, or at least to feel a human presence, he had tried to reach the door, but had fallen on his face. Rich, highly esteemed and loaded with honours, he had been accepted in the best society of the old capital in spite of his humble origin and questionable .beginnings. But he had led-a miserable life-never able quite to wash the stain of blood from his hands. The haunting secret followed him everywhere, dogging him like his shadow. Fear was also always with him, a fear all the more persistent and full of anguishanguish, that mother of angina-since he had reason to believe there was still a witness to the crime of his smuggling days. .While his b ~ d ywas being borne to its grave and the newspapers overflowed with rtsumts of his career and enumerations of his civic virtues, one man, walking behind the hearse, must have been reconstructing in his mind a scene which had, years before, frozen him with horror. This man was Thomas Bouvier. Hardly a week after the funeral my telephone rang around midnight. "Hello! Hello! This is Bouvier speaking." "Well," I thought, "this man whom I haven't forgiven for his vulgar abuse at the Chheau on Dog Derby night, and whom I've shunned like the plague ever since the incident which apparently provoked my rupSture with Dorothie, this man whom I'd have liked to pummel with my bare fists on that night so long-ago-he dares- to tellme calmly that he's at the other end of the line!" "What can I do for you?" said coldly.

"Don't bc surprised. I've an odd request to make. Would you be able to come to my place-right away?" "It's odd, all right. You should be coming to me." "I know. But I've got to stay home. You'll understand later. I've just made an important decision. Before leaving. on a-on a trip, 1 have to tell you something in confidence. It's a matter of DorothCe's wellbeing." I could no longer hesitate: I went at once to Bouvier's house on avenue Ste. Genevieve. He lived in a large stone mansion of the kind commonly built around the middle of the last century. I stepped from thc street directly into a spacious hall leading to a magnificent staircase of black walnut. To the left was a drawing-room where Louis XV furniture mingled with modern in an incongruous manner that was not wanting in luxury. .On the walls were pictures of nudes, nothing but nudes. Scarcely had I been shown into this room than a bitter smell mixed with a strong perfume assailed my nostrils. Bouvier, standing in a dressing-gown, held out his hand. "IS you please," he said suavely, "take a seat on this divan." What a divan it was! Deep, soft and richly upholstered, it could have comfortably held eight persons. My host sank down in a little mountain of cushions. I did likewise. I then noticed, within reach, some unfamiliar objects which had hitherto escaped my notice in the dim light cast by the lampshades. On a round stand was a lamp with a very thin wick whose flame, flickering in the slightest current of air, stirred shadows on the wall. Beside it was a box containing a sticky light-brown paste; there was also a long needle, and finally a pipe whose bowl was covered but for a hole no larger than would admit the head of a pin. On a shelf above our heads was an ornate incense burner-the one whose perfume had greeted me at the door. "These things may surprise you," said Bouvier. "At one time I was in the smuggling business: whisky and drugs. I never handled cocaine or morphine-Iar too dangerous, those narcotics. But I couldn't resist the temptation of opium. You're not sliocked?" "Only weaklings are shocked, as you know. But I'd say that was a bad habit you're contracting." "Bah! Till last summer I hadn't smoked for ten years. I started in again because there was too much on my mind." "What about your health?" "My health isn't worth much just now. You'll soon know what to think about my health. As a rule I don't smoke opium alone. I invite a

..

friend or two to share the pleasure. To improve the dCcor, we bring in a well-shaped woman who stretches out on cushions in the middle of the room. That provides the oriental touch. And we smoke seven or eight pipes, stopping now and then to enjoy what's happening to us. What a wonderful sensation! Your brain is so clear, so lucid that your ideas emerge without effort, the words you utter have more meaning and clarity. At a given moment your whole powers of perception are concentrated in the fine point of your intelligence. If you have to argue with anyone at that moment, you're invincible. Look, here's how it's done." He picked up the needle and dipped it in the paste to detach a particle, which he then let smoulder above the flame of the lamp. When the opium assumed the colour of coffee, bubbling, he deftly laid it on the bowl of the pipe, piercing the hole with the needle and quickly withdrawing it, thus leaving a passage through the overlying paste. He then thrust the pipe itself into the flame, which licked the precious substance while Bouvier took a deep pull. For two or three seconds he retained the smoke in his lungs, relishing it to the full; then he expelled it quietly through his nostrils. "You see?'he said. "It's delicious." He kept on talking and smoking. At times he seemed to wander, but showed occasional flashes of astonishing lucidity. It was getting late, and 1 hadn't yet learned the purpose of our mceting. "You wouldn't like to try it?'he said at last. "No, thank you. You didn't ask me to come here for a smoke, did you?" "I wish to God it had been just for that. I myself am smoking only to get up the courage to tell you what I have to tell you. It's very serious. It has to be told." The man's eyes, with their dilated pupils and fixity, had a strange look. "Of course," he said, "you've heard 01' Meunier's death. Now I can speak without harming him. More than twenty years ago we were sailing together on a yacht with smuggled goods. We had with us Abel Warren, a handsome and honest fellow whom I liked. He was Meunier's partner. I was only a hired hand, several years younger than either of them. Around one o'clock one stormy night Abel was on deck watch, right in the wind and rain, steering and at the same time keeping a look-out for pursuing Customs cutters. I was supposed to be asleep in my bunk, but our hull was pitching so much in the waves that I woke up every Sew minutes. Presently I heard Luc get up, put on his oilskins and go out in his stocking feet. 'Why,' I wondered, 'is he going out without his boots? I didn't have to wait long for an answer. A ycll burst through the storm,

then several other yells in the same voice, but growing fainter the more headway we made. Then the voice stopped: nothing more. I didn't dare move. I was sure a murder had been committed on deck, right ovcr my head, and I told myself that the slightes~movement might cost me my life. A murderer gets rid of witnesses whenever it's necessary. "A few minutes later Meunier came into the cabin in a gust of wind. "'Bouvier!' he cried, 'get up, quick! Abel's gone. He's fallen overboard! We're going back right away! We've got to find him, d'you hear? Find him at all costs!' "We spent the rest of the night cruising in the same circle. Luc was wailing, weeping, tearing his hair. You would have sworn his grief was genuinc. "'My best friend!' he kept moaning. 'My best friend.' "At dawn the storm and rain let up. I scoured the sea wit11 my eyes in all directions, thinking I saw poor Abel's black head in the smallest piece of floa~ingwreckage. "Sitting on a small keg, as if' prostrated, Meunier remained a whole hour without saying a word. At last he spoke. "'Bouvier,' he said, 'you can be my partner if you like. You've run the same risks as we did, it's only fair you should have your reward. You'll take Abel's place. If I happen to strike it rich, you'll have your share. Any time you're in need, you'll find me ready to help.' "I realized right away that he wasn't sure I'd been asleep. I could be a witness against him. That's why he was buying my silence, and my complicity, with his promises. "And so life went on. I was welded to my companion, the killer. He lavished money on me, and God knows I liked money. "He learned that I really knew about his crime that night at the Chateau, you remember, when I behaved so nastily to you and DorothCe. I was blind drunk. I'd been in love with Luc's daughter for a long time, and knowing it was you she loved, I let my jealousy get the better of me and decided to tear that damned murderer's child from him. "After that ugly scene at the ball, I went to Luc's house and told him, in full detail, what I knew about the murder on the yacht. I gave him the choice between exposure of his crime or the sacrifice of his daughter to me as my wife. "Untortunately," he went on, "Dorothk herself was in the next room and heard it all. Her presence was revealed to us by a muffled cry. We ran to her: she had fainted. You know the rest." Bouvier clasped his head in both hands. "Son of a bitch!" he muttered. "What a bitch of a life!" I was wondering whether I shouldn't strangle this foul animal, this

beast who had morally murdered DorothCe and blasted my own happincss. "So it was you who brought un Meunier's death?" said harshly. "I suppose so. Once I'd sobered up I realized the enormity of what I'd done. The very next morning I was full of remorse for having blackmailed my old friend. I went to apologize to him. You can imagine how wretched hc was. " 'Bouvier,' he said softly, 'you've hit me hard. I don't think I'll get over this blow. But it's fallen hardest on Mathte. Shc was sobbing all night long. Early this morning she wrote Max that she didn't want to see him again. Yet she was in love with him. She loved him more than her own father.' "'Luc,' I pleaded, 'please try to forget what I said last night. I was shamefully drunk. The whole story I told you was made up. I don't believe a word 01' it. When that thing happened at sea I was fast asleep, as you know. When I've had a few drinks I get the most abominable fantasies. Tell me you believe me now. Just tell me that!' "'No. What's said is said,'. he replied. 'There are, in life . . . actions, words, thoughts even, that can't be taken back.' "An anguished silence fell between us. You could say there are times when silence itself is an accusation. We could no longer speak to each other. I felt that any further explanation would be superfluous, insulting, and that he himself saw through the falsity of my protestations." Bouvier turned to me as he concluded. "Now," he said, "you have the whole story. What do you mean to do about i t!'" "To begin with, I ought to shoot you like a mad dog, as you deserve. But I'll let that wait. I've a more important task now-tomorrow I've got to get Meunier's daughter out of the convent." "His daughter? Are you sure that DorothCe is Meunier's child? Don't you see that a man like Meunier wouldn't have killed Warren without a good reason. Money? He was making all he wanted. It was jealousynothing but jealousy-at work that night. Listen: while Luc was out at sea it often happened that Abel stayed ashore, to transact business and forestall the plans of the police. Meunicr's wife, alone most of the time, was a very beautiful woman. She had hair of that blonde shade that makes you dream, deep blue eyes, one of those sensual, tip-tilted noses that all men look for and love. Warren was often at her house. No woman could resist him, and you can guess what happened. Meunier got wind of the affair soon enough. In Quebec City everyone has his nose in those matters, and they all try to find out who is sleeping with whom. It's one of the main occupations of small towns. Luc wasn't the

kind 01' man to bc a happy cuckold. He simply did away with his wife's lover. Dorothie is the image of Warren. The signs are unmistakable." Emotion gripped me. I had now but a single thought: to rescue Dorothee. I paced up and down the room. I was no longer in control of myself. The night stretched before me endlessly. "That's all you have to tell me?" I asked. When I phoned you, a while ago, I said I was "Yes, almost all. going on a trip . . You'll soon know where." I fled from this house, happy to plunge into the night and be alone with my suffering and my apprehensions.

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XXXIII

I awoke next morning at around eight o'clock. The maid brought me the newspaper. As I unfolded it, a banner headline caught my eye: THOMAS BOUVIER FOUND SHOT: SUICIDE The news stunned me. Without stopping to collect my thoughts I dressed hurriedly and went out. I felt like a madman, obsessed by a single idea: to rescue Dorothk from the convent at once. She had only to learn that her tormentor was dead, I thought, and she would come back to me-because, as I knew, she was still in love with me. I rang at the door of the convent. An old nun answered and I asked for the Mother Superior. This personage, I was told, was busy: she could not see me for an hour. I sat down to wait. "May I ask a great favour of you, Mother Superior?" I asked when at last she entered the visitors' room. "Certainly, Monsieur, if it can be done." "Then I beg you to allow me a few minutes* talk with one of your postulants, Mademoiselle Dorothie Meunier." "Monsieur, that is impossible. Our dear sister is making a retreat. She is taking the veil tomorrow." "I was a close friend of her father. I have an important message for her." "Even her own father would not be allowed to interrupt such an important duty as the meditation of her retreat. You must understand: no visits!" "For this young lady," I said, raising my voice, "my message is far more crucial than making a retreat or taking the veil. Her very life is at stabe."

"Do you mean that her lile is in danger'" "Yes, the life of her heart." I had begun to speak still more loudly now. "You must know that Dorothk came to you out of despair, and that we are still in love, and that if she remains in this convent she will die." "Young man, I beg you to control yourself! It is not uncommon for the voice of the Master to be heard and hearkened to in the very midst of secular affections. Surpassing every other love, there is the love of This One." And she pointed to the crucifix hanging at her waist. 1should have taken some pity on her painful belief, but I was becoming more and more exasperated. "If the good Monsieur Meunier were alive," she went on, "you may be sure he would be happy to sacrifice his daughter." "It is not natural for parents to sacrifice their children. They have no right to do so. Moreover, you speak of Meunier's daughter? And you take that for granted. But shc is not his daughter!" "Monsieur, you had better go!" "1 will not leave here without Dorothie. I want her! I will have her!" From the long passage of the cloister came the sound of many feet gliding along the floor. The postulants were passing nearby. Among them I recognized Dorothie beneath her veil. Unable to control myself, I cried out, "Tell Dorothk that Bouvier is dead and that Max has come to find her!" I then allowed myself to be pushed to the door by the Mother Superior. "Go, Monsieur!" she cried. "I entreat you, go!"

XXXIV

That night Dorothte was unable to sleep. Whenever she was on the point of dropping off she saw at the window the face of Max Hubert, his sad eyes fixed on her. She felt trapped in this gaze as if in a powerful net of love and reproof. Then the apparition moved away in the snow and disappeared in the blizzard raging outside. She would have liked to follow it. But what a storm! The nor'-easter, blowing from the farther reaches of Labrador where it had swept over icebergs, was now moaning through the branches of poplars and making telegraph wires twang like the strings of huge mandolins. With each gust of wind Dorothte started upright in bed. She looked at the window, expecting to see once again the features of her lover, then sank back in utter weariness. She was shivering and felt hcrsclf becoming feverish. Touching her breasts with an instinctive gesture, she found them burning. She pulled the covers further over her frail body, drawing them up to her chin. On the fine linen pillow-case nothing could now be seen but the head of black hair, the shadowy line of lips, great hollow eyes and heavy lids that would not close. Now and then she would fall asleep, and the same face would appear at the window, smile sorrowfully and retreat once more, still circled by a dark nimbus streaked with snow. Morning approached; Dorothte, burning with fever and shaken by long tremors, rose and pressed her face to the window in order to see more clearly. The beloved apparition had halted a few feet away, floating in the air. Suddenly it became luminous as a star. A cry escaped from her breast: "Max!"

"Come!" said the apparition. "Wait for me!" she cried. "I will follow you to the ends of the earth!" Noiselessly, with the strange automatism of a sleepwalker, she resumed the bridal dress given to her for the taking of the veil that day. Then she opened the window, and with a single movement leapt out, finding herself at once plunged in snow as white as her dress. She walked swiftly towards the apparition, her arms outstretched, her breast opposed to the murderous wind. The vision began gliding before her, moving towards some unknown goal. Dorothee continued to follow it. Buffeted by the snow, her black hair tossing wildly around her cheeks in the howling nor*-easter, the spellbound girl, already knee-deep in snow, held on her mysterious course, led on by her elusive guide who seemed to be 'moving ever more swiftly. Where was she going? How could she tell, adrift in this wild night where nature had mustered all its might, clamour and ferocity? She was going to him. Little else mattered! How long did this bride of the storm keep walking? Perhaps two hours. A small white figure trudging through the shifting whiteness, she kept on, braving the snow, which embraced her with an almost animal ferocity, and the wind whose breath bit deeply into her muscles and bones. No matter! She would defy the tyrant of the North, thc ruthless, marmoreal winter; she was going through his cruel and sexless kingdom, intent only on embracing her fleeing ideal with her body and soul. And in thus battling the white colossus in the name of human love, she symbolized all the passions of women for whom such love is nothing but storm and ecstasy. All at once the luminous guide vanished, as if carried away by the wind. Dorothk came to herself, pierced by deathly cold. There was no longer any feeling in her finger-tips or toes. She passed a hand over her I'ace: her nose, chin and ears were numb and without feeling. Where was she? Where was she going? How could she know? She had strayed into the very middle of the Plains of Abraham. The little Quebec girl-well used to winter and remembering the many men, lost in a stormy night, who had died of cold--summoned up all her presence of mind in an attempt to get her bearings. She could not. She plodded on. More than once she fell, her chapped wrists feeling as if pierced by needles. Each time she got up again, facing the wind-driven snow which covered her hair with crystals. The night was gradually withdrawing, and among the fantastic shapes thronging her brain she made out the outline of the Provincial Prison.

She remembered. Her lover's dwelling was quite close now. If only she had the strength to crawl that far. . . The snow was falling less thickly, the wind had died down, but the cold was now biting more keenly than ever. One last effort, and she staggered across the Chemin Saint-Louis, a small white statue in motion on the snow-swept road. A few steps more and Dorothie, exhausted, crumpled and fell almost unconscious. Torpor seized her, a feeling at once so strong and tender it was almost irresistible. It seemed to the girl who had suffered so long that her pain was being lulled. A delicious warmth was invading her whole body. She must not give in! In a moment of awareness she suddenly realized that if she remained motionless she would die. With a supreme effort she rose. Her hand, frozen stiff and without feeling, reached the bell-push. She rang and rang, hardly aware of what she was doing. Then she fell once again, for the last time. She had no further strength to rise and save herself.

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xxxv Suddenly roused from sleep by the bell, at first I thought to disregard it. Who could be calling so early? Perhaps a friend coming from some late party or other. "Well," I thought, "let's go and see, anyway." I hurried to the door and opened it. A blast of snow-laden air pierced my dressing-gown, making me shivcr. There, at my feet, was a head of black hair. I looked more closely. It was Dorothtk. I bent over the motionless figure, touching the beautiful arms stretched out over the icy threshold. It was she! And dying of cold! I picked her up and laid her on the sofa. Telephoning at once for a doctor and for my friends Hermann and Lucien, I tried to warm the girl who was, perhaps, about to die for my sake. In a few minutes she opened her eyes. "Dorothte!" I cried. "Dorothtk! Here I am. It's Max! Yes, it's your own Max who has saved you." Her words came like a faint breath from her bloodless lips. "It is you, Max? Where did you go? I lost sight of you in the storm. Now I've found you again , Let's hurry! My weddingdress, it's too thin for this weather. . .There must be a fire in your house.. I want to be warm there for ever. . . for ever. . . "Dorothte, my darling!" "Don't leave me to lie in the snow, dear love . I won't marry the Other One, you know. . . Let's go faster! I hear him behind us, running after us. ."

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"Don't be afraid, you're in my house. You don't recognize it? Look, there's your picture on the mantelpiece." "My picture? No, what I see is a great plain covered with soldiers made out of ice . . They're all calling me by name. One of them is a snowman, see, a snowman like the ones I used to make in my father's garden, when I was a little girl. He's telling me he's going to whisk me up in a squall and carry me off to the top of the world. Oh, it's frighthi! His breast has just been pierced by a spear I can't see, and the blood is running out. . "Two great armies, a horde of soldiers Two generals, you can see through them like crystal . All these white men are fighting bleeding and Ialling. They're getting up The armies are both rising in the air to storm a mountain of light. The two leaders, marching before them, hand. in hand-now they're embracing each other as they reach ." the sunlight's edge. "Dorothbe, don't excite yourself! Don't talk any more! Rest! All is well. Your sadness is all over now." "It*s not sad, it's so grand. . Don't you see, Max? Four huge riflemen are carrying a woman off in their arms What are you saying, riflepen? That you're taking my soul away with you? That's what I want, but take Max with you as well. Come, my dear love! We'll get married somewhere among the stars. . . ." Choking with emotion, I clasp DorothCe desperately in my arms, trying to keep her alive. She is still murmuring. "Am I not pretty in my wedding dress?. I always knew we would be married some day . Hold me close, so I can feel you nearer me., . . Look at my wedding dress . . . No other man shall ever have me." She falls silent. She seems to sleep. Steps are sounding at my door. Lucien and Hermann come in, followed by the doctor. "She has been delirious," I tell them. I pour a few drops of cordial between the lips of my beloved. Then, for a whole hour, the three of us remain bent over her, watching in mortal anxiety. At last Doroth&seems to emerge as if from a dream. She opens her eyes and they meet mine. ''Max! It's Max!" she whispers. "How happy I am! m y am I here?" "Because we love each other, DorothCe. You will never leave me now." "No, I will never leave. . .

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THE CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES 1. LORD DURHAM'S REPORT.edited and with a n lntroduction by Gerald M. Craig 2. THE CONFEDERATION DEBATES IN THE PROVINCE OFCANADA. 1865,edited and with an Introduction by P.B.Waite 3. LAURIER: A STUDY IN CANADIAN POL1TICS.by J.W. Dafoe, with an introduction by Murray S. Donnelly 4. CHAMPLAIN: THE LIFE OF FORTITUDE, by Morris Bishop, with a new Introduction by the author 5. THI: ROWELL-SIROIS REPORT. Book I,edited and with a n lntroduction by Donald V. Smiley 6. THE UNREFORMED SENATE OF CANADA, by Robert A. MacKay, revised and with an Introdution by the author 7. THE JESUIT RELATIONS AND ALLIED DOCUMENTS: A SEI-ECTION. edited and with a n Introduction by S.R. Mealing 8. LORD DURHAM'S MISSION TO CANADA,by Chester New, edited and with an Introduction by H.W.McCready 9. THE RECIPROCITY TREATY OF 1854.by Donald C. Masters, with a new Introduction by the author lo. POLITICAL UNREST IN UPPER CANADA. 1815-1836.by Aileen Dunham, with a n Introduction by A.L. Burt 1 1. A HISTORY OF TRANSPORTATION IN CANADA. Volume 1, by G.P. deT. Glazebrook, with a new Introduction by the author 12. A HISTORY OF TRANSPORTATION IN CANADA. Volume 11, by G.P. deT. Glazebrook 13. THE ECONOMIC BACKGROUND OF DOMINION-PROVINCIAL RELATIONS, by W.A. Mackintosh, with a n lntroduction by J.H. Dales 14. THE FRENCH-CANADIAN OUTLOOK. by Mason Wade, with a new introduction by the author 15. THE WESERN INTERIOR OF CANADA: A RECORD OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 1612-1917.edited and with a n lntroduction by John Warkentin 16. THE COURTS AND THE CANADIAN CONSTITUT1ON.edited and with a n lntroduction by W.R. Lederman 17. MONEY AND BANKING IN CANADA, edited and with a n Introduction by E.P. Neufeld 18. FRENCH-CANADIAN SOCIETY. volume 1,edited and with a n lntroduction by Marcel Rioux and Yves Martin 19. THE CANADIAN COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION, 1845-1851,byGilbert N. Tucker, edited and with an lntroductlon by Hugh G.J. Aitken 20. JOSEPH HOWE: VOICE OF NOVA SCOTlA,edited and with a n lntroduction by J. Murray Beck 2 1. LIFE AND LETTERS OF SIR WlLFRlD LAURIER. Volume I, by Oscar Douglas Skelton, edited and with a n Introduction by David M.L. Farr 22. LlFE AND LlilTERS OF SIR WlLFRlD LAURIER. Vohmell, by Oscar Douglas Skelton, edited by David M.L.Farr 23. LEADING CONSTITUTIONAL DEC1SIONS.edited and with a n Introduction by Peter H. Russell 24. FRONTENAC: THE COURTIER GOVERNOR.by W.J. Eccles 25. INDIANS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC COAST.edited and with a n lntroduction by T o m McFeat 26. LlFE ANDTIMES OF SIR ALEXANDER TILLOCH GALT.by Oscar Douglas Skelton, edited and with a n Introduction by Guy MacLean 27. A HISTORY OF CANADIAN EXTERNAL RELATIONS, Vohme I, by G.P. deT, Glazebrook, revised by the author

28. A HISTORY OFCANADIAN EXTERNAL RELATIONS. Volume /I, by G. P. deT. Glazebrook, revised and with a Bibliographical Essay by the author 29. THE RACE QUESTION IN CANADA. by Andri Siegfried, edited and with an Introduction by Frank H. Underhill 30. NORTH ATLANTIC TR1ANtiLE.by John Bartlett Brebner, with a n Introduction bv Donald G. Creiihton 31. APPROACHES TO CANADIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY, edited and with a n Introduction by W.T. Easterbrook and M.H.Watkins 32. CANADIAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE: A STATISTICAI. PROFILE. edited and with a n Introduction and Commentary by John Porter 33. CHURCH AND STATE IN CANADA, 1627-1867: BASIC DOCUMENTS, edited and with a n Introduction by John S. Moir 34. WESTERN ONTARIO AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER. by Fred Landon, with a new Introduction by the author 35. HISTORICAL ESSAYSON M E ATLANTIC PROVINCES.edited and with a n Introduction by G.A. Rawlyk 36. A HISTORY OF JOURNALISM IN CANADA, by W.H. Kesterton, with an Introduction by Wilfrid Eggleston 37. THE OLD PROVINCE OF QUEBEC. Volume I, by A.L. Burt, with a n Introduction by Hilda Neatby 38. THE OLD PROVINCE OF QUEBEC. Volume II, by A.L. Burt 39. GROWTH AND THE CANADIAN ECONOMY,edited and with an Introduction by T.N. Brewis 40. DOCUMENTS ON THE CONFEDERATION OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, edited and with a n Introduction by G.P. Browne 4 1. ESKIMO OF THE CANADIAN ~ R n I C , e d i t e dand with an Introduction by Victor F. Valentine and Frank G. Vallee 42. THE COLONIAL REFORMERS AND CANADA, 1830-1849,edited and with an Introduction by Peter Burroughs 43. A NARRATIVE.by Sir Francis Bond Head, edited and with a n Introduction by S.F. Wise 44. JOHN STRACHAN: DOCUMENTS AND 0PINIONS.edited and with an Introduction by J.L.H. Henderson 45. THE NEUTRAL YANKEES OF NOVA SCOTIA.by J.B. Brebner, with an Introduction by S.S. MacNutt 46. ROBERT LAIRD BORDEN: HIS MEMOIRS, VolumeI, edited and with an Introduction by Heath Macquarrie 47. ROBERT LAIRD BORDEN: HIS MEMOIRS. Volume 11, edited by Heath Macquarrie 48. THE CANADIAN MUNICIPALSYSIEM: ESSAYSON THE IMPROVEMENT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT.by D.C. Rowat 49. THE BETTER PARTOF VALOUR: ESSAYSON CANADIAN DIPLOMACY. by John W. Holmes 50. LAMENT FOR A NATION: THE DEFEAT OF CANADIAN NATIONALISM. by George Grant, with a new Introduction by the author 51. CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1945-1954.by R.A. MacKay, edited and with a n Introduction by the author 52. MONCK: LETTERS AND JOURNALS.edited and with a n Introduction by W.L. Morton 53. HISTORICAL ESSAYS ON THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES.edited and with a n Introduction by Donald Swainson 54. THECANADIAN ECONOMY IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION.by A.E. Safarian 55. CANADA'S CHANGING NORTH,edited and with a n Introduction by William C. Wonders

56. THE DEVELOPMENTOFCANADASSTAPLE. 1867-1939.edited and with an Introductory comment by Kevin H. Burley

57. URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN SOUM€ENlRALONTARIO. by Jacob Spelt 58. CULTURE AND NATIONALITY: ESSAYS BY A.G. BAILEY. by Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey

59. COMMUNITY IN CRISIS: FRENCH-CANADIAN NATIONALISM IN PERSPECTIVE, by Richard Jones, with a new Introduction b y the author 60. PERSPECTIVESON THE NORTH AMERICAN 1NDIANS.edited and with a n Introduction by Mark Nagler 61 LANGUAGES IN CONFLlCT.by Richard $Joy, with a Preface by Frank G. Vallee 62. THE LAST FORTY YEARS: M E UNION OF 1841TO CONFEDIRATION. by J.C. Dent, abridged and withan Introduction by Donald Swainson 63. LAURIER AND A LIBERAL QUEBEC: A STUDY IN POLITICAL MANAGEMENT,by H. Blair Neatby, edited and with an introduction by Richard T.Clippingdale 64. THE'I'REMBLAY REPORT,edited and with an Introduction by David Kwavnick 65. CULTURAL ECOLOGY: READINGS ON THE CANADIAN INDIANS AND ESKIMOS.edited and with a n Introduction by Bruce Cox 66. RECOLLECTIONSOF THE ON TO OTTAWA TREK. by Ronald Liversedge, with Documents Relating t o the Vancouver Strike and the On to Ottawa Trek, edited and with a n Introduction by Victor Hoar 67. THE OMBUDSMAN PLAN: ESSAYS ON THE WORLDWIDE SPREAD OF AN IDEA,by Donald C. Rowat 68. NATURAL RESOURCES: THE ECONOMICS OF CONSERVATlON,by Anthony Scott 69. "DOMINION LANDS" POLlCY.by Chester Martin, edited and with an Introduction by Lewis H. Thomas 70. RENEGADE IN POWER: THE DIEFENBAKER YEARS.by Peter C. Newman, with an Introduction by Denis Smith 7 1. CUTHBERTGRANTOF GRANT OWN.^^ Margaret A. MacLeod and W.L. Morton 72. THE NATIVE PEOPLES OF ATLANTIC CANADA: A READER IN REGIONAL ETHNIC RELATIONS.by H.F.McGce 73. FREEDOM AND ORDEWCOLLE$TED ESSAYS, by Eugene Forsey, with an Introduction by Donald Crerghton 74. THE CRISIS OF QUEBEC. 1914-1918,by Elizabeth Armstrong, with an Introduction by Joseph Levitt 75. STATISTICAL ACCOOUNTOF U-PPER CANAI)A,by Robert Gourlay, abridged, and with a n Introductron by S.R.Mealrng 76. THE ADVENTURES AND SUFFERINGSOF JOHN JEWITT AMONG THE NOOTKA.edited and with a n Introduction by Derek G. Smith 77. CAPITAL 1:ORMATION IN CANADA, 18%-1930. by Kenneth Buckley, with a n Introduction by M. Urquart 78. BEYONDTHE ATLANTIC ROAR: A SlUDYOFTHE NOVA SCOTIA SCO?S. by D. Campbell and R.A. MacLean 79. CONSOCIATIONAL DEMOCRACY.by K.D. McRae 80. PHILIPPE DE RIGAUD DE VAUDREIUL, GOVERNOR OF NEW FRANCE 1703-1725.b~Yves Zoltvany 8 1. CANADIAN-AMERICANSUMMIT DIPLOMACY. 1923-1973.by Roger Frank Swanson 82. HISTORIGALESSAYSVN UPPER CANADA.by J.K. Johnson 83. THE CANADIAN BlLl. OF R1GHTS;by-Walter Surma Tarnopolsky

84. SOCIALIZATION AND VALUES IN CONTEMPORARY CANADA. Vohme I. Political Socialization, edited by Elia Zureik and Robert M. Pike 85. SOCIALIZATION AND VALUES IN CONTEMPORARYCANADA, Vofume II: Socialitorion. Social Strar~jicationand Ethnicity, edited by Robert M. Pike and Elia Zurek 86. CANADA'S BALANCE OF INTERNATIONAL INDEBTEDNESS, 1910-1913, by Jacob Viner 87. CANADIAN INDIANS AND THE LAW: SELECTED DOCUMENIS, 1663-1972, edited by Derek G. Smith 88. LIVING AND LEARNING IN THE FREESCHOOI.. by Mark Novak 89. THE CANADIAN CORPORATE ELITfi: AN ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC POWER. by Wallace Clement 90. MAN'S IMPACTON THE W ~ S T E R NCANADIAN LANDSCAPE. by J.G. Nelson 9 1. PfiRSPECTlVESON LANDSCAPE AND SElTLEMENI'IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 0NTARlO.edited by J. David Wood 92. MINORITY MEN IN A MAJORITY SETTING.by Christopher Beattie 93. CANADIAN-AMERICAN 1NDUSTRY.by Herbert Marshall, Frank Southard, Jr.. and Kenneth W. Taylor 94. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN CANADA, by David Chandler 95. POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN CANADA:CASES. CAUSES, CURES. edited by Kenneth Gibbons and Donald C. Rowat 96. HISTORICAL ESSAYS ON BRITISH COLUMBIA.edited by J. Friesen and H.K. Ralston 97. THE RlOG LAKE "MASSACRE": PERSONAL PERSPECnVES ON ETHNIC CONFLICT.edited and with a n Introduction by Stuart Hughes 98. CANADA: A MIDDLE-AGED POWER.by John W. Holmes 99. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NEWFOUNDLAND: A GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE. by C. Grant Head 100. THE LAW AND THE PRESS IN CANADA.by Wilfred H. Kesterton 101. TH,E AGRICUI-TIJRAL ECONOMY OF MANITOBA HUTTERITE COLONII~S, by John Ryan 102. THE FRONTIER AND CANADIAN LETTERS, by Wilfied Eggleston, with an Introduction by Douglas Spettigue 103. CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1955-1965,by A.E. Blanchettc 104. A CRITICAL SPIRIT:THE THOUGHT OF WILLIAM DAWSON LI:SUEUR, edited and with an Introduction by A.B. McKillop 105. CHOOSING CANADA'S CAPITAL: JEALOUSY AND FRICTION IN THE 19TH CENTURY.by David B. Knight 106. THE CANADIAN QUANDARY: ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES. by Harry G. Johnson 107. KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS, by Mabel F. Timlin, with a biographical note by A.E. Safarian and a Foreword by L. Tarshis 108. THE DOUKHOBORS.by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic 109. I'HECANADIAN CITY: ESSAYS IN URBAN HISTORY.edited by Gilbert A. Stelter and Alan F.J. Artibise 110. DOES MONEY MATTERB!byJohn Porter, Marion R. Porter and Bernard Blishen 11 1. WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE: A REINTERPRETATIONby William Dawson LeSueur, edited and with introduction by A.B. McKillop 112. THE DISTEMPER OFOUR TIMES-by Peter C. Newman 1 13. THECANADIAN ECONOMY AND DISARMAMENT, by Gideon Rosenbluth 114. THE FARMERS IN POLITICS.by William Irvine with Introductior? by R. Whitaker

115. THE BOUNDARIES OFTHI'CANADIAN CONFEDERATION. by Norman Nicholson I 16. EACH FOR ALL. by Ian Macpherson 1 17. CANADIAN CONFEDERATION: A DECISION-MAKING ANALYSIS. by W.L.White, R.H. Wagenberg, R.C.Nelson and W.C. Soderlund 1 18. CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY 1966-1976, edited by Arthur E. Blanchette 1 19. THE USABLE URBAN PAST.edited by Alan J. Artibise and Gilbert A. Stelter 120. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF QUEBEC. 1760-1850. by Fernand Ouellet !22. LAST OFTHE FREE ENTERPRISERS:THE OILMEN OF CALGARY. by J.D.House 123. CONTEXTS OF CANADA'S PAST. Essays of W.L. Morton, edited by A.B. McKillop. 124. THE REDlSTRlBUTlONOF INCOME IN CANADA, by W. Irwin Gillespie