Lucille was working at Ste-Justine’s when a friend introduced her to a young Italian doctor who had come to Montreal to study pediatrics. His name was Piero Corti. She took little notice of him at first, but he later approached her in the hospital corridor and reintroduced himself. Piero was a good-looking young man, short and stocky, with a sparkle in his eyes and an engaging smile. She found him charming and amusing to be with, and she couldn’t stop laughing at the way he spoke both French and English with a singsong Italian accent. But Lucille was so engrossed in her studies that she did not give him another thought. Piero, however, was immediately attracted by the beauty and intensity of this young intern.

      The two came from very different backgrounds. Lucille had grown up in a working-class district of Montreal, while Piero was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Milan, the fifth in a family of ten. At school, Lucille strove to excel, but Piero preferred sports and fast motorbikes to homework. Despite their comfortable circumstances, Piero’s parents encouraged all their children to follow a profession, so he chose medicine and obtained a medical degree. He studied radiology and anesthesiology at the University of Milan.

      Like Lucille, Piero was attracted by the idea of living and working in the Third World. One of his brothers was a Jesuit missionary in Chad, West Africa. A brother-in-law had served as a doctor, first in India and then in Africa. Their stories fascinated him and he was determined to follow in their footsteps.

      Lucille had still to complete the final stage of her training. In order to practise as a surgeon, she needed one further diploma that required a period of training to be taken outside Canada. She sent letters to twenty top hospitals in the United States asking to be admitted to their surgical residence program. All twenty turned her down.

      Lucille was absolutely furious. I have an excellent academic record and impressive credentials. It must he the fact I’m a woman that has ruined my chance of a job in the United States, she realized. She buried her anger and decided instead to apply for a job in France. She immediately received offers of positions in both Paris and Marseilles.

      She chose Marseilles, a bustling Mediterranean seaport in the south of France. Now thirty-one years old, she said goodbye to her friends and family, and in September 1960, her father drove her to New York, where she boarded the S.S. Liberié.

      After a five-day crossing, they reached the French port of Le Havre. Lucille boarded the train for the journey south. She grew increasingly excited as they flew past charming French villages with red-tiled roofs. As they moved south, she could feel the heat of the sun and marvelled at the luminescence of the countryside that so captivated Impressionist painters such as Van Gogh and Cézanne.

      She caught her first sight of the Mediterranean when she reached Marseilles, a noisy and crowded city bordering the sea. She moved in with a French family and started work at once as an intern in pediatric surgery at the Hôpital de la Conception.

      Lucille adjusted quickly to life in Marseilles. She made many new friends, but she was startled by their ignorance of Canada. “In Montreal, do you have snow ten months a year?” one of them asked. “Is there ever any sun? What language do you speak?” inquired another. They were very surprised when she told them that many Canadians living in Montreal speak French at school, at university, even in the shops. They were just as surprised when she told them that in summer, Montrealers grow tomatoes! They thought Montreal must always be much too cold.

      She was amused to discover that the French spoken in France was different from the French she had learned in Canada. “The people here have difficulty understanding me because we have such different accents and different expressions,” she told her sister Lise. “Here, the children always call me ‘madam.’ At the hospital, the nurses call me ‘mademoiselle,’ the interns and several doctors call me ‘miss,’ and the boss, when he needs me, says ‘Go and find my Canadian.’”