Читать книгу Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - Oscar Douglas Skelton - Страница 8

While these affairs of state were in the balance, generation after generation of Lauriers were hewing their way through the Northern woods. It was in 1742 in the parish of Lachenaie that Jacques, second son of Jean Baptiste Laurier and Catherine Lamoureux, married Agathe Rochon. Charles Laurier, fourth of Jacques's five children, was a boy of eleven when the battles of the Plains of Abraham and of Ste. Foye were fought. In the year of the Quebec Act he married Marie Marguerite Parant, or Parent. Of their four children, only two, Charles and Toussaint, grew to manhood. With Charles Laurier the younger the capacity of the stock began to reveal itself and the environment to take the shape required to fit his grandson, Wilfrid Laurier, for the part he was to play in his country's life.

Charles Laurier, the grandfather of Wilfrid Laurier, was a man of unusual mental capacity and force of character. His interests and ambitions extended beyond the narrow range of habitant life. Not content with the scanty education available in the parish school, he mastered mathematics and land-surveying. He surveyed a great part of the old seigniory of Lachenaie, originally granted to Sieur de Repentigny in 1647, and later divided, the western half, two leagues along the river and six leagues deep, falling in 1794 into the hands of Peter Pangman, "Bastonnais" or New Englander, famed for his exploits as fighter and fur-trader in the far North-West.

Charles Laurier had an ingenious and practical turn, which is evidenced by the fact that he was the first man in Upper or Lower Canada to obtain a patent for an invention. In 1822 he invented what he termed a loch terrestre, or "land log." The Quebec "Gazette" of June 24, 1822, noted that an ingenious machine to be attached to the wheel of a carriage for measuring the distance traversed had been exhibited that month in Quebec, and that it was the invention of Mr. Charles de Laurier, dit Cottineau, who intended to seek a patent from the legislature next session. A letter in the "Gazette" a few days later from Charles Laurier himself dealt at length with the device. He explained that the "land log" recorded automatically the number of revolutions of the carriage-wheel to which it was attached, the dials indicating in leagues and decimal fractions of a league the distance traversed. In a carriage to which this instrument had been attached, one could almost make a survey of a province while driving, provided one had a good compass.

In the summer of 1823 M. Laurier determined to put his suggestion into practice. He attached the instrument to the dashboard of a calèche, with five dials indicating respectively tens of leagues, units, tenths, hundredths, and thousandths. He drove from Lachenaie to Quebec city, recording the distance as 54 and 487/1000 leagues. The legislative assembly, after calling Joseph Bouchette, the surveyor-general of the province, and E. D. Wells, a Quebec watchmaker, as expert witnesses, decided to grant the patent. It was not until 1826, by which time five other patents had been registered, that the formalities were completed, the fees paid and the patent obtained. In the same year, 1826, we find him asking the Assembly for assistance in making experiments in measuring distances on water and recording the course of a vessel at sea. No aid was granted, and apparently nothing further came of the project.

In 1805 Charles Laurier married Marie Thérèse Cusson. To his son Charles, or Carolus, who was born in 1815, he gave a forest farm at St. Lin, on the river Achigan, some fifteen miles northeast of Lachenaie. Here the son followed in his father's footsteps, surveying and farming by turns, and here in 1840, when Carolus had been married some six years, Charles and his wife came to spend the rest of their days in a joint household.

The strong common sense of the elder Laurier, his frankness and his sturdy emphasis on independence are brought out clearly in the étrennes or New Year's blessing sent to Carolus in 1836:

(Translation)

New Year's Blessing of Carolus Laurier

January 1st, 1836

My Dear Son:

For New Year's blessing I am going to give you some advice, and I hope that you will not scorn it, as you are now the head of a household, a substantial villager, and consequently a member of society.

Now in order to be a good member of society, you must be independent. Besides independence, many rules of conduct are understood, but that is the root of them all. Independence does not always mean riches! It means prudence, foresight in business so that you are not taken unawares and forced to yield or compromise with anyone. You must judge your own business, watch over everything that goes on in your house, in a word, over all that may help or hinder your interests.

You must subdue the flesh. That is to say, work reasonably, prudently and faithfully. A man of bodily activity may earn, without any exaggeration, 25 or 50 dollars a year more than an indolent man would. That may make an increase in his fortune of from 13 to 26 thousand francs at the end of 30 years.

Finally, my son, you are your own master; do as you please; I give you no commands. But if you wish to achieve independence, pray God to direct your thoughts and your work. It is spiritual and bodily activity which leads to independence: the indolent man is always in need. This precept may be of service to your wife and to everyone.

Charles Laurier,

Your affectionate father.

The same Polonian prudence is evident in another New Year's letter, written this time to his daughter-in-law, in anticipation of the two households being joined:

New Year's Blessing of Marcelle Martineau, Wife of

Carolus Laurier

(Translation)

January First, 1840.

Dear Madam:

As we intend to be joined together next year and for the rest of our days, unless we are greatly disappointed, God grant that we may live on good terms with one another. It is to Him that we must pray for this. Be resolute and patient. If we take care, both of us, not to be embittered against one another, we shall be able to live together happily, for it will be less costly to keep house for two families joined together than separated, as regards both household tasks and expense. If we have the good fortune to agree, we shall be happier together than apart. That is why we must fortify ourselves beforehand with prudence and patience and resignation. When we fear some misfortune, it is very seldom that it comes to us. Be wise and prudent.

Charles Laurier.

Carolus Laurier had not the rugged individuality or the practical interests of his father, but he had his own full share of capacity. His keen wit, his genial comradeship, his generous sympathy, his strong, handsome figure, made him a welcome guest through all the French and Scotch settlements of the north country. He was more interested in political affairs than his father had been, and a strong supporter of the Liberal or "Patriot" demand for self-government. It was an index of his progressiveness that he was the first in the countryside to discard the flail for a modern threshing-machine.

It was to his mother that Wilfrid Laurier always felt he owed most. Marie Marcelle Martineau was born in L'Assomption in 1815. Her first Canadian ancestor was Mathurin Martineau, who emigrated to Canada from the same part of France as Jean Cottineau, about 1687; from this Martineau stock came the poet Louis Fréchette, who counted himself a Scotch cousin of Wilfrid Laurier. On her mother's side—Scholastique or Colette Desmarais—Marcel Martineau had the blood of Acadian exiles in her veins. In 1834, when each was nineteen, Carolus Laurier and Marcelle Martineau were married at L'Assomption. Marcelle Laurier was a woman of fine mind and calm strength, with an interest in literature and an appreciation of beauty in nature unusual in her place and time. She was passionately fond of pictures, though there was little opportunity to gratify her longing, and had a very good natural talent for drawing. In the home she made in St. Lin there was an intellectual interest and a grace and distinction of life which were to leave a lasting impress on the son who came to her in her twenty-seventh year.

In 1841 Carolus Laurier proudly recorded the following entry in his papers:

(Translation)

To-day, the twenty-second day of the month of November, in the year of Our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and forty-one, was baptised in the church of St. Lin, by Messire G. Chabot, curé for the said parish, Henri Charles Wilfrid, born the twentieth day of the present month, of the lawful marriage of Carolus Laurier, gentleman, land-surveyor, and Marie Marcelle Martinault. His godfather is Sieur Louis Charles Beaumont, Esq., gentleman, of Lechenaie; his godmother is Marie Zoé Laurier, wife of Sieur L. C. Beaumont.

On January 23, 1844, he records the birth and baptism that day of Marie Honorine Malvina Laurier.

Marcelle Martineau was not fated to be with her children long. She died in March, 1848, in her thirty-fifth year. But in the seven years of her son's life with her, she had so knit herself into his being that the proud and tender memory of her never faded from his deeply impressionable mind. A second blow came with the death, when barely eleven, of the sister who had grown very dear to him.

Carolus Laurier soon took a second wife, Adeline Ethier. By this marriage there were five children: Ubalde, who became a physician and died at Arthabaska in 1898; Charlemagne, for many years a merchant at St. Lin, and member for the county of L'Assomption in the House of Commons from 1900 until his death in 1907; Henri, prothonotary at Arthabaska, who died in 1906, and Carolus and Doctorée (Mme. Lamarche), both of whom survived their half-brother.

Adeline Laurier proved a very kindly and capable mother to all her flock. Her hold on the elder boy's warm affections, and incidentally her husband's light-hearted outlook on life, are brought out in a letter which Carolus wrote to a niece of his wife, many years after:

(Translation)

St. Lin, March 19, 1886.

I am almost certain to get well in spite of my seventy-one years, and I embarked on the seventy-second the day before yesterday, while the Irish were holding their procession in the streets of Montreal, and as that day is the day of their patron saint and their national festival, and as I came into the world 71 years ago, I think that is the reason why, when I was a widower, 5 or 6 old Irish damsels from New Glasgow used to come to mass at St. Lin every Sunday and my seat was always full of them. But the moment I married your aunt, pst! their devotion was at an end, and I found myself rid of these old girls, and my seat and the rest of the church likewise.

... That did not prevent me keeping my health and being very happy with your aunt, and my children too, for I am certain that Wilfrid loves his stepmother just as if she was his own mother. I always remember that at the age of eleven, when he came home from school, he would go and sit on his stepmother's lap to eat his bread and jam or bread and sugar, with his arms round her neck, and that he would put his "piece" on his knees and wipe his mouth with his handkerchief and kiss her over and over, and then pick up his "piece," eat a few mouthfuls and begin to kiss her again....

Carolus L.

St. Lin in the early fifties was a prosperous frontier village. Twenty miles to the north the blue Laurentians set a barrier to further expansion. The village itself was the centre of a broad, fertile, slightly rolling plain, still covered for the most part with the maples and elms, the pine and spruce, of the primitive forest. Its great stone church towered high above the houses that lined the two straggling streets. The river Achigan, on which it lay, turned the wheels of the grist-mills on its banks, floated down the logs from the upper reaches, and, not least, provided fishing and swimming-holes for boys' delight. It was a quiet, pleasant home, well devised to give its children happiness in youth, strength in manhood, and serene memories in old age. Young Laurier shared in the usual children's games, though an old companion recalls that many a time when the boys would call, "Wilfrid, come, we are ready for a race," the answer from the boy bent over a book would be, "Just a minute," and again, "A minute more." He particularly delighted in wandering through the woods, sometimes with gun on his shoulder for rabbit or partridge, but more often with no other purpose than to search out bird and plant and tree. His sharp eyes and retentive memory gave him an intimate and abiding knowledge of wood life of which few but his closest friends in later days were aware.