Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
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was stunned by this revelation. Why would anyone ever think of imposing such a grotesque rule? No French? Not even in the privacy of your own four walls? This isn’t what I had expected from my sprightly dancing girl. Yet, come to think of it, there was not a single word of French on the pages that had tumbled out of the walls. Pas de recettes de glaçage, just recipes for frosting from the Boston Cooking-School. Desensitized by the normalcy of an English-only world, I hadn’t even noticed that the Blondins had parted company with their ancestors.
“I think my grandmother was lonely,” Lorena said, when she saw how shocked I was. “She just wanted to make friends. The other women, I don’t think they ever let her in. It twists my heart to think of it.”
How lonely would you have to be to give up your mother tongue?
4
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