Читать книгу Strangers in the House - Candace Savage - Страница 10
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AN AGITATION OF GHOSTS
La tristesse vient de la solitude du coeur.
Sadness comes from
the loneliness of the heart.
MONTESQUIEU, Arsace et Isménie, 1730
I WALKED THE SISTERS to their car and watched them drive down the block. What was I to make of Lorena’s revelation? Yes, it was disappointing to think that Clara Blondin might have been unhappy here. But to give up your natal language? Really, that was too much. I stomped back to the house and pulled the door shut with a thump.
There had to be more to the story, some deep ache, something I didn’t yet understand. The more I reflected on Clara’s unaccountable decision, the more I began to suspect that it needed to be seen with a wider lens, as part of a bigger story. What if the isolation that she had suffered hadn’t been hers alone? What if her loneliness, like her Frenchness, had passed down through her family tree, from generation to generation?
After all, there had been a moment when, for the people of New France, eternity had stopped, when roots that spanned centuries and continents had been abruptly cut off.1 In my mind’s eye, I can still almost see the paragraphs in my high school history text (right-hand column, black type on a glossy page) recounting the defeat of the French by the British on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. I remember the twist in my heart when I learned that France had deliberately abandoned its own children, the sixty thousand French colonists who were settled along the Saint Lawrence, preferring instead to retain a cluster of sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean. In the end, the French Catholic people of New France had been ceded to the Protestant British not by the sword but at the conference table, with a flourish of a quill pen. And my Napoléon and Clara’s great-great-grandparents had been among them.
“DO YOU THINK things that happened in the past, way back, a century or two ago—” I begin haltingly, stop, and start again. “I mean, do you think that the big events of history sometimes echo down through people’s lives for generations afterward?”
I’m putting my questions to Keith. (With Diana long since grown up and launched into a life of her own, he is the person I naturally turn to for wise counsel.) Now he is looking at me askance, as if surprised by what I’ve just said.
“Yes, of course,” he answers. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Even if the people all those years later, the descendants, don’t know the details about what happened in the past?”
“Yes, I think so,” he says. “You don’t have to know why your parents and grandparents do what they do to be shaped by them.”
Right, on with the story, then.
FOR THE POPULATION of New France, the Conquest and the long war that preceded it were disastrous. “Le Canada est écrasé,” the historians tell us. “La Nouvelle France s’efface de la carte.”2 Many people were left homeless, farms and settlements lay in ruins, the economy lurched to a halt. To make matters worse, a gang of obnoxious new arrivals had burst onto the scene, intent on turning the crisis to their own advantage. They were English-speaking entrepreneurs from England and Massachusetts, looking to make a quick buck. Boisterous and entitled, they encouraged the incoming authorities to rule with an iron hand, by subjecting their new French subjects to the full force of British law and tradition. If that meant barring the entire Papist population of the colony from medicine, the military, and most other professions, so be it. Roman Catholics were denied civil rights in Britain: making an exception for mere colonists, the incomers said, would violate “our most sacred Laws and Libertys” and tend to “the utter subversion of the protestant Religion.”3
The new colonial governor, however, was unmoved by this argument. His first priority was to ensure a peaceful transition. The last thing anyone wanted was an armed insurrection like the one already brewing in the Thirteen Colonies. If all it took to win the loyalty of the king’s new Francophone subjects were a few minor concessions, then the way forward was clear.
In due course, legislation was passed to recognize the French land-tenure system—thereby protecting the riverfront holdings of habitant farmers like the Blondins and Parents—and to remove the legal restrictions that were imposed on Roman Catholics in other parts of the British Empire. In Québec alone, a Catholic male could serve on a jury or train as a pharmacist without denying the teachings of his church. As for the Anglo business lobby, they were, in the governor’s candid opinion, a bunch of “Licentious Fanaticks”4—bigots and schemers—whose secret purpose was the complete subordination of the Canadiens. But they wouldn’t get away with it on his watch.
Still, even this kinder, gentler takeover came as a shock. A cabal of English-speaking interests was swaggering around the colony, accusing the population of disloyalty and casting scorn on the Catholic Church. Freedoms that had previously been taken for granted now had to be bargained for. The heart-connection with France—the ties of family, custom, and language—had been broken, once and for all. A troubadour of the day expressed the mood in verse.
Amant, que j’t’ai donc fait
Qui puiss’ tant te déplaire?
Est-c’que j’tai pas aimé
Comm’tu l’as mérité? 5
Lover, what have I done
That so displeased you?
Did I not love you
As you deserved?
“I’M STILL A little mad at her, you know,” I admit to Keith over supper that night. We are at home, seated in our dining room, with the kitchen to the west and the living room to the east, midway between the Rockies and the Laurentians.
“Which her would that be?” he asks, mildly. After all our years together, he is no longer alarmed when I break out of a private reverie with a seemingly random remark. For better or worse, however, he has not learned to read my mind and occasionally requires clarification.
“Clara. Clara Blondin. And I’m not actually mad at her. More disappointed, really.” A sigh. “I mean, I know that we all live in context. As much as we might like to go into our little houses and shut all the windows and doors, we can’t seal ourselves off. We live in history. You know what I mean?”
He nods encouragingly.
“Things that are beyond our control can make or break any of us.”
“The four horsemen of the apocalypse,” he says. “Death, famine, war, and conquest. There’s a famous painting by a Russian artist—what’s his name?—Vasnetsov.” Keith is an art historian and knows this kind of thing.
“Yes,” I say, “that’s exactly it. Conquest. French Canada was conquered. And I get it that being under the boot of an enemy causes damage, even if the boot was, I don’t know, the satin slippers that English gentlemen wore in the eighteenth century.”
“And you’re angry with Clara Blondin because—?”
I pick up my fork and put it down, reach for my glass of wine.
“It’s just that I’ve been reading about what happened after the Conquest, trying to see the big picture. What would make a person refuse to speak, or even be spoken to, in her own language?”
Another nod of agreement. “That’s pretty extreme.”
“I’ve been trying to convince myself that it goes way back, that the despair set in a long time ago. But, you know, lots of people never gave up. Think of the people who started my choir, for example. I want Clara to have been like them.”
The choir in question, my choir, is Le Choeur des plaines, a community choral society dedicated to performing “les plus belles chansons du répertoire francophone,” the most beautiful songs of the French repertoire. Choeur translates as choir, but it happily invites confusion with coeur, or heart, and the ensemble is proud to identify itself as an important element in maintaining Francophone culture in this English-speaking stronghold. Curiously, I first learned about it thanks to a performance of a musical masterpiece that comes to us direct from eighteenth-century Britain, from the very decades when the English military was making mincemeat of the French. On this particular evening, however, an amateur choir was making mincemeat of the Messiah. Seldom had the yoke of Handel’s allegros been less easy, or the footfall of his trills and runs more burthensome. In fact, the whole thing quickly became so unbearable that Keith and I walked out at intermission, something unheard of for us, but not before we’d taken note of the tenor soloist, whose clear, pure voice had provided the evening’s one saving grace. The program identified him as the conductor of Le Choeur des plaines.
Fortunately for me, Le Choeur turned out to take an open-door approach to new admissions. “I’ve never known us to turn anyone away,” a voice on the other end of the line told me when I called to inquire. And so ever since, I’ve spent one happy evening a week in the music room of l’École canadienne-française, a few blocks from my house, practicing les plus belles chansons of the likes of Gabriel Fauré, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Gilles Vigneault.
“The people who started the choir treasured their language. Napoléon and Clara, their ancestors had spoken French forever. Then pfft, they throw it away as if it doesn’t matter.”
Keith raises an eyebrow and fixes me with a skeptical gaze. “When exactly was the choir founded? Twenty-five years ago, isn’t that what you said? And when did the Blondins live here? The 1920s versus the 1990s: you’re talking about two different worlds.”
He has a point. I shrug in acquiescence.
“You wouldn’t do that for no reason,” he continues, “give up your mother tongue. Maybe your Blondins were just trying to survive. I don’t think you’ve drilled down far enough to find the answers yet.”
Right, then. It’s time to keep opening cupboard doors and see what tumbles out.
THE ENTENTE BETWEEN the government and les Canadiens would turn out to be short-lived. When the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776, they upended the game board of colonial power, sending pawns and rooks flying in every direction. Among the players displaced by this crisis were thousands of American colonists who were opposed to independence and who fled en masse. Many of these ultra-conservative, ultra-monarchist, ultra-Protestant refugees resettled in the British colony of Nova Scotia, but about six thousand of them ended up near present-day Kingston, then within the boundaries of the Province of Québec. A decade or so later, my own Sherk ancestors (pacifists during the revolutionary war but pro-British nonetheless) would pull up stakes in Pennsylvania and make the trek north, adding to the incursion of English-speaking settlers.
Shaken by what they saw as the dismembering of Empire, the loyalists arrived in Québec with the intention, as one of their leaders put it, of creating “a perfect image and exact copy of the British government and constitution.”6 Imagine their distress when they found themselves instead governed by French civil law, impeded by a feudal system of land tenure, and surrounded by people who submitted to the Pope and spoke “foreign.” Worse yet, they were ruled by an appointed despot, based in distant Montréal, without any sign of government by and for the people. Although a tiny minority of the population, the newcomers were mighty in their influence, and London was quick to respond to their demands. In 1791, the sprawling colony of Québec was divided into two side-by-side jurisdictions: Upper Canada to the west, with British civil law and freehold land tenure, and Lower Canada to the east, still a homeland for the French.
Although the loyalist newcomers were satisfied with this arrangement, the commercial class of Montréal, by now in complete control of the economy, were indignant about what they saw as more weak-kneed pandering to the French. In their view, it was high time for the “old settlers,” the Francophones, to recognize the superiority of British institutions, give up their alien ways, and become ordinary British subjects. Faced with this hostility, the habitants of Québec rallied to defend their distinctive heritage. “There are 120,000 of us,” they dared to remind the king. As a majority of the population, they felt their interests should “carry the balance.”7 Still smarting from the loss of its Thirteen Colonies, rattled by rising sectarian tensions in Ireland, and freshly alarmed by news of the revolution in France, London decided to take the hint. Best to keep on the right side of as many people as you could.
But behind that cloak of smiling benevolence, there now lurked a sneer. The new constitution granted each of the Canadas a democratically elected assembly but was careful to deny those bodies any real power. Authority was vested in officials appointed by the Crown and answerable only to the colonial office in London. This setup left the administration open to cronyism, self-aggrandizement, and backroom shenanigans, tactics that fit neatly within the skill set of the colonial elite. Nepotism and corruption were endemic. Decisions were made in secret and imposed without consideration for the harm they caused. Meanwhile, the people’s elected representatives could do little but mutter, obstruct, and fume. And so the tension continued to mount through the 1810s, the 1820s, the 1830s.
The final insult—the spark that would set off a violent explosion—came midway through that decade. In 1834, the legislature of Lower Canada confronted the British government with ninety-two demands for reform. Top of the list, not surprisingly, was a call for democracy and an end to the excesses of the governing clique. In this, they spoke in unison with their neighbors in Upper Canada, who were advancing similar claims. But the French-speaking colonists also had grievances that were uniquely their own.
Item: The British Parliament had passed a law to reform the seigneurial system in Lower Canada that was so badly worded it threatened to deprive farmers of their land.
Item: The British government had granted vast tracts of the province to London-based colonization companies and other speculators, thereby depriving the French-speaking residents an opportunity to expand. What was to become of the ever-increasing population of sons and daughters?
Item: The colonial administrators systematically discriminated against people of French ancestry. Why else, in a jurisdiction where French speakers still held a considerable majority, would Anglophones hold two-thirds of government jobs, including all those with the greatest responsibility and the highest pay?
Three years would pass without an official response from London. When the answer finally came, in the spring of 1837, it was a slap in the face. Apart from a small concession (an offer to reconsider the land-tenure issues), the British government either ignored the requests entirely or dismissed them with a single haughty word: any such change would be “inadvisable.” As tempers rose in the months that followed—there was an armed clash between English loyalists and Francophone patriotes in the streets of Montréal that fall—the British authorities called up military reinforcements, and the population steeled itself for trouble.
No conflict is lonelier than a civil war. Communities tear apart along all the usual shear lines—class, ethnicity, religion—and new rifts open up. Even among the patriotes, there were disagreements over tactics, as some adherents sharpened their arguments to continue the war of words, while others organized militias and began sharpening their scythes and pitchforks for battle. But perhaps the most painful break of all occurred between the patriotes and their church. In the decades since the Conquest, Roman Catholicism had become almost synonymous with French Canada, woven into every birth and death, every hope and fear. But now this guardian of the people had chosen to ally itself with the enemy, by standing on the side of constituted authority. In the parish of Saint-Polycarpe, in the southwestern corner of the colony, parishioners were so enraged when their priest instructed them to sing a Te Deum to honor Britain’s newly crowned queen that they sealed him in a barrel, delivered him to the quay, and put him on a ship bound for the United States.
Clara Parent’s ancestors lived in that parish; her great-grandmother Josette was married in that church. Wherever their loyalties fell, whatever their political stance, it hurts one’s heart just to think of it.
AS FOR THE Blondin side of the family, the guerre des Patriotes found them in the parish of Sainte-Rose-de-Lima, just north of Montréal, in the epicenter of the trouble. Napoléon’s grandfather Augustin turned sixteen that year, 1837, and it is easy to imagine him as a fresh, unshaven face in the crowd, a thousand strong, that shouldered into the local inn that autumn. Perhaps he climbed onto a bench at the back of the smoky hall to catch a glimpse of the orators, including the cousin of the famous leader of the Parti Patriote, Louis-Joseph Papineau. “The church has fomented the trouble,” someone shouted, and the gathering roared its approval. The laws governing land tenure were “partiale, secrète et vicieuse.” Agreed. France had contributed to the rise of civilization, sciences, literature, and the arts, and had never taken second place to the British. “Forward,” everyone shouted. When the crowd dispersed that night, it was clear that trouble was coming.8
A few miles from Sainte-Rose, on the other side of the Rivière du Chêne, sat the village of Saint-Eustache. In normal times, people moved freely back and forth between the two settlements; as an infant, Augustin had been taken to this neighboring village for baptism. But in these terrible new days, Saint-Eustache had become known as a hotbed of patriote agitation, and the British army, stung by a humiliating defeat in its first engagement with the rebels, was on the march north. The villagers tried to deflect the attack by destroying a strategic bridge, but the army sent out a party of artillery to test the river ice. Then came the ordinary weekday morning when two thousand redcoats marched on Saint-Eustache, their field guns and rocket launcher rumbling behind them, their bayonets glinting in the sun.