Patricia Smart - Writing Herself into Being_ Quebec Women's Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l'Incarnation to Nelly Arcan (2017, McGill-Queen's University Press) [10.1515_9780773552654] - libgen.li

Writing Herself
into Being
Writ in g H e rs e lf
in t o B e i n g
Q u e b e c Wom e n’s Autobi og raphi cal

Wr it in gs f r om M ari e de l ’ Incar nati on
t o N e lly A rcan
PAtri C iA SMA rt
McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal and Kingston • London • Chicago
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017
First published in French as De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan

© Les Éditions du Boréal 2014
ISBN 978-0-7735-5118-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5119-0 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5265-4 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5266-1 (ePUB)
Legal deposit fourth quarter 2017

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-
consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications
Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for
the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.We
acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National
Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official
Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Smart, Patricia, 1940–

[De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan. English]
Writing herself into being : Quebec women’s autobiographical writings from

Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly Arcan / Patricia Smart.
Translation of: Smart, Patricia, 1940–. De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7735-5118-3 (hardcover). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5119-0 (softcover). –

ISBN 978-0-7735-5265-4 (ePDF). –ISBN 978-0-7735-5266-1 (ePUB)
1. Canadian literature (French) – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Canadian

diaries (French) – Québec (Province) – History and criticism. 3. Intimacy (Psychology)
in literature. I. Title. II. Title: De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan. English
PS8103.W6S6213 2017 C840.9’9287 C2017-904387-0

C2017-904388-9
This book was typeset by Sandra Friesen in 10.5/13 Minion.

To my husband John, with love and thanks, and to the memory of
my beloved sister Judy Hamelin (1938–2017)
Co n t ent s
Acknowledgments ix
Author’s Note on the English Translation xi
Introduction 3
PA rt O n e L i v i n g A n d W r itin g fOr gOd :

th e M yS t i C A L er A 13
1 A Place for the Spirit: Canada as Dream and Reality in the
Autobiographical Writings of the Women of New France 17
2 Writing the Annihilation of Self: Marie de l’Incarnation 33
PA rt t WO W r i t i n g f O r the O the r :
CO r r eS P O n d en Ce S, 1 7 4 8 –1862 67
3 Writing “To Tell You I’m Here”: The Correspondence of
Élisabeth Bégon 70
4 One Is Not Born a Mother, One Becomes One:
Julie Papineau’s Journey 88
PA rt t h r ee W r i t i n g f Or On eSe Lf:
th e P r i vAt e di A ry, 1 8 4 3 – 1964 115
5 Girls’ Diaries: Steps towards an Autonomous Self 121
6 Two Nineteenth-Century Rebels: Henriette Dessaulles and
Joséphine Marchand 146
7 Diaries of “Queens of the Hearth” 165
PA rt f O u r W r i t i n g O n e Se Lf in t O hiSt Ory:
th e Ag e O f Au t Obi O g r A Phy, 1965–2012 189
8 Claire Martin: The Courage of the Autobiographical “I” 193
Contents • viii
9 Growing Up Poor in Montreal, 1930–1960: Lise Payette,

France Théoret, Denise Bombardier, Marcelle Brisson, and
Adèle Lauzon 210
10 Giving Birth to Oneself in Writing: The Struggle with
the Mother 229
11 Trapped in the Image: Nelly Arcan’s Autofictions 256
Conclusion 276
Notes 281
Bibliography 297
Index 311
A c kn o wl edgm ent s
I am grateful to the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program for a gen-

erous translation grant which made my work on this English-language
version of my book possible. Sincere thanks also to the excellent team at
McGill-Queen’s University Press, especially Mark Abley, Colleen Gray,
Ryan Van Huijstee, and Philip Cercone, who steered the book through
its various phases with great care, expertise, generosity, and patience. My
thanks again to those who helped with the original French edition pub-
lished by Éditions du Boréal in 2014, especially my editor Jean Bernier,
and to Lori Saint-Martin, Andrée Lévesque, and Yvan Lamonde, who
read and commented on the original manuscript.
Au thor ’s N o te on th e E ngl i sh Transl a t i on
This book is my own translation of a work I originally wrote in French,

which was published by Éditions du Boréal in 2014 under the title De
Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan: Se dire, se faire par l’écriture intime. A
study of Quebec women’s autobiographical writings from New France to
the present day, it aims to make these writings (many of which are unpub-
lished) visible and accessible, to be read not only for what they reveal
about women’s lives, but for the perspective they offer on Quebec history.
The title of the work draws attention to the two important writers who
open and close my study: Marie de l’Incarnation, the seventeenth-century
mystic and founder of the Quebec Ursulines, and Nelly Arcan, the bril-
liant young woman who achieved notoriety and star status in Quebec and
France with the publication of her autobiographical novel Putain (Whore)
in 2001, and who committed suicide in 2009, at the age of thirty-six.
I have made very few modifications to the French text, cutting at
most a paragraph or two which seemed unnecessarily complicated for
English-language readers and adding notes or brief descriptions in the
text to identify public figures or cultural phenomena which might be
unfamiliar to anglophones. As many if not all the texts I discuss are rel-
atively unknown, I have quoted from them at length in order to allow my
readers to hear the voices of these women who have been silenced by his-
tory for so long. When English translations of the texts were available, I
have quoted from them. All other translations are my own.
Writing Herself
into Being
I n troduct i on
This book grew out of a desire to explore the experiences of the women
who lived through and made possible the key moments of Quebec’s his-
tory: the arrival of the French in the New World, the years preceding the
British Conquest and the two centuries of Church-dominated submis-
sion that followed it, and, finally, the period of individual and collective
freedom that began with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Feminist
historians have described the reality of these women’s lives,1 in particu-
lar of those exceptions among them who broke out of the private sphere
and became actors in the public realm, but we rarely hear their own voices
or get a glimpse of their inner struggles or their perspective on the world
around them. My original plan was to write a study of women’s autobi-
ography in Quebec, but I soon became aware of the surprising fact that
there are no autobiographies by women in the three centuries that sep-
arate Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography, written in 1654,
and Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove, published in 1965. Coincidentally,
Martin’s autobiography devotes considerable space to a depiction of the
Ursuline convent in Quebec City founded by Marie de l’Incarnation
in 1639, where she was a boarder as a child in the 1920s. While in Marie
de l’Incarnation’s work the convent is presented as the backdrop to an
adventure of spiritual growth and love, as the sisters welcome their native
pupils and learn their languages, Claire Martin portrays it as a prison-like
institution run by narrow-minded, sadistic nuns bent on crushing out
all traces of individuality in their pupils. Struck by the contrast between
these two landmark autobiographical works, I began to search for mate-
rial that would shed light on the ideological developments and personal
repressions that took place in the intervening centuries, shifting my focus
to women’s correspondences and private diaries.
Writing her self into being • 4
In the initial stages of my research, the title that seemed logical for the
book that was taking shape was a depressing one – “Absence d’autobiog-
raphies, autobiographies de l’absence” (“Absence of Autobiographies,
Autobiographies of Absence”) – for not only are there relatively few auto-
biographies by women in the Quebec tradition, those that do exist tend to
exhibit a psychic fragility which is quite the opposite of the robust sense
of self one instinctively associates with autobiography. And yet, from the
beginning, women were writing: their testimonies appear in the annals
of the religious communities and in the correspondences and diaries that
were for so long the only forms of writing deemed acceptable for their sex.
As I turned to these other forms of writing the self, the pieces of the puz-
zle initially posed by the absence of female voices began to come together.
In New France, the annals of the Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec
and of Montreal, as well as the fragments that remain of a memoir writ-
ten by Marguerite Bourgeoys and, most importantly, the correspondence
of Marie de l’Incarnation, give an idea of the motivations that led these
nuns to leave the security of their for the most part cloistered lives in
France and evoke the very different lives they led after arriving in a coun-
try defined by cold, snow, vast spaces, and the constant threat of Iroquois
attacks. After the Conquest, in spite of increasing pressures of censor-
ship and self-censorship as women’s role came to be defined more and
more restrictively, women and girls found expression in letters or diaries,
leaving behind writings hidden away in drawers and passed on in some
families from generation to generation, but all too often lost or destroyed
with the passage of time.
The book is organized in a way that allows for analysis of these differ-
ent genres of personal writing but also advances chronologically from
colonial times to the present. In part 1, “Living and Writing for God: The
Mystical Era,” we will see a concept of self and writing that gravitates
around the divine presence both in content and form – most strikingly in
Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiography, which is addressed to her divine
lover and structured around the action of his grace in her life. In all of
these texts, even in the impersonal style that characterizes the annals of
the religious communities, one detects a female voice or tone quite dif-
ferent from that of the other major source of information on this period
of spiritual effervescence, the Jesuit Relations. While sharing in the mis-
sionary ardour and desire for sacrifice and martyrdom of their male
counterparts, these women offer a different perspective on New France,
a point of view attentive to the concrete details of their daily routines, to
their emotional reactions, and even (in the case of Marie de l’Incarnation)
to the most intimate nuances of the interior life. Their writings show that
introduction • 5
the New World offered them a paradoxical realization of self, anchored in

a project of self-abnegation that flies in the face of our modern concepts
of identity. The legacy of these seventeenth-century women – intense and
passionate, but ruled by a dualistic mentality that devalues the body and
all of the characteristics habitually associated with women – must have
weighed heavily on the girls and women of subsequent generations, to
whom the founding mothers were presented as models. Often through-
out this study I refer to the “Jansenist” Catholicism of traditional French
Canada, characterized by a fear of and contempt for the body, in partic-
ular of women’s bodies. Jansenism had its origins in seventeenth-century
France and flourished during the decades (1630–60) when the religious
founders of New France were migrating to the New World. Although
condemned as a heresy by the Church in the early eighteenth century, it
continued to dominate the Catholicism of French Canada, especially after
the Conquest of 1763 and the French Revolution of 1792, both of which
events contributed to French-Canadian isolation from outside influences
and domination by the Church.
For the reader interested in autobiography as a genre, the most strik-
ing paradox of these documents is the almost complete absence of any
sense of the importance of the individual self. In them the narrating (or
narrated) self yearns above all for self-annihilation; yet at the same time
they bear out the view of theoreticians of women’s autobiography that for
women the boundaries of the self are permeable, and that the female “I”
often takes shape in relationship and even fusion with an “Other,” whether
mother, children, husband, friends, or God.2 As Marie de l’Incarnation
beautifully put it: “The soul, attached to God as the centre of its rest and
its pleasure, acquires extraordinary power” (Corr., 747). Elsewhere, even
more graphically, she says of God: “C’est mon moi,” “He is my self.”3
Part 2, “Writing for the Other: Correspondences (1748–1862),” looks
at the missives of two women who observed their society from a privi-
leged point of view: Élisabeth Bégon and Julie Bruneau Papineau. Taken
together, the letters of the two women cover the period from the final
years of the French Régime up until the Rebellions of 1837–38 and beyond,
an era during which, following its defeat by the English, French-Canadian
society turns in on itself and builds a value system based on faith and the
family, both areas seen as women’s domain. As we move from Élisabeth
Bégon’s correspondence with her son-in-law (1748–54) to Julie Papineau’s
letters to her husband and other members of her family (1823–62), we see
women becoming increasingly deprived of agency and restricted to the
maternal role. Both Madame Bégon and Julie Papineau are strong women
with definite and often critical views of their society as well as dominant
roles within their families. But their letters reveal an inner fragility, strik-
ingly different from the unshakable faith of the nuns of New France.
Unlike the nuns, for whom the new country provided a space where
dreams could come true, these women often dream of being elsewhere
(“I am only at ease in places I’m not in,”4 writes the young Julie Papineau
to her husband) and seem uncertain of their identity. Given the fact that
we are dealing with correspondences, it is not surprising that this identity
is expressed in relation to another. But the epistolary form is only one of
the elements that contribute to the impression one has, on reading these
letters, that the male interlocutor of these women is perceived as a stron-
ger and more solid Other compensating for a certain emptiness, lack of
satisfaction, or insecurity on the part of the letter writer. In the place for-
merly occupied by God, we now find a man – whether a husband, a son,
or another member of the family.
Around the mid-nineteenth century, the private diary began to come
into fashion, offering a new means of self-expression for girls and women.
In part 3, “Writing for Oneself: The Private Diary (1843–1964),” I look at
more than a dozen of these, of which only two – the diaries of Henriette
Dessaulles (1874–81) and Joséphine Marchand (1880–97) – have been pub-
lished. These diaries offer multiple perspectives on the lives of women and
young girls during a period when conservative Catholicism dominated all
aspects of life and of the educational system. For the first time, girls and
women could explore all facets of their personal lives and their situations
in the world for themselves, and no longer solely in relation to another per-
son. In the jottings in their notebooks we see the emergence of the question
“Who am I?” – a preoccupation with identity and purpose that will, all too
often, prove incompatible with the roles of wife, mother, or nun that each
of the diarists will eventually have to accept. These often multivolume dia-
ries – from the one in which Angélique Hay Des Rivières (the wife of an
important landowner in the Eastern Townships) records the events of the
daily life of her family and community from 1843 to 1872 with barely a men-
tion of her own feelings to the twenty volumes to which novelist Michelle
Le Normand confided her joys, doubts, and anxieties from 1909 to 1964 –
trace an evolution towards modernity that touches every aspect of women’s
lives, even as the image of the “queen of the hearth” (the mythical, all-pow-
erful mother exalted in the pulpits and in political discourse) becomes
more and more firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. Behind this
monolithic image imposed on women, the diaries reveal the infinitely var-
ied reactions of girls and women, ranging from conformity to rebellion,
from total fulfilment in the mother role (Lady Lacoste) to the activism of a
pioneer of women’s rights (Joséphine Marchand).
introduction • 7
In part 4, “Writing Oneself into History: The Age of Autobiography

(1965–2012),” I trace the evolution of women’s autobiography since the
Quiet Revolution, from Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove to the brilliant
autofictional works of the recent and tragically deceased young Nelly
Arcan. While Claire Martin’s autobiography gave rise to controversy
because of her searing account of the violence and hypocrisy of early
twentieth-century French Canada, Arcan’s autofictions Whore and Hys-
teric expose an equally scandalous hypocrisy and violence, seen from
the point of view of a young woman who plays the game of postmodern
consumer society to the point of her own destruction. Both Martin and
Arcan portray the immense difficulty for women in achieving self-expres-
sion and agency, whether because of the social and religious pressures of
the era Martin depicts or the objectification of women in the images that
dominate contemporary society as reflected in Arcan’s work. Between
the chapters devoted to the work of these two authors, I have placed two
thematic chapters, which illustrate in a more general way this difficult
quest for autonomy. The first (“Growing Up Poor in Montreal, 1930–60”)
examines works by five women – Lise Payette, Denise Bombardier, France
Théoret, Marcelle Brisson, and Adèle Lauzon – who entered the mid-
dle class thanks to the social changes of the Quiet Revolution, becoming
the first representatives in this book of a class other than the bourgeoi-
sie. The second (“Giving Birth to Oneself in Writing: The Struggle with
the Mother”) deals with a preoccupation common to almost all wom-
en’s autobiographies: the relationship of the authors/narrators with their
mothers. In all these texts, one is struck by the immense struggle required
of these women in order to achieve personal freedom and escape the
influence of powerful and stifling mothers, often trapped in the mother
role themselves and determined not to let their daughters escape it. The
best known of these works is Gabrielle Roy’s magnificent autobiography
Enchantment and Sorrow, written in the final years of the author’s life.
The chapter opens with a brief look at two autobiographical films dealing
with the mother-daughter relationship: Anne-Claire Poirier’s Tu as crié
LET ME GO (You cried LET ME GO) (1996) and Paule Baillargeon’s Trente
tableaux (Thirty images) (2012). As well, it examines the autobiographies
or autobiographical novels of six other writers – Thérèse Renaud, Paule
Saint-Onge, Denise Desautels, Diane-Monique Daviau, France Théoret,
and Francine Noël.
What, exactly, is autobiography, then, and how have women changed
it over the centuries? I will look at these questions in more detail in
chapter 8, on Claire Martin, restricting myself for the moment to some
general observations about autobiography, its cultural context, and
women’s relationship to it. The first spiritual autobiography of the West-

ern tradition, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, written in the fourth century,
had an enormous influence on the post-Renaissance period, giving rise
to numerous spiritual autobiographies, of which the most famous was
written by a sixteenth-century woman and saint, Teresa of Avila. But the
sixteenth century is also the period when subjectivity begins to be con-
sidered apart from the relationship with God (in France, the appearance
of Montaigne’s Essays in 1580 marks a key moment in this evolution of the
concept of self). According to George Gusdorf, autobiography as a liter-
ary genre is indissociable from this historical moment when it became
possible for an individual to reflect on the meaning of his temporal exis-
tence.5 Theoreticians of women’s autobiography have argued, however,
that Gusdorf ’s “individual” is decidedly male and that women’s identity
has been constructed in terms of her relationships rather than in isolation
from them. On the level of literary form, this “relationality” so import-
ant to women leads to works in which the author/narrator often speaks
of herself indirectly, through the filter of the others (mother, husband,
or children) to whom she has been conditioned to subordinate her own
needs and desires.
When placed in the context of the whole body of personal writings
(by men as well as women) in French Canada, the absence of autobiog-
raphies by women for three centuries becomes less shocking than it first
appeared. Two important research tools – the critical bibliography Je
me souviens: La littérature personnelle au Québec (1860–1980) by Yvan
Lamonde6 and La littérature intime du Québec by Françoise Van Roey-
Roux, a thematic overview of the same material – stress the impersonal
tone of all these writings, noting that the authors speak more readily of
historical events or cultural practices than of their own experiences or
feelings. Almost all these texts are written by men (Lamonde lists only 33
works by women out of a total number of 366 for the period before 1980),
and Van Roey-Roux deplores the consequences of this disequilibrium in
terms of our knowledge of women’s lives. “We know almost nothing about
what a woman before 1950 really thought or felt. No one has ever told us,”7
she writes. According to Pierre Hébert, this absence, or fear, of expressing
oneself in writing, often identifiable by the substitution of “we” for “I” in
the narrative perspective, seems to enter the collective consciousness after
the Conquest and is the symptom of a colonized mentality. Hébert’s study
deals only with the personal diary, for which he establishes a periodiza-
tion demonstrating that a more or less autonomous “I” emerges in the
1930s and has gained considerable strength by the 1950s: “Beaten down,
denied, burned, resurrected, the self is like a cork that can be pushed
introduction • 9
under the water, but can pop up again at any time. And the more it is
pushed down, the stronger it gets.”8
In order for an autobiography to exist, there must not only be a subject
with a strong enough sense of self to be able to affirm his or her difference
from the surrounding world, but also an audience capable of appreciating
or supporting such self-revelation. In their imposing volume L’autobiog-
raphie,9 Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone remind us that the
first great autobiographer of the modern period, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
was Protestant, and note that autobiography is a genre more suited to that
religion, with its emphasis on the individual examination of conscience,
than to Catholicism, with its more authoritarian and secret practice of
confession. As Gusdorf argued, autobiography is the product of cul-
tures that value the individual. And, as Pierre Vadeboncœur suggests
in La ligne du risque, such a culture was unthinkable in Quebec before
the dramatic break signalled by the publication of Paul-Émile Bordu-
as’s manifesto Refus global in 1948. Vadeboncœur argues that the period
between the Rebellion of 1837 and Refus global was a time during which
spirit or mind (defined broadly as intellectual curiosity, spiritual values,
the creative urge, and a questioning of both the divine and the human)
was repressed in favour of an all-embracing conformity: “We sacrificed
freedom of mind to immobility […] We were children crushed by an
authoritarian father,”10 he writes. This image of children crushed by an
authoritarian father, which for Vadeboncœur represents the situation
of all French Canadians before the Quiet Revolution, is also at the heart
of Claire Martin’s autobiography, and perhaps explains its extraordi-
nary impact.11 At a time when French-Canadian society was commonly
referred to as a “matriarchy,” Martin foregrounded the father, a tyran-
nical figure allied with the clergy who denied his wife and children any
possibility of freedom or self-expression. Recounting her own child-
hood, she was speaking on behalf of a whole people. Similarly, France
Théoret, whose entire literary output (poetry, novels, short stories, and
nonfiction) is anchored in autobiographical experience, denounces the
destructive effect of traditional French-Canadian culture on the individ-
ual self. That culture, characterized by a “refusal of the first person,” she
argues, “failed to tolerate even the slightest suggestion of individuality.”12
Théoret’s tenacious struggle for self-expression against the seemingly
insurmountable obstacles created by her family, her economic situation,
and the fact of being female is emblematic of the struggle of all the women
whose writings will be examined in this book. In her autobiograph-
ical novel Une belle education (Such a Good Education), the protagonist
recalls the atmosphere of the pre-Quiet Revolution years, a time when it
was “impossible to speak of oneself […] Those who speak of themselves

are vain and boastful, self-centred egotists.”13 As well, far earlier than
Claire Martin and France Théoret, the young nineteenth-century diarist
Henriette Dessaulles had observed with remarkable lucidity the irresolv-
able conflict between the needs of her self and the demands of her society:
“Poor little me, you will be ogled, supervised, looked after, babied! They
will try to mold you, shape you, perfect you! They will take everything
from you, your time, your will, your tastes, they’ll try to steal your impres-
sions, direct your affections, soften your character […] And what will that
lead to? […] Alas! If they succeed you will no longer be yourself and if
they fail you’ll be the most miserable of little girls, because you’ll be the
most persecuted!”14
The works that will be examined in the following chapters are not nec-
essarily “representative” of women’s voices; they are, quite simply, the
voices of women who dared to express themselves in writing and whose
writings were preserved, often because the authors were the daughters or
wives of influential men. There are, however, certain themes or preoccu-
pations that recur across the generations, notably motherhood and the
constant struggle for girls and women to reconcile the demands of self
and other, body and spirit. In a very real sense, all the girls and women
we will meet in these pages can be considered “daughters of Marie de l’In-
carnation” because of the similar convent school education they received.
Despite their differences in temperament, family background, and era, all
had instilled in them a set of values supposedly inspired by the nuns of
New France and the expectation that they would live up to these impos-
sible ideals. Even our contemporary Nelly Arcan presents her choice of
becoming a prostitute as the logical consequence of the education she
received from the nuns: “Dry women, exalted by the sacrifice they had
made of their lives, women whom I was made to call mothers.”15
According to E.D. Blodgett, there are two narratives, one of which
originated with the Jesuits and the other with Marie de l’Incarnation,
that run through traditional French-Canadian culture and are presented
as the only roles worthy of aspiration: for men, to imitate the life of the
Eternal Son, and for women, to become the transcendant Mother.16 In the
area of maternity, as in all others, Marie de l’Incarnation is a paradoxical
model. By abandoning her young son when she entered the Ursulines in
1631, she transgressed the ultimate taboo for women, choosing to break
with the maternal role in order to accomplish her own destiny. And yet
she was presented to young girls as the model of spiritual maternity, with
no attention paid to the guilt about abandoning her son that haunted her
all her life. The image of the Virgin and Child at the heart of the dream
introduction • 11
that first predicted she would travel to New France17 became the power-
ful and intimidating model against which the girls and young women of
future generations were expected to measure themselves. One senses an
echo of this model in the melancholy love, as maternal as it is passion-
ate, expressed by Élisabeth Bégon in her letters to the absent son-in-law
she addresses as “dear son,” written during the final years of the French
Regime in Canada.
By the last half of the nineteenth century, a woman’s role had been pre-
cisely defined as that of wife and mother – the reine du foyer, “queen of
the hearth,” condemned to multiple pregnancies and responsible for the
Catholic education of her children. Even as it denied them autonomy, this
role gave women a compensatory power within the family, one that was
frequently used at the expense of their husbands and children. The young
Julie Papineau complains constantly about the restrictions of her life as
the mother of a large family, confined to her house in Old Montreal while
her husband Louis-Joseph enjoys a much more interesting existence in
Quebec City as head of the government of Lower Canada. But her letters
reveal how, over time, she gradually becomes a version of the dominat-
ing mother figure familiar in French-Canadian mythology, externalizing
her own frustrations through constant criticisms of her husband and
children. After her, for more than a century, a long list of young girls and
women will complain in their diaries and autobiographies about the over-
powering influence of these mothers, disappointed by life, who attempt to
maintain their power by denying freedom to their daughters.
The texts examined in this book speak all too often of crushed or
repressed selves that – like Pierre Hébert’s cork, which pops up to the sur-
face each time it is pushed underwater – nonetheless refuse to abandon
their struggle for existence. For all the women who wrote them, the act
of putting pen to paper was an essential part of the search for self and for
agency. While important for the glimpses of social reality they offer, their
writings are equally significant as works of literature.
PART O NE
•
Li v i n g an d Wri t i ng for G od:
T h e M y s t i cal E ra
Modern autobiography and the adventure of New France have their

origins in the same epistemological crisis, one which shook sixteenth-
century Europe to its foundations, demolishing the old religious, sci-
entific, and geographical certainties and opening up a space for the
expression of the individual self. Torn apart by bloody religious wars, new
scientific discoveries, and the awareness of faraway territories to explore,
the closed and hierarchical medieval universe collapsed. Thanks to the
existence of the printing press, people had access for the first time to the
stories of others and began to believe in the legitimacy of their own points
of view on the world around them. According to historian Yves Krume-
nacker, “the frame of everyday existence begins to change and people are
forced to look within themselves for certainty. It is for this reason that
the question of the subject becomes central to consciousness. Truth is no
longer to be found in the world, which seems fragile and even illusory,
but within the self […] It is on the basis of the self that the universe can be
reconstructed.”1
In France, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the reforms
of the Catholic Counter Reformation were affecting all aspects of religious
life, and there was a mystical fervour in the air. By the 1630s, thanks in
large part to the accounts of New France circulated in the Jesuit Rela-
tions, the cloistered nuns who would later be the foundresses of New
France were beginning to envisage the possibility of religious lives other
than the extremely restricted ones imposed on them by the Council of
Trent in 1615. Inflamed by love of God, they began to dream of sacrificing
their lives in the missions of New France, bringing the “Savages” of these
unknown lands into the arms of Christ. In spite of the many changes in
their lives that accompanied their arrival in the New World, the nuns
brought with them the practice of writing, recording the principal events
Par t One • 14
and activities of their communities in Annales, or annual reports, which

are the first women’s writings in the Quebec literary tradition. I will exam-
ine these annals of the religious orders in chapter 1, seeking to extract
from them a sense of the motivations, accomplishments, and disappoint-
ments of these women and attempting to determine what, if anything,
might constitute the gender specificity of their writing.
Despite the great interest in spiritual autobiography that character-
ized the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea that women might
record their spiritual experiences in writing was far from being accepted.
On the rare occasions when women dared to take up the pen to speak
of themselves, whether in correspondences or autobiographies, they
invariably excused themselves for their audacity, using misogynistic
formulas such as those frequently employed by Marie de l’Incarnation,
whose boldest demands on the authorities during the years when she
was seeking support for the unprecedented idea that a woman should
go to New France are always accompanied by apologies for her gender.
Later, near the end of her voluminous spiritual autobiography of 1654,
she states that she could have written “a large volume” had she not been
limited by “the awareness of my indignity and the lowliness of my sex.”2
Since the Middle Ages, numerous women had become known for their
extraordinary spiritual experiences, but the works in which these experi-
ences were recounted were invariably presented and made legitimate by a
male author (usually the woman’s spiritual director). Often, if a spiritual
director ordered a woman to write an account of her spiritual experi-
ences, it was to confirm that her story had nothing heretical about it or to
protect her against attacks of heresy (as was the case for Teresa of Avila,
who wrote her famous spiritual autobiography at the height of the Spanish
Inquisition in the sixteenth century).
It is not surprising that many of the great mystics of the Middle Ages
and early modern period were women, given their exclusion from the
educational systems which initiated men into the language of hierarchy,
reason, and logic that dominated the spiritual discourse of the times.
Françoise Collin reminds us that the female mystics were strong women
who often struggled against authority, founded communities, and dared
to think for themselves: “By relating to God directly, they could forego
the need to depend on men. Given women’s lack of ability to control
their human alliances and their lack of autonomy in the domestic sphere,
choosing to marry God was to choose freedom.”3 Teresa of Avila, whom
Marie de l’Incarnation read as a young girl, is clearly vaunting the freedom
offered by religious life as opposed to the constraints of marriage when
Living and Writing for g od • 15
she says to her novices: “Here, they say, is what the woman who wants to
live in harmony with her husband has to do: if he is sad, she must appear
sad; if he is happy she must act happy too, even if she only knows sadness.
Consider in passing, my sisters, what subjection you are freed from. For
here, without the shadow of a doubt, is the way Our Lord acts with us. He
makes himself your subject and desires that you should be sovereign. He
submits to your desires. Are you happy? Contemplate him resurrected.
Are you frustrated or sad? Think of him in the Garden of Olives.”4
The two autobiographical Relations of Marie de l’Incarnation, which
will be examined in chapter 2, were written under the orders or insistence
of men, and the document that combines the two versions, published in
Paris in 1677 by her son, Dom Claude Martin, five years after the death
of his mother, is introduced, edited, and modified to some extent by him
in order to make it acceptable to a religious milieu which had become
extremely suspicious of mysticism by the last quarter of the seventeenth
century. Thanks in part to this strategy on the part of her son, Marie’s
account of her experiences is the only spiritual autobiography by a woman
except that of Teresa of Avila to have escaped the wrath of the power-
ful French bishop, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who goes so far as to call
Marie “the Teresa of our times and of the New World.”5 Although it may
seem regrettable that the extraordinary writings of this woman are only
accessible to us as filtered through a male gaze, we must be grateful to
Claude Martin, without whom they would be unknown to us today. For
without the insistence of her son, Marie would never have undertaken
the 1654 autobiography. Like many women who have dared to write over
the centuries she was horrified by the idea of exposing the secrets of her
inner life. On being asked by one of her former confessors for information
about her spiritual experiences, she replied: “I will tell you because you
ask, but please respect my secrets, and burn this paper, I beg you.”6
The following two chapters highlight the apparent contradiction
between the remarkable strength these women attained thanks to their
faith in God and the self-abasement associated with being a woman so
often found in their writings. The contradiction is pushed to its limits
in Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiographies, which recount the painful
journey towards the mystical goal of self-annihilation as experienced by
a strong woman, linked by every fiber of her being to her earthly loves.
Pierre Nepveu perceptively describes these writings as “an interior adven-
ture in which a woman ceaselessly analyses herself, recalling the minutest
details of her spiritual progress and the subtlest reactions of her body.”7
Marie’s desire for self-annihilation is echoed, to a lesser degree, in the
Par t One • 16
writings of the other foundresses. All of these women display an admira-

ble strength and commitment in their writings, but one is struck by their
constant insistence on their desire to suffer, to die, and to lose themselves
in God – a problematic way for an autobiographical tradition to begin.
C h ap t e r 1
A P la c e fo r th e S p i r i t : C anada as D ream
a n d Re ali ty i n the Aut obi o g rap hi cal
Wr i ti n g s o f the Wom en of Ne w France
Canada was described to us as a place of horror, people [in France] called it the
suburbs of hell, and said that a more contemptible society did not exist. Our expe-
rience is the opposite, for we find here a Paradise.
Marie de l’Incarnation, 4 September 1640
What God had not willed in Troyes, He would perhaps bring to pass in Montreal.
Marguerite Bourgeoys, Écrits, 1697
At the origins of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec literature are

the writings of four women, all members of religious orders, who played
major roles in seventeenth-century New France. Two of these women
were born in France: Marie de l’Incarnation, the great mystic and foun-
dress of the Quebec Ursuline order, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, the
colony’s first teacher, who came to New France as a layperson but later
founded the uncloistered institution of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame
to ensure the continuity of her work and mutual support for the women
who had joined her in her mission. Marie’s writings include her spiri-
tual autobiography of 16541 (Écrits) and a voluminous correspondence
(Corr.);2 Marguerite Bourgeoys is the author of a volume of memoirs,
composed in 1697 at the age of seventy-eight (MB).3 The two others – Sis-
ters Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace of the Hospitalières de
Saint-Augustin and Marie Morin of the Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph
– are the Canadian-born authors, respectively, of the Annales of the Hôtel-
Dieu of Quebec (1636–1716) (Juchereau)4 and of Montreal (1659–1725)
(Morin).5 Their Annales, written primarily as records of the history of
their communities, rely on oral history as well as on documents conserved
within the community to recount the migration from France to the New
World as experienced by their founding members. Juchereau’s Annales in
particular is a layered work: it quotes at length from the written account
of the early years by Mère Marie de Saint-Bonaventure (Marie Forestier),
one of the three Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin (Augustinian) sisters
who emigrated along with Marie de l’Incarnation and two other Ursulines
in 1639, and it was completed and prepared for publication by another
member of the order, Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, who was
born in France but emigrated to Quebec in 1702, at the age of fifteen.
With the exception of the spiritual autobiography and the letters of
Marie de l’Incarnation, these accounts are much closer to the traditional
definition of memoir than they are to autobiography. Their aim is to
record historical events, and their authors rarely indulge in the expres-
sion of personal feelings or individual reflections. Often, particularly in
the Annales, the “we” that narrates them seems to be the collective voice
of the community, distilled from the individual voices of all the members
whose stories have been passed on from generation to generation. Writ-
ten either for younger sisters of the religious communities or for readers
in France whose support had to be enlisted for the missionary venture,
they are often edifying in tone and intent, and present an idealized view
of reality. Taken together, though, they provide a woman-centred view of
migration from France to Canada, narrated with a down-to-earth quality
and even a humour that contrasts with the heroic and tragic tone of the
male-authored Jesuit Relations.
in fr An Ce : the dreAM tAKeS Sh APe
Although many of the women’s religious orders in France were founded as

noncloistered teaching or nursing orders in the sixteenth century or ear-
lier, by the early seventeenth century the reforms of the Catholic Counter
Reformation had imposed strict rules of clausura or cloistering on them.
As Elizabeth Rapley explains, this regulation, formalized by the Coun-
cil of Trent in 1615, came at a time of spiritual effervescence, when many
women were caught up in the mysticism that had swept through Europe
during the Counter Reformation and were experimenting with new forms
of religious life. The Council, however, saw female religious above all as
virgins who must be sealed off from the world, reducing female sanctity
to a single characteristic: chastity. According to the new regulations, the
walls of women’s monasteries must be “high enough to close off any view,
either from within or from without. The entrances were to be locked and
double-locked, [and] spaces where the nuns came close to the outside
Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 19
world – the parlour, the church – were to be protected by narrow-meshed

grilles.”6 No men were allowed to enter the cloister, not even priests; nor
were mature women, who were seen as worldly and therefore as objects
of temptation. Rapley mentions that when Marie de l’Incarnation entered
the Ursuline monastery in Tours in 1631 at the age of thirty-one, all fif-
ty-eight of the other nuns in the convent were under the age of sixteen.
Such an emphasis on radical separation from the world at an early age
made for submissive nuns, treated as children by their bishops, women
who tended to regard the world outside the convent walls as corrupt and
dangerous – a view borne out by reality in the case of the Augustinian nun
Mère Jeanne de Sainte-Marie, a beautiful young woman who had entered
the convent for protection after being kidnapped and raped by a noble-
man (Juchereau, 32).
The challenge to the practice of cloistering posed by New France came
less from any awareness of its injustice to women than from the necessi-
ties of the colonial venture. Like all the other colonizing nations in the New
World, France wanted to create a country in its own image. But unlike the
others, it saw the native peoples not as enemies to be exploited or exter-
minated, nor even primarily as trading partners, but rather as “barbarian
brothers to be brought into the circle of the family and civilized by the Gos-
pel.”7 The missionary aim made France unique as well in having women
in the New World not only in the traditional roles of wife and mother, but
as active and central partners in the colonial enterprise, which was seen
as “a work of spiritual maternity.”8 By the 1630s the Jesuit missionaries
had become aware that the Indian boys and men they were attempting to
educate would fall back into “barbarianism” unless their women were also
educated into the French way of life. Because of the rules of the cloister,
there was no question of inviting French nuns to emigrate; but in his Rela-
tion of 1634 the Jesuit superior Paul Le Jeune made an impassioned plea for
some generous laywomen to offer their services to the colony as teachers
and hospital workers. A year later, he comments with amazement on the
huge response he has received – not from laywomen, but from within the
convents of France: “All the women consecrated to Our Lord want to be
part of our venture, surmounting the fear natural to their sex, to help the
poor daughters and wives of the Savages. There are so many of them who
write to us, and from so many monasteries […] that you would say they are
competing to see who can be the first to mock the difficulties of the sea, the
mutinies of the ocean, and the savageness of the land.”9
The written accounts of Marie de l’Incarnation and the other nuns who
would emigrate to Canada give an idea of the excitement generated within
the convents at the possibility of a missionary vocation. Surprisingly, for
these women who sought union with God through the total abnegation of
self, the vast and forbidding expanses of the New World represented not
an escape from the cloistered way of life but an extreme and exotic exten-
sion of it. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau writes, for example, of the founding
mothers of her community that “they were convinced that they could
only satisfy their zeal and fulfil their vocation in Canada by following the
Barbarians into the woods as the missionary fathers did; taking pleasure
in living hidden from the world, unknown, in complete separation and
total abnegation of all things, entirely abandoned to the care of Provi-
dence; and finally, expecting and hoping to find nothing loveable except
God in this country of the cross” (Juchereau, 12). The opportunity for
sacrifice and even martyrdom stoked the fires of imaginations already
attuned to excess by the baroque sensibilities of their era and practised
in the discipline of self-mortification. Marie de l’Incarnation wrote to
her spiritual director in 1635: “I envisage the hardships, both on the sea
and in the country, I envisage what it is to live with Barbarians, the dan-
ger of dying there of hunger or cold, the many occasions when one might
be seized […] and I find no change at all in the disposition of my spirit”
(Corr., 27). And the three Augustinian nuns who would emigrate with her
and two other Ursulines in 1639, far from being deterred by the rumours
they had heard that the indigenous peoples were “mangeurs d’hommes,”
“cannibals,” “thought only of their desire to sacrifice themselves for God,
and […] encouraged each other by heroic stories, considering themsel-
ves exiles for the glory of God” (Juchereau, 12). These rumours were more
than idle imaginings; Marie de l’Incarnation had received letters from
Jesuits telling of their near escapes from death at the hands of the natives,
and the Jesuit Relations of the 1640s contained lurid descriptions of cap-
tives of the Iroquois who had been eaten, as well as of the torture and
execution of Isaac Jogues and several other Jesuits. By 1659, at the height
of the Iroquois raids on Montreal, Marie Morin reports that the three
Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph preparing for their voyage to that city paid
little attention to the material things that would be needed in their new
life, “thinking only of abandoning everything.” Others in the commu-
nity looked after the practical details, “not wanting these victims to have
any thoughts other than that of their immolation, of preparing themsel-
ves to suffer martyrdom by the Iroquois” (Morin, 86). Morin mentions
the pain felt by the members of the French order at seeing three of their
best novices depart for Canada, “which had the reputation of being a
lost country for which even the best people felt horror” (Morin, 87). And
Marie de l’Incarnation, writing to her son six years after her arrival in
New France, recalls the fear of the nuns in France associated with the idea
of the New World: “I knew nothing about Canada, and when I heard the
word I believed it had been invented to frighten children” (Corr., 270).
Often strengthened by dreams or visions in which God or the Vir-
gin Mary clarified the direction they should take, these women braved
incredible obstacles even before leaving France – not only the opposi-
tion of many of their families and of church authorities, but a generalized
social disapproval of women who dared to travel, even within France.
Marie Morin comments on the heroism of one of the nuns, Sœur Macé,
for whom it was literally a torture to leave the cloister: “When I think that
sœur Macé was determined to come out of her cloister and come to Can-
ada, it seems to me a supernatural marvel, for it involved being seen on
the roads and on the sea, and being among laypeople both day and night.
Yes, my sisters, with the temperament she had, that was a true martyrdom
and a totally heroic act” (Morin, 91). She tells as well of the superior of one
of the order’s convents, Sœur Pilon, who had been refused permission to
go to Canada despite the fact that she had been praying and fasting for
several months in the hope of such a permission. As she bids goodbye to
the other nuns, Sœur Pilon says, “Yes, my sister[s], yes, I will go to Canada
and soon. Men are refusing me this grace, but God will grant it to me.”
Eight days later, the nuns learn of her death and are informed that, against
the advice of her superiors, she had made arrangements in secret for a
man and a horse to transport her to La Rochelle, where she would join the
others. Blocked in her attempt, “she died a few days later of the sadness
and frustration of not being able to go to Canada, which she regarded as a
country of holiness and perpetual martyrdom” (Morin, 88).
In the writings of both Marie de l’Incarnation and Marguerite Bour-
geoys one senses an awareness of the fact that they are radically
transgressing traditional gender roles. Marie writes incessantly to those
who are in a position to help her achieve her desire to go to New France,
always apologizing for her temerity in daring to aspire to such a calling.
“Forgive me, my dear Father, if the violent desire that has taken hold of
me makes me say things I’m ashamed even to imagine because of my low-
liness,” she writes to her spiritual director, insisting on the “shame” she
feels “for having feelings that were inappropriate to my sex and my con-
dition” (Corr., 26–7). In 1636, she wrote to Paul Le Jeune of her desire to
go to Canada: “If such be the will of God, there is nothing in this world
that can stop me, even if I were to be overcome by waves on the voyage”
(Corr., 60). Marguerite Bourgeoys is similarly fortified in her moments of
doubt by a sense of supernatural intervention. Reading between the lines
of her memoirs, one senses the immense fear and hesitation she must
have felt when Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, the first governor of
Montreal, announced that if she accepted his invitation she would be the
sole woman to accompany the 108 men he was taking with him to the
New World. Somewhat reassured by her confessor about the advisability
of setting out for “the ends of the earth” with this man she barely knows,
she still hesitates, until, she writes: “One morning, when I was completely
awake, [I saw] a tall woman dressed in a white serge dress, [who] said
distinctly to me: ‘Go, I will not abandon you’; and I knew that it was the
Blessed Virgin, although I didn’t see her face. This reassured me about the
voyage, gave me great courage, and I didn’t find anything difficult after
that” (MB, 27–8).
Marguerite’s description of her experiences travelling by coach in
1653 from Troyes to Paris and then on to Orléans and Nantes in prepa-
ration for embarcation, provides a vivid picture of the social disapproval
and dangers to which travelling women were subjected in mid-seven-
teenth-century France. Once again, it is necessary to “read between the
lines” to get a full sense of her courage, resourcefulness, and sense of
humour. She left Troyes, she writes, “without a cent and without a suit-
case, with only a small package that I could carry under my arm.” Not
until she was in the carriage did she announce to the uncle who had
agreed to accompany her to Paris that she was leaving for Canada; his
reaction is that she is joking. Upon arrival in Paris, she takes legal steps
to give up entitlement to her inheritance, and notes with relief the depar-
ture of her uncle: “I was freed of unpleasantness from that direction” (MB,
28). In Orléans, she is refused lodging and forced to remain in the carriage
while the male travellers sleep in the inn, all the while being subjected
to what she calls “objectionable” talk from the men. In another inn she
is the object of an attempt at rape: she barricades the door of her room
and sleeps fully dressed, only to discover on awakening that her room is
separated by only a curtain from “a pile of men sleeping on the floor after
a night of debauchery” (MB, 29). The final obstacle placed in her way is
an intervention from the provincial father of the Carmelite Order, whose
convent in Troyes had refused her admittance several years earlier. Now,
undoubtedly alerted by her family that she is to be stopped in her mad
venture, he tells her she will be welcomed by the Carmelites; in fact he
has written to de Maisonneuve to inform him that this is Marguerite’s
true vocation. Feeling intense pressure and guilt, she visits the Capuchin
chapel in Nantes where she finds the Blessed Sacrament exposed. “In an
instant,” she writes, “all my troubles were over. I received then a very great
strength and a strong certainty that I must go to Canada” (MB, 30).
ne W fr AnC e : the JOy fOund i n Suffe ri ng
While these women had dreamed of great and dramatic sacrifice, the
hardships of the day-to-day reality that awaited them in Canada must
have come as a surprise to them. Some of the details of this reality are cap-
tured in the diary of Mère de Saint-Bonaventure (Marie Forestier), quoted
in Juchereau’s Annales, which notes that, when their ship was delayed
after its arrival at Tadoussac in July 1639, the six nuns, the Ursuline patron,
Mme de la Peltrie, and six Jesuits prevailed upon the captain of a small
codfishing boat to find room for them aboard his vessel. “Nothing seemed
difficult to us as long as it brought us closer to our loveable place of hab-
itation,” writes Mère de Saint-Bonaventure: “So we got onto the boat and
found a place for ourselves on the upper deck, as the rest of the boat was
full of cod, which filled the entire boat with quite a bad odour. For several
days and nights we suffered a great deal. Lacking bread, we were obliged
to scrape up crumbs from the baggage hold, which contained more rat
droppings than biscuit; we picked through them to find bits that were
edible, and ate them with pieces of dried cod that were raw, as we had no
means of cooking them. We were also given a sort of plant, very hard, that
grew on the rocks beside the river. When one is very hungry, all of these
things taste good” (Juchereau, 17).
In Quebec, the Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin sleep for the first few
weeks on branches brought in from the woods, which turn out to be “so
full of caterpillars that we were covered in them” (Juchereau, 20). Their
first patients are some Algonquins infected with smallpox, and they use
up all their own linen, even the wimples and cuffs from their habits, to
dress the ulcers on their bodies. Nights are spent washing the bedding,
which the French women of the colony refuse to touch for fear of con-
tagion. Before the end of the first winter, all three nuns have fallen ill
from exhaustion. In what is certainly a prefeminist observation, Mère
de Saint-Bonaventure describes the state of the hospital, which has been
looked after by the Jesuits during the nuns’ absence, on the return of the
first of the nuns to get well: “She found a ménage d’homme [an example
of men’s housekeeping], that is, everything was filthy and in disorder: the
linens were thrown in all directions, rotten and spoiled, and everything
was so full of dirt that she had a terrible time trying to get things clean
again” (Juchereau, 24).
Having set out for New France with the goal of transforming it into a
more spiritual image of the France they had left behind, a place in which
the native peoples would be granted the “privilege” of being assimilated
into the fold of the Catholic religion and French culture, these women
Living and Writing for god • 24
encountered instead a radical otherness of climate, geography, and cul-

ture. Many of their accounts contain vivid descriptions of the extreme
cold of Canadian winters and tell of the new kinds of food to which they
gradually became accustomed. (The traditional French-Canadian dish
of fèves au lard obviously had its origins at this time, when pork and
beans were among the few staples available.) Writing to a close friend
in Tours at the end of her first year in New France, Marie de l’Incarna-
tion is enthusiastic about the fact that they have survived so well in spite
of their extreme poverty, strenuous living conditions, and the unfamiliar
food: “We spent the winter as sweetly as in France; and, although we were
crammed together in a tiny hole where there was no air, we weren’t sick
at all, and never have I felt so strong. If in France we only ate pork fat and
salted fish as we do here, we would be ill and we’d have no voice; [but] we
are very healthy and we sing better than you do in France. The air is excel-
lent; indeed, this is an earthly Paradise where crosses and thorns arrive
so lovingly that the more one is pierced, the more one’s heart is filled with
sweetness” (Corr., 109–10).
The account of the following winter contained in the Annales de
l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec reveals the brutal reality behind such an idea-
lized account of the living conditions of these nuns. More exposed than
the Ursulines because of their hospital work to the raging epidemic of
smallpox that was sweeping through the Algonquin community, two
of the tiny group of Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin are gravely ill and
coughing blood by the winter of 1641, and their only food is bread, pork,
peas, and a few plums and grapes, none of which the sick nuns can tole-
rate. The sisters spend fifty francs of their meagre savings on a “scrawny
calf that wasn’t worth two écus [the equivalent of three francs], but our
need for making broth was so desperate that we’d have paid even more
for it” (Juchereau, 31). A servant sent to the country to find eggs returns
at the end of the day with only one egg, by now frozen, with which the
sick nuns profess to be delighted. By March, Mère Jeanne de Sainte-Marie
(the nun who had been kidnapped in France) is dead at the age of twenty-
eight. Mère de Saint-Bonaventure writes of her: “One could say that she
experienced nothing but bitterness in Canada, and yet she expressed great
joy about the privilege of dying here. She had been here for less than eight
months; her weak constitution was unable to stand the rigour of the cli-
mate for even a year” (Juchereau, 32).
Marie Morin’s description of the conditions in which the Hospita-
lières de Saint-Joseph sisters lived is even more detailed. She too speaks
of their food – small quantities of wheat, pork, peas, beans, and salted eel,
with pumpkin for dessert – and concludes that “the love of penance and
holy poverty added seasoning to these foods and made them taste good”
(Morin, 102–3). Morin writes that “the cold of this country can only be
understood by those who have suffered from it.” For more than twenty-
eight years, she says, the Hospitalières lived in a house with more than
two hundred holes in it, with wind and snow filling not only their cells
but the stairway, the attic, and the chapel. The first act of the morning was
to take shovels and brooms and get rid of the snow blocking the doors
and windows. No food was free of the danger of freezing: bread had to be
roasted on the fire before each meal, water and wine placed on the table
for drinking would be frozen within fifteen minutes, and food served
hot would be cold and almost frozen by the time one had finished eating
(Morin, 104).
Only the mystic Marie de l’Incarnation writes of the spiritual dimen-
sions of Canadian nature. For her, the attraction of Canada was precisely
that it represented the space of “admirable nothingness” for which she had
always yearned. “It’s true that in Canada the senses do not sustain one; the
spirit detaches itself from nature in the pure crosses that are found here,”
she writes (Corr., 151). And elsewhere: “Did you know that hearts here
have quite different feelings than they do in France? Not sensual feelings,
as there are no objects here that flatter the senses; but completely spiri-
tual and divine feelings, for here God wants the heart stripped of all things
[…] We see […] here a sort of necessity of becoming a saint; either you
die, or you assent to it” (Corr., 122); “to truly live the Canadian vocation it
is necessary to die to everything; if the soul doesn’t force itself to do this,
God will bring it about and will mercilessly crush our nature until it is
reduced to this death […] It is impossible for me to express to you what it
costs one to reach this point […] But it must be reached, and one must not
envisage the possibility of living in this land of blessings except with a new
spirit” (Corr., 140–1).
In spite of (or perhaps because of) the hardships they endured, it
is clear that New France offered these women a space of freedom and
self-realization unavailable to them in seventeenth-century France.
Marguerite Bourgeoys would found an uncloistered institution open to
women of all social groups and financial means, devoted to teaching and
counselling the girls and women of the Montreal region, especially the
poor. And cloister, while it remained precious and essential for the other
orders, was necessarily relaxed somewhat in Canada. Recalling a time
during the Iroquois raids of 1644 when the Hospitalières de Saint-Augus-
tin sisters were forced to move out of their convent in Sillery and live for
a time in an abandoned house near Quebec, Mère de Saint-Bonaventure
reports that they recreated as much as possible the conditions of cloister,
but languished without the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in their

temporary chapel: “It is impossible to imagine how painful it is for nuns to
live in the state we were in, without cloister and deprived of all the sweet-
nesses that are part of regular convent life” (Juchereau, 50). All of these
nuns were forced to fight against the ecclesiastical authorities at various
points in the development of their communities, however, often in order
to convince them that their situation in Canada was different from that
of religious communities in France and required different rules. Marie
de l’Incarnation realized within a few years of her arrival that the Quebec
Ursulines needed their own constitution: “We need one that is specific to
this country, not only because we have our own rules, but because there
are things that cannot be dealt with in the French manner: the climate,
the food, and other circumstances are entirely different,” she wrote to her
son (Corr., 229). By 1647 they would have that constitution, which, among
other things, allowed all members of the order to speak briefly and show
affection to their native pupils, unlike non-teaching members of the com-
munity in France, who were allowed no contact with students.10 Many
years later, all of Marie’s legendary diplomatic skills would be required in
order to prevent Bishop Laval from modifying that constitution. “He has
given us eight months or a year to think about it,” she wrote to her supe-
rior in Tours in 1661. “But, my dear Mother, the affair is already thought
out and the resolution all made: we will not accept it unless at the extrem-
ity of obedience. We are not saying a word, however, so as not to make
matters worse; for we are dealing with a prelate who, being of very great
piety, once he is persuaded that the glory of God is at stake, will never
change his mind” (Corr., 653).
The Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, founded in 1634 in France as a non-
cloistered confrérie or lay association devoted to nursing, were forced to
accept clausura in 1659, the same year that three members of the order set
sail for Montreal. The three arrived in Montreal committed to cloister, but
not to wearing a religious habit or to taking solemn vows, both of which
were imposed on them in 1672 after a twelve-year battle with Bishop Laval
and Monseigneur de Queylus, the superior of the Sulpicians, who now
owned the properties of the entire island of Montreal. And the nuns of the
Hôtel-Dieu de Québec fought with Laval’s successor, Bishop Saint-Vallier,
for over a decade and were eventually forced to capitulate (in 1701) to his
insistence that they follow French practice and extend their apostolate
from the simple care of the sick to that of the poor and the marginalized.11
Certainly the fearful view of the corrupt “outside world” that many of
the nuns had held in France was transformed by the Canadian experi-
ence. All of the writers describe an atmosphere of fervour and devotion
that animated the entire society of New France, at least in the early years.
Juchereau mentions the pious widow of one of the governors, Mme Dai-
llebout, who decides not to return to France after her husband’s death in
1651 because, “belonging entirely to God, she judged that she would be
better off here, especially since at that time in New France one breathed
nothing but devotion” (Juchereau, 82). In her letters of the 1640s, Marie
de l’Incarnation constantly compares the atmosphere of the Canadian
mission to that of the early Christian Church. “We see in our primitive
Church, the zeal and the ardour of the early Church members who were
converted by the apostles,” she writes in 1640 (Corr., 104). A year later,
she refers to “our new Church; […] one sees in it a completely new spirit
which breathes a mysterious something of the divine that delights my
heart” (Corr., 139). The analogy with the early Church is present as well in
all of the other texts, and – even taking into account the tendency towards
idealization which characterizes most of them – it points to the existence
of an extraordinary sense of community among the early inhabitants of
New France. In 1659, according to Juchereau, “fervour was growing daily
among the Savages, and Our Lord was pouring his graces so abundantly
on Canada that all lived in a simplicity, a good faith, and a unity that was
very close to what we admired in the early Christians” (Juchereau, 104).
Marie Morin is even more glowing in her account of the early years in
Montreal. She describes a society united by the danger of the Iroquois
raids, living in an atmosphere of openness and conviviality, free of the
scorn for independent single women that characterized French society,
and grateful to the women who have come to offer medical services to
their community:
All of them lived as saints, in a piety and spirituality such as one

finds today only among the best nuns and priests. Those who hadn’t
heard Mass on a workday were regarded by the others almost
as excommunicated, unless they had reasons as strong as those
required today from those who miss Mass on Sunday. All the work-
ing men went to the first Mass of the day, held before daybreak in
the winter and at 4 a.m. in the summer […] and all the women went
to another, at 8 a.m. […] Nothing was locked in those days, neither
houses nor chests nor basements; everything was open and nothing
was ever stolen. Those who had enough goods helped those who
had less, without waiting to be asked […] When impatience had
made someone speak harshly to his neighbour or someone else, the
person would not go to bed without asking forgiveness on his knees.
And one never heard any mention of the sin of impurity, which was
considered with horror even by the least devout. In all, this dear
Montreal in its early days was an image of the primitive Church.
(Morin, 96)
Finally, the analogy with the early Church was central to Marguerite
Bourgeoys’s vision of the noncloistered order she was founding, for it rep-
resented a time when women were as active as men in the spreading of the
Gospel. Among her favourite images were those of “the travelling Virgin”
and of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. “The Blessed Virgin was
not cloistered, but she everywhere preserved an internal solitude, and she
never refused to be where charity or necessity required help,” she wrote
(MB, 82).
A different WAy O f W riti ng – A nd Seei ng
If there is a gender specificity in these writings, it is certainly linked to

the interiority of their view of the world. Composed in the closed spaces
of cloisters, convents, and hospitals and anchored in the concrete real-
ity of daily routines, they nonetheless embrace an infinite vastness, not
only in terms of the limitless ambitions and accomplishments of their
protagonists, but also because of the huge geographical spaces and the
decisive historical events they record (often with a “human” perspective
absent from other records). In all of them, matter and spirit are closely
intertwined, with external events presented as the results of a divine
providence which confers meaning on painful or chaotic experiences.
According to Ginette Michaud, the literary interest of Marie Morin’s
account of the founding of Montreal lies in its “mixture of styles […] the
constant movement between the descriptive and the mythic, the objective
and the lyrical, the historic and the marvellous in which the dividing line
between fiction and reality is blurred.”12 A similar observation could be
made of Marie de l’Incarnation’s long description of the Charlevoix earth-
quake of 1663, which affected all of the eastern part of the continent. In
it, the disorder caused by the earthquake is given spiritual significance by
signs, premonitions, and visions predicting that “God was ready to punish
the country for the sins committed in it” (Corr., 687–8). The account is full
of striking images which emphasize the chaos of the event and the terror it
inspired: the earth opening “as if to swallow us up,” church bells that begin
to ring by themselves, houses “shaken like trees in the wind,” the “terri-
fying rumble of carriages set adrift on paving stones and careening in all
directions” (Corr., 689). Thanks in part to the documentation available to
Marie through the Jesuit Relations, it is also a valuable historical record.
For example, she notes geological changes observed in several regions of

the colony, such as chasms emitting sulfuric vapours, new hills and rivers,
and the disappearance of entire forests: “But nothing astonished us more
than seeing the huge Saint Lawrence River, which never changes because
of its prodigious depth, take on the colour of sulfur and retain it for a
week” (Corr., 693–4).
To arrive at any precise conclusions regarding the gender specificity
of these texts, they would have to be read alongside the Jesuit Relations,
a comparison that would certainly reveal significant differences, partic-
ularly regarding relations with the native peoples.13 Although both the
Ursulines and the Augustinians came to Canada because of the Jesuit
influence and worked closely with the Jesuits after they had arrived,
their teaching and nursing duties (and the more sedentary role required
of them as women) led them to a different relationship with their native
charges than that of the Jesuit “soldiers of Christ.” Unlike the priests, who
often express disapproval of native ways and discouragement about the
possibility of converting them, the nuns typically exhibit respect, affec-
tion, and admiration for the exemplary Christianity of their converts.
Given the fact that their goal was to convert the native peoples to Chris-
tianity, it would be an anachronism to describe their attitude as “respect
for cultural difference,” and yet their openness to native habits and cul-
ture indicates a “relational” tendency similar to that observed in much
women’s writing.14 Marie de l’Incarnation frequently (and favourably)
compares her native charges to the French Catholics she has left behind.
“I have never seen any French girls as ardent to be instructed or to pray to
God as our seminarians,” she writes to Paul Le Jeune in 1640 (Corr., 93).
For her, the poverty and simplicity of the natives is far preferable to the
civilized ways of the French, and their superiority over the French in mat-
ters of the spirit is incontestable. To an Ursuline friend in Tours she writes:
“O my dear Sister! What a pleasure to find oneself with a large group of
Savage women and girls, whose poor clothing, which is only a bit of skin
or a piece of an old blanket, doesn’t smell as good as those of the Ladies
of France! But the candour and simplicity of their spirit is so delightful
that it can’t be described” (Corr., 108). And, to her former superior: “We
have here Savage dévots and dévotes, as you have polite ones in France: the
difference is that, while they are not as subtle or refined as some of yours,
they have a childlike honesty that clearly shows they are souls newly
reborn” (Corr., 139). Explaining her work to her son, she makes it clear
that the educative process is not aimed at “Frenchifying” the native girls:
“Are our Savages as perfect as I make them out to be? As for their customs,
they lack French politeness: I mean to say the ability to give compliments
and to act as the French do. We have not aimed at instilling such things in
them, but rather at instructing them well in the commandments of God
and the Church [and] in all the other religious activities” (Corr., 221).
In spite of the difficulty of the native languages, the ardent missionary
faith and real affection felt for their pupils and patients were powerful
motivations for the nuns to learn them. Mère de Saint-Bonaventure writes
of the joy experienced by the hospital sisters at being able to converse with
their Algonquin patients: “We were still learning their language, and our
diligence gave them pleasure; our habit of listening to them gave us the
facility to express ourselves; so that we were instructing them as mission-
aries” (Juchereau, 52). Marie de l’Incarnation admits that it is difficult for
a woman of her age to learn new languages (foreign words are like stones
rolling around in her mouth, she says), but she will master several of them
thanks to her strong motivation: “I confess that there are many thorns
on the path of learning a language so different from ours […] But believe
me, the desire to speak makes a big difference: I would like to let my heart
speak through my words to tell our dear converts what it feels about God’s
love” (Corr., 125). The difficulty of mastering these complex languages
offers a further chance to suffer for Christ and is thus transformed into
“divine sweetness” (Corr., 140). Small wonder, then, that the nuns per-
ceive the native communities as welcoming and docile, grateful, as Marie
de l’Incarnation says, that “for the love of their nation we left our country
and through pure charity we are dressing and feeding their daughters as if
they were our own” (Corr., 108).
Gradually, however, the nuns come to recognize the irreconcilable
cultural differences that block their project of large-scale conversions,
and begin to shift their focus to educating and caring for the French set-
tlers. The realities of Iroquois violence (the martyrdom of Isaac Jogues,
Jean de Brébeuf, and five other Jesuits, many of them close friends of the
Quebec nuns, in the 1640s as well as the terrifying Iroquois raids on the
French and the indigenous peoples of Trois-Rivières, Montreal, and the
Quebec area in subsequent years), and the death of many of the converted
natives by smallpox are early signs of what will be the ultimate failure of
the missionary project. Marie de l’Incarnation accepts the defeat of their
mission with sorrow but also with equanimity, fortified by her belief
that the Ursulines were also called to New France to ensure the spiritual
health of the French community there. She feels privileged to work with
the French as well as the natives, she writes in 1653, for “the Son of God
gave himself equally for the souls of both. Without the education we give
the older French girls, they would be worse than the Savages within six
months” (Corr., 507). Still, in the final years of her long life, it is her native
pupils that Marie thinks of as her greatest joy and satisfaction: “They are
the delights of our hearts, and because of them we find a sweetness in our
day-to-day work that we wouldn’t exchange for an Empire” (Corr., 903).
TAKIN G ROO T
Overall, these autobiographical accounts attest to the fact that for all these
women authentic selfhood (and even sainthood) was attained through a
configuration of self, alterity, and the divine made possible by the space
of New France. While they look back with affection on the sweetness
and ease of their lives in France, they refuse to exchange the challenging
spirituality of the Canadian space they have created for a return to such
comfort. In 1649, two of the Augustinian hospital nuns, exhausted by
months spent caring for the large numbers of Hurons who have taken ref-
uge in Quebec following the death of Brébeuf and his companions, decide
to return to France, and the judgment of them in the Annales suggests that
their fellow nuns see their departure as a weakness and even a betrayal
(Juchereau, 75–6). In Montreal, the Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, ignor-
ing the advice of the Sulpicians, who encourage them to return to France
after the death of their founder, Jérome le Royer de la Dauversière, in 1659,
decide, in spite of their extreme poverty, to “live and die in this dear coun-
try and land of Ville Marie, in the confidence that her divine providence
would provide for them” (Morin, 107). Marie de l’Incarnation often insists
on her attachment to the country, which she sees as the centre of her soul
and of her spiritual life: “It seems to me that nothing under heaven could
shake me or detach me from my centre, which is how I think of Canada”
(Corr., 569). In response to an Ursuline friend in Tours who has asked
whether she might return to France before she dies, she writes: “You are
right to believe that I want to die in this new Church: I assure you that
my heart is so attached to it that, unless God removes it, it will not let go
either in life or in death” (Corr., 734).
• • •
In a letter written less than two years before her death, Marie de l’Incar-
nation speaks of the rigours of the previous winter, the worst she has seen
since her arrival in the New World: “There was still ice in our garden in
June: all our beautiful fruit trees and grafts were dead. The whole coun-
try suffered the same devastation.” For her, the destruction brought about
by nature offers a possibility for mortification, and thus a reminder of
the reasons for which she left her native country: “Only the trees bearing
wild fruit were spared; in this way God, by depriving us of delicacies and
leaving us the necessities, wants us to remain in our mortification and do
without the sweetnesses we were looking forward to. We’re used to it after
thirty-one years in this country; we’ve had time to forget the sweetnesses
and delights of old France” (Corr., 877–8).
This image of nuns in a garden, grafting shoots to provide new beauty
in an austere climate and yet accepting with serenity the destruction of
their efforts by nature, strong in their faith and optimism and more aware
of the sufferings of others than of their own, captures the tone and mes-
sage of the writings of all of New France’s founding mothers. Unlike the
old country, with its sweetnesses and delights, New France has forced
these women to do without superfluous things and to direct their efforts
towards what they consider essential. In this sense, and thanks to their
own courage, perseverance, and hard work, the new country has proved
to be the “place for the spirit” they had dreamed of in France.
C h ap t e r 2
Wr i ti n g th e A n n ihi l a t i on of S el f :
M a r i e d e l’Incar na t i on
The founding paradox of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec is that

it begins with a work in which the author’s goal is the annihilation of the
self. This ideal, which is at the heart of the missionary entreprise in New
France, finds eloquent expression in the writings of the great explorer of
interiority Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation (1599–1672). Presented to gen-
erations of French Canadians as a model and canonized by the Church
in 2015, Marie de l’Incarnation remains an enigma for our modern sen-
sibilities. How can we understand or sympathize with a woman who
abandoned her only son when he was eleven years old in order to enter
the Ursuline convent in Tours, and who, for several years before that, sub-
jected her body to horrific mortifications? Although the self-hatred, the
passivity, and the burning eroticism of her mystical relationship with her
divine lover, all products of a seventeenth-century spirituality focussed on
denial of self, make Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiography an unsettling
read at times, the beauty of her writing and the power of her narrative
are compelling. Marie de l’Incarnation seeks the dissolution of her self in
divine alterity, but her strong personality asserts itself constantly, creating
an unresolved tension in the narrative between the divine and the human.
Despite her intimate relationship with the spiritual realm, Marie de
l’Incarnation is totally grounded in her body, as the name she chose for
herself in religion suggests. A passionate and intense woman, she expe-
rienced emotional upheavals so violent that they were “impossible to
describe.” When reproached by her confessor for her impetuosity in try-
ing to organize a group of nuns to leave for New France at a time when
no women had ventured there, she replied: “It is only the violent who
can storm heaven” (Corr., 46). And yet her writings and actions indi-
cate that she was also well balanced, confident, and solidly rooted in her
everyday life, including her life as a mother. “God never guided me by

a spirit of fear, but by one of love and confidence,” she wrote to her son
from New France near the end of her life (Corr., 826). Her two spiritual
autobiographies or “relations”1 (R 1633 and R 1654) and her voluminous
correspondence2 (Corr.), especially the many letters she exchanged with
her son throughout her long life, reveal the contradictions between these
two aspects of her character.
Marie identifies with her body and evokes it constantly: a body that is
in turn joyful, possessed, broken, or ready to explode from the pressure
of the immense love that inhabits it, but which remains the anchor of her
identity through each stage of her evolution. She lives in it instinctively,
expressing the joy she feels by singing, jumping, and even throwing her-
self to the ground to “exhale” the passion that has taken possession of her.
After entering the Ursulines she excels at concrete activities like sing-
ing and embroidery, both of which she takes with her to New France,
where they are still part of the tradition of the Ursuline order. “We are
most healthy and we sing better here than we did in France. The air is
excellent,” she writes in one of her first letters from New France (Corr.,
109–10). Twenty years later, when she is defending the Ursuline constitu-
tion against the powerful new bishop of Quebec François de Laval (also
canonized in 2015), it is partly their right to sing that she is fighting to pre-
serve. “He is afraid that singing will make us vain […] We no longer sing
at Mass because he says it distracts the priest,” she confides to her former
superior in Tours (Corr., 652–3).3 In the context of the dualistic Cathol-
icism of Marie’s era, the body was the enemy of the spirit, the seat of the
self which had to be disavowed and punished if one was to attain the
heights of spirituality. This is why, in the years of her great mystical expe-
riences, Marie mortifies her body cruelly, seeking to break the links with it
in order to dissolve into the divine.
This unresolved tension between the divine and the human (the spirit
and the body, the self and its annihilation) runs through the whole of
Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography and contributes to the
singularity of the author’s voice. Critic Alessandra Ferraro goes so far as
to suggest that Marie’s autobiography displays “a valorisation of self that is
incompatible with Christian belief,”4 making the work a remarkable prod-
uct of the period of transition in which spiritual writings were gradually
disappearing and autobiographies were beginning to emerge.5 Accord-
ing to Ferraro, the very act of writing one’s life, an obligation imposed
on many mystical women by their spiritual directors, is in contradiction
with the abnegation of self they were expected to exhibit in their writings:
Marie de l’incar nation • 35
“The mystic must write about herself and her intimate experience, but she
is not allowed to have a voice of her own […] All recognition is denied
to her, as it is God who is speaking through her writing.”6 Marie’s 1654
Relation displays this contradiction to the full, opening with the humble
affirmation that her text is solely an expression of the divine word,7 even
as her irrepressible personality asserts itself. According to Ferraro, this
strong presence of a self in contradiction with orthodox practice can be
explained by the fact that the Relation was written, not in obedience to her
spiritual director as were most women’s spiritual writings, but at the urg-
ing of the son she had left behind in France and to whom she felt the need
to justify herself: “An acting subject is substituted for a subject which is
acted upon. It is the tension, the combat, between these two subjects – the
first of whom must disappear before God’s voice and the second of whom
wants to tell her story in order to defend and justify herself to a man – that
the Relation puts before us.”8
However, an earlier autobiography by Marie de l’Incarnation, written
in 1633 at the command of her spiritual director, is equally marked by the
tension between the divine and the human, and is in some ways a more
moving document than the “official” autobiography of 1654, especially in
the parts where Marie describes abandoning her son when she entered
the convent in 1631, an act still fresh in her memory at the time of writ-
ing. This combat between two subjects – one passive and one active, one
drawn powerfully towards the divine presence and the other resisting the
attraction that seeks to swallow her up – is part of a complex network of
elements that make up the “incarnational” dimension of her narrative: the
importance accorded to bodily manifestations at each stage of the spiri-
tual evolution, the strength of character of the protagonist, her confident
sense of equality with her divine lover, displayed in what she herself calls
the “boldness” with which she addresses him and, finally, the down-to-
earth quality of many of her images and comparisons (the obstacles that
face Marie after her entry into the Ursulines are compared to “showers
of hail [which], if I tried to stop and argue them away […] returned with
even greater force the next time” (R 1633, 328); and in 1647, after a long
and difficult period of adaptation following her arrival in New France, her
sufferings are finally taken from her, “lifted off me like a piece of clothing
being removed” (R 1654, 308). While tracing the path towards annihila-
tion of self as Marie presents it in her autobiography, I will draw attention
to these elements which counteract the intended direction of the narra-
tive, demonstrating her human qualities and the physical groundedness
of her spirituality.
MArie And he r SOn
According to Elisja Schulte Van Kessel, female mystics experienced their

union with God in a more bodily way than their male counterparts.
“They lived their physical union with an incarnate God more frequently
and directly because they were more familiar with the body: with birth
and death, with food, physical care and consolation, with milk, with
blood and with tears.”9 Marie Guyart was certainly familiar with all these
things in the years of her great mystical experiences. Married at seventeen
to Claude Martin, a master silk manufacturer, she gave birth to her son
Claude two years later, in 1619, then faced the death of her husband and
the bankruptcy of his business the same year. Eleven years later, no longer
able to live with “her heart in the cloister and her body in the world” (R
1654, 104), she entered the Ursuline convent in Tours, confiding the care
of her son to her older sister.
For many who have only a vague familiarity with Marie de l’In-
carnation’s story, it is this image of the mother who abandoned her
eleven-year-old son and of the son who (according to his mother’s auto-
biography) came every day with his friends to pound on the convent
door shouting, “Give me back my mother!” that sticks in the mind and
makes Marie seem a perfect image of the “monstrous mother.” There is
no doubt that the young Claude’s continuing rebellion, her family’s dis-
approval (especially when she distanced herself even more definitively
from her son by sailing for New France in 1639), and Marie’s own lifelong
feelings of guilt make the relationship between her and her son a central
element not only in her life but in her mystical experience. Claude is, lit-
erally, her incarnation: the bodily and terrestrial part of herself that she
cannot, and will not, give up, although God seems to be calling her to do
so. Before entering the Ursulines she resists this call for several years, tell-
ing herself that the idea of leaving him is a temptation from the devil. “I
complained of it to God, telling him ‘Alas, my Beloved, take this thought
from me, I pray you […] I have a son I must take care of ’” (R 1633, 261–2).
Although they are not able to stay together, Marie and Claude will write
to each other for over thirty years, in letters that follow the rhythm of the
semiannual departure of ships between France and New France, letters
in which the very human emotions of anger, resentment, and guilt will
gradually give way to forgiveness and reconciliation. If it were not for the
insistence of Claude, who is constantly reproaching his mother for having
abandoned him and who demands of her in return an account of her spir-
itual experiences, Marie de l’Incarnation’s life and writings would almost
certainly be unknown to us today. For it was Claude Martin who, after his
mother’s death in 1672, assembled her numerous writings and published

them in Paris in 1677, under the title La Vie de la vénérable Mère Marie
de l’Incarnation, Première Supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle-France,
tirée de ses Lettres et de ses Écrits.10
MAternity: An indiSSOLubL e b Ond
By leaving her son, Marie de l’Incarnation broke with the restrictions

imposed on women by the maternal role in order to achieve her own sub-
jectivity: the possibility of living out the implications of the great passion
for God that had taken hold of her life. However, she never ceased loving
her son or attempting to explain to him all the contradictory aspects of the
choice she had made. Several times in their correspondence she describes
the separation from him as a veritable tearing apart of her body: “When I
left you, not yet twelve years old, I did so with strange convulsions that only
God was aware of. It was necessary to obey His divine will” (Corr., 130);
“And when I embarked for Canada […] it seemed to me that my bones
were coming out of their sockets, so painful was the feeling of abandon-
ing you” (Corr., 725); “Let me tell you once more how, by separating myself
from you, I was literally making myself die while still living […] Leaving
you, I felt as if my soul was being separated from my body with excessive
pain” (Corr., 836–7). And she never ceases giving him advice about how he,
too, can attain the great joy of a life dedicated to Christ. Writing to Claude,
now a Benedictine monk, in 1645, she expresses her desire that he should
die a martyr in terms that were surely influenced by her knowledge of Jesuit
sufferings at the hands of the Iroquois, but that, seen from the perspec-
tive of our present-day values, are almost unimaginable: “O my dear son, I
would be so consoled if I were to be told that you had lost your life for Jesus
Christ. If ever I found myself in the position of seeing that happen to you,
I can only pray that our divine Spouse would give me the courage to push
you back into the fire or under the hatchet if you were showing human
weakness, for I know that by so doing I would be offering you a great ser-
vice” (Corr., 270). Another letter, written the same day and addressed to
the subprioress of the Ursulines in Tours, reveals the logic of this dualis-
tic world view, in which it was necessary to crush earthly values in order
to allow those of the spirit to flourish. In it Marie expresses her great joy
on learning that her beloved niece has entered the Ursulines, but urges the
nun to impose mortifications on her: “Don’t fear to kill anything that is too
lively in her, for such a death will make her soul doubly alive” (Corr., 264).
Marie’s letters reveal that she never abandoned her motherly respon-
sibility for Claude. In the first letter she writes him from New France, one
senses her anger against this rebellious son who did not bother to con-
tact her before her departure and who continues to avoid embracing the
religious vocation she has always wanted for him: “I don’t want to act the
same way with you as you have done with me. Really! How could you
have let the ships depart without giving me the consolation of a word
from you? Others did contact me, otherwise I would have known noth-
ing about your whereabouts,” she reproaches him. “It’s time for you to
grow up and think about where your life is going. Others have helped you
through the years, now it’s time for you to take responsibility for yourself
[…] Give up your cowardice, my dear son, and face up to the fact that you
will gain nothing without an effort” (Corr., 115). As for Claude, even if he
did bend to his mother’s will and enter the Benedictines in 1641, one sus-
pects that the wound of the maternal abandonment never actually healed.
Up until his mother’s death in 1672, he will write to her of his anguish,
his lack of confidence, and the sexual temptations that sometimes tor-
ment him, seeking to receive twice a year, when the mail arrives from New
France, the advice and support that were denied to him in his youth.
Between the two, reconciliation will come through writing: not only
through their letters, but also through the spiritual autobiography that
Marie writes in 1654, finally giving in to her son’s request that she record
her mystical experiences. It is clear that Claude sees his mother’s writings
as a compensation for the suffering she has inflicted on him, just as she
sees his religious vocation as a justification for her act of abandoning him.
The moving letter she writes him in 1647 marks a turning point in their
relationship, for in it Marie promises to send Claude all her future spir-
itual writings and asks for his forgiveness. The fault, she claims, was not
hers, but that of a God who separates beings from their natural attach-
ments and who inflicted on both of them an almost intolerable suffering:
Your reproaches cause me pain and require a response […] Indeed,

you have a right to complain that I abandoned you. And I would
willingly complain as well, if I were allowed to do so, of the One who
came and brought a sword to the earth, creating strange and unnatu-
ral divisions. It is true that, while you were the one thing in the world
that my heart was attached to, He desired to separate us even while I
was still nursing you, and that in order to hold on to you I fought for
almost twelve years […] Finally I had to give in to the force of divine
love and suffer the unspeakable pain of being torn away from you.
But that has not stopped me from constantly judging myself the cru-
elest of mothers. I beg your forgiveness for this, my very dear son,
for I have been the cause of great suffering in your life. (Corr., 316)
Seven years later, in the letter that accompanies the 1654 autobiography,
she asks herself whether the extraordinary graces God has bestowed on
her were not given to her precisely because she made the ultimate sacri-
fice of giving up her son: “If there is any reason for these graces, the only
one I can think of is that I abandoned you for love of Him at a time when
you most needed me […] If there are other causes for his gifts to me, I am
unaware of them” (Corr., 526–7).
“there iS MO re thAn One AuthO r, there A re

tWO”: the SO n AS hiS MO the r’S edit Or
Like most other women’s writings of the period, Marie de l’Incarnation’s

autobiography was made accessible through the mediation of a male
voice: that of her son. Claude Martin’s Vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de
l’Incarnation is a combination of his own words and those of his mother,
structured around the Relation she sent him in 1654. It also includes his
own commentaries, long quotes from his mother’s letters, and fragments
of an earlier autobiography written in Tours in 1633, with extensive criti-
cal remarks from him about his own memories of the events recounted.
In his preface Claude rightly states: “There is more than one author, there
are two, and both were necessary to complete the work. This great ser-
vant of God worked on it herself and her son produced the final version,
attempting to serve simply as an echo responding to what she says.”11 The
echo is, however, much more than a simple reproduction of his mother’s
voice, especially in regard to the fragments of the 1633 autobiography,
available to the reader in the order chosen by Claude and accompanied by
his memories and comments.12 In a sense, the most interesting part of the
book is these two intertwined autobiographies, that of the mother and the
son, which cover the eleven years between Claude’s birth and his mother’s
entry into the Ursulines.
In assuming the role of editor of his mother’s writings, Claude Martin
is following a tradition that goes back to medieval times, in which author-
ship is solely a male preserve. Although his presentation of his mother’s
life and work is a gesture of love and homage, it is not exempt from the
prejudices of his age regarding women. “We see many illustrious women
and girls,” he writes, “but few of them are free of the weaknesses char-
acteristic of their sex. There was nothing ignoble or effeminate about
her.”13 Writing near the end of the classical age in France, he felt obliged
to “polish” the language of his mother, who had lived most of her adult
life in the New World: “As for her style, I admit it is not as polished as it
might be and lacks the delicacy of our contemporary works.”14 As well,
he sometimes modifies the text to make it conform to the Catholic ortho-

doxy of his time, in which mysticism had come to appear somewhat
suspect.15 Fortunately, thanks to the existence of a manuscript of Marie’s
Relation found in the Ursuline convent in Trois-Rivières and to the
magnificent critical edition produced by Dom Albert Jamet, we have as
accurate a version of Marie’s original manuscript as possible.
S tePS t OWA rd the di SSOLutiOn Of Se Lf:

THE RELATIONS Of 1 6 3 3 And 1 6 5 4
The 1654 Relation describes the stages in the author’s evolution towards
the intense mystical experiences of her twenties, her subsequent entry
into the cloister, and the call to travel to “the ends of the earth” in order
to convert the “Savages” of New France and bring them into the arms of
her divine lover. An earlier account of the mystical experiences, written
in 1633, gives a slightly different version of events. While the 1654 ver-
sion is at once a spiritual autobiography and a commentary on the nature
of mystical experience, that of 1633 obviously covers a shorter period of
Marie’s life and tends to be a more direct and detailed account of some
of the events of her young adult life, in particular her practices of mor-
tification, the anguish of having to leave her son, and her early years in
the cloister. I will use the 1654 autobiography as my primary source in
tracing the stages of the author’s evolution, and refer to the 1633 account
for details or emotions not covered in the later version. The 1654 version
(which I will refer to as “the autobiography”) is divided into thirteen long
chapters which the author calls “states of prayer.” The story advances in
spiral fashion, with each state of prayer corresponding to a further step
towards the “bottomless depth” of the self, where the ego dissolves into
infinite love. As in all autobiographies, there is a back and forth move-
ment between the inner and the outer world, but it is absolutely clear
that the author is primarily interested in recounting her spiritual expe-
rience and that outer events are of relevance only to provide a context for
this path towards God. The plan for the book which Marie wrote in 1653,
with chapter titles such as “How God leads the soul away from affection
for worldly things,” shows that God is without a doubt the primary pro-
tagonist of this work. But its interest as an autobiography resides in the
finesse with which Marie traces her response to the action of God in her
soul: the irresistible attraction, but also the confusion, the resistance, the
indignation, and even the anger she feels at this force which is carrying
her forward, often against her will.
A We LL- bALA n Ced yO ung gi r L
Often spiritual autobiographies begin with a conversion experience,

a dramatic change in the life of the author after a divine illumination or
intervention. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, much read in Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are the original model for this type
of work, but by Marie de l’Incarnation’s time there were many other exam-
ples: the soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, renouncing his life in the world and
consecrating himself to God after a serious wound in battle; the Carmel-
ite, Teresa of Avila, who describes her life as worldly and superficial up
until a long illness which leaves her temporarily paralyzed and during
which God reveals Himself to her; Blaise Pascal and the unforgettable
“night of fire” in which he becomes aware of God’s presence. But in Marie
Guyart’s case, the first overwhelming revelation of God’s presence exists
in perfect continuity with the innocent and happy child she has always
been. At the age of seven, she has a dream in which she gives herself to a
Christ figure as attractive as a fairytale hero.
All of Marie’s strong personality is captured in this dream which opens
her autobiography: her confidence, her frankness, her simplicity, and,
above all, her strong sense of being specially chosen and loved. Playing
with a friend in the schoolyard, she sees the sky open and Jesus approach-
ing, and cries out to her friend: “It’s Our Lord! It’s to me that he’s coming!”
As he comes closer she feels her heart “inflamed with his love” and
opens her arms to embrace him, while he, “the most beautiful of all the
children of men, with a face full of gentleness and an unspeakable attrac-
tion, embraced me and kissed me lovingly, and asked: ‘Do you wish to be
mine?’ I answered ‘Yes’” (R 1654, 46–7). All of Marie’s life as an adolescent
and a young woman will be a deepening of this pact she has concluded
and a gradual expansion of the immense love that inhabits her.
Even as a young child she had been attracted by the good, admiring
the humility of those she saw praying in church and loving God with sim-
plicity. After the dream this natural attraction to goodness continues, and
she becomes more and more conscious of being guided by an inner pres-
ence. Gradually she loses interest in the normal activities of girls her age,
preferring to “stay alone in the house and read books of piety,” and aston-
ishing those who had always seen her as a “carefree young girl” by her new
practice of going to Mass each day. “They didn’t see what I was experienc-
ing within, and I myself didn’t understand, except that I was following his
attraction” (R 1654, 49–50).
At sixteen, she will have a first sign that God is leading her in a direc-
tion that goes against her natural instincts, and she will not be pleased.
It happens in the confessional, where, in spite of knowing she has done

nothing wrong, she is overwhelmed by remorse: “Feelings of guilt assailed
me in confession, and I began to suspect that God wanted me to leave
behind my childish preoccupations […] But still I was convinced I hadn’t
done anything to offend Him, knowing that sin is impossible unless you
are conscious of doing wrong” (R 1654, 48). Another time, finding her-
self in the confessional with a priest who did nothing but question her
routinely, she finds she is incapable of revealing her inner thoughts and
experiences: “My heart closed up […] I simply answered his questions
and listened to his remonstrances, but was incapable of saying a word to
him” (R 1654, 53). She knows instinctively that what matters is her private
relationship with God, and that her inner peace depends on this relation-
ship and not on the rules and formalistic practices sometimes imposed on
her by the clergy.
The confidence and good sense displayed in these anecdotes give an
idea of the type of relationship Marie will have with the Church through-
out her life. While fully respecting clerical authority, she will always
display an independence of mind and a diplomatic skill that will allow her
to achieve her goals without openly contesting the Church’s authority (tal-
ents she will notably have to put to use after the arrival of the powerful
François de Laval as bishop of Quebec in 1659, twenty years after she and
the first Ursulines had arrived in the city). For her, as for all Catholics, the
mediation of the Church and the sacraments are an absolutely fundamen-
tal part of the relationship with God, and she is quite sincere when she
writes to her confessor, Dom Raymond, in 1635: “I admit to you, Reverend
Father, that my mistrust of my own instincts and weaknesses often makes
me apprehensive about what you will say to me. When I see myself this
way, I try to enter into the dispositions you are proposing to me, abandon-
ing myself to someone who can give me something of his own solidity of
spirit and calm the impetuosity of mine.” However, she adds, characteris-
tically: “But tell me, Reverend Father, do you really want me to hide what
I’m feeling in my deepest self?” (Corr., 45).
i nundAted by the inf i ni te: the e ArLy

M yStiCAL yeA rS
Although she dreams of a religious vocation, Marie does not resist her
mother’s insistence that she is too joyous a person for the life of the clois-
ter. And so, by the age of nineteen, she finds herself married, mother of a
six-month-old son, and soon a widow faced with the bankrupcy of her
husband’s business and a mysterious scandal associated with his personal
life. For the next two years she will live with her father, having confided
the care of her infant son to a wet nurse, and, shortly after that, she will
move with little Claude into the home of her sister and brother-in-law,
soon becoming an indispensable part of their marine transporting busi-
ness. (Her legendary business skills will later serve her well as the superior
and administrator of the Ursuline order in New France.)
During this period Marie will have her first experience of mystical rap-
ture, a “piercing of love […] so deep and inexorable that its pain could
not be erased, even if I had been able to throw myself into a fire to extin-
guish it” (R 1654, 69). Walking down the street on 24 March 1620, she is
suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation of being plunged into blood
(immediately recognized by her as the Precious Blood of Christ), and by
a new and acute awareness of sin: “In that moment, the eyes of my spirit
were opened and all the faults, sins, and imperfections I had committed
in my entire life became visible to me in precise detail” (R 1654, 68). This is
the event that she will forever afterward describe as her “conversion.” She
has literally become other, a new person: “I returned home, changed into
a new creature, so powerfully changed that I could no longer recognize
myself ” (R 1654, 71).
If Marie’s childhood dream of Christ’s coming to her had a fairytale
atmosphere, her life now, after this decisive experience, becomes that of
a young woman totally and exuberantly in love: “I had so much interior
vivacity that, when I was walking in the street, I would sometimes make
little jumps, and if anyone had seen me they’d have thought I was crazy
[…] I felt a lightness such as I had never known, doing everything for my
Beloved” (R 1633, 164, 167). And she adds, in an exquisite and concrete
formulation: “When he took away his graces and his incredibly strong
support, I was like a bird in the air without a branch to hold onto” (R 1633,
165). She no longer has any desire except to be “swallowed up in that great
sea of purity” which has engulfed her being, distracting her from the mul-
titude of duties and responsibilities of her everyday life: “Whether I was
cooking or cleaning, hearing the shouts of more than twenty vulgar and
ill-instructed servants or looking after all the details of my brother-in-
law’s business, none of that could distract me, and it seemed to me that the
great ocean had broken its bonds and washed over me. I was completely
submerged in it” (R 1633, 158). It is during this period, when the fullness of
her love is so great that it seems to want to explode the prison of her body,
that she discovers the outlet of writing: “When I had fully sung his praises,
I took up a pen and wrote of my passionate love in order to evaporate the
fervour of my spirit, for otherwise my nature could not have survived
such suffering” (R 1633, 165).
beCOM ing “Li Ke irO n in the hA ndS Of A

b L ACKSM ith ”: ASCeti CAL P rACti C e S (1 6 2 0 –1 6 2 5 )
When she comes to her senses after the Precious Blood experience, Marie
realizes she is in front of a church run by the Feuillant fathers, a reformed
religious order which had recently arrived in Tours. On going into the
church, she encounters a priest and asks him to hear her confession, and
he, realizing the extraordinary nature of what the young woman is telling
him, invites her to come back the next day and talk further. From then
on this priest, Dom François de Saint-Bernard, will be her spiritual direc-
tor, replaced a few years later by another Feuillant father, Dom Raymond
de Saint-Bernard. The Feuillants, known for their tendency to encourage
extreme practices of mortification, will thus be her directors throughout
the years of her great mystical experiences.
These are the years during which Marie will learn hatred of self, the
necessary complement of love of God according to the dualistic spiritu-
ality of her era: “I followed this inclination, which produced a greater and
greater hatred of myself, a neglect of my own interests and those of my
son, and a distaste for the world” (R 1654, 73–4). She makes her indiffer-
ence to female fashion clear by wearing unattractive clothes, a practice
which has the further advantage of discouraging any would-be suitors:
“I dressed ridiculously to convince everyone I had nothing more to do
with the world” (R 1654, 73). During the first year she takes a vow of chas-
tity, duly consecrated by Dom François, and begins to experiment with
mortifications of the type that pious young women of her acquaintance
talk about, whispering that you have to get a priest’s permission before
undertaking such practices: “My sight was mortified, my ears were closed
to the language of the world, I rarely spoke, able only to talk of God and
of virtue” (R 1654, 74). One cannot help wondering what must have been
the effect of such strange practices on little Claude, who later recalls these
years with the tone of admiration appropriate for a hagiography: “She
always had her eyes closed, even during times of recreation, except when
she had to work or needed them open for other reasons […] When she
walked in the streets, she always looked down and walked with a regular
step and a humble gravity that made everyone admire her. People in their
houses and shops interrupted their work to watch her go by […] raising
their eyes to heaven and saying adoringly: ‘It’s Madame Martin.’”16
Soon she advances to more rigorous practices, beating herself with
handfuls of nettles, which give her the sensation of being “in a pot of boil-
ing water.” Already she eats very little. According to Claude, “her life was a
continual fast [and] one wondered how she could stay alive and maintain
the strength needed to keep up the work she was doing all day and some-
times all night.”17 But now she begins to put absinth on her tongue before
eating meat, “not just to take away its taste, but to make the experience of
eating it disgusting and disagreable to the mouth.”18 She wears a hair shirt
and sleeps on wooden planks while wearing it, wounding her flesh. And
yet, she claims in her autobiography, she was never sick during these years
of mortification. On the contrary, “I felt a new strength and energy grow-
ing in me, allowing me to do more and more, and the Spirit kept pushing
me towards new mortifications […] I was insatiable and unable to find
enough instruments of mortification to satisfy my desire” (R 1633, 177).
Such practices were widespread in France in the early years of the sev-
enteenth century, especially among women, and their aim was not only
to imitate Christ’s suffering, but to abolish the self in its very foundation:
the body. According to Hélène Trépanier, the theme of self-annihilation
is omnipresent in the spiritual treatises of the times and, especially in the
case of women, gave rise to practices of mortification and the idealization
of physical suffering.19 For historian Barbara Diefendorf, the phenome-
non is related to the apocalyptic mentality of the years following the wars
of religion, a period during which women often desired to suffer as much
as their men had done during the terrible times of war. As well, as almost
all the paths open to men seeking to devote their lives to the imitation of
Christ were closed to them, women paradoxically triumphed over these
limitations by undertaking bodily self-punishment: “Behind the lure of
asceticism lay a complex tension between obedience and autonomy, abdi-
cation of will and self-control,” writes Diefendorf.20
During this turbulent period, Marie is conscious of being acted on by
an irresistible force which seems to go against her nature, a force that is
breaking her down “like iron in the hands of a blacksmith” (R 1633, 179),
particularly in her body, where her sense of self is lodged: “My poor body
was being led around like a dead person and suffered everything with-
out saying a word, for it was overcome by the Spirit of grace” (R 1654, 98).
Inspired by this inner force, she adds to her earlier vow of chastity those
of poverty and obedience: a poverty which involves the future of her son
more than her own interests, as she possesses nothing but what her sister
gives her, and an obedience to her spiritual director as well as to her sis-
ter and brother-in-law, “whom I obeyed as if they were my superiors, as a
child would obey its mother and father” (R 1654, 107).
These vows cost her dearly, however, and her ego resists and rebels
against them. Suddenly it seems to her that the horrific mortifications
she has been imposing on her body are senseless, especially as others
around her seem capable of living as good Christians without tormenting
themselves in such a fashion: “As far as my body was concerned, the devil
[…] led me to think that I was crazy to have made it suffer so much and
that there were many other Christians who kept God’s commandments
and would be saved without going through such things.” She suffers as
well from her vow of obedience, asking herself, “what good is served by
this submisssion to one’s director; […] it was far too difficult and […]
there was nothing wrong with following one’s own inclinations.” She hates
being treated like a servant in her sister’s home in spite of all the contribu-
tions she makes to it and to the family business. And the vow of poverty
weighs on her, as she is extremely worried about how it will affect her son’s
future. One day, assailed by all these torments, she confides to a friend:
“What good are all these things I’m doing? I can’t stand being imprisoned
like this any longer.” “Finally I was defeated in every possible way,” she
concludes. “I was like the poor beggars who go trembling from door to
door” (R 1654, 110–12).
But this is only the beginning of her trials. In order to empty herself
entirely of ego, she must lose the admiration of others as well as her own
self-esteem. “Pressed on by the Spirit,” she comes up with an idea that ter-
rifies her: that she must publicly display a list of her sins on the church
door, “and that her name must be attached to this list, so that everyone
would know how disloyal she had been to her God.” Fortunately for her,
her spiritual director, Dom Raymond, intervenes at this point, takes the
paper from her and burns it (R 1654, 98).
It would seem that the annihilation of the self is close to being realized,
and certainly Marie seems unable to see anything at this point but her own
indignity. As Hélène Trépanier points out, the goal of identifying with “être
rien,”21 “nothingness” was the key concept in early seventeenth-century
French spiritual treatises, and Marie would seem to have achieved it: “I
found myself so useless and empty […] that I recognized I was truly noth-
ing […] The truth of my nothingness was like a flame that I saw all around
me” (R 1633, 190–1). To inscribe this realization indelibly on her conscious-
ness, she contemplates the corpse of a dog on the road she takes to go to
daily Mass, reflecting on the putrification of all being and the nothingness
of all things: “I stopped every day to look at and contemplate this infection.
After a few days it was full of worms, and then, later, it faded into noth-
ing. The sight remained so firmly engraved in my mind that never, in the
years since then, have I felt a sense of pride without immediately humili-
ating myself before God, saying, ‘Ah! I am nothing more than a dead dog.’
[…] The vision of the dog gave me such a great hatred of myself that it has
always remained with me, so that I never look at myself without self-hatred
and without considering that I am my own greatest enemy” (R 1633, 191).
The closer Marie gets to God, the more her self-hatred increases: “I
could see nothing more worthy of scorn and rejection than myself ” (R
1654, 95). She is now ready to enter the state for which she has been “con-
stantly yearning,” in which she will at last be able to say that her God and
her deepest self are one and the same reality: “He is my good, he is my self,
he is my entire life” (R 1654, 101).
t O WA it And t O burn: the “betrO th AL”

Peri Od ( 1 6 2 5 –1 6 2 7 )
Marie is now twenty-five, and there are two activities that sustain her
during this chaotic period of her life: acts of charity and daily Commu-
nion. Aware of her generosity, the poor arrive in large numbers at her
sister’s door, knowing that she will find some way to help them. She cares
for the sick and bandages their wounds, until her sister and brother-in-
law, fearing contagion during these years when the plague was raging in
Tours and elsewhere, forbid her to indulge in such dangerous interven-
tions. She arouses the disapproval of her petit bourgeois milieu not only
by visiting a man in prison accused of a crime of which she is convinced
he is innocent, but also by mounting a public campaign in his favour and
making presentations to the judges in his court case, which lead to his
acquittal. It is as if the fullness of love that inhabits her is spilling out into
actions in the world.
Two great spiritual experiences take place in these years. On Pente-
cost Monday in 1625, while attending Mass in the chapel of the Feuillants,
she has an illumination in which she comes to understand the mystery of
the Trinity. A few months later, she has the physical sensation that “my
heart was being ravished and enchained to another heart, and that these
two hearts, although separate, were so closely entwined that they were
one” (R 1654, 114–15). From this moment on, her story is dominated by
the language of mystical love: langorous cries bemoaning the absence of
the Beloved and burning with desire for an object that is constantly out
of reach: “Although he was within me, it seemed that he was fleeing from
me and that he inhabited an inaccessible realm of light” (R 1654, 109). The
vocabulary here is inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs and originates as
well, according to Denis de Rougemont, in the same sensibility as that of
the medieval courtly love tradition: “The soul suffers separation and rejec-
tion even at the height of its ardour.”22 As well, the romances which were
popular reading material for young girls and women and which Marie,
like Teresa of Avila, had at least briefly indulged in before turning to more
pious readings, may have influenced her experience of union with the
divine. She experiences her love as physical pain, especially in the heart,
so consumed by the flames of love that she must cry aloud in order to seek
consolation: “The heart seems extraordinarily large and seems to contain
a fire that would erupt if the heart broke […] I shut myself up in an out-of-
the-way place and lie down on the ground to stifle my sobs” (R 1654, 113).
This is the stage in the path towards mystical union that is sometimes
referred to as “betrothal.” The love of Christ has replaced obedience to
God the Father, setting the stage for a new reciprocity between the two
partners. It is the state of “pure Love,” in which, according to the femi-
nist theorist Françoise Collin, “the Other doesn’t give orders; he is more
the Son than the Father.”23 Marie understands this well and explains it to
Dom Raymond in a letter (probably written in 1626) which displays an
enormous amount of confidence for a twenty-six-year-old woman writ-
ing to her aged spiritual director. As she explains to him, the respect for
God’s majesty has now been replaced by a true and loving exchange with
the Son, who is as much her captive as she is his: “But love […] charmed
my soul to such an extent that it forgot about respect and majesty [….]
Inflamed with love, it could see only love. It could see only the Word, the
object of its passion, which delighted and captivated the heart […] She
[the soul] was the captive of this love, but love too [that is, the Spouse] was
equally her captive” (Corr., 3).
Marie de l’Incarnation’s strong individuality is particularly notable in
the language she uses to address her divine lover during this period. Often
she uses the familiar “tu” rather than the more formal “vous,” as in the fol-
lowing passage, where she reproaches him for all the pain he is causing
her: “Is what you want for me that I should die, my Love? […] I no lon-
ger know what I am saying or doing, I am so lost to myself, and you are
the cause. Ah! I ask you not for treasures or riches, but only that I should
be allowed to die for love” (R 1633, 212, 215). She continues her mortifica-
tions, asking her divine lover to give her strength to punish herself: “And
he helped me so greatly that my blows tore at my body; then I put on a
hair shirt so I would feel the wounds even more strongly” (R 1654, 109).
According to psychoanalyst Catherine Millot, such extreme practices
play an indispensable role in the dissolution of self sought by the mystics:
“The mystical transformation is not achieved without cost. It involves the
abolition of everything in us that tends towards closure: the ego and all
its attributes […] This is perhaps what explains the immense appetite for
suffering that suddenly awakens, as if suffering will allow us to burn even
more strongly […] The aim is to reconstitute the self in a new way, making
it totally open […] Asceticism seeks to make us coincide with the abyss
that we are in God.”24
Now fully open, the self seeks only dissolution in the Other. Marie’s
language becomes more and more centred on love, and her images more
oceanic, evoking a “labyrinth of love in which one is intoxicated and
blessedly enchanted” (R 1633, 210), an “ocean of love which swallows up
its chosen ones” (R 1633, 210), and an “abyss without a bottom or shores”
(R 1633, 234). Ready to throw herself into this abyss, she awaits with impa-
tience the moment of complete union: “Content, but not yet satisfied […]
she aspires to disappear into this abyss and to be so lost in it that only her
Beloved will be visible, for, through his love, he will have transformed her
into himself ” (R 1654, 125).
VOUS ÊTES MON MOI , “ yO u A re My S eLf” :

the PA r AdOX O f MySti C AL uniO n
In the seventh of her thirteen chapters (and thus in the precise centre of
her autobiography), Marie de l’Incarnation describes her accession to the
state of “mystical marriage.” This is the moment in which the self dissolves
into the infinite, and yet it is a reciprocal union, beautifully described in
Marie’s ecstatic words to her divine lover: “You are my self, you are my
very own” (R 1654, 142). Yet, even at this stage, one is struck in Marie’s
account by a paradoxical insistence on her own individuality: her sense
of the equality of her relationship with her Beloved and her resistance
to being torn away from her earthly moorings. The pages in which she
describes her mystical union with Christ are among the most erotic in all
of Quebec literature, as passionate and even more intimate in the telling
than Teresa of Avila’s famous accounts of her own mystical experiences.
Was the fact that Marie had already had sexual experience in marriage a
factor in her ability to live and to write about this passion? There is no way
of knowing. But the familiarity of the language with which she adresses
her divine lover, often reproaching him or arguing with him when not
expressing her undying passion, makes her voice unique in the literature
of mysticism: more concrete and down-to-earth than others, and more
insistent on the claims of the body and the earth to coexist with the divine
rather than being simply absorbed by it.
Marie attains the heights of mystical experience in the spring of 1627, at
the age of twenty-seven: “This adorable Person took hold of my soul, and,
embracing it with an inexplicable love, united it to him and took me as his
spouse” (R 1654, 138). The fusion is so total that the self is not only pene-
trated by the lover but transformed into him, in an erotic caress of infinite
tenderness: “It was through divine touches and penetrations of him into
me and, in an admirable manner of reciprocal return, of me into him. No
longer myself, I became him in an intimate and loving union, in such a

way that, lost to myself, I could no longer see who I was, having become
him by participation” (R 1654, 138–9).
Now bathed in the happiness of a being who no longer has any desire,
for “she possesses the One she loves” (R 1654, 141), Marie redoubles her
acts of charity and calls together her brother-in-law’s servants to talk to
them about God, treating them like naughty children in somewhat the
same way as she will later treat her beloved native girls in New France: “I
corrected them frankly, in such a way that these poor people became as
submissive to me as children. When some of them went to bed without
saying their prayers, I made them get up again” (R 1654, 142). She stands
up for their rights to her brother-in-law when they are dissatisfied with
their working conditions, cares for them when they are ill, cleans them
and makes their beds, recalling with humour that, during those weeks and
months, her sister’s house was “like a hospital in which I was the nurse”
(R 1654, 143). She lives in a state of perfect beatitude which she describes
in a letter to her confessor as “like a Heaven, in which [the soul] enjoys
God, [in] a concert and harmony which can only be tasted and heard by
those who have had this experience.” This state, she explains, in spite of its
appearance of sensuality, has nothing to do with the realm of the senses:
“He makes the senses die, and, recalling the soul into union with him,
absorbs it in pleasures and charms which surpass anything the human
mind can imagine” (Corr., 4).
This is the moment of mystical marriage, in which the self disappears
totally into the Other, and yet, paradoxically, increases in strength due
to the infused love that now fuels and directs it: “She embraces him and
speaks to him mouth to mouth, saying, ‘You are my self, you are my very
own’” (R 1654, 141–2). Marie has now achieved the annihilation of self
she has constantly sought and to which she will forever remain faithful.
The eroticism of the union with the Beloved is marked both by extreme
gentleness and by violence: “She is completely possessed and penetrated
by him. His love and caresses consume her and make her expire in him,
suffering the gentlest of deaths, but these deaths are the very essence of
sweetness” (R 1654, 141). And yet, at other times, the caresses are so vio-
lent that she admits, in a letter to Dom Raymond that, “I could probably
talk to you about it, but I can’t bring myself to write it down.” In the same
letter, she does, however, attempt to describe her experience: “I was com-
pletely outside myself and it seemed to me that my very chaste Spouse
was taking pleasure in overwhelming me and in adding new flames
to the ardour that already consumed me, even as he was leading me to
speak […] more and more boldly of my love for him.” The intensity of
the experience was so great, she writes, that it did violence to nature: “He
revealed himself so powerfully to my spirit and consumed me so totally
[…] that my soul seemed to want to break the links that attached it to
nature” (Corr., 12).
Marie’s account suggests, however, that she is not willing to break her
links with nature: on the contrary, she is determined to remain herself
even as she lives this love to the fullest. “The divine Spirit, jealously want-
ing to possess her totally, wrenched her away from her self ” (R 1654, 147),
she writes. She resents being torn away from her work and her respon-
sibilities in the world and has trouble concentrating on what people are
saying to her, to the point that her brother-in-law begins to tease her
about being so distracted. When she tries to sleep and is awakened by the
words of love she hears in the depths of her soul, “I prayed with confi-
dence to my Beloved One, asking him to let me sleep, since I needed the
rest” (R 1633, 228). If she tries to read, he distracts her to the point where
she gets a headache, and yet, she recalls: “What I was reading was beau-
tiful. If I had had my way, I’d have wanted to continue reflecting on it” (R
1654, 145). She can no longer even concentrate on her prayers: “As soon as
I started my rosary, when I heard the words of the prayers, my spirit was
carried away towards God” (R 1654, 146). If she is alone in her brother-
in-law’s country house, she finds some comfort in singing the words of
her prayers or looking at the landscape, or even in running to escape from
the “plenitude” which is torturing her body: “I would run in order to dis-
tract myself, but my body would not let me go. Without thinking, I would
run into the woods or the vineyards like a madwoman, and afterwards,
coming back to my senses, I would fall to the ground, beaten down by the
Spirit” (R 1654, 148). And always, she is afraid that people will notice: “I
went everywhere without a candle, trying to keep hidden and silent. The
basement, the attics, the courtyard, and the stable were the places I hid. At
night, I put myself in danger of being hurt. I was blind to everything. As
long as I could find a place to hide, I would be satisfied” (R 1654, 149–50).
It is in the moments of resistance to this overwhelming of her self that
Marie’s vocabulary takes on its greatest boldness and originality. “Oh, my
Love! I pray you, give me some time to think about what I must do for
others, and afterwards I will caress you” (R 1633, 221). At times, she com-
plains to him as if to a too ardent lover who does not realize how tired
she is or does not respect her autonomy: “Oh my Love, I can’t stand it any
longer! Leave me alone for a while, my Beloved One!” (R 1654, 143); “My
Beloved, let me finish this piece of work and then I will devote all my time
to embracing you” (R 1654, 145). “In my prayers and in the streets, no mat-
ter where I was, I was dying of love and yet I was enjoying the fullness of
love […] I don’t know how to express it. One suffers, one languishes, one
enjoys” (R 1633, 232–3), she writes. “But, no matter how great the pain is,
one doesn’t want to be delivered from it, for it is so charming that it seems
that the heart is the target into which the Beloved is shooting his arrows
and that he wants to pierce in every direction” (R 1633, 238).
This is l’amour fou, a love so overwhelming that it can only be
accompanied by a certain amount of agressivity against the one who
so imprisons the self. “But he is taking pleasure in making me suffer so
much and the suffering soul necessarily wants to inflict similar pain on
her Beloved” (R 1633, 233). These moments of combined adoration and
aggressivity are the most violently erotic in Marie’s account, with the
relationship between the two lovers resembling a game of reciprocal
love and vengeance: “She cries: O my Love, you have taken pleasure in
inflicting pain on me; now I must have my revenge by causing you simi-
lar wounds […] Then, it seemed to me that thunderbolts leaped from my
heart towards the Beloved, and wounded him. After that the soul, full of
languishing desire, collapses onto the breast of the lover and expires in
ecstasy” (R 1654, 148–9).
b e C OM ing An urS uLine : fALLing “frOM A high

MO untA in int O A n A b ySS O f MiSe ry”
After this period of great ecstasy, Marie is so physically exhausted that she
falls ill. Having reached what is often referred to as “the end of her mystical
itinerary,” she enters into a state of permanent union with God which will
sustain her for the rest of her life. She has now penetrated to the deepest
level of self and of integration with the divine, and lives in a state of sim-
plicity and perpetual praise: “Since then my soul has remained in its centre
which is God, and this centre is in the soul, where it is beyond all senti-
ment. It is such a simple and delicate thing it cannot be expressed. One can
speak about all things, read, write, work, and do anything one wants, and
yet […] the soul never ceases being united with God” (R 1633, 240).
The need to enter the cloister now becomes more and more pressing.
Marie had resisted it for several years, telling God she had a son who
needed her. But now Claude is almost twelve years old, and, she writes,
“an interior voice was haunting me, telling me that it was time and I must
hurry, that there was nothing further for me to do in the world” (R 1654,
158). A distressing event which takes place two weeks before the day
agreed on for her entry into the Ursulines shows, however, how attached
she remains to the things of the world. Her son runs away, and Marie
experiences the overwhelming agony of a mother who has lost her child:
“I was sure he had drowned or been taken away by some wandering man
[…] I sent several people into the country to search for him, but in vain.
Oh God! Never would I have believed that the pain of the loss of a child
could be so terrible for a mother. I had seen him ill almost to the point of
death, and then I had willingly given him up to Our Lord, but to lose him
in this way was beyond my understanding.” Even the inner peace she con-
tinues to experience in her relationship with God does nothing to counter
“the overwhelming sadness of such a loss […] of being deprived of the
thing I loved most” (R 1633, 276–7). This drama increases the already con-
siderable criticism circulating in Marie’s milieu about her plan to leave her
child, but after three days the young boy returns home and, on 25 January
1631, Marie finally enters the cloister. At the moment of bidding her son
goodbye she laughs, as if to send him courage, but her description of the
moment in the Relation written two years later shows the extent to which
she lived her last day in the world preoccupied by her son’s pain: “As I left
our home to enter God’s house, the child came with me, all resigned. He
didn’t dare show me his affliction, but I could see the tears flowing from
his eyes […] He aroused such a great compassion in me that it seemed
to me that my soul was being ripped from me; but God was dearer to me
than all that. Leaving him in God’s hands, I said goodbye and laughed as I
did so. Then, receiving the blessing of my confessor, I threw myself at the
feet of the Mother Superior” (R 1633, 284–5).
As in each of the earlier stages, Marie has found her direction by lis-
tening to her inner voice, has conquered her doubts and triumphed over
the obstacles in her path. But yet again she will learn that it is not she,
but God, who is in charge, and that her journey towards annihilation of
self is far from having ended. In the 1654 autobiography, she recalls the
years of her noviciate as joyful ones, during which she discovered that
she possessed an instinctive understanding of Holy Scripture and adored
singing in the choir of novices. “Singing soothed my soul and allowed it
to breathe, as well as touching the senses […] so that I would sometimes
jump or clap my hands to get others involved in singing the praises of
such a great God” (R 1654, 174).
However, in the 1633 version, much closer in time to the events
recounted, the first three years of Marie’s noviciate are presented as a time
of anguish and depression, during which she is faced with a reality far dif-
ferent than the illusions she had had about herself and about convent life.
From the moment of her arrival, disoriented by the loss of the structure
of her previous life, she is overwhelmed by a sense of “no longer having
any willpower or self-control” (R 1633, 293). Claude and his noisy friends
come regularly to the convent door, and her son’s desolate cry, “Give me
back my mother!,” intensifies her feelings of guilt and makes her fear she
will be sent away from the convent. She hears of gossip circulating among
the other novices “that I was a cruel and heartless mother who had aban-
doned my son for my own self-satisfaction, [and that] I would soon be
dismissed from the community, as the others were not willing to put up
with all the noise” (R 1633, 297).
A week before taking the veil, Marie has a vision foretelling even
greater trials ahead: “I still had engraved in my mind and heart the con-
sciousness of being nothing in face of the great All […] My soul could
see itself in this great All as if in a very clear mirror, where it saw a reflec-
tion of all its defects” (R 1633, 308, 312). The vision marks the beginning
of a period of intense moral isolation and self-doubt that will last for
almost three years, during which she will be obsessed by her imperfec-
tions, convinced that the other sisters hate her, tempted by things that had
no interest for her when she was in the world, and unable to remember
the content of the prayers and readings required for the young novices.
Once, she is even tempted by suicide: “When I was close to a window, I
was tempted to throw myself through it to the ground. The thought was
so horrifying that I withdrew even further into myself ” (R 1633, 321).
Faced with God’s silence, she begins to doubt his existence: “I convinced
myself that it was madness to believe there was a God, that everything
that was said about him was a fantasy [and] that all the graces I thought
I had received were pure madness on my part […] It was a temptation to
despair, the greatest I have ever known” (R 1633, 337–8). The memory of
the heights from which she has fallen makes her distress all the greater:
“To see oneself in such a wretched state and so far from what one has
known in the past is more humiliating than I can say” (R 1633, 322).
Many of these feelings – lack of confidence, difficulty in communi-
cating with others, loss of memory, a sense of emptiness – correspond
to what today are considered symptoms of depression, and there are
certainly events in Marie’s life during this period sufficiently wrenching
to have plunged her into such a state. Six months after her entry into the
cloister, her father dies, followed by the death of her brother-in-law, Paul
Buisson, six months later. Her son’s conduct becomes more and more
problematic, and Marie blames herself for it. Her sense of isolation is
doubtlessly exacerbated by the fact that the oldest of the other novices is
only sixteen, and that these naïve young girls tend to chatter and gossip
about the scandalous fact that, unlike them, Marie has known marriage
and motherhood. A final blow is the departure of her beloved spiritual
director, Dom Raymond, and his replacement by a cold, condescending
priest who makes fun of her spiritual experiences and intimidates her to
the point that she hardly dares open her mouth in his presence. While all
of these factors provide a psychological explanation for Marie’s distress,
from the perspective of her 1633 narrative each of them is a step on the
painful journey towards the realization of her own nothingness.
The ups and downs of Marie’s life during this period are numerous and
exhausting: she lives the day of her profession of vows in the spring of 1633
“plunged in an ocean of love” (R 1633, 330), only to find herself a week later
back in “the abyss of my crosses” (R 1633, 332). Like all who suffer from
depression, she is convinced that nothing will change and that no one can
help her. Gradually, however, she begins to sense that the humiliations she
is experiencing are part of a divine plan: “A powerful instinct told me to
continue seeking self-abasement, to sink to the bottom of this feeling of
nothingness and accept being forgotten by all” (R 1633, 332–3).
With the arrival of a new spiritual director, the Jesuit Georges de la
Haye, Marie finds once again a person in whom she can confide, and it
is under his direction that she begins to write the text now known as the
Relation of 1633.25 However, her rebelliousness remains strong even as she
is writing it. Not only does she threaten to stop working on it and to burn
the pages already written (R 1633, 338), but she begins to hate her formerly
beloved superior, imagining her guilty of various crimes. Only gradually
does she realize that God is leading her towards detachment from this
woman to whom she was extraordinarily close, “desiring that I should be
attached only to him” (R 1633, 339). The difficult period of apprenticeship
is drawing to a close. One evening, while walking in the convent garden,
Marie asks God’s pardon and is overwhelmed by a sense of peace: “In the
same moment, all my temptations, crosses and inner pain evaporated, as
if I had never known them, and I was filled with a great sense of peace” (R
1633, 341).
Through the three years of her noviciate, Marie has evolved from being
an exalted and tormented young woman into a true religious. No longer
does she spend her time in the horrific mortifications she inflicted upon
herself in her twenties, and, when she speaks of God, it is now more often
in terms of “contentment” than of ecstasy. The heights and depths of her
emotional life have been transformed into “a simple attention to God”
which provides her with “nourishment for all things” (R 1633, 345). Her own
conclusion about these years is that she has now learned the necessity of
suffering if one is to achieve “interior purity.” In fact, she reflects, if she were
obliged to choose between the ecstasies of her former life and the crosses
she has suffered, “I would willingly take all my crosses” (R 1633, 342).
t OWA rd S ne W frAnC e
Although each of Marie’s chapters (or “states of prayer”) ends in a state

of serenity, that fact does not exclude the possibility of further change.
Around Christmas 1633, the young Ursuline has a dream which she does
not understand, but which foretells her apostolic vocation in Canada. It
will take her five years of struggle with various authorities – including the
most intimidating of all, God the Father, whom she will confront with her
usual boldness – before she will succeed in embarking for the New World.
Once again, just as, six years earlier, she had felt “[her] heart in the cloister
and [her] body in the world” (R 1654, 104), she describes a feeling of dis-
location between body and spirit, saying of these years: “My body was in
our monastery but my spirit, linked to the Spirit of Jesus, could not bear to
be enclosed” (R 1654, 198).
In her dream, Marie sees herself in the company of an unknown
woman with whom she is walking on a road strewn with obstacles. They
arrive at a delightful place “open to the sky […] and full of a silence that
contributed to its beauty” (R 1654, 190). In the distance they see a small
church and, seated on it, the Blessed Virgin holding the Child Jesus and
gazing at “a large and vast country, full of mountains, valleys, and thick
fog,” a country “as terrifying as it was desolate.” Letting go of her com-
panion’s hand, Marie runs to the Virgin, who seems to be speaking to
her child “of this country and of me, saying that she had a plan for me” (R
1654, 193). The Virgin then turns towards Marie and kisses her three times,
while the companion observes the scene from a distance.
One is struck here by the resemblance to the childhood dream with
which Marie opens her 1654 autobiography. Once again she is with a com-
panion, and once again she senses that it is she, and not her companion,
who is being singled out for special graces: “It seemed to me that this lit-
tle girl had some imperfection and that, even though she was a good girl,
he had chosen me rather than her” (R 1654, 46), she writes of the earlier
dream. Did Marie perhaps have a tendency to see others as rivals? If so,
such competitiveness could explain the hostility of other nuns mentioned
in the 1633 account of her noviciate years, and, in the later text, in the
description of her early years in New France. Certainly the fact of seeing
herself as the preferred one indicates her unshakable conviction that she
has an extraordinary relationship with God, a conviction that gives her
the courage to triumph over all obstacles.
The 1633 dream marks the first significant reference to the Virgin
Mary in Marie de l’Incarnation’s writings, and it is perhaps worth not-
ing that the Virgin appears “as she was at the age when she was nursing
the adorable child Jesus” (R 1654, 193). As she nears the end of her painful
years in the noviciate and comes close to accepting the separation from
her son, Marie’s unconscious is perhaps suggesting the possibility of a new
state of spiritual maternity for her. Indeed, the images she uses to describe
her Canadian mission are often ones that suggest maternity. “I ardently
love all my little Savages, and I have the feeling of carrying them in my
heart,” she writes to Dom Raymond shortly after her arrival in Quebec
(Corr., 24).
Filled with the apostolic spirit, Marie now dreams only of spreading
the love of Christ throughout the world: “The Spirit carried my mind
to India, to Japan, to America, to the East, and the West, to all parts of
Canada and the Hurons, and to every part of the inhabitable earth where
there were souls I imagined belonging to Jesus Christ” (R 1654, 198). She
becomes jealous, even enraged, when – in another maternal image –
she imagines these souls in the hands of the devil: “I couldn’t bear it any
longer, I kissed all these poor souls and held them to my breast” (R 1654,
198). Although she claims not to have heard of Canada at the time of her
dream, she will hear of it more and more in the following years, thanks
to her links to the Jesuits. Her unconscious will therefore be open to wel-
coming the words of God that come to her in an ecstasy in 1635: “It was
Canada that I showed you; you must go there and make a house for Jesus
and Mary” (R 1654, 203). From then on, the obsession with Canada will
not leave her: “I still travelled in spirit throughout the world, but the parts
of Canada were my resting place and my country” (R 1654, 204).
In the numerous letters Marie sends to people of influence from 1634
to 1636, seeking support for her “mad” idea of founding an Ursuline con-
vent in New France, one is struck by the frequent use of self-deprecating
terms (“lowliness,” “imbecility,” “indignity”) related to her sex. Consumed
by an apostolic fire which is driving her to transgress the gender boundar-
ies of her time, she knows she must carefully choose language that will not
provoke the opposition of those on whom she relies to make her venture
possible, even as she hides her plans from others who would be scandal-
ized by the idea of a cloistered nun daring to venture out into the world:
“I didn’t dare speak of it to anyone […] as it was such an extraordinary
enterprise, in fact an unprecedented one, [and] far from what was seen
as appropriate for me” (R 1654, 205). It is impossible to tell whether the
self-deprecating terms related to being a woman are simply a rhetorical
strategy or whether Marie, like other women of her time, has internalized
the misogynistic attitudes of her milieu. “Pardon me, my dear Father, if
the violent instinct which is driving me forward is making me say things
I am even ashamed of thinking, given my lowliness,” she writes to Dom
Raymond. “When I was doing my spiritual exercises, I was quite ashamed

to confront my deepest feelings, which were not at all appropriate for a
person of my sex and situation in life” (Corr., 26–7). Later, she writes to
him: “It is possible that our dear Jesus seeks to take glory from things that
are lowly, vile, contemptible, and deserving of scorn, in other words, from
us poor nuns” (Corr., 40).
Finally Marie realizes that her project is in the hands of God, and
the moment of abandoning herself to his will is one of mystical ecstasy:
“This adorable Majesty cast his gaze on me, letting me know that I had
desired to subjugate his will to my own, but that, through love, he desired
to subjugate mine […] And then my soul was transported by a divine
agony. Barely breathing, it confessed itself conquered, saying and signify-
ing by its breaths: ‘Ah! My Love! O my great God! I desire nothing, I can
desire nothing. You have ravished my will!’” (R 1654, 212–13). Following
this moment, she enters into a state of serenity which lasts a year, until
she feels God telling her that the time for action has come. She reveals
her secret plan to Jesuit friends with links to the Canadian mission and
through them comes into contact with Madeleine de la Peltrie, a rich
woman seeking to finance a group of nuns willing to go to New France.
When the two women meet, in January 1639, Marie immediately recog-
nizes Mme de la Peltrie as the companion of her 1633 dream. Four weeks
later Marie and another sister leave Tours for Paris, where they join Mme
de la Peltrie and two other Ursulines who will accompany them on the
journey to New France.
Two visions Marie has during the days preceding her departure reveal
to her that the adventure in Canada will be the final step in her journey
towards the annihilation of self. In the first, she sees an immense building
in an unknown city, “built, not of stone, but of crucified persons” (R 1654,
236–7). The second vision, which lasts for three days, terrifies her: “I had a
vision of what was going to happen to me in Canada. I saw endless crosses,
a terrible abandonment by God and by other people and entry into a hid-
den and unknown life. It seemed to me that God in his Majesty was saying
deep within me: ‘Now you must serve me at the expense of your self; go
and show me the proof of the fidelity you owe me’” (R 1654, 236).
So conscious is she of the “horrifying solitude of the spirit” God has in
store for her that Marie says her goodbyes to her loved ones and her coun-
try in an almost “unfeeling” state (R 1654, 237). And yet, she recalls, as she
stepped into the rowboat that would take her to the ship on 4 May 1639,
she had the feeling of “entering paradise” (R 1654, 242). Up until the point
when the ship leaves the English Channel, she continues to write letters
which she gives to fishermen to take back to France. Later, she will recall
that during the three months of the voyage, “there was so much to suffer
for those of our sex and condition that you would have to experience it to
believe it” (R 1654, 246). She is constantly thirsty, barely sleeps, and suffers
throughout the voyage from “such an extreme headache that I’d have died
if it were any worse” (R 1654, 246). Near the coast of Newfoundland the
ship passes so close to an immense iceberg that all on board prepare for
the death that seems inevitable. A general absolution is given, and Mme
de la Peltrie holds onto Marie, “so that we would die together.” Efficient
as always, Marie arranges her habit “in such a way that I would be decent
when the bodies were washed ashore.” Calm in face of her possible death,
she nonetheless remains optimistic: “I didn’t feel a single moment of ter-
ror, but rather […] the awareness that I was offering God the ultimate
sacrifice in being denied the joy of seeing our dear Savages. [However] I
still felt deep within my soul that we would reach Quebec” (R 1654, 244–
5). Saved by “an obvious miracle,” they do in fact arrive in Quebec, on 1
August 1639.
n e W fr A nCe : LA nd O f deS ire And nO thingneSS
In his book Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, Pierre Nepveu describes the

paradoxical feeling of extreme deprivation experienced by the first Euro-
pean settlers of the Americas: after the moment of discovery, in which
“the landscape is perceived as a field of infinite possibility,” comes a turn-
ing in on oneself, a sense of the need for refuge in face of “this foreign and
hostile world.” According to Nepveu, the writings of Marie de l’Incarna-
tion offer a privileged point of view on this experience of the New World
as both “lack and supreme intensity.”26 And indeed, it is hard to imagine
a more vivid description than Marie’s of the simultaneous sense of exhil-
aration and deprivation evoked by the reality of New France. All the risk
and madness of the North American adventure, all the vast space and the
teeming life of the colony are brought to life in the numerous letters she
finds the time to write from her cloister despite her busy life as an admin-
istrator, teacher, and confidante of almost all the major actors of her era.
The image of herself projected by these letters is that of a woman who has
found self-realization and a vehicle for the expression of her overflowing
energy. There is a sense of optimism and of the exaltation of the mission-
ary project: the joy of sharing in such an important venture with equally
committed female and male companions, the discovery of a culture rad-
ically different from her own and the acquisition of its languages, and,
finally, the challenge of adapting to the hardships of the new country. And
yet, behind this panorama of her projects and her society, in the “depths
of the soul” where the essence of Marie’s story always lies, she is living a
“crucifying” drama whose stages and meaning are revealed in the pages of
her autobiography.
Upon her arrival in Canada, Marie recognizes the country she had
seen in her dream six years earlier: “The huge mountains, the vast spaces
and the geography were exactly as I remembered them, except that there
were fewer mists than in my dream”27 (R 1654, 259). New France is indeed
the country of her dreams, for it will not only allow her to realize her
apostolic mission, but will offer her a freedom and autonomy that would
have been unimaginable in France. In the early years of the mission, large
numbers of Algonquins are baptized and several of them, encouraged and
aided by the Jesuits, agree to give up their nomadic lives in order to clear
the land around Lévis, located on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence
River opposite Quebec, and settle there. Marie observes that their piety
and enthusiasm resemble those of the early Christians. “No souls could
be more zealous and pure in their observance of God’s law. I admire them
when I see how submissive they are to those who teach them” (Corr.,
119). The comparison of the native peoples with children is frequent, and
there is little doubt that Marie is more than comfortable in the position
of authority she has assumed in God’s name: “I see generous and brave
native captains fall to their knees at my feet, begging me to pray to God
with them before they eat. They join their hands like children and I make
them say whatever I want” (Corr., 108).
In spite of the wars with the Iroquois and the very real dangers to
which her Jesuit friends were exposed, Marie’s account of these early years
is full of optimism. Most of the indigenous peoples seem docile and wel-
coming, thirsting as they are (according to Marie’s perspective) for the
God the French are bringing to them. A 1642 letter contains a beautiful
portrait, biblical in inspiration,28 of a group of Algonquins who arrive at
the convent in the middle of winter, walking on the ice of the Saint Law-
rence River “as if on a beautiful plain”: “They were thirsting like deer with
the desire to hear Mass and to receive the Blessed Sacrament, having been
deprived of both for almost four months” (Corr., 160). Doubtless the need
for food and lodging also contributes to the enthusiasm of the new con-
verts: the Ursulines recognize this, and offer hot meals to all who arrive
at their door. Marie speaks of “a great number of travellers who were con-
stantly at the grille of the cloister asking for both physical and spiritual
nourishment […] with the result that there was always a pot on the fire; as
one was being emptied, another was being made ready” (Corr., 159).
For more than three years the Ursulines live in a tiny house with two
rooms that serve as kitchen, refectory, dormitory, parlour, choir, and
classroom. In one of her letters, Marie mentions that it is often impossible

for them to keep a candle lit because of the wind that passes through the
house, and that at night they can see the stars through the gaps between
the roof boards (Corr., 98). Their primary task is the instruction of native
girls, with a few French girls added as day students. After the order and
discipline of cloistered life in France, it is not hard to imagine the shock
which such a total absence of private space and constant immersion in
the chaotic lifestyle of the native girls must have represented for the nuns.
“The dirtiness of the Savage girls who weren’t yet used to French clean-
liness meant that we would sometimes find a shoe in our pot, and every
day there would be hairs and pieces of charcoal in it,” Marie recalls in her
autobiography. Yet she insists on the fact that, far from provoking disgust
on the part of the nuns, the dirtiness of the little “orphan Savages […] was
an unimaginable delight for us” (R 1654, 260).
The deep contentment experienced by Marie de l’Incarnation in her
new life can only be fully understood in the context of her goal of self-
annihilation, for which Canada proved to be the ideal space and location.
In the vision that preceded her departure from France she had under-
stood she was leaving for a place where she would finally learn “how to
serve God at [her] own expense” (R 1654, 264). And now, in spite of the
success of the little Ursuline establishment, she enters into a period of
anxiety and loss which, in mystical terms, corresponds to the “dark night
of the soul” described by Saint John of the Cross. Worse than the depres-
sion she had suffered in her early years in the cloister, this excruciatingly
painful period will last seven years.
From Marie’s point of view as expressed in the Relation, these suffer-
ings are “crucifying” steps towards the total loss of self-esteem. Once
again she finds herself in an abyss or state of nothingness which God will
eventually fill: “I saw myself as the lowest and most debased of beings,
deserving of nothing but scorn” (R 1654, 264). But the modern reader
will recognize in this lack of confidence a possible symptom of exhaus-
tion and culture shock. In addition to living twenty-four hours a day in
two small, badly heated rooms and sharing that space with their native
students, Marie and her companions are faced with a disastrous finan-
cial situation, beginning in the fall of 1642, when their founder, Mme de
la Peltrie, decides to leave for Montreal with Jeanne Mance, withdraws
her financial support from the Ursulines, and even takes with her a con-
siderable amount of furniture. Marie writes frenetically to other possible
benefactors begging for aid, especially as she has committed herself to the
construction of a monastery for the Ursulines, but her requests meet with
no success. With their debts accumulating and their future appearing
more and more uncertain, it would not be surprising if the other nuns in
their panic began to question the decisions of their superior. According to
Claude Martin, “they blamed her behind her back for faults of which she
was innocent and treated her as if she were guilty of some crime. No mat-
ter what she did or to whom she turned for support, she met with nothing
but coldness.”29
Far from the familiar milieu of Tours and the great mystical expe-
riences of her twenties, Marie now goes through a period of inner
devastation during which, perhaps more than in any other part of her
autobiography, she reveals herself as fully human and even imperfect,
although undoubtedly not as “unworthy” as she feels herself to be. She has
always experienced life as a succession of ups and downs, and now, in the
absence of God, she is constantly at the mercy of her moods: “I passed
from an abyss of light and love into an abyss of darkness and pain, and felt
myself plunged into a hell full of sadness and bitterness. And, from the
depths of this darkness, without my understanding its cause, there came
a temptation to despair” (R 1654, 265–6). She even desires to throw herself
into the flames of Hell “to displease God, whom this state of feeling had
led me to hate” (R 1654, 266).
During these seven years of torment, Marie de l’Incarnation continues
to function efficiently, keeping her anguish secret from all except a few
trusted friends: “They said I was gentle and patient; but I who carried this
misery around with me found myself far from perfect, and when a friend
I could trust visited me I could speak of nothing but these problems, thus
humiliating myself even further” (R 1654, 286). Living in a state of “habit-
ual bitterness which made me feel nothing but aversion for others” (R
1654, 285), she loses all self-esteem. But on 15 August 1647, the Feast of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she prays to the Blessed Mother
and suddenly feels all her burdens “lifted from [her] like a piece of cloth-
ing,” and peace pouring into “the sensitive part of the soul” as her aversion
towards others is transformed into “a cordial love of all those towards
whom I had felt bitterness” (R 1654, 308).
the eM ergen Ce Of the fe Mi ni ne
In her thirteenth and final chapter, Marie summarizes the external and
internal events of her life during the seven years since the 1647 transfor-
mation. In a state of serenity, animated by a strength originating in the
depths of her soul, she traverses two tragic events which, for many, are
signs that the time has come to abandon the mission and return to France:
the martyrdom of her Jesuit friends Jean de Brébeuf, Charles Garnier, and
Gabriel Lalement at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons in 1649 and a fire

that destroys the recently built Ursuline convent the following year. These
years are also a period in which, for the first time, she centres herself in
the feminine principle embodied in the Virgin Mary and in a new recog-
nition of her own strength as a woman.30
Her love of Holy Scripture guides her through the chaos of these events
and provides her with an indefatigable strength: “Since I have been in
Canada, working with people of varied conditions and backgrounds,
there have been several delicate matters I have had to deal with. These
divine maxims have given me strength and sustenance […] teaching me
how to forget myself and focus on God […] accomplishing things and
taking risks that go far beyond what a person of my sex can normally
do” (R 1654, 313, 316). She recognizes that she has now arrived at a state of
fusion between self and divinity which gives her an indomitable strength:
“God possessed me through the maxims of his adorable Son, acting
through me in all I had to do” (R 1654, 318).
It is not an exaggeration to see the disastrous events of 1649 and 1650
as external manifestations of the state of self-annihilation which Marie de
l’Incarnation has now attained. The death of the Jesuits at Sainte-Marie
Among the Hurons signals the defeat of the great missionary dream
which had brought Marie to America, and, on a more intimate level, the
disappearance of close friends who have lived the sacrificial adventure to
its ultimate conclusion. The arrival in Quebec of the few survivors of the
Huron mission is an “extreme blow”: “It was the most pitiable thing that
had happened in our new Church. The Reverend Fathers who remained
alive had suffered more than those who had died. One could see that they
were beings who were burnt to the core, in whom Jesus Christ lived more
than they lived in themselves. Their saintliness was so visible that every-
one who saw them was overcome” (R 1654, 319).
Now fifty years old, Marie turns for the first time to the study of the
Huron language, as the Ursulines have agreed to undertake the educa-
tion of the newly arrived Huron girls. But, less than a year later, this new
beginning will come to a premature end. During the night of 30 Decem-
ber 1650, after a lay sister goes to bed forgetting the piece of hot charcoal
she has put into her yeast so that it will not freeze before morning, the new
convent Marie had put immense effort into building burns to the ground.
All the belongings of the nuns, including their habits and shoes, are swal-
lowed up by the fire. Marie manages to save the papers of the community
by throwing them out a window, but decides to allow the autobiographical
manuscript she has been working on for her son to burn rather than risk
the possibility of it being picked up and read by a passerby. In a subsequent
letter to him, she wryly compares the situation of the nuns on that dread-
ful night, trembling with cold in their nightgowns, their bare feet in the
snow, to “the nudity of Job, not on a pile of manure but on the snow, in a
night of extreme cold” (Corr., 414). In another letter she quotes an observer
of the scene who remarked: “Either these girls are crazy or they are filled
with the love of God” (Corr., 414). Marie reflects, however, that the differ-
ence between the situation of the Ursulines and that of Job is the charity
that comes to the nuns from all quarters. “Compassion came to us even
from the very poor: one person offered us a towel, another a shirt, and yet
another a coat. Someone gave us a chicken and someone else a few eggs
[…] This country is very poor, as you know, but its charity is even greater
than its poverty.”31 Discussing this disaster in her autobiography, Marie
praises God for having reduced all the fruits of her labours in New France
to nothingness: “His plan was accomplished through our annihilation,
especially as far as I was concerned, for it was I who had built this house
and put a great deal of work into bringing it to the state it was in [at the
time of the fire].” “It is you who have done this, my chaste Spouse. May you
be blessed! You have done well,” she concludes (R 1654, 325).
There is a striking contrast between the way Marie faces these trage-
dies and the long periods of depression set in motion by other difficult
moments in her life. This time, rather than turning in on herself to reflect
on her anxieties and wounds, she turns immediately to the practical tasks
necessary to assure the survival of her community, refusing to entertain
the possibility of a return to France: “I felt a total aversion to the idea of
returning to France, unless we recognized that it was God’s will that we
do so” (R 1654, 327). This strength coincides with the new centrality of
the Blessed Virgin in her spiritual life, made clear in her account of the
work she undertakes on building a new convent (the one that still stands
on the Rue du Parloir in Quebec). The closeness of her relationship with
the Blessed Virgin, with whom she walks around the construction site,
consulting her about the decisions she must make, recalls her familiarity
with her “more than adorable Beloved” in her younger days in France: “I
had hardly started when I felt her assistance in an extraordinary way: that
is, she was continually present to me […] I felt her near me without see-
ing her, accompanying me everywhere as I went back and forth … from
the beginning of the demolition of what was left of the old building until
the completion of the work. And as we walked, I chatted with her, saying,
‘Come on, Divine Mother, let’s go and see our workers’” (R 1654, 331).
A WOMA n ’S Writi ng
The Relation ends with a summary of the stages through which God,
having seduced the soul by pleasure, has led it to the annihilation of
everything in it that did not participate in the divine. Marie now lives in
an “extraordinary clarity” born of her certainty that God is love: “I am
ceaselessly in commerce with the divine, in such a simple, delicate, and
intense way that it cannot be described. It is not an act, it is not a breath, it
is such a gentle sensation in the centre of the soul where God dwells that
[…] I can find no words for it” (R 1654, 352–3). Her life, her speech, and
her writing are now, more than ever, an expression of God’s presence in
her: “It is through him that I speak” (R 1654, 352–3). Reiterating her con-
viction that she has only arrived at this point through God’s mercy and
her desire to live according to the spirit of the Gospel, and that she still
fears other future “infidelities,” she closes her autobiography with the fol-
lowing words: “I am closing these notebooks on the 4th day of August,
shortly after completing my spiritual exercises” (R 1654, 356).
To what extent is it possible to detect characteristics related to gender
in this extraordinary document? The author herself highlights one of the
differences between her own work and that of her male contemporaries
when she mentions that she could have written a longer account of her
life, but “the awareness of the lowliness and indignity of my sex kept me
from doing so” (R 1654, 317). In an era when the right to express oneself in
writing was denied to women, only the insistence of her various spiritual
directors and of her son allowed her to overcome this fear of unworthi-
ness, and her numerous attempts to protect the confidentiality of her
writings are a further sign of the social constraints regarding women and
writing. And yet she writes constantly, snatching moments by the fire
in the midst of her many responsibilities to do so, as if writing provides
her release from the intensity of her experience or a necessary means of
self-analysis. As well, if one judges by the beauty and originality of her
images, she writes purely for the pleasure of putting words on the page.
Certainly there is nothing approaching the interiority of Marie de
l’Incarnation’s works in the masculine writing of the same period. The
attention she pays to the intimate movements of her body and soul, the
sometimes painful complexity of the human relationships she describes,
and, above all, the maternal love and guilt which traverse her pages, make
her work a model of feminine writing whose echoes will be felt in the cor-
respondences, diaries, and autobiographies of women who will follow.
Her obsession with her own unworthiness, particularly as a woman, will
also be part of her legacy, and, regrettably, it is this self-denial, rather than
her passion, her rebelliousness, and her warm human qualities, that will
be emphasized by teachers and clerical authorities seeking to instill the
values of submissiveness and self-abnegation in young girls in prepara-
tion for their role as perfect wives and mothers.32
PART TWO
•
Wr i ti n g for th e Other: C or resp ondences,
1 7 4 8 –1862
Before the end of the seventeenth century, the age of mystical passion had
ended, and, with it, the possibility for the self-realization it represented
for at least part of the female population. In France, at the time when
Claude Martin was publishing his mother’s spiritual autobiography, the
bitter debate on Quietism was at its height, and Mme Jeanne Guyon, the
most radical and individualistic of all the French mystics, was impris-
oned for five years in the Bastille, condemned by both the king and
the Church for refusing to submit to their authority.1 In New France, it
would seem that the aridity of the living conditions of the nuns – the very
conditions that had made the country a space for possible sainthood in
the eyes of their predecessors – had begun to harden their minds and
psyches, leading to an increasingly austere moralism. A letter written in
1720 by Mère Marie-Andrée Duplessis, the Superior of the Hospitalières
de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, to a friend in France describes Canada as a
country that is “sterile in all things that could be pleasing” and capable of
producing only vulgarity.2 The contrast with the observations of ear-
lier members of the same community is all the more striking when one
reflects on the fact that the Annales de l’Hôtel Dieu de Québec, in which
these observations were recorded, were edited by Mère Duplessis herself.
The beginning of the eighteenth century also marks an evolution in the
concept of self and the forms of life writing. The principal mode of written
self-expression for women was now correspondence, whether private
letters, business letters, or letters sent to newspapers.3 Educated women
were now expected to master the epistolary arts, and manuals on letter
writing, ornate writing tables, and shops devoted entirely to the sale of
pens and writing paper were common in European countries.4 According
to Marie-Claire Grassi, “the letter becomes a privileged place for daily
self-expression […] For the woman, be she mother, lover, or friend, the
Par t two • 68
letter is the sole means of expression at her disposal […] In her confi-
dences, woman speaks of the difficulty of being a woman in the eighteenth
century.”5
A place for reflection and self-examination, the letter differs from other
genres of personal writing in that the self constructed in it is necessarily
in relationship. According to Georges Gusdorf, “in the letter, no matter
how intimate, the subject expresses him/herself for another, in relation
to a ‘you.’ […] The aim is to attract attention, to capture the sympathy
of the other person, whose absent presence illumines the entire field
of speech […] Exposed to the gaze or the intuitions of the other, I am
invited to discover myself in turn […] Identity is deepened and completed
through reciprocity.”6 For Brigitte Diaz, “the paradox of correspondence
[is that] one addresses the other in order to find oneself.”7 Dena Good-
man demonstrates through a number of case studies that letter writing
in the early eighteenth century “shaped the way women established and
maintained relations with others [and] emerged as women’s primary site
of reflection and self-reflection; in letters women were able to articulate a
gendered subjectivity at a time when gender expectations were changing
and often contradictory.”8
Correspondence also has a temporality which is particular to it and
which can affect the feelings of the letter writer. Béatrice Didier reminds
us that in the eighteenth century, “a period in which faxes and emails were
unknown,” it took time for a letter to reach its destination: “Between the
time a letter is written and the time the response to it arrives, several days
can pass, a time of possible anguish or disapproval which may find expres-
sion in the following letter. In any case, feelings can change between these
two times, new events can take place, other correspondences can inter-
vene.”9 This lack of coincidence between the time of writing and reception
was particularly dramatic in New France, where at least six months sep-
arated the departure of letters on the last ships setting out in the fall from
the arrival of replies to them in the spring. The melancholy tone of the
letters written by Élisabeth Bégon to her son-in-law Michel de Villebois
de la Rouvillière between 1748 and 1753 – the only surviving writings by
a laywoman from the years preceding the Conquest – is at least partly a
function of the temporal and geographical distance separating the letter
writer from the object of her affection. Almost a century later, in the era of
Julie Papineau’s letters to her husband Louis-Joseph Papineau (1823–62),
distances are shorter and postal delays less extreme, but the inevitable
time lapse between the writing and the reception of the letters nonetheless
gives rise at times to serious misunderstandings and irritations between
the two correspondents.
Writing for the Other • 69
The letters of these two women – the only women’s correspondences

from the period to have been published – provide a window into the
evolution of women’s subjectivity between the mid-eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Unlike the foundresses of New France, each of the
two women is, or has been, a wife and mother, and it is striking to note
how fragile or rigidly conformist their sense of self can be. In moments
snatched from the busy routine of her life as a widow, grandmother, and
society matron, Madame Bégon writes to her son-in-law in order to feel
that she exists as a person, and the melancholy tone of her letters is, in
part, a result of the apparent lack of reciprocity in this intimate relation-
ship. The four decades covered by Julie Papineau’s correspondence reveal
the stages in the evolution of a woman who never succeeds in reconciling
her own desires with the demands placed on her as a wife and mother. The
hesitant young woman of the 1820s, who follows her husband’s advice in
all things, is succeeded in the decade of the 1837–38 Rebellion by a mature
woman with radical political ideas, very frustrated by the constraints of
her maternal role. During the years after the Rebellion, when her husband
is in exile in France, Julie appears as a strong woman determined to keep
her family together and responsible for their economic survival. But the
portrait of her in her final letters is that of a woman disappointed by life,
clinging to her rigid religious beliefs in order to survive and, too often, a
bitter and domineering wife and mother: the negative underside of the
French-Canadian reine du foyer, or “queen of the hearth.”
As well as providing a detailed look at two women’s inner lives, these
correspondences contain perceptive portraits of social and political life in
their respective eras. Eloquent female expressions of self and the world,
they cannot be seen as typical or representative of women’s lives in the cen-
tury that followed the Conquest. Taken together, however, they trace the
gradual diminishing of women’s possibilities in that era and their transfor-
mation into the sacrificial mothers exalted by the dominant ideology.
C h ap t er 3
Wr i ti n g “To Te ll You I’ m Here”:

T h e Cor re s p on de n c e o f É l i sa bet h B égon
What a great amount of snow, absence, and death! What a huge expanse of
uncrossable space! And what an infinite sadness, except for the parts that are
sheer folly: the love, in spite of everything, of this “Iroquois woman” for a selfish
outlander […] And, above all, what rich experience not only of a woman’s life but
of a decisive period in our history – all of it expressed in a voice ignorant of its
own creative power.
Nicole Deschamps, “Avant-propos,” Lettres au cher fils
Written to preserve a precarious love from the ravages of time and dis-
tance, the letters sent by Élisabeth Bégon to her son-in-law Michel de
Villebois de la Rouvillière from 1748 to 1753 were discovered in 1932, after
almost two centuries of neglect, in the attic of the Countess of Rancougne,
a French descendant of the Bégon family. Published two years later,1 they
are now in the collection of Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Qué-
bec. Until their reissue in book form in 1972, under the title Lettres au cher
fils,2 prefaced by Nicole Deschamps, they had mostly interested scholars
for their observations of daily life in New France in the years preceding
the Conquest. However, as Martin Robitaille points out, these letters “are
much more than a chronicle of society and family life in the eighteenth
century; they also have the characteristics of love letters, of the private
diary and of women’s writing.”3
Like Marie de l’Incarnation, Élisabeth Bégon was a passionate woman,
willing to risk all for love. But while Marie achieved fulfilment by reject-
ing the traditional mother role, Élisabeth combines the roles of mother
and lover in a somewhat unsettling way, at least according to Deschamps’s
t he Cor respondence of Élisabeth bégon • 71
interpretation of the letters: “What an image of the Quebec mother this

woman offers us, with her combination of passion and martyrdom,
smiling and suffering, at once the brilliant society hostess and the pious
follower of the Third Order […] madly in love with her son-in-law.”4 Élis-
abeth had revealed her passionate and independent nature long before
her relationship with her son-in-law, however. Born Marie-Élisabeth
Rocbert de la Morandière in Montreal in 1696, she was the eldest of six
children. At the age of seventeen, she fell in love with Claude-Michel
Bégon de la Cour, a descendant of a noble family in France and the
younger brother of the colony’s intendant. Claude-Michel was a war hero
whose battle wounds, according to Deschamps, included a “caved-in
chest,” some “mutilated fingers,” and “a missing right eye.”5 In face of the
Bégon family’s opposition, the two lovers scandalized their milieu by
marrying “à la gaumine,” that is, by simple mutual consent before two
witnesses, a practice that was vigorously condemned at the time by Msgr
de Saint-Vallier, the bishop of Quebec. The marriage was regularized
in 1718, and in subsequent years Claude-Michel Bégon occupied sev-
eral positions in the colonial administration, finally becoming governor
of Trois-Rivières in 1743. By this time, Élisabeth had given birth to four
children, of whom only a daughter (Marie-Catherine-Elisabeth, born in
1719) and a son (Claude-Michel-Jérôme, born in 1732) survived. In 1737,
at the age of eighteen, the daughter, Marie-Catherine, married another
French nobleman and member of the colonial administration, Michel de
Villebois de la Rouvillière (to whom Madame Bégon’s letters will later be
addressed). Three years later, in 1740, Marie-Catherine died of tuberculo-
sis, leaving two children: a son (who was raised by relatives in France) and
a daughter (raised by her grandmother Élisabeth Bégon).
Between 1743 and 1748, Élisabeth and her husband acquire a reputa-
tion for the grace and elegance of the dinners and receptions they host,
often for distinguished guests travelling through Trois-Rivières on the
new road between Montreal and Quebec. It is probably during these same
years that a loving friendship forms between Élisabeth and her son-in-
law Michel. But in 1748, Élisabeth suffers the loss of both these men. In
April, her husband dies, and, a few months later, her son-in-law leaves for
France, planning to proceed from there to what he hopes will be a bet-
ter paid and more prestigious position in the colonial administration of
Louisiana. After the death of her husband, Élisabeth leaves Trois-Rivières
and moves into a house on Rue Saint-Paul in Montreal with her father,
her granddaughter Marie-Catherine, an elderly friend she calls “Mater,”
her adolescent niece Tilly (whose parents are in France and who has been
brought up by her aunt, Élisabeth Bégon), and a number of servants. Her
correspondence with her son-in-law begins in this house, six months after
the death of her husband.
Already melancholy during this period of mourning her husband, Élis-
abeth is further disturbed by the great distance separating her from her
son-in-law, and by the fact that for several months she is unaware whether
he is in France or in America. “What are you doing, dear son, and where
are you? That is what I don’t know and will not know for a long time, a
fact which distresses me greatly,” she writes on 15 February 1749 (113). And
on 12 March: “But where should I write you, dear son? […] I write to you
in Mississippi when you’re in France, and I shall perhaps write to you in
France this spring when you’ll no longer be there!”(129). She writes to him
almost every day: short letters in which she sums up the day’s events, gives
him news of little Marie-Catherine (whom she calls “our dear daughter”)
and other family members, and shares the latest gossip. “At last I’m free
after a number of tiresome writings,” she confides to him in her first letter,
“and can now chat with you with the same satisfaction I’ve always had.
I plan to do so every day, and I repeat to you a hundred times that it is
the only consolation left to me. You know, dear son, how hard it is for me
to bear your absence” (43). For her, the daily letters are not only a way to
make the beloved son-in-law present but also to feel that she herself exists,
thanks to the relationship with him: “Goodbye, that’s enough for you,” she
says in closing the next day’s letter. “As far as news of me is concerned, I
have no desire other than to tell you that I’m here” (44).
The letters begin in November 1748, and Élisabeth, knowing that she
will be unable to post them until the arrival of the ships the following
spring, decides to bind them together in notebooks that she ties up with a
ribbon. Thus, several decades before the private diary becomes a common
practice,6 she creates a sort of diary in which she records the thoughts,
emotions, and events of her life each day. The correspondence, which cov-
ers the period from November 1748 to January 1753 (scarcely two weeks
after Michel de Villebois’s death in New Orleans), is made up of nine of
these notebooks or letter-diaries, of which the first five were written in
Montreal. The last four, as well as sixty-one letters in more conventional
form, were written in France, where Élisabeth Bégon moved in late 1749,
hoping to be reunited there with her “dear son.”
WOM en ’S Writing : A S PAC e fOr O ne Se Lf
Over the centuries, women have turned to writing to strengthen their

sense of self, taking time to explore their thoughts and feelings in the
midst of days filled by their duties and responsibilities as wives, mothers,
or daughters. Jean Le Moyne, one of the first and most lucid observers of
women’s condition in French Canada, sees in Élisabeth Bégon’s letters the
reflection of a society where women’s living space is beginning to be con-
fined within the maternal role. “The time of the amazons is over and the
Canadienne is tired of the sword […] Within the lower classes and the
petite bourgeoisie, woman is starting to take on the solitary maternity of
her mythical image; she is becoming the mother, too much the mother.”7
Well educated (she often translates English texts for the colonial admin-
istration) and wielding considerable influence in society thanks to her
friendship with the Marquis de La Galissonière, the acting governor of
the colony, Élisabeth is far from conforming to the myth of the fertile and
self-sacrificing mother which will implant itself in the collective psyche
after the Conquest. And yet her letters reveal a woman who identifies
entirely with her roles of mother, spouse, and daughter and has played
them to perfection, to the point where the passion she feels for her son-
in-law is inextricably bound to a feeling of maternal duty. As well, she
constantly worries about her father’s health, devotes herself every day
to the education of her granddaughter, and manages all aspects of the
household.
In the centre of this world she animates and which constitutes her rai-
son d’être, Élisabeth Bégon nonetheless feels the need to withdraw every
day into the solitude of writing, exchanging with an absent interlocutor
who offers her a protection against sadness and a harbinger of better days
to come. The impossibility of receiving a reply in the predictable future
creates the conditions that link her writing to that of the private diary.
Already in November 1748, less than three weeks after the start of the cor-
respondence, she notes that she will be deprived of news of Michel “for
perhaps more than a year” (55), and she has in fact had no reply from him
when the final Montreal “notebook” ends, in June 1749. Yet her desire to
write is so strong that she does so regularly, in spite of the lack of a reply
and the frequent thought that she has nothing interesting to say. In a
sense, she admits, she is writing for herself: “Goodbye, dear son, I’ll talk
with you again tomorrow if I can find something amusing to tell you, for
what I write isn’t worth your time and patience, although it is the only
satisfaction I have” (66–7). The pleasure she finds in writing is indissocia-
ble from that of expressing her love for the one who will read her, whose
“absent presence [to quote Gusdorf] illumines the entire field of speech.”8
Thus she can write to Michel in December 1748 that he has no need to
read her letters if he does not want to; for her, the pleasure and necessity
of communicating with him are sufficient justification for the act of writ-
ing: “I sometimes worry about boring you with the poor things I recount,
my dear son. I have the satisfaction of writing to you and of telling you, at
least on paper, what I wish I could say in person: that I have no other plea-
sure today, gentle son, than chatting with you” (60–1). Six months later,
still having had no answer from him, she declares that she will be unable
to sleep unless she tells him of her love for him: “I confess to you, dear
son, that if I didn’t enjoy writing to you so much I would give it up, since
I have nothing to say that would amuse you. But I wouldn’t sleep well if I
hadn’t at least told you that I love you. A small satisfaction for you, but an
important one for me, since I can’t see you. At least I have the satisfaction
of chatting with you for a moment” (187).
Reading between the lines of this correspondence, one is struck by the
lack of love that was, finally, the fate of this woman who devoted herself
entirely to the needs of her family. Not on the part of her beloved father
(although she worries about his hesitation to move to France with her
and about his rapid aging after their arrival in a country in which he feels
himself a foreigner), but of the ungrateful and much loved “dear son,” of
her niece Tilly who, once reunited with her parents in France, rejects the
aunt who raised her, and finally of her elderly friend “Mater,” who does
not accompany the family to France and gravely wounds Élisabeth by
not writing to her in the following years. However – and this is what is so
moving about Élisabeth – she notes these slights in passing, without feel-
ing sorry for herself (except perhaps in the case of her abandonment by
Mater). What matters to her above all is not to upset the “dear son” who so
rarely replies to her letters, and to remain the charming and witty society
woman who had inspired his complicity in the years they were together.
g OSS iP On A bACKgrOund Of SA dneSS:

A C hrO ni CL e Of L ife in neW frAnCe
Writing to amuse her absent interlocutor, Élisabeth becomes a chronicler

almost in spite of herself, recreating on paper the conversations of earlier
years during which she and her son-in-law had grown closer by mak-
ing fun of the people around them. From her house on Rue Saint-Paul,
close to that of her protector and friend La Galissonière, she observes
the comings and goings of people who often stop by her house to ask her
for a good word with the governor or to share the latest news and gos-
sip. She also talks about her family – the education she is giving little
Marie-Catherine or her worries about her aging father – and about the
religious practices (or lack of them) of her compatriots. The tone is witty
and light, but as the weeks and months go by without a reply from her
son-in-law, one senses behind the banter a growing anguish: a feeling of
terror caused by the pitiless climate and an increasing worry about her
own uncertain fate and that of the colony in these years leading up to its
defeat by the English in 1759.
Whether her distance from her milieu is due to her period of mourn-
ing or to an artistic temperament, Élisabeth shows herself to be a
perceptive observer of her society. Among the actors who cross her stage
are the most important members of the colonial administration – the gov-
ernor La Galissonière, who adores Élisabeth’s granddaughter and often
comes to the house to chat with her; her ambitious neighbour Longueuil,9
who drinks too much and covets the governor’s post, and whose numer-
ous hypocrisies are not lost on Élisabeth; and the intendant François Bigot
who travels from Quebec City to Montreal with a fleet of ships carrying
his silverware so that he can impress Montreal society by the pomp of his
parties and receptions. As well, there are servants, members of the mil-
itary, and authoritarian priests, enraged by the profligate lifestyle of the
members of their congregations.
One senses in this society the malaise of a colony still somewhat
unsure of itself, knowing it is not seen as “civilized” by the mother coun-
try and aspiring to be so. Families in New France send their sons to the
old country to be educated and to work: Élisabeth’s own son and grand-
son were both raised in France and have remained there, and her sister
and brother-in-law have moved there, leaving their daughter Tilly with
her. It is a society still characterized by the roughness and energy of the
age of exploration and wars with the indigenous peoples, and one is not
surprised to learn that Élisabeth’s French in-laws, once she has arrived in
their country, pejoratively refer to her as “the Iroquois.” Several genera-
tions of proximity to the native peoples have left their mark on the colony:
Élisabeth often mentions visits of native chiefs to the governor and speaks
of negotiations between the colonial administration and the native peo-
ples regarding the exchange of prisoners. She even has a native servant,
Alida, whose presence she tolerates in order to please her spoiled grand-
daughter: “Alida […] is still as bad as ever. I have often wanted to get rid
of her, or at least to send her back to her father, but your daughter won’t
allow it. This innocent child adores the dirty little woman more than she
deserves, and that convinces me to keep her” (65–6).
Corruption in this society is the rule rather than the exception. Élis-
abeth mentions that her neighbour Longueuil demands bottles of
wine from those who seek his favours and that he has “bought a suit of
embossed velvet using government revenues” (63–4). Elsewhere, she
speaks of a government employee who has “redone his home from top
to bottom, the ceilings, fireplaces, and floors all replaced and new plaster
mantelpieces throughout […] And, according to the workmen, it is all

paid for using certificates meant for repairing the king’s houses and the
fortifications” (50–1). To distract themselves during the interminable win-
ters when they are cut off from the mother country, people eat, drink, and
dance, often at parties that last until six or seven in the morning. “There
were some great benders at M. de Lantagnac’s dinner last night. I was
told, dear son, that they all tried to dance a minuet but couldn’t manage it,
and then it was decided they would go to Deschambault’s place and have
onion soup. A lot more wine was drunk […] They put Noyan into a car
sleigh and took him home” (94). There are balls almost every night, even
during Advent, a practice which enrages the curés: “Would you believe
it, dear son, the devout Mme Verchères had people dancing at her house
for the whole night? Our priests will have lots to preach about: imagine
having a ball on the feast of Our Lady, in Advent! The best part is that
tomorrow there’s a ball at Mme Lavaltrie’s place, and the day after that at
Mme Bragelogne’s. M. le curé will be very upset” (62). During the Easter
period, people dance all night and sleep during the day “while the Blessed
Sacrament is exposed” (112). After the festivities they search desperately
for a priest who will be indulgent enough to give them absolution, but
such priests are not easy to find, as the bishops have threatened them with
excommunication: “Everyone is looking for a confessor and no one is get-
ting absolution unless they promise never to go to another ball. As you
can imagine, that is too great a sacrifice to make” (143).
To all appearances, the missionary fervour that originally dominated
New France has given way to an authoritarian Church mocked by the
majority of the faithful. Élisabeth tells the story of a young priest, just
arrived from France, who, as part of the marriage ritual, asks the young
couple if they understand the implications of the sacrament they are
about to receive: “They said no, but that in four days they could tell him
more about it if he was curious. The poor priest bent his head and said
nothing more” (106–7). And she approvingly reports her granddaugh-
ter’s reply to a priest who has given her permission to read Don Quixote:
“It’s just as well that you gave me permission, since I really only need my
grandmother’s. I think she is capable of judging whether or not I can read
a book, and no one else needs to bother about what I should read” (80).
Thanks to such distractions Élisabeth maintains a surface calm, but
her frustration is obvious, especially in the winter, when the ships have
left and the colony is settling into the lethargy of a long winter. “Every-
thing is peaceful and quiet. I alone have no tranquility, overcome as I am
by the knowledge that I am far from everything,” she writes in November
1748 (53). She hates the snow and the cold, which isolate her, cutting off all
contact with the world for several interminable months: “A foot of snow
fell last night, dear son, and made me groan when I got up this morning.
You are so lucky to be in a country free of this terrible cold! I tremble in
advance at the thought that we’ll be stuck in snow for nine more months”
(47), she writes in November. By mid-May, nothing has changed: “It’s
terribly cold, it’s snowing, it’s raining, it’s hailing, and I think winter
is starting over again. We have a fire on in every part of the house and
we’re freezing. All the trees are in blossom and I think they’ll be dam-
aged” (169). The price of firewood worries her (“It is no longer possible
to live in Canada […] we would be crazy to stay in a country where we
have to spend all our money on keeping warm”); and she constantly fears
during the long periods of cold that a fire will start in one of the houses,
all of which are lit by candles. These worries increase her desire to be in
France, safe from the cold and the inconveniences of the Canadian winter:
“Dear son, I would so love to be in France […] At least there I wouldn’t be
exposed to the possibility of freezing and dying in a pile of snow” (76).
In the five Montreal notebooks (covering the period from November
1748 to mid-June 1749), the idea of leaving for France, where Élisabeth
hopes to be reunited with her son-in-law, her son, and her grandson,
recurs constantly. Her granddaughter, who shares her desire to go to
France, uses the bitterness of the Canadian climate as a way to convince
her great-grandfather to leave: “I think he’s afraid to complain of the cold
or of the other frustrations caused by the climate in front of her, for she
always replies: “Well, dear papa, wouldn’t you be better off in France?”
(83). Élisabeth’s desire to leave is also fuelled by the knowledge that her
friend La Galissonière will be departing in the autumn of 1749, and that
without him she will lose her privileged place in society. She comments
with irony on the fact that people who used to look down on her and
Michel now go out of their way to please her, thanks to her friendship
with the governor: “You know how they think in this country. They are
always willing to kowtow to those who are close to power […] Every day
I see faces that bore me and […] I know that they only come to see me
because they think it will pave their way to meeting the governor” (48,
54). The hypocrisy of it makes her cynical, and, more and more often,
she blames the country for these attitudes: “I see everyone, dear son, and
I trust no one: I know my country too well to do otherwise” (85). And
elsewhere: “Nothing new, dear son. I don’t believe there is anything more
sterile than our poor country” (132).
L Ov i ng With Out reASO n: ÉL iSAb e th And MiC heL
What makes these letters unforgettable is the infinite nostalgia that ema-
nates from them, the vastness of the unknown space into which they
seem to be thrown, at the mercy of the winds and the tides. The voice of a
woman speaks to us across all this distance, sighing words of love into the
surrounding silence, words that evoke the fragility, but also the absolute
necessity, of this link to the other that attaches the letter writer to life and
to hope. Reading them, one would like to know more about this Michel
de Villebois de la Rouvillière, the “dear son” who is the object of so much
passion, but few details of his life have been retained by history.
According to Nicole Deschamps, Michel was “ugly, obese, and of frag-
ile health,”10 an idealistic and always unsatisfied reformer who, during
his time in Louisiana, fell into a state of paranoia in which he felt perse-
cuted not only by his superiors and colleagues, but also by the members
of his family. In the final months of his life, his hostility against his moth-
er-in-law Élisabeth is so great that he denies her custody of his daughter
Marie-Catherine and severs the business relationship he has with her.
Is he the “ungrateful son” described by Nicole Deschamps? Or rather
a young man seeking to regain control of his life against a domineering
mother-in-law? As his letters to Élisabeth no longer exist, we can only
speculate on the nature of their relationship based on her words.
In her presentation, Deschamps states that “the tone of the correspon-
dence leaves no room for doubt: these are certainly love letters.”11 Noting
that Michel is closer in age to his mother-in-law than to his deceased
wife (at the beginning of the correspondence he is forty-six and Élisa-
beth is fifty-two), she suggests that what she calls the “strange affection”
between them was of a sexual (and œdipal) nature, even if the customs of
the time and Élisabeth’s piety meant that it was never fully lived out: “Is it
natural that in the eighteenth century a proper mother-in-law would call
her ‘dear son’ ‘my plump angel’ or ‘my fat pig’? […] The saddest aspect
of this adventure is perhaps how repressed it was. If Élisabeth Bégon is
a new Jocasta, she is a wounded one. And Michel, who seems never to
have really dared to be an Œdipus, is hardly even tragic. Basically he is no
more than an absent person with a bad character, whose charm remains
inexplicable.”12
According to Deschamps, Élisabeth is “a Mater dolorosa who perhaps
prefigures the generations of our sacrificial mothers,”13 close to masoch-
ism in her refusal to renounce her love in the face of Michel’s silence:
“Can it even be considered love to spend your life writing to someone
who doesn’t love you? It is a sterile and cruel occupation which would
exhaust even the most exacerbated masochism.”14 Seen in relation to this

supposedly overpowering mother, Michel appears as the impotent son,
prefiguring all the “bitter and disappointing, far away and silent heroes” of
Quebec literature. “Where, when and how will the son, victim of an abu-
sive mother, cease trying to escape?”15
To put such interpretations into perspective, it is important to remem-
ber the vast distances, the postal uncertainties, and the moves of the two
letter writers, not to speak of Michel’s illness – all of which offer convinc-
ing explanations of the gaps and silences in the correspondence. It is clear
that both Élisabeth and Michel are aware of the difficulties that beset their
attempts to communicate. On 26 March 1750, when Élisabeth has already
been in France for five months, she writes to Michel that she has not heard
from him in over a year (235). A few weeks later, having finally received a
letter from him, she writes: “What a joy for me to see your handwriting!
But when I saw the date I was devastated! How can it take six months for
a letter to go from you to me?” (239). She reproaches him for not having
mentioned receiving “all the letters we sent you from the North country
over the last two years. You must have received several when you arrived
there, from my dear father, from your daughter, and from me” (240). But,
just as Élisabeth was unaware for more than a year whether Michel was in
France or Louisiana, he, for his part, has been sending her letters to Can-
ada, not knowing she has already arrived in France. In September 1750,
she notes not only receiving a letter sent from him in Louisiana and dated
3 July 1750, in which he says he has received no letters from her (276), but
also a packet of letters that he had sent to her Canadian address eighteen
months earlier: “I have just received a packet from you dated 26 June 1749,
which apparently comes from Canada” (280). The following year, she
encloses a note addressed by little Marie-Catherine to her father: “I am
so upset that I haven’t had any news of you! You haven’t written to us for
more than eight months. I beg of you, please write us” (352). In addition to
all these geographical obstacles, there is the risk of an accident at sea: in
October 1752, Élisabeth mentions the shipwreck of a vessel coming from
Louisiana which would probably have been carrying letters from her son-
in-law (280).
Despite these difficulties, several comments in Élisabeth’s letters indi-
cate that her son-in-law is eager to conserve links with her and with his
family. “You tell me not to let you languish,” she writes, “so I’ve taken
advantage of the first chance I’ve had to give you news of us” (242); “you
assure me that you love your poor mother […] Don’t you think, dear son,
that our separation is harder on you than it is on us, especially on me?”
(248). At times Élisabeth apologizes for all the details in her letters, adding
that she is only writing this way because he has asked her to: “You have
urged me to write you. Aren’t you getting tired of my scribblings?” (250);
“I think that I would be ashamed to have you read all my follies; but you
tell me that we must tell each other everything we think since we can’t see
each other” (295).
There is no doubt that the atmosphere of loving complicity which sur-
rounds Élisabeth’s evocations of Michel is closely tied to a maternal feeling,
but the text offers a less scandalous interpretation of her loving words than
the one proposed by Deschamps. Not only are the modes of discourse in
eighteenth-century correspondences extremely sentimental, as Cather-
ine Rubinger explains, but Madame Bégon’s language must be understood
in the context of the network of family relationships that defines her and
constitutes her raison d’être.16 A mother who has lost all her children – the
two who have died in early childhood, the adolescent son from whom
she has been separated for many years, and her beloved daughter, dead
of tuberculosis – she is also in the midst of a period of mourning for her
husband. The “loving friendship” she shares with her son-in-law probably
dates back to the period after her daughter’s death, when the young wid-
ower moved into the house of his parents-in-law in Trois-Rivières along
with his two small children. Since then, the grandson has been sent to live
with his other grandparents in France, but Michel and his daughter have
remained with the Bégons, becoming the “dear son” and “dear daughter”
to whom Élisabeth so often refers. According to Rubinger, the endearing
terms Élisabeth uses, while they may seem somewhat incestuous to a mod-
ern reader, should be understood in the context of an era in which family
structures were often modified by premature deaths. For Élisabeth, Michel
is her “favourite child,” the missing link in the network of family love upon
which she depends: “You know, dear son, that your poor mother isn’t good
for much except for loving her children. So you can imagine how much I
suffer at being separated from you” (121); “I prayed [to Saint-Xavier] this
morning, with all my heart, to look after my dear children, including you,
whom I certainly consider the dearest of all” (124).
Small wonder, then, that Élisabeth so values this relationship with a
son by marriage who is also a friend and a confidant of many years. “These
people are really ridiculous,” she writes him. “How I would laugh if you
were here! But I dare not confide in anyone” (139). Filled with panic by the
idea of another long winter to go through, she remembers how her son-in-
law would reassure her: “Our river is full of ice and will overflow if this cold
season lasts much longer. Dear son, you know how I used to worry during
these cold spells and how you were the only thing that kept me calm. But
now I’m alone and must reassure myself no matter what comes” (72).
Élisabeth is truly a mother for Michel, worrying about his situation in

Louisiana, encouraging him to keep up his religious practices, and shar-
ing with him her great sorrow at the death of her husband, a sorrow she
dares not reveal in the presence of her father and granddaughter: “I con-
fess, my son, that I feel weighed down on all sides. All I can do is sigh,
sometimes about your absence and sometimes about what the Lord has
taken from me and for which there is no consolation” (56). Gradually, as
the months pass, we begin to hear a language of self-pity in her letters,
one that will become familiar in the discourse of future generations of
French-Canadian mothers – complaints and reproaches that will amplify
in frequency and volume after her move to France.
e Xi L e in the MO ther COuntry: “eve rythi ng i S e e

MAK eS Me M iSS My OWn C O untry”
On 4 November 1749, after a difficult voyage, the Bégons arrive at the

home of Michel’s brother in Brest, France. The next day, Élisabeth writes
to Michel: “I must love you greatly to have undertaken such a terrible
voyage! Nothing could make me want to go back” (197). But the France
she had idealized earlier will turn out to be a disappointment. She soon
becomes aware of her many differences from the French, both in the way
she perceives them and in the way they see her. By the following January,
still at the home of the Villebois de la Rouvillières, she has had time to
become aware of the snobbishness of her hosts and their condescending
attitude to her: “It seems that I have no idea how one should behave and
that I’m just an Iroquois. I don’t say anything, but I would so much like to
have my own place to live!” (205).
Everything in France seems to her inferior to what she had in Canada.
In Montreal, people dropped in on her constantly; here, given the dis-
tances and the poor condition of the roads, visits are difficult to arrange:
“I’m terrified by those miserable roads and won’t soon go back in that car-
riage, but you can’t get anywhere on foot. Here, the paving stones kill my
feet and, if I want to go out, it costs a fortune to be carried in a chair […]
so I stay in my room most of the time. Feel sorry for me, my dear son, for I
deserve your pity” (210). Surprisingly, she suffers from the cold more than
she did in Canada, and reproaches her son-in-law for having so praised
the climate of his country of birth: “Every day I have occasion to ques-
tion your judgment about the weather in France. You always talked about
how beautiful it was here in April! It’s horribly cold, even worse than it
was in March. We have the heat on more often than we did in Canada and
it is certainly costing us more, but I would rather do without new clothes
and spend my money on keeping warm” (215). The cost of living is higher
than in New France, and she claims to be “weighed down by debts” (255).
Unable to find a good pen for writing, she decides she will have to order
one from Canada (227). Workers and servants seem incompetent to her:
“None of them know what they’re doing. You have to do everything your-
self, even the servants’ work. I have only one miserable servant and all she
does is run around. And they tell me I’m lucky to have her!” (292). Even
the religious processions are less impressive than those of New France:
“I’ve never seen anything as pathetic as that procession. No clergy, no
people you’d want to spend time with, no one but the poor, they’re the
only ones who have any faith here” (236).
Élisabeth suffers from the loss of the social status she enjoyed in
New France: “It is sad, after being served as I used to be, to be reduced
to this,” she laments after complaining yet again about the servants: “We
are served like dogs and if I don’t check on my soup a hundred times,
we wouldn’t eat at all” (313). But at the same time she is scandalized by
the materialism and superficiality of her hosts: “All they talk about in
this house is how to make more money” (207), she writes. It is a milieu
obsessed by hierarchy and riven by jealousies, where those who get pro-
motions are envied while those who do not are the objects of scorn: “The
only pleasant thing in this country is the climate. In everything else –
fame, envy, jealousy, and all that is socially undesirable – it is worse than
Canada. Only money and the rich are appreciated […] which makes it a
wretched place I would leave with pleasure if it weren’t for the hope of see-
ing you here” (223). Élisabeth feels more and more isolated, unable to be
sociable with people “who are always putting on airs and lack the qualities
one looks for in a friend” (366). Her own sister (the mother of her niece
Tilly), a sickly and petty woman, rejects both her daughter and the aunt
who raised her in New France: “Our Tilly is less esteemed in this house
than Alida was with us. They say she is sulky and badly brought up. I
reply that I did my best” (303). Later, she will reveal that her sister’s family,
including their daughter Tilly, have broken with her because of jealousies
caused by Élisabeth’s close relationship with her father: “Envy and jeal-
ousy destroy everything. They think that everything I eat and drink has
been stolen from them and that my dear father loves no one but me. Their
daughter, whom I raised, is of the same opinion and only comes here with
her sister to see my father” (382). More and more, Élisabeth’s vocabulary
becomes one of complaint and self-pity, peppered by words like “misery,”
“old age,” and “crosses to bear”: “Peas have been in season for two weeks
now, and I still haven’t been able to get any, which makes me nostalgic for
our country, where I wasn’t always the last to get good things. Ah, poor
old mother that I am, in the time when I should be having some sweetness
in my life there is only misery! […] I have so many crosses to bear!” (245).
The more she is disappointed by France, the more she becomes nostalgic
for Canada: “I am angry, dear son, that so many people sang the praises of
France to me. Every time I face a setback I say to myself: If I were in Can-
ada this wouldn’t be happening to me” (295).
the finAL yeArS
Élisabeth Bégon’s final years are marked by the tragedy of a rupture with
her son-in-law, whom she will nonetheless continue to love until the end.
Michel falls into what was seen by his superiors as a mental disturbance,
characterized by aggressivity and paranoia. On learning of this from
friends in the colonial administration and from Michel’s own letters, Élisa-
beth tries to control the situation as much as possible, giving him advice in
her letters and intervening in his favour with influential friends in France.
Although Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière’s letters to Élisabeth
have never been found, the numerous missives he sent to the Ministry
of the Marine in France during his time in Louisiana still exist, and are
cited at some length in historian Guy Frégault’s study of the years during
which the Marquis de Vaudreuil was governor of Louisiana.17 In those let-
ters Michel appears egotistical, angry, and perpetually dissatisfied. Two of
the accusations he makes are echoed in Élisabeth’s letters. First, he bitterly
criticizes Governor Vaudreuil and his family, who are close friends of Élis-
abeth, and second, he denounces the practice common among colonial
civil servants of enriching themselves by private ventures even as they
continue to work as representatives of the king, a practice which Élisabeth
Bégon defends constantly in her letters to him. Are these the paranoid
imaginings of a sick man, or is there a grain of truth in his numerous
complaints? Probably both interpretations have some validity. Some of
Élisabeth’s observations indicate that she is aware of the accuracy of his
criticisms of Vaudreuil and of his feeling that she and other members of
his family have sided with corrupt colonial administrators to make him
abandon his principles: “I won’t comment on what you have written about
the way we have all conspired in making you play a role that doesn’t suit
you […] I suffer as much as you do from all this, dear son, but you will be
free of it all next fall. I don’t know yet who will be replacing M. de Vau-
dreuil, but I have been told he has been named governor of Canada” (381).
Vaudreuil is an old friend of Élisabeth Bégon. He was governor of
Trois-Rivières until the post passed on to her husband in 1743, and she
is in constant contact with his brother in France. In fact, she writes to
her son-in-law in November 1750 that their “dear little one,” now eleven
years old, is promised in marriage to a Vaudreuil: “Your daughter is mak-
ing great preparations for the balls. She is starting to dance quite nicely.
She intends to marry M. de Vaudreuil in two years and he will have to
ask for your permission” (319). An alliance with the Vaudreuil family is
doubtless in line with Élisabeth’s own ambitions, and one can imagine
her distress on learning from one of her contacts in the colonial admin-
istration of the existence of a letter from her son-in-law denouncing the
governor. She writes to him immediately, expressing her great disappoint-
ment and advising him to avoid such impetuosity in future: “[The letters]
you’re writing against M. de Vaudreuil can do you a great deal of harm.
You complain bitterly about unimportant things and about matters that,
if you had any sense, you would discuss with him in private. But to write
these things, dear son? I no longer recognize you; I have never seen you so
caught up in pettiness. Is there someone who is perverting you and ruin-
ing your good sense? For at the very same time as you are complaining, M.
de Vaudreuil is praising you in the most generous terms […] Don’t write
things on the spur of the moment” (344). In future, she tells him, if he
feels he is a victim of injustice, he should write to her, for she has enough
influence to help him: “The esteem that your mother has acquired in this
country gives her confidence and the friendship of persons who can do
much” (345). In several other letters she offers him advice: “Don’t listen to
gossips” (349); “Think, dear son, on the fact that you have been put there
to look after your own affairs and not to be the reformer of the governor
[…] I can see you groaning, but with a bit of reflection you will see that I
am right” (350–1).
In the course of this period in which Michel has become a more real
interlocutor, and no longer the idealized and mute phantom that he was
during the long months when his mother-in-law was without news from
him in New France, a change of tone is perceptible in the letters. Even as
Élisabeth continues to assure him of her great love for him, she begins to
sound like a “mother hen,” involving herself in Michel’s affairs to the point
where one can understand the anger that finally led him to break with her.
She has heard from the Vaudreuils that he is living beyond his means, and
she advises him not to spend too much (282); and, aware of his tendency
to be overweight, she gives counsel to him about his eating habits: “I find
that you go too long without eating. Skip supper, but eat a little before
bed […] Maybe you’re eating enough for two meals at dinner” (271). Sur-
rounded in France by people who explain to her the machinations they
use to make money in the colonies, she encourages her son-in-law to do
the same: “Don’t you see that these are the ways to make money, and that
you’re a fool, my poor son, if you don’t take advantage of them?” (311). It
would be understandable if Michel, already critical of the corruption he
sees around him, were offended by his mother-in-law’s advice that he do
likewise: “If you’re not interested in making money where you are, you
deserve to be beaten, for […] those who have no commercial ambitions
are considered stupid. I fear that you aren’t concerned enough with these
matters” (315). Often she counsels him to get along better with the Vau-
dreuils, even if it means going against his principles: “You are right to
say that the Vaudreuil family is happy. I am constantly seeing how they
succeed in everything they undertake. I exhort you, dear son, to live in
harmony with them […] I know it’s difficult for you, but some things have
to be sacrificed” (272).
The final letters are devastating in their sadness. Overcome by Michel’s
constant accusations and insults, Élisabeth tries to defend herself, but the
growing distance between her and her son-in-law becomes obvious when
she begins to address him as “vous” rather than “tu” for the first time in
the correspondence (or rather to alternate between “vous” and “tu,” for
she is unable to remain angry with the “dear son” for very long). In Jan-
uary 1753, unaware that Michel has succumbed to an attack of apoplexy a
few weeks earlier, she responds with dignity to the ultimate injury he has
inflicted on her – the withdrawal of her custody over her granddaughter:
“As for giving your daughter to your sisters, you had only to tell me that
that was your wish and that you felt she was better off with them, and I
would have given her to them” (417).
All of Élisabeth’s support systems have now fallen apart: not only
the united family of which she had dreamed, but the much loved coun-
try, whose coming defeat can be felt in the news she receives from
New France. The French have been defeated by the English at Miami
and Detroit (269) and the merchants are abandoning the colony and
returning to France (340). Harvests are poor (378) and the entire city
of Trois-Rivières has been destroyed by fire (408). “This poor coun-
try [is] in great misery,” she writes (378). “I have been told many things
that make me thank God I am no longer there” (343). So much sadness
leaves its mark, and Élisabeth speaks more and more often of old age and
approaching death: “I’m getting old and have less and less hope, for I’m
now crippled. I can no longer do anything. If I walk, I feel sick, and if I
want to work, which I often have to do, it’s the same thing. Ah! dear son,
you can certainly call me ‘old grandmother’ these days!” (413). In April
1753, she writes to M. de Rostan, a civil servant who has been sympathetic
to Michel, asking him to “act as a father” to her two grandchildren, now
fourteen and fifteen years old: “You will understand, dear sir, that I wish
with all my heart that I could continue looking after these dear children,
but my health no longer permits it” (423). Her father dies the following
year, and Élisabeth herself will pass away on the first of November 1755, at
the age of fifty-nine.
• • •
After reading her correspondence, the image one retains of Élisabeth

Bégon is that of her unshakable love, and of the strength, tenacity, and
diplomatic skills that gained her the respect of the influential men of her
time. Like Marie de l’Incarnation, she lived her life in tune with her soci-
ety and was the confidante of those who held power in it. Like Marie as
well, she was a woman of passion who found her own centre and sense of
self in fusion with an other. “Since then, my soul has remained in its cen-
tre, which is God, and this centre is within,” wrote Marie. Élisabeth echoes
these sentiments in writing to her son-in-law: “I find my own centre when
I can find a moment to tell you that I love you” (313). The all too human
object of her love will prove to be less solid than the divine one that sus-
tained Marie, and without him she collapses, living her final years in a
state of misery and abandonment.
Yet her writing, to the end, is full of vitality, demonstrating a percep-
tiveness and talent for communicating the colours and movement of her
inner and outer worlds. Neither Marie de l’Incarnation nor Élisabeth
Bégon saw themselves as writers and, like her predecessor, Élisabeth
insisted that her writings be burned in order to avoid the possibility that
they might fall into the hands of someone other than their addressee.
Certainly she never envisaged the possibility that they would be read
by posterity: “I ask you always to burn [my letters] and not to put them
in piles of paper like the ones you used to have in Canada,” she writes to
Michel. “Throw all my writings into the fire and don’t keep any except
those that might amuse you, if you feel like laughing at your poor mother
who writes like a cat” (250). Writing nonetheless occupied an import-
ant place in her daily routine, offering her a way to record and reflect on
the evolution of her thoughts, emotions, and activities, thus defying the
passage of time and the certainty of death. She constantly refers to her
packages of letters as a “journal”: “I’m going to begin my journal” (291);
“there is a Jesuit father here who will deliver my journal to you, after I
have wrapped it in a waxed cloth” (258). It is a journal paradoxically writ-
ten for another and destined for him alone, a hybrid and innovative form
born of the fusion of her own psyche with that of the loved one: “I give
you permission not to reply to my letters, as long as you tell me you have
received them and thrown them into the fire. That is all I demand of you,
especially regarding my journal. My writings are done only for you. So
please don’t keep them, I beg of you” (281).
Élisabeth Bégon’s letters testify to the fact that it was possible for a
woman of her era to have agency and to express herself freely, without
feeling imprisoned in the mother role as later women would often be.
Autonomous, elegant, and witty, she is fully engaged in the society of her
time, whose hypocrisies and contradictions rarely escape her. Her ideas
on the education of her granddaughter, criticized by some of her acquain-
tances, suggest that she may have been an anomaly for her times; certainly
they seem based on a conception of the female role much broader than
that imposed on girls and women after the Conquest.18 She has the child
study the history of France, geography, Latin, grammar, and Roman
history, all “to give her the inclination to write and a taste for learning”
(87), as well as reading Corneille, La Fontaine, and Don Quixote. And
she encourages her to think for herself rather than spending her time on
learning embroidery: “She only likes the sciences and hates embroidery,
for which I don’t criticize her, far from it; I think she will eventually learn
to do work. Many condemn me for not making her work instead of study-
ing Latin, but I ignore them: she likes these subjects and wants to learn
them” (363).
Bégon’s letters contain certain early signs of characteristics that will
later be common among French-Canadian mothers: a tendency to want
to control the lives of her children (even that of her son-in-law) in the
absence of other outlets for her ambition; a feeling of anxiety, externalized
in certain fears (the cold, fire, roads); and, finally, the litany of “crosses to
bear” which becomes more insistent as the years go by: “But I wasn’t made
to have satisfaction in this world, for it seems to me that the Lord desires
to give me crosses of all sorts” (220). A century later, in Julie Papineau’s
letters, these characteristics will be more pronounced and the struggle for
autonomy more difficult.
C h ap t er 4
O ne I s N o t B or n a M ot her, O ne B ecom es
On e : Ju li e Pa p i neau’s Jour ne y
The most voluminous of nineteenth-century correspondences in Que-

bec and by far the most revealing of an individual woman’s subjectivity in
the first half of the century is that of Julie Bruneau Papineau (1795–1862).
Almost all of her letters are addressed to her husband, Louis-Joseph Pap-
ineau, and they cover four decades (1823–62); other letters, addressed to
her children, her sister-in-law Rosalie Dessaulles, and others, are also part
of the collection. Compared to Élisabeth Bégon’s letters, written seventy
years earlier, they give a sense of the narrowing of women’s role brought
about by the ideology of “separate spheres” for men and women, which
began to gain influence in the late eighteenth century in both Europe and
North America.1 Another important contrast with the Bégon letters is
that in the Papineau correspondence (referred to as JP and LJP) the letters
of both husband and wife have been preserved and published.2
Born in Quebec City and educated by the Ursulines, Julie Bruneau
was the daughter of a merchant, Pierre Bruneau, who sat in the House
of Assembly of Lower Canada from 1810 to 1816, and of Marie-Anne
Robitaille. In 1818, she married Louis-Joseph Papineau, seigneur of La
Petite-Nation, who at the age of thirty-two was already leader of the Parti
canadien and speaker of the House. As Papineau was the member for the
riding of Montréal-Ouest, the couple settled into a house on Rue Bon-
secours, in what is now Old Montreal. Over the next fifteen years, Julie
gave birth to nine children, of whom four died in early childhood. Sepa-
rated for several months a year by the sessions of the House of Assembly,
which met in Quebec, and often for longer periods (notably Papineau’s
year-long visit to London in 1823 and his years of exile in France after the
failed Rebellions of 1837–38), the couple maintained contact thanks to a
regular correspondence dominated by news of the family and of politics.
Julie Papineau’s Jour ney • 89
In it Julie often speaks of her health problems, her frustrations at being

separated from her husband, and the boredom of her daily routine as a
mother, and, more and more as tensions increase in the years preceding
the Rebellion, she expresses strong and radical views about the political
situation of Lower Canada. As well as being a precious source of infor-
mation on the life of a bourgeois woman of the period3 and providing a
woman’s perspective on the ideologies and political events of the time,
Julie’s letters reveal a female sensibility: the joys and frustrations of a
woman, the feeling of melancholy that often weighed on her throughout
her life, and the political and religious beliefs that sustained her within the
rigidly defined roles of wife and mother that were hers.
Although the immense temporal and geographic distances that
affected the correspondences of Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth
Bégon are long gone in the nineteenth century, distance and the uncer-
tainties of the roads and the postal system play an important role in the
epistolary relationship of the Papineaus. Papineau is often absent during
the Christmas period, for example, as the House of Assembly sits from
the beginning of December until the end of March and travelling between
Montreal and Quebec by carriage takes two or three days, often more
in winter. While his letters during this season are always eloquent and
full of emotion, expressing his regret for being absent and his seasonal
wishes for each member of the family, those of Julie, alone with her chil-
dren during this period meant for family celebration, are often sad and
even bitter in tone. In spite of his busy schedule, Papineau finds the time
to write Julie two or three times a week, and often reproaches her for not
writing him more often, a difference that can perhaps be explained by the
fact that the husband’s days are full of things to write about, while those of
the wife are “always the same.”
The distance that separates the correspondents can at times create
heartbreaking moments, like the ones surrounding the death from croup
of their four-year-old daughter Aurélie on 24 February 1830, while her
father is in Quebec. On 13 February, Julie writes to her husband that “the
children are well” (JP, 41), mentioning the health of their daughter Ézilda
and their son Gustave, but with no mention of Aurélie. After that, there
are no letters from Julie until 8 March. On 25 February (not knowing that
his daughter is dead) Papineau, having learned from Julie’s brother Théo-
phile that little Aurélie is gravely ill, sends his wife an emotional letter: “I
so deplore seeing you ill, suffering and surrounded by sick people while
I can’t be with you to share in caring for our poor children! Théophile is
cruel to have written me a letter that worries me as much as his last one
did, and not to have written again the next day to reassure me about the
state of my sweet little Aurélie […] The dear little one can speak of her
papa and miss him, but, luckily for her, she cannot be torn apart by this
absence as I am in this moment of seeing her in danger without being
able to be with her. I want to hear the details about you and about her, and
nothing else” (LJP, 198). On 8 March, his wife sends him one of the black-
est letters of the entire correspondence, reproaching him for his absence,
a letter that marks the beginning of a period of depression that will last for
several months:
You are right to call me the mother of sorrows and afflictions: that
is what I am and will be for a long time to come. I have been forced
to submit to the greatest and most heartfelt of all the losses I have
suffered, made all the more painful by the circumstances that
accompanied it. Yes, dear friend, you can only have a vague idea
of your own misfortune, compared with that of your unfortunate
mother, since you didn’t see our child suffer, and what a terrible suf-
fering it was! […] Is there anything more terrible than seeing a child
gasping for breath at every moment, unable to eat or drink, and
asking only that you walk with her or shake her so she can breathe
a little more freely? And even this poor bit of relief was given to her
by friends and strangers, as her unfortunate and tender father was
absent, a fact she was aware of and even spoke about. And her poor
mother, in bed herself, suffering terribly in a thousand ways, was
denied the opportunity to help her and give her the care I would
have been so consoled to have given her and that I can no longer
hope to give. (JP, 43)
hi S t O ry, fi Cti On, CO rreSPOndenCe:

L OOK ing fO r the “re AL” JuLie PAP i neAu
The letters quoted above give an idea of the anger and resentment one
finds in many of Julie’s letters, and of the often more gracious tone of those
of her husband. Is it possible to know the “real” Julie Papineau? The cou-
ple’s correspondence has given rise to two very different interpretations
of Julie’s character, by the historian Fernand Ouellet and the novelist
Micheline Lachance. Ouellet’s book, Julie Papineau: Un cas de mélancolie
et d’éducation janséniste (1961), in which he severely criticizes the char-
acter and personality of Julie and blames her for the many ills that befell
her family, was withdrawn from bookstores and libraries after a libel suit
pursued by descendants of the Papineau family.4 Lachance’s novel, the
bestselling Le roman de Julie Papineau (1995), aimed at feminist readers,
presents Julie as an intelligent and sensitive woman, a passionate Patriote

and a mother devoted to her children, although often frustrated by the
limitations imposed on women of her era by the maternal role.
Which interpretation of the correspondence is the more believable?
Fernand Ouellet, a specialist on the Rebellion of 1837 who also pub-
lished several articles arguing that the French Canadians themselves
were responsible for most of the problems that led to the insurrection,
presented an image of Julie which historians accepted for over thirty
years.5 Using a psychological approach from the 1950s called “character-
ology,” he describes Julie as a timid and melancholy woman, “unsuited
by her character and education for dealing with the difficulties involved
in the education of such a large family and the political activities of her
husband.”6 “Extremely excitable,” she also had depressive tendencies and
experienced maternity as a “formidable testing ground,” according to
Ouellet. In the first years of her marriage, he tells us, Julie’s letters show she
is incapable of caring for her two children, a situation that deteriorated
further as her husband’s political life became more complicated and the
number of her children increased. As well, he argues, she remained cut off
from all ongoing social relationships: “Her friendships seem to have been
rare and superficial […] Preoccupied above all by her malaises and per-
sonal weaknesses, she doesn’t seem to have known any real joys.”7 Strictly
adhering to his “characterological” approach, Ouellet ignores the often
difficult circumstances of Julie’s life, accusing her of inventing “imagi-
nary misfortunes” and exaggerating her real causes for unhappiness (he
accuses her, for example, of having been too greatly affected by the death
of her daughter Aurélie in 1830). During the Rebellion, Julie was not only
without news of her husband and her eldest son for several months, fear-
ing constantly that they were dead or had been arrested by the English,
but she was constantly hearing rumours accusing her husband of coward-
ice and treason, and it is not surprising that her letters express feelings of
distress and anxiety. Ignoring their context, Ouellet reads these letters as
simply the complaints of a profoundly pessimistic woman, whose negative
attitudes were formed by the Jansenist-influenced religious education she
received from the Ursulines. According to him, she maintained these atti-
tudes, based on “an absolute condemnation of the world”8 until the end of
her life, in spite of her husband’s constant efforts to win her over to a more
optimistic view of the world.
Unlike Ouellet, Micheline Lachance sees Julie as an ardent Patriote,
more lucid than her husband regarding the small concessions offered by
the English governor Gosford, very sure of her opinions when in the com-
pany of her numerous friends, and courageous enough to defy her cousin
Msgr Lartigue, the bishop of Montreal, when he threatens the Patriotes

with excommunication. Her Julie is a strong woman, married to a man
who is exceptional in many ways, but often weak, vain, or extremely hes-
itant. One recognizes the couple described by Ouellet, but Lachance’s gifts
as a novelist allow the reader to be touched by their courage, their suffer-
ing, and their humanity. Using exactly the same sources as Ouellet, she
espouses Julie’s point of view – or at least that of the Julie she imagines.
Here, for example, is how she presents the “melancholy” and the “com-
plaints” which Ouellet argues are Julie Papineau’s principal character traits:
She was sad, though. The worries of her everyday life were weigh-
ing on her. The challenge of raising a large family by herself […] of
appearing cheerful when she had the blues and calm when violent
incidents were happening every day in the neighbourhood. She
would have loved to talk of such things with Louis-Joseph. But what
was the point? He didn’t understand her melancholy. Every time she
dared to complain about one of the children or to feel the least bit
sorry for herself, he would blow up. She had a perfect life, he would
repeat, and she had to learn not to give in to the dangerous tendency
she had for worrying about misfortunes that would probably never
happen. And yet he himself complained constantly in his letters […]
Julie understood his frustrations and sacrifices. But she resented the
fact that he never showed the same sympathy for her problems.9
In spite of Lachance’s fidelity to her sources, the image of Julie she con-
structs is a romanticized one. In the first chapter of her novel, we see Julie
from the point of view of her husband, who admires her “slim silhouette,”
“the paleness of her beautiful face,” and “her marvellous smile, for which
he would have sold his soul”10 – all of this in a scene where the Papineaus,
fleeing Montreal with their children during a cholera epidemic, are trav-
elling on a road strewn with corpses. Unlike Ouellet, who insists on the
many failures of the Papineau family and on Julie’s responsibility for them,
Lachance offers us the portrait of an idealized family in which all the chil-
dren adore their “little mother,” who adores them in turn in spite of her
fatigue and the many worries associated with her maternal role. Above
all, the novelistic dimension of Lachance’s account of Julie’s life relies on
an imagined relationship between Julie and Robert Nelson, a doctor and
Patriote, who cares for her and protects her during her husband’s absences
– a loving friendship that begins with the death of little Aurélie in 1830
and the long period of pain traversed by Julie after her daughter’s death.
Observing the doctor with an old aunt, Julie imagines him in his office,
“bending over his patients, mostly women, who blushed as they confided
their intimate maladies in a breathless little voice. She also thought about
his wife and children, of whom he never spoke.”11
In order to provide as faithful a portrait as possible of Julie Papineau
based on her letters, it is important to recall George Gusdorf ’s comments
on epistolarity: “In the case of the letter […] the subject expresses him-
self for another, in relationship with a ‘you’ […] the letter writer’s identity
is deepened and completed in reciprocity.”12 Women’s correspondences
with their husbands, in particular, have to be read in light of this relation-
ship between the letter writer and an absent and more powerful Other,
whose life is more interesting than hers according to society’s standards.
As well, as Trev Broughton has argued, correspondences can reveal more
of the negative traits of the writer than diaries or autobiographies: “More
than any other genre, letters expose – because they enact – writers’ casual
disloyalties and betrayals, their moods and inconsistencies, their bro-
ken vows, flatteries, promiscuities.”13 Although Julie Papineau’s letters
contain many protests and complaints, they also reveal her intelligence,
her courage, her devotion to her children, and a demand for justice that
colours her perspective on the events of her time. By situating her words
in the context of the sometimes unequal exchange with her husband, we
can explore the complexities of her character and come to a better under-
standing of her famous “melancholy.”
une QuAL SPhereS
The epistolary relationship of Julie and Louis-Joseph Papineau is an

excellent illustration of the separation between the public sphere (men’s
domain) and the private sphere (that of women) which had become the
norm in their time, while at the same time demonstrating how their cor-
respondence helps each of them to break out of those separate spheres. In
his letters, Louis-Joseph participates as much as he can in the decisions
and daily activities of the family, giving advice to Julie on the education
of the children, on renovations to their home, and so on. Julie reports to
her husband on the content of the Montreal newspapers and on political
activities in the city, as well as giving him her opinion on the complex net-
work of alliances and rivalries in his political milieu. However, despite the
affection and mutual respect that characterize their letters, it is clear that
Julie dominates neither of the two spheres. While Papineau sees himself
as the authority in all matters, often using a paternalistic tone, his wife
expends much of her epistolary energy on defending her opinions and
apologizing for herself, even on domestic matters.
In the first seventeen years of her marriage, Julie Papineau is almost

always pregnant or nursing a child, and she often gives birth in the
absence of her husband. Four of her children – Didier (1820–21), Arthur
(1824–25), Aurélie (1826–30), and Ernest (1832–34) – die during this same
period. Three boys and two girls survive – Amédée (born in 1819), Lac-
tance (born in 1822), Ézilda (born in 1828), Gustave (born in 1829), and
Azélie (born in 1834).
Julie’s letters reveal her to be a devoted mother, upset by the frequent
illnesses of her children and often ill herself, constantly finding ways to
make their absent father into a real presence in her children’s lives and
reassuring her husband about their affection for him: “Amédée is get-
ting smarter and smarter. He often speaks of you” (JP, 24); “little Gustave
runs everywhere […]; he often speaks of you” (JP, 50); “Your dear Ézilda
misses you so much that I sometimes have to take her on my lap to con-
sole her. Luckily at her age children move quickly from sadness to joy; as
soon as a friend comes to the house she invites us to drink to the health of
her dear papa” (JP, 70).
For Papineau, Julie’s letters are an essential nourishment, helping him
to navigate the frustrations and complications of his life in the capital. He
insists on knowing all the details of domestic life and proffers constant
advice about the care of the children, assuring Julie in an 1825 letter that,
thanks to her letters, he feels “transported” into the intimacy of the family:
You didn’t give me any details about the occupations of your little
household: if Théophile or Philippe are giving you any help, if any of
your friends come to help you, how are my flowers doing, etc. With
the stomach weakness so many of our children suffer, you must be
very careful not to let them get their feet wet when they go out and
to keep Amédée in the house when the weather is bad. And you
must absolutely pay attention to their diet, and consult the doctor
about it […] Give me more details about the changes in Lactance’s
illness, and tell me what he and Amédée are talking about: hearing
their words would give me more pleasure than the most beautiful
music. A line on these subjects will transport me into the family, I’ll
be able to be with you more intimately and gaily than if you tell me
nothing about them. (LJP, 107–8)
Similarly, Papineau’s letters, full of information and opinions about

political and social life in Quebec, open up an important world outside
the domestic sphere to Julie. Alone in Montreal with the children, she is
bored and lonely, and often complains of her situation: “I can’t go out: the
children always need me” (JP, 27–8); “I was so lonely at the end of the day
and up until bedtime, I can’t find words to express how bored I was!” (JP,
32). She excuses herself for not writing more often, saying that she doesn’t
want to worry her husband by speaking of her anxieties, and insists on
the joy that news of him always brings to her: “I’m sure that if I wrote you
more often it would always be the same lamentations, with nothing amus-
ing to recount to you, I would just bore you and tire you out by sharing my
worries with you. For me, on the contrary, your letters are very funny and
interesting […] You should know that they are the only thing that brings
some consolation to your unfortunate friend” (JP, 18). She envies her hus-
band’s activities and is often ironic about the contrast between his life and
hers: “We will be having dinner in the family while you will be dining with
the great” (JP, 28); “M. Jacques Viger [the mayor of Montreal and a mod-
erate Patriote] […] came to see me yesterday […] He talked politics with
me for a while, and also spoke about the pleasures of the capital at this
time of year. Here, everything is sad and silent” (JP, 38).
As the years go by, however, Julie becomes calmer and more confi-
dent in her role as a mother, and speaks of her melancholy less often. In
1829, she tells of the pleasure she had with other family members over the
Christmas period, teasing her husband that he may disapprove of some
of her activities: “We had a really good time […] At the réveillon, your
father said that he must have some champagne left and had another bot-
tle brought to the table. I’m writing this to you because I’m certain that
such a thing will give you ample opportunity to give me a sermon” (JP, 33).
She resists more and more strongly her husband’s exhortations about the
necessity of weaning her children early so she will be less fatigued, writing
him about the infant Ézilda: “As for what you’re advising me, that I should
wean the little one, she is still too young and, not only that, she hasn’t any
teeth yet […] I am fine and nursing her doesn’t tire me” (JP, 35). Reply-
ing to his extremely detailed instructions about renovations being done
to their house in 1831, she says that he would be better advised to concen-
trate on political matters: “As for your plan for the interior arrangements,
I don’t approve of it; I prefer the one from M. Trudeau, which is much
less expensive. I see from your letter that you didn’t fully understand it
[…] Don’t spend any more time on it, it must tire you in the midst of your
many occupations and it keeps us from having other news of you, espe-
cially about politics”(JP, 46).
Often in his letters, Louis-Joseph Papineau speaks of his dream of leav-
ing political life and being reunited with his family: “O my dear Julie, a
quiet life where love and confidence reign is my highest ambition; my
public life is in constant opposition to my tastes, my reflections, my heart,
and my head” (LJP, 103). This desire will grow more pressing as the stress
of the political situation increases in the 1830s, provoking a sharp reply
from his wife, who is as affected as he is by political tensions that make her
fear for her children’s future:
You complain about public life and how wretched it is […] I am

tired of both. I don’t see any beautiful side even to private life, where
you believe you’ll spend your days in greater serenity. No, you’re
mistaken. You would have more leisure to see and feel all the little
frustrations of private life. Don’t you experience it when you’re at
home? Are you happier? Are the situation and the occupations you
have here enough to satisfy you? No. I’m only a woman but I get
bored and tired out by all the minute and frustrating details involved
in looking after a house, problems with the servants and, even more,
the great task of raising a family and, besides all that, thinking about
the future as this family advances in life. What a great deal of worry
and sorrow are in store for us! I have all the time in the world to
think about these things in my sad house where I have nothing to
distract my mind. (JP, 93)
“ P O Liti CS iS the On Ly thing th At inte reS tS Me ”
By the time she is thirty-five, Julie has become sure of her political ideas.
Since the beginning of her marriage she has accepted the long absences
of her husband as necessary sacrifices, and she has read nationalist news-
papers like La Minerve to keep up on political developments. But in the
French Canada of her era, even in the progressive milieu of the Patriotes,
politics is not seen as women’s domain. As Allan Greer explains, the idea
of separate spheres for men and women is at the heart of the republican
ideal which inspired the Patriotes:
Given that they oppose the existing hierarchies for reasons of equal-
ity and call for a government of “the people,” the philosophers, the
Jacobins and the patriots of America must face the question of who
makes up “the people.” It is obvious that it is not made up of all the
human beings who inhabit a given territory […] The tendency is to
exclude women in particular from direct participation in the politi-
cal life of the republican City. While the declarations can be cryptic
or open to multiple interpretations, full of subtexts and silences, it is
nonetheless the case that, during the period of the great bourgeois
Julie Papineau ’s Jour ney • 97
revolutions, gender becomes the first line of demarcation between

those who govern and those who are governed.14
In 1834, following this logic, the Assembly of Lower Canada, presided

over by Papineau, removed women’s right to vote;15 three years later, the
Patriotes announced that women would be responsible for the numer-
ous domestic tasks (buying local products, knitting, weaving, and so
on) made necessary by the boycott of British products to put pressure
on London. Julie disapproves of the misogyny of the Patriotes, respond-
ing ironically to one of her husband’s numerous pieces of advice about
domestic matters: “As you say, I may not have obeyed all your absolute
orders; once in a while I allow myself to deviate from them, to the horror
of these men who preach independence and love liberty so much, and yet
demand so much submission from their wives” (JP, 51).
For her, politics is a visceral commitment which frees her from the
monotonous routine of her daily activities and gives her the feeling of
participating in the creation of a better world. Stronger and more mili-
tant than her husband on several issues, she dialogues with him and gives
him sensible advice even as she admits knowing she is going beyond the
boundaries of her role in daring to speak of such matters. On occasion,
Papineau reminds her that authority in the couple belongs to the husband,
but he does so in a teasing way, as in this letter from 1830: “I received your
good and amiable letter this morning. Although it shows a bit too much
independence of spirit against the legitimate and absolute authority of
your husband, I am not surprised, only afflicted. I see that the disastrous
philosophy is corrupting everyone’s mind, and that Rousseau’s Social Con-
tract is making you forget the Epistle of Saint Paul: ‘Women, submit to
your husbands.’ ‘All power comes from God.’ But, beautiful as the angels,
you women are, like them, inclined to revolt!” (LJP, 194).
It is clear, however, that Papineau respects and admires his wife’s
ideas, going so far as to admit to her: “In the matter of politics, you think
and express yourself as well as [your husband]” (LJP, 310). As leader of
the party in power, he is often obliged to play the role of mediator or to
espouse moderate ideas, while she can take more radical positions. In
the New Year’s greetings he sends to all members of the family in Jan-
uary 1833, he says to his wife: “As for you, I really have nothing to ask,
except perhaps a bit more indulgence in your attitude to the society in
which we are condemned to live. It’s not necessary to take to heart evils
that can’t be corrected, as you do. I love you dearly and embrace you ten-
derly” (LJP, 263).
Julie often criticizes the English administration, which she sees as

“dishonest and wanting to crush us” (JP, 71). She stresses the danger of
making concessions to London (JP, 70) and advises her husband not to
be misled by the minimal concessions being proposed by Governor Gos-
ford, such as the use of French before English in meetings and official
receptions: “I hope that all these little favours and appearances of justice
towards Canadians aren’t distracting and flattering our members too
much” (JP, 95). But she excuses herself every time she expresses a strong
opinion, saying for example, after having expressed her ideas on the role
the Assembly should play in obtaining justice for French Canadians:
“You’ll laugh at my reflections on such a subject but it interests me; I’m
saying what I think, and, as I don’t dare speak of such things to others, you
have to be patient enough to read my words” (JP, 69). She is caught up in
her passion for politics and must speak of it, even though she is conscious
of her awkwardness and intimidated by the greater sophistication of her
husband in political matters: “That’s enough badly expressed political
ideas: I’m writing this letter in a hurry and I’m not used to writing about
these things and probably shouldn’t do so,” she states in an 1833 letter to
him. “Don’t preach to me about it. Women’s ideas are always tolerated, but
my head and my heart are so full of them that I can’t help spilling them out
to you, Mister Censor! […] What will you say about my scribblings? Well,
to console you I’ll say that I speak a bit better than I write, and certainly
with more circumspection” (JP, 71). And, in 1835: “That’s enough badly
expressed political ideas; they would make many who are kinder than
you laugh about women who want to mix themselves up with things they
don’t understand and want to be involved in them even though they don’t
understand” (JP, 96).
The letters of February and March 1836 show Julie’s remarkable per-
spicacity regarding the approaching political troubles. Papineau and
his party have learned of a document secretly sent to Governor Gosford
indicating that London will under no circumstances accept the idea of
responsible government, and the possibility of rebellion is growing. On
8 February, Papineau writes to his wife: “The affairs of the country are
becoming more and more grave, and more and more encouraging for the
fiery ones who are determined not to give up any of their rights. Upper
Canada is formulating the same demands as we are” (LJP, 345). A letter
from Julie, dated the same day, shows that she is already aware of the legis-
lative impasse and of the possibility of violence: “I hope that you will force
the government to act; otherwise, Canadians will have to prepare them-
selves for a civil war” (JP, 115). But, even as Papineau and other members
of his party are becoming more radical, splits appear within the party,
especially in Montreal, where confrontations between the “constitution-

als” and the “patriotes” are increasing. When Robert Nelson and a few
others suggest to Papineau that he absent himself from Montreal “for a
few years” so as to protect himself from an attack by the constitutionals,
Julie’s stinging response will turn out to be prophetic: “If they were wor-
thy citizens, they would be proud to have you and would be prepared to
defend you in the case that anyone was infamous enough to attack you,
instead of trying to convince you to run away and hide so that they will
be safe. Your enemies would take advantage of that by accusing you of
being a coward” (JP, 121). A year and a half later, the accusations of cow-
ardice aimed at Papineau after his sudden departure from the battle of
Saint-Denis will prove that she was right.
During the same period, Julie pens a pessimistic analysis of the
ambivalence of French-Canadian attitudes towards English power.
Although she makes no distinction between the bourgeoisie and the
people, her criticisms will prove accurate as far as the upper classes are
concerned, for all of them, with the exception of Papineau, will rally to
the side of the English before the rebellion breaks out. Unlike them, the
members of the lower classes, especially in the Richelieu Valley and the
county of Deux-Montagnes, will fight desperately, often at the cost of their
lives, against the British army. Julie Papineau’s searing commentary on
French-Canadian ambivalence deserves to be quoted in full, for it fore-
shadows ideas that will be eloquently expressed more than a century later
by independentist artists like novelist Hubert Aquin16 and filmmaker
Denys Arcand:17
Haven’t I always told you that I feared we would succumb because

they know we lack men who are firm and resolute in their demand
for justice? They are incapable of persevering with energy and espe-
cially of sacrificing their personal interest for that of the country.
The foreigners, on the contrary, will be tenacious and it will be easy
for them to have an advantage over us […] You don’t know French
Canadians. I’ve told you over and over and I’m more and more
convinced of it: when they are put to the test they are flighty and not
at all effective, they are selfish and therefore jealous of the success
of their compatriots, they have no public spirit; they’re big talkers
and very brave when they have nothing to fear. If they are threat-
ened, they suddenly lose courage; they lack judgment when they
think they’re close to obtaining justice […] Reform will take place
in Europe and in Upper Canada; but here in this little corner of the
world you will be oppressed, because we believe we’re meant to be
oppressed; and they know us better than we know ourselves […]

They know all too well that they can succeed, because we help them
keep our chains in place. (JP, 118–19)
t h e rebe LLi On And itS eff eC tS: A L ife C ut in t WO
The Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 mark a catastrophic break in the life of the
Papineaus, compromising not only their social and economic status but
their relationship with their country, their compatriots, and the political
ideal that had guided them for the previous two decades. The ambigu-
ity and apparent inevitability of the events of the spring and summer of
1837 are well known: both the Patriotes and the English were led, through
a series of rhetorical and real confrontations, to an armed conflict which
neither side truly desired. The first battle took place on 23 November at
Saint-Denis, with victory going to the Patriotes. Disguised as a farmer,
Papineau escaped from Saint-Denis and managed to reach the United
States, but his absence from among those who were arrested and con-
demned to death or exile remained a subject of controversy for the rest
of his life. As for Julie, who had quietly left Montreal with her children
and taken refuge at her brother’s home in Verchères, she was not only
deprived of news of her husband for several months, but exposed to the
rumours of cowardice and even treason that were circulating about him.
Even her own disappearance gave rise to rumours: in December 1837, a
newspaper article made reference to her death.18 In June 1838, she and
her youngest daughter Azélie rejoined her husband and her sons Amédée
and Lactance in Saratoga, leaving Ézilda and Gustave with her sister-
in-law Rosalie Dessaulles in Saint-Hyacinthe. In the United States, Julie
supported the group of Patriotes who urged Papineau to travel to France
in order to seek French support for the Patriote cause, which he did in
February 1839. In September of that year, Julie joined him in Paris with
their three youngest children, Ézilda, Gustave, and Azélie, and their maid,
Marguerite. In 1843 she returned to Canada with the three youngest, leav-
ing Papineau and their son Lactance in Paris. Not until two years later,
after numerous delays and hesitations, did Papineau finally return to
Montreal, allowing for the family to be more or less reunited. Not surpris-
ingly, Julie’s letters during this period are often hostile, displaying an anger
and frustration about her husband’s indecisiveness that will never really
disappear from her letters in future years. After his return, Papineau was
twice elected to the new Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada,
but he never resigned himself to the new political situation of the United
Canadas or regained the popularity and prestige he had enjoyed before
the Rebellion. The final years of the couple were spent at La Petite-Nation,
in the magnificent manor house Papineau had always dreamed of hav-
ing built and which Julie, who hated country life, had never wanted. The
name given to the new house was Montebello.
The letters of the post-Rebellion period offer the portrait of a woman
who has seen her greatest passion – that of country – reduced to ashes and
her husband rejected by the compatriots who had formerly adored him.
In her first letter to Papineau during his exile in the United States, she
describes “the aspect of this country, changed in an instant, as if metamor-
phosed,” with several of the Patriotes “tied up and garrotted, entering the
city surrounded by their fiercest enemies, exposed to the jeers and vocif-
erations of the foreign mob threatening them with imprisonment and the
scaffold” (JP, 136). She is frank with her husband about the attacks on him
in the press, describing “the despicable language in our newspapers, all
with the same aim: to treat you like traitors, scoundrels, and opportunists
and to imply that you were the aggressors and the authors of our misfor-
tunes […] That is the language of the most moderate of them, judge for
yourself what the others are saying” (JP, 136–7). In a letter to her sister-in-
law Rosalie Dessaulles, she speaks of “the rest of our painful career, which
has already ended politically” (JP, 151). Only her religious faith gives her
the strength to persevere: “How grateful we should be to providence for
according us the greatest of graces: that of preserving your precious life,”
she writes to her husband. “The other sacrifices are easy, compared to the
possibility of losing you […] May God’s will be done! I ask Him only that
we be together again” (JP, 136). A letter to her son Amédée insisting on the
danger of happiness exhibits the Jansenist attitudes criticized by Fernand
Ouellet in his portrait of Julie, attitudes that will become more and more
pronounced in the years following the Rebellion: “You must appreciate
more than ever the things I have always taught you about nothingness and
the fact that happiness doesn’t last […] We escaped death and we should
be grateful to Him who preserved us” (JP, 142).
Despite the change in their fortunes, Julie’s devotion to the Patriote
cause is unshaken. To her husband, who, fearing that the government will
confiscate his properties in his absence, is hesitating to leave for France,
she replies that “this sacrifice for the native land” (JP, 183) is a necessary
one, even as she admits to Amédée that it is a sacrifice which is costing her
dearly: “I acted as the strong woman so as not to discourage him, and if I
hadn’t done so he would not have consented to go. But now it’s going to be
hard for me […] If, by chance, he meets with an accident, you can imagine
how I will reproach myself ” (JP, 169–70). And, to her sister-in-law Rosalie:
“Our separation was cruel and, most difficult of all, I was obliged to hide
from him what it was costing me, for if he had seen my distress he would
never have left” (JP, 172). During the seven months Papineau is in Paris,
before her arrival with the children, she keeps him up to date on politi-
cal events at home, even though she confesses to being “more and more
disgusted with what’s going on in the country and with politics” (JP, 196).
After the appearance of the Durham Report (1839), which advocated the
assimilation of French Canadians through a union of Upper and Lower
Canada, she concludes that there is no longer any hope of reconciliation
and that the people must continue to fight: “He acted as the vile instru-
ment of the English government […] England must give in to us or we will
fight. It is necessary, it is what the people want: they will do it desperately
and fruitlessly. There is no other choice and it will lead to our total ruin.
But since they are determined to destroy us, it is better to try to defend
ourselves than to simply allow ourselves to be exterminated” (JP, 196–7).
Noting the new “enthusiasm [of French Canadians] for everything
that is English and their ingratitude towards France,” Julie proposes to
her husband that he should make efforts to encourage French immigra-
tion to Canada: “By these means we will be rid of the British and Yankees,
with whom we can never hope to live in peace if we desire to preserve
our nationality and our language” (JP, 197). She constantly reminds him
of the importance of his mission in France, not only for the country but
for the rehabilitation of his reputation: “The country is ready, minds are
inflamed, all eyes and ears are on your mission. It has revived their cour-
age and inspired fear in our tyrants […] Consider as well, my dear, that
your reputation is at stake and that it is the final stage of a long political
career, and that you must try to make it end in the best interests of your
country and the honour of your name. Take courage! This is no time for
indecisiveness. You must decide right away” (JP, 201–2).
More and more, in these years following the Rebellion, Julie assumes
the role of the strong woman, looking after all the affairs of the now
impoverished couple in a situation in which the danger of retribution
from the English is a real one. Ouellet’s description of her as a timid
woman is contradicted by the letters of these years in which she resists
the advice of her father-in-law about selling or renting out the house on
Rue Bonsecours, in spite of the fact that Papineau no longer has a salary
and that the seigneurie of La Petite-Nation, while still costly, no longer
brings in any revenues: “One reason among others why I didn’t rent out
the house: if we speak of doing so, [the English] will be daring enough
to put their troops into it, as they wanted to do last winter […] If I don’t
get the money that is owed to us there are several articles I could sell”
(JP, 135). After suggesting several ways in which her husband could raise
funds for the Patriotes in Paris, she excuses herself for intruding in such
a way into men’s domain: “I hope you will make all these efforts, and as
soon as possible. You must also see whether money might not be available
from Russia in the case that France doesn’t want to help us […] You will
laugh at my opinions, but what does it matter? Even if I don’t know how
to express myself, I know how to feel and you know exactly what I mean,
even if I’m saying it very imperfectly” (JP, 191–2).
Once she has arrived in Paris, however, and is cut off from her links
with family and country as well as from the organizing role that had given
her strength, Julie begins to mope. In her letters to Amédée she worries
constantly, complaining of the expenses of life in Paris and of the inter-
ruption of the children’s education. Lactance wants to study medicine, but
the Papineaus cannot affford it; as for the other children, she is trying to
give them lessons at home, but without much success: “You know what a
school at home without rules or restraints is like. I have never been more
discouraged since the beginning of our exile” (JP, 217). Contacts with
Canada are becoming more and more rare; in 1840 she confides to her son
that a sum of money a friend was to send them has not arrived: “We’re at
the end of our means” (JP, 220). In Paris, although they now have French
and American friends, they cannot afford the carriages and fine clothes
needed for life in society: “We have to live in isolation and limit ourselves
to what is strictly necessary” (JP, 216). Complaints become frequent: “I
regret more and more having allowed myself to be convinced to come
here, where we are separated from you and where everything is so expen-
sive […] I hardly ever go out any more. My health is so bad!” (JP, 231).
Yet she insists that these revelations she is making to her son must remain
confidential; the reputation of the Papineaus as a happy couple must be
maintained at all costs. Even the hope of returning home begins to slip
away during these years: Julie often states that she would prefer to live in
the United States rather than “live in Canada before its independence” (JP,
228). Everything she hears about the country leads her to despair for its
future and for the place the Papineaus might occupy within it: “We are far
from wanting to return, given the state of servitude things have fallen into
[…] Young people will no longer be part of our lives: they too are becom-
ing indifferent, ambitious, and materialistic, so goodbye to all bonds of
affection! There are very few persons who are interested in us” (JP, 237–8).
All in all, Papineau’s failure to find support in Paris and the worrisome
rumours Julie hears about the situation in Canada have plunged her into
a state of disillusionment: “Where are energy and patriotic virtue to be
found in this century? I don’t see them put into practice anywhere; selfish-
ness is the order of the day” (JP, 228).
In August 1843, against the will of her husband, Julie returned to Ver-
chères with her three youngest children, leaving Lactance with his father
in Paris. The two years between her return to Canada and that of Papin-
eau in September 1845 mark the longest period the two have been apart
and the beginning of an emotional break between them that will never
entirely heal. Julie decides to return to Canada primarily because of her
worries about the future of her children. As for Papineau, the fact that he
continually puts off the date for his return, preferring to spend his time in
Paris on archival research,19 reflects his fears about returning to a coun-
try which has been transformed in his absence and in which, he rightly
suspects, he will no longer have an important role to play. Julie’s letters
of this period, full of anger, resentment, and reproach, justify to some
extent the negative portrait of her by Fernand Ouellet. But it is clear that
her reproaches are warranted and that she is accurately describing her
husband when she speaks of his chronic indecisiveness. In April 1844, she
writes to Lactance: “You won’t believe how much the last two letters from
your father have afflicted me, for I see how indecisive he is, how much of
a ditherer! […] He is inexcusable for having knowingly made us all suf-
fer […] He has no desire to help us. I have no power over him, and he
will claim that I’m responsible for my own fate, as I decided to return to
Canada on my own” (JP, 284). A few weeks later, on learning that her
husband is now saying he will return in the fall, she shares her doubts
with Amédée: “Please God he will finally make up his mind. I would be
submissive and patient if I really believed that he had; but past experi-
ence makes me fear that when September comes he will be as undecided
as ever” (JP, 288). Her fears are well founded, for it is not until Septem-
ber 1845, a year later than originally planned, that Papineau, having just
returned from a long trip to Italy, leaves the European continent he has
come to adore in spite of the hardships of exile.
By the end of this long period of separation, Julie’s letters are those of
a bitter and complaining woman, disappointed by her fate since the trou-
bles of 1837 and 1838. She no longer believes in the existence of a protective
providence, and at times her religious faith is tenuous. All of her children
have problems with health, scholarly success, or social adaptation, doubt-
less in part due to the constant displacements and traumas of their youth
and to their father’s dramatic fall from grace. Julie blames herself for all
of these problems: “Everything I’ve done for my family has contributed
to their downfall,” she writes to Lactance (JP, 287). As well, she senses
that her children blame her for their difficulties: “Your apathy and indif-
ference are inexplicable,” she writes to Amédée in 1844. “I am filled with
more sorrow than I can bear, without consolation from any member of
the family” (JP, 291). To her husband, who is enjoying himself in Paris and
touring Italy while she is forced by her poverty to move into a small house
in which there will be boarders she will have to look after, she writes:
“Everything upsets me and displeases me. And also, as you know, your
sons are unkind” (JP, 301). Her anger at him for the role he has played in
their misfortune is constant: “I have to be well in order to put up with the
new trials and troubles caused by your constant refusal to return to this
country, which I don’t approve of at all,” she writes to him, describing the
disorder and filth of the new house. Even the political situation in Lower
Canada seems to her to be a result of her husband’s lengthy absence: “If
you had come home right after the resignation of the minister, the coun-
try would not be in the situation it’s in, for Lafontaine and his party
would not have gained influence on the people and even on some of your
friends, who have been duped by him” (JP, 297). When Papineau informs
her in December 1844 that he will be difficult or impossible to reach by
mail during his trip to Italy, she responds with a letter that recalls, but on a
more bitter note, the reproaches she used to make to him when he was at
the pinnacle of Quebec high society: “At least you’ll have the distractions
of the trip, while all we have here is trouble, arguments, and worries about
the long wait to find out what our future holds. How interminable time
seems to me!” (JP, 302). The New Year’s greetings she offers him for 1845
are for “a better future, if such a thing is possible for us! I’m starting to
doubt it” (JP, 303).
As for Papineau, he remains the same as ever, in spite of moments of
discouragement and doubt. Philosophical as always, he counsels his wife
to read Seneca in order to cheer herself up (LJP, 473) and reproaches her
for lacking “philosophical strength or religious resignation” in traversing
the “inevitable difficulties [of life], either with me or without me” (LJP,
475). The dream he has always had of retiring to a quiet life in the country
with his family seems close to becoming a reality, and he counsels his wife
to prepare their daughters for such an existence: “They must acquire tastes
and simple occupations that are appropriate for the country. For, after our
meeting, I truly hope that I will not be caught up again in the whirlpool
of political agitations, but that cultivating my garden, enjoying my books,
and best of all enjoying domestic happiness and the companionship of a
loving wife and loving and beloved children, I will peacefully spend the
days, however long, that are left to me” (LJP, 503).
the finAL yeArS
During the seventeen years between her husband’s return from France
in 1845 and her own death in 1862, Julie Papineau comes to fully inhabit
the role of sorrowful mother. Dissatisfied with her life, authoritarian
with her children, who disappoint her, and constantly critical of her
husband’s expenses in the construction of the magnificent manor house
Montebello, she represents both the positive and negative characteristics
of the “queen of the hearth,” at the precise moment when this image of
woman is becoming central to the dominant ideology of French Can-
ada. Lacking real power, she tries to control all the activities of the family
members even as she complains that they never listen to her: “As far as
your building is concerned […] I know you won’t pay any attention to
me when I tell you that it’s going to cost half as much again as what you
expect, but I won’t get involved,” she writes to Papineau in a typical let-
ter. Reading these letters, one is reminded of Fernand Ouellet’s negative
assessment of Julie, particularly in her later years. “The last ten years of
her life were painful,” he writes. “Bitter, anxious, tormented by scruples,
pessimistic, and authoritarian, she was responsible for her own unhap-
piness and that of those around her […] The values she cherished above
all others – family, country, and religion – were not sufficient to give her
a positive taste for life.”20 However, Ouellet’s characterological approach
limits his perspective, leading him to blame Julie for having “contributed
in a major way to her own unhappiness”21 and to ignore other factors that
contributed to her unhappiness: her political disillusionment and the dis-
appearance of outlets for her ambition after the Rebellion, the negative
effects of her husband’s political misfortunes on the lives of their children
and, finally, the increasing influence, after the failure of the Rebellion, of
conservative Catholicism and its emphasis on the responsibilities of the
Christian mother.
In June 1846, when Papineau receives the back salary due him as
Speaker of the Assembly from 1832 to 1837, the couple enter a period of
relative financial comfort during which Papineau can finally undertake
the project of constructing his manor house. The letters between the two
continue to be fairly frequent, as Julie, although she agrees to pass her
summers at La Petite-Nation, prefers to spend the rest of the year in Mon-
treal. “Do you want to know what I think of La Petite-Nation?” she writes
to Amédée in July 1846. “I find it exactly as I always predicted it would be:
wild, lacking embellishments, without any interest at all for the moment.
And at my age, I will never see it prosperous and beautified” (JP, 319). And
yet her husband’s efforts to improve the house over the years are far from
pleasing her. In April 1856, with the construction still far from completed,
she expresses her rage in a long attack on her husband, threatening to
spend the summer with her son Amédée and his family in Saratoga rather
than at La Petite-Nation:
I learned yesterday from Amédée that you are persisting in the

madness of new construction, when I told you I preferred repairs,
construction that will disfigure the house and cause us torment and
trouble for the whole summer. This has been going on for six years!
Your idea is completely outlandish, especially at a time like this
when we’re short of money […]: it kept me awake all night! I still
can’t believe it! […] I refuse to go there and witness such extrava-
gance […] I don’t know how to put this into words, but it’s going
to make this place which has been so disastrous for us even more
unpleasant […] You will be responsible for all the unhappiness of a
family that has already been severely tested. (JP, 426)
Although Papineau’s letters to his wife remain courteous, their rela-

tionship has deteriorated and they are living separate lives, without paying
much attention to each other’s needs and desires. Julie’s description of
their life at La Petite-Nation in a letter to Amédée makes this clear: “He
must know what I’m suffering, without any consolation, but he is gayer
than ever, always busy, interested in everything; except that, in the short
time when he’s in the house, he gets angry at the smallest things […] Out-
side, he goes around the lakes, has the property surveyed, and keeps up
on all the construction. He comes home in the evenings tired, eats, and
sleeps. So you see what an amusing life we’re having here with our depress-
ing thoughts!” (JP, 325). Her letter marks a sad contrast with those written
two decades earlier, when she addressed her husband as “dear friend.”
Now, she prefers to confide in her eldest son about her husband’s faults,
thus taking her place in the constellation of mothers and sons represented
by her spiritual ancestors, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon.
As for Julie’s political ideas, it is not the “values of country” that have
failed her, as Ouellet proposes, but rather the fact that those values have
disappeared and that the possibility of bringing about independence no
longer exists. Despite the fact that her husband was twice elected to the
parliament of the United Canadas, Julie no longer has any illusions about
his political influence, or about the possibility of improving the situation
of the country. In 1854, she writes to him: “I’m glad the session is going
to be short, as I’m sure you won’t accomplish anything useful” (JP, 415).
Often she pesters him with the idea that he should sell his properties so
that they can live in the United States, a country she sees as less “selfish”
and “ungrateful” than Canada:
I am more and more disgusted with this place and with this poor,
selfish, slanderous and libellous society [ …] I repeat to you […] if I
had been in the States I’d have done everything in my power to sell
our properties […] I told you that in Europe, and here too […] and
you should have paid serious attention to what I was saying […] I
know that all you’re going to do is shrug your shoulders with pity for
my ideas. I don’t care, I’m telling them to you anyway because they
would make the future life of our family less bitter. We can’t hope
for such a thing, though. We will have to suffer and soon die: that
will be our fate! But it is the idea of leaving our children in such an
ungrateful and inept country that hurts me the most. (JP, 337, 339)
While in the past Julie had been courageous enough to defy the clergy
in adhering to the Patriote cause, now her ideas are identical with those
of the Church. Her vision of “the people” is now a moralistic one, which
sees in their situation only “vice” and alcoholism, problems that would be
solved by greater religious faith. “You talk to me about the demoralization
of the people,” she writes to her husband in 1860. “I know about it and feel
it deeply. If alcohol gets more widespread they will be seriously advancing
into evil, and they will be all the more guilty because they lack the reasons
for such things present in other nations. They have the help of religion,
and others don’t. Their nature must be truly perverse, as nothing seems
able to stop this torrent of vices! I thought of our dear curé: he must be
greatly afflicted by such wrongdoing” (JP, 486–7).
Little by little, the reality of the English presence starts to be felt in the
life of the Papineaus. Anglicisms occasionally appear in Julie’s letters, as
for example when she writes to Azélie in 1861 about baking, using the
English words “grocer,” “rolls,” and “yeast,” and the French word “fleur”
(flower) instead of “farine” for “flour” (JP, 492). On the occasion of the
visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1860, the Papineaus sent him a
magnificent bouquet and decorated their house with English and French
flags, seen by the prince as his boat went up the Ottawa River to the capital.
Deprived of the political hopes that had nourished her early years as
the wife of Lower Canada’s most important political leader, Julie now too
often resembles the negative archetype of the French-Canadian mother
– complaining, impotent, and obsessed by the injustice of her fate. In
1846, she writes to her husband: “It is almost impossible [that I would not
suffer excessively], given that I have a mother’s womb and the sensitivity
of a sick woman weighed down with sorrows that have lasted for years
and seem to get greater each day […] Only a mother can understand what
I endure” (JP, 335–6). She has always been the mother hen, controlling the
smallest details of her children’s lives and advising them of their religious
duties. Yet, as the letters of this period indicate, they are almost never at
home with her, even when they are gravely ill, as were Lactance (interned
in an asylum in France in 1854 after eight years of mental illness), Gustave
(affected in adolescence with a cardiac condition of which he died in 1851,
at the age of twenty-two), and, to a lesser extent, Azélie, who also suffered
from a nervous condition.
In September 1846, Lactance suffers a grave nervous attack while visit-
ing friends of the family in New York, and Gustave is worrying his parents
by his rebellious and undisciplined behaviour. In a letter to their older
brother Amédée, Julie complains about her two younger sons:
The only satisfactions I expected in life were those that would come
from my children, and that hope has been so cruelly shattered that
I am left with no consolation. Gustave is […] violent, excessively
weak, and selfish; he knows how much he has disappointed me, and
he hasn’t written a word to me since he left. He will only do so when
he needs some of his things. I did all I could to keep him happy […]
I have nothing to reproach myself as far as the other one is con-
cerned either. I did all I could for him, he has often failed me and has
never recognized what I have suffered for him […] He has ruined
his life and mine. There is only one thing that could console me,
even in his madness, it would be to see him return to the religious
beliefs he should never have abandoned. (JP, 323–4)
In November, when Lactance is admitted to a mental hospital in New

York State, his father goes there to consult with his doctors and to try to
reassure the young man. Julie, in the meantime, writes to them disagree-
ing with the doctor’s advice, insisting on her own anguish, and making
Lactance feel guilty about being ill: “I beg you to do all that you can to get
better: your health depends on it, and also the situation of your devoted
mother and the happiness of your family. Yes, if you don’t get better there
will be no more happiness for us.” Invoking “the imperious duty of a
Christian mother […] which I must not neglect,” she preaches to her son
about the errors that have led him to this sad state, for which, she claims,
there is only one remedy: a return to God. “Providence has led you by ill-
ness and affliction to this place […] In Paris, you were carried away by
conversations and reading the works of misguided men whose followers
are led from error to error, and never to happiness: I saw it happening
and knew it would lead to misery for you. But God is so good and mer-
ciful. He hasn’t abandoned you […] Yes, I repeat to you, you can still be
happy if you follow the advice of the mother who is so devoted to your
wellbeing” (JP, 334). Her insistence on the importance of obedience and
submissiveness echoes the ideas of the conservative Catholicism that has
now consolidated its influence over the population: “[You must] submit
to the will of God, who has sent you this illness […] God asks of you only
simplicity and the docility to follow the advice of the bishop to whom I
have recommended you” (JP, 343).
In March and April 1847, Gustave, ill with a fever that threatens his life
for several weeks, is staying at the home of his aunt, Rosalie Dessaulles, in
Saint-Hyacinthe, and Louis-Joseph goes there to care for him. On learn-
ing how serious his illness is, Julie writes to her husband: “The dear child
is paying for his lack of prudence […] Tell him how much I regret not
being able to be with him; I am a mother who is thwarted in everything
and suffers all the more because of it, but he is lucky to have such good
parents […] Excuse me for such a short letter; I have a terrible headache”
(JP, 345). On learning a few weeks later that her son has received the sac-
rament of Extreme Unction and that his health is slowly returning, she
writes: “What consoles me the most is his return to piety and religion, for
I’m convinced he can’t be happy without them; nor can his poor mother
[…] God has sent us this trial in order to be a greater consolation to us
[…] Prayer, supplications, and resignation have been my only refuge since
I was deprived of the pleasure of looking after him myself, and it was a sad
state of affairs” (JP, 346). Similarly, when Azélie, suffering from a nervous
illness, is placed in boarding in a religious community in September 1856,
her mother sees prayer and renunciation as the only solution to her prob-
lems: “That will bring you the grace not to give in to your thoughts and
your will: […] you are starting to get on the right track by going against
your inclinations” (JP, 429). As she did with her sons, she makes the
young woman feel guilty for being sick, appearing more preoccupied by
her own suffering than by that of her daughter.
According to Ouellet, the nervous illnesses of the Papineau children
are largely the result of their mother’s negative influence; Julie herself
believes their problems are a result of the horrors they experienced during
and after the Rebellion. Whatever the cause, she is critical, domineer-
ing, and petty in the way she seeks to control every detail of their lives,
and cold in her judgments of them. In her opinion, Lactance and Gus-
tave are timid, awkward, and “of no use for anything” (JP, 359). Ézilda,
Julie Papineau ’s Jour ney • 111
their unmarried daughter who is a dwarf and who will keep house for
them until Papineau’s death, is also a failure in the eyes of her mother: “It’s
true she’s not interesting or well educated, and her conversation shows
it; besides, her timidity and modesty don’t do her any favours” (JP, 386).
Other families, Julie writes to her husband, “are much happier than we
are, for they have good children: mine make me unhappy […] I am so
tormented by having a family whose members don’t get along with each
other and can’t be together” (JP, 362).
• • •
It is tempting to see in this rigid, authoritarian woman an incarnation of

what was long described as the French-Canadian “matriarchy.” However,
such a perspective would miss the gradual evolution of Julie Papineau –
the young woman tormented by the death of her daughter Aurélie, the
convinced Patriote, more radical than her husband in many respects,
and later the courageous and resourceful wife and mother who took on
responsibilities unusual for a woman of her time in the years of her hus-
band’s political misfortunes. Julie is a singular individual who doubtless
dealt as best she could with the many challenges of her life. But she is
also the product of her era, of the political events that put an end to her
ambitions, and of a religious and social atmosphere that denied women
subjectivity and an autonomous voice. The complaints, the resentment,
the anger, and the frustration expressed in her letters, especially in her
later years, are part of a constellation of emotions and behaviours which
– judging by the private diaries written by young girls and women in the
century after her death in 1862, as well as in the autobiographies of women
who grew up in the years preceding the Quiet Revolution – will be passed
on, from generation to generation, by Quebec mothers until the begin-
ning of the modern era.
As early as the mid-nineteenth century, the pressures imposed on
women by the exaltation of the role that will come to be known as la reine
du foyer, “queen of the hearth,” increase.22 Woman’s role will be the topic
of sermons, pastoral letters by bishops, and newspaper articles, among
them a series of misogynistic pieces by Julie Papineau’s grandson, Henri
Bourassa (founder of the newspaper Le Devoir in 1905).23 The biography
of Marie de l’Incarnation by the influential priest H.-R. Casgrain, depict-
ing the foundress of the Ursulines as a submissive wife, which appeared
in 1862, the year of Julie’s death, shows how the image of the women of
New France was reconfigured to bolster this conservative ideology.24
Presented by clerical leaders and educators as a continuation of the values

which inspired Marie de l’Incarnation and her contemporaries, this ideal-
ization of the wife and mother for her devotion and self-sacrifice is, on the
contrary, a reversal of those values. For the women of New France, abne-
gation of self seems, paradoxically, to have led many of them to agency:
in seeking to accomplish God’s will, they found the strength to cross the
ocean, found a new society, and open themselves, at least to some extent,
to the culture of the indigenous peoples they were seeking to convert. Two
and a half centuries later, these same ideals of sacrifice and abnegation,
communicated to girls through a system of education conditioning them
to aspire only to the roles of wives and mothers, became tools in denying
women freedom of choice and action. Julie Papineau’s final letters, with
their sentiments of overwhelming frustration and resentment and their
constant complaints, are a striking illustration of the possible, and even
probable, results of such conditioning.
As previously noted, the epistolary genre can be a cruel lens through
which to read a life, for letters (unlike the diary, for example) can expose
the worst characteristics of one’s relationships with others. Julie Papi-
neau’s correspondence gives an idea of the image she must have projected
in public – gracious, polite, and elegant – when she asks her husband or
her daughter-in-law to transmit her greetings to others. In private, how-
ever, she allows herself a very different language in addressing her loved
ones: do this, buy me that, write us twice a week even though we never
write you because we have nothing to say (JP, 433). The reader will have
observed that Julie frequently uses the word “selfish” when referring to
her children, her compatriots, or her society. Yet one cannot help notic-
ing the extent to which she herself seems self-centred and incapable of
empathy. The sad New Year’s greetings she sends her husband at the end
of 1855 offer a poignant glimpse into the way she sees her life. More than
a complaint, they are a lucid evaluation, communicated with her usual
frankness, of the events that have transformed her existence, reducing her
to a state in which her only consolation is her belief in the value of sacri-
fice and the possibility of redemption in the next world:
I’m starting to write this […] so it will reach you by New Year’s Day,
in order to wish us a better and happier year than those that have
been so bitter for us, leaving wounds and scars that will never heal
[…] Our young days were happy: we were surrounded and loved
by many good relatives, sincere friends, and our country. But what
changes have taken place since then! All of that has disappeared and
our personal sorrows have been extraordinary. Since 37, we have

been tested in every way, with one trial succeeding another, each of
them more poignant than the one before. We must therefore submit
and ask for the patience to continue our sacrifice to the end: it is
God’s will. (JP, 424)
PART THRE E
•
Wr i ti n g for On e s e lf : T he P ri v a t e D i ar y,
1 8 4 3 – 1964
By the mid-nineteenth century, the space available to women for writ-

ing had expanded to include the private diary. Thanks to notebooks in
which they could record their lives as they pleased, women could now
explore their own psyches and situation in the world for themselves, and
no longer solely in terms of their relationship with a divine or human
Other. The intimacy of the private diary offers a mirror-space, protected
from the gaze of others, where one can reveal oneself openly, search for a
direction in life, evaluate one’s progress, lament one’s failures and, ideally,
construct a self capable of thinking and acting in relative freedom from
social constraints. For the first time, with the arrival of Romanticism and
its emphasis on the individual, the question “Who am I?” begins to preoc-
cupy girls and women.
Because of their confidential nature, most of these private diaries
have disappeared. Although some were doubtless stored away in draw-
ers or attics for generations, very few have survived to the present day.
Not surprisingly, most of those that still exist were written by women
who belonged to influential families, often those of well-known political
figures, and are found in archival collections with names like Dessaulles,
McGill, Cartier, Lacoste, Marchand, Dandurand, and Laurendeau. Not
only because of archival practices, but because keeping a diary was for the
most part a practice of well-to-do women and girls with the education
and the time to be able to write, the record they provide is that of the lives
of female members of the elite.
While not representative of all French-Canadian women, these diaries
offer an interesting sample of voices suggesting the various preoccupa-
tions of middle- and upper-class girls and women in the last half of the
nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries and the pressures
exerted on them by the dominant ideologies of the period. Historians
Par t t hree • 116
have analyzed women’s role in this period as defined in sermons and

other church documents and as embedded in the judicial and educational
systems, but we have very little idea of what girls and women themselves
actually thought and how they experienced living under these constraints.
Were young girls content or rebellious during their convent school years,
for example? Did church doctrines on women’s bodies and sexuality make
them feel guilty or inadequate? What could it have been like for them
to enter marriage with little or no knowledge of the physical aspects of
conjugal union? And, once married, how did they experience the role
of wife, mother, and educator so rigidly defined for them by society, and
the apparent power implicit in their status as “queens of the hearth”?
More important for our purposes, to what extent do these diaries display
autonomy and agency on the part of their authors? Are the diarists more
interested in loving and being loved than in realizing their own desires
and needs? Does the reality captured in their diaries include that of the
public sphere or is it confined to the domestic realm? Private diaries offer
a privileged look at the lives of girls and women, but only if we learn to
read them “between the lines” at times, for the amount of self-revelation
in them is limited by the conventions of their era. The physical and emo-
tional aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, puberty, and sexual experience
are, for the most part, unspoken.
Keeping a diary is an attempt to give form and meaning to passing
days: to create through writing a sense of continuity or permanence which
transcends time. Unlike autobiography, where the writer seeks to impose
unity or coherence on her life by means of a retrospective gaze, the
fragmented and chronological form of the diary allows for more freedom
and transparency. The typical diarist has no interest in publication and
therefore no need to construct an image to present to the world or even
to organize what is put down on paper. On the contrary, the diary “notes
life as it is, in all its variety and contradictions […] content with recording
the usual events of a week or even half a day, it adapts itself to repetition
and lack of progress.”1 It is a type of writing particularly suitable to the
lives of traditional women, all too often repetitive, monotonous, and filled
with activities deemed insignificant by others. For women whose lives
were devoted to the well-being of their husbands and children, the diary
offered a chance to withdraw into a private space, gather strength, and
impose a direction on the apparent circularity of the daily routine.
Perhaps more than any other type of autobiographical writing, dia-
ries are concerned with identity, offering a mirror in which the diarist
can watch herself live, seek to better understand her deepest motiva-
tions, analyze her actions and reactions: in other words, question and
Writing for Oneself • 117
strengthen her self. At their most basic level, diaries are a proof that one
exists in a particular time and space. Ghislaine Perrault (the future wife
of André Laurendeau, journalist, politician, and future co-chair of the
Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism), who began her
diary in 1922, at the age of eight, writes her initials – GP – in nine different
ways in the opening pages of her diary, as if asking herself: “Who am I?”
How shall I present myself to others and to myself?” By the time she is ten,
she has already started to define herself in simple terms, imagining the
impression she will make on an eventual reader: “I don’t want anyone to
read what I’m writing here, but if it happens, that person should know that
I’m ten years old and that I’m very tall for my age” (17 December 1924). At
eleven, inside the cover of her diary, she inscribes her identity as children
have done for generations:
Ghislaine Perrault
2155 Jeanne Mance
Montreal
P.Q.
Canada
North America
World
Universe
During adolescence, keeping a diary can be inspired by the sense that the
time has come to make important choices about one’s future. At sixteen,
Michelle Le Normand, who later became a novelist, begins a diary by
promising herself she will not abandon it as she has so often done with
previous diaries: “For the tenth time perhaps, I’m starting a diary. Will I
do with it what I’ve done with all the others? That’s possible, but it’s not
my intention. At sixteen, surely it’s possible to keep the promises one
makes to oneself ” (9 September 1909). From this point on, Le Normand
kept a diary until her death in 1964. Joséphine Marchand, later a feminist
pioneer and the wife of Senator Raoul Dandurand, begins her diary at
the age of seventeen, spurred on by the awareness of passing time and the
need to better define her identity: “Tonight I’m making a sudden resolu-
tion: to keep a diary, a mirror of my impressions. I’m now seventeen years
old […] I’m no longer young; I’ll soon be eighteen and I must start to look
seriously at what awaits me in life” (18, 30 July 1879).
The role of confidant played by the diary is equally important. In
her “dear diary,” the writer finds an Other to whom she can confide her
hopes and anxieties, and with whom she can share her daily experiences:
“I would like to […] translate my ideas into words or confide them to

someone in an intimate way, but my inability to give a true idea of my
impressions and the absence of the confidant I so desire paralyzes me. So
I’ve decided to be my own confidante and write down my ideas so I’ll have
them to amuse me later on,” writes Marchand (18 July 1879). Several of the
young girls whose diaries have been conserved (Henriette Dessaulles and
her younger sister Alice, Joséphine Marchand, Michelle Le Normand)
write to assuage the psychic wounds of feeling badly loved or not under-
stood by their mothers. The diary is a true object of affection, perceived as
an ever-faithful friend: “I haven’t the slightest little flirtation to recount to
you, my dear diary,” notes Marchand (30 July 1879); “For the last half hour
I’ve been trying to do my philosophy homework, and now I’m coming to
see you with great pleasure, dear diary,” writes Michelle Le Normand (14
February 1910). For fourteen-year-old Henriette Dessaulles, frustrated by
the constant admonitions of her stepmother and her teachers, the silence
of her diary is one of its most precious qualities: “And I will tell you all my
little secrets, dear mute one, who receives my confidences without giving
me any advice!” she notes in the first entry.
Finally, diaries offer a concrete way to measure one’s progress towards
a goal or make resolutions about improving oneself, especially on New
Year’s Day or birthdays. The diarist can return to these resolutions later
and reflect on them, a characteristic amusingly illustrated by eleven-year-
old Ghislaine Perrault’s comment that her parents used to be handsome
and that her brother will be handsome when he’s older, if he grows a mus-
tache. Five years later, on rereading her diary, she notes in the margins
that she was wrong: he is handsome now, in spite of the absence of a mus-
tache. The young Michelle Le Normand, who wants to be a writer, rereads
her diary entries a year after writing them, adding critical remarks like,
“What a banal idea!”; “Not true!”; “I was so ridiculous!”; “I’m not like that
any more”; or “What a terrible style!” in the margins. Joséphine Marchand
often returns to the idea that she is writing in order to create a record to
which she can refer in later years: “Here is a memory I will be able to tell
my nephews about when I’m an old, unmarried lady talking about my
past: about the time when I was young and charming and refused a bril-
liant offer for marriage” (20 July 1879).
Diaries as a genre of personal writing were not originally about the
expression of the individual, however; nor were they perceived as an
appropriate venue for women’s writing. Samuel Pepys’s famous diary,
covering the period from 1660 to 1669 but not published until 1825,
chronicled the major public events of the author’s time from a personal
point of view. In the eighteenth century, the appearance of “letter-diaries”
(of which Élisabeth Bégon’s letters are an example) marked the beginning
of a shift in focus towards individual thoughts and feelings, and spiritual
journals aimed at tracing the progress of the soul became common, espe-
cially among Protestants. Not until the arrival of Romanticism does the
term “private diary” come into usage. The movement towards interiority
coincides with the split between the private and public realms which took
hold at the turn of the nineteenth century, and, along with it, the grow-
ing perception of diary writing as an essentially feminine practice. The
idea that a woman might write for public consumption was still far from
being accepted, but jotting down a few lines for herself or the members
of her family was seen as an acceptable and even enviable occupation for
upper-class women. By the mid-nineteenth century, attractively bound
notebooks with blank pages, often marked with the days of the year, were
a popular item among girls and women.2
Of all the genres of personal writing, diaries offer the most intimate
reading experience. Reading these manuscripts in which the author
unveils the most secret layers of her soul, one has the feeling at times of
having intruded into a forbidden and sacred realm. But as one moves
slowly ahead, struggling to decipher the unfamiliar handwriting, and
to read across the inkspots, the crossed-out words or sentences, and the
marginal comments, one feels less like a voyeur or a judge than a confi-
dant, perhaps the very confidant the author dreamed of while addressing
her “dear diary.” One cannot help imagining her as she writes, snatching a
few minutes from her busy day to record the events or thoughts she deems
worthy of keeping and reflecting on. For in a sense, the diarist, by putting
words on paper, becomes a character in a linguistic construction which
reflects her and accompanies her in life. As a literary genre, the diary leads
its reader to an identification similar to that created by a novel, with the
important difference that the reader’s identification is not with a fictional
character or narrator but a real person.3 As well, as in the novel, there is
an element of suspense which accentuates the feeling of a shared intimacy
between reader and writer, for the character/author whose daily adven-
tures one follows, often for several years, is as ignorant as we are of what
will take place in the drama – her life – from page to page.
The two chapters which follow examine diaries by young girls. In
chapter 5, six unpublished diaries, held in various archives and private
collections in Quebec and covering the period from 1864 to 1936, will
allow us to formulate some hypotheses about the development of the
sense of self in girls during that period. In chapter 6, we will look at two
superb diaries, both published – those of Henriette Dessaulles (1874–1881)
and Joséphine Marchand (1879–1900) – stressing the tension in each
of the diaries between the expression of a strong individuality and the

need to conform to social dictates. Finally, chapter 7 will focus on private
diaries by married women in the years between 1843 (Angélique Hay Des
Rivières) and 1964 (Michelle Le Normand).
C h ap t e r 5
Gi rls ’ D i ar i e s : S t ep s t o w ards an
Au ton om ous S el f
I’ve come to the end of you, my poor little notebook. How I have marked you up
and told you my secrets! You will join your brothers in my chest of secrets – you
will be burned when I’m older; I’ll reread you before that, perhaps with a bit of
scorn for you and for me, and yet, there is something of me in you – a little piece
of a young girl’s soul – it may be a rare thing to find little girls who amuse them-
selves by writing!
Henriette Dessaulles, Journal, 24 August 1876
In the diaries of young girls, which became popular along with the arrival
of Romanticism in Quebec in the 1860s, the individual self finds expres-
sion for the first time and diaries become truly “private.” The vogue for
diary writing owed much to the 1862 publication of the diary of Eugénie
Guérin, written in the 1830s by a pious young French woman. “Diaries are
the latest craze and there are secrets everywhere,” notes Henriette Des-
saulles in her own diary in January 1877.
In some cases, diaries were the continuation of the journals girls were
expected to keep for spiritual or pedagogical reasons. In France at this
time, according to Philippe Lejeune, girls began to keep diaries at about
the age of ten, in preparation for their First Communion, and often, once
they had acquired the habit, moved on to more personal diaries at about
fourteen years of age.1 At times, keeping a diary was recommended to girls
as an exercise in spelling, handwriting, or grammar. Whether spiritual
or pedagogical, such diaries were meant to be read by others: by teachers
or by the young girl’s mother, as indicated by this note on the first page
of the diary Ghislaine Perrault began at the age of eight: “Thank you for
letting me read your diary. I liked it very much. Mom.” The content and
tone of the diary kept by Alice Dessaulles (Henriette’s younger sister) at

boarding school in February 1880 are evidently dictated by the fact that
she must show it to one of the nuns. Judging by Henriette Dessaulles’s tes-
timony, girls’ diaries were considered dangerous and were sometimes even
forbidden by the nuns: “My little notebook, you’re in danger here. Peo-
ple here are very indiscreet, they call it supervision […] Keeping a diary
is forbidden. I find that amusing and I know how to protect myself from
such virtuous curiosity!” (20 September 1876). A few months later, she
notes with consternation that the nuns have confiscated the diaries of her
cousin and of one of her friends: “They got hold of the journals of Augus-
tine [Bourassa] and Emma. They were indiscreet enough to read them and
arbitrary enough to burn them without consulting the poor authors. There
is very little respect for one’s rights in this holy house” (23 January 1877).
The six unpublished diaries examined in this chapter include those
of Marie-Louise Globensky (1864–66); Alice Dessaulles (1880); the dia-
ries of George-Étienne Cartier’s daughters Joséphine and Hortense, from
1871 to 1873; the first two volumes of the diary that novelist Michelle Le
Normand kept from 1908, when she was sixteen, until her death in 1964;
and, finally, the diary of Ghislaine Perrault (1922–35). Taken together, they
give a good idea of the hopes and concerns of young girls of the period,
as well as of the possibilities offered and the constraints exerted on them
by their milieu. It would be an oversimplification to suppose that one
can trace a linear or chronological progress towards autonomy by mov-
ing from one of these diaires to the next, however. Differences in the age
and even the temperament of the diarists can have at least as much influ-
ence as the era or the milieu in which they are writing. For this reason,
the diary of Alice Dessaulles, written during the month of February 1880
under the watchful eyes of the nuns of the Convent of the Presentation
in Saint-Hyacinthe, will be examined before those of the Cartier sisters,
who were, respectively, twenty-three and twenty-one years old when they
began their diaries in 1871 and who were preoccupied above all else with
finding husbands. Although the order of presentation of the six diaries is
mostly chronological, it is also influenced by the degree of independence
of each of the authors.
t h e di Ary O f A WeLL- brOught-u P yO ung gir L:

MA rie -LO ui Se g LO benSKy (1 8 6 4 –1 8 6 6 )
Closer to a chronicle or a spiritual diary than to our present-day concept

of a private diary, the five notebooks filled by Marie-Louise Globen-
sky (1849–1919) between 7 July 1864 and 14 February 1866 document
girls’ d iaries • 123
the activities of the young girl and her family with no sign of the sort
of self-questioning or self-exploration that would indicate a distance
between the author and her social and religious milieu. Marie-Louise
records the almost daily visits of Louis-Joseph Papineau, a close friend of
her parents, to the family home, describes in detail the six weeks she and
her friend Éliza Chauveau2 spent at Papineau’s manor house Montebello
in the summer of 1864, and notes her activities at home and in convent
school during the following months. The manuscript of this diary, along
with one that Globensky kept from 1912 to 1919, is found in Bibliothèque
et Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal.3 A typed copy of her diary
– along with a few other documents, including a short diary kept by Glo-
bensky in February 1866 and a copy of all the diaries signed Lady Lacoste
(1889–1919) after her marriage to Alexandre Lacoste – is in the Centre de
Référence de l’Amérique française in Quebec.4
The daughter of Léon Globensky, a Montreal merchant who later
became a customs officer, and Angélique Limoges, Marie-Louise is, at
fifteen, a pious young girl, content with her life as an upper middle-class
Catholic student. Except for the friendship with Louis-Joseph Papineau
which dominates the first two notebooks,5 her daily activities seem typical
of those of the girls of her social milieu: shopping, balls, music lessons,
and a party at her house in which young men and women enjoy them-
selves until one in the morning (23 October 1864). The last two notebooks
are mainly devoted to her religious activities: attending Mass on the first
Monday of each month as a Child of Mary, vespers, novenas, retreats, and
attendance at the Forty Hours of Adoration during Holy Week.
The political and cultural sympathies of the Globenskys were liberal
and patriotic, as the first lines of the diary indicate: “Mr. Papineau and Mr.
Chauveau are coming for dinner” (7 July 1864). They had been friends of
the Papineaus for several years: a letter from Julie Papineau to her hus-
band, dated 19 November 1857, refers to “an agreeable day” spent with “this
interesting family,” and in May 1862 she mentions the visit to Montreal of
“Miss Globensky’s fiancé” (Alfred Garneau, son of the historian François-
Xavier Garneau, married Marie-Louise’s older sister Élodie in 1862).
During the six weeks spent at Montebello, Marie-Louise writes in her
diary almost every day. She notes that on her arrival at La Petite-Nation
with Éliza Chauveau, Papineau, his son-in-law Napoléon Bourassa, and
his granddaughter Augustine Bourassa, the party is met by Papineau’s
daughter Ézilda, and she describes the manor house and property in
detail, finding them “magnificent.” Among the daily activities she records
are walks in the woods with Papineau; games of “beggamon” (backgam-
mon), whist, and cards with Mme Benjamin Papineau; embroidery,
reading, and letter writing. One Sunday, after attending Mass and a First
Communion ceremony, she notes in her diary that several of the children
at Mass were natives and that all of them were poor. Another Sunday, she
sings at High Mass with Napoléon Bourassa and afterwards accompanies
him to his studio, where he paints her portrait.6 Papineau is very atten-
tive to his young visitors, bringing them flowers from his vast gardens and
weaving earrings and crowns of them for the girls. Among the books he
reads to them is the novel Charles Guérin,7 written by Éliza’s father, which
makes them cry (31 July 1864). On 18 August, the last day of their stay at
Montebello, Marie-Louise notes: “Today is the anniversary of Mme Pap-
ineau’s death.”
In the last two notebooks, which cover the period from 17 Octo-
ber 1864 to 25 May 1865, almost all of the entries are devoted to religious
events or sentiments. Unlike the young girls who will keep diaries fif-
teen or twenty years later, Marie-Louise Globensky never addresses her
diary directly (a practice which would indicate a certain individuality
and the possibility of having secrets to confide), but she does, occa-
sionally, address comments or exclamations to God and even to the
Catholic religion. On 8 December 1864, the day of the Feast of the Immac-
ulate Conception, she writes: “I went to Communion at seven o’clock
this morning, and I am so happy to say, my Beloved belongs to me, I pos-
sess Him. O sweet Jesus, it is so lovely to speak to you in this way.” A few
weeks later, she mentions a party where “we talked all evening about the
happiness of practising our holy religion, for in it the poet finds superb
subjects, the artist delightful pictures, and the orphan finds a mother.” She
exclaims: “Oh beloved religion I want to live and die for your glory” (26
December 1864). Such total adhesion to the protective and reassuring uni-
verse of faith gives her a joyful confidence, present in this lyrical passage
from 1 May 1865: “What a beautiful day it is today, I’d like to shout it loudly
so everyone would hear, it’s the first day of May, the month of Mary, this
month is consecrated to the memory of my good Mother. Oh, what gentle
joy irradiates my forehead at this thought. This morning at eight o’clock
we had the Mass of the Children of Mary.”8
But several of the diary entries suggest that this cosy religion-centred
existence is surrounded by interdictions and maintained by fear. During
a retreat, a lecture given by Marie-Louise’s aunt (a nun) stressing “the
importance of listening to God’s word at all times” is followed by a sermon
on “the frightful state of a soul in mortal sin,” which Marie-Louise sum-
marizes in detail, and by the story of the atrocious death of Saint Agnes,
a martyr of chastity (17 October 1864). Elsewhere, she mentions a sermon
on “dances such as Polka, waltzes, etc. etc.” (26 December 1864). The copy
of a letter to an unknown recipient (probably Papineau) is inserted in the

diary at the beginning of fall 1864. Unable to decide whether to return
to the convent for another year or to stay at home, as her parents would
like her to do, she speaks of her fear of the world that awaits her outside
the convent: “I’m afraid of being seduced by this deceitful world because
the most beautiful illusions often turn out to be cruel disappointments,
we want to gather the roses but we find that they contain a lot of thorns.
True happiness is only found at the foot of the tabernacle; that is where
the afflicted soul goes to lay down its sorrows and that is where it finds
consolation.”
A third file in the collection contains other documents related to reli-
gion: a typed summary of the contents of a religion course, a “Prayer [to
the Blessed Virgin] to be recited for thirty days in order to obtain a special
favour,” and a description of the discipline to which a Child of Mary was
expected to submit in order to fulfil her religious duties. Entitled “Rule I
want to follow in order to enjoy eternal happiness,” and dated June 1864,
it outlines a rigid spiritual routine beginning the moment one wakes up
in the morning: “On awakening I will make the sign of the Cross; I will
offer my heart to God; I will dedicate all my actions to him and say an Ave
Maria in honour of the Blessed Virgin’s chastity so she will keep me pure,
then I will say my rosary […] After that I will get out of bed promptly and
dress as modestly as possible, then I will kneel down and say my morn-
ing prayer.” Other activities mentioned are meditation (“at least a quarter
of an hour each day beginning at 7 o’clock”), Mass (“every Sunday and Holy
Day and as often as possible during the week”), spiritual reading (“at least
a quarter of an hour each day”), and confession, followed by Communion,
each month. Under the title “Rules for Life,” Marie-Louise adds: “Never
go to the theatre […] Never read dangerous books … Never wear low-cut
dresses.” Other rules are added the following year: “I will never go to balls
or shows, and in the entertainments that are allowed to me I will never
wear clothes that could offend modesty, oh no never, may God preserve me
from that […] Finally, I will spend my days reading, writing, and attending
to the housework (except during the hours of prayer)” (3 March 1865).
At the beginning of February 1866, Marie-Louise meets a young
lawyer, Alexandre Lacoste, and the short diary she starts at that point
indicates that her preoccupations have changed considerably. The desire
to begin a new diary is apparently linked to the fact that she is on the verge
of her seventeenth birthday: “Today I’m starting a small journal because
I’ll be seventeen tomorrow and I can already see that a great change is tak-
ing place in me; since I’d like to keep track of my ideas at this age, I’ll try to
write in it every day” (1 February 1866). But already in this first entry she
mentions a party which took place the night before, at which a certain Mr.
A. Lacoste was present, and the following day she writes: “Ah! how happy
I’d be if he loved me” (2 February 1866). Soon she speaks only of him: “His
image follows me all the time […] I love him so much how can I not love
him” (7 February 1866); “If only he knew – I love him more than myself ”
(14 February 1866). On 8 May, only three months after their first meet-
ing, she weds her beloved, who will, over the course of the years, become
a member of the Senate and chief justice of Quebec’s Court of Appeal. In
1889, now officially known as “Lady Lacoste” and soon to give birth to her
tenth child, Marie-Louise will begin her diary again and continue to write
in it until her death in 1919.
W riting under Surve iLLAnC e:

AL iCe deSSAu LLeS (6–2 9 februAry 1 8 8 0 )
From Alice Dessaulles (1862–1934), we have only the fragment of a journal

begun at the Convent of the Presentation in Saint-Hyacinthe in February
1880,9 just before her eighteenth birthday. The journal opens on 6 Feb-
ruary, the twentieth birthday of her older sister, Henriette, whom Alice
has not seen since arriving at the convent in September. The manuscript
is accompanied by a sheet of paper containing the following dedication,
obviously addressed to Henriette Dessaulles after Alice’s death:
Papineauville 22 July
A legacy for you while I’m still alive: a relic of youth from our dear
Alice. The first page made me think that I should leave it to you.
Later, you can give it to someone who would appreciate it or destroy
it, if you think that would be better.
Best wishes to you in all your endeavours.
Adine Bourassa10
Since the time, two years earlier, when Henriette Dessaulles had seen
her friends’ diaries confiscated by the nuns at the same convent, the
rules seem to have changed, for Alice has the right to keep a diary if she
agrees to have it read by one of the nuns. Aware that such an intrusion
is antithetical to the whole idea of journal writing, she resists, and suc-
ceeds in negotiating a compromise with the nun in question: “I want to
write. Last night I asked Sister Sainte-Étienne for permission not to show
her my journal, and told her I prefer to keep it for myself. She told me
that if I show her just a few lines, that will be enough. So that I can say
I’m showing it to her if anyone asks” (7 February). But the very fact of
girls’ diaries • 127
writing under supervision influences the content and tone of the journal
to such an extent that as one reads the outpouring of edifying thoughts
and feelings in this diary, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know which of
them are authentic and which are invented for the consumption of Sister
Sainte-Étienne. This is a diary which must be read for the tension between
what it hides and what it reveals. In so doing, one discovers a young
woman troubled by a vague sadness, which she tries in vain to escape by
clinging to her religious beliefs.
Alice “scribbles” in her diary two or three times a week, before filling in
for an absent teacher or, surrounded by noise, in study hall in the evening.
“There’s a frightful racket going on around me, but I’m taking out my
notebook to record my impressions of being 18” (7 February). Her writ-
ing seems motivated by the desire to take stock of her life: in a few days
she will be eighteen, the age at which one feels obliged to determine one’s
direction in life, and she is strongly tending towards the idea of a religious
vocation. The diary serves as the confidant she needs, especially as she is
feeling particularly alone and lost: “My heart needs to love someone as
one would love a mother,” she writes (6 February).
Like her sister Henriette, Alice seems overwhelmed by the pain of
an unresolved period of mourning which goes back to the death of her
mother sixteen years earlier, and tormented by the feeling of being
rejected by her stepmother (whom she calls “Maman”): “I still remem-
ber Maman, how we called her Cousine when she was young. Some time
before her marriage, she asked me if I wanted her to be my mother […] I
said yes […] I felt the need for my mother. A mother! Oh God, you took
mine away from me! It was your will. The older I get, the more I feel the
need to have Maman to myself, these days Maman is still dear to me, but
I can’t talk to her or show her the affection I feel, and I am generally shy
with her, and that makes me suffer” (6 February).
The approach of her birthday makes her serious, almost to the point
of trembling, as she thinks of the decisions that await her, and she turns
to God for reassurance. At eighteen, she still feels like “a baby” compared
to other girls of her age, and yet she knows that the coming year will be a
decisive one: “The day after tomorrow I’ll be 18! That is so old! I can hardly
believe I’ll be 18, for all the other girls seem much older than I do. I feel
like such a baby. What will this year bring to me? All I know is that noth-
ing will happen to me except what God wills. Here I am, God, do with
me what you will” (7 February). Her birthday provokes a reflection on
the passage of time and awakens memories of her Catholic childhood, a
period of calm followed by several more turbulent years: “It is almost six-
teen years now since our dear mother left us, and since then there have
been so many changes. I was a child and then I became an adolescent, and
tomorrow I will be a young adult. Oh beautiful years, you are disappear-
ing so fast […] 18 years! Tomorrow. Goodbye, my 17 years; I regret seeing
you go. Will you ever come back, sweet impressions of my Communions,
retreats, and readings, and the innocent joys of boarding school? Will
you ever return and give me back the calm my poor heart has lost?”
(8 February).
At this stage of her life, Alice seems convinced (or is trying to convince
herself) that she is destined for a religious vocation (in reality, she will
marry seven years later and will give birth to seven children). She likes
teaching and anticipates with pleasure the time when she will have pupils
of her own: “I taught again today; Sister Sainte-Cécile didn’t show up. I’m
her substitute. I really like teaching. I imagine the days when I’ll have my
own pupils and be able to measure their progress. Oh! I’m going to love
teaching!” (7 February). The feeling of being “chosen” by God gives her a
sense of belonging that is doubtless linked to the feelings of rejection and
loneliness that torment her: “All are not called to the same path […] and
it’s a serious choice. O my God, a thousand thanks for the favour you have
given me of making my choice here, far from the distractions of the world
[…] You have brought me into solitude and spoken to my heart; you have
said: It is here that I want you to be; it is here, in the humble habit of a nun,
that you will finish your course. Oh, the best of all possibilities has been
given to me. I will follow the spotless Lamb” (8 February).
The awareness that one’s writing will be read by those in authority must
surely have led to rivalries and hypocrisy on the part of the students, each
seeking to appear more pious than her classmates. It is hard to believe, for
example, that the following sentences were not written to impress the nun
who would read them: “I gave some more lessons today […] I like help-
ing my teachers. Sometimes there is so little we can do to show them our
appreciation. We also have prayer. Oh! That is what I love most. I turn to
Him who possesses all treasures and all happiness and I ask him to bestow
them on the spiritual director who showed me the path to follow and the
teachers who exhaust themselves instructing me and surround me with
such tender affection” (12 February). Just as harmful to students’ sense of
self as the intrusion into the confidentiality of their diaries were the com-
positions they were expected to read aloud in class. Alice hates exposing
herself in this way and has difficulty writing them:
We read our compositions this morning. I can’t help wondering

how my classmates manage to go on about their subjects so easily.
I can’t do it, I try and I never succeed, even when I write in these
little notebooks. I’m not good at displaying my impressions or

reflections, like Dine, for example. She is so lucky to be able to write
beautifully, some of her pages are little masterpieces. I like hearing
her talk about Jesus, whom she loves so much. This morning she
read us a lovely composition about the sanctuary lamp; her pages
were full of pious, tender, and delicate sentiments. I would have
liked to know what Sister Sainte-Étienne thought of her composi-
tion, once again she will be convinced of the real piety of my dear
friend. (8 February)
Five days later, though, Alice speaks of Dine again, this time in a way
suggesting that she is writing for Sister Sainte-Étienne. It is hard not to see
a betrayal of her friend in Alice’s revelation of Dine’s true feelings about
her faith. After explaining that Dine no longer likes her English course
and wants to go home, and that she has also refused to go to confession,
a fact of which the nuns are unaware, she writes: “My God, it makes me
suffer to see her forget this Jesus she used to love so much and that she still
pretends to love. Please don’t punish her” (13 February).
At its most basic level, the religion that dominates all of Alice’s
thoughts is one that refuses life and exalts death, creating extreme confu-
sion in the young woman. On one hand, she writes that she wants to die in
order to be reunited with her dead mother; on the other, she is conscious
of an instinctual desire to live. Only one solution allows her to reconcile
these opposing desires: to live in order to suffer while awaiting death: “Do
I want to die? No, no, not now; if it is God’s will I want to live. Not to enjoy
life, for it’s not beautiful, but to suffer […] I want to live […] in order to
learn to desire death and the happiness of seeing God. I want to live in
order to fulfil the mission God has given me here below” (20 February).
For those familiar with the fiery and rebellious diary of Alice’s older
sister, Henriette Dessaulles,11 the confusion and apparent hypocrisy pres-
ent in Alice’s diary can only come as a surprise. Such characteristics are
doubtless in large part the result of a very effective system of surveillance
which, by playing on the desire of young girls to please and be accepted,
denies them the possibility of true self-expression. Alice becomes con-
scious of this in the final passage of her journal, where she finally rebels,
stating that what she writes concerns only her, and not Sister Sainte-Éti-
enne. It is a sad and inconclusive rebellion, however, for, lacking real
freedom of expression, she can only envisage one solution – that she will
abandon writing for the time being and come back to it later, when she
has found subjects more suitable to be revealed to others: “I’m trying to
decide whether to show these scribblings to Sister Sainte-Étienne or limit
myself to a few lines. Why should I show her everything? It’s not that I
lack confidence; I can’t really say why I’m hesitating. Maybe because I
don’t want her to know the little thing that I prefer to hide. But maybe it’s
because this writing is for me. I can see that I’m not in the mood for writ-
ing tonight. I’ve finished my notebook. Tomorrow, when I start a new one,
I’ll show it to her” (29 February).
fitting One ’S L ife int O A SOC iAL diA ry:

J O S ÉP hine And h O rten S e C Artier (1 8 7 1 –1 8 7 3 )
The diaries that Josephine Cartier (1847–1886) and her sister Hortense
(1849–1941) kept between 1871 and 187312 are primarily a record of the
social activities of these two young women who were related to some of
the most influential political and ecclesiastical personages of their time.
Their father, Sir George-Étienne Cartier – a lawyer and businessman as
well as a politician – was a former Patriote who had chosen to support
the reformer Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and his party after the Act of
Union13 in 1841. As leader of the moderate Parti bleu, he had been prime
minister of the United Canadas from 1857 to 1862 and later became one of
the principal architects of Confederation. Their mother, Hortense Fabre
(Lady Cartier), was from an equally prominent family. Her father was the
Patriote bookseller, Édouard-Raymond Fabre, who had been mayor of
Montreal from 1849 to 1851, and her brothers were Msgr Édouard-Charles
Fabre, secretary of the powerful bishop, Ignace Bourget, (Fabre would
himself become bishop of Montreal in 1873), and the journalist Hector
Fabre (later a Canadian senator and diplomat). Joséphine is twenty-three
and Hortense twenty-one on the first of January 1871, when they begin
their diaries. The two diaries overlap, often recounting the same events
from differing perspectives. Beginning on 1 December 1871, when the two
young women leave Montreal for Europe with their mother, their journals
become travel diaries, even as their authors continue to note the whirl-
wind of social activities and visits to important people that mark their
extended stay in England and France. In October 1872, Cartier, having lost
his seat in the federal election of the previous month and now gravely ill,
joins his wife and daughters in England. Hortense’s diary ends on 1 March
1873 and Josephine’s on 11 May of the same year (the same day as their
uncle is consecrated bishop of Montreal). Nine days later, on 20 May 1873,
their father succumbs to Bright’s disease.
Written in pencil or pen in small notebooks (five by eight inches),
often with spelling mistakes, the entries in the two journals are usually
short and factual, although they sometimes contain brief commentaries
or descriptive adjectives. On 7 January 1871, Hortense writes: “Sliding

party at the Citadel – charming lunch at the citadel – the others went
sliding while we watched”; while her sister, who participated in the same
activities, contents herself with writing: “Bored to tears by the constant
presence of the Marquis.” Two days later, Josephine notes: “(Flora) & Paul
behave like the vulgar people they are. Party at the Cauchons dull enough
to put you to sleep,” while Hortense limits herself to a “boring dancing
party at the Cauchons” (12 January 1871). When their days seem dull or
empty, they summarize them in brief phrases: “Nothing new. Still frus-
trating” (29 January 1871); “In the car. Still life paintings. Boring” (14 April
1871), writes Josephine; and Hortense notes: “Boring paintings by Mr. Por-
ter” (14 March 1871); “Nada” (16 March 1871); “Nothing” (19 March 1871).
It is clear from the first entries on that there are tensions in the family
and that the two young women do not appreciate the obligations that go
with their social status. Josephine begins her journal by evoking the diffi-
cult year that has just ended and expressing the hope that the next one will
be better: “Alleluia. End of the year ’70 which was full of so many bitter
frustrations for us; with a sort of superstitious fascination, H. [Hortense]
& I see the arrival [of a new one] with a singular joy, and truly what I have
to write here seems to fulfil our desires. First, after much discussion, Papa
is allowing the purchase of a necklace – $50.” About the New Year’s din-
ner, she comments: “A family supper. Everyone pretending to get along.”
Hortense, more rebellious than her sister, gives a more detailed descrip-
tion: “Inevitable family meal seasoned by epigrams and severe looks from
the abbé [their uncle], who wants us to get married. Thanks to my skilful
diplomacy, I succeeded in making peace with my aunt Lévesque whom
I can’t stand at the moment” (1 January 1871). The next day, describing
an afternoon spent with her uncle, Canon Fabre, and another priest, she
deplores “the necessity of talking to boring people of all ages and condi-
tions” (2 January 1871).
The activities of the Cartier girls are typical of those of young women
of upper-class families: keeping busy and amusing themselves by a suc-
cession of visits, balls, teas, a play rehearsal, sleigh rides, walks, sewing,
and embroidery as they wait for marriage. In February 1871, at the worst
moment of the Franco-Prussian war, they start German lessons. “Three
times a week a German teacher comes and bores us to death,” notes Hort-
ense. And Josephine adds: “The Prussians are entering Paris. Tonight I’m
starting to learn German pronunciation by reading. May the errors I com-
mit insult this barbaric language” (1 March 1871).
In their descriptions of their numerous social activities, the diarists
(especially Hortense) emphasize what preoccupies them most: young
Writing for On eself • 132
men. “The officers were perfect to us,” she writes after a reception at the
Citadel (7 January 1871); and, two weeks later: “Last night a good ball
– danced with Coulson, Holbech, Biddell – I have a complete crush on
Biddell” (23 January 1871). On 19 February: “Saw M. Walpole at the door
of the parish church – he was superb – in the afternoon, a walk with Jos
and Dr. Hingston – in the evening M. Walpole et Mons. Williams dined
here – they stayed until 11:30.” And, on 28 June: “A snack at the Citadel in
the room of a little man who is madly in love with one of us – but which
one???” On arriving in London, Hortense is immediately struck by “the
devotion of English Catholics and the number of attractive young men
who belong to that religion” (17 December 1871). In fact, if there is a theme
which confers a certain unity on these journals, it is that of the desire and
the necessity to find an acceptable husband.
Neither of the young women gets along with their father, whom they
call “Captain.” For several years, Cartier has been living with his mistress,
Luce Cuvillier, and he rarely comes home. The entry for Monday 30 Janu-
ary 1871 in Hortense’s journal reads: “The Captain left – only good news of
the day.” In April, Josephine notes: “The Capt. is staying here” (19 April),
and, two days later: “Nothing unusual except the Capt’s departure” (21
April). There is little doubt that the “bitter frustrations” she evokes in her
entry of 1 January are related to the open hostility between her parents, an
untenable and publicly humiliating situation that will convince Lady Cart-
ier to leave for Europe with her two daughters before the end of the year.
In Europe – at least if we rely solely on Hortense’s diary – life con-
tinues more or less as it had been in Canada, interspersed with visits to
Westminster Abbey, the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre, Versailles, and the
Bois de Boulogne. There are visits to relatives and friends in France and
England, evenings at the theatre and the opera, and even – after their
father’s arrival in England – the honour of being presented to the Queen.
“An invitation to court arrived like a thunderbolt,” announces Jose-
phine on 15 February 1873. During the following days there are dresses to
choose, visits to the hairdresser, and numerous other preparations. When
the day arrives, she notices above all the interesting men who are present:
“Presentation. Big fuss with our makeup and dresses. Maman is ravish-
ing […] We notice the handsomest of all the handsome men from the
French embassy. Ditto a superb Prince of Wales. And a very good-looking
Edinborough. A trio to make one dream” (27 February 1873). Hortense,
summarizing the two weeks leading up to the presentation in a single
entry, gives a bit more detail: “Nothing but comings and goings as we
got ready for our presentation at court, which went off better than I had
expected – the Queen is short, plump, red, and gracious – the Princess is a
nice, fat mother – the Prince of Wales is superbly handsome – my attrac-

tive Edinborough is very deep” (1 March 1873).
But Josephine, more melancholy than her sister, gives a picture in her
diary of the sadness of a journey without end, which is not only expensive,
but seems to have no goal other than that of escaping from their situation
in Canada. To finance their trip, the Cartier women depend on money
sent to them irregularly by Cartier’s lawyer and, at the beginning of their
trip, Josephine notes: “Our lodgings are very bad” (9 January 1872). The
anxiety of living this way is apparent in a comment she makes on 4 March
1872: “Henri gives us the news that the Capt. is sending us some money.
It’s the first time we’ve heard any mention of it. We only had 12£ left. We
were terribly worried, and the news was like a branch held out to a person
who’s drowning. Our days weren’t too bad, but the silence of the night was
interrupted by our tears and our feverish agitations. I didn’t dare speak
of it to them, but my fear was that we had been abandoned.” When, at
the end of summer 1872, they leave France for England, her diary gives
a sense of the chaotic feelings aroused by a long and disorganized trip:
“Departure for England. First frustration. They charge us 25 francs for our
extra baggage. In the train, I’m overcome by a feeling of despair. Why, I
wondered, are we going there?” (26 August 1872). An obligatory stop at
Brighton for the famous baths is enveloped in a sadness made worse by
their financial worries: “The hotel is expensive and not very clean. We
search for a lodging. Find one for 2 guineas, a less than acceptable hole
[…] I return with the terrible feeling that a morbid destiny is hanging over
me” (10 September 1872).
As is often the case in women’s diaries of this era, intimate events and
feelings are expressed, if at all, in a veiled fashion. For example, Jose-
phine writes “A quarrel follows” (3 February 1872) without giving any
detail about the content of the quarrel; and elsewhere: “No new or excit-
ing emotions to report on here […] As I’m totally exhausted, I’m not
going to write about the thoughts that were occupying my mind” (5 April
1871). But, reading between the lines of these two journals, one can detect
the traces of falling in love and of broken hearts. After a stay at a resort
in Cacouna (on the Gaspé peninsula) with her family, Josephine notes:
“Departure from Cacouna. Spoke to Dr. Thomas for the last time the
night before we left. He alone will know the story of my time of love and
folly with Dupuy” (6 September 1871). In Europe, she will nostalgically
remember a certain “M.W.” (perhaps the elegant Mr Walpole who is men-
tioned several times in the two diaries in the spring of 1871). In the entries
between April and September 1872, there is the indication of a number of
failed attempts to connect with M.W., either in France or in England, and
the vague suspicion that the young man’s parents disapprove of a liaison
with the Cartier family. By the end of the summer, Josephine has given up
hope: “I feel horribly sad because I can now see that we won’t see him in
England. What a disaster! He was a man both Hortense and I would have
married with our eyes closed, as he has so many fine qualities” (29 August
1872). In the meantime, Hortense has received a marriage proposal from
Henri Salles, a French cousin of the Fabre family. There are numerous
mentions of Henri in both diaries, beginning with the arrival of the Cart-
ier girls in France, but little by little Hortense becomes more intimate with
him: “Henri came and put a flower in my room” (19 July 1872); “I dined
in a restaurant with Henri, then we bought some music – in the evening,
sat out with Henri on the balcony smoking” (24 July 1872). The day before
their departure for England, Josephine notes: “A walk at Passy with Henri
who distinguishes himself by a formal proposal of marriage to Hortense”
(25 August 1872). Two weeks later, however, Hortense writes: “Received
a letter from Henri – very bad news from Canada” (5 September 1872).
It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what this bad news consists
of, but a long entry in Josephine’s diary dated 5 September recounts the
drama which surrounded the reception of this letter:
A day of disaster! I woke up when Maman called me and, unlike my

usual habit in London, I’ve been waiting for the arrival of the mail.
Maman is always saying there are letters and it would be better for
us if there weren’t so many. Hortense grabs the parcel from Liver-
pool and over her shoulder I read the hard truth. I burst into tears,
which makes me feel a bit better. What an upheaval for all three
of us. It was for this conclusion that we saved so much money and
spent so many of our precious moments hanging about in the coun-
tryside!!! […] Why in the world does he have to get mixed up in our
affairs this way? (5 September 1872)
One can only guess at the content of the letter which so upset the Cart-
ier women, but it seems probable that their father has refused to give
his consent for Hortense’s marriage – a supposition borne out by Carti-
er’s will, which states that the small amount of money he has set aside for
his daughters is based on the condition that neither of them will marry
“a member or an ally of the Fabre family.”14 In October, Cartier arrives in
England and it is clear that the question of the marriage of the two girls
is a source of tension in the family. “The capt says he feels better but he’s
changed a lot. He runs errands for us and is obsessed with […] the desire
to see us married,” writes Hortense on 24 October 1872. On Christmas
night, after a tension-filled day, a long, furious notation in her diary

reveals the immense frustration of a young woman who is conscious of
the fact that her fate and that of her sister depend entirely on their ability
to find a husband acceptable to their father:
I continue to be responsible for the rainy weather and the fact that
there isn’t any sun. Here’s a way to make peace with your children: a
warning for fathers! Have two of them and accuse them every day of
being two too many, always talk to them about yourself, scold them
constantly, if they’re girls, get rid of all the young men who would
love to take them off your hands by marrying them, and then accuse
them of remaining old maids, speak in front of them of all their
friends who are getting married, be sure that your daughters will
never desire either marriage or the convent or even the scaffold in
order to get free of your charming company […] This is written on a
really merry Christmas 25 December 1872.
The fate of the Cartier sisters, who seem to have been prepared for
nothing in life except a desirable marriage, and whose diaries recount,
more than anything else, their frantic search for a husband, is a sad one.
In the end, neither of the two sisters married. After their father’s death,
they moved with their mother to Cannes, where Josephine died of pleu-
risy in 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, and their mother twelve years later.
Hortense lived in Cannes until the beginning of World War II. During the
Occupation she moved to England, where she died in 1941, at the age of
ninety-two.
Writing t O “figure O ut […] W hAt i AM” :

Mi Che LL e Le n OrMA nd ( 1 9 0 9 –1 9 1 1 )
Ah ! I wish I could define my self – but am I capable of doing so? I change so often
that I don’t understand myself at all […] I’m almost certain that this diary I’m
writing now will shock me when I read it later […] for, whether I like it or not, I’m
not always all “me” in these pages!
Diary of Michelle Le Normand, 20 December 1910
In 1909, at the age of sixteen, Michelle Le Normand (1893–1964), born

Marie-Antoinette Tardif,15 began to keep a diary, a practice to which she
would be faithful for the rest of her life. Twenty notebooks containing her
diaries, covering the periods from 1909 to 1911 and from 1918 until her
death in 1964, are in the Fonds Le Normand-Desrosiers at Bibliothèque et
Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal. The early notebooks (1909–

11) begin as a handwriting exercise, but soon develop into the record of a
search for self entirely new in the history of the private diary in Quebec.
Unlike the diarists before her, Le Normand tries to capture the moods
and states of mind of a self that is constantly changing and no longer rig-
idly defined by traditional feminine roles – a situation which perhaps
accounts for the anguish and uncertainty so present in her diary. The first
notebook begins on 9 September 1909 and ends on 18 June 1911. Inside it,
there is a folded and undated sheet of paper which contains the follow-
ing sentences: “Yesterday’s woman or today’s woman – But it’s today’s
woman one must prefer! – Our grandmothers were good, wise […] sim-
ple.” Whether written as part of a school composition or simply a personal
reflection, the passage reminds us that the young Michelle Le Normand
lives in a world that has changed considerably for women since the “scrib-
blings” of the young girls of the nineteenth century. An example among
others of this evolution is the fact that two of the diarists of earlier decades
(Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand), along with several
other women, became journalists or authors at the turn of the twentieth
century, offering new role models for young women. An entry in Le Nor-
mand’s diary, recalling a conversation with a friend about their plans for
the future, makes this clear: “We’d like to be old maids – we’re afraid of the
religious vocation – and as far as marriage goes, we wouldn’t mind it, but
we don’t want to have children,” she writes (26 November 1910).
Full of doubt, contradictions, and dramatic changes of mood, Le Nor-
mand’s diary seems symptomatic of an age of transition, in which the
old beliefs and roles no longer offer a reassuring framework of life for
an adolescent girl. For example, she resists the message of sacrifice and
abnegation contained in the novel Angéline de Montbrun by Laure Conan,
which appeared in 1882 and quickly became a classic, without knowing
what values could replace the ones she rejects. “I’m reading Laure Conan
these days […] and asking myself what great sacrifice she must have
had to make that would explain why she only sees the sad side of life,”
she writes. Not only does Angéline de Montbrun’s protracted period of
mourning after the death of her father seem unrealistic to Le Normand,
but the heroine’s refusal of marriage goes against her own instincts: “I
love Papa very much but I can’t understand why a young woman would
miss her father so much that she would give up her own future and wal-
low in her pain […] Maybe she is crying without reasoning […] It’s fine
that Laure Conan likes sacrifice, but why does it have to be in the religious
vocation or celibacy? I don’t agree.” However, her own freedom of choice
increases her fear of the future: “Between you and me, I wouldn’t want to
have a religious vocation […] and I think about it often […] There is a
great need for doing good in the world […] But I’d rather not think too
much about the future” (14 January 1910).
The first pages of the journal, contained in an exercise book bearing
the title “Music Theory Homework,” are penned in an ornate and some-
what stilted handwriting, but after about four pages the writing becomes
more natural and the author starts to note her impressions and moods.
The style is dreamy and romantic, and the content superficial: these are
the pages to which Le Normand will return a year later, writing critical
comments in the margins like: “This is so banal!”; “I was mad!”; “I’m
rereading these pages and I find them very poor for the beginning of a
diary […] I don’t know if it’s because I’ve changed […] but it’s not me, not
at all!” (2 November 1910). She writes about nature, the melacholy of the
month of October, and her feelings of sadness, boredom, and emptiness.
She worries about the fact that she is no longer interested in her studies
and is going to lose her first place in class. Often close to a state of depres-
sion, she complains about the fact that nothing is happening in her life
and that she therefore has nothing to write about in her journal. It is clear
that the diary functions as a means of warding off sadness and provides
her with a space where she can analyze her torments: “In a few days it will
be December. I feel so tired of everything […] No, not really […] but I
only feel good when I’m alone […] I don’t know why. It’s 5.30 in the morn-
ing […] I’m up and everyone else is sleeping […] and I feel peaceful. Soon
I’ll get nervous and impatient again […] Ah ! if only someone could tell
me what I’m made of […] and whether there’s a remedy for this need for
solitude” (28 November 1909).
Like many other adolescents, she feels misunderstood and unloved.
Trying to understand “this feeling of isolation I have always sensed in our
family […] ever since I was a little girl” (2 November 1910), she, like many
of the young diarists who have gone before her, identifies the problem as
a coldness and distance in her relationship with her mother: “Between
Maman and me, there is a feeling of constraint that I don’t understand
[…] and that is why I feel sad so often […] and have such a great need
to be loved […] Yes, to have someone who would think the way I do,
and who would at least understand me […] It is a dream that agitates
my imagination and preoccupies me all the time. Oh, how I wish I could
know how my life will turn out” (2 November 1910).
A student at the Académie Saint-Léon in Montreal, a school run by
the nuns of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Le Normand is bored with
school work, but spends time with a group of friends who are equally
bored with what she calls “convent school time.” “I have certainly never
been this lazy before,” she writes at the end of a school term (12 December
1909). The free time that comes with the holidays only makes her more
uncomfortable: “I’m on holidays! At last! And yet tonight I’m still not
happy” (23 December 1909). Nothing seems to be happening in her life,
and the books she reads are dreadfully dull: “I’ve just finished a book by
Roger Dombre; amusing but a bit too funny. Too much ridiculousness”
(23 December 1909). Only snowshoeing or skating with her friends dis-
tract her from her lethargy: “There is nothing more pleasant than being
on the mountain on a snowy day” (10 February 1910).
Totally new in relation to the diaries of the nineteenth century are the
anguish, the constant questioning, and the fear of the future that char-
acterize this journal. Although Le Normand enjoys the idea of being a
“woman of today,” the price of this freedom seems to be constant uncer-
tainty: “Ah! if only I could unravel exactly what I am,” she writes on 3
December 1910. Feelings of melancholy and despair (which she calls her
“black butterflies”) run through the diary like a leitmotif: “I am tired, so
tired, and tonight I feel terribly sad […] Why am I assailed by so many
black ideas? Why does the future frighten me?” (29 December 1909); “It’s
dreadful how often I have sad thoughts and how rarely I feel that it’s good
to be alive” (11 March 1911).
For Le Normand, writing – her diary, but also other texts – gradually
fills this emptiness and strengthens her desire for a professional writing
career. Little by little, new horizons open up for her. In March 1910, she
enrols in a writing course given by René du Roure, a young professor
from France, at the Montreal campus of Laval University,16 and the com-
pliments of her teacher increase her confidence and heighten her desire
to be a writer. “By the way, I have literary ambitions; I’d love to write for
a newspaper; I’ve even taken some steps in that direction lately and I’m
waiting for the results – I would be so happy!” she writes on 11 December
1910. And, two weeks later: “I have become a journalist. Two articles by
me, signed Claude, have already appeared in L’Avenir du Nord, the Saint-
Jérôme newspaper” (28 September 1910). For the next three years, while
writing occasional articles for L’Avenir du Nord, she enrolled in literature
courses at the University of Montreal, from which she received a diploma
in literary studies in 1913. As Michel Lemaire notes, she is one of the first
women in Quebec to pursue graduate studies in literature.17
Fed by her readings, Le Normand’s desire for love becomes ardent
during her eighteenth year. “I’ve been reading a bit these last few days and
it makes me want to be loved. I’m thirsty for love!” she writes on 5 October
1910. On Christmas Day of that year, irritated by the presence of her older
sister and her husband, who are constantly kissing and who speak only
of money and food, she confides to her journal: “I want an intellectual

husband […] who has a sense of values and doesn’t think about money
all the time, but about God and society; [someone who would choose to]
live above all for his faith […] and also for his country.” Idealistic, roman-
tic, and mad about literature, she is thus entirely ready for the great love
which will arrive in her life in June 1911, in the person of the crippled poet
Albert Lozeau.
The story of Le Normand and Lozeau’s love affair is now known,
thanks to the publication in 2006 of the letters written to her by the poet
between 1911 and 1921.18 Paralyzed by tuberculosis of the spinal column,
Lozeau is thirty-two when he meets the young Michelle Le Normand.
Already a celebrated author since the publication of his collection of
poems L’âme solitaire in 1907, he contributes a regular column to the
newspaper Le Devoir, founded in 1910. He lives with his parents on Rue
Laval, near the Square Saint-Louis, and often spends his afternoons on
the balcony in his wheelchair, watching the passersby. On 22 May 1911, Le
Normand writes: “I’ve seen Albert Lozeau four times since Saturday, on
his balcony. And now I’m obsessed with a new infatuation. If I followed
my impulses I’d write to him. My heart gives me so much misery and so
many worries!” She screws up her courage and sends him an anonymous
letter, noting in her diary on 12 June: “I was desperate to write to Albert
Lozeau. I did it on Wednesday the 7th and on Saturday he replied to me
in Le Devoir,” adding a handwritten copy of Lozeau’s column – a long
poem followed by a request that his admirer reveal her name. She replies
to him with a long letter, also transcribed in her journal, containing her
name and address. In the final entry of her journal, she writes: “Received
a good letter from Albert Lozeau on Tuesday the 13th, my 18th birthday.
I was happy for the whole day. I replied to it in the evening – and I soon
got another letter – and another one yesterday with his portrait enclosed.
He has offered me his friendship and he’s now occuying all my thoughts.
Where will all of this lead? Will he disappear from my affections like all
the others, or is this one for life? I can’t […]” (18 June 1911).
Passionate and reciprocal, the love of Le Normand and Lozeau will last
for several years. Le Normand has finally found the mentor she craved:
a sensitive and intelligent man who adores her, shares her tastes in read-
ing, corrects her texts, and finds her employment at Le Devoir, where she
starts writing in 1915, briefly becoming editor of the women’s pages in
1918. From 1915 on, she uses the pen name Michelle Le Normand, pub-
lishing a series of articles on her childhood which appear in book form
in 1916, to great success, under the title Autour de la Maison. Because of
his illness, Lozeau grants his “dear Marie-Antoinette” total freedom to live
as she pleases and have relationships with other men, and Le Normand’s
diary for 1918 reveals that she has, indeed, fallen in love with another
man.19 As for Lozeau, always generous to this woman he will love until his
death in 1924, he continues to write to her until July 1921, a year before her
marriage to Léo-Paul Desrosiers, Quebec writer and journalist. But the
love she formerly felt for Lozeau has changed to pity. Now calling him her
“poor poet,” she notes, after a visit to him in 1919: “I loved him very much
in the past […] but I don’t love him at all any more […] I pray for him, out
of pity. I find it unjust that I no longer feel anything for him. What a terri-
bly sad fate!” (7 April 1919).
the Se Cret S O f hAPPine SS:

ghi SLA ine Perr AuLt ( 1 9 2 2 –1 9 3 6 )
The diary of Ghislaine Perrault (1914–76), preserved in the Fonds Familles

Laurendeau et Perrault of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Qué-
bec,20 begins when she is eight years old and ends with this entry, the
only one for 1936: “Paris, Friday 12 June 1936: Madame Laurendeau is
embarking today on the Alaunia, the same ship we sailed on. Our baby
was baptized in the same grey and blue baptismal gown that both André
and his mother wore.” From her own childhood until the beginning of
her years as a mother, Ghislaine Perrault notes what appear to her to be
the principal events of a happy life: a privileged existence, to be sure, but
also, in a more general sense, completely “normal.” The daughter of Mar-
guerite Mousseau and of Antonio Perrault, dean of the Faculty of Law at
the Montreal campus of Laval University and author of several books on
law and social justice, she attended the Académie Saint-Urbain and later
the University of Montreal. With her future husband, André Laurendeau,
journalist, she attended courses given by Abbé Lionel Groulx,21 who soon
became a friend and advisor of the young couple, and later, in 1934, Ghis-
laine’s spiritual director.
The first two notebooks (1922–30), written between the ages of eight
and fifteen, are bound in leather; the first, with the embossed title “Daily
Journal 1914,” may have belonged to the author’s mother. The two note-
books are followed by four others, covering the years from 1930 to 1936
and recounting, among other things, the engagement and marriage of
Ghislaine and André Laurendeau. An interesting aspect of the last three
notebooks is that they are conceived as being not only Ghislaine’s journal,
but that of the couple. On the cover of the first (extending over the period
from 4 September 1932 to 17 November 1933), “André Laurendeau” is writ-
ten in Ghislaine’s handwriting. The second, which goes from 19 November
1933 to 16 June 1935, bears the title “Diary: André and Ghislaine,” and con-
tains about twenty pages written by Laurendeau; the third, covering the
period from 17 July 1935 to 12 June 1936, is titled “Our diary: André and
Ghislaine,” and contains a few entries by Laurendeau.
Throughout her journal, Ghislaine Perrault writes knowing she may
well be read by others, with or without her consent: her mother (whose
comments indicating she has read the diary have already been quoted),
her fiancé, or other eventual readers. The content, closer to that of a
chronicle than to the intimate revelations of some young girls’ diaries,
reflects this awareness, most explicitly in the entry which closes the sec-
ond notebook:
Monday, 30 June 1930

I think I will stop this journal here. Now that I’ve finished my
studies at the convent, I’m going to start a new notebook […] This
diary doesn’t contain many impressions. My method is to relate
only the facts: that way, the impressions aren’t known to others, and
they come back to me clearly when I reread the facts. I will probably
continue using this tactic. Maybe, for example, if I meet a boy who
pleases me I won’t hesitate to say he’s “adorable,” unlike the silence I
would have kept here not so long ago …
So goodbye to this first journal.
Ghislaine Perrault
P.S. My new pen writes nicely, doesn’t it?
The first notebook, with only occasional entries, communicates the

freshness and innocence of the existence of a little girl with an appar-
ent gift for happiness. The occasional spelling mistakes and the purely
descriptive character of the entries recall the pedagogical aim of girls’
diaries of the period, but they are also a sign of the literary tastes and
ambitions of the young diarist. “I woke up on this happy morning,” she
writes, adding what she had for breakfast, “and then I played the piano
and did my homework” (4 February 1923). “Finally! I’m starting my diary
again. There are many things that have changed,” she writes two years
later, noting the alterations in the furniture of the room she shares with
her sister, Francine, and the Christmas presents she received (23 Janu-
ary 1925). Too young to define herself in psychological terms, she often
evokes her physical characteristics: “I have a strange nose, neither big nor
small, turned up in a funny way. Brown hair that is wavy when I brush
it but messy half an hour later” (10 October 1925). At thirteen, she notes
her height: “I’m in seventh grade […] I measure 5 feet 8 inches in my low
heels” (13 March 1927). The first notebook also contains the plots of two
novels she plans to write, full of exotic elements, in which she imagines
herself as a soldier and speaks of a voyage to Turkey, but also accords a
great deal of importance to friendship (4 February 1925).
Happiness is a recurrent theme, as in the charming passage which ends
the first notebook: “My diary isn’t really a diary, because I don’t write in
it regularly. Excuse me if my writing is dancing, but the cat is rubbing up
against my face and distracting me. In my grammar homework there was
a sentence: ‘Happiness is somewhere, but can never be found.’ I think the
beginning of it is ridiculous: ‘Happiness is somewhere.’ Of course happi-
ness is […]” [the following pages are ripped out] (25 February 1925). Two
years later, in a long entry, perhaps the draft of a school composition, she
returns to the subject, treating it with surprising maturity for a girl of her
age. Happiness is not an impossible goal, she writes. It can be found in the
texture of everyday life, with its struggles and disappointments: the rou-
tine of life at the convent, waiting for Friday (“a distracting and passionate
obsession”), buying a new house, practising the piano, the certainty that
her best friend Madeleine will be at the lake during the coming holidays.
“I may be the only person who understands happiness this way, but I also
think that, thanks to the way of seeing things God has given me, I’m the
only one who’s right. That’s why I’m happy while everyone else is com-
plaining,” she concludes (27 May 1927).
The whole of the second notebook, written between the ages of eleven
and fifteen, bathes in this atmosphere of happiness, and the perfume of
past days emanates from the cherished objects conserved between its
pages: dried flowers and leaves, found in the spot which Ghislaine and her
friend Madeleine have designated their “secret place”; birthday cards and
Valentines; a ribbon from her sister’s graduation bouquet; a list of maxims
copied from her grammar book. The notebook also contains some poems
written by Ghislaine and a newspaper clipping with a story entitled, “The
Legend of the Lilacs,” signed “Ghislaine,” with the dedication “To my soul
sister Madeleine.” A description of a winter landscape, written at the age
of eleven, suggests that the young girl has some literary talent (7 Novem-
ber 1925). At twelve, her love of the French language leads her to found
a group of friends she calls “The Canadian academy of the French lan-
guage” (a suitable activity for the future wife of André Laurendeau). At
fourteen, she is delighted when her father brings her an anthology of
French poetry on returning from a trip to Europe (27 July 1928); and at
fifteen, thanks to a friend who is a medical student and has worked at the
mental hospital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, she receives a letter from the poet
Émile Nelligan, which she copies into her diary. A year later, the same
friend gives her a notebook containing poems which Nelligan has writ-
ten down from memory. The love of music and nature are also sources of
creativity for this young girl with romantic tastes, who has a piano even
at the cottage and dreams of playing it in harmony with nature: “A beau-
tiful moonlit night. I wish I could take my piano out into the woods, to
make music at night in the middle of nature […] Music has given me so
much! Beethoven has received my sadness, Chopin has seen his elegies
become enraged, and dear Brahms has helped put a smile back on my face
after Grieg advised me to work on myself. Oh, dear piano, what would I be
without you?” (23 July 1928). And, a few days later: “When I play Beetho-
ven for example, I seem to hear a soul in solitary nature. The woods and
the sky make me think of music, and vice versa” (27 July 1928).
Religious practices occupy a large place in young Ghislaine’s life,
though she is not excessively pious. Triduums, novenas, and retreats are
regular activities, motivating her to try to improve herself, usually in the
direction of greater docility. At twelve, she decides to start a triduum, three
days of prayer of which the first is devoted to combatting laziness, the sec-
ond to pride and “wanting to be in charge,” and the third to “conquering
impatience and becoming more docile” (3 March 1926). A week later, she
confides to her journal that the success of the triduum was only partial: “I
finished my triduum. There’s a small improvement. But I think I’ll make a
novena in a few weeks, with the same intentions” (10 March 1926).
Basically, Ghislaine Perrault is a “normal” adolescent girl with a lively
interest in art, extremely faithful in her friendships, and sure enough of
herself to note, after a “love interest” in a young boy when she is twelve,
that she is glad to be free again: “I’ve noticed that what I thought was ‘love’
(what a huge word) for the Valiant Horseman was only a ‘crush,’ as they
say at the convent. And my crush is over! I’m so glad!” (30 April 1926).
The four notebooks that follow trace, with remarkable discretion, the
relationship between Ghislaine and André Laurendeau, from their first
meeting in October 1930 until their marriage in June 1935. The entries
are short and factual: “Tennis with Châteauguay, André, and Jacques
[…] Afterwards, André plays the piano for me […] Then, Jacques went
to get Maman. André stayed for a few more minutes” (9 October 1930);
“This afternoon, ‘L’Arlésienne’ at the Saint-Denis with A. A good film.
Pretty. Lovely music. Then A. at our house for a few minutes. Piano. All
in all, an excessively calm afternoon” (11 November 1930). Ghislaine soon
meets Laurendeau’s friends, including the poet Saint-Denys Garneau (18
January 1931). She keeps poems by Alfred Lozeau in her diary, belongs
to a sewing circle, and attends lectures with her father: “This evening,
with Papa at Saint-Sulpice, a lecture by Robert Choquette, ‘Variations
on Alfred Desrochers.’ Very good. His thoughts were deep, solid and
well expressed” (14 April 1931). In November 1933, she goes to a ball at
the Windsor Hotel with Laurendeau, and a small piece of lace, probably
from her dress, is attached to the page. A few lines by Laurendeau, writ-
ten two months later, give his own impressions of the evening: “I noticed
four young girls as pretty as Ghislaine, but not prettier. She had a beau-
tiful bearing […] with an appearance of reserve that made her look very
young: both a little girl and a beautiful woman. – I’m not writing under
the influence of my enthusiasm. It’s now January, and my memories are
two months old” (14 January 1934).
Religion is important in the life of the couple. On 26 April 1933, Ghis-
laine notes that they consecrated their engagement by attending Mass
(“On Saturday January 7, our engagement. At 7.45 Mass at the Jesuit
church. A. gave me my ring just before Communion, in the middle of
Mass”), and adds that they celebrated André’s twenty-first birthday the
same way (“Tuesday, 21 March. André is 21. We went to Communion at
the Jesuit church”). With their friends from La Relève,22 they are enthu-
siastic about the religious renewal coming from France, attend a series
of lectures given by philosopher Jacques Maritain in October, read
Léon Bloy, and buy themselves a copy of “The Liturgical Year” on New
Year’s Day 1935. Ghislaine is also very involved in Laurendeau’s nation-
alist activities, which intensify in 1932 with the founding of the group
Jeune-Canada.23 Her diary portrays a life of shared passions and work,
where she helps organize events and listens attentively to the ideas her
fiancé is developing for his speeches: “Arrived late for the Abbé Groulx’s
course, then we went to André’s place. He read me what he’s adding to his
speech on ‘the sense of nation’ for the radio. We chatted, and worked a
bit in the library. Had supper. Chatted (in the living room) and said some
amazing things. I left at 8:30” (13 December 1933). A year later, she notes:
“At the Monument National [a well-known theatre on Saint-Laurent Bou-
levard], ‘Who will save Quebec?’ – A full house. André [and the others]
warmly applauded. Tonight we start selling ‘Our reasons for being proud.’
A good result” (3 December 1934). This nationalist commitment seems to
increase the opposition of Ghislaine’s father to his daughter’s engagement,
which is mentioned several times in the diary.24 Ghislaine speaks of his
anger when he arrives home and finds the two alone without supervision
(26 April 1933), and she mentions a visit of her father to the Abbé Groulx
in 1934, to discuss the nationalist ideas of André and Ghislaine. A month
before their marriage in 1935, she refers to a series of lectures with the
provocative title “Is Nationalism a Sin?,” given by Henri Bourassa, polit-
ical leader and publisher of Le Devoir, in which he attacks Groulx and the
young nationalists in the name of religion: “We went tonight to Bouras-

sa’s first lecture: ‘Is nationalism a sin?’. He demolished Abbé Groulx, the
Jeune-Canada, and all nationalists with his cruel putdowns” (30 April
1935). It was a dramatic evening, which pleased Ghislaine’s father but dis-
turbed Groulx and his young disciples, leading them to the decision that
Laurendeau must reply to Bourassa after the next lecture. The diary also
refers to an “amazing” lecture given by Father Georges-Henri Lévesque
early in 1935, a lecture which, acccording to Yvan Lamonde, was a key date
in the history of the movement for secularism in Quebec.25
The notebook ends on 16 June 1935, with the entry: “We have been mar-
ried since Tuesday, 4 June, at nine o’clock,” followed by a description of the
wedding day. A subsequent notebook, covering the period from 17 July
1935 to 12 June 1936, contains only nine pages of text, all devoted to the
debate between the nationalist groups and the Church. Like most young
girls’ diaries, that of Ghislaine Perrault ends with her marriage.
• • •
From the feeling of security offered to the young Marie-Louise Globen-

sky by her family, milieu, and religious beliefs in the 1860s to the innocent
and happy existence related in Ghislaine Perrault’s diary sixty years
later, it might seem that little has changed in the situation of young girls
of “good families.” And yet the diaries reveal a wide range of hopes, illu-
sions, and anxieties, including guilt feelings aroused by the rigid religious
instruction offered in the convents. After Globensky, one sees attempts at
rebellion with varying degrees of success in the diaries of Alice Dessaulles,
the Cartier sisters, and Michelle Le Normand, and a more and more con-
fident expression of a female self that dares to speak out against familial,
religious, and social pressures. All of the diaries express a need for love,
whether that of a distant father (the Cartier daughters), a mother who
fails to understand her daughter’s aspirations (Alice Dessaulles, Michelle
Le Normand), or of a “Prince Charming” figure endowed with the qual-
ities of both tender lover and husband offering an enviable social status.
Significantly, many of these diaries end at the moment when a lover or
husband appears, as if the role of confidant played by the diary were no
longer necessary or – a more troubling possibility – as if the diarist under-
stands that she no longer has a right to a space for private writing. This
conflict between writing for oneself and acceptance of social norms is at
the heart of the two diaries we will examine in the following chapter –
those of Henriette Dessaulles and Josephine Marchand.
C h ap t er 6
Tw o N i n e te e n th - Ce n tu r y Re bel s: Henri et t e
D e s s au lle s an d Jos é p hi ne M archand
The posthumously published diaries of Henriette Dessaulles (1874–81)

(HD-I and HD-II) and Joséphine Marchand (1879–1900)1 (JM) offer a
vivid portrait of two young women who dared to think for themselves in
spite of the rigid conventions of bourgeois society in their era. The two
diarists are almost the same age (Henriette Dessaulles was born in 1860
and Joséphine Marchand in 1861) and grew up in the same region south of
Montreal (Henriette Dessaulles in Saint-Hyacinthe and Joséphine March-
and in Saint-Jean-d’Iberville). The dates of the two journals overlap, with
both including the years from 1879 to 1881. Henriette Dessaulles began
hers at the age of fourteen2 and ended it at twenty-one, a few months
before her wedding; Joséphine Marchand kept her diary from the age of
seventeen until she was thirty-eight, recording her long resistance to the
prospect of marriage, her engagement, her wedding day and night, and
the early years of her life as a wife, mother, and public figure. Of particular
interest for our purposes is the fact that her diary originates in precisely
the situation that leads Henriette Dessaulles to abandon hers: the inevi-
tability of marriage and its implications regarding a woman’s right to her
own life and thoughts.
In each of the diaries, we follow the personal, intellectual, and spiri-
tual evolution of the daughter of an important liberal family, with the
resources necessary to allow her independence of mind and a strong
sense of self. Henriette Dessaulles (1860–1946) is the daughter of
Georges-Casimir Dessaulles, the descendant of a seigneurial family and
a nephew of Louis-Joseph Papineau, who was successively mayor of
Saint-Hyacinthe, a provincial member of parliament, and a member of
the Canadian Senate. Joséphine Marchand (1861–1925) is the daughter of
Félix-Gabriel Marchand, a lawyer and writer who was premier of Que-
bec from 1897 to 1900. Encouraged by her father, she began publishing
henriette dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand • 147
her writings while still a teenager and, by the 1880s, was the only Que-
bec woman besides the novelist Laure Conan to write regularly for the
public.3 During their adult life both Dessaulles and Marchand were
journalists and women of letters who left their mark on Quebec culture,
especially with regard to the situation of women. Under the pen name
Fadette, Dessaulles wrote a weekly column in Le Devoir from 1911 to 1945,
while Marchand founded the first women’s magazine in Quebec, Le Coin
du feu, in 1892 and made an important contribution to women’s rights and
education over the following decades.
Despite these similarities, the two diaries are strikingly different in
content, form, and even the quality of the writing. Dessaulles’s diary,
which the French critic Philippe Lejeune described as “one of the most
remarkable diaries ever written in the French language”4 and about which
others have accurately noted that it “reads like a novel,”5 is an exqui-
site document, devoured by readers and written about by critics since
its publication in 1971.6 There is now an excellent critical edition of this
diary, prepared by Jean-Louis Major in 1989,7 as well as a paperback edi-
tion in two volumes which appeared in 1999 and 2001.8 Although there
can be little doubt of the authenticity of the ideas and feelings expressed
in the diary, Jean-Louis Major discovered imprecisions in its chronol-
ogy which indicate that Dessaulles reworked the text, probably about
twenty years after writing it, perhaps with the possibility of publication in
mind.9 As the original manuscript of the diary has never been found, it is
impossible to tell whether other corrections, revisions, cuts, and even sty-
listic improvements were made at the same time. Reading the diary, one is
enchanted by the hypersensitive but rebellious character of the diarist and
her lively evocations of the dramas of her daily life, as well as by the depth
of her spiritual and intellectual questioning. Unlike Dessaulles’s diary,
Marchand’s is more analytical than emotional, as was its author who
describes herself on more than one occasion as “cold” and “reserved.” It
is, however, a fascinating record of Marchand’s growing realization of the
fact that marriage and maternity are inevitable for a woman of her milieu,
and later of her discovery of the possibilities open to her as an indepen-
dent-minded woman in a progressive marriage.
Each of the diaries implicitly asks whether it is possible for a woman
to have an autonomous existence and sense of self in a society centred on
the traditional role of woman. Adolescence is presented in both as a sti-
fling time, not only because of the repressive convent school atmosphere,
but because each of the young women has an authoritarian mother or
stepmother who seems dissatisfied with her own life and infuriated by
her daughter’s desire for freedom: “I should have been a boy, or, if there
was no way to make me a boy, dear despotic God, couldn’t you have made
me a bird?” writes Henriette Dessaulles at sixteen (HD-I, 171). The years
following the end of her convent studies are a time of emptiness and wait-
ing, filled with frivolous activities which are closely supervised by her
stepmother, at the end of which the young girl is expected to assume her
role as wife and mother – a period of idleness well described by Henri-
ette Dessaulles: “I try on dresses, I buy trinkets, I have visitors, and I’m
always moving without ever getting anything worthwhile done. It’s the life
of a puppet and I’ll soon be tired of it. I wish I could be studying Law with
Maurice!! That would be a great success: I’d be the expert on legal matters
and he could be the expert on love!” (HD-II, 191).
At the heart of each of these diaries, then, are questions about love and
marriage. If Henriette Dessaulles’s diary “reads like a novel,” it is at least
in part because it recounts the story of a great love which triumphs over
obstacles and finally fills the heart of the young diarist so completely that
she willingly gives up the “companionship” of her diary. In the very first
entries she speaks with interest of her neighbour Maurice Saint-Jacques,
the older brother of her best friend Jos, and the diary follows the growth
of her love for him, a relationship rendered all the more passionate by
the fact that it is forbidden by Henriette’s stepmother. Joséphine March-
and’s diary also contains frequent mentions of the man she will eventually
marry, the future Canadian senator Raoul Dandurand. But, unlike Des-
saulles, she speaks constantly of her efforts to keep him at a distance,
for she sees him as too devoted to her and lacking independence. Grad-
ually, however, she evolves toward the realization that he represents “a
good catch” and that marriage is the only acceptable vocation for a young
woman of her class who has no desire to become a nun.
Closely linked to the question of marriage is the fate of the diary (that
is, of the right of a young woman to a space reserved for her own writing)
as the wedding day approaches. Mellowed by the presence of love in her
life, Henriette Dessaulles moves from rebellion to an apparent abdication
of her autonomy, symbolized by the fact that she gives her fiancé the right
to read her diary and, soon thereafter, realizes that she no longer feels
the need or the desire to write in it. As for the more rational Joséphine
Marchand, not only does she keep a diary after her marriage, but she
never reveals its existence to her husband.10 After her marriage, the diary
changes considerably, however, becoming a unique blend of the private
and the public, a reflection not only on her preoccupations as a wife and
mother, but also on her activities in the public sphere.
t he edu CAti O n Of A “Queen Of the he Arth” :

reS iS tAnC e And rebeLL iO n
Taken together, the two diaries provide a record of the systematic silen-
cing of young girls as part of their preparation for the roles of wife,
mother, and educator. In Dessaulles’s diary we follow the process
from day-to-day, along with the diarist’s rebellion against it; in Mar-
chand’s, written after she has completed her studies, it is presented more
summarily.
The contrast between Henriette Dessaulles’s diary and that of her sis-
ter, Alice, (analyzed in the preceding chapter) is striking. While Alice at
eighteen seems passive and completely dominated by religious authori-
ties,11 Henriette, at fourteen, is fiery, sure of herself, and at times scornful
of her teachers and the other pupils in her class. “It’s hard to tell how much
these strange little nuns are aware of,” she writes after one of the teachers
asks indiscreet questions about her private life (HD-I, 59). A strong indi-
vidualist, she bristles at the conformity imposed at the convent: “I’m not
made to be part of a flock […] I detest the shepherd, the crook, the sheep,
and the pasture!” (HD-II, 24). But her confident exterior hides an extreme
sensitivity, as well as a sadness that goes back to the death of her mother
when she was four years old. The rigid rules and cold attitude of her step-
mother have increased her feeling of loneliness and her need for rebellion.
Rejecting the hypocritical behaviour she observes daily at home and in
the convent, she proclaims herself “thirsty for change, progress, and wider
horizons,” ideas that, in her estimation, are at odds with the old-fashioned
values of her stepmother: “She is a representative of the Old Regime:
‘Authority, whether it’s right or wrong,’ ‘You must bow your head!’. I am
the New Regime, horrified by tyranny, even in its religious forms and
most of all in its religious forms, because it deforms and disfigures reli-
gion, which should represent true freedom, as it is the creation of a perfect
God” (HD-II, 134).
The portraits of mothers in the two diaries suggest that it was not
unusual for women to feel resentment about their role of queens of the
hearth. Henriette’s stepmother, cold and distant with all her children,
seems particularly hostile to Henriette, who suffers enormously at being
so rejected: “I wish I had a mother who would take me in her arms, caress
me, help me” (HD-I, 96); “I completely freeze up in this coldness, and if
bad humour also comes into the mix, I feel shaken and nervous and lose
all my courage!” (HD-II, 196). Henriette notices the contradiction between
her stepmother’s behaviour in the family and the pious image she presents
to others: “What a difficult temperament! I have trouble understanding

this virtue which is so hard on others, this piety which takes her to church
so often but doesn’t keep her from being violent and angry more than half
the time!” (HD-II, 166). Joséphine Marchand’s mother is also extremely
demanding, complains constantly, and is never satisfied: “Maman thinks
she is the most unfortunate of women and, strangely, it is her children
who are her greatest cross” (JM, 76). Like Henriette, Joséphine suffers
from the atmosphere created by her mother in the family: “I’m feeling low
today. The house isn’t as pleasant as it could be: Maman is nervous and
irritated, and her constant recriminations and lamentations, which fill
the house from morning to night, make me sad and tense as well. When I
am upset and irritated like this, I am not always as kind as I could be, but
it’s almost uncontrollable. This state of affairs exhausts me to the point of
making me ill” (JM, 38).
Later, when she herself is a mother as well as an activist for women’s
rights, Marchand observes her mother’s sacrificial attitude from a greater
distance. In 1897, by which time her father has become premier of Quebec,
she notes that her mother still exhibits “her marvelous faculty of suffering
from everything and not enjoying anything” (JM, 170), and that “the great
victim in the sad life of our family wasn’t the one you might expect […]
She who called herself ‘the sacrificed one’ for forty years ruined the joy of
a whole generation of children” (JM, 197).
Both diarists describe the education of girls as a system governed
by rules and constraints, with no opportunity for questioning or self-
exploration. Dessaulles criticizes the formalism of the religion taught in
the convent, focussed on rules and rituals rather than values: “All this fuss
about ceremonies and external gestures is empty, it rings in one’s ears like
ancient bells but says nothing to the soul” (HD-II, 198). After a supervised
walk of the boarders, in which the nun in charge punishes the little girls
who step off the sidewalk by making them keep silent, she reflects: “It
would be a lot more valuable if she kept them from lying! But that would
be caring for the soul, and here it’s only outer appearances that matter!
The ideal, here, is to walk in a stilted and starched way, with your eyes on
the ground, your hands crossed over your stomach, and speaking very
quietly as if you were in church. How ridiculous!” (HD-II, 25). At eigh-
teen, at the beginning of Lent, she notes: “I got ashes on my forehead this
morning. It’s a dirty little gesture that doesn’t inspire me! Little pagan!”
(HD-II, 169). And at twenty, after hearing a sermon on devotion to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, she recalls the “strange devotions” practised at the
convent, in which the students had to insert thorns into a red velvet heart
that was supposed to represent the heart of Jesus: “It would be beautiful to
love Jesus with all one’s heart, but statues with bleeding hearts and hearts
of velvet destroy this spiritual feeling!” (HD-II, 374).
Marchand too comments on the inadequacies of an educational system
“with vaporous content, which absorbs the intelligence of girls and ren-
ders them useless for anything until they are confronted by their duties
as wives and mothers, duties they usually carry out […] mindlessly and
without energy” (JM, 117). When her fiancé, Raoul Dandurand, teases her,
saying that women’s only goal is to find a husband, she imagines the kind
of education she would like to see for girls: a solid basis in the arts and
sciences, no novels to read, as the latter awaken “the effervescence of their
young imaginations,” and, most importantly, “great pride in their relation-
ships with men” (JM, 116). While recognizing that most young women are
destined for marriage and motherhood, she insists on the importance of
offering them an education that will encourage their independence and
even equip them for the single life:
Marriage is, indeed, inevitable (and my aim would not be to

distance them from it). But I would like to teach them to live in
relative happiness without marriage. A busy and intelligent life
would protect them from the worry and anxiety of waiting. In other
words, their existence should have a noble goal, as men’s lives do:
the golden butterfly of love should not come to them as it would to
a useless flower that lacks perfume […] In my opinion, if you don’t
happen to meet a man suitable for passing your life with, celibacy
is not a bad choice, but rather a very acceptable status quo, perhaps
lacking in excitement, but not in serenity and peaceful interests.
(JM, 116–17)
Religious retreats, times of prayer and reflection during which one exam-
ines one’s direction in life, appear in both diaries as occasions in which the
self is extremely vulnerable, and young women are bombarded with ser-
mons, readings, and meditations on sin, death, and damnation. Henriette
Dessaulles resists their negative messages, criticizing the “stupidity” of the
sermons and the poor quality of the French used in them, and affirming
her right to think for herself: “He is decidedly ridiculous, this man who
brings everything down to its lowest level! He only talks about the ugly
things in us […] and with flamboyant descriptions of punishments” (HD-
I, 108). When the retreatants are told to write an analysis of each sermon,
she wonders: “Analyze what? Ideas? There aren’t any! – The language of
this gentleman is as poor as what I’m writing in this journal, in fact it has
more mistakes. The poor man! If he knew how much he scandalizes me by
Writing for On eself • 152
speaking of God as if he were an ordinary man, and by presenting great

truths like a dinner menu” (HD-I, 110). What matters to Henriette is her
own relationship with God, independent of the mediations of the clergy:
“Dear God, I want to make a good retreat. Give me your grace. Help me
yourself, for You love me, and your priests don’t know how to speak to my
heart!” (HD-I, 107).
Radically different from that of Dessaulles, Joséphine Marchand’s
experience of retreat illustrates the enormous pressure exerted on young
women at a time when they are contemplating their future. In a “Retreat
Diary,” written when she was twenty-three, she describes in detail the
gradual shattering of her self-esteem over the three days of the retreat,
resulting in a dramatic “conversion” that will have a lasting influence on
her life. Marchand is particularly vulnerable as she begins the retreat, for
she must soon decide whether or not to accept the marriage proposal of
the man she still calls “Mr. Dandurand,” for whom she feels no passionate
attachment. Over the course of the retreat, she gradually succumbs to the
influence of the director (a nun), who tells her that her lack of passion for
Dandurand is an indication that she has a religious vocation, and that she
must “decide on her vocation” before the end of the retreat. The priest adds
his opinion, saying that she is taking a great risk by contemplating mar-
riage to a man “of little faith” (JM, 64). Influenced as well by readings about
death and the necessity of sacrifice, Marchand arrives at a decision which
puts her future in question and completely destroys her peace of mind:
she will promise the Sacred Heart not to marry Dandurand unless she is
“morally convinced that he will be a good and true Catholic” (JM, 67):
I will always remember the 21st of March 1884 and its anguish. Never
have I suffered so much morally […] After speaking with Father
Caraux, I was shattered; I cried in the chapel and in my room, like
a Madeleine, and said to myself: If only I could die tonight! […]
Why did this decision cost me so dearly? Is it because I love him
greatly? No […] It’s because my future, which seemed so certain, is
now completely in doubt. Everything will have to be started over.
Will I find someone else who will love me as he does, who will be
as devoted as he is to my happiness? It’s probable that I’ll never get
married! (JM, 67–8)
Is it possible to maintain one’s autonomy under such pressures? At the

beginning of a new year at the convent, Henriette Dessaulles exposes the
impossibility of her situation with remarkable lucidity, seeing clearly that
if she affirms her individuality she will be condemning herself to social
rejection: “Poor little me, you will be ogled, supervised, looked after,
babied! They will try to mold you, shape you, perfect you! They will take
everything from you […] Alas! If they succeed you will no longer be your-
self and if they fail you’ll be the most miserable of little girls, because you’ll
be the most persecuted!” (HD-I, 200–1). Several critics have opined that
Dessaulles abdicates her autonomy in favour of love, claiming that she “has
no other choice, no other possibility than to accept the social norms [of
her time].”12 While it is true that the happiness of knowing she is loved (as
well as the impossibility of envisaging a future other than marriage) trans-
form the young rebel and lead her to a submissiveness that may appear
shocking to the modern reader, we will see that her apparent compliance
does not exclude the presence of a lively critical intelligence. As well, by
examining Marchand’s journal, we will see that, during the same years in
which Dessaulles was giving herself over completely to love, the milieu
offered other possibilities to women tenacious enough to grasp them.
tALK ing t O “SOMeO ne W hO underS tAndS” :

h enriette deSSAu LL eS ’S APPAre nt S urrender
As she turns eighteen, Henriette Dessaulles believes strongly in the pos-

sibility of living according to her own values: “I won’t be shaped by life
[…] I will make my own life, of everything that is in me,” she writes (HD-
II, 127). However, once her studies are over, she finds herself trapped in
a life that lacks structure. Her stepmother is still forbidding her to see
Maurice, and her days follow one another in unbearable monotony.
“I don’t know what to write, I’m dying of boredom! I cried about it a
while ago” (HD-II, 102), she writes in July 1877. In August, she takes part
in decorating her family’s house in preparation for the visit of the apos-
tolic delegate to Saint-Hyacinthe: “I make votive candles, I paste and cut
things out; and I’ll go crazy if this keeps on much longer!” (HD-II, 103).
A few months later, she takes part in a small play with her friend Jos, and
is warned by the superior of her former convent school of the dangers
of being an actress and losing her dignity (HD-II, 137). She reads boring
French authors, approved by the Church, and English authors (Dickens,
Tennyson, Longfellow, Carlyle) whose ideas make her more conscious
than ever of the narrowness of her environment: “There have been female
saints, heroes, and great sinners! For sure they were born far from this
large village which feels to me like a box out of which square houses and
stiff, varnished trees are pulled every morning […] And then, when the
day is done, they fill up the box again and close it: everything sleeps and it
all starts over the next morning!” (HD-II, 120). A visit from a pious friend
planning to enter the convent inspires the following reflection: “It’s possi-
ble that in other countries [nuns] have more personality – Here, the first
priority is to get rid of it – to crush anything in them that would differ-
entiate them from others – they are all reduced to the most general and
ordinary level, and then forbidden to look at anything beyond what’s right
in front of them” (HD-II, 186). At times Henriette dreams of travelling, of
seeing countries where there might be more room for a questioning spirit:
“I’m not living – I’m floating in my dreams when I’m not stuck in the dust
[…] and this empty life is worthless. I was made for something better. If
only I could travel, open my mind, come into contact with the truly beau-
tiful. I wish I had huge wings to take me to beautiful countries where they
grow things other than vegetables like us!” (HD-II, 194–5).
But for her there will be no travel, just love and marriage: a sweet
exchange of her rebellion for the happiness of being at last understood
and loved. “When will I be able to speak to someone who understands the
mystery of pain and human suffering which so revolts me?” (HD-I, 44),
she had written when she was fifteen. The role of her diary – and its even-
tual replacement by another confidant, Maurice – can only be understood
in the context of the solitude she has experienced as her lot since the death
of her mother. Both the blank pages of the diary and, later, the attentive
ear of her fiancé fulfil her need for “someone who understands.”
During these long years of solitude, the diary is her confidant, friend,
judge, and support, the sole repository of her most intimate secrets: “Jos is
keeping a diary and she lets me read it – it’s full of amusing little stories of
what she’s doing […] She reproaches me for not letting her read my diary
and doesn’t understand why. I refuse, saying: ‘I write only for myself!’ I
don’t explain to her that it’s my soul that holds the pen and that I can’t
possibly let her read my soul” (HD-I, 50–1). Henriette fiercely protects
the space of her intimacy, even against Maurice, to whom, as she reveals
in the opening pages of the diary, she refused to give her portrait when
she was fourteen: “I said no; he insisted […] I would really have liked to
please him, but give him my portrait! No, thanks. I’ll keep such things for
myself ” (HD-I, 17). When she is sixteen and Maurice asks her if she loves
him “more than anything,” she resists, imagining a more egalitarian rela-
tionship with him: “Yes, I love him a lot, but he said more than anything,
and I don’t love him more than anything! I try to think of him as little as
possible. It distracts me to think of him and keeps me from concentrat-
ing on my studies, and I want to learn and know things, and some day be
educated enough for him to enjoy my company as if I were a boy! I should
have been a boy, I’m no good at being a girl!” (HD-I, 155–6).
By allowing Maurice to read her diary, Henriette is giving up her

autonomy, all the more so because the diary reveals the intensity of her
love for him. In their day-to-day relationship she is reserved, continuing
to address him as “vous” even though he has been using the more familiar
“tu” with her for a long time, and saying little when he declares his love for
her. She refuses his first request to read her diary, sensing the constraints
that such a sharing will have on her freedom to express herself: “He asked
about my journal, which he’d be curious to see! That’s all! […] You’ll never
see this mirror of my whole self, though! Never? That’s a big word […]
maybe some day, but what will I think about […] if I no longer dare to
write down my dreams?” (HD-II, 131–2). When he asks again, insisting
that he wants to understand her and know her depths, she begins to envis-
age the possibility of giving in to his request: “I’m sometimes tempted
to put my diary in his hands, and yet I hesitate and I’m afraid of such a
step. I know, though, that when I decide to do it, reason won’t have any-
thing to do with it. One fine day, he’ll really want it and, as always, I’ll give
in to what he wants […] There is no use pretending to myself. He is my
will, my reason, my heart, my all […] and it’s only what’s left of my pride
that is making me put off the moment when he will know it” (HD-II, 245).
The intensity of the emotion she feels when she does finally give in to his
request shows her deep attachment to this exceptional diary, and also the
immensity of her love for Maurice: “[I am] still troubled by this promise
I’ve made. I feel a bit as if he were going to open my heart and see what’s
inside, and it’s almost a physical pain I feel. And yet I’m happy to think
that after this he will never be able to doubt my love for him” (HD-II, 259).
From the moment when she shows him her diary, Henriette’s love for
Maurice begins to take the place of her autonomy and of her desire to
write: “I’m letting myself be absorbed by my love. It is my constant preoc-
cupation and my only goal. The more I move forward, the less I belong to
myself ” (HD-II, 262). Now she sees the limitations of her relationship with
her silent notebooks: “I no longer need to write for myself, it’s so much bet-
ter to confide in him and chat with him” (HD-II, 375); “If at least you could
give me advice, my poor confidant! You’re so useless with your big white
eyes! A confidant is supposed to speak, to answer, to help a person! […] I
want a new one, do you hear me?” (HD-II, 325). The diary now appears to
her as “a somewhat cumbersome friend I still love, but who is no more use
to me: it’s to Maurice that I write pages and pages to keep him up-to-date
on my pleasures” (HD-II, 367). Far from regretting this progressive detach-
ment from her diary, she sees it as an entry into maturity: “A new phase of
the Self! I no longer have the slightest desire to write!” (HD-II, 363).
This new “phase of the Self,” confirmed by the official engagement of

the couple, is the stage of learning to be “a Madame… his wife!” (HD-II,
375). While formerly Henriette had hated domestic tasks, now she does
them joyfully, thinking about how she will soon be in a house of her own
(HD-II, 372). She now enjoys the social events she used to scorn: “I’m too
honest to claim that I’m bored by life in society […] I’m not bored at balls,
receptions, or at the parties that take place one after the other. I am sur-
rounded, flattered, admired and, I’m afraid, loved!” (HD-II, 367). Despite
the proud claim early on in her diary that she didn’t have “the heart of a
slave” (HD-I, 141), she now submits with pleasure to the least desires of her
fiancé: “I have discovered that I love doing what he wants” (HD-II, 363).
Her new nickname for Maurice is “Mr. Wisdom” and she describes herself
more and more often as “a little girl”: “Happy peoples have no history, and
little girls don’t write theirs! […] Maurice receives clients and pleads their
cases […] I live in a little paradise where there’s no sign of a serpent” (HD-
II, 362). Like other young women of her time, she accepts the fact that her
future husband now exercises control over what she reads13 (HD-II, 254–
5), seeing that control as a sign of his care for her: “And that’s how little
girls are treated when their friend is a Wise Person! […] I’m touched by
the delicacy, protectiveness, and tenderness with which he envelops the
confident and yet somewhat fearful little soul that is me” (HD-II, 355). The
diary ends a few weeks before Henriette’s wedding, closing with the image
of a beatific future from which any attempt at female rebellion would be
banished: “An earthly paradise [but] with no forbidden apple, no lying
demon, and no disobedient and curious Eve!” (HD-II, 392).
Critics who have seen only capitulation in these final pages of the
diary have, however, ignored several passages which indicate that the
critical faculties of the young diarist remain intact. She remains scepti-
cal about several of the practices of her religion, affirming, at the height
of her happiness, that she has the feeling of inhabiting “an earthly heaven
from which I fear God is too absent” (HD-II, 376). She continues to act
in plays in spite of the opposition of her stepmother and the nuns, and
proclaims her intention to keep waltzing even after it has been forbid-
den by the Church: “If it weren’t for the bother of being touched by any
old person, which does upset me, I would waltz even more often than I
do now, in spite of all the ecclesiastical interdictions which don’t bother
my conscience at all! […] I waltz the way I eat chocolates, and even if the
Pope came to tell me I’m doing wrong, he wouldn’t convince me!” (HD-
II, 351–2). She observes other marriages critically, noting that very few
couples seem as happy as she and Maurice are, and that too many hus-
bands ignore the good qualities of their wives: “Her husband treats her
a little […] cavalierly. If I were in his place, I would adore that woman. I
bet he doesn’t know her and doesn’t understand her […] He belongs to
the race of men who expect homage and are blind to everything around
them! There are tons of men like that!” (HD-II, 349). When a judge who is
a neighbour and friend of the family opines that “a woman who can read,
write, and count a bit knows enough to be a good homemaker and perfect
wife,” she replies, “perfect for a stupid husband!” (HD-II, 200). Finally, rec-
ognizing that there are moments when Maurice does not understand her
and that she finds some of his ideas uninteresting, she celebrates the fact
that there is a distance between them: “Each one of us has his own little
hat, and under the hat his own little ideas! I like that, because it means that
I can keep for myself a little private corner where I can put my things, my
precious little things!” (HD-II, 375).
As for the realities awaiting her after marriage, she hopes for time to
“be spoiled by Maurice before having to raise crabby little children”
(HD-II, 296), but admits her total ignorance of matters concerning sex,
pregnancy, and contraception: “Jos doesn’t know any more than I do, but
I hope […] that people only have children if they want them” (HD-II, 380).
Eight weeks before her wedding, these questions are still unasked and
unanswered: “Now a new life is starting, a life partly hidden by a myste-
rious veil that no one is willing to lift for me […] How strange! Strange to
enter an unknown territory that everyone else seems to know but no one
speaks of. I don’t even ask Jos about it, she is probably as ignorant as I am!”
(HD-II, 391).
bACKing int O MArri Age : JOSÉPhi ne MArCh A nd
One of the principal functions of Joséphine Marchand’s diary is to provide

her with a space to reflect on marriage, an institution which terrifies her,
but which she sees as inevitable. In one of the first entries, she mentions
that she has received a marriage proposal from an old, single anglophone
man, and that her response to him was “as brief as it was negative” (JM, 16).
However, influenced by the marriage preparations of her sister Eugénie,
she asks herself whether “all these preparations aren’t making me want to
play a principal role myself ” (JM, 18). After the first part of the diary, in
which the entries are infrequent (only eight between July 1879 and January
1880), she abandons it for almost two and a half years (from 30 January
1880 until 27 July 1882), in order to concentrate on her “literary work” (JM,
21), returning to it only when, as she notes, “I seem to be getting involved
with someone, a person who didn’t attract me at all at first” (JM, 22). This
person, Raoul Dandurand, and Joséphine’s ambivalent feelings about him
and about marriage in general will be the subject of almost all the diary
entries up to the day of their wedding on 12 January 1886.
After meeting Dandurand, who immediately declares his immense
admiration for her,14 Joséphine describes herself as “less frightened than I
was” by the idea of marriage (JM, 23), but until the day before her wedding
she will resist the coming transformation of her life. Fiercely indepen-
dent, she has trouble imagining herself in the role of wife and mother:
“Will my cold, even selfish, nature, be capable of the devotion required by
that state?” (JM, 45). Several times, she notes that the happiness of young
lovers does not survive the monotony of married life: “My brief reconcili-
ation with marriage is over. I feel more repugnance than ever for this holy
state […] The change in one’s life has its attractions at first; but, once you
get used to it, you’re less happy than you were before” (JM, 25–6); “It seems
to me that it’s the husband who becomes indifferent and bored. All the
things one says, the craziness, the futilities, the unimportant things, are
charming when one is in love, but afterwards, you find yourselves with
nothing to say to each other. Conversation becomes banal and indiffer-
ent, as it is between two people who see each other constantly” (JM, 52).
After spending several days visiting the home of the future premier Hon-
oré Mercier15 and his wife in Montreal, she notes: “The little household
exchanges between our hosts proved to me once again that one must
reflect seriously before committing oneself irrevocably. There is a great
distance in age between them, and he is used to treating her like a child”
(JM, 29). On 31 December 1882, thinking about the coming year, she
writes: “Goodbye 1882! What will your sister bring to me? … Not mar-
riage, I hope! […] Getting married is madness” (JM, 33). Afraid that the
“intolerable situation” in her own family is pushing her towards marriage
(JM, 38), she tells herself: “[I need] two years all to myself [before] clos-
ing my eyes and throwing myself into the abyss. I would have liked not to
get married until I was twenty-five” (JM, 41). When Dandurand proposes
to her in September 1884 she accepts, reminding him, however, that the
“fateful event” is still a long way away and that she has no intention of get-
ting married before she is twenty-four (JM, 83).
Like Henriette Dessaulles, Joséphine sees a contradiction between
keeping a diary and the openness to another person required by engage-
ment and marriage. Unlike Dessaulles, however, she finds a way to protect
the space of her private writing, although a somewhat questionable one
– lying to her fiancé. As her relationship with Dandurand becomes more
intense, she realizes that the prospect of him reading her diary is already
leading her to censor herself: “The cause of this constraint [in my writ-
ing] is perhaps the idea that some day I will have to allow another person
henriette d essaulles and Joséphine Marchand • 159
to read these indiscreet meanderings. No matter! Let us be honest above

all” (JM, 55). Little by little, she begins to notice that the letters she writes
to her fiancé are taking up the time she used to devote to writing in her
diary: “This is a simple polite visit to my Journal,” she writes in June 1885,
after six weeks in which she has recorded nothing. “I don’t want to neglect
it completely and, if truth be told, I have little of interest to tell it. My out-
pourings have deserted it and taken a new direction” (JM, 103). When the
engagement becomes official, she begins a new notebook with a binding
of pink ribbon to signify happiness, in which she admits to having lied
to her fiancé by telling him she has burned the previous notebook: “His
curiosity and interest worried me. I was afraid he would be upset by all the
prevarications and gloominess it contains” (JM, 102). Three weeks before
their wedding, she promises him “not to destroy this last volume of my
Journal, as he believes I have done with the others; on condition that he
must never insist on seeing it, that he must wait until I show it to him on
my own initiative” (JM, 128).
Joséphine opens her new notebook by reflecting on the possibility that
these “last thoughts of a young girl, written before her wedding” (JM, 102)
may one day find a reader. The revelations that follow, about the terror
and confusion she feels regarding the physical realities that await her after
marriage, are a rare and perhaps unique record of what must have been a
common experience. Ill-prepared by their Catholic education to under-
stand the realities of the body and sexuality, young women must have
been terrified by comments like those of two married women who tell
Joséphine that “conjugal life is a long martyrdom for Christian women,
who sacrifice themselves completely […] It’s good to get rid of one’s illu-
sions before getting married, because otherwise the awakening is too
brutal” (JM, 123). Idealistic and romantic, Joséphine generally succeeds
in conquering her fears during the time of her engagement; for example,
she responds to a tactful remark by her fiancé about the “possible suffer-
ing” associated with childbirth by telling herself that the only thing that
worries her is the intrusion of children into the life of the couple: “I’m not
really interested in the material aspects of maternity […] for there’s noth-
ing poetic or great about them […] On the contrary, they are trivial and
disillusioning. The sad part is the little intruders who gradually change
the feelings of your best friend or even steal him from you. Little by lit-
tle, the wife gives up her status as a spoiled child, her privileged place, her
empire, to the little despots who have arrived in her life” (JM, 104–5).
However, the “material aspects of maternity” become inescapable
during the pregnancy and childbirth of her sister Eugénie, which bring
to the surface Joséphine’s repressed feelings of disgust for the body and
dismay about women’s destiny. During a conversation with her fiancé

about “poetry and love,” she notices her pregnant sister and is over-
whelmed by her realization of love’s “brutal, inevitable, revolting result.”
“Assuredly [she writes], the human race is guilty for so disfiguring a beau-
tiful feeling. In a better world, we would be able to love without such
humiliations” (JM, 109). When her sister gives birth on 15 November 1885,
Joséphine is plunged into a crisis that lasts several weeks, from which she
will only emerge thanks to Dandurand’s tenderness and understanding.
On 16 November, the day after the birth, she writes: “I think I aged by
several days yesterday, and lost many of my illusions,” ending her observa-
tions on the birth with the following sentence: “Riel was hanged today.”16
Her sister’s moans, her mother’s suffering, and the serene confidence of
her brother-in-law, who seems oblivious to his wife’s pain, upset her to
the point that “[her] whole being [is] trembling with disgust and terror”
and she asks herself: “What has woman done to deserve all this?” (JM,
121). Having decided that the act of giving birth is “the banal, tiresome,
and disappointing result of love,” she begins to wish that there could be
an expression of her love for Dandurand other than marriage: “I wish he
didn’t want to marry me. I wish he was my brother […] Oh la! la! I hope
I’ll have time to get over these frightful impressions before my wedding!”
(JM, 122). Men now appear to her as “the smiling executioners of women”
(JM, 123) and women as their blind, passive victims: “What a disappoint-
ment life is! Woman is the perennial victim!” (JM, 121). She begins to sense
that her fiancé is treating her in a condescending manner: “The time of
appreciating my intelligence is over now; he loves me like a wife, with the
kind of gentle, distracted interest one gives to children” (JM, 124).
Marchand’s crisis is clearly a product of the Victorian era, and, more
particularly, of a Jansenist education which has instilled in her a disgust
for the body, particularly the female body. “I must resign myself, close my
eyes, live as much as possible in the realm of the mind and not of matter,
it’s the only way to avoid dying of disgust” (JM, 23), she writes less than
two months before her wedding. “If I hadn’t resolved to conquer all my
repugnance it would be a crime for me to get married. Only God can con-
sole us for the disappointing reality of life” (JM, 127).
Despite her fears and hesitations, the entry for 11 January 1886 reveals
a confident and serene Joséphine, more realistic than she had been before
her crisis, but full of love on the day before her wedding. She bids farewell
to this final volume of her youthful diary in a tone of camaraderie similar
to the one used so often by Henriette Dessaulles in addressing her diary:
“Goodbye, dear Journal. It’s not easy to leave you. Your little pink ribbon
was prophetic! When you see me again, I won’t be me and you won’t be
you. The last time I’m writing in you is by the window, in the little back
bedroom, next to the tomb with a padlock on it which is waiting for you
and in which I’m going to imprison you. Goodbye! Say: ‘Goodbye, made-
moiselle.’ It’s the last time for us” (JM, 134).
• • •
The diaries of Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand not only

offer a revealing look at the tension between autonomy and love, individ-
uality and social conformity in the French-Canadian bourgeoisie of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, they also illustrate the crucial role
played by the private diary in maintaining a young woman’s sense of self.
One of the effects of reading private writings, with their close link to the
author’s life, is that on reaching the end of the text the reader inevitably
wonders, “What happened next?” The lives of Dessaulles and Marchand
in the years following their marriages indicate that each of them remained
faithful to her choice: Dessaulles by devoting herself totally to a life – trag-
ically shortened – of wife and mother, and Marchand by adopting a way of
life that allowed her to reconcile career and marriage.
At the age of thirty-seven, Henriette Dessaulles found herself a widow
and mother of five children, suffering from serious health problems. A
little over a year earlier, in March 1896, following the birth of a seventh
child who died five months later, an attack of peritonitis left her paralyzed
for almost two years. Shortly after the attack, in March 1897, her husband
became the Liberal candidate for Saint-Hyacinthe for the upcoming
provincial election, but had to withdraw a month later, after an attack of
typhoid fever. On 4 May 1897, he died of pneumonia. Devastated, Henri-
ette returned with her three youngest children to live with her parents,
and was further shaken the following year by the death from pleurisy of
her sister-in-law Joséphine Saint-Jacques (the “Jos” of her diary). Accord-
ing to Jean-Louis Major, the rewriting of her diary began during this
period of mourning and led to “a sort of rebirth”: “At the gates of death,
having lost the desire to live,” as she confided to a friend in 1898, “she
found in her diary the thirst, desire and passion for life which she had lost,
as well as a proof of the persistence of love.”17
Dessaulles’s diary contains four premonitions of this premature end of
her idyll, most notably, a dream in March 1878 from which she has diffi-
culty freeing herself on awakening: “I saw Maurice dead and laid out in a
very long living room – not theirs. I was there, alone with him. He seemed
blonder and had a long mustache, it was him, but he was different, still
young but more handsome and older. In my dream, I kissed him and I
can still feel the impression his cold forehead made on my lips […] There
were flowers everywhere, on the floor, on the tables, and their perfume is
still there in my heart, it’s atrocious! Dear God, please don’t separate us
in that way, I couldn’t bear to see him die” (HD-II, 177). A year later, she
confides the following thought to her journal: “I can only see one enemy,
death, which separates people so pitilessly, and, thinking about it, I trem-
ble with terror. Dear God, leave me Maurice, leave me for him, that is all I
ask of you!” (HD-II, 247–8). Maurice too foresees death, on two occasions.
When Henriette tries to console him as he is leaving for college – “We
have a whole life to be together” – he replies dreamily: “A whole life! […]
I don’t know how many years that represents,” and the two lovers remain
silent, troubled by the spectre of death (HD-II, 247–8). Another time, his
face pale, he interrupts Henriette while she is playing the “Miserere” from
Il Trovatore on the piano, whispering: “I beg you, Henriette, don’t play that
any more in front of me […] The death knell is dreadful!” (HD-II, 247–8).
A sceptical reader might wonder whether these memories were added to
the text or amplified during the process of revision; whether or not this
is the case, they closely correspond to the sad fate of the couple. A few
excerpts from the revised text of the diary were published in Le Journal
de Françoise in 1908, and during the same period Dessaulles (under the
pseudonym Jean Deshaies) contributed a column on graphology to the
same publication, and later to La Patrie. In 1911, her famous weekly col-
umn, “Les Lettres de Fadette,” began in Le Devoir, where it continued to
run until a few months before her death in 1946.
As for Joséphine Marchand, she returned to her diary two weeks after
her wedding (describing, in an entry of remarkable honesty and dis-
cretion, the mutual embarrassment of two young newlyweds on their
wedding night, and the fact that the physical consummation of their
union did not take place until eight days later), and kept it up intermit-
tently until shortly after the death of her father, then premier of Quebec,
in 1900. The interruptions to the diary are at times lengthy (Joséphine
abandons it for more than a year after the birth of her daughter Gabrielle
in December 1886, and for more than five years in the 1890s, a period in
which she is actively involved in a large number of political, professional,
and charitable activities), but each time she returns to it she stresses
its importance in her life. In 1897, perhaps thinking of the four years of
hard work spent as founder and editor of Quebec’s first women’s maga-
zine, Le Coin du feu (1892–96), she expresses her regrets at having spent
so much time on journalism, at the expense of her private diary: “From a
selfish point of view, I was very wrong to abandon my little private writ-
ings in order to do public journalism: an arid task which enslaved me to a
h enriette dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand • 163
thankless labour, distracted me from my reading and my favourite stud-

ies, and also – while I was doing my best to instruct others – kept me from
educating myself ” (JM, 162).
During these years in which Marchand, her husband, and her father
are all active and influential in the public sphere, the form of the diary
reproduces the back and forth relationship between the inner and outer
worlds which characterizes the author’s life. Reflections on the behaviour
and education of her daughter or on family life alternate with accounts of
public events like the accession of her husband (then thirty-seven years
old) to the Senate, in 1898, partly thanks to his wife’s prestige and influ-
ence.18 “We have the reputation of being ambitious, and it’s accurate,” she
writes. “As for playing a role in the world, I want an important one or none
at all” (JM, 192). She realizes that her diary, besides being a document that
will interest her daughter some day, will be of interest to future readers in
the same way as the memoirs of politicians: “I want to lay out my memo-
ries so I’ll feel free afterwards to philosophize or make pronouncements
on daily events. In the last few years I’ve known many people who will be
talked about in the history of our country. I’ve seen many events quorum
pars parva fui [in which I played a small role]” (JM, 162–3). The conscious-
ness of the historical value of what she is writing can be felt even in the
style of the diary, which now consists of long entries summarizing the
activities in which she has taken part and explaining their political signif-
icance. Marchand knows that her lectures and her involvement in the new
National Council of Canadian Women, founded by Lady Aberdeen, the
wife of the governor general, have made her a model for the women of her
generation: “My entry into active life proved that, in our century, there are
women of value in the public sphere” (JM, 163). She notes the opposition
of Quebec’s clergy to the women’s movement and denounces the huge
sums of money spent by the Church on building huge cathedrals, accom-
panied by presbyteries as grand as castles, in small country parishes, when
such money should be spent on schools and on helping the poor (JM, 164).
Reflections of this nature are interspersed with more personal rev-
elations on subjects such as the thankless role of the mother, who is
responsible for her children’s discipline while her husband is perceived by
them as being more indulgent (JM, 184), the hard work involved in sew-
ing summer dresses for her daughter during the years when she is actively
involved in the public sphere (JM, 219), or the pleasure of being alone at
home when her daughter has gone skating with her friends: “I have my
books, a pen, and some paper. With that – and the privilege of being
able to use them! – I would be happy even in prison” (JM, 186). In 1898,
Marchand founded l’Œuvre des livres gratuits (The Free Books Project),
an organization which offered books to teachers with no access to librar-

ies and to those who were too poor to buy them. The following year, she
was honoured by the French government with the Palmes académiques,
in recognition of her defense of French culture in America. In 1900, as
the representative of Canada, she chaired the International Conference of
Women in Paris.
Overall, this woman who accused herself in her youth of being cold
and distant displayed remarkable passion in her public life, although her
attitude was often condescending, whether on the subject of the French
language (she is scandalized by the poor French spoken at her daughter’s
convent, and by the French spoken in Parliament), culture (“We cannot
forever fail to recognize the intellectual interests of our anemic race,” JM,
165), or women, of whom she writes the following: “In a country lacking
in art, culture, and intellectual atmosphere, the French-Canadian woman
leads the most boring life imaginable. The only thing that raises her
above the material reality of her life as a homemaker or society woman
is her religion […] They don’t even bring up their own children, which
would force them to exercise their ability to think. The convents and col-
leges look after that” (JM, 165). The only charitable activities permitted
to women (fundraising for religious communities, looking after sacris-
ties and altars, and sewing for the poor) keep them in “a passive role that
discourages all independent effort or personal ideas” (JM, 165). March-
and’s diary is witness to the fact that it was towards this goal – to “elevate”
women, and the whole population, towards independence of thought and
personal autonomy – that she devoted her life. Like Henriette Dessaulles,
she offers a singular example of intellectual and personal independence in
an era in which such qualities were far from the norm for women.
C h ap t e r 7
D i a r i e s of “ Qu e e ns of t he Hear t h”
In spite of the difficulty of reconciling private writing with marriage

revealed by the diaries of Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand,
several married women did manage to keep diaries. In the mid-nine-
teenth century, some began to assume the role of unofficial historians,
using chronicle-type diaries in which they noted the births, illnesses,
anniversaries, birthdays, and deaths of their family members, as well as
the social and religious activities of their communities. If the authors of
these texts “come to life” for the reader, it is not by revealing their intimate
secrets, but by evoking with precision and even eloquence the details of
their daily lives. In the first part of this chapter we will look at two of these
chronicle diaries, kept by Angélique Hay Des Rivières between 1843 and
1872,1 and by Marie-Louise Globensky (Lady Lacoste), from 1888 until her
death in 1919.2 In the twentieth century, changes in women’s lives opened
the way for a new type of married woman’s diary, much more revealing
of the author’s private life. The diary kept from 1922 to 1964 by the writer
Michelle Le Normand,3 wife of the novelist Léo-Paul Desrosiers, is an
excellent example of this type of diary. At once a workshop for perfect-
ing her writing, an outlet for expressing the frustrations of her marriage
and career, and an irreplaceable confidant, it illustrates how diary writing
could be a literal “life saver” for married women. In the third part of the
chapter, we will examine this diary in detail, paying particular attention to
the author’s attempts to satisfy the sometimes irreconcilable demands of
her roles as wife, mother, and professional writer.
A Ch rOni CLe di A ry: A ngÉL i Que h Ay deS ri viÈ reS

(1843–18 7 2 )
On 15 July 1872 (a Monday), in the final notebook of her journal,

Angélique Hay Des Rivières writes: “Yesterday, a fine day. I played the
organ in order to please the curé – a young organist! – sixty-seven years
of age!” Thanks to this information and other facts noted in her diary or
mentioned in the chronicles of the Eastern Townships,4 we know that
Angélique Hay was born in 1805 and that she married Henri Des Riv-
ières, one of the principal beneficiaries of the will of the merchant James
McGill, in the 1830s. In McGill’s will, several large tracts of land in the
canton of Stanbridge, near the American border, were left to Henri Des
Rivières and his brother Francis. The Hay-Des Rivières couple settled
there and actively participated in the development of the region, whose
economy was largely based on wood. In 1837, Henri Des Rivières joined
the Patriotes and took part in the Rebellion, but escaped arrest; later he
pursued a brief political career, first as prefect of Missisquoi county and
later, for a few months in 1841, as member of the Legislative Assembly for
Verchères. Their son Willie was born in 1840, and their daughter Caroline
in 1842. In 1843, at the age of thirty-eight, Mme Des Rivières began the
diary in which she would write almost every day until 1872, except for an
interruption of ten months in 1855 and a three-year interruption after the
death of her husband in November 1865.
The fact that the diary was a family enterprise and not just an individ-
ual occupation is made clear on three different occasions when Mme Des
Rivières is absent or ill, and is replaced by her daughter Caro. On 3 April
1858, Caro writes: “Maman is very ill.” She will be the diarist for almost
four months, except for an interruption of three days (7–9 July), during
which she travels to Montreal and is replaced by her brother Willie. Sim-
ilarly, on 14 June 1864, after announcing that she and her husband are
leaving for Montreal the next day, Mme Des Rivières writes: “Dear Caro
– will write in my absence,” and her daughter will do so from 15 to 23 June.
A month later, Caro takes up the pen again for four days, announcing:
“Maman ill with an attack of inflammation” (25 July 1864). When Mme
Des Rivières returns to her journal three years after the death of her hus-
band, she confesses that she has lost the taste for writing, but is doing so in
order to please her son: “I again this year – continue to keep a daily Jour-
nal at the request of my dear Willie who wishes to have it, to refer to – as
the daily occurrences, of what was done – will be mentioned – also who
came, and went away – if I consent to take up this Journal it is entirely to
diaries of “Queens of the h ear th” • 167
be useful, to dear Willie – as, I have no more, the same interest or desire –
to follow it up” (1 January 1869).
Only three of the ten notebooks (II, III, and IV) are written in French.
The fact that the diarist writes regularly in English starting in November
1853 can perhaps be explained by the increase in the anglophone popu-
lation of the region (already significant, thanks to the presence of United
Empire Loyalists), due to Irish immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. A cer-
tain amount of interaction between the two language groups takes place
because they share a common parish; Mme Des Rivières mentions, for
example, that, during a novena, the priest preaches to the Irish in the ves-
tibule after giving his sermon in French in the church. The sentences and
expressions in the English-language volumes often have a French struc-
ture and even contain French words at times: “It is not to be told, this
intense cold we have had today – such a piercing wind ! – quite a poudrée!”
(6 January 1857); or, discussing a new priest: “He is so graphic, his voice
good, he is entraînant” (27 February 1864). The punctuation is irregular,
with a great number of dashes, commas, capital letters, and underlined
words. The size of the diary is also worth noting: the first eight notebooks
are fairly large (eight by ten inches), with lined pages and enough space
to allow the writer to say whatever she likes. If the entries in the diary
become more laconic after 1869, it is not only because the diarist has lost
interest in writing, but also because she is now using a smaller notebook
(six by eight inches) with the dates already printed on the page, and cover-
ing three days per page.
The diary provides a portrait of family and social life in the canton
of Stanbridge in the years following the Act of Union of the two Cana-
das in 1841. What we know of the Des Rivières family suggests that they
were Catholic moderates with links not only to the anglophone bour-
geoisie of Montreal but also to Papineau and his Parti Patriote.5 The rare
mentions of political events in the diary indicate that, to the extent that
she was interested in politics at all, Mme Des Rivières shared the views of
her husband. On 29 April 1849, four days after the burning of Montreal’s
parliament buildings, carried out by anglophone Tories infuriated by the
passage of a law granting indemnity to the Patriotes, she notes that one of
the members who supported the bill, the Honorable Mr. Moore, is angry
because he was burned in effigy by the Tories. And on 21 August, after a
summer of fires and violence in Montreal, she complains about “the Mon-
treal vandals and their depredations”: “It’s terrible, they’re angry at poor
Mr. Lafontaine – but why let them have so much of their own way – it’s the
ruin of the city of Montreal.” In the background of the diary’s notations,
one can make out a picture of the economic and technological progress
of the region of Stanbridge. In 1843, Mme Des Rivières mentions her
husband’s trips to Montreal on horseback, changing horses at Saint-Jean-
sur-Richelieu. In 1865, she notes: “The Montreal and Vermont junction
railroad opened today to the Public! A new Era for us! We shall now leave
Des Rivières Station and be landed at Bonaventure Station in Montreal,
without changing cars – how delightful! what a happy change for us, what
an improvement! for we old people – how much Henri and I will find
it convenient when we go to town!” (16 January 1865). In the 1840s, she
refers to the construction of a dam, a sawmill, and a carding mill, as well
as to the danger of flooding during spring thaw: “This afternoon the ice
broke up in bits […] the height of the water is beyond description” (1 April
1845). In 1872, she observes that this danger no longer exists: “The ice
broke up this morning, and went down the river, without causing the least
damage – water not as high as usual – we have been protected in a most
particular manner – at one time, we had, all season, to fear an inondation
[sic.] – the Almighty has been merciful to us –” (15 April 1872).
The details of the life of a wife and mother of comfortable means, liv-
ing a fairly isolated life in the country, are numerous and precise. Walks
(often with her daughter) are frequent during the day; the evenings are
devoted to card games, visits, and writing letters. Often Mme Des Rivières
writes in her diary when the children are in bed, and she always begins
by noting the day’s weather: “A hoary frost, this morning – bright and
pleasant, all day –” (30 April 1857); “rain, rain, more rain – when will it
cease?” (2 May 1857); “I went to Mass – this morning – I was wrapped up
– like in January” (21 March 1864). The close correlation between religious
faith and the caprices of nature are a constant theme: “Rain – rain again –
what is going to become of us? it pours rain all day – roads fearful, awful
[…] the gardens are saturated so wet – it is impossible to sow […] – it
cannot be helped – it is the Almighty’s Will – we must bow down submis-
sively, to his divine will –” (12 May 1864). Life follows the rhythm of the
seasons. At the beginning of May 1844, she notes that they have removed
the storm windows; in June 1844 that, thanks to their greenhouse, they
have “delicious little potatoes” for dinner; in March 1845, that workmen
have finished filling the ice shed; and, in June 1849, that “the gardener
gave us little green peas for dinner today” (26 June 1849). In the spring,
there is the great annual house cleaning: “I have been busy, all day, mak-
ing la revue annuelle of trunks and cupboards in the garret – I have yet, two
days work before having quite finished the review” (21 April 1857); “I have
been busy, putting away – out of harm’s way, by the Moths, all that they
could injure – so much done” (29 March 1864). In the fall there are fruits
diaries of “Queens of the hear th” • 169
to be preserved for the winter: “made 12 lbs apple jelly – it’s very fine” (24
November 1869). Mme Des Rivières’s garden is the object of constant
attention, nourishing her family, pleasing her by its beauty, and reminding
her in a concrete way of the passage of time and the change of seasons.
In the spring, the greenhouses already provide a multitude of fruits and
vegetables: “I went to see the hot beds this afternoon – melons, cabbages,
cucumbers, tomatoes, a few potato plants, lettuce and radishes, carrots,
cauliflowers – and a glorious sunset – this morning it was delightful to
hear the Robin warbling so prettily as well as the Nightingale” (28 March
1864). With August comes the plenitude of harvest season: “The garden
is looking beautiful – a quantity of melons – it seems to me – the Forest is
looking more and more beautiful […] I believe some intend to commence
harvesting next week” (20 August 1858). In September, winter’s arrival is
already on the horizon: “A cold bright morning – Henri always on the go
either riding or driving – I miss my Caro – the garden is looking already
triste, the dahlias withered and gone – the garden walks are covered with
dead leaves – autumn has set in very early – we make fire in the stoves,
even in our bed-room – how very early in the season to commence, all
this kind of work” (22 September 1864).
Religious practices are omnipresent in Mme Des Rivières’s life. She
attends Mass frequently, as well as High Mass, vespers, and the Benedic-
tion of the Blessed Sacrament on Sundays (2 March 1845), often makes
novenas, and celebrates religious feast days. The parish is growing: in 1845,
she notes that fifty children made their First Communion, and in 1849 that
120 persons received the sacrament of Confirmation (2 July 1849). Very
active in parish life, the Des Rivières often receive visits from important
priests and bishops, including Msgr Édouard-Charles Fabre, who will suc-
ceed Ignace Bourget as bishop of Montreal (30 June 1849). On 4 August
1849, speaking of the visit of two priests, she writes: “I never enjoyed
myself better, in the aimable (sic) society of these gentlemen.” Among her
spiritual readings are the classic work The Imitation of Christ, given to her
by her daughter (1 August 1849), and The Spiritual Combat (30 January
1850). Her faith sustains her during times of illness and offers consolation
in periods of suffering or mourning. After describing the terrible pain
experienced by her husband during one of his frequent attacks of gout, she
writes: “Sad, how sad! God! grant him, patience and resignation, to bear,
with so much pain” (21 April 1857). In 1864, during a long period in which
both her husband and her daughter are ill, she prays that her own health
will be preserved so that she can continue to care for her sick ones: “Caro
walked out for a few minutes – returned fatigued – I was not well today
– cramps in my chest – God, spare me from being ill, as I have enough
to do, to attend my sick – Henri’s gout is on his mind” (3 March 1864). In

general, the Des Rivières women seem more pious than the men. While
Caro devotes more and more of her time to the Church as she grows older,
Mme Des Rivières seems relieved to learn that Willie, at twenty-four, has
made his Easter duty, and she prays that his piety will continue (21 March
1864). During the last months of her husband’s final illness, she is ecstatic
when he receives Communion: “I feel so grateful, so happy, to see my poor
Henri looking so pious, so happy! My God! I thank you with all my heart!”
(29 April 1865). There are few, if any, expressions of guilt or other negative
religious feelings in the diary, but it is clear that for Mme Des Rivières the
world is full of dangers from which only religious practice offers protec-
tion. On Caro’s sixteenth birthday, her mother writes: “Dear child: may
she always be blessed, with health and happiness. I hope she will always
prefer her home and quiet habits to all the vain illusions and apparent
pleasures of the gay world – I flatter myself that her turn of mind is such
that she will not […] follow the path of many who find pleasure, in the gai-
eties and frivolities of life – she has a great shield, at this present moment
– her sincere piety and sweet disposition” (14 February 1858).
While devoted to her children, especially her daughter, Mme Des Riv-
ières seems not to be overwhelmed by the responsibilities of motherhood,
as Julie Papineau was, nor even to be particularly conscious of a “maternal
role” to which she must conform. However, she constantly worries about
her children’s health, often writing gratefully in her diary: “My dear chil-
dren are in good health.” The almost daily entries for June and July 1849,
when an epidemic of cholera was raging in Montreal, reveal the fear and
anguish felt by a mother during such a time, and the consolation offered
by religious faith: On 21 June, she writes: “Today’s Le Pilote says there are
two cases of asiatic cholera in Montreal that were fatal – may God pre-
serve us from it – ah! my God, what a scourge – I tremble when I think
of it – may God’s will be done – my dear little ones are in perfect health”;
and, two days later: “My dear little children are in perfect health – they
are always so happy – they go to bed singing and wake up the same way
– these dear children – may they always be this happy” (23 June). By mid-
July, her worries have increased, causing her headaches and feelings of
melancholy: “I’ve had a nervous feeling for the last few days that has really
upset me – I imagine a thousand things – my thoughts are sad – worse
– I’m torn apart the word cholera makes me tremble – oh! My dear little
children, how it would cost me to let go of them” (15 July); “I no longer
dare to read the papers, I’m so afraid of what they will say about cholera –
it’s amazing, how afraid of it I am this year” (18 July).
Despite moments of anguish like these, Mme Des Rivières is a calm,

well-balanced woman with a good sense of humour. The act of keeping
a diary helps her to see her life from a distance and to laugh at it at times,
as in the entry for 1 January 1872, where, after noting that it has rained all
night, that the roads are slippery, and that her children have come to ask
her blessing for the new year, she adds: “My dear children! I blessed them,
with all my heart – may all the fervent wishes and prayers I made for them
be heard […] I have lost three teeth, my front lower teeth! Such a vacuum!
I’m an old toothless bonne femme!” Especially at the beginning of a new
year, the diary provides her with an opportunity to look back at her life,
noting the triumphs and losses of the past year. On 1 January 1857, having
lost her mother during the previous year, she welcomes the new one with
sadness: “Appearance of a continuation of mild weather – the Moon looks
dim – […] I have felt very brittle and low-spirited all day – this morning,
early, dear Willy and Caro came to ask their Father, to bless them – and to
give us an affectionate kiss – dear children! – I was denied, that happening
of being blessed by a dear Parent, this year – dearest Mother was not there
– to bless me – how very much I felt the void!” Similarly, the entry for 1
January 1869 indicates that she has not recovered from the loss of her hus-
band three years earlier: “Willie and Caro, gay and cheerful – came early
this morning to ask my blessing – the dear one was not there to bless them!
[…] What cruel reminiscences!”
Examples like these give an indication of the way in which Mme Des
Rivières’s diary, as well as being a family chronicle, provides glimpses
of her interior life. Writing is an activity of renewal for her, indulged in
moments of solitude snatched from her busy days: “I was alone, I said my
rosary – and then I enjoyed letting myself go in a daydream that pleased
me greatly – I scribbled a lot today” (7 August 1849). Some evenings she
waits until all the members of the family have gone up to bed before start-
ing to write: “Henri went to bed before eight o’clock – Francis has gone up
to his room – my dear Children have gone to bed – and now I’m alone,
quite alone – I’m thinking – I’m scribbling – it’s eleven o’clock – I’m going
to get ready for bed myself – I read a lot this evening” (30 January1850).
Internalizing the attitudes of her time regarding women’s writing, Mme
Des Rivières devalorizes the act of writing to some extent by constantly
describing it as “scribbling” (as do many female diarists of the period).
But it is clear that for her, writing is more than a means of documenting
the facts of her life. It is a tool for sharpening her perceptions of the world
around her and for capturing passing moments, as well as a training in the
art of writing and a way to live more fully and consciously.
A MOde L “Queen Of the he Arth ” :

the di A ry Of LA dy LAC OSte (1 8 8 8 –1 9 1 9 )
Marie-Louise Globensky (Lady Lacoste) abandoned her journal in 1866,

a few weeks before marrying Alexandre Lacoste, and took it up again in
August 1888, on her return from a trip to Europe with her husband, now
a member of the Senate and chief justice of Quebec’s Court of Appeal. At
the time she begins to write in it again, Marie-Louise is the mother of nine
children and pregnant again (her seventh daughter, Berthe, was born on
16 March 1889); her youngest child, Arthur, who was only three, died after
a short illness a few weeks after his parents’ return. A final child, René,
was born in 1891, but survived for only eleven months. The Lacostes live
in a large house on Rue Saint-Hubert in Montreal, a desirable neigh-
bourhood for the French-Canadian bourgeoisie. Marie-Louise spends
summers in the country with her children, joined by her husband on
weekends. Confident, optimistic, and devoted to her children, she seems
to have inexhaustible energy, which she directs towards cultural, charita-
ble, and religious activities. On Thursdays when in town, she hosts a salon
for writers, artists, politicians, and other members of the professions. She
organizes charitable endeavours in her parish, sews for the poor, makes
religious vestments and altar cloths for the church, and organizes charita-
ble events for the Sisters of Providence and other religious communities.
Later in life, she will be a member of the Board of Directors of Hôpital
Sainte-Justine (founded by her daughter Justine), promoter of a vast net-
work of écoles ménagères (home-making schools for girls), and president
of a multitude of other committees and boards of directors.6
Like the journal of Mme Des Rivières and the one she herself kept as
a young woman, Lady Lacoste’s journal is closer to a chronicle (or even a
social calendar) than to a private diary. The entries, rarely consisting of
more than a sentence or two, often begin by noting the day’s weather and
record, usually without commentary, the births, baptisms, First Commu-
nions, engagements, weddings, and deaths of members of the family, as
well as the numerous balls, receptions, concerts, and official ceremonies
she attends with her husband, often in the company of friends who are
well-known members of the Montreal elite: Wilfrid Laurier, prime minis-
ter of Canada, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, future premier of Quebec, the
railway magnate William Van Horne, and others. In 1899, she mentions a
skating party she is hosting for fifty people; another time, she notes in pass-
ing that her husband “dined with the Prime Minister at the Royal Club.”
Still as pious as she was in her youth, Lady Lacoste attends Mass every
day and organizes her life around religious feast days, sermons, and
d iaries of “Queens of the hear th” • 173
retreats. She comments favourably on a sermon which denounces “lively

dances” and the danger of novels, and particularly appreciates those that
discuss the role of the wife and mother. A “sublime” sermon on the mis-
sion of Christian mothers inspires the following summary: “She is the one
who must shape the heart of her child, this flower confided to her care.
In order to do so, she must learn to be devoted, to sacrifice herself. From
the cradle onward, the love of duty must be instilled in [the child]” (24
October 1892). Both her daughter and her first granddaughter are named
Marie,7 a sign of the family’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin.
A perfect example of the French-Canadian “queen of the hearth,” Lady
Lacoste is strong and energetic, with her strength rooted in the teachings
of her religion, and devoted to her (frequently absent) husband and chil-
dren. The numerous references in the diary to the children’s birthdays give
an idea of the warm family atmosphere: “My little Thaïs is six today” (18
October 1892), “my little Alexandre is ten” (29 January 1893), “My Yvonne
is 18 today, now she is really a big girl, I regret seeing her grow up so fast”
(2 March 1899), “my little Berthe is ten today” (16 March 1899). At forty-
two, Lady Lacoste is already a grandmother, but she continues to give
birth every two or three years. On 23 July 1891, she gave birth to her last
child, René, whose death eleven months later is movingly recorded in her
journal. On 21 June 1892, she describes his sudden death in the middle of
the night, when he had seemed only mildly ill the evening before: “At the
very moment the doctor arrived, the dear little angel had already taken
flight for heaven where his brothers were waiting for him.” The descrip-
tion of her anguish – one of the rare times in her diary when she reveals
her emotions – shows the important role religious faith can play in giving
meaning to unbearable suffering. Even after this immense loss, she finds
strength in the certainty that she must accept God’s will: “No, I couldn’t
believe it, what a heartbreaking experience for a mother. I had to give up
this angel I so loved to caress. He was not mine, and yet I bathed in that
illusion! […] You are the Master of things, my God, you lent him to me,
you want him back, may your holy will be done […] May I be reunited
with you again some day, my darling, that is my hope. You are happy now,
I am suffering” (21 June 1892).
The sentences she writes the following day, after the return of her hus-
band, are a sober account of the shared suffering and faith of the couple,
with no dramatization of her own emotions: “I could only show him the
cold little body of our dear René and tell him about my night of anguish,
but, as a Christian full of resignation, he exhorted me to suffer in silence”
(22 June 1892). On 23 June, the day of the funeral, she simply notes: “A day
of indescribable sacrifice may it be of spiritual benefit to me.” In August,
vacationing with her family at Lotbinière, she is still torn between the
affliction she feels and her belief in the merit and necessity of suffering:
“Alas, in a single day everything was broken, my dear René left me, for
heaven it’s true, should I complain about it? Earthly selfishness. We cry
only for ourselves. O my angel, think of your mother, obtain for her the
ability to immolate herself since you possess the glory I dreamed of for
you” (6 August 1872). Unable to shake off her sorrow, she remains at home
while the other members of the family leave “joyfully” for a boat trip:
“My poor broken heart refuses to go, the departure of my dear René still
absorbs me” (10 August 1892).
Other than mentioning her social relationships with various people of
influence, Lady Lacoste rarely refers to public events in her diary. Notable
exceptions are Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the corona-
tion of King Edward VII, a day when “flags were flying from all the roofs
[of Montreal]” (9 August 1902). One senses the shadow of war in the note-
books written between 1914 and 1918, for example, when she mentions
sewing for the Red Cross, or in her wish on New Year’s Day 1916 that “this
year will bring us peace.” When Armistice Day finally arrives, she writes:
“A superb day, and what happiness on waking up this morning to the deli-
cious news that the amnesty accord has been signed, at last we’re seeing
the end of this frightful war. We can finally breathe easily and thank with
all our hearts the God who has delivered us” (11 November 1918).
On the occasion of her fiftieth birthday on 2 February 1899, Lady
Lacoste notes in her diary that her life is “well advanced,” and offers
a prayer to God that she will be able to continue doing her duty “as you
desire, and [that I will be able] to give you back all the souls you entrusted
me with.” In the twenty years that follow, she continued living as she
always had: in harmony with the traditional order, submitting to church
dogma and to the rules and practices of her society, working to improve
the situation of the poor and the marginalized without ever questioning
the social hierarchy that maintains the divisions of class and privilege. It
was her daughters – Marie, Justine, and Thaïs – who would go further.
Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie, one of the great pioneers of women’s rights
in Quebec, led the struggles for women’s access to university, the legal
rights of married women, and the right to vote; Justine Lacoste-Beaubien
founded l’Hôpital Sainte-Justine, the first children’s hospital in Quebec;
and Thaïs Lacoste-Frémont worked for several decades on improving
women’s legal situation. As a “Christian mother,” Lady Lacoste took seri-
ously her responsibility of “shaping the heart of her child […] from the
cradle onward, [by instilling in her] the love of duty” (24 October 1892),
and the commitment of her daughters testifies to the fact that she suc-
ceeded in her mission.
t h e diAry Of M i Che LL e L e nO rMA nd (1 9 1 8 –1 9 6 4 )
I want woman in her place, in her role. The arts are not forbidden to her. She has
the right to spend time on them on the condition that her husband lack for noth-
ing. The husband must be the most important thing.
Claude-Henri Grignon, Letter to Michelle Le Normand, 22 June 19388
Although she is more or less forgotten today, Michelle Le Normand was

one of the most widely read female writers in Quebec before the publica-
tion of two important novels by women in 1945: Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur
d’occasion and Germaine Guèvremont’s Le Survenant. As well, she is one
of the only women writers of the period (if not the only one) who suc-
ceeded in combining marriage and motherhood with a literary career.
In addition to her collection of short stories, Autour de la maison, which
appeared in 1916, she published eight other books: four novels (Couleur
du temps, 1919; Le nom dans le bronze, 1933; La plus belle chose du monde,
1937; La montagne d’hiver, 1961), two collections of short stories (La mai-
son du phlox, 1941; Enthousiasme, 1947), a book of nonfictional stories
(Dans la toile d’araignée, 1949), and a biography (Marie-Célina Plourde,
Veuve de Joseph-Onias Thériault: Sœur Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal, des
Servantes de Jésus-Marie, 1879–1938, 1942). In June 1922, Le Normand
married Léo-Paul Desrosiers, the future author of historical and patrotic
novels like Nord-Sud (1931) and Les engagés du grand portage (1938), which
are among the classics of Quebec literature. According to Julia Richer,
a close friend of the Desrosiers, the complementarity of the couple was
remarkable: “Never have two such dissimilar beings complemented each
other so well. While Léo-Paul Desrosiers was serious, meditative and
silent, his wife Michelle was lively, impulsive and enthusiastic. But they
shared a love of literature and an irrepressible need to write. From the day
when Michelle Le Normand’s smile came to brighten Desrosiers’s soli-
tude, their fate was sealed. With the support of a companion who valued
intellectual work above all else, he could, in all security, begin the work of
a creative career that would alternate between history and the novel.”9
Behind this image projected by the Desrosiers couple, one can imag-
ine the possible tensions between two people so different from each
other: one of them “serious, meditative and silent” and the other full of
joie de vivre; one of them considered to be a great writer and the other
as the companion who supports her husband and provides him with the
security necessary for his creative endeavours. Michelle Le Normand was,
in fact, devoted to her husband and convinced of the importance of his
work; she was an indispensable collaborator who corrected and recopied
Desrosiers’s manuscripts, as well as handling his relations with his pub-
lishers and even the sales of his books.10 But her diary reveals the price
she paid, and the reality behind the façade of the perfect complementarity
of the couple: the damage to her own self-esteem caused by the constant
moodiness of her husband and her determined struggle to keep writing
herself, in spite of the obstacles created by her responsibilities as a wife
and mother. Reading this diary, which covers a period of more than forty
years (from Le Normand’s marriage until her death in 1964), is an often
sad experience, in which one has the feeling at times of intruding into a
space that should perhaps remain private – for example, in the frequent
mentions of Le Normand’s despair at the untenable marital situation in
which she was imprisoned by the rigid attitudes of her time and her own
conservative views. Such an intrusion into the private life of the writer is
only justified by the courage, vulnerability, and joie de vivre that we dis-
cover in these pages, often written in the difficult moments of her life.
In all, Le Normand’s diary consists of twenty journals: the first one
covering the years 1909–11 (see chapter 5), and nineteen others, written
during the period from 1918 to 1964. Four of these journals precede her
marriage to Desrosiers: a notebook containing summaries of her readings
and drafts of articles from 1918 and three others which deal, among other
things, with the end of Le Normand’s relationship with the poet, Albert
Lozeau, in 1919; a new romance, with lawyer Georges Monarque, which
lasted from 1918 to 1921; a year’s stay in Paris (October 1920 to October
1921), during which Le Normand studied at the Institut catholique and at
the Sorbonne; and a correspondence with her future husband, Léo-Paul
Desrosiers, in 1920 and 1921.
bef O re MA rriAge (JOurnALS ii i–vi,

MAy 1918–MAy 1 9 2 2 )
The unacceptable prospect of a literary career which would exclude mar-

riage and motherhood leads Le Normand to break up with her mentor,
Albert Lozeau, in 1919, given that, in spite of his love for her, he is judged
unsuitable for marriage because of his infirmity: “I no longer want to see
my life solely as a long literary career devoted to looking after a sick man
[Lozeau], I want to see it include a probable marriage, and motherhood,
and feelings and actions that are [French] Canadian,” she confides to
her journal in April 1919. At twenty-seven, she doubtless sees the love of
Desrosiers, a man who shares her literary, patriotic, and religious views,
as a last chance for the marriage and motherhood of which she dreams.
Already in the first letters she receives from him, she notices that he is “a
sad and not very happy young man” (14 December 1920), but in Decem-
ber 1921 she decides to accept his marriage proposal. Declaring herself
madly in love, she gives up writing for several months, noting in her diary
that “I’ve been working hardly at all on my writing and a great deal on my
trousseau” (22 March 1922). Some weeks later, she comes across her diary
by chance as she is preparing to move to Ottawa: “I’ve unearthed my diary
from one of the boxes I still haven’t packed! And I’m writing a few lines in
it […] My life as a fiancée is ending” (12 May 1922).
t he firS t ye ArS O f MA rriAge ( JOurnAL vi i,

June 1922–OC t Ob e r 1 9 2 8 )
Le Normand starts a new volume of her diary during the couple’s hon-
eymoon in the Gaspésie, with each of the partners writing about their
happiness at being together. The fact that this notebook covers more than
six years is an indication of the little time she finds to write among her
activities as a young wife and soon a mother. As Desrosiers is the par-
liamentary correspondent for Le Devoir, the couple settles in Ottawa; in
1928, he leaves Le Devoir to become the official recorder for Hansard and
editor of all House of Commons publications, a position he will occupy
until 1941. A first son, Louis, is born in 1923, and a second, Claude, in 1925.
These are generally happy years for Le Normand. In fact, she confides
to her diary in the first year: “We are so very, very happy together that I
sometimes take the time to feel a little afraid, as if my apprehension will
protect me from other things” (12 March 1923). She often declares her love
for Léo-Paul: “I always want him to feel good. The smallest thing worries
me. I love him so much” (14 May 1923); and, on their first anniversary:
“Life together has not disappointed either of us. I thank God very much
for this” (12 June 1923). In August 1925, she notes that they have moved
into the “house of [their] dreams.”
Yet there are problems, almost from the beginning: Desrosiers is
frustrated at work, even more so after he becomes a civil servant, and
Le Normand is having difficulty writing. From the time her first son is
born, in 1923, she spends less and less time writing in her diary, except
for noting the progress of “baby.” In September 1923, she admits: “Some-
times I am very depressed about my writing. It seems to me that nothing
I write has any value, and that it would be wonderful not to have to do it
any longer. This morning, I’m in that kind of mood. And I can find noth-
ing, absolutely nothing, to write about in my next article. Paul consoles
me and cheers me up – and I know that soon I’ll go from discouragement
to enthusiasm […] Sometimes it’s hard. But nothing is achieved without
effort, and I shouldn’t let such things get me down” (25 September 1923).
A frequent complaint in these years is the difficulty of finding a maid
(either they quit or are let go shortly after being hired). The lack of time for
writing, as well as a dearth of inspiration probably linked to the constraints
of her life as a mother, gradually eat into Le Normand’s confidence: “My
only worry is my lack of literary confidence, my constant sterility! Once
a week, regularly, the article I have to write [for Le Devoir] reduces me to
sadness. Then, when it’s done, I come back to life and find my joy again.
Paul scolds me. Is my brain tired out? Or is it that there are so few sub-
jects to write about in my daily life?” (March 1924). In August 1925, three
months after the birth of her second son, she resigns from Le Devoir.
Le Normand’s diary is a moving record of the conflict felt by women
artists over the generations between the claims of self and other, life and
artistic creation. Being a writer demands a certain amount of egotism,
discipline, positive models to encourage one, and, as Virginia Woolf
famously put it, a room of one’s own into which one can withdraw and
find solitude – all of which were lacking in Michelle Le Normand’s life.
Perhaps too sociable or too attracted to the pleasures of life, she often
expresses doubts about her vocation as a writer, accusing herself of lazi-
ness and feeling guilty when she produces nothing. Already in 1919 she
had identified the dilemma faced by many women artists: “I am so much a
woman (!) with my poor heart which constantly needs to belong to some-
one and be busy; so much a woman with my imagination that is excited
by feelings more than by my writing. It doesn’t matter, though I suffer a
bit to see that I can’t devote myself entirely to my writing. It seems to me
that I’m not moving forward. I absolutely must write an article today” (27
April 1919). After the birth of her first two children, she discovers a new
passion, tennis, and throws herself into it with her usual enthusiasm: “It is
literally a kind of madness. I would play in the house if I could. I tremble
with impatience when I look at the courts in front of our house and real-
ize I have to be here – without playing” (July 1927). But, always, the need
to write and to be worthy of the reputation she enjoys brings her back to
her desk: “It’s now almost twelve years that I’ve had my little reputation
as a writer – and so few works in all those years. It would be so wonder-
ful to write well and write a lot,” she notes, and then adds: “The event
– these days – is tennis” (May 1927). Some months later, she returns to the
theme of feeling unworthy of her status as a writer, reproaching herself for
having “contributed nothing to the world” although she has given birth
to two children: “I am filled with confusion when I think of the fact that
I’ve been writing for 12 years, that my reputation is shrinking rather than
growing – and that I’ve still given nothing to the world” (29 August 1927).
Maternity seems to have been difficult to accept for Le Normand, who
complains about having to look after the children when she has no maid
and bristles at the primary duty of a “queen of the hearth,” sacrificing
herself for others. “I am egotistical. I was spoiled when I was a child and
have felt the effects of it all my life. I don’t like being sacrificed, I don’t like
devoting myself [to others] – with the result that the smallest sacrifices
are harder on me than on most other people,” she writes on 21 February
1928. After a quarrel about the children, following which her husband
is cool with her for ten days, accusing her of not being a “good mother,”
she explodes: “Is it my fault I was spoiled? If until my marriage I had no
concerns other than myself and was always surrounded by people who
adored me?” (17–18 July 1928).
Tensions between Le Normand and her husband increase during these
early years. In March 1927, she confides to her diary: “Paul has a pro-
nounced tendency towards pessimism […] which upsets me and terrifies
me.” A year later, she expresses the wife’s eternal complaint: “I find Paul
too quiet, too much inside himself – too used to my company. Often he
doesn’t remember things I’ve said – and is amazed when I’m upset by that.
I wish I could write all the time. It would put an end to my pipe dreams,
my heartache, my other demands.” And, a bit later: “Instead of talking,
projecting, or explaining what he thinks, Paul is mute and taciturn in all
our crises. And he runs away” (Spring 1928).
t O Write , in SPite O f everything ( JO urnALS vii i

A nd iX, nOve Mber 1 9 2 8 –June 1 9 3 8 )
Over the next decade, Le Normand keeps a separate notebook (Journal

VIII) in which she writes drafts of future articles and plans for the nov-
els, Le nom dans le bronze (1933) and La plus belle chose du monde (1937).
In Journal IX, she occasionally notes events (such as the birth of her
daughter Michelle in 1929), as well as the thoughts and emotions of her
day-to-day life. It is a large notebook of 350 pages, written between the
ages of thirty-five and forty-five by a courageous woman who demands a
great deal of herself.
During this period, Le Normand matures, and her writing improves:
the diary contains a number of beautiful evocations of landscapes in
Ottawa and in the Gaspésie, where the couple spend several weeks each
summer, as well as precise, eloquent descriptions of the texture of her

daily life. Struggling constantly with two heavy burdens – her husband’s
depression and the retarded development of her daughter Michelle – she
becomes more realistic over these years.
The journal opens on a familiar theme – the difficulty of writing – in a
passage which evokes the uneventful nature of her daily life and the many
distractions that keep her from her work: “It’s raining, it’s dark, I have
nothing in my head and no energy. I could work, though, since my two
boys are playing quietly downstairs. But I need light! … light outside and
light within me. My autumn is often gloomy. I make ferocious resolutions
about writing, then they are annihilated by time, circumstances, or lazi-
ness” (3 November 1928).
In addition to her responsibilities at home, Le Normand is fully
involved in the life of Ottawa’s francophone community. She is active in
several clubs, gives lectures, writes occasional book reviews, and keeps up
her friendships, sometimes inviting twenty or thirty people for tea. Unable
to renounce her literary ambitions, she tries to find time to write: “Tried
for two hours yesterday to finish the opening section of my novel […]
Failed […] discouraged […] Maybe I don’t have the strength or tempera-
ment for a long piece of work. Why, in spite of everything, does this worry
about the work to be created never leave me?” (19 April 1929). And yet she
has three novels in preparation: Le nom dans le bronze, a nationalist novel
inspired by the ideas of Abbé Lionel Groulx, which will appear in 1933; a
book with the tentative title of Quatuor or Les quatre, which will become
La plus belle chose du monde, an autobiographical novel about four young
women living in Montreal at the beginning of the First World War (1937);
and, finally, another novel, closer to her experience as a wife and mother,
which she thinks about often but never writes. Reflecting on her lack of
inspiration for a novel she is attempting to write (probably Le nom dans
le bronze), she admits that it does not correspond closely enough to her
own experience, and tells herself that her next novel, which will be called
Maternity, will be better and easier to write (26 November 1928).
Le nom dans le bronze, with its plot similar to that of Lionel Groulx’s
controversial novel, L’appel de la race (1922), is the story of a young woman
who is in love with an anglophone, but who, on a trip to Quebec City, dis-
covers her cultural heritage and decides to give up her relationship with
him. In her diary, Le Normand seems somewhat uncomfortable with the
ideological content of her book, worrying that patriotism is no longer
in style and that her book will be badly received by the critics (3 March
1933). Before publication, she sends the manuscript to three priests for
their approval. This is a common procedure, and she submits to it despite
the fact that she considers it “a ridiculous idea.” When one of the three
expresses reservations about the novel, she exclaims: “What does a priest
know about novels? And this one is a poet to boot!” (24 November 1932).
The novel is, in fact, well received by the critics when it appears, but the
handwritten dedication in a copy of it which now belongs to Montreal’s
Grande Bibliothèque shows that the author is still unsure of its value. “To
Berthelot Brunet,11 this book that you will probably hate,” she writes.
Le Normand and Desrosiers have some justification for their dreams
of an international reputation. Desrosiers’s Nord-Sud and Le Normand’s
Autour de la maison were honoured by the Académie française in 1932,
and, the same year, Desrosiers was invited by the prestigious Parisian pub-
lisher Gaston Gallimard to submit his next manuscript to Gallimard (2
June 1932). In April 1934, Le Normand starts her novel La plus belle chose
du monde, praying, as she often does, for her work to bear fruit: “O God,
help me to write a masterpiece, or at least help me to have a successful
career as a writer. To have success would be patriotic: if it could make a big
splash, Paulo and I would be known outside Quebec. Oh, what a beautiful
dream! Will I have to sacrifice it as well?” (Summer 1935). In August, after
noting with satisfaction that “my pen is moving across the paper almost
by itself,” she adds: “It’s not for me personally that I want fame, it’s for my
country, for my children” (1 August 1935). And yet, for four months in 1936
she neglects her own novel in order to correct the proofs and look after
the publicity, sales, and distribution of a work by her husband, Le livre
des mystères. In May 1937, on learning that the Paris publisher Grasset has
rejected her novel, she resigns herself to the fact that it will not be pub-
lished in France. Instead, she publishes it at her own expense, and on its
appearance, La plus belle chose du monde is unanimously praised by the
critics (10 September 1937).
On the surface, then, these are productive and successful years for
the Desrosier-Le Normand couple. But behind their successes the diary
reveals a tense and even tragic atmosphere, aggravated by the deterio-
rating mental and physical condition of their daughter Michelle. The
conflict of temperaments between husband and wife grows worse, and
in the privacy of her journal Le Normand gives free rein to her feelings
of anger and desperation, accusing her husband of having destroyed her
joie de vivre by his constant negativity. On their seventh anniversary she
writes: “It seems to me that […] Paul will always be ill, and I’m afraid of
how life with him will change me over the years. Tonight, he said to me:
‘You shouldn’t have married me, poor Miche!’” (12 June 1929). The stress
of Desrosiers’s work in the House of Commons increases in this decade,
plunging him into a state of constant depression. As for Le Normand, only
her work and the recognition of her own and her husband’s books help
her survive. On her husband’s thirty-fifth birthday, she writes: “[Faced
with] his incurable sadness […] I work. It’s the only consolation. And
then I get enthusiastic again when the orders for books arrive. Nord sud
has been published” (4 November 1931). While totally sympathetic to her
husband’s stresses at work, she sees that his problems are psychological as
well as professional: “He’s not sociable. He doesn’t like anyone, he’s not cut
out for having friends […] He’s always alone, meditating or stewing over
things” (21 December 1932). When the prestigious Prix David is won by
an author other than her husband, she is bitter, furious at the injustice of
the choice, all the more so because the other writer has now bought him-
self a car: “Louvigny de Montigny now has a car: his jury paid for it!” (12
November 1932). Her own moods, she observes, depend entirely on those
of her husband: “He doesn’t know how to live, that is, to find meaning in
life. All his black moods and daydreams come from that […] When he’s
happy, he smiles easily and I’m totally happy myself ” (10 May 1934); “Each
crisis relieves him and […] gives him back his equilibrium. But my own
equilibrium gets weaker each time” (28 October 1937).
Le Normand’s gradual discovery of the extent of her daughter’s hand-
icap is heartbreaking to read. During her first year, the little girl is calm
and smiling, but slow to develop, and her mother sometimes thinks she
is “lazy.” At nineteen months, she is still not walking, and her mother is
extremely anxious, all the more so because she feels alone with her burden:
“When one imagines, on getting married, that one is gaining a support
in life, one is often mistaken. At bottom, everywhere I go it is the woman
who supports, keeps calm, and is courageous” (22 June 1931). At three and
a half, there has been no change: “My little girl doesn’t walk. I never think
of anything else, yet everyone thinks I’m so carefree and happy” (25 May
1933). And, a few months later: “Will she be normal some day? Talking and
walking like other children? Sometimes I doubt it. The only consolation
is that she is not unhappy, that she is gay, and spoiled, and we surround
her with tenderness and care” (2 October 1933). A year later, after con-
sulting several doctors, she mentions a mysterious “illness of an invisible
gland which explains why, at almost five, she is still not walking by herself
and can only say Mommy and Daddy” (3 October 1934). A few days later,
Brother André,12 sent by Le Normand’s sister-in-law, who is a nun, comes
to see the little girl. His visit moves Le Normand to tears, for she must now
resign herself to the fact that “God does not want a miracle” (14 October
1934). In 1935, the doctor’s verdict is merciless: “No point in treating her
[…] she will only improve a litttle and will die before puberty” (22 Sep-
tember 1935). Le Normand prays constantly for the little girl and, terrified
by the idea that the child will one day have to be placed in an institution,
admits: “Since I haven’t obtained a miracle, I wish that God would come
and take her” (15 June 1936). In 1937, she laments that “this incomplete, veg-
etative, babbling, and joyless little life […] is of no use to anyone, except to
my sanctification, my suffering” (28 April 1937).
Unable to change the situation, Le Normand turns more and more
to religion, finding a certain consolation – as had Julie Papineau and so
many other women of the time – in the glorification of suffering and sac-
rifice. Frustrated with her husband’s sullenness, she concludes: “Nothing
can be done, except to endure it. My attempts to help are too often pushed
away” (9 May 1935). Resignation is also mentioned in relation to her hus-
band’s struggles: “[Léo-Paul] has had so much to put up with – but, my
God, he is so badly equipped for life. I pray. I have no other resource. And
instead of being gentle and patient, I get angry – oh! without shouting! –
and I tell him what I think. His suspicious and complicated mind drives
me to despair” (8 July 1936).
t O uC hing bO tt OM (JO urnAL X, 2 AuguS t 1 9 3 8 –

1 MAy 1 9 4 4 )
A major change in the fortunes of the Desrosiers took place in 1941, when
Léo-Paul Desrosiers was named chief librarian of Montreal’s municipal
library and, the following year, elected to the Royal Society of Canada.
The tenth volume of Le Normand’s diary records these events, as well as
the greater calm that characterizes their life after the move to Montreal.
However, most of the notebook’s 180 pages are devoted to their final years
in Ottawa, the most difficult time of their life together. During this per-
iod, Le Normand is working on a novel that will never be completed but
whose title, La lampe est éteinte (The light has gone out), suggests her state
of despair in those years. It will, she says, be a novel centred on the lack
of communication in a couple, as well as being a satire of the federal civil
service milieu. “The novel I’m thinking of would be the story of a young
family […] I’d like to try to capture the melancholy of this moment we’re
going through: when I never have the impression that I’m important to
Paulo, but rather fear constantly that I’ll displease him and be criticized”
(23 October 1938). Vacationing in the Gaspésie in 1939, she mentions
that her novel is advancing, but that it will not be possible to publish it
while her husband is still in the civil service (7 August 1939), adding, a few
months later: “Personally, I would take the risk, And a succès de scandale
wouldn’t be such a bad thing” (29 November 1939). She is still working on
it in 1943, making a written portrait of her husband’s detested former boss,
Senator Rodolphe Lemieux,13 “now dead and buried, although his por-
trait still smiles in the halls of the House of Commons” (10 August 1943).
As far as literary success is concerned, these are good years for Le
Normand. In February 1939, her novel La plus belle chose du monde is
published in France, and she quotes from a report in a French newspaper
of an academic lecture which claimed: “In 1939, it is Madame de Sévigné
whose work is being taught at the Sorbonne; in 2039, it will perhaps be
Madame Michelle Le Normand” (11 September 1939). In February 1941,
she publishes a collection of short stories, La maison aux phlox; she is also
working on her biography of Sister Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal as well as
doing book reviews for various publications. At the same time, she con-
tinues to look after the correction of proofs and the sales of her husband’s
books. On 22 October 1938, she makes the following observation: “Paulo
is always criticizing me because I don’t spend enough time on my writ-
ing. But he forgets all the days when I don’t write for myself because I’m
answering the letters he should be replying to, or looking after his books
and his publicity.”
Because of the tension in her marriage, the years 1938–40 are the dark-
est of Le Normand’s life. She questions herself often about happiness and
love in marriage, always finding the same answers: pray, endure, keep
silent, resign oneself to unhappiness, and hope for eternal salvation. “I
said to myself: none of that matters to me any more, I will be happy when
I’m dead, because I will have endured all of it as a good Christian. And
that’s all that matters. To endure with as much patience and gentleness as
possible. Endure. Put up with the fact that everything one does displeases
the other or, for no reason, saddens him” (18 November 1938). The expres-
sions Fiat, fiat, fiat, “Let it be done,” and “It’s up to God” are her usual way
of ending the discussion of a difficult subject, and yet resignation does
not come easily to her: “Is there any tenderness one can count on? For
that matter, is there anything we can count on in this world? Loving one’s
suffering and accepting it with mystical joy isn’t easy” (17 May 1939). A
sentence from a novel she loves, Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke, inspires
a reflection on the difficulty of communication: “[I wondered] how it
was that human beings, with all their powers of language, are so poor at
communicating among themselves […] And then I thought about all
the things Paulo never says to me any more, and about what I never say
to him, even though I’m constantly thinking about him. I’m not capable
of giving him happiness. No one can give happiness to another person.
And yet, despite my basic selfishness, it is for his success that I constantly
pray. It’s true that it all comes back to myself. When he’s content, I can be
happy in my own way” (23 October 1938). At times she seems close to a
d iaries of “Queens of the h ear th” • 185
feminist rebellion, but her conservative beliefs stop her from following
her thoughts to their logical conclusion: “But does marital happiness exist
anywhere? Is there such a thing as a just man? Why do we women have
to put up with the bad humour of men as if we were responsible for all
their problems? […] Doubtless because of Eve. Everything goes back to
her!” (6–7 November 1938). And later: “I deluded myself for a long time, I
was determined to believe in happiness – but at bottom, for several years
now I’ve only known small moments of happiness. Paulo will never be a
happy person. He’s more alone than I am, because he’s so unsociable. He
doesn’t want to see anyone. He doesn’t even answer the telephone […]
Paul will never be cured. It’s like a gangrene” (9 December 1938). In Sep-
tember 1939, desperately in need of tenderness, she has a strange dream
about Albert Lozeau, who has been dead for sixteen years. “And yet I don’t
want the return of love,” she writes on awakening. “I have hardened […]
I no longer believe in human happiness” (30 September 1939). In July
1940, on holiday in the Gaspé with her children, she receives a letter from
Desrosiers proposing a solution to their problems: that she would live
in Montreal while he remains in Ottawa. Distraught, she spends the day
praying for God’s help, before concluding: “I can no longer sense any feel-
ing for me in P. […] except blame, hostility, irritation. He has placed me in
the category of his enemies” (25 July 1940).
Such intimate revelations about the relationship between two people
make the reader wish to know the point of view of the other person in
question: a possibility that exists for the reader of a correspondence, but
not of a private diary. In any case, the tensions between the two dimin-
ish after their move to Montreal in 1941, and after their difficult decision
to place their daughter, now eleven, in a private institution: “Will we get
used to it? Will we ever get over the feeling of being burned, in the deepest
part of ourselves, by this unbearable pity! My little girl! My little girl!” she
writes (20 August 1941).
the LAS t nO tebOOKS ( JO urnALS X i–XX,

20 MAy 1944–19 OC t O b e r 1 9 6 4 )
The final notebooks of the diary are a perfect illustration of the idea that,
traditionally, women’s lives have followed a repetitive and even circular
narrative arc, marked by few dramatic changes. Over and over again, the
struggles and the periods of relief, the attempts at resignation followed
by moments of revolt or despair, the solitude and the passion for writing
(as well as its difficulty) return like melancholy leitmotifs in the note-
books of Le Normand’s last twenty years. In 1953, the Desrosiers move to
Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts in the Laurentians, where Le Normand finds a

certain amount of peace in the beauty of the landscape and her frequent
outings on skis. She keeps publishing, but at a slower pace: a collection of
short stories, Enthousiasme, appears in 1947, another collection, Dans la
toile de l’araignée, in 1949, and a final novel, La montagne d’hiver, in 1961.
She is aware, however, especially after the arrival of the Quiet Revolution
in 1960, that contemporary Quebec is no longer interested in her kind
of writing. Still extremely conservative, she and her husband have been
passed over by history and feel estranged from the tastes of their time.
Upset by the films she hears discussed on the radio and by the mention of
scandals associated with a religious community, Le Normand prays “that
the Holy Spirit will enlighten everyone […] What a dreadful era!” (Febru-
ary 1964).
The hundreds of books read by Le Normand over the years, carefully
listed in her journal, reveal the rigidity and self-censorship imposed on
her literary tastes by Catholic orthodoxy. “I read. I read too much. I for-
get half of what I’ve read,” she writes on 16 November 1934. Along with
the names of a great number of mediocre authors, English and Amer-
ican bestsellers, and books on spirituality, there are mentions of the
authors she likes: Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield,
Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann – and of Louis Hémon’s Maria Chap-
delaine, which she would like to have written herself (14 October 1932).
In general, French literature enrages her by its frank descriptions of
the body and sexuality, inspiring several colourful explosions over the
years. After reading a French novel she likes, she writes: “Hardly a word
on love. What a record for a Frenchman!” (November 1928). Modern
French novels seem to her “so empty, so untrue, so lacking in anything
that is moving” (14 October 1932). The well-known novel Les Thibault, by
Roger Martin du Gard, for example, inspires the following reflection: “As
in all French novels, forbidden love takes up a lot of space, and my God,
how boring it is. Last night I finished Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
– where, on the contrary, with feelings that are purely human but clean,
and with decent characters who aren’t thinking about sex all the time, the
reader is charmed for 600 pages!” (5 January 1932). On reading André
Gide’s L’immoraliste, she wonders: “Why do people like this author so
much, what explains his worldwide reputation?” (Summer 1933). Unlike
Gide, the novelist Joseph Malègue, whom she calls “a Catholic Proust,”
fills her with enthusiasm: “It’s the most beautiful French novel I’ve ever
read. [He shows that] one can be human without grovelling in the mud,
without making a display of sexual life, of evil” (25 November 1934).
She finds Henry de Montherlant’s Les jeunes filles “decadent” (Winter
1937); she detests Le journal d’un curé de campagne by Georges Bernanos

(Summer 1938) and La Pharisienne by François Mauriac (Winter 1942);
she likes Colette, but says of her: “How well this dishonourable woman
writes!” (Autumn 1939). Her tastes do not change; in the late 1950s she is
still indignant about the authors who are respected in France (Jean-Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux): “What
can our good people learn from these authors who are condemned by
the Church!” (5 March 1959). In 1964, she is thrilled to hear Father Émile
Legault, one of the founders of Quebec theatre,14 say on the radio that Sar-
tre is out of date.
It was this same conservative spirit that had been responsible for
Le Normand’s reputation and the sales of her books, as religious com-
munities and schools made up a large proportion of her readers. But if
conformity to such ideas worked in her favour, the self-censorship it cre-
ated prevented her from completing the two novels (Maternité and La
lampe est éteinte) which grew out of her own experience and which were
perhaps too revealing of her private struggles for her to envisage offering
to the public. Her published works have the taste of another era; they are
too often sentimental, tales bathed in nostalgia or constructed around
unrealistic episodes that betray the lack of inspiration she so often com-
plains about in her diary. It may be that Michelle Le Normand’s greatest
contribution to literature is the diary itself, to which she confided the
essential aspects of her life for over fifty years, along with her keenly felt
emotions and her profound interrogations about the meaning of life. The
passion for writing which is present throughout the diary was, in fact, her
greatest reason for living.
In the last year of her life, Le Normand was still, at seventy-one, inhab-
ited by the imperious need to write to which she had never succeeded in
giving full expression. Inspired by a visit from Gabrielle Roy the previ-
ous year, she had begun to imagine the possibility of a new novel, but, as
usual, the writing of it was constantly interrupted by her other activities
and responsibilities: “In 1964 – as in 1963 – it will be almost impossible to
write. What a fastidious task it would be to list all that I’ve had to do since
the beginning of the year: receive guests, shop and make meals, correct
Paulo’s proofs […] And yet this book that I’ve been thinking about since
Gabrielle R.’s visit has started to inspire me, it seems to me that it would
be something new in my work and in our literature” (20 January 1964).
The next day, she notes: “Worked on the manuscript that I’m calling for
in silence […] Will get back to it in a minute” (21 January 1964) and, a few
days later, after a list of her daily activities: “No literature in any of that”
(24 January 1964). The final entry in the diary is dated 19 October; on 1
November, Le Normand died suddenly, towards the middle of a day that

was probably not very different from all the others.
• • •
The diaries of Angélique Hay-Des Rivières, Lady Lacoste, and Michelle

Le Normand, each of which covers almost the entire married life of its
author, cannot be seen as representing the “typical” life of a “queen of the
hearth,” but together they tell of the experience of such women for a per-
iod of over a century, the one in which the role of wife and mother was
most rigidly defined in French Canada. Each of the three diarists takes
her role very seriously, and each draws strength and consolation from her
religious faith, with its ideal of self-sacrifice and its belief in the redemp-
tive value of suffering (especially for women). Devoted to their children,
they are fiercely protective of them in face of the dangers of sickness,
death, and moral depredation that threaten them. The negative aspects of
their religious beliefs – fear of sin and disgust for the body – are glimpsed
at times in these diaries and were undoubtedly part of the legacy passed
on from mother to daughter during these years. However, it is only in the
most modern of the three – that of Michelle Le Normand – that such pre-
occupations become explicit, contributing at least in part to the anguish
expressed by the diarist in the thousands of pages she left for posterity.
Of the three diaries, only that of Le Normand presents the wife and
mother as an autonomous individual, irreducible to her role and func-
tions within the home, and it is therefore not surprising that this diary is
the only one of the three in which the diarist frequently expresses feelings
of anxiety, confusion, frustration, and guilt. To achieve a solid sense of
self is far from easy in a culture and milieu in which women who dare to
challenge traditional roles are disapproved of and condemned by those in
power. In spite of the brief period of fame and recognition Le Normand
enjoyed, thanks in part to her conformity to the dominant ideologies, she
paid for her fame by a lack of inspiration and a dispersion of self among
her numerous feminine and national obligations. Above and beyond the
particular details it reveals to us about the author Léo-Paul Desrosiers and
the literary and cultural milieu of their time, Le Normand’s diary offers us
a valuable portrait of the difficulty of reconciling marriage and maternity
with a writing career in the first half of the twentieth century. The accu-
sation of “selfishness” that she often directs against herself, and that her
husband directs against her, speaks volumes about the difficult road that
women still have to navigate in the pre–Quiet Revolution years before
achieving autonomy.
PArt f O ur
•
Wr i ti n g On e s e l f i nt o Hi st or y:
T h e A ge o f Au to bi o g rap h y, 1965–2012
Astonishingly, it is not until 1965, three centuries after the spiritual

autobiography of Marie de l’Incarnation, that another autobiography by a
woman will appear in Quebec. In the final decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury, thanks to the example of Laure Conan, the novel became a literary
genre to which women could aspire, but, as the diary of Michelle Le Nor-
mand illustrates, the possibility of a literary career for a woman, especially
if she was married and a mother, was extremely problematic until the
mid-twentieth century and even beyond. It is no coincidence that Claire
Martin, the first woman to write an autobiography in contemporary Que-
bec, had no children – like the novelists Laure Conan, Gabrielle Roy, and
Anne Hébert, and indeed like Marie de l’Incarnation, who had to leave
her son in order to embark on the spiritual adventure that would lead her
to write about her life.
In chapter 8, devoted to Dans un gant de fer (In an Iron Glove) by Claire
Martin, we will see that autobiography can be far more threatening to the
established order than the novel as we revisit the controversy over her
book, which appeared in the same year as Marie-Claire Blais’s novel Une
saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, set in a very similar universe of violence
and repression. In that chapter we will also look at some definitions of
autobiography, try to clarify the traditional distinction between autobi-
ography and memoir, and, finally, look at some of the traits theoreticians
have seen as characteristic of autobiographies by women. Dans un gant de
fer is both an autobiography, recounting the survival and eventual liber-
ation of the author from childhood to her early twenties, and a memoir,
describing, analyzing, and denouncing the milieu which not only per-
mitted but encouraged the kind of violence against women and children
experienced by the author. Equally important as a work of art and as a
social document, Dans un gant de fer deserves a detailed analysis.
Par t four • 190
Despite the example of Claire Martin, Quebec women were relatively

slow to accede to autobiographical writing, perhaps because traditionally
they had been so well trained in obedience and silence. But by the end of
the 1970s, thanks to the liberating influence of the Quiet Revolution and
later of feminism, their autobiographical texts began to appear. With these
contemporary autobiographies, in part because of the social changes
brought about by the Quiet Revolution, the field of personal writing by
women expands to include autobiographical works by women of poor
and working-class backgrounds. In chapter 9, we will look at some of
these writings, paying particular attention to the complex interweaving of
social class, language, culture, religious background, and gender identity
in the often painful journeys of their protagonists towards self-expression.
These autobiographies correspond to a coming into existence – an
act of giving birth to the self through language – and often they gravitate
around an original wound, almost always identified with the mother and
the conservative culture she embodies and transmits to her daughters.
Chapter 10 will examine the intense struggle with the mother, the starting
point and also the stumbling block of so many women’s autobiogra-
phies, no matter what their cultural origin. In the Quebec context, this
all-powerful mother, who either stifles her daughter with too much love
or paralyzes her by rejection, carries the imprint of a negative Catholicism
and finds an unforgettable fictional counterpart in Anne Hébert’s “La
grande Claudine” – the mother figure of her short story “Le torrent,” who
looms over her son like a monstrous entity blocking his route to free-
dom and happiness. In several of the autobiographies, the resemblance
between the mother and this mythical character created by Anne Hébert
is at least implicit; in Denise Desautels’s Ce fauve, le bonheur (This beast
happiness), the debt to Anne Hébert is made explicit by a series of inter-
textual allusions which echo Hébert’s writings and endow the author’s
painful quest for autonomy with a collective resonance.
All the autobiographies examined in this section go beyond the simple
reconstitution of reality and involve a construction of self linked to the
author’s ability to distance herself from the facts and memories that make
up her life and impose order and coherence on them. Such a recreation
of one’s past self is achieved by projection into a character the author
can observe, judge, and dialogue with from her present perspective.
In Gabrielle Roy’s magnificent autobiography La détresse et l’enchante-
ment (Enchantment and Sorrow), the meeting between the author and
her younger self is evoked with a compassion familiar to readers of the
author’s other works, but exercised here, in her final work, with regard to
herself: “I can talk about her without embarrassment. The child that I was
Writing Oneself into histor y • 191
is as much a stranger to me as I would have been to her if she, at the dawn

of life as they say, had been able to see me as I am today. But from birth
to death and from death to birth, through remembrance on my part and
hopes and dreams on hers, the two of us keep moving closer to a common
meeting ground, as the distance between us grows.”1
The impression of strangeness that Roy feels in face of the heroine who
embodies her younger self is an indication of the “fictional” dimension of
all autobiography. As Louise Dupré points out, the simple fact of project-
ing oneself into a narrative “I,” without whose existence the book would
be a simple testimony, necessarily implies an entry into fiction: “And what
is fiction, other than a form one invents for one’s life? For writing is not
opposed to reality, it prolongs reality, arranges it, magnifies it.”2 Several of
the texts we will examine in these chapters go beyond the limits of tradi-
tional autobiography, with its clearly recognizable identification between
author, narrator, and protagonist and its implicit pact with the reader
guaranteeing the truth of what is recounted, and admit to some extent
their fictional character. Some are called “autobiographies,” some simply
“stories” or “autobiographical stories,” and still others are called “novels.”
But all contain infratextual signs (dates, precise places, proper names,
or mentions of historical events) which anchor them clearly in the lived
experience of the author as it can be verified outside the text. Even Claire
Martin’s autobiography, in spite of the author’s insistence on the accuracy
of her memory and the “truth” of what she is recounting, is necessarily a
reconstruction of lived events, whose impact depends on formal aspects
of the work like the quality of the author’s writing, the emotion commu-
nicated to the reader, and the suspense the author imparts to the telling of
her tale. Other autobiographies are more explicit about containing a fic-
tional dimension. In the prefatory note to her autobiography, Ce fauve, le
bonheur, Denise Desautels explains the liberating effect of this “fictional”
dimension she felt the need of conferring on her text:
I began this story as if I were writing an autobiography. The heroine

was me. At least, that was what I believed, and it terrified me. The
useless concern with truth, the doubts that assailed me with every
word, all of these things militated against the continuation of this
project. I quickly understood that only the pleasure of the text, with
its advances, retreats, and reversals, could put into movement the
obsession that runs through the story. To face up to Happiness with
all its cunning, I had to have recourse to vital forces, deliberately
fictional, thanks to which another truth, lighter than the first one,
would have a chance of emerging.3
Par t four • 192
Echoing Gabrielle Roy, she evokes the “familiar strangeness” she experi-
ences in relation to her heroine, a strangeness “linked to the very pleasure
of reading.”4
The final chapter will be devoted to “autofiction,” a hybrid genre which
plays on the ambiguity created by the inevitable mixture of “true” and
“fictional” elements in autobiography, and to the works of one of its most
brilliant practitioners, Nelly Arcan. Tragically, these works, which give
voice to the identity questions of contemporary young women, do not
succeed in advancing the quest for self we have seen in earlier autobiog-
raphies. On the contrary, their narrators, despite their lucidity, exhibit a
need for self-destruction which seems like the triumph of all the negative
elements against which their predecessors were struggling. In a sad irony,
Arcan’s work recalls that of Marie de l’Incarnation, by a need for transcen-
dence which, deprived of an object, turns against itself in an expression of
pure nihilism. While the seventeenth-century mystic was, paradoxically,
grounded in her body throughout her life, we shall see that Arcan, impris-
oned in her female body, became more and more obsessed with a sense
of being “disincarnated,” or cut off from her body, in the years before her
self-imposed death at the age of thirty-six.
C h ap t e r 8
Cla i re M ar ti n : T he C oura ge of t he
Au to bi o g r a p hi cal “I”
The publication of Claire Martin’s autobiography Dans un gant de fer (In

an Iron Glove),1 in 1965, more than three centuries after Marie de l’Incar-
nation’s spiritual autobiography, marks the move of women’s personal
writings into the public sphere, at the precise moment when Quebec
culture as a whole was freeing itself from its restrictive past through the
Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. A worthy inheritor of Élisabeth Bégon by
her acerbic comments on her society, of Henriette Dessaulles by her rev-
elations about the convent school world, and of Joséphine Marchand by
her feminist critique of education and women’s position in society, Claire
Martin produced with In an Iron Glove the first explicitly feminist work in
Quebec literature.
As mentioned in the introduction, autobiography as a literary genre
begins at the moment when the concept of the individual appears in
Western culture, and in traditional French Canada the possibilities for
individual self-expression were extremely limited, especially for women.
It is precisely this erasure of individuality, achieved through a pedagogy
which punished all manifestations of the child’s singularity, that Claire
Martin denounces in her autobiography. A scene in the book describing
the author’s earliest traumatic memory suggests that, at least uncon-
sciously, the idea of individuality dominates her psychic landscape. The
scene takes place on a Sunday morning when Claire, only three and a half
years old, and her older brother André are at home with their father while
their mother and sisters are at Mass. Always subject to irrepressible gig-
gles, Claire gets carried away with laughter when her brother uses a word
she has never heard before, and which she finds comical. “My father never
took laughter for anything but a symptom of lewdness. And we had all
been suspected of dirty-mindedness from the cradle up. Though we
laughed very seldom, it was still too much, if you consider the dangers
Writing Oneself int o histor y • 194
it exposed us to,” recalls the narrator (24). What follows is a dispropor-

tionate punishment which will remain forever engraved in the author’s
memory, her first experience of her father’s violence: “It began with open-
handed blows which immediately became very heavy, then, getting into
the swing of it, blows with the closed fist, and if he got really swinging he
would finish off with kicks that sent us skidding from one room to the
next all through the downstairs” (25). What is interesting for our purposes
is the word which provoked Claire’s peals of laughter: it was the word
“individual.”
A stinging commentary on a milieu and an epoch, In an Iron Glove is
also a work of art in which, through the power of the author’s writing, an
individual drama attains universal proportions. In it, Claire Martin tells
the story of her childhood in a family dominated by a sadistic and vio-
lent father, living in an isolated and badly heated house a few kilometres
from Quebec City. The work also contains an exposé of the education she
received in convent school, at the hands of nuns whose mediocrity and
lack of intelligence were matched only by their cruelty. One of the import-
ant works of the Quiet Revolution years, the book exorcised a past that
was still fresh in the collective memory and denounced a system of which
many of its readers had themselves been victims. The dates in brackets at
the end of the volume (April 1957–August 1965) indicate that the book was
gestating during the eight years in which Claire Martin was establishing
a reputation as a novelist and short story writer – a consummate stylist
and an irreverent critic of her society, especially regarding its treatment
of women.2 In a 1979 interview, she claims that she put off working on the
book because she sensed in the 1950s that the time was not yet ripe for the
revelations she was preparing to make: “It was the time for me to write
[my memoirs] and I was ready to do it. I’d been preparing them for years.
But I didn’t want to publish them before people were ready to accept what
I was saying, and in 1959–60 it would have been too early. They would
have upset so many people that the book would have gone nowhere.”3
The numerous personal letters received by the author and stored in
Fonds Claire Martin at Library and Archives Canada4 testify to the lib-
erating effect of the book for hundreds of readers, especially women,
many of whom corroborate what the author says about the education of
girls. “I started primary school about twenty years after the period you
described, but I can assure you that things hadn’t changed; I think they
had even gotten worse,” writes one correspondent. Another, ten years
younger than the author, writes: “In an Iron Glove revived in me the cin-
ders of a past that I thought had completely gone cold, for, like all the
women of my generation (40 years old), I spent a great deal of time with
Claire Mar tin • 195
the ‘sisters’ you describe so well. I observed them being accusatory, spite-
ful, and sly.” A young woman writes that she was overwhelmed by reading
In an Iron Glove because in it she found the explanation of her own moth-
er’s unhappy life. Among the most moving of the letters are those from
women who remember being treated as “bad girls” by the nuns, as Claire
Martin was. One of them, born five years before the author, reflects on
“our convent schools, obsessed by mortal sin, crimes, and little girls who
are not good,” adding: “I was one of those girls, and I turned out to be a
good woman.”
Aut ObiO grAP hy, MeMO irS, WOM en’S

Aut O biO grAPhieS
When In an Iron Glove was published, most critics referred to the book
as “memoirs”; today, we would be more likely to call it an autobiogra-
phy. Is “autobiography” the proper term for this account of the author’s
childhood and adolescence, ending when she is in her early twenties? Or
would this story, which situates the author’s experience very precisely in
the context of women’s lives in early twentieth-century Quebec, be more
accurately described as the author’s “memoirs”? According to Philippe
Lejeune, autobiography is “a retrospective prose account by a real per-
son of their existence, stressing their individual life, and in particular the
story of their personality.”5 In memoirs, on the other hand, “the author
is behaving like a witness: his point of view is individual, but the object
of his discourse […] goes far beyond the individual; it is the story of the
social and historical groups he belongs to.”6 In an Iron Glove belongs to
both of these categories, illustrating how interdependent they are and
anticipating by a decade the feminist idea that “the personal is political.”
However, neither the concept of autobiography nor that of mem-
oirs adequately describes this work in which the gradual accession of
the protagonist to freedom is unimaginable without the narrator’s criti-
cal observations on the obstacles to that freedom represented by family,
convent school, and society in general. Claire’s passage through the vio-
lence and sadism of her environment, from her first reaction of terror and
astonishment to a succession of emotional states and strategies of survival
(cynicism, ruses, lies, emotional paralysis, and, always, rebellion) gives the
story its narrative power. And yet, far from insisting on the uniqueness of
her situation, Martin draws attention to the representative nature of her
experiences, inscribing her own story in that of her moment in history:
“It mustn’t be thought that I was the only one persecuted. Almost all of us
were, each in turn, and each for her own particular reasons” (68); “Many
Writing Oneself into h istor y • 196
of us who went through the system complain that our minds were left
uncultivated. And what about the heart, then, what about the heart?” (69).
According to feminist theorists, this sort of fusion between autobi-
ography and memoir is characteristic of the autobiographical writing
of women, whose sense of identity is often more relational and less
strongly individualized than that of men. Jacques Lecarme and Éliane
Lecarme-Tabone note, for example, that “in the nineteenth century,
women more often wrote memoirs than autobiographies” and that in
their memoirs “the personality of the author often manifests itself solely
in the subjectivity of the point of view adopted.” When “real” autobiog-
raphies do exist, “women grant more space to the other, not only in the
definition of their own identity but on the emotional level.”7 One can
almost speak of “intersubjectivity” in describing some of these works,
a phenomenon observed by Françoise Kaye in her analysis of In an Iron
Glove: “The ‘I’ isn’t abolished in these memoirs. It has in some sense
merged with or melted into a collectivity. Claire’s story is also the story
of her sisters who appear much less often in the text, who are heard less
often, but who have as much presence as the narrator has.”8
t ruth O r fi C tiO n? the C OurAge Of the

Aut Obi Ogr APhi C AL “ i”
The nature of the controversy that followed the publication of In an Iron

Glove suggests that the troubling aspect of the book was indissociable
from the fact that it presented itself as an autobiography rather than a
novel. For the first time in three centuries in Quebec, someone – a woman
– had dared to say: “This is what I lived and I’m not the only one to have
lived it,” and the effect was dramatic, as documented not only by the
many personal letters received by the author, but also by the angry dis-
cussion which took place about the “truth” of the book’s contents. In the
same year, Marie-Claire Blais’s novel, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel,9
which evokes a universe strikingly similar to that of Martin’s book, was
unanimously praised by the critics. Each of the books offers a disconcert-
ing portrait of French Canada before the Quiet Revolution, seen from the
point of view of a child: a universe of interdiction and religious dogma
dominated by a sadism born of the very values of suffering and self-sac-
rifice propagated in church teachings and in the educational system,
whose greatest victims are children. Matriarchal in Blais and patriarchal
in Martin, authority is personified in each of the works by an immense
and intimidating figure: in Blais’s novel, by the unforgettable Grand-Mère
Antoinette, seen from the point of view of her newborn grandson Jean Le
Maigre; in Martin’s work by the cruel, hypocritical, and ridiculous father

who reigns over the universe of the small protagonist like a fairytale ogre.
Even this brief description gives an idea of the “literary” aspect of Martin’s
autobiography: as many critics and readers noted, In an Iron Glove “reads
like a novel.” However, unlike Marie-Claire Blais, who was praised for her
dreamlike presentation of a social reality that was vaguely recognizable,
Claire Martin was constantly asked to justify her choice of the autobi-
ographical genre and to respond to critics who questioned the accuracy of
her portrayal of society.
The stormy reception of In an Iron Glove is, in part, an indication of
the fact that autobiography was still an unfamiliar genre in the Quebec of
the sixties. In the numerous interviews she gave after the book appeared,
Martin was often asked why she had not transposed her memories into
novel form rather than writing such a disturbing book. In answer, she
explained the fundamental difference between the concepts of truth
and verisimilitude: “There are things you can say in a novel and others
that you can’t say […] What is true is not necessarily the same as what
will pass for true. This truth, often hard to believe, belongs in a book
like the one I’ve written. In a novel, it wouldn’t have been believable, and
I’d have covered it with a veil of modesty.”10 Later, reflecting on the fact
that representatives of the publishing house Gallimard were interested
in publishing her book in France but wanted to present it as a novel, she
comments: “This idea of making it into a novel was ridiculous. It would
have made the worst novel ever published in Canada.”11 As a teenager, she
had been obliged to lie in order to hide the violence in her family from
those around her, and it was unthinkable to her that she would now blur
the boundaries between truth and fiction. And yet she would say of her
book: “It’s an autobiography, perhaps, but my childhood had an almost
fictional character that pleased me as a novelist.”12
Critic Philippe Lejeune offers some guidelines for distinguishing
between an autobiography and a novel. In formulating his famous con-
cept of the “autobiographical pact,” he puts into words something that the
reader of any autobiography takes for granted: the fact that it involves a
“pact” between author and reader guaranteeing the “truth” of the story
that is told. Often this pact is made explicit by paratextual signs (a pref-
ace, subtitle, dedication, or author’s note) declaring the autobiographical
intention of the author.13 Although there are none of these paratextual
signs in In an Iron Glove, the book presents itself without ambiguity as a
true, referential document: the detailed genealogy of Martin’s ancestors,
the precise dates and place names, and the allusions to a wide range of
recognizable people and real events anchor the book solidly in historical
reality. As well, throughout the book the author insists on the accuracy of
her memory and the truth of her story: “Blessed with a pitiless memory,
I have forgotten nothing” (4); “I am inventing nothing” (198). This does
not mean, however, that she is giving a “photographic” representation of
her childhood or that she is revealing everything about it; on the contrary,
she claims that her childhood was worse than the representation she gave
of it in the book: “Everything couldn’t be told, because there were things
that were too huge, too raw, because there are moments in life when truth
goes beyond what can be imagined.”14 The manuscript of In an Iron Glove
contains more than one example of scenes that were eliminated from the
final version because they were too painful or too violent to be believable.
At one point in the published version, the narrator intervenes ironically
in the text to warn the reader that what she is about to reveal about her
ignorant and cruel stepmother is true, even though it may seem torn from
a fairy tale:
Here I pause for a word with the reader. It is extremely unliterary, I

know, but I can hear what you’re thinking from here, Dear Reader,
and I can’t resist making room for a bit of dialogue.
– “You’re not going to throw in a stepmother on top of all the rest?”
– “You will have to excuse me, Dear Reader, I don’t wonder that at
times you must think I’m laying it on a bit thick, but I can’t help it.
Truth is sometimes… et cetera. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am going
to throw in a stepmother.” (326–7)
Elsewhere, before recounting the painful experiences of her sister, Dine,

who was obliged to abandon her studies at the age of fourteen in order to
care for her dying mother and her younger siblings, Martin writes: “To tell
what the next six months were to be for Dine is no easy task. It seems to
come straight out of a third-rate novel. As little as I say, I always seem to
be overdoing it. Yet it may well be that I don’t know the whole of it” (91).
The “autobiographical pact” of Claire Martin with her readers, so
shocking for some and so liberating for others at the time of the book’s
publication, may seem of little consequence today. But at a time when
autobiography, with its potential for revealing disturbing truths, could
have implications for the whole population – and thus required consid-
erable courage – In an Iron Glove carved out a unique place for itself in
Quebec literature and culture. By entering into an autobiographical pact
with her readers, Claire Martin was making a statement about the right of
her fellow citizens to justice: “A child doesn’t just hunger after tenderness,
caresses and presents, but justice. And how hungry I’ve been!” (282).
A M iL ieu W ith Out LOve
The opening sentence of In an Iron Glove – “I have forgiven everything”

(3) – immediately establishes the narrator’s emotional perspective. After
this opening, which is followed by a statement about the pity she now
feels for her father in old age (a “wrinkled little creature, shrivelled to half
his size, trembling […] deprived now of the cruel strength that had once
been both his pride and his master” [4]), the narrator announces that she
must now “put aside that pity [in order to] tell things as they were” (4).
From this moment on, the book becomes the story of an epic but unequal
struggle between the father – gigantic, menacing, and yet ridiculous in his
tyranny – and the innocent little girl with the irrepressible laugh, whose
only weapons are her intelligence, her cunning, and the awareness of love
she has acquired during long stays with her maternal grandparents. The
two volumes of the autobiography – The Left Cheek and The Right Cheek
– deal, respectively, with the author’s childhood and adolescence. The first
covers the period between Claire’s birth and the death of her mother, a
month before Claire’s thirteenth birthday. The second follows the stages
of Claire’s development at home and at the convent until she is twenty, and
ends with the moment of liberation represented by the wedding of her
sister Françoise. In the first volume, in spite of Claire’s consciousness of
the injustice in her family, her father’s tyranny remains unchallenged. In
the second, Claire evolves little by little towards a moral and intellectual
independence from her persecutors. Having lost all those who were dear
to her – not only her mother, but also her maternal grandparents, and
the only one of her teachers to have shown her any compassion – she tra-
verses a long period of dryness and anger, from which she will gradually
emerge thanks to the growing and increasingly effective solidarity that
links her and her brothers and sisters. As for their father, who lacks the
intelligence to outwit his now adolescent children, he appears more and
more as an impotent figure and object of scorn. The last lines of the book
confirm the victory of the children over their former tyrant: “He went on
talking, but nobody was listening” (357).
The theme of love and its absence, central to all of Claire Martin’s
works, is one of the elements that structure the autobiography, colour-
ing not only the stages of Claire’s evolution but the analysis of her milieu.
“In those days, it was pretty difficult to love in this country. It either
made people laugh, or set their teeth on edge” (127), recalls the narrator.
The tension between love and its opposite (shame, scorn, humiliation)
is summed up for her in the contrast between her maternal and paternal
grandparents. When Claire stays at her maternal grandparents’ house, she
is aware of a “climate of love,” in which “there was no shame in speaking

from the heart, in weeping freely if what one was saying was sad, or bub-
bling over if it was gay” (38), while in her paternal grandparents’ home
all expressions of love, especially those involving the body, give rise to
“embarrassed grimacing.” It is the paternal grandparents, she suggests,
who were typical of the French-Canadian milieu of her childhood, whose
mentality she sums up as follows: “No body, no heart, and none of the
words that name them” (39).
It is this sort of Jansenist attitude that Claire encounters everywhere
until the end of her adolescence: at home, in the confessional, and at
boarding school. Her father and the priests in the parish resemble each
other in suspecting children of serious sexual perversions, acts that
the children in their innocence are incapable of even imagining. At the
convent, the nuns exercise their authority by humiliating their pupils,
administering “meticulous and patient tortures” like scrubbing the faces of
the girls who had bad marks with a stiff brush dipped in a powerful deter-
gent that left their faces “peeling and oozing blood” (49). Observing the
petty and fickle attachments of some of the nuns to their “teachers’ pets,”
Claire experiences for the first time the vanities of love, of which she will
later, in her novels and short stories, show herself to be a shrewd analyst:
“The world of feelings seemed to me to be set up like a vast game organized
by insincerity and cunning, a game whose rules you had to learn” (244).
On the rare occasions when she encounters exceptions to these rules,
Claire is filled with astonishment and gratitude: “It was the first time in
that institution that I had encountered a truly human feeling, the pres-
ence of a real heart. I was enraptured. A fervent gratitude drove me on
in my work, since it was all I had to offer” (84); “Was what had just hap-
pened really possible? Were there really sisters who could understand a
little girl’s heart, her preferences, her need of reciprocity? I wouldn’t have
believed it” (126). Worn out by her misfortunes and by the cruelty that
surrounds her, Claire goes through a period of emotional paralysis: “I
was almost incapable of feeling any more pain. I was nothing more than a
bunch of scars” (161). By showing the effects of this spiritual and intellec-
tual climate through the experiences and reactions of her heroine, Martin
goes far beyond simply providing a satirical portrait of her society. As
critic Jean-Louis Major wrote to her in a personal letter, her autobiogra-
phy is, above all, a call for love and a witness to its healing possibilities:
Every moment [in your book], no matter how painful or sordid, is

illuminated by the beautiful transparency of clear-minded love. For
this story, made up primarily of unhappiness and pain, is, more than
anything, an act of love: a love that shines through every one of your
sentences and gives each line its quality of contained emotion, each
event its exemplary character and the whole of the book its power-
ful immediacy. In an Iron Glove is full of the love of life: a love that
allows for both the splendid flames of anger and the joys of irony.15
the nA rr At O r And the PrO tAgOniSt
As important in autobiography as the story that is told is the perspective

of the author on what she is recounting. The point of view of the author
– or, rather, of her spokesperson in the book, the narrator – colours the
entire narrative. The “I have forgiven everything” which opens In an Iron
Glove determines the perspective and the style of the whole book, trans-
forming material which could have been presented as melodrama or
made into an inferior novel into a work which vibrates with wisdom and
serenity. In almost every sentence or paragraph, thanks to the ironic smile
of the narrator, the traumatic past lived by the child is redeemed by a pres-
ent in which the values of good sense, reason, and justice are unassailable.
Thanks to her talent as a novelist, Martin is able to bring to life the
child that she was, capturing her experiences, perceptions, and feelings as
they were lived at the time. Rarely has the terror of a child petrified by the
power of an adult seeking to humiliate her been depicted as unforgetta-
bly as in the scene where six-year-old Claire has to answer a nun who is
demanding to know why she did not go to Communion: “My hands were
moist and the blood hammered in my ears […] I couldn’t utter a word
[…] I didn’t have the courage either to tell the truth or to lie. Just enough
to keep on standing there, a little outside myself, feeling the way you do
just before you faint. Only one thought: It can’t last forever, there’s nothing
to do but wait” (77). Often the humour of the text comes from the naiveté
of little Claire, who can never figure out what it is she has done wrong
when her father or the nuns fly into a rage. But her innocence also has a
tragic resonance, as in the scene in the confessional, where she hears with
horror, from the mouth of the priest, an enumeration of sexual perver-
sions that are beyond her imagining. The narrator respects the point of
view of her small heroine, smiling at her naiveté and her blunders, and, on
occasion, offering a retrospective judgment of her actions: “I can’t think
of those holidays without remorse. I was truly impossible” (107). Never,
however, does she express pity for her, with the result that the reader too
feels not pity for the little girl as much as admiration for her rebellion.
As well as mediating the story, the narrator is present in the text as a
spokesperson for the author at the time of writing. Her serenity and joie
de vivre are apparent not only in the humour of her presentation of the
past, but in her comments on her present situation: “Fate […] has richly
compensated me for everything!” (17); “Anger can be corrected. I know
that, for at birth I received a good share of the paternal heritage” (35).
At times, through the use of expressions like “I understood later” or “If
I had known,” she emphasizes her adult perspective on the events of the
past. In this respect, the description of her last visit to her dying mother,
many of the details of which she admits to having forgotten, is particularly
moving: “If I had known, when I was living it, that it was to be the last, it
seems to me that I would be able to describe it second by second” (180). At
times, she questions the motivations or perceptions of her younger self,
asking herself, for example, how it could have been possible that she did
not understand that her mother was close to death: “Is it normal that a
girl almost thirteen should be so little aware of what’s going on, especially
when it’s a question of her own mother’s sickness and approaching death?
[…] I think that I didn’t want to know” (179–80).
In summary, the act of writing her autobiography gives Claire Martin
the possibility of examining her life from her present point of view, and
even of correcting perceptions she has had of certain events or persons.
For example, when reflecting on the period in which she and her brothers
and sisters formed a “clan,” united in their opposition to their father, she
sees the situation of her father in a new way: “And I sometimes find myself
pitying the solitude of this man” (221). Similarly, remembering a nun who
persecuted her, she declares: “The poor girl with her South American
lake, her dirty Gospels, her singular spellings, and her ignorance of the
Templars, she has given me a chapter that I rather like, and in return I for-
give her all the slaps she gave me” (159). Even as it constitutes the principal
link between the heroine and the narrator, the process of writing com-
pletes the transformation of one to the other – a transformation which is
also a healing process. It is through writing that the narrator discovers, for
example, that, contrary to the memories she has always had of her years in
boarding school, all of the nuns were not cruel: “Years had to go by and I
had to write this book before I could perceive that from time to time one
of them had crossed my path who wasn’t a shrew, who, I would even have
to admit, was a really fine person. I’m glad to say that. It warms my heart
to discover that I wasn’t always as unhappy as I remember myself being”
(242). During her childhood and adolescence, Claire goes through long
periods during which, broken by her pain and anger, she is unable to cry;
now, reliving these experiences through writing, healing tears come to her
eyes. Recalling the letter she wrote to her grandmother after her grandfa-
ther’s death, she states: “Today, thirty-five years afterwards, I have tears in
my eyes as I write this page. That night I wrote three or four, and my eyes
were as dry as an ancient desert” (225). As she writes about the humili-
ations that her stepmother inflicted on her and her siblings, she weeps:
“When I try to imagine this scene, I am blinded by tears” (348).
A St Ory An Ch Ored i n hiS t O ry
As important as its literary qualities is the historical value of In an Iron

Glove, an indispensable document on the first decades of twentieth-
century French Canada (especially in Quebec City). As a background
to the narrator’s memories, we see the evolution of Quebec society from
the First World War to the end of the Depression years, including deci-
sive moments like the end of the war (marked in Claire’s family by an
evening as lugubrious as all the others), but also objects, technologies,
and fashions. Among Claire’s earliest memories is that of her grandpar-
ents’ telephone, easy to use even for a three year old: “First there was the
telephone lady you gave your number to, and then the number was never
more than three digits long” (17). She also recalls the “paper twenty-five
cents” that her grandfather gave her, and that the nuns tried to force her to
put in the bank of contributions destined for the charity The Holy Child-
hood (67); the Quebec City streetcar which, “coming down from l’Avenue
des Érables, ran along la Grande Allée, la rue Saint-Louis, la Côte de la
Fabrique, then down to la rue Saint-Jean where Grandmother and Grand-
father lived” (70); her Aunt Berthe’s living room in Quebec, “very, very
1925, in what was called flapper style: dark as the devil’s den, hung with
navy blue wallpaper brightened a little by a sparse orange design, stuffed
with cushions” (181). In about 1930, her father buys one of the first radios
of the period, equipped with a key allowing him to prevent other mem-
bers of the family from using it (176). The narrator also evokes the Eaton’s
catalogues from which she and her sisters ordered their clothes (222), the
popularity in the 1930s of French songs and cinema, two areas in which,
before that time, “Quebeckers […] were Americanized to the marrow –
much more than they are now, you have no idea” (289), and, finally, the
misery of large segments of the population during the Depression and the
stock market crash of 1929, which allowed her father to get rich by acquir-
ing properties at a low price.
Several of the author’s memories are related to her life at boarding
school and the Catholic atmosphere of her childhood: the “I give my
heart to God” prayer recited by the boarders on awakening (105); the
many hours devoted to the study of English at the Ursuline convent (82);
the red-covered books, from the publisher Mame et fils in Paris, given as
prizes at the end of the school year. Once a year, on 31 May, during the
celebrations marking the end of the month of Mary, the boarders have
permission to enter the Ursulines’ garden, of which Marie de l’Incarna-
tion herself had spoken in her letters:16 “a garden full of fruit trees and
flowers and raked gravel paths which has left a wonderful memory”
(102). She also evokes the church decree of 1923 forbidding dancing in
the diocese of Quebec, to which the faithful responded by announcing
they would go and dance in Montreal (89); the popular retreats for men
preached by Father Lelièvre in Saint-Sauveur parish (216); the New Year’s
blessing (210); the family rosary recited every evening (186); the annual
pilgrimage of the family to the shrine at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré (233);
and the young French-Canadian candidate for canonization Gérard Ray-
mond, who was very popular in the 1930s (313).
More than simple historical facts, many of these concrete details pro-
vide the basis for an analysis and critique of the narrow-mindedness
encouraged by the institutions of the period. In the family, no ques-
tioning of the rules, the madcap ideas, or the violence of the father is
permitted: “That’s the main reason I hated him so, because of that terri-
fied silence he reduced us to, that cowardice he plunged us into, just as
deeply and for as long as he wanted” (262). At the convent (especially at
the “second convent” – that of the sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-
Dame in Beauport, where Claire was a boarder after her years with the
Ursulines), one of the teachers accuses her of “wasting [her] time read-
ing” (151). Language itself is seen as a terrain full of dangers: instead of “Q”
(a sound which in French is identical to a vulgar word), the students are
made to say “que”; Pope Pius VII is called “Pius, the seventh in name” for
similar reasons; and the name of Lake Titicaca is replaced by “Titicana”
(144). “What are you looking for in the dictionary? Dirty words?” one of
the nuns asks Claire (143). Not only does such an education fail to trans-
mit essential knowledge to the students, but, notes the narrator, it actively
teaches them not to think: “Thought! Poor me! […] Shortly after I left the
convent, I perceived that I knew nothing, that I wasn’t aware of anything,
that I couldn’t have named a great writer later than Victor Hugo, that I
didn’t know how to go about discovering what I needed to know” (297).
At twenty-five, she admits, she was “fascist and anti-semitic” (296), the
almost inevitable result of an education which failed to teach her how to
think for herself: “There were quite a few of us who hadn’t the least idea
where we were going. To the right, to the left, any old way […] Like sheep,
we always believed the last person to speak” (296). Such a state of igno-
rance is part of the logic of a system of thought centred on the divine and
ignoring the human: “Headed straight for eternity, face to face with God,
no one else around, a little object in transit, I really didn’t need to know
anything, all I needed was to be a bigot” (298).
the SAd L iv e S Of WOMe n
Reflecting on the passivity and need for self-sacrifice which led her
mother, on the advice of a priest, not only to marry her father (already a
widower and father of a six-year-old boy), but to stay in a marriage where
she was physically abused, the author lists several factors which contrib-
uted to the suffocating atmosphere of the period: the final years of the
Victorian era, puritan attitudes from the United States, the arrival in early
twentieth-century Quebec of extremely conservative priests and nuns
from France after the adoption of the law which secularized the French
educational system in 1905. And, she might have added, the increasingly
conservative nature of Ultramontane French-Canadian Catholicism after
the reign of the powerful bishop Ignace Bourget in Montreal. Surrounded
by all of these repressive tendencies, women – the cornerstone of the
patriarchal edifice – were their greatest victims:
I know the women of that generation all too well. In them, timidity,
apprehension, the inability to face life, a fear of the world and of the
hereafter reached a pinnacle. In earlier days, women, city women at
least, still breathed a little of that fresh air that circulated before the
Victorian era. Grandmother, her sisters and sisters-in-law, though
quite estranged from the spirit of Voltaire, were much more daring
than Mother ever was. Their own grandmothers, to judge by the
anecdotes I heard about them, were even more so. At the other end
of the scale, my generation began to throw off the yoke. My poor
mother and her contemporaries lived through what was really the
most suffocating stage of the feminine adventure. (6)
The rage and insistence on justice for women which animate almost
every page of In an Iron Glove are rooted in the indignation felt by Claire
Martin from a young age regarding the fate of her mother, “a sacri-
ficed woman […] chronically terrified by all the bugaboos of the age
[and] persuaded that no woman has the right to escape the task that
heaven requires of her devotion” (7). As an adolescent, Claire is scandal-
ized to learn that she owes her life to “a brief moment of pleasure taken
from a poor, sick, frightened woman, reduced to the state of an object,
used and kicked aside afterwards” (274). The home, the parish, and the
convent reinforce the contemptuous and guilt-inducing attitudes to
women which underlie male domination. A woman who leaves her

husband is responsible for all the sins that his solitude may lead him
into, Claire’s mother is told when she dares to return to her parents’
house with the children for two years (20). According to Claire’s father,
“women shouldn’t read. That was an occupation that should remain
strictly masculine. If you let women read they risk, first, imagining that
they understand, and second, concluding that they have brains in their
heads. Whereas women have nothing in their heads” (149). The cleaning
woman, a mother of six children, tells Claire tearfully that the priest has
refused her permission to have a hysterectomy, even though her doctor
has said she will risk her life if she has another baby. This was the period
– and not only in Quebec – when Catholic doctrine decreed that in a
difficult birth the life of the child must take precedence over that of the
mother: “God didn’t invent operations, and someone else could have
brought up the children,” the priest says blithely. For Claire, stories like
these are a nightmarish initiation into the woman’s life that awaits her: “I
could only tremble with fear at the thought of my female condition, and
wish the curé was dead” (260).
Among the rare reading materials permitted in Claire’s family are the
Annals of the Good Saint Anne, a monthly publication put out by the Sanc-
tuary of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. The letters column of the magazine
offers Claire and her sisters other examples of the sad lives of women:
“Sounds like a gay future for us!” (295). These letters are also examples
of the power of the Church over women, most of whom seem to accept
the advice given by the priest with docility: “The thought of the millions
of women who had bowed to this frightful fate for centuries, and would
for centuries to come, made me boil with rage. I couldn’t see why those
idiotic women would take the trouble to write to the Annals just for the
confirmation of a death sentence they had been labouring under so long
already. Were there really that many people who believed in the truth of
such a crippling system?” (295).
At the convent, the boarders are taught by the nuns that menstrual
periods and other signs of puberty are punishments from God: “We were
so used to being ashamed of our bodies, to thinking that every last thing
that happened to them was a punishment for some unknown crime, that
even the growth of a single hair disturbed us greatly. When I first noticed
them growing in my armpits and pubes, I was overcome with despair.
What could I have been doing?” (141). The sole aim of the education of
girls, according to the narrator, was “to make us servile, pious, resigned
and prudish” (297). The idea of university education for women led to
interminable discussions about “the feminine vocation,” in which there
was “one point on which everyone agreed: marriage just wasn’t possible
for such a girl. Never, never, never would any man on Quebec soil wish to
marry this bluestocking” (299). Having revisited the situation of women
through the lens of her own experience, the narrator provides the fol-
lowing description of how “the feminine vocation” was envisaged in her
youth: “We had no right to knowledge, either general or specialized. But
yearly maternities, sleepless nights and dreary days, nursing children,
washing, cooking, finished off with eclampsia or puerperal fever – no
objection to that. Feminine vocation” (299).
the t WO “MA dAMe MArtinS”
As we have noted, there were no true autobiographies – no works exhib-

iting the self-possession, clear-mindedness, and writing ability required
to impose a narrative coherence on one’s life – between those of Marie
de l’Incarnation and Claire Martin. By a strange coincidence, these
two women had the same family name: Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation
because, before entering the Ursulines in 1631, she was the wife and later
the widow of the silk merchant Claude Martin, and Claire Martin (born
Claire Montreuil and, after marriage, known as Mme Roland Faucher),
because, when she began publishing in 1957, she adopted the family
name of her mother, Martin. Even more important, the role of the con-
vent of the Ursulines in Quebec City is central in both autobiographies.
As we have seen, this convent, founded by Marie de l’Incarnation in 1639,
appears in Claire Martin’s autobiography as a symbol of the stupidities
and injustice of an entire culture built on the denial of individual freedom
(and therefore of the possibility of autobiographical expression).
One cannot help wondering what personal and cultural factors con-
tributed to the emergence of these two works, while so many women’s
voices remained silent. What pushed these women to write, and what
inner reserves of strength allowed them to resist the pressures of censor-
ship and self-censorship exercised by the institutions of their time? In
each of the two, the words on the page seem to come from an inner need
of expression awakened by the exceptional character of what they expe-
rienced – in the case of Marie de l’Incarnation, mystical experiences of
great intensity and import; in Claire Martin’s, the horrors of a brutalized
childhood. Although autobiographies are eminently subjective construc-
tions and cannot be seen as primary historical sources, these works reveal
with remarkable clarity the essential truth of the historical moments
marking the beginning and the end of the long period in which Catholi-
cism was the predominant force in French-Canadian culture.
While the life and writings of Marie de l’Incarntion were exemplary,

she nevertheless shared the values – a mixture of common sense, opti-
mism, and mystical aspirations – of the other nuns who came to New
France. Three centuries later, Claire Martin’s autobiography lifts the veil
on a petrified culture, in which the source of divine love that energized
these nuns has dried up, replaced by a stifling atmosphere of rigidity,
conformity, and hypocrisy. And it is in the very heart of the Ursuline
convent that the young Claire Martin experiences the sadism and narrow-
mindedness that are symptoms of this spiritual asphyxiation. “When
I look back on all those wretched years, I realize that the thing that was
lacking in our convents was kindness,” she writes (99).
Twice in her autobiography, with her usual humour, Claire Martin
alludes to Marie de l’Incarnation or to the convent of the Ursulines as it
existed at the time of the foundress. Describing the daily schedule of the
young boarders, she implies that it had not changed since the seventeenth
century: “We were put to bed when we weren’t sleepy and had to get up
before we had slept enough […] The girls of 1660 had followed the sched-
ule, and nowhere in the convent archives was there any record of their
having suffered from it. Naturally enough, when you’ve always got the
Iroquois on your heels, dawn doesn’t come any too early. Nothing better
than to be in a vertical position. But we, who were not threatened by any-
thing […] would gladly have foregone being wrenched out of our sleep
by a great jangling bell” (75). As for the attitudes of the Ursulines of the
1920s to their foundress, a tragicomic story illustrates the impoverished
mentality of the time. Needing a miracle to bolster the cause of Marie
de l’Incarnation’s beatification, the nuns choose a disabled pupil and
announce that all the prayers and devotions of the year will be dedicated
to obtaining a cure for her from the foundress: “She was radiant. One
morning she would wake up with both legs the same size, there wasn’t the
slightest doubt about it. Prayers began immediately” (105). Unfortunately,
at the end of the year no miracle has taken place: “We multiplied our
prayers and promises, in vain. Nothing happened. The venerable found-
ress remained insensitive, and little by little Jeanne lost her smile. The
month of June found her just as she had come to us in September. All she
had got out of it was not having had a single day without hearing her infir-
mity talked about […] Every step she took was a deep disappointment,
incessantly renewed, both for herself and for the whole convent” (106).
Between these two great autobiographies, each of which sums up the
mental and moral atmosphere of its era, something has clearly happened –
a hardening, or perhaps a fatigue or fear which led to narrow-mindedness
and the tyranny of the strong over the weak, especially women and
children. However, as little Claire discovered early on regarding her

father’s power over her, “all tyrants suffer from a common weakness in
their systems: they cannot prevent those they tyrannize over from think-
ing” (22). Nor, fortunately for readers, can they prevent them from writing.
C h ap t er 9
Gro wi n g U p Poor i n M ont real ,

1 9 3 0 – 1960: Li s e Pa y e t t e , France T héoret ,
D e n i s e B om b ardi e r, M arcel l e B ri sson,
a n d A dè le L auz on
It isn’t easy to carry one’s projects to conclusion. How many times have I been
told I was ambitious? I never believed I was born for a small piece of bread. I was
naïve enough to believe that I wasn’t underprivileged, even if I was born in the
Hochelaga-Maisonneuve part of Montreal.
France Théoret, Journal pour mémoire
In Gabrielle Roy’s novel Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute), published

in 1945, critics and readers have rightly seen an unflinching but com-
passionate portrait of the inhabitants of the impoverished Montreal
neighbourhood of Saint-Henri during the Second World War. For the
first time in Quebec literature, there was a work that seemed to give voice
to the poor, particularly to girls and women, and to present their per-
spectives on reality. However, a reading of autobiographical accounts by
women who grew up in poor areas of Montreal during those years – sev-
eral of them in Saint-Henri itself – provides a more complex portrait of
the experience of poverty as lived by girls and women.
Li Se PAyette : A n ALternAtive viSi On O f

SA int-he nri
For the future television personality and cabinet minister Lise Payette,
then a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in Saint-Henri, reading Bonheur
d’occasion in 1945 was the first major blow to her self-confidence, a “cul-
tural shock” that “almost killed” her and from which it took her a long
time to recover. In the first volume of her memoirs, Des femmes d’hon-
neur: Une vie privée, 1931–1968, Payette states that she never forgave
Payette, t héoret, bombardier, brisson, and Lauz on • 211
Gabrielle Roy for writing that novel. She reveals that, during the many
years in which she hosted the popular television show Appelez-moi Lise,
she never attempted to interview the novelist, and that later, when she was
a minister in the cabinet of René Lévesque and lived in Quebec, she was
often tempted to go and knock on Roy’s door and explain to the author
all the harm the novel had done to her as an adolescent. This harm, she
writes, consisted in making her see her own life from the outside and in
confronting her with the idea that poverty was an interminable and repet-
itive cycle from which escape was almost unimaginable:
I saw my life and my world and I saw us as if in a mirror through

her characters […] I looked around me through her eyes. I saw us
poor, insignificant, lacking in ambition and culture, born for a small
piece of bread and incapable of escaping our fate, repeating the same
gestures and the same errors from generation to generation. I was
wounded in the depths of my self. I saw us as lazy, satisfied with little
and not wishing for anything else […] I was ashamed. Ashamed to
be who I was, ashamed of being from Saint-Henri, ashamed as well
of having worn stockings with runs in them, like her heroine with
whom I identified. I felt like an animal caught in the headlights of a
car. (67–8)
What made Roy’s novel offensive for Payette was its lack of corre-
spondence with the details of her own life in Saint-Henri, in which the
experience of material poverty did not exclude a strong sense of pride in
her maternal, working-class heritage and a rich cultural life that included
movies, theatrical events like Gratien Gélinas’s Fridolinades, and enthusi-
astic participation in the lively culture of 1940s radioromans, whose star
system included actors like Muriel Guilbault, Pierre Dagenais, Huguette
Oligny, and Guy Mauffette, all of whom would leave their mark on Que-
bec theatre and radio. Saint-Henri was a “tough” neighbourhood in the
1940s and ’50s, to the extent that Payette’s father, in order to safeguard
his daughters’ “virtue” (as well as his own philandering lifestyle) rented a
cottage at Lac-des-Deux-Montagnes every summer, where he deposited
his wife and daughters at the end of June and returned to pick them up
in September. But it was also a neighbourhood where there was a strong
sense of community, especially among young people. Among Payette’s
memories are Saturday night parties, with slow dancing and games of
spin-the-bottle, that went on until six in the morning when the young
people (like those in The Tin Flute) would go off to Sunday Mass together,
and ritual battles in Selby Park between the boys of Saint-Henri and the
anglophone boys from Westmount, which Lise always attended to cheer

on her friends. To help pay for her studies with the Sisters of Saint Anne,
she works on weekends behind the soda counter at the Five and Ten (like
Roy’s Florentine Lacasse). By the end of her high-school years, she and
her friends have begun to organize for a Saint-Henri young people’s cen-
tre, “a cultural space all for us, where we would be able to listen to classical
music and opera, discuss the latest books, and even have a ciné-club” (92–
3). As well, she has become her school’s representative in the progressive
Jeunesses étudiantes catholiques, where she will meet Gérard Pelletier,
Jeanne Sauvé, and other future leaders of Quebec and Canadian society.
In sum, in spite of her poverty, what Payette remembers about Saint-
Henri is a sense of community and possibility: the joy and fun of being
young, the discovery of classical music, theatre, and literature, a healthy
and comfortable relationship between adolescent boys and girls, and
a strong sense of pride, confidence, and family instilled in her by her
mother and grandmother. Small wonder, then, that, like many others
in Saint-Henri in 1945, she cannot forgive Gabrielle Roy for putting her
vision of Saint-Henri’s poverty on display for the outside world.
• • •
The five works we will examine in this chapter evoke the physical and
psychological realities of poverty as lived by young women who grew
up in Montreal in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Three of them – Payette’s
Des femmes d’honneur, Marcelle Brisson’s Le roman vrai, and Adèle Lau-
zon’s Pas si tranquille: Souvenirs – are memoirs; the two others – Denise
Bombardier’s Une enfance à l’eau bénite and France Théoret’s Une belle
éducation (Such a Good Education1) – are autobiographical novels.
Although poverty is linked to social class in all these works, it is per-
ceived and lived differently in each of them. Unlike Lise Payette, who
experiences poverty with pride, Denise Bombardier experiences it with
shame and dreams constantly of escaping it. For Adèle Lauzon, poverty
gives rise to a rebellious spirit and a struggle for social justice, while
for France Théoret it is a paralyzing force: the day-to-day experience of
belonging to a group which cruelly stigmatizes anyone – particularly
any girl – who dares to aspire to a life beyond its narrow confines. For
Marcelle Brisson, poverty is the shared experience of many who lived
through the Depression years: an unemployed father, annual moves
because the family can no longer afford to pay the rent, and the recur-
ring spectacle of men lining up to get their social assistance cheques. In
each of the works, poverty and social class are linked to other factors
Payette, t héoret, b ombardier, brisson, and Lauz on • 213
which define the identity of the authors: being a girl in a culture where
gender roles are strictly defined and maintained, but also that of being
francophone and Catholic in a city where power and money belong to
anglophone Canadians. A final factor, common to all the authors and
perhaps the key one in their journeys toward individuation, is the fact
that each is the eldest child in her family.
The autobiographies analyzed here challenge several stereotypes of
poverty and life in French Canada in the three decades before the Quiet
Revolution, and the distinctiveness of the voices within them shows that
growing up in poverty is an individual experience, strongly influenced by
culture, politics, gender, and family background. In the history of wom-
en’s personal writings in Quebec, they are the first examples of life writing
by nonbourgeois women, speaking of the experiences of groups like the
poor and unemployed of the Depression years or the francophone work-
ers who tried to make a living at a time when English was the language
of work in Montreal. The authors are among the many children from
these milieux who became contributors to and benefactors of the Quiet
Revolution.
Three of the authors – Lise Payette, Denise Bombardier, and Adèle
Lauzon – became journalists in print or on television after 1960. Mar-
celle Brisson, after twelve years as a cloistered nun, became a professor
of philosophy, while France Théoret is a poet and novelist. All five grew
up in what were then working-class areas of Montreal: Hochelaga-
Maisonneuve, Saint-Henri, Parc-Extension, and the northern parts of the
city. The works by Payette, Lauzon, and Théoret are wholly or partly situ-
ated in Saint-Henri, and the striking contrasts in their representations of
the area owe as much to differences in family background as to changes
which took place in Saint-Henri over the decades. Lise Payette and Adèle
Lauzon were both born in Saint-Henri in 1931, but Lauzon’s memoir
begins when she is eight or nine and her parents, in a change of social sta-
tus that dramatically illustrates the class mobility of the period, moved
to the neighbouring district of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and enrolled their
daughter in the upper-class convent school of Villa Maria. Théoret, born
in 1942 in the district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, moved with her family
to Saint-Henri in 1956, at the age of fourteen. Her novel, which is clearly
autobiographical, begins with the arrival of her protagonist Évelyne’s fam-
ily in Saint-Henri in 1956, when Évelyne is also fourteen. As for Denise
Bombardier, born in 1941, she grew up in the multiethnic neighbourhood
of Parc-Extension, north of the Plateau Mont-Royal. Marcelle Brisson,
born in 1929, lived in several different lodgings with her family in the area
farther north, near Parc Jarry and Avenue Christophe-Colomb.
• • •
At the beginning of her essay, Remnants of Nation, an important work on

women’s poverty narratives, Roxanne Rimstead cites Paulo Friere’s reflec-
tion that the poor must find a way to value their own thoughts about the
world over and against the dominant cultural discourses they have often
internalized.2 In pre–Quiet Revolution Quebec, the idea that poverty was
the divinely decreed lot of the French-Canadian people was frequently
repeated from the pulpit and passed on from generation to generation
in a sort of folk wisdom of patience and resignation: On est nés pour un
petit pain, “We were born for a small piece of bread.” In Denise Bombar-
dier’s Une enfance à l’eau bénite, this idea is articulated by the father, with a
profound self-hatred with which his daughter must come to terms before
she can acquire a sense of confidence in her own perceptions of herself
and of the world. A frustrated and cynical hydroelectric technician who
works for an English employer, he constantly reminds his family that “the
English are our masters” and shows his contempt for his compatriots by
referring to them as “Culbécquois.” Bombardier’s hilarious account of the
alcohol-fuelled trips her dysfunctional family would occasionally make
around Montreal in her aunt’s car provides an economic map of Montreal
and of the cultural associations attached to different levels of wealth. As
they ogle at the houses of the anglophone nouveaux riches of Ville Mont-
Royal with their picture windows and impeccably manicured lawns, the
aunt observes: “They’re rich but they look stupid” (118). In Outremont, lit-
tle Denise discovers that there are people of her “race” who are as rich as
the English, but is shocked by her aunt’s second-hand gossip about their
immorality. In Westmount, her father contemptuously explains that the
owners of the mansions they are driving by also own all the forests, mines,
and lakes of the province: “Duplessis, the premier, gives them the whole
province and you, the ‘Culbéquois,’ continue to elect him.” And he goes
on: “Keep speaking ‘culbéquois.’ Keep learning the catechism. The English
are happy. You’re playing into their hands” (120). Finally they go down the
mountain and across the railway tracks into Saint-Henri, where the father
tells them: “This is where you belong. This is what French Canadians are
like! Look how happy they are on their balconies with a cross on their
neck and a dozen children in the house!” (120).
Autobiographies can confirm the stereotypes we have of a culture
(although they always add complexity to them), and two of the works
examined here – those of Lise Payette and Denise Bombardier – do
indeed reinforce the familiar image of the French-Canadian family cen-
tered around a strong mother, with a weak, irresponsible, negative, or
absent father. In Théoret’s novel, the father is, on the contrary, too present:
a grocer and later owner of a sleazy hotel-restaurant north of Montreal,
he obliges his children to work as “slaves” in his establishments and
watches them closely in the hours they spend at home. Only Marcelle
Brisson and Adèle Lauzon have positive memories of their father and rec-
ognize the importance of his influence on their life choices. Nonetheless,
in all the autobiographies, it is the father who controls the purse strings.
Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove, which contains a heart-breaking scene
describing the terror of Claire’s mother when she must ask her husband
for money,3 offers the prototype of this recurring model, which is even
present in Marcelle Brisson’s work, despite the fact that it is the author’s
mother who supports the family by gambling, while her husband is
unemployed. In Des femmes d’honneur, Lise Payette reveals that her father
gambled away his entire weekly salary during the night her mother was
giving birth to Lise, her first child. A delivery man and later a bus driver,
he gives his wife a small amount of money each week, out of which she
must pay the rent, food, electricity, heat, and clothing bills. Payette’s mem-
ories of poverty are not memories of deprivation, however, thanks to the
optimism and strength of her mother and her maternal grandmother.
“When the cupboards were empty, we went to eat at my grandmother
Marie-Louise’s place, where the door was always open” (23). When the
electricity is cut off because she cannot pay the bill, Lise’s mother puts a
candle on the table and serves her daughters pancakes with molasses or
French toast, “and for us those meals were transformed into celebrations”
(23). Although she had worked as a secretary before marriage, her mother
chooses, as her own mother had done, to work as a cleaning woman in the
houses of Westmount so she can be at home when her daughters return
from school. However, like grandmother Marie-Louise, she works only
for francophone families, claiming that she can accept taking orders if
necessary, but only if they are given in French!
fr AnC e th ÉO ret: the trAP Of POverty
The striking contrast between Payette’s representation of poverty and

that of France Théoret, who lived in Saint-Henri a decade after Payette
and attended the same high school as she had, suggests that poverty is a
relative condition, not entirely reducible to economic circumstances,
and that it can be most oppressive when those who are condemned to it
actively perpetuate its rules and injustices. Une belle éducation (Such a
Good Education) is a stark and uncompromising evocation of the abso-
lute desolation of poverty, paradoxically beautiful in its precision and
unsentimentality. The main section of the novel covers the period from
the arrival of the family in Saint-Henri in 1954 to the end of the protago-
nist Évelyne’s high school studies in June 1958, when she moves with her
family to Saint-Colomban, a village in the Laurentians, where her father
has bought a seedy hotel and bar. Two subsequent sections bring the book
to its conclusion: in the first, set in June 1968, we see Évelyne at the end
of her university studies and in the second, situated in October 1985, we
learn that she has become a writer.
For those who are familiar with the recurrent images of Théoret’s pre-
vious work – the young girl listening with terror to the rats behind the
walls of her bedroom, the tyrannical father enraged by the fact that his
daughter is studying Latin, the almost mad mother who emerges from
the bathroom after a miscarriage and, without a word of explanation,
brutally asks her daughter, “Do you want to see the fetus?” – the autobi-
ographical nature of Such a Good Education leaves no room for doubt.
The omnipresent reality of poverty in the work creates a claustropho-
bic, silent, and paralyzed universe, shot through with repressed rage and
hostility: a moral and psychological prison which mirrors the oppres-
sive ugliness of the material conditions in which the characters live. The
tiny, dark, rat-infested house they inhabit is bare of ornament and cut off
from the community by the mother’s decree that the front door be perma-
nently locked and that there be no contact with the neighbours. When her
daughters begin to develop friendships at school, their mother tells them
they do not need friends, that all the teenagers of the neighbourhood are
“juvenile delinquents” who will end up in reform school, and that their
proper role is to stay at home and obey their parents.
In an earlier, explicitly autobiographical work, Journal pour mémoire,4
Théoret speaks of the intense need for beauty she felt as an adolescent and
the painful, almost unbearable sense of deprivation caused by the lack of
beauty in her surroundings: “I was captivated, I had the cult of beauty […]
I couldn’t live without it. My desire for it was so great that reality seemed
sad and painful to me […] Beauty was a lifting of my shadow, my por-
tion of unlivable eternity, the image that I disappeared into.” From its
first sentence on, Such a Good Education immerses the reader in a similar
atmosphere: “The moment we arrive I notice how bare the street is and
that there are no trees” (3). Ugliness shows itself brutally in the two-sto-
rey lodging Évelyne’s father has rented without even consulting his wife:
in the basement, a kitchen lit by a bare light bulb where no daylight pen-
etrates, a living room area in which they install a television and a rickety
sofa bed, and an oil furnace with pipes extending to the ceiling; on the
main floor, bedrooms without doors, and a toilet. From the perspective
of the hypersensitive Évelyne the reader experiences the humiliation of

such a lack of privacy: the need to wash in front of everyone in the kitchen
sink, with cold water; the impossibility of getting away from her parents’
constant arguments about money; the unpleasant odours; the regular
appearance of huge rats which her younger brothers, in a rage and need
for violence they will carry with them for life, catch and hurl against the
brick wall in the asphalt courtyard behind the house.
Despite the precarious financial situation of his family, Évelyne’s father
does not see himself as poor. On the contrary, he considers himself a
member of the middle class. Obsessed by money, he fanatically espouses
capitalist ideology: “Money is the true indicator of intelligence […] He
is not one of the losers, he is a winner […] He is after a success story, he
has an American soul, he believes in business […] My father compares
commerce to conquest” (68). He has chosen to move his family to Saint-
Henri because he believes there is more money to be made in a “poor
neighbourhood,” where people have less choice as to where they shop for
the necessities. Obese and constantly complaining, he spends his time in
front of the television and barely speaks to his children. His anger is par-
ticularly directed at his eldest daughter Évelyne, whose intelligence and
timidity he resents, and whom he constantly reproaches for her refusal to
work in his store. Évelyne’s mother is equally authoritarian, silent, and full
of repressed anger. Proclaiming her hatred of the “dark, smelly and cold”
apartment in which she is forced to live, she refuses to cook, clean, do the
washing, or put curtains on the windows.
In spite of her parents’ middle-class aspirations, Évelyne’s life as she
enters her high-school years is one of poverty and unremitting duty:
returning home at lunchtime every day to heat up canned food for her
younger brothers, who have already learned to laugh at her and taunt her
with the word “servant”; putting up with the unpleasant smells and the
filth of the house, grabbing a quick half hour at the kitchen table to do
her Latin homework, and admiring the fashionable clothes she sees in
the boutiques on Rue Notre-Dame without any hope of acquiring them.
All of this becomes “a habit, a way of being. I cannot imagine it being any
different […] I am learning to want only what I have” (36–7). Like Floren-
tine Lacasse in The Tin Flute, although more consciously, she sees herself
repeating the destiny of her mother: “My mother’s voice traverses my ear,
deposits in me the idea that life is unhappy, that women are inevitably
subject to their husbands’ authority, that they give themselves up to be of
service to others” (21).5
Like many of the other mothers in Quebec women’s autobiogra-
phies, Évelyne’s is a controlling and intimidating figure. Forbidding all
conversation at the dinner table, she insists on good table manners and
total obedience, reminding her children on the rare occasions the family
goes to visit relatives that she has given them “a good education” and that
they must not disgrace her. It is against this education in submissiveness,
strongly reinforced by the nuns at school, that Évelyne’s arduous struggle
to acquire an autonomous identity is set. Faithful to an “inner voice” that
whispers to her that the only way out for her is through “learning,” she
embarks on a tenacious, step-by-step construction of self that will even-
tually take her to university, in spite of the opposition of her parents and
the need to live in conditions of extreme poverty, which she hides from
her fellow students. Although her university degrees will open the doors
to the middle class for her, she will never forget the poverty which has
defined her existence. Once she has embarked on her career as a writer,
she vows to be true, in everything she writes, to its reality and its devastat-
ing consequences.
deni S e bOM bA rdier : Se e ing One Se Lf

AS e XCePt i OnAL
While Lise Payette almost breezes through poverty, strengthened by

the pride instilled in her by her mother and grandmother, and France
Théoret’s protagonist gradually escapes from it thanks to her tenacity,
Denise Bombardier’s autobiographical novel Une enfance à l’eau bénite (A
childhood bathed in holy water) offers a very different perspective on the
experience of growing up poor. Full of humour and irony, her first-person
narrative recounts the childhood and adolescence of an unnamed heroine
obviously modelled on the author, who learns from an early age to hide
her family’s poverty and “play the game” of bourgeois society. This story,
which could have been subtitled “Learning to Be a Snob,” is remarkable
for its humour and honesty. Bombardier’s narrator/heroine is an intelli-
gent and talented girl who is motivated to win at any cost in order to raise
herself above a milieu which everything in her social environment has
taught her to disavow.
From its very first sentence – “I made my First Communion in a state
of mortal sin” (9) – Bombardier’s narrative is propelled forward by her
sense of being “unique, exceptional” (9). Like France Théoret’s Évelyne,
Bombardier’s protagonist lives her Catholic childhood and adolescence
with a constant sense of guilt. Unlike Évelyne, however, she experiences
that guilt not as paralyzing but as “stimulating”: “If I am the greatest of
sinners in God’s eyes, I have to be the best in face of the adults who matter
to me: my parents and my teachers. I will reach my goal by my scholarly
accomplishments” (9). With two Irish families living on her street, the
unnamed narrator (whom I will call “Denise”) quickly learns English and
chooses to speak it with her mother in the elevators of the department
stores downtown: “It is absolutely crucial that no one should guess my ori-
gins” (10). Embarrassed that her father does not go to church, she hides
the fact from her teachers and classmates through a series of ever-more
elaborate lies.
Through an alliance with her mother, who projects onto her daugh-
ter her own unfulfilled dreams, Denise embarks on a journey that will be
a denial of her class and cultural origins. Enrolled at the age of three in
diction classes, an important part of growing up for many young Québé-
cois in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, she soon comes to see the connection
between “speaking well, being educated, and being rich” (18). At school,
her piety and her perfect French make her the favourite of all the teachers
and she is often hated by her classmates, to the point that, in grade five,
they complain about her to the principal: “We’re sick of having our French
corrected. Of being told we have to talk like the teacher’s pet” (96–7).
After school she prefers to play with her anglophone neighbours rather
than with the francophones, who make fun of the way she speaks. By the
age of eight or nine she has come to see the French language, even when
spoken well, as “a language of inferiors” (18).
Like Théoret’s character, Denise is constantly made aware of her fam-
ily’s economic status by the violent quarrels of her parents about money:
“Insults and cries accompanied the moment when he would furiously
throw a few dollar bills on the table, never enough, and my mother would
gather them up with a discouraged air. As if we were despoiling him of
something we had no right to. I hated the terrifying power he had over
us […] and I was humiliated by the obsessive role money was coming
more and more to play in my life” (195). However, her mother, by steal-
ing money from her husband’s pockets, manages to sew dresses that make
her daughter look like “a little princess,” attracting admiring glances from
people on the streetcar each Sunday when the children and their mother
visit their maternal grandparents.
As already observed, poverty is relative and exists, to some extent at
least, in the eye of the beholder. Denise never sees herself as poor: the
poor, for her, are the unfortunate children in her school who are referred
to as les queues, who sit in the back of the class smelling of urine and are
constantly humiliated by the nuns: “When they had an accident, Sister of
the Holy Martyrs would make them clean up their mess and leave them
with underclothes stuck to their behinds until the end of the class” (37).
When Denise herself has a similar accident, the teacher makes one of the
poor girls clean up after her while she consoles the tearful Denise and
takes her off to find her a clean pair of bloomers. As she returns to her
seat, Denise feels both humiliated about what has happened and happy
at the treatment she has received, but lacks the courage to look the poor
queue,who has been forced to clean up after her, in the eyes. In the school-
yard, she refuses to participate in games if any of the queues are present:
“And as we, the smartest in the class, are popular, all our friends agree
to kick them out of the group. It happened in front of the teachers, who
weren’t the slightest bit upset. When Mlle Tremblay is preparing our souls
for the bimonthly confession, she asks us: ‘Did you love your neighbour as
yourself?’ It would never have occurred to me to feel guilty for my odious
treatment of these poor queues. My neighbour means those who are equal
to me. They are my inferiors” (46).
Before she reaches high school, Denise has perfected the art of “pass-
ing for rich.” She never invites friends to her house, and, after the diction
classes, she asks the wealthy parents of her fellow students to drop her off
a few blocks from home, in a ”better” part of the neighbourhood. But the
older she gets, the more she feels trapped by the falseness of her situation,
isolated in a world in which she cannot reveal herself to anyone: “I am
ashamed of those I love, and, by projecting me into a milieu that is above
my own, my mother has involuntarily trapped me in an unbearable soli-
tude” (62). Seeking to escape her crisis of identity, she throws herself into
a mystical and guilt-ridden religiosity which only increases her anguish.
Fortunately, around the same time, she also discovers books. In all the
autobiographical works we have examined in this chapter, reading is a
powerful means of transformation and liberation, enabling the protago-
nists to envisage other models and ways of living than the ones presented
to them at home and at school. Bombardier’s observations regarding
the mistrust of books and ideas in the culture around her echo those of
Théoret, and also those of Claire Martin, who had been dismayed by her
total ignorance at the end of her school years three decades earlier. Like
the other two writers, Bombardier describes the immense and solitary
effort required in order to face up to this hostility to education and cul-
ture: “The network of public libraries was little developed. And I hardly
knew anyone who owned any books. In order to read, I needed to have a
will that was greater than the apathy around me […] People didn’t trust
those who were too well educated. They were afraid of them” (64–5, 68).
At the age of ten or eleven, when Denise is starting to search for a direc-
tion of her own, her father’s ideas, of which she had been so ashamed
when she was younger, take on a new meaning for her. Influenced in
spite of herself by his never-ending criticisms of what she is being taught
in school, she wonders for the first time whether “dying scalped by the
Indians for the glory of God” is really her ambition in life. At eleven,
exhausted by the effort of constantly measuring herself against the rich
and confident students in her diction classes, she asks her mother to with-
draw her from them (112). Gradually, over the course of her adolescence,
she frees herself from the prejudices of her milieu and develops a new
respect for her heretical father who, she realizes at the time of writing, was
a neonationalist before his time.
MA rCeLLe bri SSOn : eSC APi ng vertiC ALLy
Whether experienced with pride (Payette), pain (Théoret), or snobbery

(Bombardier), poverty is always something one seeks to escape, and the
autobiography of Marcelle Brisson, Le roman vrai, illustrates how few
ways of escape there were for young women of poor backgrounds in the
1930s and 1940s. The book revolves around an obsessive question: Brisson
asks herself how she could have been capable of making the monumen-
tal error of entering the cloister at the age of twenty and staying there
for twelve years before returning to society. The echoes of The Tin Flute
are numerous in all these autobiographies, and when reading Brisson it
is hard not to think of Yvonne Lacasse, Florentine’s younger sister, who
escapes into religion in order to avoid her destiny of poverty. Remem-
bering her relationship with her mother, Brisson discovers an unsatisfied
need of tenderness and physical warmth which must have been at the
origin of her oceanic desire for love: “Much later, I understood this dissat-
isfaction as the sadness of not having had a tender mother […] It was as
if neither she nor I knew how to express our love by gestures: she treated
me like a sensible big girl” (25). At the same time, she precisely identifies
the social conditions and sexist attitudes which limited the possibilities
for young women of her class: “What kind of a future was reserved for the
girls of my neighbourhood? Becoming exemplary mothers? Moving into
the bourgeoisie by acquiring a husband they would support as best they
could? […] Being a single mother like Simone or like my cousin Estelle
who regularly took her child to the daycare on Côte-de-Liesse?” (66–7).
In spite of scholarly successes which gain her access to an education rare
for girls of her class, she notes the few professional possibilities and the
absence of female models for the young women of her generation: “Not
one of us was planning on a career, for there was no professional future for
girls, even of the bourgeoisie” (75).
And yet Brisson shows little interest in the Church or religious senti-
ment during her childhood and adolescence. Born in 1929, “the year of
the stock market crash,” she is the first child of a “couple of modest work-
ers, employees of a laundry: Augusta Hétu, a sorter, and Augustin Brisson,
a delivery man” (15–16). They are a harmonious couple, and when Augus-
tin loses his job as a result of the crash they soon enter into an economic
relationship unusual for the period. Encouraged by his wife, who adores
taking risks, Augustin opens a small restaurant which soon goes bank-
rupt. Later, he survives as best he can by doing small jobs for relatives and
neighbours, while his wife, of Amerindian descent, indulges her passion
for gambling, often spending entire nights in clandestine gambling estab-
lishments with little Marcelle beside her in a cradle. Two other children
– boys – are born during these years, and Marcelle feels more and more
excluded from the chaotic and colourful group of people who make up
her mother’s world. When she starts school, however, she will begin to
discover a world of culture and knowledge in which she will feel more at
ease than in the noise and confined space of the family home.
The reassuring world of school also offers a refuge from the tensions
and worry created by poverty. When Augusta wins at gambling, the
bills are paid and an atmosphere of celebration reigns in the house, but,
between 1928 and 1940, unable to pay the rent, the Brissons move eight
times. Another echo of The Tin Flute in Brisson’s work is the description
of the annual moving day, on which her father borrows a cart and horse,
and the children and all their cousins participate in loading and unload-
ing the furniture. Brisson remembers it as a joyful event, for her mother
prepares sandwiches, the children drink KIK soda pop, and all are buoyed
up by their hopes for a better apartment than the one they are leaving.
But the new place always turns out to be worse than its predecessor: the
Brissons will even be evicted from two of them by the municipal Depart-
ment of Health. Several of these lodgings are infested with rats: “A terrible
memory, the rats… [they] lived in our sheds. They roamed around on the
porches looking for the garbage bag. We even saw them on the clothes
line and on the electric wires” (43). And, outside the house, she observes
the daily spectacle of misery: “On our street, near Rue Saint-Vallier, there
was a soup kitchen. I saw men – never women – lining up long before it
opened. My mother explained to me that these unfortunate people were
poorer than we were. No matter what, even if we had nothing to eat, we
would not join the line. She wouldn’t accept boxes from the Saint Vincent
de Paul either. She didn’t want to depend on public charity” (42).
Like Payette, Bombardier, and Théoret, Brisson gains entry through
her studies into a larger and freer space than the cramped household, a
world in which, thanks to her good grades, she will finally merit her
mother’s admiration. She quickly acquires a passion for reading, perhaps
inherited from her parents: her mother scandalizes the neighbours by

reading popular novels instead of doing the housework, and her father,
despite only three years of schooling, is a great lover of newspapers: “I
devoured my first book in two days, reading without stopping, even while
I was walking on Rue Saint-Vallier” (45). Thanks to the school library,
she reads Geneviève de Brabant,6 the Comtesse de Ségur,7 biographies,
adventure stories, lives of saints. At the end of primary school, she benefits
from a situation which is entirely new for girls of poor neighbourhoods:
the Sisters of Sainte-Croix have just opened a day school, with tuition of
five dollars a month, which will allow their graduates access to the cours
classique.8 For the Brisson family, five dollars is also the amount of their
weekly unemployment cheque, but Marcelle’s mother does not hesitate:
“I would go to the Sainte-Croix High School” (49). At eleven, she uses
her mother’s library card to borrow books by Corneille, Racine, Molière,
Dante, Shakespeare, and Gœthe. On the streetcar, she and her school
friends entertain the other passengers by reciting passages from Romeo
and Juliet, Phèdre, or Le malade imaginaire aloud (61). In 1945, the Sisters
of Sainte-Croix perform another “democratic act,” opening the last four
years of the cours classique to day students, and allowing their best stu-
dents to skip a year and enter directly into the final year, fine arts. At last,
“girls of modest origin could dream of going to university” (72).
During adolescence, Brisson drifts into a sort of idealistic mysticism
made up of love of nature, poetry, and travel, a young Catholic girl’s
romanticism similar to that of Denise Bombardier at the same age: “I was
penetrating to the deepest levels of my self, to the point at which I fused
with nature and felt reborn in harmony with the origins of the world”
(62). A course on Paul Valéry’s poem “Le cimetière marin” (“The Grave-
yard by the Sea”), offered to girls on Saturday mornings at the University
of Montreal, awakens in her a desire to see the ocean, and soon she is off
with friends to hitchhike around the Gaspésie and, the following sum-
mer, the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area. By the end of the war, literary and
philosophical works are again crossing the Atlantic, and Brisson, now
enrolled at the University of Montreal, is reading and discussing works
by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Gide, Antoine Saint-Exupéry,
Jacques Maritain, and Emmanuel Mounier.
The passion for ideas, travel, freedom, and the absolute, all of which
made Brisson identify with Jack Kerouac and hear the call of the road,
attract her to the idea of a career of writing or journalism, but she is dis-
couraged by the few female models in these professions. Despite grave
religious doubts, she allows herself to be convinced by her professors
and her spiritual director that she must “interpret this call of the road
in a symbolic way” and consider the possibility of a contemplative reli-

gious vocation. “Lacking models in my family, my environment, in the
Quebec of the time, I adhered to what the Church was presenting me
through its saints and its mystics. It was a world of excess, another form
of my desire for the absolute” (108). In September 1949, she enters the
Benedictine community of Sainte-Marie des Deux-Montagnes, and the
obligatory dowry is paid by an anonymous donor. She remains there until
1962. Reflecting later on the motivations which led her to this choice, she
evokes the poverty and the claustrophobia of the family environment: “I
can think of a very down-to-earth answer: I had no place of my own at
home. Barely a pullout chair-bed to sleep on for five or six hours a night.
I got up early in the morning, washed, got dressed quietly, and left for the
university […] My parents would never have allowed me to live outside
the home” (109–10). It is clear that Brisson’s decision to take the veil, a dra-
matic shrinking of her immense desire for life, is intimately linked to the
fact of being a girl and to the poverty of her place of origin.
Ad ÈL e LAuZO n : A Qu eS t f Or J uSti Ce
Unlike the previously discussed books, Adèle Lauzon’s Pas si tranquille

describes an experience of poverty that is relatively short, thanks to her
father’s financial success, but marks the author for a lifetime because
of the stigmatization to which she will later be subject in the bourgeois
milieu where the family moves. Another contrast with the other works is
the fact that Lauzon is the daughter of a strong, loving, and open-minded
father, who encourages her independence. A respected businessman, he
becomes the president of the Club Richelieu (a club for members of the
francophone elite) and during the 1940s, a friend of Maurice Duplessis,
premier of Quebec during an ultraconservative time known as the “great
darkness” (1936–39; 1944–59). Throughout these same years, Adèle, a
student at the University of Montreal, is becoming known for her radi-
cal articles in the student newspaper, Le Quartier latin, in particular for
an article supporting the workers in the famous Asbestos strike of 1949,
which polarized Quebec and is seen by many historians as a prelude to
the Quiet Revolution. When Duplessis tells Adèle’s father that his daugh-
ter should “learn to be quiet,” her father replies: “My daughter thinks
what she likes and writes what she likes” (27). The contrast between this
broadmindedness and the fury of Théoret’s father when he learns that his
daughter is studying Latin could not be more pronounced.
The story of the social ascension of Lauzon’s father – and how class
snobbery condemns his daughter to being looked down on as “the
daughter of a garage owner” for years afterwards – provides a rare look

into the class mobility that was possible in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec,
as well as the condescension shown to the poor by nouveaux riches who
had themselves succeeded in escaping poverty in previous generations.
Born in Saint-Henri, Lauzon’s father was the son of a baker and the sev-
enth of nine children. Thanks to a scholarship which destined him for the
priesthood, he was educated by the Franciscans at Collège Séraphique in
Trois-Rivières, where he studied Latin and Greek and developed a life-
long love of literature, particularly of Victor Hugo (his daughter Adèle
was named after Hugo’s daughter). During his college years, Lauzon
decided that he wanted to be a lawyer, but was obliged to abandon his
studies at the age of seventeen, when his father, who had lost his job, fell
into a serious depression. His entrepreneurial genius manifests itself for
the first time when he rents a commercial space in Saint-Henri and hires
his father as a baker; within a few years, “Lauzon Bread” will be delivered
to homes in many districts of Montreal. His next breakthrough (still in the
1930s) grew out of an idea that came to him after he lent a car to a friend
for a few days in exchange for a small fee. Soon after, he decides to buy
another car and rent it out, and, within a few years, he has become the
owner of the first car-rental operation in Quebec. In 1947, he establishes
the Lauzon Driving School and becomes the host of a new radio program,
Les Lauzon de Conduite (Driving lessons/Lauzons), in which he explained
the rules of the road to the thousands of new car owners in 1950s Quebec.
Certainly more privileged than the other autobiographers, Adèle
Lauzon grew up in a house where there was a profusion of books, where
girls were seen as the equals of boys, and where there was great respect
for French-Canadian culture. As a young girl, she accompanied her father
to a lecture given by Henri Bourassa, Quebec journalist and politician,
and she recalls that her first political act was that of writing “vote no”
in chalk on the walls of her neighbourhood during the 1942 campaign
against conscription. Her memories of shopping with her mother in the
department stores of downtown Montreal recall Gabrielle Roy’s recollec-
tions of similar shopping trips with her mother in Winnipeg,9 and offer
a striking contrast with Denise Bombardier’s account of how she and
her mother tried to pass for anglophones in the same stores. Like Gabri-
elle Roy, Lauzon is embarrassed by her mother’s insistence on speaking
French – “I thought she was brave but I was ashamed because it always
led to scenes that put me into a panic, as I was extremely shy” (12) – but
the example of her mother’s resistance and insistence on her right to
speak French will mark her for life. Her nationalism is strengthened by
the tense relationship she senses between her family and their anglophone
neighbours in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce: “I was […] humiliated by the

feeling that the English were masters everywhere, and that we were only
servants, sometimes too complacent” (12). At the same time, like the other
Villa Maria students, she is attracted by American fashion magazines and
movies, and sometimes speaks English with her classmates to prove her
sophistication: “English got us out of the suffocating world of the nuns,
the Church, sin, and mediocrity. Using the English language transformed
our grey landscape into a glittering background” (18).
Like the other authors, Lauzon sees reading, and in particular, cer-
tain books she read in her youth, as having been extremely influential in
the choices she made in life. Her passion for social justice originated, she
claims, in her reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the age of
fourteen, through a series of comical errors. Having heard that one of her
heroes, the actor Pierre Dagenais (also admired by Lise Payette) will be
the star of a radio version of the novel, she decides to listen to it, expect-
ing a popular murder mystery. Overwhelmed by the story, she searches
for the novel, impossible to find in Quebec in the 1940s, but finally obtains
it thanks to her father’s friendship with Henri Tranquille, a bookseller
who played an important role in progressive thought during the Dup-
lessis years. For Adèle Lauzon, Raskolnikov represents a combination of
strength and compassion which anticipates her own predilection, later in
life, for radical and even violent political action: “It was like a phantasm
of omnipotence which would compensate for my feeling of being weak,
small, dependent, French Canadian and, worst of all, a girl” (13). Her pen-
chant for social justice increases at Villa Maria, where the parents of her
schoolmates, almost all of them wealthy francophones from Westmount,
refuse to let their daughters associate with “the daughter of a garage
owner.” (“You invited that into the house?” says one of the mothers on see-
ing Adèle in her living room.) Reflecting on this rejection, so painful for
her as an adolescent, Lauzon claims that, rather than making her hate the
rich or feel ashamed of her parents, it gave her “an acute consciousness of
my dignity and that of my parents, a sensitivity to humiliation that would
later influence my convictions. What mattered most from then on was
respect. The respect owed to me and my loved ones, and that I would have
for others. Respect for the intrinsic value of each person and not for the
fact of their belonging to a social class, race, religion, or ethnicity” (16–17).
This respect for the dignity of all human beings, regardless of their class,
nationality, religion, or ethnicity, will lead Lauzon, over the course of her
years of study in France, to the Communist Party and to a young member
of that party, Michel Van Schendel, whom she will marry and bring back
to Montreal in the late 1950s.
• • •
Like many other women’s autobiographies, these five works are accounts
of the road travelled and the obstacles overcome in a process leading to
self-acceptance and the confidence of self-expression. In each case, it is a
road which obliges the author/narrator/protagonist to navigate the often
contradictory realities of class, language, religion, culture, and gender,
at a time when economic and social success was reserved for men and
demanded a mastery of the English language. In these circumstances,
learning to be true to one’s self and finding values other than submission
to live by were a considerable challenge for young women, whose entire
education and experience were directed towards preparing them for the
roles of wife and mother.
Taken together, these autobiographical accounts contain images and
themes that evoke a common reality: that of school uniforms, Catholic
guilt, diction classes, and idealistic dreams, to name only a few. Despite
the limits of the convent school educations described, one cannot help
being impressed by the vast culture to which these schools opened the
doors for their young pupils. For all of the writers, although the right to
a university education was far from being a reality, books and access to
knowledge were of key importance. In a 2012 column in Le Devoir, Denise
Bombardier recalled the extreme financial hardship of her years as a stu-
dent at the University of Montreal, and the opposition of her father to her
studies: “My mother stole dollar bills from my father’s pants pockets and
gave them to me parsimoniously, for my father believed that advanced
studies for girls were a waste of money. May God rest his soul!”10 France
Théoret lived in a similar if not worse state of poverty during her years
at the same university, a victim of the same paternal opposition and
tormented by the need to hide her poverty from her fellow students.
Bombardier describes the situation of being poor at university in the
1960s as that of feeling like an impostor: “One fact was very clear to us,
the poor who had arrived at university surrounded by our petit bourgeois
contemporaries. We felt like impostors and, at the same time, like the rep-
resentatives of the “people” to whom our classmates from Outremont and
Notre-Dame-de-Grâce were so devoted. I think that our destitute finan-
cial state contributed to our determination to succeed.”11
However, one is equally struck by the differences between the percep-
tions, choices, and roads taken by these five women, differences that can
be explained as much by their individual temperaments and family sit-
uations as by their socio-economic condition. The contrast between the
experiences of Lise Payette and France Théoret at the same school, run
by the Sisters of Sainte-Anne in Saint-Henri, ten years apart, is a striking

example of such individual differences. While Payette emphasizes the
encouragement she received from the nuns after her traumatic reading
of The Tin Flute, Théoret describes an education entirely devoted to the
values of piety and submission, well summed up in the scene where, after
excelling in a provincial test, she is called to the principal’s office and given
a lecture on the sin of pride and the dangers of aspiring to a fate outside
the norms of her class.
Among the first examples we possess of personal writings by women
who are not members of the upper classes, these works offer a new and
complex perspective on the experience of young girls who grew up in
poor neighbourhoods during the three decades before the Quiet Rev-
olution. In addition to revealing the tenacity of these young women and
their passion for knowledge and dignity, they throw light on the milieux
in which these women grew up and on the educational system which, in
spite of its faults, was an instrumental part of their journey towards auton-
omy. In spite of their differences, all these authors demonstrate the ability
to look at their lives as a totality and make sense of it that is the sine qua
non of autobiographical writing.
C h apt e r 1 0
G i v i n g B i r th to On e sel f i n Wri t i ng: T he

S tr u g gle wi t h t he M ot her
So what is a mother? Someone who makes the stereotypical gestures she’s been
told to make, and who has no personal language or identity. How can we, the
daughters, have a personal connection and shape an identity for ourselves in
relation to someone who is nothing more than a function?
Luce Irigaray, The Bodily Encounter with the Mother
Two autobiographical films made by Quebec women in the last twenty

years capture the dramatic stakes of the relationship which, for many
women, is the most intimate and intense of their lifetime: the link
between mother and daughter. In Tu as crié LET ME GO (You cried LET
ME GO), Anne-Claire Poirier’s final film, she mourns her daughter Yanne,
a young drug addict who was murdered in October 1992, at the age of
twenty-six. Transcending her own personal grief, she explores the mys-
tery of the last years of her daughter’s life through interviews with the
latter’s friends, many of whom became drug addicts or prostitutes in an
apparent rebellion against the values of their parents’ generation. The film
is a critical examination of the state of Quebec society as well as of Poir-
ier’s fractious relationship with her daughter. By means of family films
and photos, she revisits the past and attempts to weigh her own portion of
responsibility for the troubled relationship which her daughter perceived
as an unacceptable constraint on her freedom. The other film, Trente tab-
leaux (Thirty images), by Paule Baillargeon, explores the tangled web of
the mother-daughter relationship from the point of view of the daughter
(Baillargeon), and, in so doing, traces a portrait of the evolution of Que-
bec society over the last fifty years. Using photos, animations, videos, and
film clips, Baillargeon presents the scattered fragments of her life: the little
girl whose dream of being an artist is demolished by her mother’s decree

that she has no talent; the young actress whose improvisations betray the
presence of an immense repressed rage; the filmmaker whose feminist
film La cuisine rouge (The red kitchen) is judged to be so scandalous that
Baillargeon’s career grinds to a halt; and, finally, Baillargeon as a mother,
filled with joy at the birth of her daughter Blanche, the first step in a rec-
onciliation with her own mother and with life. In an interview at the time
of the film’s release, Baillargeon admitted that she “carried [her mother]
on her shoulders” all through the process of making the film, but that it
was only on its completion that she recognized its true theme: “That of the
mother that I loved and hated, who died seven years ago and whose own
anger inhabited me.”1
Anger and guilt, the desire for fusion and the feeling of being aban-
doned, love and hate: the mother-daughter relationship is full of
ambivalence, and it seems as if female autobiographers of all national-
ities feel the need to explore it in order to untangle the threads of their
own journey towards autonomy. Unlike men’s autobiographies, those of
women are often a project of giving birth to the self. These difficult births
seem to circle around an original wound, almost always associated with
the mother and the conservative culture she imposes on her daughters.
This negative mother, whose maternal instincts seem restricted to the aim
of preventing her child from achieving autonomy, is a familiar presence
in Quebec literature.2 One of her most unforgettable embodiments is in
Anne Hébert’s character from The Torrent, “la grande Claudine,” whose
message of refusal of life resonates incessantly in the mind of her son, who
has been made deaf by his mother’s violence: “One must master oneself
utterly. We have no idea of the evil forces within us. […] I will master you
thoroughly myself.”3 Seen through the eyes of her son François, Claudine
is an immense and paralyzing presence: “As a child, I was dispossessed of
the world. By the decree of a will higher than my own, I had to renounce
all possessions in this life. I related to the world by fragments […] I could
see the large hand of my mother when it was raised against me, but I could
not perceive my mother as a whole, from head to foot. I could only feel
her terrible size, which chilled me.”4
In this image of ice, immensity and paralysis, this ability to reduce the
other to a state of nothingness that can only be escaped by violence, Anne
Hébert has captured the intimidating power of the archetypal mother. In
patriarchal culture, mothers were traditionally consigned to a role which
frustrated and diminished them, but which they were expected nonethe-
less to pass on to their daughters. As a result, maternal love often contains
a great deal of resentment or bitterness, while filial devotion hides an
t he Str ug gle with the Mother • 231
immense, repressed anger. It is not surprising, then, that the autobiogra-

phies of Quebec women who grew up in the period when the mother was
seen as “queen of the hearth” are so often stories of lives nipped in the bud,
written by women who never entirely freed themselves from the trauma
of their childhoods. Such a destruction is suggested by the titles of the two
earliest works examined in this chapter: Thérèse Renaud’s Une mémoire
déchirée (A torn memory) and Paule Saint-Onge’s La vie défigurée (A
disfigured life). The coldness, rules, and punishments inflicted by moth-
ers are, however, only one aspect of the passionate and problematic link
they have with their daughters. As feminist psychologists have reminded
us, the mother and her body represent the place of unattainable fusion,
the source of love and the beginning of language for her child.5 For sons,
the break from her, while difficult, is a natural part of growing into male
identity; for daughters, whose relation to her is one of sameness rather
than difference, it is more difficult, especially in patriarchal society, where
the mother, frozen into her appointed role, never reveals herself to her
daughter as a subject. The title of Margret Andersen’s feminist collection,
Mother Was Not a Person, sums up the problem succinctly. Psychoanalyst
Luce Irigaray, in her lyrical text Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre (“And the
One Doesn’t Move without the Other”), gives voice to the anguish of the
daughter caught in this paralyzing relationship: “With your milk, mother,
I drank ice. And now here I am frozen inside. And I walk even less surely
than you do, and I move even less. You have flowed into me and this hot
liquid has become a poison that paralyzes me […] I must make another
effort, get angry at you once more for wanting me to remain small […] and
at last I will emerge from your dream. From my sickness. From you in me,
from me in you. I will get away from us […] I will live my life, my story.”6
According to Bella Brodzki, the struggle with the mother is often the
very basis of women’s entry into autobiographical writing: “She is the
pre-text for the daughter’s autobiographical project […] As the child’s
first significant Other, the mother engenders subjectivity through lan-
guage; she is the primary source of speech and love […] In response, the
daughter’s text, variously, seeks to reject, reconstruct and reclaim […]
the mother’s message.”7 In some cases, autobiography can be an act of
revenge, allowing the writer a power over the mother that she never had
in childhood and possibly still lacks. Shirley Neuman argues that wom-
en’s autobiographies often contain “an incipient matrophobia,” born of
the daughter’s fear that, if she is not vigilant, she risks being swallowed up
once again in the mother’s tastes and values.8
All the autobiographies examined in this chapter – Une mémoire déchirée
(MD) by Thérèse Renaud, La vie défigurée (VD) by Paule Saint-Onge, La
détresse et l’enchantement (Enchantment and Sorrow) (ES) by Gabri-

elle Roy,9 Ce fauve, le bonheur (CFB) by Denise Desautels, Ma mère et
Gainsbourg (MMG) by Diane-Monique Daviau, Hôtel des quatre chemins
(HQC) by France Théoret, and La femme de ma vie (FV) by Francine
Noël – illustrate the struggle against the mother necessary in order for
women to achieve autonomy. Gabrielle Roy’s book is closer than the
others to classical autobiography in that it was begun shortly before the
author’s death and is, in many ways, her last testament to her readers. But,
like all of the other books, it is an autobiography by a daughter, in which
the author explores the minefield of her relationship with her mother in
order to understand herself. The interest of these works lies not only in
the perspective they offer on the mother-daughter relationship, but also
in what they tell us about the situation of the “queens of the hearth” of
earlier generations. What was the price paid by these women for accept-
ing the traditional maternal role, and what were the compensations? How
much power did they exercise in their families, and what values did they
transmit to their daughters? Each of the works (even that of Gabrielle Roy,
to some extent) demystifies the idealized portrait of the French-Canadian
mother propagated by the dominant ideology of the time, several of them
going so far as to make us wonder if these women even loved their chil-
dren at all. Whether cries of anger or suffocation, attempts to understand
or gestures of reparation, all bear witness to the fact that the daughter’s
liberation cannot take place without her recognition of the mother as sub-
ject rather than object.
eChO eS Of AurO re , the L i ttLe MA rtyr:

thÉr ÈS e renAud A nd PAuLe SAi nt- O nge
Lamentations over lost childhoods and the distance between daughters

and mothers, both Thérèse Renaud’s Une mémoire déchirée and Paule
Saint-Onge’s La vie défigurée seem to lose their coherence and narra-
tive direction after strong opening sections on the childhood of the two
authors. Each author expresses a feeling of failure as she contemplates
what she has made of her life. For Thérèse Renaud, one of the signatories
of the famous manifesto Refus global in 1948 and the author of the first
volume of surrealist poetry published in Quebec, Les sables du rêve (1946),
the “imperious need to recount [her] interior journey” (MD, 143) emerged
after seventeen years of literary silence. The book is dominated by
Renaud’s regret at not having found a creative artistic expression since her
marriage to painter Fernand Leduc in 1948 and the birth of their daughter
Isabelle in the 1950s. For Paule Saint-Onge, the writing project originates
in a similar feeling of failure, despite the fact that the author is the mother
of eight children (barely mentioned in the book) and had achieved a cer-
tain amount of fame as a novelist in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in a
difficult moment of her life, following a divorce, a subsequent failed rela-
tionship, and the suicide of one of her sons, she examines her past as part
of a process of learning to live independently. “I have often dreamed of
writing the story of a happy love, but I have only known punished love
[…] I have also wanted to write a story about feminine liberation, and I
would have called my book The Autonomous Woman. But I am not the
one to write about an autonomous woman […] As for this disfigured life,
perhaps I still have a few years in which to make it better” (VD, 7–9).
Like Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove (although less successfully), these
works are attempts to exorcise the effects of childhood abuse, an all too
common phenomenon in the era when the story of “Aurore, the child
martyr” was the subject of a bestselling book and a popular movie.10 Born
in the 1920s, both authors have memories of humiliating punishments,
religious hypocrisy, and a cold, cruel mother or stepmother figure. Saint-
Onge refers explicitly to Aurore, recalling that she read “this best seller of
the period” at the suggestion of her mother, who used the book to frighten
her children, threatening them with the prospect of the cruel stepmother
who would replace her if she died: “The odious stepmother who would
have only one goal: to torture us, the poor little orphans” (VD, 44). Beaten
by her mother, young Paule has no difficulty identifying with the little
victim Aurore: “Even as I would think with horror about the mouthfuls
of soap she had to ingest, I was being beaten regularly. One evening a
neighbour, troubled by my cries, came and rang our doorbell” (VD, 45).
In the case of Thérèse Renaud, whose mother died when she was six,
the role of cruel stepmother is filled by Mlle Rose, an ugly, crippled “old
maid” recommended by the parish priest as a caregiver for the children
after their mother’s death. For more than a year, until a neighbour inter-
venes to inform their father about what is taking place in his home, the
three Renaud sisters, all of whom will later be part of the group associated
with the Refus global manifesto, are “forbidden to play and consecrated
to prayer” (MD, 24). They attend Mass at five o’clock every morning, and,
on the way home, follow their guardian in single file reciting the rosary,
with Thérèse dying of embarrassment at the prospect of being seen by
her friends from school. At home, they are deprived of food in order to
“make sacrifices.” Quickly chosen to be the scapegoat, Thérèse is often
required to kneel under the table and be kicked by Mlle Rose while the
others eat: “Strange as it seems, that was the way my consciousness was
formed. I learned to steel myself in adversity and transcend the suffering
I was feeling in my body and my heart: I remained motionless under the

table” (MD, 26). In the evenings, the girls are obliged to recite the rosary
with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, meditating on their sins,
while their guardian hovers over them, ready to strike them with a ruler if
their arms tremble (MD, 24).
Each of the authors displays a psychic fragility which originates in
feelings of rejection by the mother. “To protect my sensibility and my intel-
ligence, I had to cut myself off early from the maternal universe, but a child
cannot resign itself to such a fate without a terrible struggle,” writes Saint-
Onge (VD, 40). The eldest daughter of an unhappy couple living in the
Plateau Mont-Royal district, she adores her father, a streetcar driver who
has left an earlier job as a Canadian Pacific Railways technician because
his jealous wife refuses to allow him to spend two days a week away from
home, as required by the job. Her obese mother neglects the housework
and the children, and spends her time in a rocking chair on the balcony,
sending her daughters to the corner store to buy her Coca Cola and can-
dies: “For her, the pleasures of the table had replaced all others” (VD, 33).
Her sole passion is for card games: “When she could find partners for a
game of 500, she was transfigured. She laughed, joked, and always wanted
to get the jackpot […] Time – oh how marvelous this was! – was abolished”
(VD, 20). More often, she spends her evenings embroidering in the com-
pany of her eldest daughter, telling the latter how unhappy she is, or leaves
the little girl at home with her younger sister, waiting until “the big hand
of the clock goes all the way around” (VD, 19), while she visits a neigh-
bour. The children seem to be regarded as disagreeable little intruders in
the melancholy routine of her days. Haunted by the memory of being vio-
lently pushed away by her mother when she was looking for consolation
(VD, 25), Saint-Onge also recalls constantly being threatened with reform
school, with her mother going so far as to pick up the phone and pretend
to be dialing the authorities in order to intimidate her daughter (VD, 44).
The atmosphere of negativity surrounding the mother – “a climate of
anger at life, at men, at us, the children, who were there because of a man”
– destroys the daughter’s sense of self: “[It is] a climate that sucks you
under little by little and makes you want to return to the nothingness she
is constantly reproaching you for having emerged from. And so, if you’re
pious – and education in those days often offered you such an escape – you
pray fervently to die” (VD, 38). At the time of writing, the author remem-
bers having heard that her mother, from whom she was estranged, uttered
her name just before dying: “The great pity that her death inspired in me
was mixed with astonishment that I could have been her last preoccupa-
tion: I had given up hope so long ago of being loved by her” (VD, 89).
And yet the signs of an earlier and different mother exist. Among the
young Paule’s first readings are some of the red-bound volumes, published
by Mame et fils, which were given out as prizes at the end of the school
year and which her mother had won in convent school: “She must have
been a good student, for there was an impressive number of them” (VD,
55). In the living room there is a piano which no one ever touches, and,
stuffed in a cupboard in the basement, old partitions which lead the lit-
tle girl to the discovery that her mother studied piano for four years with
the famous composer Rodolphe Mathieu, although, “according to all
appearances, she hadn’t retained any of it, not even the love of music”
(VD, 59). As the process of writing leads her to a better understanding of
her mother, the narrator sees her as “trapped from birth onward in a sti-
fling circle of rules and regulations, which she tried pathetically to escape,
using whatever means were at her disposal” (VD, 19–20).
Thérèse Renaud’s memories of her mother are less precise, but the fact
of having lost her at so young an age leaves the narrator with a vague sense
of guilt and emptiness: “I had a difficult relationship with my mother […]
Mostly I remember a reciprocal lack of understanding” (MD, 12). She
recalls a woman who was cold and distant when her husband was absent:
“[When he wasn’t there], the whole house became sad. Our mother, who
was usually cheerful, became dreamy, distant, and indifferent to us” (MD,
8). The independent-minded Thérèse cannot help provoking her mother,
and is punished by being locked in a closet or put in a cold shower: “Giv-
ing full rein to my anger, I shouted insults at her which terrified me by
their extravagance” (MD, 12).
From little rebels who would have preferred to be boys, Saint-Onge
and Renaud soon turn into “bad girls” and later, after years of condition-
ing, into Catholic teenagers inflamed by a religiosity made up of guilt,
self-sacrifice, and a desire for fusion with something greater than the
self. Meanwhile, under the surface, simmer a rage and self-hatred whose
eradication will be the work of a lifetime. “I was born guilty,” writes Saint-
Onge. “One finally rebels against such a heritage, but I think that rebellion
came too late for my generation, as the structures of our lives were already
in place” (VD, 62–3). At eight, she began writing a novel with the title
“Rage in the Heart,” and at ten she read Romeo and Juliet in secret, hiding
it behind a larger book entitled On the Necessity of Prayer, but by adoles-
cence she has become obsessed with martyrdom and dreams of wearing a
hair shirt: “But where could one find a hair shirt in our day and age?” (VD,
58–9). Later, she wonders whether the “edifying” books she was made
to read were not, in fact, a dangerous influence, cultivating a tendency
towards masochism. “Add to that ideas on the supposedly feminine virtue
of altruism […] and you find yourself admirably prepared to make your
eventual marriage a triumph of abnegation, deprivation, and constant
pregnancies” (VD, 57).
The young Thérèse Renaud also dreams of sacrificing herself for
Christ, but her mystical aspirations are mixed with “evil thoughts”
inspired by sermons on such horrors as “kissing on the mouth” (MD, 62).
Like Saint-Onge, she denounces an educational system which prepared
girls for no career other than that of wife and mother: “We were raised
in the purest Bovarysm imaginable” (MD, 143). Her observations on the
internalization of hate-filled ideologies learned at convent school recall
those of Claire Martin. With her school friends, she indulges in lurid fan-
tasies about Communists, Jews, Freemasons, and even the students from
a neighbouring English school, dangerous because it is coeducational:
“We were surrounded by bad elements who desired not only our moral
defeat, but our physical mutilation. I saw myself submitting to martyrdom
rather than giving in to their desire to make me deny Christ, who had
given his life on the cross to save humanity” (MD, 60). A more material
salvation will come to her at the age of sixteen, when, through her sister
Louise, then a student at the School of Fine Arts, she will meet the young
artists surrounding Paul-Émile Borduas, the future signatories of the
manifesto Refus global. However, like Paule Saint-Onge, it is only many
years later, after years of marriage and motherhood, that she will take
stock of her life, her relationship with her mother, and the culture of her
childhood through the process of writing her autobiography.
g Abrie LL e rOy: Avenge the MO ther,

Or eSCAP e he r gAZ e?
As those familiar with Gabrielle Roy’s work are aware, the mother is the
central figure around which the writing circulates incessantly, as if around
an unfathomable mystery. From the dedication of her first novel, The
Tin Flute, to her mother, Mélina Roy, to her final text, published posthu-
mously under the title Le temps qui m’a manqué (TM) (Not enough time),
Roy sings the praises of the mother even as she laments the separation
from her, perceived as an “abandonment” which leads to much guilt on
the part of the daughter. This final work – the unfinished sequel to the
autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, written just before the author’s
death in 1983 – is entirely devoted to the twin themes of the mother and
writing, the closely linked poles of the author’s identity. It opens with an
evocation of the train trip taken by the author, then a young journalist
working on her first novel, from Montreal to Manitoba on the occasion of
her mother’s death in 1943, and ends, after several months of mourning,
with the moment she returns to writing The Tin Flute.
The idealization of the mother which characterizes all of Roy’s work
is well captured in the reflections of the narrator as she stands before
her mother’s coffin: “I had just understood that from my dead mother,
through what she had loved and taught me to love, I was receiving far
more than what she had given me in the course of her life” (TM, 60). But
the title of the book, Le temps qui m’a manqué, suggests the other side of
this debt to the mother: the constant guilt felt by the daughter who, by the
simple fact of living her own life, has the feeling of having abandoned her
mother. It was a guilt acutely felt by Roy at the time of her mother’s death,
as she had decided, on her return from Europe in 1939, to settle down in
Montreal rather than returning to her teaching position in Manitoba as
her mother had expected her to do. By a cruel irony of fate, Roy receives
the telegram announcing her mother’s death at the precise moment when
she has just finished writing a joyful letter to her, revealing that she has
received a small raise and now has enough money to look after the needs
of her family. An example of the distance between aspiration and reality
which is at the heart of Roy’s vision, this scene is also of interest because
of the ambivalence betrayed by the author regarding the debt which links
her to her mother: “Why did Maman have to die before I had time to give
her the reason to be proud of me that I had crossed the ocean to find for
her with so much effort? She was always so patient: why couldn’t she have
given me just a little more of the time I needed?” (TM, 14).
It is possible, however, that the mother’s death was the only way to
resolve the terrible ambivalence of the daughter and to liberate her cre-
ative energies.11 For two years, she tells us, she has been carrying the
manuscript of The Tin Flute, “a thick pile of typed sheets which must have
made up 800 or 900 pages” (TM, 88), with her wherever she goes, without
being able to work on it. She is so discouraged with the novel’s imperfec-
tions that once she almost throws it in the fire: “It only would have taken
a few seconds; lifting the cover on the stove, slipping the large package
into the flames. And now, not having had the courage to do that, I had
no choice but to carry on with my work on it” (TM, 88). The text ends at
the moment when, after several months of mourning, the author’s writing
finally begins to flow: “I was surprised […] to see that I had filled twenty
pages. And not only that […] on rereading them, I realized I had greatly
improved my text” (TM, 89). This sense of a liberation of her creative
energy clarifies the passage quoted earlier, in which the narrator reflects
that her dead mother has given her more than she had when she was alive.
From this moment on, the author/narrator will live more and more within
and for her writing, filling the void created by her mother’s absence with
the presence of a virtual reader to whom she will offer the gift which she
had not had time to give her mother: “Real life for me was located more
and more in the stories I told myself or told others who might recognize
themselves in them, and then, perhaps, we would truly meet in silence,
me walking alone and that stranger in the future, who would stop for a
moment, awaiting something unknown” (TM, 90).
This “writing of reparation,” as Lori Saint-Martin describes Roy’s
work,12 will also be a gradual return to the mother and to an explic-
itly autobiographical writing. In Enchantment and Sorrow, Roy reveals
that her earliest writings were autobiographical, but that they lacked the
authenticity and strength she would later acquire through her work as a
journalist: “I began with anecdotal accounts of my adventures in England
and France. Alas, in my downcast state of mind, no longer stimulated by
elation, I could bring forth only platitudes. It took close to a year before
I began to write articles with some substance, given the opportunity by
a farmer’s publication, the Bulletin des Agriculteurs, to write on subjects
involving fact, reality, close observation” (ES, 410).
After The Tin Flute (1945) and a later realist novel, Alexandre Chenevert
(The Cashier) (1954), Roy’s work becomes more and more autobiograph-
ical, notably in the short story collections Rue Deschambault (1955), La
route d’Altamont (1966), and Ces enfants de ma vie (1977).13 But it is only
with Enchantment and Sorrow that she fully assumes the autobiograph-
ical pact with her readers, guaranteeing the referential truth of her story
and the identification between author, narrator, and protagonist. Close to
classical autobiography in that it is clearly seen by the author as a liter-
ary testament left for her many faithful readers, Enchantment and Sorrow
is nevertheless different, in that it covers only the years leading up to the
author’s discovery of her literary vocation, born of an urgent desire to
“avenge” her mother which goes back to early adolescence.14
Brodzki’s idea that the mother is the “pre-text” for the writing of the
daughter is perfectly illustrated by this autobiographical masterpiece in
which Roy anchors all the great themes of her work – time, love, the need
for justice, the infinite aspirations of human beings, and the inevitable dis-
tance that separates them – in her own experience and in the symbiotic,
painful, but loving relationship she had with her mother. In the open-
ing scene, which describes the shopping trips she and her mother would
make to Eaton’s, in anglophone Winnipeg, the link between mother and
daughter emerges as the cornerstone of Roy’s identity and writing. Begin-
ning with the surprising opening sentence – “When did it first dawn on
me that I was one of those people destined to be treated as inferiors in
their own country?” (ES, 3) – we discover a Gabrielle Roy much more con-
scious of the political dimensions of her Franco-Manitoban heritage than
her earlier work suggested, and pushed to excel as a young girl in order to
compensate for the injustices her compatriots have suffered, as illustrated
by her mother’s stories of their ancestors. It is the mother who formulates
this goal for her daughter after the humiliations they have endured in try-
ing to communicate in French: “I was the one, with my quick mind and
my brain not broken down already from constant figuring, who ought
to start learning English so I could make up for all the rest of us” (ES, 6).
The need to excel becomes more precise at the age of twelve, after Gabri-
elle, hospitalized for a grave illness, realizes that her medical expenses
represent a terrifying burden for her mother: “In order to make good for
Maman, I realized that once I was back at school I’d have to work twice as
hard, always come first in French and English and all the other subjects,
win medals and other kinds of prizes, and keep bringing her trophies” (ES,
21). With this realization begins an ascension each of whose steps will par-
adoxically lead her further away from the mother for whom she believes
she is pursuing these achievements.
Among the qualities which make Enchantment and Sorrow such a
powerful work is Roy’s ability to bring her “characters” to life: not only
her mother and father, but also the brothers and sisters with whom, she
admits in the text, she did not always get along. The reflections of a great
writer close to death are thus nourished and accompanied by the anxiet-
ies, failures, and aspirations of her loved ones, and the story of her own
evolution is inextricably linked to theirs. It is a striking example of wom-
en’s tendency to make the autobiographical “I” a porous space, open to the
other and not restricted to the life of the individual author.15 That said, it
is the mother who functions in the text as the primary “other”: the mirror
image of the author’s identity as well as the origin and goal of her quest.
In a scene which clearly shows the interdependence of the “enchantment”
and “sorrow” of the title, young Gabrielle’s joy during her high school
graduation ceremony is inseparable from her consciousness of the mater-
nal sacrifices which made this joy possible, just as the joy she perceives in
the face of her mother generates a feeling of distress:
From up there on the stage, I searched and searched through the

faces in the crowd. Finally I caught sight of her, and she remains
forever in my memory as I saw her then. Her poor face was grey
with fatigue – she may have finished my dress only late the night
before – but was lifted, straining towards me, smiling at me across
the distance. For all its sunken eyelids and drawn cheeks, it shone
with pride, and that hurt more than anything I’d seen before because
I knew how much all this had cost. The wave of cruel realization
swept over me, gripped me in vice-like anguish, robbed me of all
my joy in the day, then faded, leaving me to my insouciant youth up
there in my place of honour. (ES, 60)
Such a dissolution of the barriers between self and other can only
be lived with an extreme ambivalence, which is captured in the final
image the narrator has of her mother at the time of her own departure
for Europe. Alone, pathetic, and abandoned on the railway platform, the
small figure of the mother constitutes such a powerful reproach that the
daughter, in spite of herself, is relieved to be leaving her behind:
Why hadn’t I noticed before how tiny she was? Her body was like a
child’s […] Her sorrowful eyes were fixed on me as though they’d
never lose me wherever I went. It became unbearable. I saw too well
that she knew I wouldn’t be coming back […] It was clear now that
I wasn’t leaving to make good for her […] it was really to be free of
her. Free of her and the family woes clustered about her […] They
all seemed to be reproaching me for their failed or unfulfilled lives.
Why is it only happening to you? Why not us? Mightn’t we have
found happiness too? (ES, 192–3)
During her two years in France and England, an alternatively exalted

and anguished period in which she affronts numerous obstacles on the
way to discovering her vocation as a writer, Roy continues to feel an enor-
mous amount of guilt each time she receives a letter from her mother: “I
began to tremble as soon as I recognized the writing. I always trembled
when her letters came, not because I was afraid of reading reproaches or
complaints – there never were any – but because seeing her writing was
enough to open the door to memories of all the suffering culminating in
me. Surely I shouldn’t be the only one to escape […] At this, the shame of
having been able to be happy while she was sad overcame me” (ES, 329–30).
Such tensions can only be resolved through writing, a triumph over the
time which has always been “lacking” for the author, and a reconciliation,
beyond time, with her mother and her loved ones. Enchantment and Sor-
row ends with a vision of the author as she embarks on her writing career,
not yet knowing that in her first novel, The Tin Flute – a story of poverty,
courage, and pain centred on maternal love and on the unending strug-
gle between daughters and mothers – she will find “the feeling of coming
home, of oneness with my people, whom my mother had taught me to

know and love in my childhood” (ES, 410).
d iSPOSS e SS ed O f the WOrLd: deniSe de SAuteLS,

di Ane -MO ni Que dAvi Au, And frAnC e thÉ Oret
Unlike Gabrielle Roy’s work, in which, no matter how great the anguish of
the daughter, the mother is always portrayed lovingly, the autobiograph-
ical works of Denise Desautels (Ce fauve, le bonheur), Diane-Monique
Daviau (Ma mère et Gainsbourg), and France Théoret (Hôtel des quatre
chemins) present a more sombre portrait, representing her in all her par-
alyzing power. Avatars of Hébert’s “grande Claudine,” these mothers stifle
their daughters’ creativity and rebellion, overpower them with a suffo-
cating love (Desautels), reduce them to nothingness by their indifference
(Daviau), or render them mute by their rigidity (Théoret). “Our mother
‘kept us in line,’ as she was always proclaiming,” writes Théoret (HQC,
11). “She never kissed or embraced us and she argued with us every day.
Signs of tenderness were deemed to be dangerous. We weren’t yet worth
anything much” (HQC, 29). Daviau’s mother exhibits the same scorn for
her child and the same hypocritical justification of it by her authoritarian
principles: “My mother said – it was her principle of education and the
basis of any relationship with a child: ‘You must never let a child get away
with anything. A child is meant to be dominated. Its character is meant to
be broken.’ […] Words were not necessary between us: I understood very
early on that she, my mother, was going to devote her whole life to break-
ing me” (MMG, 82). In Desautels’s work, where Anne Hébert’s influence
is explicit and constant, the mother is part of a cohort of sweet and men-
acing women whose voices transmit the Jansenist beliefs of traditional
French Canada: “The voices carry within them, camouflaged under many
caresses, absence, the weight of Heaven, and the ugliness of the world,
terror, death. Hardness as well, like a hair shirt, a means of resisting the
temptation of evil. They alarm us in order to better swallow us up, hold
us in their grasp, absorb us into themselves. Yes, these softly murmuring
voices which we’re not allowed to contradict are sure of themselves and of
their truth” (CFB, 71).
Each of the three texts has a static or circular character, the mark of a
story unable to take shape, stuck in the quicksands of the original fusion
or blocked by the immensity of the rules forbidding it to move forward.
For the poet Denise Desautels, born in 1945, the sudden death of her
father when she was five years old is the initial disaster, the subject of a
never completed mourning process around which her entire body of work
circulates, and the passage from poetry to prose in Ce fauve, le bonheur
corresponds to the liberation of an entry into time.16 By its circular form
and its constant returns to the suffocating atmosphere of childhood, her
story captures the extreme difficulty of this entry into history – not only
individual history, but also that of a Quebec hesitating on the threshold
of modernity. The story begins with a precise date – “On 6 May 1950, my
father died” (CFB, 15) – and ends in 1960, “a year still talked about in his-
tory books, which marks a break, the end of a long sleep, of an absence”
(CFB, 219). It is also the year of a personal liberation, marked by the young
protagonist’s crossing of Montreal from east to west in order to attend a
Van Gogh exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, an experience which
signals her accession to an autonomous voice, associated with artistic
expression: “And, this time, it is my real voice I hear” (CFB, 233).
As Louise Dupré explains, the word Happiness, always spelled with a
capital letter in the text, is “a metaphor for the simultaneously blissful and
deadening state of fusion with the mother which must be broken with in
order to arrive at subjectivity.”17 The title suggests the troubling nature
of the secure and excessively loving universe created by the young hero-
ine’s mother and aunts after the death of her father and of a little cousin
two years later – a universe in which all signs of pain are repressed and
one finds consolation in the idea that the dead, transformed into angelic
presences, are keeping watch over the living: “Pink angels accompany
us everywhere” (CFB, 22). Beneath the surface, death hovers like a men-
acing presence and the child learns, under pain of sin, to repress her
natural curiosity: “Happiness. It is like a wild animal ready to awaken; a
threatened peace. Always well behaved, it doesn’t anticipate the dreams
that come at night, with their noise and disorder, that will finally attack it
[…] My future guilts” (CFB, 28). The heroine sleeps with her mother until
puberty, succumbs to melancholy when she is absent, and feels an ambig-
uous pleasure in her caresses: “My mother’s caress moves along my leg
fabricating Happiness, over my ankle, until it reaches her despair at being
a woman alone, infinitely alone, a despair she doesn’t succeed in hiding, it
goes as far as her false smiles, as far as her loving words, too smooth, too
polite, which bind me, breathe me in, swallow me up […] I cry my eyes
out, weeping over myself, my mother, and the interminable life we lead,
over this emptiness I carry within me, this bottomless pit”(CFB, 55–7).
A “round form” (CFB, 50), a “cocoon [filled] with caresses” (CFB, 129)
from which joy and pain are equally banished, this too cosy universe is
opposed to individuation and prevents one’s entry into time: “I remain
for all time a little girl, tucked in by her mother, tucked in until the end
of time” (CFB, 94). The “I” does not exist, as the borders of the ego are
dissolved into a sort of magma where one’s private self is a forbidden terri-
tory: “I am possessed. Where does my being begin? Where does hers end?
How is it possible for a person to sleep alone, to live alone? I do not know.
I do not think. Thoughts of my own don’t exist. In this universe where
everything is order and cleanliness, thoughts are the only thing that are
susceptible to being dirtied” (CFB, 131).
Divided into short chapters corresponding to the people or the expe-
riences which marked the narrator/protagonist, the text thus reveals
by its very shape the important role played by openness to the other in
the evolution towards subjectivity. The narrator’s adolescence, closed in
by the limited horizons of 1950s Quebec, is dominated by fear, anguish,
and a constant sense of guilt. But there are meetings which awaken her to
the existence of a wider world, anchored in history. Her Uncle Bernard,
who has not been the same since he returned from the war, carries within
him experiences that are unforgettable, uncommunicable: “Elsewhere,
the war, something other” (CFB, 154). And a woman who works with her
mother, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, shows by her example
that there are ways to experience tragedy other than closing oneself off
from the world enveloped in an imaginary Happiness: “The smile of the
Polish woman who is walking on my right, her head high, her dark hair
blown by the wind, and my mother close by, vulnerable, having noticed
the familiar vertigo of her little orphaned daughter” (CFB, 108). The let-
ters from the narrator’s French pen pal Élisabeth tell of an unknown and
somewhat intimidating cultural world: for example, she describes a trip
to Paris to see the film Hiroshima mon amour, almost unimaginable for a
young Québécoise in 1958: “I had never heard of Carl Dreyer, or Margue-
rite Duras, or Alain Resnais, or Emmanuelle Riva […] Reading her letters,
I had the impression of entering a fictional universe. In fact, at that time,
I was discovering the world, the vast world in books […] in the Larousse
dictionary and the Grolier encyclopedia my mother had bought” (CFB,
198). And above all there is Lou, her best friend since childhood, in whose
company she discovers literature and art, reading Les fleurs du mal in
secret and dreaming of living with intensity: “It’s easier with two of us”
(CFB, 229). Numerous intertextual allusions – to Émile Nelligan, Anne
Hébert, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide, Albert Camus, Clarice Lispector,
Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, and the Quebec feminist writers France
Théoret, Madeleine Gagnon, Louise Cotnoir, and Louise Dupré – empha-
size the vital importance of literature, another route to openness and
sharing, in a gesture of recognition on the part of the author to the writers
who have helped her survive and taught her how to live.
At the opposite pole of the maternal spectrum, Diane-Monique Daviau

writes with the devastated consciousness of knowing she was completely
rejected by her mother: “[I imagine] the warmth of my mother’s arms […]
but I have no memory of it” (MMG, 15). And yet her story too is an exercise
in mourning: for her mother, who died without asking to see her daugh-
ter, but also for “the affection and support that [she] would have wanted to
have” (MMG, 101). Faced with the reality of her mother’s death, the narra-
tor is overcome by a feeling of irreparable loss: “I can’t get rid of the idea
that keeps coming back to me like a crazy obsession: that I’d like to slide in
beside her in the coffin, lie down beside her with my face turned towards
hers” (MMG, 13, 17). The moment when the coffin is closed marks for her
the end of the possibility of being loved, the disappearance of “the land
of ochres and almost violet blues towards which I had always held out my
arms” (MMG, 18).
A “monster of egotism” (MMG, 130) and a master of the arts of manip-
ulation and blackmail, this mother (like that of Paule Saint-Onge) often
brandished the threat of her future death as a weapon against her loved
ones: “When I die, people are going to be surprised […] But it will be too
late!” (MMG, 22). Daviau writes to explore the possibilities contained in
these enigmatic words, imagining that after death her mother has become
the companion of Serge Gainsbourg, a singer and actor loved by the
daughter but hated by the mother when she was alive: “It is a little bit as
if […] my mother shared something with me” (MMG, 78). The words of
Gainsbourg’s famous song “Je t’aime. Moi non plus” (I love you, me nei-
ther) are repeated several times in the text, a heartbreaking reminder of
the uncrossable distance between mother and daughter.
“Shell,” “wall,” “prison,” “hard kernel” (MMG, 131): the recurrent images
of the mother all emphasize her hardness and inaccessibility. Angry at her
mother even beyond death, the narrator imagines aggressive strategies
that will allow her to penetrate this impregnable fortress: “I would force
her to laugh […] I wouldn’t give up, I would be obstinate, pitiless, I would
break her as she broke us by walling herself up in her coldness, I would
shatter her hard gaze, her hard voice, her unending ability to be miser-
able” (MMG, 29). Writing provides a means of escaping her paralyzing
anger: “[I write] in order to move forward […] as if I were a donkey […]
so that I can finally discover something that will help me to take another
step in my life” (MMG, 28). But the narrative refuses to take off, turns in
circles, constantly falls back into repetition: “It circles around the death
of my mother, it speaks of the abyss which opened under my feet when
my mother died, it tells of the difficulty of losing one’s mother when one
never really possessed her, perhaps it speaks of mothers who never allow
themselves to be tamed, of all the mothers who don’t give, who would
rather die than offer themselves” (MMG, 52).
Gradually the writing project takes shape. The author will try to pen-
etrate the mystery of this lack of love, to “go back even further, to find
the moment when my mother, my very own mother, was forever lost to
me” (MMG, 21). Unable to remember such a moment, she begins to obses-
sively imagine the loving relationship she would have wanted to have with
her mother: “At the end of each sentence, I put what didn’t exist […]: the
gentle words of my mother, the caresses of my mother, the attention of
my mother, the indulgence of my mother, the generosity of my mother,
the gaiety of my mother. At the end of each sentence, as alive as a dream,
as vibrant as a wish: the gaze of my mother” (MMG, 28). Or she clings to
the pathetic fragments of memory of what, for her, was a “paradise lost”
– silent evenings spent at her mother’s side while the latter is watching
television, interrupting the program from time to time to give orders
to her daughter: “Go and get me a handkerchief / Give me the cross-
word section / Bring me the cushion […] Turn up the TV […] Go and
empty the ashtray and bring me some matches / Go and see what time
it is […] Go and get me another Coke […] Alright, it’s getting late. Go
to bed!” (MMG, 144–5). During these evenings, the little girl dares not say
anything, do anything, or hope for anything, for fear of being relegated
to nothingness: “At each moment, I could be expelled from paradise,
rejected with no possibility of an appeal. I was a little Cinderella whose
carriage could be transformed into a pumpkin at any time” (MMG, 145).
Like many of the other mothers in these autobiographies, Daviau’s
mother exerts total control over her family and constantly complains to
her children that, growing up in a family of fifteen children, she lacked
mothering herself. Disappointed by life, she blames her unhappiness on
the fact of being a mother: “I have given up everything for you all!” (MMG,
107). She spends her time waiting, never satisfied, projecting her frus-
trated dreams onto her daughter: “For a long time […] I believed that I
wasn’t good enough […] My mother couldn’t see my good qualities or my
actions […] my path, my life […] She could only see what was lacking in
me, my faults, my weaknesses […] She seemed obsessed by her dreams
which had remained in suspense, unrealized” (MMG, 104).
Imprisoned in a thankless role and deprived of other options, these
mothers cling to their role furiously, treating their daughters like chil-
dren until they reach adulthood. Not being subjects themselves, they
cannot bear the idea that their daughters could separate themselves from
them and achieve autonomy. Like so many other autobiographical texts
by women, Ma mère et Gainsbourg illustrates the paralyzing fusion with
the mother spoken of by Luce Irigaray: “My mother was lost to me when
I started to speak and to walk, my mother turned away from me when I
started to disappoint her, to escape her, to be myself – when I started to
escape her by being myself ” (MMG, 93). The narrator succeeds in sepa-
rating herself from her mother, but at the price of an ongoing feeling of
emptiness which her story attempts to fill. Given that the person she is
mourning never became a subject herself, it is an impossible task: “My
mother […] cannot die easily because she is not yet born […] Doesn’t a
story, no matter what kind, have to contain an ending, a conclusion?
Nothing here can lead to the resolution of anything” (MMG, 51).
Having reached the end of her story, the narrator does, however, arrive
at a certain acceptance of herself and of the imperfections of her relation-
ship with her mother, imperfections reflected in the formlessness of her
text: “The hardest thing […] is obviously to accept the fact that there is no
meaning, no direction, in all of this” (MMG, 116). Noticing her increasing
resemblance to her mother as she gets older, she is at first horrified, but, as
she gradually learns to accept this resemblance, she is reconciled to some
extent with herself and with the necessity of living with her negative her-
itage: “I feel almost privileged to have nothing in my suitcase but a dress
with holes in it” (MMG, 126).
Like Such a Good Education (examined in chapter 9), France Théoret’s
Hôtel des quatre chemins (Hotel at the crossroads) is described as a novel
on the title page, but, like the earlier book, it is clearly autobiographical,
with place names, dates, characters, and events which correspond to facts
in the author’s life. Once again the protagonist is named Évelyne, and
here her evolution is traced up until her decision in her thirties to break
with her mother, Éva, and devote herself to writing. Rather than follow-
ing a linear or chronological order, the eleven short chapters of the book
are “portraits in movement,”18 corresponding to themes (“Service, Help-
fulness, Servility,” “I Offer the Other Cheek”), events (“Leaving the City,”
“Starting College”), or persons (“My Mother’s Principles”) which have
influenced or marked the narrator. Here again Théoret is exploring her
relationship with the elegant and sensual mother she adored as a small
child, but who reduced her to a state of muteness by her coldness, anger,
and rigidity. In short, factual, powerfully resonant sentences, she assesses
the damage done to her in childhood and reflects on the collective dimen-
sion of her individual experience.
Hôtel des quatre chemins resembles Such a Good Education in its focus
on the education of a young girl at home, at school, and in society – an
education aimed at the erasure of all traces of individuality, spontaneity,
and imagination. One recognizes the hierarchical system written about
by Claire Martin and others, based on the power of the strong over the
weak; Théoret’s heroine is taught, for example, that “if you don’t learn to
obey, you won’t know how to give orders” (HQC, 29). For the timid Éve-
lyne, who seeks above all to please her mother, this means she must be
obedient and “servile” in all circumstances: “The adult was large, the child
was an unfinished being whose energies had to be crushed. They had to be
drained, destroyed, gotten rid of entirely if possible” (HQC, 30).
Beginning with her earliest volumes of poetry in the 1970s, Théoret’s
work has circulated around two themes: the relationship with the mother
and the daughter’s struggle to find a voice. As Lori Saint-Martin explains,
the short phrase “Je, langue, mère” (I, language, mother) in her second
book, Une voix pour Odile19 (A voice for Odile) (1978), sums up Théoret’s
entire project: “to tell what has never been told about mothers, women
and bodies that are mistreated […] To give birth to all these mothers
through writing.”20 In spite of her hysterical outbursts and her rigidity,
the mother is evoked with tenderness in these works, portrayed as a silent
and suffering victim linked to her daughter in a fragile complicity. It is
not until Théoret’s two autobiographical novels Such a Good Education
(2006) and Hôtel des quatre chemins (2011) that her full destructive force
is unveiled. Each of these works seems to bring the author closer to total
self-revelation, almost as if she were unpeeling the layers of an onion
skin and getting closer to an almost unspeakable truth. It is hard not to
think in this regard of Denise Desautels’s words about her own process of
self-discovery: “There are so many resistances before you get to the true
story, the thin, bony shell that protects the soul.”21 In Hôtel des quatre che-
mins, Théoret’s ongoing preoccupation with finding liberation through
the pursuit of knowledge is shown to be linked to an extreme ambivalence
in the mother-daughter relationship, for it is the mother who not only
inspires her daughter with the desire to excel in her studies, but, years
later, represents the voice of interdiction, harshly telling her that she has
no right to abandon her mother and her social class by continuing her
education.
Like a praying mantis which devours not her husband (since he is
“head of the family”) but her children, Évelyne’s mother refuses to let
go of her daughter, pursuing her into adulthood and reducing her to a
childlike state on each encounter. Married to an authoritarian, mediocre
husband and deprived of the possession of a house, which she considers
the symbol of feminine success, she puts on airs of superiority, dressing
her children in such a way as to show they come from a well-to-do fam-
ily (HQC, 27) and teaching them to condescend to their working-class
neighbours. Possessed by an immense anger, she screams or falls into
silence, treating her children coldly and insisting on total obedience from
them: “She totally assumed her role as a mother. She made us toe the line,
knocked us into shape […] She taught us that we shouldn’t be afraid of
our lowliness. If we were very lowly, we would be accepted” (HQC, 13, 17).
Such an education in servility, reinforced by the hymns sung at church,
the lessons taught in school, and the threats and insults of the adults at
home, leads the little girl to the realization that revolt is impossible. Here,
Théoret explores in depth the disappropriation of self which she captured
in the image of the “old, tired little girl” of her early poetry: “Mocking was
the prerogative of the big people and you had to accept it with a smile. It
was a perilous thing to learn, this disappropriation of the self […] I gave
in before my parents. I had the feeling of having been born tired, lacking
will, on the side of dirtiness and guilt. I had so little personal value, I was
too young for that. My shame was continual” (HQC, 30).
Until adolescence, Évelyne continues to adore her mother in spite of
being constantly rejected by her: “Her rigid body would freeze” (HQC,
31). Blaming herself for her mother’s coldness, she lives in the future,
motivated by the principle so often repeated by her mother: “The best
heritage we can leave our children is schooling” (HQC, 26). This princi-
ple will guide her throughout her life, leading her to engage in the search
for knowledge that was the principal subject of Such a Good Education.
Hôtel des quatre chemins reveals the extent of the struggle with her mother
that will be necessary in order for her to claim this right to education and
knowledge.
Focused primarily on the years after the family’s move from Saint-Henri
to Saint-Colomban in the Laurentians, where the father has bought a hotel-
bar situated at the crossroads of the village, Hôtel des quatre chemins reveals
an important transformation in the mother who, despite her anger, had
in the past shown an interest in the arts, dressed as elegantly as she could,
sewn good clothes for her children, and hired a diction teacher who read
them the fables of La Fontaine: “That mother no longer existed” (HQC,
37). Now, having given up her dreams and her ambitions for her children,
she does all she can to resemble the other women in the village and please
the lumberjacks, loggers, and construction workers who are the principal
clients of her husband’s bar. Education, formerly seen as an advantage for
her children, now seems to her a defect, an unacceptable sign of their dif-
ference: “Here, we’re in the country, surrounded by unpretentious people,
and my daughter walks around with a book in her hands. I don’t want our
clients to see my daughter with a book” (HQC, 37). Often she intones, with
pursed lips: “The little miss is putting on airs.” As well, she repeats con-
stantly to her daughter, who is now working in the bar, that “all men are
superior to all women” (HQC, 38). Totally devastated, the young girl enters a
long period of confusion and stuttering, in which only the forbidden activ-
ity of reading offers her any relief. Torn between conflicting views of the
world, she loses all sense of her own worth and dares not utter any words of
revolt: “In her presence I was learning what was called masochism” (HQC,
38); “I was a rebel without the right to rebellion” (HQC, 57). Treated as a
snob and accused of being pretentious or mentally ill, she sinks deeper and
deeper into silence: “I became mute, turning more and more into what I
had been since birth, a night person, without a voice. I had learned too
many things, I didn’t know where to start” (HQC, 59); “I was under surveil-
lance, that is why I never spoke” (HQC, 67). In her mother’s gaze she sees no
recognition of her own existence: “I was an intelligent object in her service.
As in the past, when I was a child, I served as a place for her waste disposal,
an outlet for the disgust she felt for my father” (HQC, 95).
The book deals only briefly with the years of college and university
described in Such a Good Education. It does, however, record the awaken-
ing of the “inner voice,” defined, as in the earlier work, as a key moment of
transition: “I learn to value my existence” (HQC, 93). The book ends with
a final attempt at communication with the mother, an event that begins
in hope but ends in disaster. Now thirty-four years old and a college pro-
fessor separated from her husband, Évelyne rents a cottage with the idea
of using it as a place to write. Full of optimism, she invites her mother,
now a widow, to visit her there, planning to ask her if they may now at
last begin to address each other using the familiar “tu.” “My decision to
ask her this anticipates a renewal, we will have a better relationship. We
will be closer to one another. I think about my mother, whom I’ve never
stopped loving […] I am part of the women’s movement and I want to give
her what I’m receiving from the other women […] My heart is pound-
ing. I’m feeling the same way about her as I did when I was little” (HQC,
114). The mother acquiesces to her daughter’s request, but immediately
attacks her, accusing her of stealing boxes of spaghetti twelve years earlier,
when she was a student living in poverty and returning to the hotel-bar
to work on weekends. All at once the joy of addressing her mother as “tu”
disappears, and Évelyne falls back into her childhood feelings of guilt and
shame: “I am inhibited, destroyed by her accusations. I was on the edge
of euphoria and now I am falling into an abyss […] I admit that I stole
some boxes of Catelli. I lower my head, ashamed, uncertain, guilty […]
It doesn’t occur to me to justify myself […] The day is ruined […] I had
hoped to get closer to her. I was so close to her in childhood, I loved her
so much […] I am a woman of language and I can’t formulate a single con-
vincing sentence in her presence” (HQC, 115–18).
Éva leaves, telling her daughter how disappointed she is in her: “She
expected more of me, she tells me. My mother is dissatisfied with me, with
my way of living, with what I am, with what I have” (HQC, 118). The next
day, Évelyne sits down in front of a blank page and begins to put her dis-
possession into words.
re COn C iLi AtiO n At LA S t: frAn Cine nOËL
A combined biography and autobiography, Francine Noël’s La femme de

ma vie (The woman of my life) treats the same themes as the works pre-
viously discussed, but goes beyond them to a reconciliation with the
mother who, thanks to the process of remembering and writing which
constitutes the book, has finally become a subject for her daughter. As
in the works of Saint-Onge, Desautels, Daviau, and Théoret, the mother
presented here is controlling, egotistical, and uninterested in sacrificing
herself for her daughter. But even as she lays bare these negative aspects
of her mother, Noël pays homage to her verve, energy, and courage and,
above all, to the passion for storytelling she has passed on to her daughter.
Like Gabrielle Roy, but in a more sustained fashion, she brings her mother
to life for her readers, allowing them to espouse her point of view as fully
as they do that of her daughter. Written ten years after the death of Noël’s
mother, the book is an attempt to untangle the complex threads of a rela-
tionship that moved from the daughter’s total admiration for her mother
as a small child to an embarrassment and desire for distance which began
when she was eleven years old. Unlike the other authors, Noël follows the
mother-daughter relationship through the length of a full life (or, rather,
two full lives), from the original fusion and the dramatic break to an
ongoing series of reconciliations and retreats, until the moment when the
daughter accompanies her dying mother in her final moments, holding
her hand “like that of a child who needs reassurance” (FV, 154).
La femme de ma vie conforms perfectly with the traditional cri-
teria of autobiography, fully respecting the pact between author and
reader as to its referential truth. The identification between author, nar-
rator, and protagonist is total and the story is full of dates, place names,
and events which anchor it solidly in the historical and cultural real-
ity of Quebec (Gratien Gélinas’s Fridolin monologues from the 1940s,
the songs of Félix Leclerc, the election of René Lévesque, etc.). Faithful
to the quotation from Samuel Beckett which is the book’s epigraph – “I
tell it as I see it” – Noël writes in a direct, down-to-earth prose studded
with amusing anecdotes, evoking her negative feelings about her mother
even as she presents the life of the latter and traces the progression of their
relationship as objectively as possible. Like Gabrielle Roy, she recognizes

the immense influence of her mother’s talent for storytelling on her own
vocation as a novelist, with the notable difference that the family saga
recounted by Noël’s mother turns out to be a tissue of lies.
The mother’s voice (its musical intonations, its impeccable articula-
tion, its accent) and her stories are at the heart of the magic she exerts,
but are also an aspect of her overpowering and irritating presence in her
daughter’s life. Thus, the first sentence of the book – “My mother talked a
lot” (FV, 11) – is double-edged. Noël reveals her ambivalence in an amus-
ing scene where she recalls the frequent telephone calls she would receive
from her mother when she was in her forties, the mother of a small boy, a
well-known novelist, and a college professor. While her mother goes on
at length about herself on the phone, showing no interest in the life of her
daughter or grandson, Francine looks after various tasks, watering her
plants or giving herself a manicure while murmuring an occasional word
or two to show that she is still on the line. And yet, she adds, in spite of her
irritation she would sometimes take the time to call her mother herself,
for the simple pleasure of hearing her voice: “I would dial her number and
then lie down on my bed and listen to her. I had the best of her then, her
voice abstracted from her body” (FV, 115).
As in Denise Desautels’s Ce fauve, le bonheur, the intensity of the
original fusion with the mother owes much to the fact that the latter is
present only intermittently in the life of her daughter. In both autobiog-
raphies, the formative years of the protagonists (from ages three to five)
are a period in which they only see their mothers on weekends. Fran-
cine’s parents having temporarily separated, she is living with a guardian
in the suburbs while her mother works during the week in downtown
Montreal. For the little girl, her beautiful and elegant mother seems like
a “hard-working fairy” (FV, 15), an affectionate physical presence who
shares her bed and whose crepe de Chine dresses, jewellery, trinkets, and
silvery belts she adores. In turn, she knows she is adored by her mother,
who caresses her from head to toe while singing loving words (FV, 12).
The short period during which her parents reconcile leaves few traces in
her memory: “In my memories, I’m alone with my mother” (FV, 13).
Mother and daughter live together for only a year and a half, when
Francine is eight or nine years old, and the author recalls this time on Rue
Laval, near Square Saint-Louis, as the happiest of her life. Enrolled in the
neighbourhood school, the little girl returns home alone at lunchtime
and after school, waiting until her mother returns from work with her
arms filled with groceries. Energetic, joyful, and a good cook, her mother
shares with her daughter not only her housekeeping secrets but her love
of culture: the Metropolitan Opera, which she listens to every Saturday

as she does her ironing, the songs of the Quebec chansonniers, and the
folksongs of her Gaspé childhood, sung heartily while playing a piano left
in the apartment by the previous tenants, and an oral and personalized
version of literary works, from the Bible and Greek mythology to Lafon-
taine, Hugo, Musset, and Lamartine, as well as stories about “Louis XIV,
Marie-Antoinette, Cleopatra, Liszt in Paris, Chopin in Paris, Josephine
Baker in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt in Montreal, King Dagobert, the twins
Jacob and Esau and their plate of lentils, and Vercingetorix conquered by
the Romans” (FV, 28). During their walks in the neighbourhood, she tells
the story of “each building, each house, each passerby” (FV, 22). All her
stories have a personal touch, with poet Émile Nelligan’s house on Rue
Laval inspiring a tale in which she is the principal character: “She told me
he had been thrown out of the house by his father and said that she identi-
fied with him. Their youths had almost touched each other – there were a
few decades between them, but that was a minor detail. According to her,
Émile had been familiar with her home territory, Cacouna! He had spent
his summers there and admired the same landscapes as she had” (FV,
22). The stories of her childhood in the Lower Saint Lawrence, worthy of
a picaresque novel, constitute a myth of origins for Francine, peopled by
priests, fishermen, and a whole panoply of colourful characters who gave
her the sense of having a history and belonging to a culture:
Whether she was evoking the exploits of Hercules or those of

our family, she was carried away by her storyteller’s emotion and
revealed feelings to me which she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – reveal any
other way […] She had such joy and conviction in telling the story
that I totally espoused her point of view. My life was life according
to Jeanne Pelletier. Like all storytellers, she chose what she wanted
from reality and transformed it. She gave me a sunnier vision of the
world. She designated my place in this world and our family saga
constituted the framework of my personal story, which was a con-
tinuation of hers. (FV, 37–8)
And then, at the age of about ten, the heroine is expelled from par-
adise through her own fault: “I took a false step and I was shut out of
this happiness […] My marvellous childhood with her was over. It had
lasted a year and a half ” (FV, 38–9). Caught skipping school, Francine
is sent, sick at heart, to a boarding school run by the Sisters of Saint
Anne in Lachine. From that moment on, daughter and mother will be
separated by a distance that is not only geographical, but dictated by
questions of social class, as Francine begins to compare her mother

to the bourgeois mothers of her schoolmates. Seeing her through the
eyes of the other girls, she feels disgusted by her too made up face, her
heavy perfumes, and her cheap jewellery: “Suddenly, I was ashamed of
this solitary, hardworking, flashy mother. And I was ashamed of being
ashamed. A gulf started to open up between us” (FV, 53). Overcome with
guilt about these feelings, she reveals them to a priest in confession, only
to discover that he is obsessed with “sins of impurity” and not the least
interested in her relationship with her mother. Seething with frustra-
tion, she leaves the Church and does not return for the next twenty-five
years: “No one could deliver me from my repugnance for my mother, no
one wanted to absolve me of it, and I was condemned to live alone with
it and my guilt” (FV, 64).
With this growing detachment comes “the desire to live my life rather
than hers” (FV, 67). Frustrated by the control her mother still exerts over
her, Francine leaves home at seventeen, in a gesture to which her mother,
wounded to the quick, responds by disinheriting her. And yet she con-
tinues to interfere in her daughter’s life, telephoning the theatre in the
middle of a play in which Francine is acting to inform them that she is on
the verge of committing suicide and will do so unless her daughter returns
home immediately. Used to her mother’s self-dramatizations, Francine
is not overly worried: “I returned to the stage with even more adrenalin”
(FV, 78). Over the years, the two women come to a reconciliation of sorts,
made easier when Francine becomes a mother and Jeanne a grandmother,
but always extremely tense, especially when the two find themselves in
the same physical space for more than a day or two. In spite of herself,
Francine is unable to conquer the disgust she feels for her mother’s body:
“Her laboured, sonorous breathing disgusted me instead of inspiring my
compassion. Her patchouli-based perfumes made me feel sick and I hated
the way she dressed like a thirty-year-old coquette […] Part of me judged
every one of her gestures, I was irritated by the lack of control I had over
the physical effect she had on me” (FV, 111–12). At times, she admits, she
was troubled by the contrast between the mothers she portrayed in her
novels and the reality of her own situation: “At night, I was haunted by the
vanity of my prose: in my books I invented characters who were loving
mothers and who were loved, but I couldn’t stand my own mother” (FV,
112–13). As Jeanne reaches old age, a certain calm, even a reversal of roles
between mother and daughter, arrives in their relationship: “She talked
less, using her energy to fight against her pain. I became talkative. In my
turn I told her all my ‘office’ stories, I confided in her a bit and she listened
to me without judging” (FV, 123).
The family saga is also transformed during these years. Behind its
ellipses and false notes, Francine discovers a hidden story, marked by vio-
lence, alcohol, and a rejection her mother has never been able to speak
of, one which explains her rapid mood changes, hypersensitivity, and
tendency to reject her own daughter. If, for the daughter, the fact that
her grandfather was a smuggler during the prohibition years adds spice
to the family story, she realizes that this is not the case for her mother:
“Shame doesn’t need to be founded in reality in order to take a person
over and reduce them to silence, camouflage and denial” (FV, 107). This
parental silence is not unique, Noël suggests, but rather a phenomenon
common to families of the generation which gained access to the middle
class thanks to the Quiet Revolution: “There will always be things that
aren’t spoken of – suffering, deprivation, failures – and in the family his-
tory of most people in my generation there are a lot of suspension points”
(FV, 107). Her mother’s stories – as much by what they leave out as by
the magic they exert – are one version among a thousand of the collec-
tive story of the Québécois people: “The murmur of her words had passed
over my childhood like a snow squall which attracts the eye on a beau-
tiful winter day. Under the shimmering snow, I now suspected the frost,
the famous Quebec silence by which she too was affected. A part of her
remained enclosed in permafrost” (FV, 107).
A voyage towards love and understanding, the book ends with the
author’s statement that she misses her mother. It is not (as in the case of
Gabrielle Roy, for example) an idealized and suffering mother she misses,
but rather the complex and imperfect one she has discovered through
writing: “Not the fairy of my childhood, but the person who replaced her,
the capricious and difficult woman with whom I shared moments of com-
plicity, the pleasure of words and laughter. I miss her courage, her passion,
and even her implacable pride” (FV, 164). It is also a voyage towards the
self, for, in revisiting the stormy territory of her relationship with her
mother, the author has discovered many aspects of herself which are an
inheritance from her mother: “The pride of being part of a family […] my
confidence at work, my feeling of belonging to a class – the one I came
from – and pride in being a Québécoise. But the best thing she left me
is words. Her love of stories rubbed off on me” (FV, 161–2). Returning in
conclusion to the autobiographical pact, she identifies with precision the
only type of truth which autobiography can aspire to: the authenticity and
accuracy of one’s own point of view on reality. “There is no such thing as
a complete and objective account. So I didn’t aim at the truth, but rather
to tell the story of my mother as she spoke of herself and as I heard her
speak” (FV, 164). More than anything, her book is “a small and simple
battle against being swallowed up by death. A memorial. The refusal of

loss” (FV, 165).
• • •
More than any of the other works, and with a “panache” (FV, 164) which
recalls that of the author’s storytelling mother, La femme de ma vie pres-
ents a mother-daughter relationship that takes place over time, moving
from the paradise of original fusion to the necessary rupture, and finally
to reconciliation with a mother who has finally become a subject for her
daughter. As Lori Saint-Martin points out, Gabrielle Roy too “lays the
groundwork for a recognition of maternal subjectivity […] inscribing
the voice of the older woman in the text of the younger one in such a way
that two subjectivities, two voices are at times intertwined.”22 But in Noël’s
work, the difficult dialogue between daughter and mother is examined
from all points of view, embraced in all its imperfections, and followed
in its changes over time. For the first time, there is a possibility of recon-
ciliation with the overpowering French-Canadian mother presented as
a paralyzing force in so many other autobiographical works by women.
Several of these works mention the unfulfilled dreams of these mothers in
passing, but the mother is presented as so distant and forbidding, and the
autonomy of the daughter is so dearly bought, that reconciliation seems
out of the question. As Luce Irigaray’s work demonstrates, a mother who
has not lived herself, who is not herself a subject, cannot give her daughter
the tools necessary for achieving autonomy. All these texts tell of women
imprisoned in the maternal role and of the consequences of that impris-
onment for the lives of their daughters. As for the father, he is notable for
his absence. In almost all of them, to borrow Francine Noël’s description
of her own family situation, we are in the presence of a “dynasty of single
mothers” (FV, 83).
Is it possible to generalize on the basis of these few examples about the
situation of Quebec women – that of the so-called “queens of the hearth”
who reigned over the pre-Quiet Revolution families, or that of their
daughters, many of whom became adults in the 1960s, when changes in
women’s role had begun to take place? Most of the authors make the link
themselves between their experiences and those of the larger collectiv-
ity, showing their own acquisition of voice as a consequence of the Quiet
Revolution and, a decade later, of the feminist movement. Reading their
stories, one begins to understand the often bitter struggles and the hard-
won solidarity among women that were necessary before the latter could
say, along with France Théoret, “I value my existence” (HQC, 93).
C h ap t e r 1 1
Tr ap p e d i n th e Im a ge:
N e ll y A rc an’s Aut of i ct i ons
A death wish […] develops and grows when you’re eaten up by your own reflec-
tion. Committing suicide is just a refusal to go on cannibalizing yourself.
Nelly Arcan, Burqa of Skin
I’ll finally be able to show my ugliness […] I’ll kill myself in front of you at the end
of a rope, I’ll make my death into a poster that will reproduce itself on the walls,
I’ll die like they die in the theatre, in the din of the hue and cry […] And if I die
before my suicide […] if someone strangles me in a fit of rage because my very
special way of keeping silent outlasts the most cocksure of speeches […] I’d have to
be found dead in bed, the crumpled sheets on the floor a sign of someone fleeing
without bothering to cover me […] I’d like to be unveiled cold and naked to my
community, so that no-one can deny me any longer, permanently fixed, a corpse to
be identified.
Nelly Arcan, Whore
Aut O fi CtiO n Or the SP eC tAC Le Of the Se L f
On 24 September 2009, at the age of thirty-six, scant weeks before the

publication of her novel Paradis clef en main (Exit), Nelly Arcan took her
own life in her Plateau Mont-Royal apartment. Her tragic death brought
an end to a brilliant and scandalous body of work of which the first two
books, Putain (Whore) (2001) (W) and Folle (Hysteric) (2004) (H), as
well as a collection of short texts published posthumously under the
title Burqa de chair (Burqa of Skin) (2011) (BS),1 are examples of a hybrid
genre called autofiction, a product of the postmodern era which all of
Arcan’s works portray and denounce. Trapped in the image of femininity
nelly Arcan’s Autofictions • 257
transmitted by advertising and the media, Arcan can only expose, with
a rage-stoked lucidity, the devastating effect of these images on women’s
lives and her own inability to get free of them. And what better means to
communicate the nature of this image-centred universe than autofiction,
a genre founded on the impossibility of distinguishing between image and
reality, lies and truth, in all autobiographical works?
The product and symptom of an age in which the old hierarchies have
collapsed, autofiction makes a spectacle of a self in free fall, liberated by
(or condemned to) the singularity of its narrative path. As Madeleine
Ouellette-Michalska points out, it is the self we meet on phone-in shows,
reality television, and even the immensely popular Quebec television
program Tout le monde en parle: media spaces where the postmodern
Narcissus exhibits his or her struggles and excesses before audiences of
millions.2 The term autofiction, invented in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky,
refers to a category of works close to the autobiographical novel, but
which proudly display their refusal to submit to generic boundaries.
Neither novels nor autobiographies, they are a combination of the two,
thumbing their nose at readers who look for signs of the pact guarantee-
ing the referential truth of the text. Philippe Lejeune, the theoretician who
formulated the concept of the “autobiographical pact,” reflected in the
1970s on the possibility that a novel might exhibit the onomastic identity
of author, narrator, and protagonist which characterizes autobiography:
“Can the hero of a novel have the same name as the author? Nothing says
that such a thing is impossible, and it might in fact be an internal con-
tradiction that could produce interesting results. But in practice, I cannot
think of an example of such a work.”3 This was the challenge to which
Doubrovsky seemed to be responding by inventing the neologism auto-
fiction to describe one of his own works: “Autobiography? No, that is the
privilege reserved to the important people of this world, at the end of their
lives and in a beautiful style. A fiction, rather, of events and facts that are
strictly real; or an autofiction, if one prefers, which replaces the language
of an adventure by an adventure in language.”4
The boundaries between autobiography, the autobiographical novel,
and autofiction are porous and depend to some extent on the point
of view of the observer. For some critics,5 the category of autofiction
includes any fictional work which contains a clearly identifiable autobi-
ographical element. According to this very broad definition, the list of
such works goes back to Dante’s Divine Comedy and would include such
titles as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Hubert
Aquin’s Prochain épisode (Next Episode). Jacques Lecarme’s definition
is much more restrictive: for him, only works in which the text actually
contains the name of the author can be considered autofictions: “The term
autofiction designates a novelistic fiction which is also an autobiogra-
phy. It is a fiction in that it is labelled a novel, and some parts of it may
therefore be fictional. It is an autobiography in that author, narrator, and
protagonist all bear the same proper name: that of the author or of his or
her usual pseudonym […] This nominal designation can be complete,
partial, or coded, but it is not limited to an initial or reduced to anonym-
ity.”6 Gilles Perron also stresses the importance of the author’s name, even
if shrouded in ambiguity, in the distinction he makes between autofiction
and the autobiographical novel: “While autofiction aims at confusion
between the character and the author, the autobiographical novel avoids
this confusion by disguising the author under another name in the story.”7
Following Lecarme’s strict definition, the only work by Nelly Arcan
that truly qualifies as an autofiction is Hysteric, a text described on the
title page of the original French version Folle simply as a recit, a “story,”
although the English translation is presented as a novel. Not only are the
narrator and the protagonist identical to the author, but the text reveals
that the name Nelly Arcan is a pseudonym (the author’s real name is Isa-
belle Fortier): “I kept my real name for close friends and used Nelly for
everyone else” (H, 18). Later, addressing her lover, the narrator remem-
bers: “You thought I was beautiful too, you were happy, you had Nelly
Arcan at your feet” (H, 160). Several other publicly known details of the
author’s career, especially regarding the success of her first book, Whore,
are also revealed in the book, so that, as Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska
observes, “the contract of identity as defined by Lejeune is […] fulfilled.
The name of the author, whether or not it is a pseudonym, includes the
identity of the narrator and that of the principal character.”8
Most critics are, however, less demanding than Lecarme regarding the
need for the author’s name to be included in the text if it is to be consid-
ered a work of autofiction. In general, they allow for extratextual signs like
a prologue or an author’s note attesting to the autobiographical nature
of a work to be sufficient indicators of its autofictional status. This is the
case of Whore, which, while it is described as a novel on its title page,
was accompanied by numerous interviews and television appearances
in which Nelly Arcan spoke openly of the fact that, like the narrator of
her book, she had worked as a call girl for several years while a student
of literature and psychoanalysis at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
Attracted by the scandal, members of the media focussed their attention
on the autobiographical aspects of the book, ignoring its literary qualities
in spite of the author’s attempts to draw their attention to them. In front of
the cameras, Arcan often found herself trapped in the image of the whore
she had created of herself, while desperately wanting to be treated as the

writer she had become by publishing the book.9 In an interview with Pas-
cale Navarro, she discusses this dilemma, insisting on the fact that Whore
is not an autobiography, but rather a fiction inspired by the facts of her
life: “I can’t stop [this insistence on the autobiographical aspect]. But I
don’t want people to focus on the image of the prostitute as an object of
curiosity […] I want them to listen to me, to see me, as a writer.”10
In general, the “fictional” element in Arcan’s writing consists of a ten-
dency to push the elements of a situation, emotion, or person to their
limits, while at the same time reducing them to their essential traits. “All
the characteristics I borrow from people are made absolute,”11 she tells
Tristan Malavoy-Racine regarding her book Hysteric. Speaking of Whore,
she explains to Pascale Navarro that she chose an esthetic, or a form, in
which to capture lived reality: “I wrote this novel in a state of hatred. Then
I detached myself from the story. It is true that it’s autobiographical, but at
the same time, I wrote it as if I were ‘beside’ reality: the form that I chose is
one of entrapment, of excess, there was a literary and esthetic decision to
communicate hatred.”12 Nancy Huston describes the way this process of
transformation of reality works for Arcan in her presentation of “Shame,”
a short story based on the author’s humiliating experience when she was
a guest on the program Tout le monde en parle in 2007: “She amplifies the
pain she is feeling, pushes it to a paroxysm, which is her way of capturing
its meaning” (BS, 67).
In the interviews Arcan gave, one is also struck by her tendency to
generalize from her own experience, making it emblematic of the expe-
rience of all women, especially regarding the tyranny exerted on them by
images of women in the media: “It’s my story that I’m telling, that of a girl
who needs to please no matter what the cost. And the alienation related
to beauty is a woman’s story. When I go into a corner store and see all
those magazines with photos of sexy teenagers, I can’t bear it: I’m both fas-
cinated by this femininity and panicked by it. I absolutely have to be the
most beautiful. If it’s not me it’s them, and then who am I?”13
“Then who am I?” This question, which is the central one asked by
all the writings analyzed in this book, is dissected and analyzed with a
despairing lucidity in the work of Nelly Arcan. Who am I, the Québécoise
raised in a Catholic milieu which fashioned every aspect of my deepest
self, and in whose dogmas I no longer believe? Who am I, the daugh-
ter of a woman who never existed as a subject, but only as the object of
desire for a man? Who am I, who detest my body and need male approval
to the point that I submit to an unending series of cosmetic surgeries?
The obsession with the body, appearance, and sex exhibited by Arcan’s
narrators is the surface covering of a fragile or nonexistent sense of self,

linked to a culture centred on the image of the sacrificial woman. As the
title of her posthumous volume Burqa of Skin suggests, the cult of beauty
in Western society, like the veil worn by Muslim women, can mask an
absence of identity or autonomy. The dissonance between public image
and inner reality, which girls become used to at an early age, may explain
women’s taste for autofiction, a genre which allows them to reveal their
intimate selves in the public sphere at last. In Autofiction et dévoilement
de soi, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska remarks that the lack of modesty
and desire to shock the reader which characterize the writing of Arcan
and other writers of autofictional works (Annie Ernaux, Catherine Mil-
let, Christine Angot, Marie-Sissi Labrèche) are attempts to disguise a
confusion that is close to panic: “No longer knowing who she is, woman
capitulates readily to the desire of the other, his fantasms, his needs.”14
Reflecting on the situation of today’s women, who longer have the ideals
of femininity and the roles that formerly defined them, she concludes that
the separation of sexuality and reproduction, while offering women new
possibilities of erotic fulfilment, condemned them to the perpetuation of
their status as sexual objects: “Makeup, diets, visits to the gym, hormone
therapy and cosmetic surgery transform her flesh into a cultural object.”15
In Nelly Arcan’s work, the sexual object speaks, from the most abject
space assigned to her in culture, that of the prostitute (Whore), and that of
the woman lost to herself through love (Hysteric). And through the power
of her words, the object becomes a subject.
In many ways, Arcan is the female double and the tragic “little sister”
of another Quebec writer, Hubert Aquin, whom she resembles not only
by the assonance of their names, but by a desire for suicide that goes
back to adolescence. “Since the age of fifteen I have dreamed of a beauti-
ful suicide,”16 says the narrator of Aquin’s Prochain épisode, in a sentence
echoed by the narrator of Hysteric: “The day I turned fifteen, I decided to
kill myself when I turned thirty” (H, 10). Both authors write with excep-
tional lucidity about the forces at play in the culture of their time, and yet
they themselves were tragically incapable of escaping from the dark ele-
ments they had unearthed: the problematic heritage of the religious past,
the far-reaching but undeclared war between men and women, and the
suffocating presence of Quebec within Canada, which Arcan describes as
“this empty container, this country like a sky where so many things stretch
out and unfold, spread out like the agonies of a beached whale, but where
nothing moves, nothing happens, just stretching, only distance happens,
time that turns in circles” (BS, 40).
n elly Arcan’s Autofictions • 261
In an earlier work,17 I used the metaphor of a “corpse under the foun-

dations of the house” to illustrate the situation of woman in Quebec
literature and, more broadly, in patriarchal culture as a whole. As the
second quotation from Nelly Arcan used as an epigraph for this chap-
ter suggests, Arcan is this corpse – the woman imprisoned in her body,
destroyed by her reflection in the mirror, uncertain of her identity,
obsessed by her resemblance to a mother whose fate she does not want to
repeat, and dependent on the love of a paternal/masculine other whose
destructive values she recognizes but is unable to resist. In the theatre that
her life had become by the time of her suicide, she voluntarily assumed
this role, denouncing the scandal of women’s situation in a culture that
has reached an impasse: “I’d like to be unveiled cold and naked to my
community, so that no-one can deny me any longer, permanently fixed, a
corpse to be identified” (W, 80). Reading her, one is reminded of another
literary corpse, that of the “black woman” at the end of Anne Hébert’s
novel Kamouraska:
Off in a parched field, under the rocks, they’ve dug up a woman, all
black but still alive, buried there long ago, some far-off, savage time.
Strangely preserved […] And everyone thinks that she must have
an absolutely awesome lust for life, buried alive so long. A hunger
growing and growing inside the earth for centuries on end! […]
And whenever she runs through the town, begging and weeping,
they sound the alarm. Nothing before her but doors shut tight […]
Nothing to do now but let herself die. Alone and hungry.18
WHORE : M ySti Ci SM turned uPSide dOWn
In Whore, Arcan universalizes her own experience by fusing it with the

archetype of the prostitute, the ultimate woman-object: “This whore can
be me or not, she could be somebody else” (W, 38). Defined by her body,
rejected and rendered mute by the patriarchal society of which she is both
an accomplice and a victim, the prostitute is the woman exchanged as mer-
chandise who epitomizes the oppression of all women.19 As Yannick Resch
observes, the question posed by Arcan’s provocative and dispossessed nar-
rator is that of “the identity of woman and the use of her body in today’s
society […] The interrogation about identity is at the heart of the narra-
tive. The narrator seeks to know who she is based on her clients’ multiple
but always identical ways of looking at her.”20 This story of a fragmented
and postmodern protagonist, reduced to her body and frozen in the gaze
of the other, is a continuation of the quest for identity present in all the
earlier autobiographies by women and, sadly, a suggestion that this quest
has reached an impasse. In a striking passage which echoes not only the
“decree of a will higher than [one’s] own” of Anne Hébert’s The Torrent, but
also the paralysis of the narrator of Aquin’s Next Episode as he confronts
the failure of his nation’s history,21 Arcan’s narrator links her own drama
to the absence of stories (or the absence from history) of her Québécois
and female ancestry: “What’s killing me came well before me, its seed was
somewhere in the gestures my mother didn’t make, the void has a weight
that I swear you can inherit, you can carry inside yourself the story of
three centuries without history, ten generations forgotten because there is
nothing to say about them or because the only thing to say would be what
wasn’t done, and I’ve had it with this story that won’t tell itself ” (W, 72).
The voice which speaks in the text is that of the prostitute, seated on
the bed waiting for her clients or lying on the couch in her psychoanalyst’s
office, but in it can be heard the voices of all women caught in the oppres-
sive structures of patriarchal society: “It’s the body that makes the woman,
the whore is proof of it” (W, 41). It is a powerful and despairing voice,
carrying the reader along in its lyrical flow, and it seems to come from
“elsewhere, on the other side of things.”22 According to Danielle Laurin,
it is the devastating authenticity of this voice that distinguishes the text
from a simple autobiography: “This voice […] transcends the question of
whether or not it is true. We are, above all, in literature.”23 The text, a long
monologue punctuated almost exclusively by commas, repeats itself and
circles endlessly around a series of fragments linked by free association
of images or ideas. While reminiscent of psychoanalytical discourse, it is
also a lament, a prayer, an exorcism: “I talk about everything and nothing
without interruption so that there are no gaps between the words, so that
it sounds like a prayer […] knowing that it accomplishes nothing […] but
you have to keep going not to die from the blow of a silence too much
borne, have to say everything several times in a row and especially not be
afraid to repeat yourself ” (W, 57–8). At times, from the depths of her soli-
tary space, the narrator addresses an unidentified “you” who could be her
psychoanalyst, but who, as Michel Biron observes, is above all “an absent
addressee with whom the reader is invited to identify.”24
the SAC rifi CiAL WOMA n
A sort of preface or prologue with no title, printed in italics, anchors the

text solidly in Quebec culture. There is reason to suspect that in this pro-
logue the author has chosen to remove her literary mask, entering into
the autobiographical pact with her readers which guarantees the truth of
the story to follow. Several aspects of it create this impression: the calmer
tone of the writing, the suggestion that the author is addressing the reader
directly – “I’m not used to addressing others when I speak, which is why
there’s nothing to hold me back” (W, 1), the details she reveals about her
childhood, her family situation, and the route that led her to prostitution
and later to writing. However, as there is no way to verify whether the text
is “true” or “fictional,” its generic ambiguity remains total.
In her preface to Burqa of Skin, Nancy Huston proposes the provoca-
tive idea that prostitutes, cut off from time and the possibility of change
during their hours of work, “have a tendency to become either mystics or
nihilists. Or both.”25 And indeed, in Arcan’s prologue, prostitution and
mysticism appear as the two opposing poles of a long tradition of female
sacrifice. The author/narrator describes her childhood in a small village
near the Maine border – a traditional Catholic childhood which seems
something of an anachronism given that Arcan was born in 1973, more
than ten years after the start of the Quiet Revolution – and offers a sur-
prising contrast with the urban, postmodern universe of the story that
follows: “In this fervently Catholic country where I grew up […] life could
be quite beautiful if you didn’t want much, if you had faith” (W, 1). In the
“archaic” (W, 10) atmosphere of this childhood universe lie the roots of
the narrator’s alienation: the aspiration to sacrifice, the feeling of never
being good enough or talented enough, the desire to please at all costs, the
self-hatred, the obsession with a body that is always to be perfected. The
narrator’s description of her teachers – “dried-up nuns, fanatic about the
sacrifice they were making of their lives, women I had to call mothers and
who’d had to choose fake names” (W, 1) – recalls the ideal of self-sacrifice
espoused by the nuns of New France and rigidly imposed in the convent
school curricula described by Henriette Dessaulles and Claire Martin.
Ironically, the decision to become a prostitute, initially seen as a break
from this Catholic past, turns out to be a repetition of the attitudes of
these nuns: “[I became] a whore to escape every shred of my past identity,
so I could prove to others that you really could pursue your studies, dream
about being a writer, hope for a future and […] sacrifice yourself just like
the sisters in my elementary school” (W, 1–2). Like them, she chooses a
new name on entering her vocation as a call girl, that of her sister Cynthia,
who died a few months before her own birth. As well, she imagines that
the nuns, like her, have perhaps doubted God’s existence and attempted
to escape their families: “Maybe they didn’t really believe in their God
who was so thirsty for names, at least not to the end, maybe they were
just looking for a pretext to separate from their family, free themselves
from the act that had brought them into the world” (W, 3). Another trope
which will be familiar to readers of previous autobiographies by women
is the narrator’s negative and distant relationship with her mother: “I had
too many mothers, too many sanctimonious models reduced to a rein-
vented name […] too many of that kind of mothers and not enough of my
mother, a mother who didn’t say my name because she needed to sleep
too much, and in her sleep she left my father in charge of me” (W, 3).
With remarkable economy, the prologue exposes the elements that
led to the narrator’s eventual choice of prostitution and to the book she is
presenting to her readers: the mother, constantly in bed, who neglects
her daughter; the father, a fanatical believer, who demarcates the border-
line between good and evil for her, suggesting that she is already on the
side of “those who had to be denounced” (W, 5); the deceased older sister
who, not having lived long enough to acquire a personality, will always
be the rival she cannot surpass, the one who has “taken over everything I
didn’t become” (W, 5). The prologue evokes a fairly typical female ado-
lescence, tormented by “fears of this being too fat, that too small, having
a friend who’s prettier” (W, 6) and the choice of a university in downtown
Montreal where the classroom windows look out on sex workers walking
by on the street: “The nearness had an effect on me, it sent me toppling
over to the other side of the street, how could a theory hold water in the
face of so much pleasure?” (W, 8). The father, a spokesperson for the rural,
Catholic ideology of traditional Quebec, denounces the city as a place of
sin and installs a crucifix in his daughter’s apartment, “to keep [her] under
surveillance” (W, 7). In a world so rigidly divided in two, it is easy to “topple
over to the other side,” all the more so because the authoritarianism of the
prostitution system mimics that of the narrator’s childhood milieu: “Pros-
tituting myself was easy, since I’d always known I belonged to others, to a
community that would take the responsibility of finding me a name, reg-
ulate my comings and goings, give me a master who’d tell me what to do
and how, what to say and not say, I’d always known how to be the smallest”
(W, 8). In such a milieu, as France Théoret and Pierre Vadeboncœur have
pointed out, there is no place for the autonomy of the individual. Only writ-
ing, taken up when the author/narrator is in psychoanalysis, offers hope of
deliverance and of an eventual entry into the cohort of women writers who
have succeeded in liberating themselves through words. Always ambiv-
alent about other women, whom she sees as rivals who “never show up
without threatening to put me in my place, back in the ranks where I don’t
want to be” (W, 11), she admits that she envies these writers and dreams of
joining their ranks one day: “What I do envy is that they can call them-
selves writers, I’d like to think of them […] the way I think about myself, as
Smurfettes, whores. But don’t worry about me, I’ll write until I finally grow
up, catch up with those whom I don’t dare read” (W, 11).
A Pri SO ner O f the bO dy And the i MAge
While the mystic punishes her body in order to disappear into the
divine, the prostitute is reduced to hers, a scorned and anonymous object
invaded by the sperm of thousands of men: “I didn’t dream these thou-
sands of men in my bed, my mouth, didn’t invent their sperm all over me,
in my face, my eyes” (W, 13). As in the case of the mystic, the prostitute’s
self is annihilated, but against its will and without any divine or human
recompense. Knowing that her body is only a receptacle of male desire,
a female body interchangeable with a thousand others, the narrator
searches desperately for her self: “It isn’t me they’re getting hard for, never
has been, it’s my whoredom, the fact that I’m there for that […] it could
just as well be somebody else, not even another whore but some doll made
of air” (W, 13).
In her private life as well as in her work as a prostitute, the narrator
is possessed by a feeling of nonexistence, a lack of the borders she needs
to protect her fragile sense of self: “I think about what makes me a
woman, about that femininity I have a reputation for, [that] infinite flu-
idity I have, and it swallows me up whenever it’s not supported by slaps
or fondling” (W, 15). Illustrating John Berger’s insight that “men look at
women. Women watch themselves being looked at,”26 she details the
many instances in which women learn to deny their identity in favour of
the image they project. The insatiable need to be seen and desired trans-
forms life into a spectacle and makes every mirror an enemy and a judge:
“How do you walk without foundering under those piercing looks, looks
that send me back to what I can’t seem to see in the mirror, those mirrors
that hound you in stores and cafés everywhere, offering you more pres-
ence, and me no longer existing among them” (W, 17); “mirror, mirror, on
the wall, who’s the fairest of them all, well it can’t be me […] I’m inade-
quate, indefinable” (W, 18–19). Her feeling of inferiority is amplified by the
images in the magazines the agency places on the table beside her bed: “If
I think I’m so ugly, maybe it’s because of all those girls […] in the maga-
zines piled there […] fourteen year old bimbos advertising a new wrinkle
cream, their little noses and luscious lips, their tanned asses and hard nip-
ples sticking out under an open blouse” (W, 29).
Despite her rage against a society in which “they’re putting makeup on
little girls and you’re supposed to be eighteen your whole life” (W, 92), the
narrator recognizes the devastating effects it has had on her own psyche.
Her obsession with being “the most beautiful” and even her choice of
prostitution go back to a hypersexualized childhood (“I didn’t become a
whore with the first client, no, it was long before that, during the figure
skating and tap dancing of my childhood, in the fairy tales where you had
to be the most beautiful and sleep yourself to distraction” (W, 44–5), fol-
lowed by an adolescence dominated by American movies, comic books,
and television, all reinforcing the stereotypes of the man who acts and the
woman who seeks only to be the object of his desire. In a sterile parody of
mystical life, the modern woman spends her life cut off from time and the
world, in an unending quest for beauty and youth:
A whole life [in which] you’ve got to hydrate your skin and make
yourself up, get larger breasts and lips, and then do the breasts again
because they aren’t big enough, keep an eye on your measurements
and dye your white hair blonde, have the wrinkles on your face
burned off as well as the varicose veins on your legs, in fact have
your whole body burned to get rid of any signs of life, so that you
can live out of time and the world […] like Michael Jackson alone
in his white skin, finally dying from never being completely white,
completely blond. (W, 92–3)
Here, as in all of her work, Arcan is exposing the duality at the heart of
patriarchal culture: the opposition between the male subject, abstract and
immaterial, and the woman object identified with her body. The narrator
comments acerbicly on the lack of symmetry between the sexes in matters
of the body: “Anyway, they notice only when women are fat, they can be
whatever they want, mediocre or flabby, half hard, whereas with women,
flab and wrinkles are unforgivable, totally indecent, remember, it’s the
body that makes the woman” (W, 41).
the vi CiO u S CirCL e thAt LeA dS bAC K

T O THE MO THE R
In the prologue, as we have seen, the author/narrator situates the origin

of her drama in the family situation of her childhood: “Out of this knot
emerged the fundamental, tireless, and alienated subject of my writing,
my struggle to survive a sleeping mother and a father waiting for the end
of the world” (W, 11). Just as the prostitute she evokes is not only her but
all prostitutes, all women, her relationship with her parents, while entirely
convincing on the level of autobiography, is explored in its psychic depths
and becomes emblematic of the incestuous structures of desire which,
n elly Arcan’s Autofictions • 267
the narrator comes to believe in the course of her psychoanalysis, under-

lie society as a whole. Like the autobiographers of the previous generation,
Arcan’s narrator is possessed by the fear of turning into her mother, “a larva
hovering between sleeping and waiting to take form” (W, 48), “somebody
who sleeps and doesn’t speak, somebody who really isn’t anybody because
she isn’t there” (W, 72). It is this fear that motivates her to become a prosti-
tute, in a rupture which only forces her into the other stereotype reserved
for women. Mother or whore, larva or Barbie doll are the only options for
a woman in a male-dominated universe where young girls quickly learn
“that you mustn’t grow old, no, not that […] you have to stay saucy and
childless to excite the guys between two business meetings” (W, 29).
At first glance, the narrator’s mother seems to have nothing in common
with the domineering mothers of so many other Quebec women’s autobi-
ographies. Arcan almost always presents her as a “larva” or a “corpse,” the
mute and nonexistent woman created by patriarchal society: “My mother
doesn’t speak and doubtless never did, maybe that’s what she lacks the
most, wings to fly and a voice to speak” (W, 97). Rejected by her husband
in favour of younger women, she has retired to bed and spends her days
feeling sorry for herself, even as she follows her husband’s every gesture
“with the eyes of a dog waiting to be walked” (W, 30). Yet her influence on
her daughter is immense, and becomes a more and more obsessive theme
as the latter moves forward in her exploration of self. While initially kept
at a distance by images that seem designed to shock the reader, she grad-
ually emerges as the key figure in her daughter’s drama, its origin, and its
inescapable destination: “I have my mother on my back and in my arms,
hung around my neck and rolled into a ball at my feet, I have her in every
way and everywhere at the same time” (W, 126).
Arcan’s description of the mother – a good example of the esthetic of
excess and hatred she later described as her approach in the writing of
Whore27 – is limited to repulsive but eloquent physical traits (her “too-
thin lips,” “downward smile,” “funereal look,” fingers with bitten-off nails
“crooked from uselessness,” W, 27), all of which the narrator fears that she
can already detect in her own body: “And I’ve got to stand up straight to
keep back the moment when she catches up with me and I’m folded in two
by her scoliosis, bent more and more towards the ironing board by her
hump […] stand up straight and wear false nails […] and my lips need sil-
icone, since how could I resolve to live without lips as she does […] yes,
that’s what the money’s for, to cut myself away from my mother, give myself
a face that belongs to me, break away from that curse of ugliness” (W, 29).
Despite her “disgust for being a larva engendered by a larva, disgust for
a mother whom I constantly detest” (W, 30), and her fear of becoming “a
prolongation of my mother, a corpse who leaves her bed to pee, to show

off her agony” (W, 31), the narrator gradually faces the fact that her life is
an even sadder version of that of her mother. Like her, she is confined to a
bed and a room, and like her, she submits to the desire of the other: “Don’t
you have to be a larva to whore like this […] I forget at what point I no
longer know how to say no to anything […] the sanctimonious little larva
who whimpers on demand and lowers her head when they hand her the
money” (W, 55). Like many other women in search of themselves, she dis-
covers at the end of her quest that she has been moving in a circle back
to her point of departure: “I think like my mother […] I am my mother
[…] I see that I actually do sleep, eat, think like my mother, suffer like her,
too, mustn’t forget that, being like your mother means being completely
like her […] right up to being ugly and to what you can’t manage to say,
right up to no longer being able to stand yourself ” (W, 89). In a despair-
ing passage reminiscent of Anne Hébert’s image of the “black woman,” she
exposes the centuries-old roots of the heritage of nonexistence transmit-
ted from mother to daughter across the generations of patriarchal culture:
“This mother who haunts me […] everyone has already forgotten her
except perhaps me, I have to think about her for all those who no longer
do, that’s why I hate her […] and for all these reasons my spirit is dying too,
it’s dying from the weight of my mother […] the weight of a corpse that’s
very hard to budge […] I should bury her once and for all, cover her with
the strongest metals so she can’t come to the surface and hunt me down
with her octopus’s grip, with the menace of her bird of ill omen” (W, 73).
P etrified by the fAthe r’S gAZe :

the Stru Cture S Of deS i re
Both in the bed where she receives her clients and on the psychoana-
lyst’s couch, the narrator is trapped by the male gaze and intimidated by
an authoritarian discourse that denies her the right to speak. Obliged to
listen as her clients talk about their affairs, conquests, and disappointing
wives, she is forbidden to speak of herself or to ask intimate questions.
Yet she never stops imagining the women in the lives of these clients and
is filled with rage at the hypocrisy of their claims that they would never
allow their own daughters to become prostitutes: “But who do you think
I am, I’m the daughter of a father like any other, and what are you doing
here in this room, squirting sperm in my face if you wouldn’t want your
daughter to take her turn at it” (W, 98).
In Arcan’s work, as in Claire Martin’s, it is the father, not the mother,
who embodies the Jansenist ideology of traditional French Canada:
“He likes to think that we live under the reign of evil and […] that life
down here will never be a life but an ordeal” (W, 62); “[he] takes pleasure
in tracking down happy people and crushing flowers for the sole reason
that they grow in a greenhouse and not according to divine will” (W, 151).
Already at the age of ten, guilt-ridden by the discovery of her body and
her father’s claim that females carry within them an “indelible stain, the
serpent’s bite” (W, 64), the narrator prays desperately to remain good
and to continue being loved by her father. As she enters adolescence, her
obsession with the evil lodged in her body manifests itself in a refusal to
eat: “I became anorexic the day when my sex took over from my braids
and patent leather shoes” (W, 154). She blames her father for her inabil-
ity to grow up, trapped as she is in the desire to remain a little girl in his
arms: “He passed on to me his dread of happiness and lulled me for hours
into believing that I mustn’t grow up or get older, that I ought to stay small
forever so that he could carry me in his pocket everywhere […] this body
which isn’t a child’s anymore, though not really a woman’s, is still not
mine, it never will be, since someone kept it with him, it’s rolled into a
ball on my father’s knee, it’s still a tiny thing wriggling at the bottom of his
pocket” (W, 151, 154).
All the male figures in the narrator’s life – her clients, her psychoana-
lyst, her cosmetic surgeons, and the professors who take her on their laps
(W, 124) – are images of the father who made her into a little starlet, sure
of her powers of seduction and of the fact that she was preferred to the
wife for whom he no longer cares. A large part of the guilt that weighs
on her is related to this betrayal of her mother, and hence of all women:
“I killed my mother, I took away her youth and the attention of men” (W,
71); “I should have not been a child from the start and tied myself to this
drained woman” (W, 163). All of society appears to her to be ruled by this
structure of desire, with men demanding “fluid flesh that is still matur-
ing” (W, 42) and women seeking to remain eternally young in order to
please them. Faced with the consciousness that her life as a prostitute has
been a repetition of this repressed desire for the father, she begins, with a
pleasure mingled with horror, to imagine that her real father will show up
some day at her door: “Why doesn’t he get it over with and take me, put an
end to this eternal tension between fathers and daughters […] this society
where girls are whores and fathers are clients” (W, 43); “so that he’ll finally
know what he’s made of me, what I’ve made of him” (W, 147–8).
SWALLOW ed uP by the Mi rrOr: HYS TERI C
The story of a mad love affair experienced by a protagonist named Nelly

Arcan, Hysteric represents a decisive step in the author’s deterioration: the
confirmation of a fundamental lack of substance which is literally enough
to drive her mad. The original French title Folle evokes a mad love affair
that reduces the narrator to abjection, but it could also apply to the uni-
verse, cut off from reality and entirely dominated by the image, within
which the protagonists live. In this cool and narcissistic little world, sit-
uated in the clubs and bars of Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal and in the
virtual reality of cyberspace, “each person is a mirror image of the other,
reflecting his or her popularity, insignificance, confusion or humilia-
tion.”28 Since the huge success of Whore, Nelly has become a celebrity in
that world, while at the same time being recognized, with condescension
but also with a shiver of sexual desire, as a former prostitute – an image
from which she will never succeed in freeing herself. The tragic ending of
Hysteric is foreseen in its first sentence: “When we saw each other the first
time at Nova [a commercial party which takes place in a loft on the night
of the summer solstice] on Saint-Dominique Street, it was already too
late: our story would be a calamity” (H, 5). The fateful meeting takes place
on the day before the narrator’s twenty-ninth birthday, which is exactly
a year before the date of her planned suicide. Several months later, after
breaking up with her lover and having an abortion, she begins writing
him the letter which constitutes the text.
Darker and cruder in some ways than Whore, Hysteric exposes the
underside of a universe of appearances and fakery, as threatening as the
block of ice hidden by an iceberg’s shimmering tip: “It was just the tip of
the iceberg, as people say when they want to warn adventurers so they will
understand that some things flourish in the depths where they thrive in
secrecy and take on monstrous proportions” (H, 124). Small, intelligent,
and insecure, Nelly falls in love with a man who is her polar opposite: a
French journalist freelancing for a Montreal tabloid who dreams of
becoming famous by publishing a novel based on his “research” on por-
nographic websites. Tall, arrogant, and extremely handsome, he seduces
her initially by his accent: “Today, I realize I loved you because of your
French accent, I heard the race of poets and thinkers come from the
other side of the world to fill our schools, that accent […] that made you
a bearer of the Word like my grandfather said of his prophets” (H, 5–6).
Nelly’s feelings of inferiority in relation to France are one of the recur-
rent themes of the book.29 “You loved me like a colonizer” (H, 142), she
writes to her lover, recalling the sordid details of their sadomasochistic
relationship; and elsewhere she writes: “You should know that killing
myself will be a way to cast off the weight of France that you made me
carry” (H, 112). In him she has found the God-man, the male authority
figure all of whose characteristics contribute to her diminishment: “You
were three years younger than I was but you towered over me, when you
moved through a room, you automatically put me in a corner. With a sin-
gle hand you could mask my face entirely […] Our disproportion excited
you, it thrust you forward, it made you look grander” (H, 37).
Trapped by the world of the image and especially by the image she has
projected of herself, Nelly moves from one humiliation to the next until
she reaches a state of total disconnection from reality. While her deepest
desire is for love and for being part of the normal life of a couple – “I’d had
an easy life but missed out on what’s essential: being part of a couple in
love, with that butterfly feeling in your stomach, projects for the future in
a loft on the Plateau and sharing the housework” (H, 37) – she finds herself
in a relationship with a man who treats her like a prostitute, spitting on
her and sending her home when she displeases him, a man whose narcis-
sism leads him to boast of the photos he takes of his own penis. In order
to demean Nelly completely, he forces her to participate in erotic sessions
on porn sites, a triumph of the virtual over the real which she correctly
sees as a total disembodiment: “I wondered whether you were looking at
Jasmine’s ass or mine, I doubted the usefulness of my contribution to your
romance, I was only a conduit to the screen, I doubted the reality of my
own flesh against yours” (H, 86).
Everything in the daily life of the lovers is dominated by the gaze: the
gaze of others on them and their own narcissistic gaze at their reflection
in the mirror. Because they like “being seen in the midst of artistic fer-
vour” (H, 134), they write in cafés, and the one Nelly prefers is Le Pèlerin,
where she writes before a mirror: “After years of writing in cafés I can
attest that you’ve finally found your spot when you can cry, keeping an
eye on your face in the mirror, without anyone seeing you” (H, 137). But
the mirror is also the ultimate judge, which reflects not only her imperfec-
tions but her very nonexistence. This “lack of being” (H, 33) is evident to
her on the night the lovers first meet at Nova, when she feels herself swal-
lowed up by the immense mirror that covers one of the walls of the loft:
“Then I caught sight of myself, Nelly. Despite your attention, I collapsed
into myself, I slipped from your hands, the mirror swallowed me up and
the thread between us was broken. That night at Nova without wanting
to I displayed the flaw that has been in me since birth and has turned me
into a monster unable to appear in my aunt’s tarot cards […] That flaw,
you came to know it well, it exhausted you because it clung to you so you
might counterbalance it with your love, so you might give it a little of your
beauty” (H, 124).
Even more than Whore, Hysteric is marked by nostalgia for a world in
which transcendence would be possible. Without it, the cosmos becomes
a chaotic and menacing entity amplifying Nelly’s feelings of nonexis-
tence. At the height of their love and happiness, she and her lover kiss in
front of a crowd of spectators, and the reaction of the onlookers confers
on the scene something of the atmosphere of the elevation of the Host:
“When your lips touched mine, people around us went silent and lowered
their eyes as if they were in the presence of a priest raising the body of
Christ above their heads. That the world around us bowed to acknowl-
edge our love made me so happy that I paid the bill” (H, 104). Following
her abortion, Nelly sinks into the depths of despair and renounces what-
ever faith she may have had in a dimension beyond matter: “That night I
understood many things: the soul does not exist and people will convince
themselves of just about anything to ward off death when it approaches
[…] If there had been life after death, the wind would have howled the day
I had the abortion, and the light bulbs in my three room apartment would
have exploded to cast darkness upon the sacrilege I had committed” (H,
66–7). With the passage of the generations, the search for transcendence
has become degraded, going from the solidity of the Catholic values
of Nelly’s grandfather (nonetheless ruled by fear and by the sense of an
impending catastrophe) to the superstitions of her aunt who is a devotee
of tarot cards, and then, in Nelly’s generation, to the belief in probabil-
ity that inspires her friend Josée in her search for a partner on internet
dating sites: “Believing in probabilities is a great way to find your way
when you don’t believe in God” (H, 146). For the father of Nelly’s lover,
a fanatic of astronomy, the spiritual quest takes on a scientific form that
only imperfectly hides his terror of a fragmented universe no longer
under divine guidance: “A comet might not pass at its appointed time, it
might be carried off by currents moving through the bottomless chaos of
space […] The cosmos held his cherished novas and supernovas born of
what he called the “Iron Catastrophe,” the moment when the atomic cohe-
sion of stars was undone. His greatest hope was […] to see stars explode,
he wanted to see their gases projected into space, where perhaps the soul
resided” (H, 139–40).
Deprived of this transcendent dimension, Nelly experiences her
imprisonment in a body with anguish: “I understood that evening that my
body had moved through my life without my soul, which had never left
the void from which I was expelled at birth” (H, 163). The self, demolished
by the disaster of her love, is now nothing but a gaping wound, its pain
made all the more unbearable by the experience of writing: “I think this
letter has reached some sort of end […]; it circled our story and finally
collided with its core. I tried to understand our love and reach within it,
and only hurt myself more. Writing serves no purpose but to shipwreck
on the reefs; writing means losing parts of yourself, you understand far
too intimately that you’re going to die” (H, 166). Nelly ends her letter to
her lover on the day before her thirtieth birthday, the day set for rejoin-
ing the soul she left behind in stellar space: “This letter is my corpse. It’s
already starting to rot, it’s exhaling its gases” (H, 166). Like a nova or a
supernova, she has exploded into the cosmos.
Living in S hAM e: BUR QA OF S KI N
Published in October 2011, two years after the death of Nelly Arcan, the
collection of short, previously unpublished writings titled Burqa of Skin
confirms the author’s exceptional talent and throws a harsh light on the
existential impasse of her final years. Its various texts reveal an immense
solitude and an irreparable sadness, and return to the major themes of
Arcan’s work: the relationship with the mother, the tyranny of the image
and of technology, the hatred of the body, the search for transcendence
and meaning. Perhaps because they were not reworked into final form
during the author’s lifetime, these texts, almost all of which are narrated
in the first person, seem to reveal the “real” Nelly Arcan, the wounded and
vulnerable being who in the earlier works was hidden behind the masks of
autofiction. For example, for the first time in Arcan’s work, we see her cry:
“I cry. I cry in a theatre. My cries are heard by the crowd and every spec-
tator’s rapt gaze is on me […] admiring and unmerciful” (BS, 32). Burqa
of Skin recounts the painful details of the life of a young writer, no lon-
ger the latest star in the literary firmament, who feels abandoned by her
friends and family because of the negative portraits of them which fill her
books: “The shame which increases with age […] the shame which grows
larger as my friends keep me at a distance, as my parents erase themselves
from my life” (BS, 29). In a text entitled “The Dressing Gown,” a frag-
ment of a longer autofictional work which Arcan sent to her publisher in
April 2008, a narrator who “no longer works, or hardly at all” and spends
all day in her dressing gown laments the fact that she will never have a
child and bitterly regrets the harsh judgments she formerly made of her
mother: “I was ashamed of my mother. I judged her and I regret that now.
You lose sight of yourself when you judge your mother” (BS, 32). Another
event clearly anchored in the autobiographical and easily recognizable for
those who followed Arcan’s appearances in the media is the humiliating
treatment she received on the popular television program Tout le monde

en parle in 2007, the subject of the story “Shame” in which the protagonist
Nelly is presented as “an unbearable and thoroughly unhappy woman, full
of doubts” (BS, 75).
Shame is in fact the predominant theme of the whole collection: a
shame undoubtedly related not only to the fact that she is a woman and
a gazed-at object, but to the guilt instilled in her during her Catholic
childhood. But shame in Arcan’s work is also a more all-embracing con-
dition, a fundamental unworthiness felt in the depth of her being: “My
very being is indistinguishable from my shame […] The shame of my
presence, of existing among others” (BS, 29). It is a “condemnation to exis-
tence” which goes back to the “primordial rape of birth, which each time
rips from nothingness a form which asked for nothing except to remain
in […] the eternal mineral cold of the cosmos” (BS, 30). And for Nelly, her
disastrous appearance on Quebec’s most popular television show, before
an audience of two million spectators, represents the culmination of this
primordial experience of shame. Invited onto the program on the occa-
sion of the publication of her third novel, À ciel ouvert (Breakneck), she
is assaulted by a series of questions and jocular comments which totally
ignore her book and instead draw attention to her body and her seductive
appearance. Crushed, she is unable to respond, “because she knew only
how to write. Outside of her books, she wasn’t worth anything. She wasn’t
certain of anything. Her true significance only came across on paper”
(BS, 76). Not only is an image worth a thousand words, as in the oft-
repeated phrase, but “an image could annihilate a thousand words” (BS,
77), and that evening Nelly receives the indisputable proof of the power of
the image: “The whole world’s judgment was reflected on her fallen face,
that night, and then it slid down into her cleavage. In the hollow of her
corseted breasts lodged the oldest story to afflict women, that of the exam-
ined body, the history of their shame” (BS, 69).
Imprisoned in her body, Nelly is paradoxically disembodied, like the
prostitute “excommunicated from all that is not her body: love, friend-
ship, marriage, childbearing” (BS, 43). Images of cold, distance, and
disembodiment are numerous in “The Dress”: “To be disembodied is to
see yourself from afar, in the distance, from someone else’s point of view.
Disembodiment is a gust in your eyes, a polar wind that lashes and makes
your teeth chatter” (BS, 45). A call girl, the narrator tells us, is quite the
opposite of a companion, for in her life “everything is distance and fri-
gidity; a body […] trussed up in the frou-frou of its disembodiment” (BS,
43). The virtual world of the internet is equally cold and disembodied, “a
portal of disembodiment, a desert of ice” (BS, 44–5). In this desert, one
doesn’t live, one survives, simulating the presence of love: “To be cold is
to feel your body move further from the hearth, further from the central
heat of the heart […] But we act like it’s nothing. We act as if something
other than this emptiness, something like love, exists” (BS, 45, 44).
Diagnostician of a problem from which she is not alone in suffering,
Nelly Arcan is a tragic voice, thirsty for love in the desert of a postmodern
world which values only appearances and consumption. In her apparently
disillusioned way, she repeats the heart-rending question posed by Claire
Martin regarding French-Canadian society before the Quiet Revolution:
“And the heart, then? What about the heart?”30
Co n c lu si on
From the spiritual autobiography of Quebec’s mystical foundress to the

work of the young author forever identified with her job as a prostitute,
all of the writings examined in these pages speak of a difficulty of being,
and in particular of the difficulty of being a woman in a world that does
not recognize women as subjects. Is it pure coincidence that the writ-
ings of Marie de l’Incarnation and Nelly Arcan exhibit similar feelings of
inadequacy and a similar need to punish the body and sacrifice the self
on the altar of the Other? The reverse side of this sense of unworthiness
is an immense need for love and justice, which, for those who were able
to find ways to channel it, led to possibilities of action in the world and
in history. Feminine in their content and form, these writings throw new
light on Quebec’s history, from the dreams and accomplishments of the
foundresses to the long period of retreat and isolation that followed the
Conquest, the effects of which, if one judges by the testimonies of many of
these women, are still being felt in spite of huge steps towards liberation.
All of the women whose stories are recounted in these pages left their
mark on history – at the very least, on that of their families and loved
ones – and yet most of them would be unknown to us had they not put
pen to paper to record the events of their lives. Together, their writings
tell of experiences and personal qualities which challenge stereotypes and
make these women and young girls – including the nuns whose lives and
works are recorded in the annals of their religious communities – singular
and fascinating human beings, made all the more interesting by the less
than perfect character traits one detects at times in their self-revelations.
Far more than the writings of their male counterparts, their works offer
us a glimpse of inner realities and private lives in the various periods of
Quebec history.1 At the same time, from Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly
Conc lusion • 277
Arcan, these women and young girls are often lucid and critical observers
of their society.
Although usually expressed indirectly and with a great deal of
restraint, the realities of the body and maternity are central preoccupa-
tions of these texts, and perhaps the reason for their eminently practical,
down-to-earth perspective on the world. The body is a constant presence
in them, whether in the leaps for joy that express Marie de l’Incarna-
tion’s happiness or the constant preoccupations with illness on the part
of many of these women, who were responsible for the health of their
loved ones. Élisabeth Bégon worries about the signs of aging in her
father and in her own body; Julie Papineau, Angélique Hay Des Rivières,
and Michelle Le Normand are tormented by their helplessness when
faced with the illnesses of their husbands and children. The reality of the
body is experienced as pain more often than pleasure: Marie de l’Incar-
nation’s severe mortifications of her body, Joséphine Marchand’s horror
as she observes her sister giving birth, and young Claire Martin’s terror
when she discovers the first signs of puberty are symptoms of an all-too-
common alienation. Whether or not she so desires, woman is condemned
to inhabit the body that patriarchal, Catholic society has identified as a
primary source of evil. At the same time, she is invited to transcend it by
becoming the angel of the hearth, destined to transmit the same malaise
and the same interdictions to future generations. It is no surprise that
Nelly Arcan, although imprisoned in her body and her image, paradoxi-
cally describes her situation as one of “disembodiment,” an ironic contrast
with Marie de l’Incarnation, the mystic who fully inhabited her body as
well as her spirit (a contrast made all the more evident in the original
French, where the word for “disembodiment,” so often used by Arcan to
describe her condition, is désincarnation).
Several of these texts, in particular the private diaries, throw troubling
light on the educational system which transmitted these self-destroying
values to young girls. The nuns depicted by Henriette Dessaulles, Claire
Martin, France Théoret, Denise Bombardier, and others are all too often
guilty of snobbery, narrow-mindedness, and hypocrisy during this period
(1850–1950), which was the most conservative and repressive in the his-
tory of the Church in French Canada. The devastating discovery by Claire
Martin and Thérèse Renaud at the end of their studies that they had
learned nothing but bigotry is, however, counterbalanced by the positive
experiences of other young girls like Ghislaine Perrault and Lise Payette.
The autobiographies of women who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s
reveal the important role played by the convents in opening up possibil-
ities of higher education and social advancement for their working-class
students, as well as the huge range of cultural knowledge many of the nuns
transmitted to their students.
Maternity is a recurrent theme in these texts, and yet the maternal role
frequently appears as a trap for women, blocking their access to subjectiv-
ity as well as to writing. In fact, the maternal point of view is rarely heard
in these texts. It is by liberating herself from her maternal responsibilities
that Marie de l’Incarnation opens a path for herself not only towards spir-
itual fulfilment, but towards writing and action in the world, and it will
be a long time before other women are able to reconcile their maternal
role with writing or other activities outside the domestic sphere. Élisabeth
Bégon and Julie Papineau, both talented writers and perceptive observers
of their society, identify so strongly with their maternal role that in their
later years they risk overpowering their loved ones with their solicitude
and complaints. The “queens of the hearth” of the nineteenth century also
disappear into their role, even in their private diaries, where they chroni-
cle the history of their families and rarely speak of their own thoughts or
feelings. In the first half of the twentieth century, the diary of Michelle Le
Normand breaks with this pattern and offers an eloquent testimony to the
difficulties of reconciling professional writing with marriage and mother-
hood. And yet by their regular “scribbling” in their diaries, all these wives
and mothers achieve the status of subjects and leave traces of their exis-
tence on paper for following generations.
Almost all the autobiographies by women published since the Quiet
Revolution record the difficult paths followed by their authors before
finding expression of their own voice. The obstacles they confront and
finally surmount can be social, cultural, or economic (or a combination of
all three), and they vary depending on the temperament and family situ-
ation of each writer, but, in every case, the fact of being a woman, and the
daughter of a woman, is of fundamental importance. Too often, the most
difficult of all the obstacles to self-expression and autonomy for these
authors or their narrators is their link to the mother, who seems to block
their path by a superabundance of love, by rejection, or simply by a refusal
to envision the possibility that their daughters can achieve the freedom
that has been denied to them. “Judging your mother is like throwing a
boomerang,”2 as Nelly Arcan sadly observes. In one of the most recent
autobiographies, Francine Noël’s La femme de ma vie, the author, through
the very process of writing, comes to an understanding of her own mother
as a subject and thus reaches a reconciliation with her, opening up the
possibility of a filiation between mothers and daughters in future gener-
ations. In all of these works, as Barbara Havercroft observes, “it is […] the
coming to writing, the performative gesture of chronicling [the author’s]
Conc lusion • 279
quest for liberation, that constitutes the last, most decisive stage of the
acqusition of subjectivity and agency.”3
The struggle for subjectivity in these texts is not the linear route to
progress one might have imagined or wished for, but rather a path filled
with obstacles, which many of these autobiographies take as their primary
subject. The courage of the autobiographical “I,” so unexpected and yet
so necessary at the time when Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove was pub-
lished, is still not acquired without a struggle. In November 2012, France
Théoret received Quebec’s highest literary honour, the Prix Athanase-
David, bestowed annually on an author for the entirety of his or her work.
On receiving the prize, she spoke of the courage required to tell stories
like these, and the resistance they still encounter: “I cannot make the
point more strongly: one is not allowed to write about negativity or nega-
tion, absence to oneself, or the various faces of the difficulty of existing
in the world. All these things that destroy so many parts of ourselves.”4
Reflecting on the links between today’s women and those of Marie de l’In-
carnation’s time, the historian Brigitte Caulier evokes a still unfinished
struggle, prominent in all the personal writings by women examined in
this book:
The emergence of women as subjects and writers takes many painful

detours. [In the time of Marie de l’Incarnation], this route involved
the multiple renunciations imposed by the cloister: that of femi-
ninity [to the point of anorexia in the case of certain mystics] and
that of maternity. Such renunciations were the price of liberty! […]
Marie de l’Incarnation found her God of love, but not without pain
and a certain negation of her woman’s body […] Today’s women
must still struggle with their bodies in order to be recognized fully
as persons made up of both body and soul.5
As for the “truth” of these stories, the theoreticians of autobiography

and autofiction have taught us not to take the version of reality proposed
by authors as objective or impartial statements of fact. These texts offer
at times contradictory and always subjective perspectives on history and
on the lives of women. However, at the deepest level – well exemplified by
the resemblance between Anne Hébert’s portrait of “la grande Claudine”
and the many mothers evoked in these personal writings – the imaginary,
myth, literature, and history are fed by a common source. And it is per-
haps in personal or autobiographical writings that we come closest to the
always receding point where the personal, the collective, and the universal
come together.
N o t es
i ntrO duCti On
1 See, most notably, the pioneering volume on Quebec women’s history by

Micheline Dumont, et al., L’histoire des femmes au Québec.
2 See, for example, Mason, “The Other Voice,” 207–35; Jelinek, “Women’s Auto-
biography,” 1–20; Friedman, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves,” 34–62.
3 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 101.
4 Papineau, Letter of May 19, 1823, in Femme patriote, 26.
5 Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” 28–48.
6 See also Lamonde and Turcot, La littérature personnelle.
7 Van Roey-Roux, La littérature intime, 16.
8 Hébert, “Pour une évolution de la littérature personnelle,” 16.
9 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, 42.
10 Vadeboncœur, La ligne du risque, 171–3.
11 In addition to receiving the Prix de la Province de Québec, the Prix France-
Québec, and the Governor General’s Literary Award, In an Iron Glove had
record sales, with six printings for the first volume and three for the second.
See chapter 8 for a discussion of the book’s impact and the controversy that
surrounded its publication.
12 Théoret, La femme du stalinien, 138.
13 Théoret Une belle éducation, 48.
14 Dessaulles, Journal: Premier cahier, 280–1.
15 Arcan, Putain, 7.
16 Blodgett, “Reports from la Nouvelle France,” 46.
17 The 1634 dream, which prefigures Marie’s mission in a “great and vast country,
full of mountains, valleys and thick fog […] as pitiful as it was terrifying,” is
dominated by the figure of the Virgin Mary, holding her son in her arms, “as at
the age when she was nursing our adorable infant Jesus” (Marie de l’Incarna-
tion, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 193).
n otes to pages 13–34 • 282
PART ONE
1 Krumenacker, L’École française de spiritualité, 123.

2 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 317.
3 Collin, “Le livre et le code,” 13.
4 Quoted in ibid.
5 Bossuet, “Instruction sur les états d’oraison,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 9: 126.
6 Marie de l’Incarnation, “Letter to Père Poncet, 1670,” in Correspondance, 888.
7 Nepveu, Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, 34.
Ch AP ter One
1 Marie de l’Incarnation, “La Relation de 1654,” in Écrits spirituels et historiques,

vol. 2: 45–366.
2 Ibid., Correspondance.
3 Bourgeoys, Écrits. See also Marguerite Bourgeoys: Textes choisis.
4 Juchereau and Duplessis, Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.
5 Morin, Histoire simple et véritable.
6 Rapley, Social History of the Cloister, 113.
7 Jamet, “Introduction,” in Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, ii.
8 Ibid., iii.
9 Le Jeune, Relation of 1635, quoted in Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, vol. 1: 269.
10 See Gourdeau, Les délices de nos cœurs, 41–3.
11 See Choquette, “‘Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu,’” 627–55, for an excellent
overview of the history of all of these orders in France and in Canada.
12 Michaud, “Une chétive historienne,” 45, describes Morin’s Annales as “a female
history of the city of Montreal,” noting in particular the freshness and sensual-
ity of much of its imagery.
13 On the contrast between Marie and the Jesuits, see Davis, Women on the Mar-
gins, 116–21.
14 Dumais, “À partir d’une éthique de la relation,” 123–8.
ChAP ter t WO
1 Marie de l’Incarnation, “Relation de 1633,” in Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol.

1: 139–351; and “Relation de 1654,” in ibid., vol. 2: 15–388.
2 Marie de l’Incarnation, Correspondance.
3 See Théry, “Marie de l’Incarnation, intimée et intime,” 107–17, for an analysis of
the “incarnated” or embodied dimension of Marie de l’Incarnation.
4 Ferraro, “Une voix qui perce le voile,” 66.
notes to pages 34–60 • 283
5 On this period of transition, see Gusdorf, “De l’autobiographie initiatique,”

957–94.
6 Ferraro, “Une voix qui perce le voile,” 66.
7 “I confess that I can only hesitate in trying to speak of what happens between
God and the soul […] However, as I have been ordered to write, I am putting
on paper what the spirit of grace which directs me obliges me and allows me to
write about it.” As quoted in ibid., 68.
8 Ibid.
9 Schulte Van Kessel, “Vierges et mères,” 143.
10 Martin, Vie.
11 Quoted by Jamet in Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques,
vol. 1: 124.
12 See Davis, Women on the Margins, 128–32, on Claude Martin as editor of his
mother’s autobiography.
13 Ibid., 133.
14 Ibid., 55.
15 See Beaude, “De l’autobiographie comme provocation,” 48.
16 Martin, Vie, 622, quoted in Jamet, Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et
historiques, vol. 2: 180.
17 Ibid., 620, quoted in Jamet, Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et histo-
riques, vol. 2: 179.
18 Ibid.
19 Trépanier, “Être rien,” 190.
20 Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 51. For a psychoanalytical interpreta-
tion of these practices, see Millot, La vie parfaite.
21 Trépanier, “Être rien.”
22 Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 147. See Book 3, Passion and Mysti-
cism, on the similarities between courtly literature and mysticism.
23 Collin, “Le livre et le code,” 13.
24 Millot, La vie parfaite, 31.
25 According to Oury, certain parts of what we now know as the Relation of 1633
were probably added as late as 1636 (Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 217).
26 Nepveu, Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, 31.
27 Dom Albert Jamet, the author of the critical edition of Marie’s writings, sug-
gests that these “mists” could refer to the “spiritual darkness” that hung over
the colony in 1634 (the year of Marie’s dream), during the three years of British
and Protestant domination (1632–35). In 1634, he writes, the only remaining
vestige of the Catholic mission which had been established by the Recollet
fathers was the tiny church in Quebec City (Notre-Dame de Recouvrance),
which could correspond to the church on which the Blessed Virgin was seated
in Marie’s dream. The “mists” began to lift in 1637 with the arrival of the Jesuits
and the construction of new seminaries and other establishments (Écrits spiri-
tuels et historiques, vol. 2: 278).
28 “As the deer pants for flowing water, so my soul thirsts for you, O God”
(Psalm 42).
29 Martin, Vie, 513, quoted in Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 382.
30 Crichton, “De-mystifying the Mystic,” 10, 172.
31 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 416.
32 For example, an influential nineteenth-century biography of Marie de
l’Incarnation by Monseignor H.R. Casgrain presents her as a submissive and
accomplished wife, a model “queen of the hearth”: “Always ready when she
should be, she directed everything with gentleness and created an admirable
harmony within the home. Since the day when she had pledged her troth to
her husband at the foot of the altar, she had devoted all her affection to him
[…] obeying the slightest indication of his will and seeking to anticipate all
his desires, which were orders for her” (Histoire de la Mère Marie de l’Incarna-
tion, 81–2).
PART T WO
1 Quietism, a mystical doctrine affirming the possibility of a union with God

which transcends institutional rules and practices, was condemned by Pope
Innocent XI in 1687. In France, Bossuet led the attack on Quietism, most
notably by condemning Madame Guyon and her defender Fénelon. However,
as noted in the avant-propos to part 1 (see note 5), he was full of admiration for
Marie de l’Incarnation.
2 Letter of Mère de Sainte-Hélène (Marie-Andrée Duplessis), 21 October 1720,
quoted in Juchereau, “Introduction,” Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xl.
3 For an excellent study of this body of material, see Roy, “Stratégies
épistolaires.”
4 See Goodman, Becoming a Woman.
5 Grassi, “Naissance de l’intimité épistolaire,” 74.
6 Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi, vol. 1: 152.
7 Diaz, “Avant-propos,” in L’épistolarité au féminin, 9.
8 Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 2.
9 Didier, “Écrire pour se trouver,” 247.
Ch APte r three
1 See Roy, Rapport de l’archiviste, 1934–1935.

2 Citations in this chapter refer to the second edition of this book: Deschamps,
ed., Lettres au cher fils.
3 Robitaille, “Du rapport à l’image,” 41.
4 Deschamps, ed., “Avant-propos,” in Lettres au cher fils, 13, 18.
5 Ibid., 20.
6 See Melançon, “Letters, Diary, and Autobiography,” 151–70.
7 Le Moyne, “La femme dans la civilisation canadienne-française,” in Conver-
gences, 87.
8 Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi, vol. 1: 152.
9 Paul-Joseph Lemoyne de Longueuil, a retired military man whose grandfather,
Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil et de Châteauguay, received a number of land
grants as a wedding present from Maisonneuve in 1654, including a property
on Rue Saint-Paul, where he and his wife lived for the rest of their lives. The
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/index.php.
10 Deschamps, ed., “Avant-propos,” in Lettres au cher fils, 23.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 35.
13 Ibid., 33.
14 Ibid., 26.
15 Ibid., 34–5.
16 Rubinger, “Love, or Family Love, in New France,” 187–99.
17 Frégault, Le Grand Marquis.
18 For more on this topic see Micheline Dumont-Johnson, Girls’ Schooling in
Quebec.
ChAPter f O ur
1 See Greer, “La république des hommes,” 507–28.

2 See Julie Papineau, Une femme patriote: Correspondance 1823–1862, and
Louis-Joseph Papineau, Lettres à Julie.
3 See Lamonde’s review, “Julie B. Papineau,” 591–4.
4 For information on the libel suit, see Rudin, “Julie Papineau,” 372–5.
5 See also Ouellet, “Le destin de Julie Bruneau-Papineau,” 37–63.
6 Ouellet, Julie Papineau, 15.
7 Ibid., 22.
8 Ibid., 40.
9 Lachance, Le roman de Julie Papineau, vol. 1, La Tourmente: 298–9.
10 Ibid., 16.
11 Ibid., 301.
12 Gusdorf, Écritures du moi, 152.
13 Broughton, “In the Cowshed,” 5.
14 Greer, “La république des hommes,” 510.
15 Because of the political changes which followed the Rebellion, this law did not
take effect until 1849.
16 See Aquin, “La fatigue culturelle du Canada français” and “L’art de la défaite.”
17 See Arcand’s NFB film Le confort et l’indifférence.
18 The article appeared on 11 December 1837 and is quoted in Roy, “Stratégies
épistolaires,” 452.
19 His research contributed to François-Xavier Garneau’s important Histoire du
Canada.
20 Ouellet, Julie Papineau, 27, 29.
21 Ibid., 29.
22 See for example Hudon, “Des dames chrétiennes,” 169–94.
23 See Bourassa, Femmes-hommes.
24 See chapter 2, note 33.
PART TH REE
1 Gusdorf, Écritures du moi, vol. 1: 324.

2 Raoul, “Women and Diaries,” 57–65.
3 For the poetics of the private diary, see Gusdorf, Écritures du moi, vol. 1, chap.
12; Rousset, “Pour une poétique du journal intime,” 155–70; Braud, Forme des
jours; Girard, Journal intime; and Didier, Journal intime.
Ch APter fi ve
1 Lejeune, Le moi des demoiselles, 23.

2 The daughter of Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, Éliza Chauveau (1849–75)
also kept a journal during her stay at Montebello. See Mathieu, “Journaux per-
sonnels,” 1–23, for a study of her diary and those of her sisters Flore, Henriette,
and Honorine.
3 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Fonds Alexandre
Lacoste, Box 6, Globensky, Journal, 1864–1866, 1912–1919.
4 Centre de Référence de l’Amérique française, Québec, Fonds Thaïs Lacoste-
Frémont, P41.1.1/003–006, Globensky, Journal, February 1866, 1889–1919.
5 At almost eighty years old, Papineau adores Marie-Louise and treats her like
one of his own daughters or granddaughters. Shortly after her stay at Monte-
bello, he writes to her: “I would love to advise you about what books to read to
continue your excellent education. It is obvious from your letters that you have
already read a lot, and fruitfully: one can see it in your use of well-chosen and
elegant expressions, ones that are rarely used in conversation. They must come
from your readings, ones you have loved. You have acquired, by your love of
reading, an endless source of useful and agreeable pleasures. You are called to
a brilliant future. Don’t let yourself be one of those frivolous women who run
out of topics of conversation after they’ve talked about the latest fashions and
the latest scandal.” Archives du Séminaire de Quebec, Fonds Thaïs-Frémont,
Papineau to Globensky, 7 September 1864.
6 The Portrait of Marie-Louise Globensky, the future Mme Alexandre Lacoste
(1849–1919), painted by Napoléon Bourassa in 1864, is now in the collection of
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
7 One of the first social novels published in Quebec (1853), Charles Guérin was
authored by Éliza’s father, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, who later became
premier of Quebec (1867–1873).
8 The Children of Mary was an association formed in France in the 1830s to
foster the spiritual development of adolescent girls, under the patronage of the
Blessed Virgin.
9 A copy of Alice Dessaulles’s diary is located at the Centre d’histoire de
Saint-Hyacinthe, CH384/000/000/001.054.
10 The daughter of Napoléon Bourassa and Azélie Papineau, Adine Bourassa was
a cousin of the Dessaulles sisters.
11 See chapter 6.
12 The two diaries are preserved in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Montreal.
13 The British North America Act, 1840, commonly known as the Act of Union
1840, was enacted in July 1840 and proclaimed 10 February 1841. It abolished
the legislatures of Lower Canada and Upper Canada and established a new
political entity, the Province of Canada, to replace them.
14 The hostility between Cartier and the Fabres is political. Unlike Cartier, who
pursued a federalist career, the Fabres remained loyal to the tradition of Pap-
ineau and the Patriotes. They were also closely connected to the conservative
bishop Ignace Bourget through the uncle of the Cartier girls, Msgr Édouard-
Charles Fabre.The hostility became open in 1854, when Cartier supported
Wolfred Nelson against his father-in-law Édouard-Raymond Fabre in the
election for mayor of Montreal.
15 Born on 13 June 1893 in L’Assomption, a small village north-east of Montreal,
Marie-Antoinette Tardif studied at the convent of L’Assomption, run by the
Sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. In 1903, the family moved to
Montreal.
16 Since 1884, Laval University in Montreal had been offering lecture series
open to women, even if women were not allowed to enrol as students at the
university. See Sicotte, Marie Gérin-Lajoie, 54, on the role played by the young
Marie Lacoste (the daughter of Marie-Louise Globensky and future wife of
Henri Gérin-Lajoie) in the decision of the rector of Laval University to admit
women to these lectures.
17 Lemaire, “Introduction,” in Lozeau, Lettres à Marie-Antoinette, 6.
18 Lozeau, Lettres à Marie-Antoinette. See also Gouin, “Un épisode dans la vie de
Michelle Le Normand,” 17–36.
19 This was Georges Monarque (1893–1946), a lawyer and amateur historian born
in Sorel, who encouraged Le Normand to continue writing but (if one judges
by her diary) never showed any interest in marrying her.
20 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Fonds Familles
Laurendeau et Perrault, Perrault, Journal (1922–1936).
21 Lionel Groulx (1878–1967) was a priest, a historian, and the most influential
proponent of traditional French-Canadian nationalism from the 1920s until
the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.
22 A periodical founded in 1934 by Laurendeau’s friends Robert Charbonneau
and Paul Beaulieu, to which both Laurendeau and Saint-Denys Garneau
contributed.
23 Jeune-Canada was a movement created to denounce the situation of franco-
phones in Canada. In December 1932, the group organized a public meeting
to launch their “Manifesto of the young generation,” whose ideas are similar
to those of Laurendeau’s Report of the Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism in the 1960s. According to Monière, André Laurendeau, 51, two
thousand people attended the launch of the manifesto, which was later pub-
lished in Le Devoir and attracted 70,000 signatures.
24 See Monière, André Laurendeau, 40, for more information on Antonio Per-
rault’s opposition to his daughter’s engagement to Laurendeau.
25 According to Lamonde, “the highpoint of the decade, from the point of view
of the history of ideas, was the debate (1935), polite but with decisive conse-
quences, between the young Dominican priest Georges-Henri Lévesque and
the prestigious abbé Lionel Groulx. It was a debate which symbolized the clash
of generations within the Church and […] challenged the traditional relation-
ship between Catholic action and national action” (L’heure de vérité, 14).
Ch AP ter S iX
1 Marchand, Journal intime.

2 A remark near the end of the first notebook of Dessaulles’s diary indicates
that earlier volumes were destroyed: “You will join your brothers in my box of
secrets – you will be burned; when I’m older, I will reread you first, maybe with
a bit of scorn, both for you and for me” (August or September 1876). And at
the end of her final notebook, before giving up her diary for good, she implies
that her practice of diary writing goes back to childhood: “Writing was a real
pleasure when I was a child. I wrote this famous diary whose first volumes I
destroyed” (20 May 1881).
3 Marchand, who already at nineteen writes columns in her father’s newspaper
Le Franco-Canadien, as well as plays, the first of which was performed in Feb-
ruary 1880 (JM, 21), is aware of the astonishment of her milieu at the idea of a
woman who publishes: “It is really amusing to hear the people around me talk
about my literary talent. There are so few women who write in this country
that my signature arouses people’s curiosity” (JM, 21–2).
4 Lejeune, Le moi des demoiselles, 296.
5 Raoul, “Moi (Henriette Dessaulles),” 842.
6 Dessaulles, Fadette (1971).
7 Dessaulles, Journal (1989).
8 Dessaulles, Journal, Premier cahier (1999); and Journal. Deuxième, troisième
et quatrième cahiers (2001). Passages from the diary quoted in this chapter are
taken from these editions.
9 The reference to the Salvation Army identified and commented on by Major
is a flagrant anachronism, indicating that the text was rewritten – and not
just recopied – by Dessaulles. In an entry dated 4 October 1875, Dessaulles
criticizes the rhetoric of a sermon on death given during a retreat: “Poor little
priest! You weren’t speaking in the way Jesus would have spoken – you’re
preaching more like the ministers of the Salvation Army who’ve been shouting
like fanatics in the streets of Montreal for the last while.” Major notes that the
Salvation Army made its first appearance in Montreal in December 1884, that
the movement did not exist in Canada before 1880, and that in England where
it was founded, the name “Salvation Army” was only adopted in 1878. See
Major’s “Introduction,” in Dessaulles, Journal, 28.
10 See Dandurand, Mémoires, 48.
11 Henriette herself comments on her sister’s peaceful nature – “her detached
airs, her lazy philosophy, her caressing voice, her pretty brown eyes which
laugh at my liveliness and my tendency to melodrama!” (HD-II, 356–7). See
also ibid., 327.
12 Imbert, “Fadette,” 71. See also Cantin, “Le Journal d’Henriette Dessaulles,”
312–23.
13 This was a common practice for young girls of the period, even for the inde-
pendent Joséphine Marchand. “Every book that came into her hands was first
read by a censor: either her fiancé, who wanted to be sure she didn’t unknow-
ingly take up an unsuitable book, or her mother, who closely monitored all the
books suggested to her by her fiancé and even by her confessor.” Montreuil,
“Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand,” 489–90.
14 In his memoirs, Dandurand, describes his first impressions of Joséphine: “I

had read articles and columns signed with the pseudonym ‘Josette’ when I
first met their author. I immediately became aware that she was very knowl-
edgeable about France; she told me that she read the French newspapers that
her father, M. Marchand, subscribed to. We were the same age. She was more
interested in the serious aspects of life than in the social distractions she
could have taken advantage of. Her way of thinking was very personal, she
knew how to defend her ideas gently but firmly. At first I found her a bit cold
and indifferent, but I understood that her apparent coldness was only a wise
reserve, and that she could only be approached with deference […] Except for
Laure Conan, who had just published her first book Angéline de Montbrun,
she was the only woman at that time who was writing regularly for the public”
(Mémoires, 47–8).
15 A lawyer, journalist, and politician who rose to power by mobilizing
French-Canadian opposition to the execution of Louis Riel, Honoré Mercier
was premier of Quebec from 1887 to 1891.
16 In spite of the shock induced by her sister’s childbirth, Marchand is capable of
a lucid analysis of the political implications of Riel’s hanging: “The French-
Canadian people, fanatically stubborn in their devotion to the Tory, English
and Orangist government, have just received proof that they are scorned and
less valued than a dog would be. Riel was sacrificed without hesitation by Sir
John A. MacDonald [sic]. The representatives of the province of Quebec at the
Ministry, without any dignity, dared not protest, thus showing their servility
and incompetence. The old Orangist is laughing up his sleeve, saying that
French-Canadians fly off the handle easily and will soon calm down” (JM, 122).
17 Major, “Introduction,” in Dessaulles, Journal, critical edition, 38.
18 According to Raoul Dandurand, “It was thanks to her, to her prestige, to the
sympathy she aroused in all who knew her, that I obtained such a position at so
young an age” (Mémoires, 53).
ChAP ter S eve n
1 McGill University, Rare Books Department, Journal of Mme Henri Des

Rivières (Angélique Hay), 1843–1872. In English and French.
2 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Lacoste Family
Fonds (P76/6), Globensky, Journals 1864–1866 and 1912–1919. For a typed copy
of all Lady Lacoste’s journals (1864–1866; 1889–1919), see Centre de Référence
de l’Amérique française, Fonds Thaïs Lacoste-Frémont (P41).
3 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Fonds Le
Normand-Desrosiers (026/002/054–026/004/005), Le Normand, Journaux
(1909–1964).
4 See for example Day, History of the Eastern Townships.

5 François-Amable Trottier, dit Desrivières (the father of Henri Des Rivières), a
fervent Catholic, opposed to the idea of an anglophone university in Montreal,
brought a suit against the inheritors of James McGill claiming that he was
meant to be the sole beneficiary of the will, and hired Papineau as his lawyer
in 1820–21. It is thanks to the fact that he lost the case that McGill University
was founded.
6 See Sicotte, Marie Gérin-Lajoie, for many of these details.
7 In 1923, Sister Marie Gérin-Lajoie (1890–1971), the granddaughter of Lady
Lacoste, founded l’Institut des Sœurs de Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil (les
Sœurs du Bon Conseil), a religious community devoted to social work.
8 Quoted in Lacroix, “‘Mon petit commerce,’”185.
9 Richer, Léo-Paul Desrosiers, 19–20.
10 According to Lacroix, Le Normand was an efficient business woman, for
whom “books and prizes were products like any other […] Selling books (or a
vote in a literary jury) allowed one to buy a car or a trip to France” (“‘Mon petit
commerce,’” 175).
11 A critic and novelist, Berthelot Brunet was the author of several books, includ-
ing a history of French-Canadian literature which appeared in 1946.
12 Brother André Bessette (1845–1937), commonly known as Frère André, was
strongly devoted to Saint Joseph and was credited with thousands of healings
under the saint’s patronage in the early decades of the twentieth century. The
present-day basilica Saint Joseph’s Oratory, in Montreal, was built on the site of
a chapel he campaigned to build in honour of the saint. He was canonized by
the Catholic Church in 2010.
13 Rodolphe Lemieux (1866–1937) was a Liberal member of parliament and an
influential minister in the cabinets of Wilfrid Laurier and Mackenzie King.
During the years in which Desrosiers began his career as a civil servant, he was
president of the Privy Council. He was named to the Senate in 1930.
14 In 1937, Father Legault founded the Compagnons de Saint-Laurent, an influen-
tial theatre troupe that lasted until 1952 and was a training ground for several
important Quebec actors.
PA rt fOur
1 Roy, Enchantment and Sorrow, 60–1.

2 Louise Dupré, “Postface,” in Alonzo and Desautels, eds., Lettres à Cassandre,
113.
3 Desautels, Ce fauve, le bonheur, 11.
4 Ibid.
Ch APter eight
1 The original French-language version, published by Le Cercle du Livre de

France, appeared separately in two volumes, La joue gauche (1965) and La joue
droite (1966). Translated into English by Philip Stratford, In an Iron Glove was
published by the Ryerson Press in 1968, Harvest House in 1975, and (with an
introduction by Patricia Smart) by University of Ottawa Press in 2006. Quota-
tions from the translation are taken from the 2006 edition.
2 Before Dans un gant de fer, Claire Martin published a collection of short sto-
ries, Avec ou sans amour (1957), and two novels, Doux-Amer (1960) and Quand
j’aurai payé ton visage (1962), all with Le Cercle du Livre de France.
3 Iqbal and Dorion, “Claire Martin,” 76.
4 Library and Archives Canada, Fonds Claire Martin, 1956–86.
5 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, 14.
6 Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 15.
7 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, 119.
8 Kaye, “Claire Martin,” 49.
9 Blais, Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (1965), translated as A Season in the
Life of Emmanuel (New York: Grosset, 1966).
10 Blois (sic), “Quelques propos de Claire Martin.”
11 Library and Archives Canada, Fonds Claire Martin, Note written by Claire
Martin.
12 Jean Basile, “Autour de Un gant de fer, tome premier de la biographie précoce
de Claire Martin. Pardon et souvenirs,” Le Devoir, 11 December 1965.
13 Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 16–21.
14 Alain Pontaut, “Claire Martin et l’exorcisme d’une adolescence,” La Presse, 10
September 1966.
15 Library and Archives Canada, Fonds Claire Martin, Letter from Jean-Louis
Major, 10 December 1965.
16 See end of chapter 1.
Ch APter nine
1 Quotations from this work are from the English version, Théoret, Such a Good
Education.
2 Rimstead, Remnants of Nation, 3.
3 Martin, In an Iron Glove, 57–9.
4 Théoret, Journal pour mémoire, 203.
5 Unlike Lise Payette (and like Michel Tremblay), Théoret has expressed
admiration for Gabrielle Roy’s work, and particularly for Bonheur d’occasion
(conversation with the author).
6 Geneviève de Brabant is a chaste and wronged heroine of medieval legend

whose tale has been the subject of numerous stories, plays, and operas since
the seventeenth century and is, notably, mentioned in the first volume of
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
7 Sophie Rostopchine, the Countess of Ségur, was a nineteenth-century French
writer of Russian origin whose most famous work is the children’s novel Les
malheurs de Sophie (The Misfortunes of Sophie).
8 An eight-year program of education, centred on the humanities, which led to a
baccalaureate and to the possibility of future university studies and the liberal
professions of medicine and law.
9 Roy, Enchantment and Sorrow, 3–7.
10 Denise Bombardier, “Étudiante d’antan,” Le Devoir, 3–4 March 2012, B5.
11 Ibid.
Ch APter t e n
1 Odile Tremblay, “Fragments de femme: Trente tableaux, le film autobiogra-

phique en mode collage de Paule Baillargeon,” Le Devoir, 18 March 2012, e9.
2 See Saint-Martin, Le nom de la mère.
3 Hébert, The Torrent, trans. Gwendolyn Moore, 8.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 See, for example, Rich, Of Woman Born.
6 Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other,” trans. Helene Wenzel,
56–9.
7 Brodzki, “Mothers, Displacement, and Language,” 245–6.
8 Neuman, “Autobiography and Women’s Bodies,” 59.
9 Gabrielle Roy’s La détresse et l’enchantement is the only one of these works
to have been translated into English. Quotations and page references for
this work will therefore be from Enchantment and Sorrow, translated by Patri-
cia Claxton.
10 Aurore Gagnon (1909–20), a victim of child abuse who died of exhaustion
after numerous beatings, tortures, and wounds inflicted by her stepmother
and father, became a popular cultural icon in Quebec after her death, with
a play, books, and movies based on her story. On little Aurore’s place in the
Quebec imaginary, see Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois.
11 See Michaud, “L’autobiographie,” 95–114, for a nuanced study of this ambiva-
lence in Le temps qui m’a manqué.
12 Saint-Martin, Le nom de la mère, 119–60.
13 See Ricard, “L’œuvre de Gabrielle Roy,” 23–30.
14 See Michaud, “L’autobiographie,” on the characteristics which distinguish
Enchantment and Sorrow from a classic autobiography.
15 For Michaud, “Gabrielle Roy’s autobiographical writing necessarily involves

her relationship with the other: the self-knowledge of the subject is inseparable
in it from recognition of the other” (ibid., 100).
16 See Dupré, “Déplier le temps,” 301–16, for a superb analysis of this aspect of the
work.
17 Ibid., 312.
18 The dedication by France Théoret in the author’s personal copy of this book
reads as follows: “Portraits in movement: that was my original idea. Here are
eleven of them.”
19 Théoret, Une voix pour Odile, 13.
20 Saint-Martin, “La maternité dans l’œuvre de France Théoret,” 135–6.
21 Desautels, L’angle noir de la joie, 10.
22 Saint-Martin, Le nom de la mère, 120.
Ch AP ter eLeve n
1 All of these works have been translated into English, and the extracts quoted in
this chapter are from the translations.
2 Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction, 13–14.
3 Lejeune, Pacte autobiographique, 14.
4 Doubrovsky, Fils, back cover.
5 See in particular Colonna, Autofiction, and Gasparini, Roman autobiogra-
phique et autofiction.
6 Lecarme, “Autofiction,” Encyclopédie Universalis (http://www.universalis-edu.
com/autofiction).
7 Perron, “Le récit de soi,” 27.
8 Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction, 58.
9 This was a dilemma Arcan encountered throughout her career, most notably
on the occasion of her appearance on the television program Tout le monde en
parle in September 2007.
10 Navarro, “Journal intime,” 14.
11 Malavoy-Racine, “La peine capitale,” 15.
12 Navarro, “Journal intime,” 14.
13 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 90.
16 Aquin, Prochain épisode, 25.
17 Smart, Writing in the Father’s House, 3.
18 Hébert, Kamouraska, trans. Norman Shapiro, 264.
19 See, for example, Théoret’s volume of poetry Nécessairement putain and the
following articles: Saint-Martin, “Politique et sexualité”; Havercroft,
“(Un)tying the Knot of Patriarchy”; and Boisclair, “Accession à la subjectivité

et autoréification.”
20 Resch, “Putain de Nelly Arcan,” 179–80.
21 “There comes a moment, after two centuries of conquests and 34 years of
confusional sadness, when you no longer have the strength to go beyond the
abominable vision,” Aquin, Prochain épisode, 25 (my translation).
22 Biron, “Écrire du côté de la mort,” 337.
23 Danielle Laurin, “Nelly Arcan 1973–2009: Ni putain ni folle, juste brisée,” Le
Devoir, 26 September 2009 (http://www.ledevoir.com/culture/livres/268828/
nelly-arcan-197).
24 Biron, “Écrire du côté de la mort,” 337.
25 Huston, “Arcan the Philosopher,” preface to Arcan, Burqa of Skin, 16.
26 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47.
27 See Navarro, “Journal intime,” 14.
29 This feeling of inferiority was humiliatingly reinforced when Arcan appeared
on the French television program Tout le monde en parle (not the Quebec
version) in 2001, when the host Thierry Ardisson laughed at her “horrid Cana-
dian accent.”
30 Martin, In an Iron Glove, 69.
COn CLuS iOn
1 See my Writing in the Father’s House for a more general comparison of wom-
en’s and men’s writing in Quebec literature.
2 Arcan, Burqa of Skin, 32.
3 Havercroft, “(Un)tying the Knot of Patriarchy,” 207.
4 France Théoret, “Notes for an Interview on Receiving the Prix Athanase-
David,” November 2012.
5 Caulier, “Entrer dans la modernité,” 386–7.
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In de x
abnegation, 5, 33; in girls’ education, Marie de l’Incarnation, 33–4, 45–6,

112, 196, 236; and nuns of New 50, 58, 63–5
France, 20, 23, 31; in Michelle Le Andersen, Margret, 231
Normand, 136; in Marie de l’Incar- Aquin, Hubert, 99, 262; Prochain épi-
nation, 25, 34, 66; in Julie Papineau, sode (Next Episode), 257, 260
112. See also annihilation of self; Arcan, Nelly, 7, 10, 192, 256–75, 276–8;
sacrifice; self-sacrifice and Hubert Aquin, 260, fictional
agency, 5, 7, 11, 87, 112, 116, 265, 279. See element in, 257; and image of
also autonomy; identity; sense of women, 256–7, 265–6; and love,
self 275; and need for transcendence,
Algonquins, 23–4, 30, 60 272–3; postmodernism of, 256–7,
alterity: in correspondences, 6, 69; in 275; pseudonym of, 258; and sense
diaries, 117; in women’s autobiog- of self and identity, 259–60, 265,
raphy, 8, 31; in Élisabeth Bégon, 270; suicide of, 256–7; and women’s
73–4, 86; in Denise Desautels, 243; experience, 257
in Marie de l’Incarnation, 33, 46, Arcan, Nelly, works of
47, 48, 56; in Claire Martin, 196; in – Burqa of Skin: disembodiment,
Gabrielle Roy, 239. See also women’s 274–5; shame, 273–4
autobiographies: and relationality – Hysteric: as autofiction, 258; and
annals: of religious communities, 4, image of France, 270–1; and mirror,
14, 17–18, 276; Annales de la bonne 270–2; and sado-masochism, 271
Sainte-Anne, 206; Annales de l’Hô- – Whore: and the body, 265–6; and
tel-Dieu de Montréal, 24–5; Annales Catholicism, 263; and the father,
de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 24, 26, 67 268–9; and the mother, 264, 266–8;
annihilation of self, 5, 15–16; in seven- and woman object, 261, 266; and
teenth-century spirituality, 33, 45; in women’s identity, 261
inde x • 312
Arcand, Denys, 99 ideas on girls’ education, 76, 87; and

asceticism, 44–8 letter-diary, 73–4, 77, 86–7; and the
Augustine, Saint, 8, 41 maternal role, 72–3, 78–9, 84–5, 87;
Augustinians. See Hospitalières de as an observer of society, 74–7; and
Saint-Augustin old age, 85–6; and relationship with
Aurore, child martyr, 232–3 native peoples, 75; and relationship
autobiographical films, 7, 229–30 with son-in-law, 78–81; and sense of
autobiographical pact, 191, 197; in self and need for an Other, 73–4, 86;
autofiction, 257; in Nelly Arcan, 263; as a writer, 86
in Claire Martin, 198; in Francine Benedictines, 37–8, 224
Noël, 250, 254; in Gabrielle Roy, 238 Bigot, François, 75
autobiography, 189–275; and autofic- Biron, Michel, 262
tion, 257–8; definition, 195; and the Blodgett, E.D., 10
diary, 116; and fiction, 191–2, 195–6, body, the: and being a woman, 259,
257; and the individual, 8–9; as a 261–3, 265–6, 273–5, 276–7; and
literary genre, 8; and memoir, 195; female mystics, 36; and Jansenist
and the novel, 196–7 attitudes, 5, 159–60, 186, 188, 192,
autofiction, 192, 256–8, 260 200, 269; mortification of, 43–8;
autonomy, 7, 11, 14, 87, 116, 122, 190; and and the mother, 231, 248, 251, 253.
relationship with the mother, 230, See also guilt; Jansenism; shame
232, 245–6, 255, 278; in Henriette Bombardier, Denise, 212–14, 218–21;
Dessaulles, 148–55; in Marie de and attitude to the French lan-
l’Incarnation, 45, 51, 60. See also guage, 219; and Catholic guilt and
identity; sense of self mysticism, 218; and denial of class
and cultural origins, 219–21; and
Baillargeon, Paule, 7, 229–30 education and reading, 219–20, 277;
beauty: for the nuns of New France, 32; and father, 214; and humour, 218;
in Nelly Arcan, 259–60, 266, 272; and mother, 219; and poverty, 220,
for Angélique Hay-Des Rivières, 227; and sense of being exceptional,
169; for Michelle Le Normand, 186; 218–19; and speaking English, 219
in Marie de l’Incarnation’s writing, Borduas, Paul-Émile, 236
33, 65; in France Théoret, 216 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 15
Beauvoir, Simone de, 88, 187 Bourassa, Henri, 111
Beckett, Samuel, 250 Bourassa, Napoléon, 123–4
Bégon, Claude-Michel, 71 Bourgeoys, Marguerite: Autobiogra-
Bégon, Élisabeth: Lettres au cher fils, 5, phie et testament spiritual, 4, 17; as
11, 68–9, 70–87; attitude to France, founder of uncloistered institution,
75, 77, 80–3; attitude to winter, 76–7, 25, 28; and inspiration of the Blessed
80; and collapse of New France, 85; Virgin, 22, 28; and transgression of
and epistolarity, 72–4, 78–80; and gender roles, 21–2
inde x • 313
Bourget, Ignace (Msgr), 130, 169, 205 Conan, Laure (Félicité Angers), 136,
Brébeuf, Jean de, 30, 31, 62 147, 189
Brisson, Marcelle: Le roman vrai, 7, Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 17, 137,
221–4; adolescent love of travel, 204. See also religious communities
223; and entry into Benedictines, Conquest (1760), 3–5, 8, 68–70, 73, 87
221, 224; and lack of female models, correspondences, 67–113; and gender,
221, 223–4; and parents, 222; and 93; self and other in, 68; temporality
poverty, 212, 222–4; and role of and space in, 68, 89; and Élisabeth
education and reading, 222–3 Bégon, 72–4, 78–80; and Julie Pap-
Brodzki, Bella, 231, 238 ineau, 88–90, 93, 112
Cartier, George-Étienne, 130, 132 Dandurand, Raoul, 117, 148, 151, 157
Cartier, Hortense, 130–5; and anger at Daviau, Diane-Monique: Ma mère
her father, 135; and finding a hus- et Gainsbourg, 7, 232, 244–6; and
band, 134–5; and social activities, mother, 241, 244–6; and self-accep-
130–4 tance, 246; and writing, 245–6
Cartier, Joséphine, 130–5; and finding Desautels, Denise: Ce fauve, le bon-
a husband, 133–4; and melancholy, heur, 241–4; and autobiography, 191;
133; and social activities, 130–4 and Catholicism, 242; and death of
Cartier, Lady. See Fabre, Hortense the father, 242; and Anne Hébert,
Casgrain, H.-R., 111, 284 190, 241; and mother, 242–3; and
Catholicism, 5–6, 9, 205; of Marie-Lou- self-acceptance, 242; and self and
ise Globensky, 123–5; in Anne other, 243; and writing, 242
Hébert, 190; in Julie Papineau, 106, Deschamps, Nicole, 70–1, 78–80
110. See also Church: domination; Des Rivières, Angélique. See Hay-Des
Jansenism; religious communities Rivières, Angélique
Caulier, Brigitte, 279 Des Rivières, Henri, 166, 169–70
censorship, 4, 90, 98, 122, 126, 153, 181, Desrosiers, Léo-Paul, 140, 165, 175–7,
187, 207. See also self-censorship 181, 183, 185, 188
Chauveau, Éliza, 123 Dessaulles, Alice, 118, 122, 126–30; and
Church: and censorship, 153, 187; death of mother, 127; and Jansenist
domination, 3, 76, 108, 116, 277; and ideas, 129; and lack of confidence,
French-Canadian nationalism, 145; 127; and religious vocation, 128; and
in Marcelle Brisson, 224; in Henri- writing under surveillance, 126–30
ette Dessaulles, 156; in Joséphine Dessaulles, Henriette, 6; and critique
Marchand, 163; in Claire Martin, of Quebec culture, 153–4; and
196, 204, 206. See also Catholicism; diaries forbidden, 122; and diary
Jansenism as confidant, 118, 154; and diary
Coin du feu, Le, 147, 162 and marriage, 148, 153, 155–6; and
Collin, Françoise, 14, 48 education, 148, 150; and female role,
inde x • 314
147–8, 153–4; and ideas on religion, epistolarity, 67–9, 93; and popularity
150–2; and individuality, 10, 149, for eighteenth-century women,
153; and love, 148, 153; and mother, 67–8. See also correspondences
154; and rewriting of diary, 161; and
stepmother, 149–50 Fabre, Édouard-Charles (Msgr), 130–1,
Dessaulles, Rosalie, 88, 100, 101, 110 169
Devoir, Le, 111, 139, 144, 147, 162, 177–8, Fabre, Hortense (Lady Cartier), 130,
227 132
diaries, 3, 4, 6, 8, 23, 72–3, 115–88; as feminism, 3, 23, 90, 117, 185, 193, 190,
activity for women, 119; chronicle 195–6, 230–1, 243, 255
diaries, 70, 118, 122, 141, 165–75; and Ferraro, Alessandra, 34–5
confidentiality, 115; girls’ diaries, Feuillants (order of priests), 44, 47
121–45; letter-diaries, 118–19; as Forestier, Marie (Mère de Saint-Bo-
a literary genre, 116–17; married naventure), 18, 23–5, 30
women’s diaries, 165–88; and mir-
ror-space, 115; retreat diary, 152; role Globensky, Marie-Louise (Lady
as confidant, 117–18; spiritual, 121–2; Lacoste), 122–6, 172–5; as a Catholic
travel diary, 130 bourgeoisie, 123; and chronicle-di-
Diaz, Brigitte, 68 ary, 122–3, 172; daily activities of,
diction classes, 219–21, 227, 248 123, 172; and death of son René,
Didier, Béatrice, 68 173–4; and family, 123; and marriage
Diefendorf, Barbara, 45 to Alexandre Lacoste, 123, 126, 172;
Doubrovsky, Serge, 257 and Montebello, 123–4; as a mother,
dualistic mentality, 5, 34, 37, 44. See also 172–4; political and cultural sympa-
Jansenism thies of, 123, 172–4; and religion,
Duplessis, Marie-Andrée (Mère), 18, 67 123–5, 172–3
Duplessis, Maurice, 214, 224 Grassi, Marie-Claire, 67
Durham Report, 102 Greer, Allan, 96–7
Groulx, Lionel, 140, 144–5, 180
education, 6, 9, 10, 14; and convent Guérin, Eugénie de, 121
schools, 112, 116, 150–1, 227–8, 234, Guèvremont, Germaine, 175
236, 277–8; of native girls, 30; as guilt, 116, 145, 188, 205–6, 227, 230; in
responsibility of the mother, 11; in Nelly Arcan, 269, 274; in Denise
Élisabeth Bégon, 73–4, 87; in Denise Bombardier, 218, 220; in Denise
Bombardier, 219–20; in Mar- Desautels, 243; in Michelle Le Nor-
celle Brisson, 221–3; in Joséphine mand, 178; in Joséphine Marchand,
Marchand, 147, 159–60, 163; in 160; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 36,
Claire Martin, 193–4, 196, 204, 206; 42, 54–5, 62, 65; in Francine Noël,
in Julie Papineau, 93, 103; in France 253; in Julie Papineau, 108–110; in
Théoret, 218, 246–7 Thérèse Renaud, 235; in Gabrielle
inde x • 315
Roy, 236–7, 240, 242; in France 68, 93; and the mother, 229–32;
Théoret, 248–9. See also body; and role of writing, 72; in women’s
Jansenism; shame autobiographies, 190, 192, 213, 218,
Gusdorf, George, 8, 9, 68, 73, 93 220. See also agency; autonomy;
Guyon, Mme Jeanne, 67 sense of self
indigenous peoples, 3, 19–20, 23, 26; in
hatred: in the mother-daughter rela- girls’ education, 208, 221; relation-
tionship, 230, 268; in Nelly Arcan, ship with the nuns in New France,
259, 267; in Denise Bombardier, 219; 29–30; in Élisabeth Bégon, 75;
in Diane-Monique Daviau, 244; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 31, 50,
in Adèle Lauzon, 226; in Marie de 60–1. See also Algonquins; Hurons;
l’Incarnation, 54–5, 62; in Claire Iroquois
Martin, 204; in Julie Papineau, 101; individuality, 13, 18, 67; and auto-
in Thérèse Renaud, 236. See also biography, 5, 8–9, 195, 207, 213,
self-hatred 227–8, 242; and diaries, 115, 118–20,
Havercroft, Barbara, 278 121, 124; erasure of in Quebec
Hay-Des Rivières, Angélique: Journal culture, 3, 8–10, 193, 246, 264; in
as family enterprise, 166–7; format Henriette Dessaulles, 152–3;
of Journal, 167; and humour, 171; in Michelle Le Normand, 188; in
and language of writing, 167; and Marie de l’Incarnation, 48–9;
motherhood, 170; and nature, sea- in Claire Martin, 193–4, 207; in
sons, garden, 168–9; and political Julie Papineau, 111
views, 168; and religious practices, Irigaray, Luce, 229, 231, 246, 255
169–70; and social and family life, Iroquois, 4, 25, 27, 30, 37, 60; and Élisa-
167–8; and spiritual readings, 169 beth Bégon, 70, 75, 81
Hébert, Anne, 189, 241, 243, 261; and
“la grande Claudine,” 190, 230, 241, Jansenism: definition, origin, and
279 influence in French Canada, 5,
Hospitalières (Hospital Sisters): in 188; in Nelly Arcan, 268; in Denise
New France, 17; Hospitalières de Desautels, 241; in Joséphine March-
Saint-Augustin (Augustinians), 18, and, 160; in Claire Martin, 200; in
23, 24, 67; Hospitalières de Saint-Jo- Julie Papineau, 90, 91, 101. See also
seph, 20, 25, 26, 31 body; Catholicism; guilt
Hurons, 31, 57, 63 Jesuits, 10, 23, 55, 57–8, 60, 86; Jesuit
Huston, Nancy, 263 martyrs, 30, 37, 62–3; Jesuit Rela-
hypocrisy, 7, 77, 128–9, 208, 233, 268, tions, 4, 13, 18–20, 28–9
277 Joyce, James, 257
Juchereau de Saint-Ignace (Sister
identity, 5; defined in relationship, 6, Jeanne-Françoise), 17–18, 20
8, 196; in diaries, 115–17; in letters,
inde x • 316
failed feminist rebellion, 184; and

Kaye, Françoise, 196 journalism, 138–9; and marginal
Kerouac, Jack, 223 comments, 137; and her mother,
Krumenacker, Yves, 13 137; and need for love and marriage,
137–40, 176; and readings, 138,
Lachance, Micheline, 90–3 186–7; and relationship with her
Lacoste, Lady. See Globensky, husband, 175–7, 179, 181, 183–5; and
Marie-Louise religion as consolation, 183–4; as
Lamonde, Yvan, 8, 145 wife, mother, and writer, 165, 175,
La Peltrie, Marie-Madeleine, 23, 58–9, 177–81, 183, 187–8. See also Des-
61 rosiers, Léo-Paul; Lozeau, Albert
Laurendeau, André, 115, 117, 140–5 Lévesque, Georges-Henri, 145
Lauzon, Adèle: Pas si tranquille: Sou- Lozeau, Albert, 139, 176, 185
venirs, 7, 224–6; and father, 215, 224;
and French language, 225–6; and Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de,
poverty, 210, 212–13, 215; and quest 21–2
for social justice, 212, 224–6; and Major, Jean-Louis, 147, 161, 200
reading, 225–6; and social ascen- Malavoy-Racine, Tristan, 259
sion of family, 224–5 Mame et fils (publishers), 203, 235
Laval, Msgr François de, 26, 34, 42 Mance, Jeanne, 61
Lecarme, Jacques, 9, 196, 257–8 Marchand, Félix-Gabriel, 146
Lecarme-Tabone, Éliane, 9, 196 Marchand, Joséphine: Journal intime
Leduc, Fernand, 232 (1879–1900), 146–64; and critique of
Lejeune, Philippe, 121, 147, 195, 197, French-Canadian culture, 164; and
257–8 diary and confidentiality, 158–9;
Lemieux, Rodolphe, 184 and education, 151; and fear of the
Le Moyne, Jean, 73 body and sexuality, 159–60; and
Le Normand, Michelle (Marie-An- marriage, 156–9; mother, 150; and
toinette Tardif): Journal, 6, 117; religion, 152, 163; and women’s role,
adolescent diary of, 135–40; 151, 159, 163, 165
adult diary of, 175–88; and age of Maria Chapdelaine, 186
transition, 136–8; and Angéline Marie de l’Incarnation: Correspon-
de Montbrun, 136; and attitude to dance, Écrits spirituels et historiques,
sacrifice, 136, 179, 183; and cen- 3, 5, 15, 30–1, 33–66; and abandoning
sorship and self-censorship, 175, her son, 33, 38–9, 53–4; and action
181; and conservatism, 186–7; and in the world, 47, 50; and anni-
contribution to husband’s writing hilation of self, 33–66; apostolic
career, 182; and daughter’s disability, vocation of, 56–7; beatification of,
182–3; and diary as confidant, 118; 208; and Canadian nature, 25; can-
and diary and search for self, 135–8; onization of, 33; and the Charlevoix
and diary and marriage, 175; and earthquake, 28; correspondence of,
inde x • 317
4, 27; and depression, 54, 61–2, 64; Quiet Revolution, 194; and reader
and devaluation of self as a woman, reaction, 194–5; and sadistic father,
14, 21, 57–8; and entry into the 193–4, 200, 206; and women’s role,
Ursulines, 19, 52–3; and eroticism 205–7; and Élisabeth Bégon, 193;
and mysticism, 49–52; and fusion and Henriette Dessaulles, 193; and
with God and self-hatred, 44, Joséphine Marchand, 193; and
46–7; and identification with the Marie de l’Incarnation, 207–9
body, 15, 33–4, 37, 43–8, 56, 65; and Martin, Dom Claude, 15, 36, 39, 44,
indigenous languages, 30, 63; and 62, 67
marriage and motherhood, 42–3; as martyrdom, 4, 20, 21; in Élisabeth
model, 10, 11, 33, 284; and mortifi- Bégon, 71; in Joséphine Marchand,
cations, 44–8; mystical experiences 159; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 30,
of, 43–52; and native pupils, 29, 62; in Thérèse Renaud, 236; in Paule
31, 61; and New France, 17–18, 20, Saint-Onge, 235
31, 57–9; and relationship with the matriarchy, 9, 111, 196
Church, 42; and relationship with matrophobia, 231
her son, 36–9; and son as editor, 15, McGill, James, 115, 166
39–40; spiritual autobiography of memoirs: and autobiography, 195–6;
(Relation), 3, 5, 33–66; and spiritual definition of, 18; and Marguerite
directors, 54–5; strong personality Bourgeoys, 4, 17, 21; and Joséphine
of, 41, 45, 48, 51; and temptation of Marchand, 163; in Claire Martin,
suicide, 54; and tension between 189, 194
human and divine, 33–4; and Virgin Middle Ages, 13–14, 39, 47
Mary, 56–7, 64; and vow of chastity, Montaigne, Michel de, 8
44; and vows of poverty and obedi- Morin, Marie (Sœur), 17, 20–1, 24–5,
ence, 45; and Relation as women’s 27–8
writing, 65–6 mother and daughter, 196, 229–55;
Maritain, Jacques, 144, 223 in Nelly Arcan, 264, 266–9,
Martin, Claire: Dans un gant de fer (In 278; in Denise Bombardier, 219;
an Iron Glove), 3, 7, 9–10, 189, 193– in Marcelle Brisson, 222; in
209; and autobiographical pact and Diane-Monique Daviau, 241, 244–
truth, 196–9; and autobiography 6; in Denise Desautels, 241, 242–3;
and memoir, 195; and controversy in Claire Martin, 202; in Francine
on publication, 197; and critique of Noël, 250–5; in Lise Payette, 215; in
education, 192, 201–4, 208; as first Gabrielle Roy, 236–41, 255; in Paule
feminist work, 193; and humour, Saint-Onge, 234; in France Théoret,
201–2, 208; and the individual, 216–18, 241, 246–50
193–4; and Jansenist milieu, 200; motherhood: in Quebec culture, 190;
and mother, 202, 205; and narrator as women’s role, 11, 66, 111–12; and
and protagonist, 201–3; and portrait women’s writing, 175, 189; in Élisa-
of French Canada, 196, 199; and beth Bégon, 81, 83, 87; in Angélique
inde x • 318
Hay-Des Rivières, 168, 170; in and fusion with mother, 251; and
Lady Lacoste, 172–4; in Michelle mother and body, 253; and mother
Le Normand, 175–9, 182–3; in as storyteller, 251–2; and moth-
Joséphine Marchand, 160; in Marie er’s voice, 251; and reconciliation
de l’Incarnation, 34, 36–9, 52–4; in through writing, 250, 254
Julie Papineau, 88–90, 95, 109–12,
116. See also mother and daughter; Ouellet, Fernand, 90–1, 101, 104, 106
queen(s) of the hearth Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine,
Mounier, Emmanuel, 223 257–8, 260
mysticism: Church mistrust of, 15, 40,
67; and mystical religiosity in ado- Papineau, Julie: Une femme patriote,
lescent girls, 220, 223–4, 236; and correspondance 1823–1862, 6, 11, 87,
women, 14, 34–5, 36; in Nelly Arcan, 88–113; and conditions of epistolar-
192, 262, 263, 265–6; in Michelle Le ity, 68–9, 88–90, 93, 112; and effect
Normand, 184; in Marie de l’Incar- of English presence, 108; effect of
nation, 25, 33–66 the Rebellions, 100–3, 106; evolu-
tion of, 112–13; and evolution of the
nationalism: in Adèle Lauzon, 225–6; couple, 104–5; and interpretations
in Michelle Le Normand, 180; in of her character, 90–3; Jansenist
Ghislaine Perrault, 144–5 attitudes and Catholicism of, 90–1,
Nelligan, Émile, 142–3, 243, 252 101, 106–7, 110; and melancholy, 89,
Nelson, Robert, 92, 99 91, 93; as a mother, 89–90, 94–6,
Nepveu, Pierre, 15, 59 106, 108–11; and political ideas,
Neuman, Shirley, 231 96–100, 102–3; as strong woman,
New France, 4–5, 13–14; and Church 6, 92, 97, 102; and women’s role, 88,
moralism in eighteenth century, 93–7, 106, 112
76; and cloistered communities, Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 88, 92–110;
19; and correspondence, 68; and and courtesy and love of family,
corruption, 75–6; and dances and 94–6; and English presence, 108;
festivities, 76; and relationship with exile and indecisiveness of, 103–4;
France, 75; religious fervour in and Marie-Louise Globensky,
seventeenth century, 27; women’s 123–4; and Montebello, 101, 105–7,
perspective on, 4, 23, 28–31 123; and paternalism, 93, 97; and
nihilism, 192, 262 Rebellions, 98–101
Noël, Francine, 7, 232, La Femme de ma Pascal, Blaise, 41
vie, 250–5; and absence of father, patriarchy, 196, 205, 230–1, 261–2,
251; and autobiographical pact, 266–8, 277
250; and autobiography and truth, Patriotes, 92, 96–7, 99–101, 103, 166–7
254–5; and autonomy, 253; and col- Payette, Lise: Des femmes d’honneur,
lective dimension of family story, une vie privée 1931–1968, 7, 210–12;
254; and education and class, 252–3; and education, 212, 227–8; and
inde x • 319
father, 215; and mother and grand-

mother, 215; and poverty and sense Rapley, Elizabeth, 18, 19
of community, 211–12; and self-con- reading(s), 47, 51, 109, 124, 186, 195,
fidence, 210–11, 215 206; diaries, 119, 158, 161, 176; and
Pelletier, Gérald, 212 importance in evolution of young
Pepys, Samuel, 118 girls, 87, 136, 138, 163, 206, 210, 220,
Perrault, Ghislaine: Journal, 140–5; and 222–3, 226, 228, 249; pleasure of,
diary and identity, 117; and diary 192; spiritual, 125, 128, 151–2, 169
and marriage, 145; and diary read by rebellion, 6, 229; against the mother,
mother, 121, 141; and Lionel Groulx, 241; in girls’ diaries, 129, 145, 148,
140, 145; and happiness, 140–3; and 149–51; in Michelle Le Normand,
André Laurendeau, 117, 143–5; and 185; in Claire Martin, 195, 201; in
love of the French language, 142; Paule Saint-Onge, 235; in France
and love of music and nature, 143; Théoret, 249
and marginal comments, 118; and Rebellions (1837–38), 5, 9, 89, 91,
nationalism, 144–5; and religious 98–100; and effect on Julie Pap-
faith, 143–4; and shared diary, 140–1 ineau, 101–2, 106, 110. See also
Poirier, Anne-Claire, 7, 229 Papineau, Julie; Papineau, Louis-Jo-
postmodernism, 7, 256–7, 261, 263, 275 seph; Patriotes
poverty, 9, 24–5, 29, 31, 45–6, 64, 105; Refus global, 9, 232–3, 236
and identity, 212–14; in Denise religious communities, 4, 14, 61, 164,
Bombardier, 214, 218–21; in 172; in education, 137, 194; negative
Marcelle Brisson, 221–4; in Adèle qualities of, 3, 67, 149, 194–5, 200–6,
Lauzon, 224–6; in Lise Payette, 208, 218–19, 263; in New France,
210–12; in France Théoret, 215–18 17–32; positive contributions of, 223,
Protestantism: and autobiography, 9; 276; as vocation, 221, 224, 154. See
and spiritual journals, 119 also annals
Renaud, Thérèse, 7; Une mémoire
queen(s) of the hearth, 6, 11, 69, 116; déchirée, 232–6; and Les Sables du
diaries of, 165–88; and domineering rêve, 232; and abused childhood,
mothers, 231–2, 255; fulfilment in 233–4; and death of mother, 235; and
role as, 172–5; and lack of subjec- education, 236, 277; and rebellion,
tivity, 278; and nineteenth-century 235; and Refus global, 232, 236
ideology, 111; resentment of role as, Resch, Yannick, 261
106, 149–50; training of, 150–1 retreats, 123–4, 128, 143, 151, 152, 173,
Quietism, 67 204, 250
Quiet Revolution, 3, 186; and access to Rimstead, Roxanne, 214
the middle class, 213, 225, 254; and role of women: in Claire Martin, 205–7.
individual and collective freedom, See also queen(s) of the hearth
3, 194, 255, 263; and women’s autobi- Romanticism: and the individual,
ography, 7, 190, 193; years preceding, 115; and the private diary, 119; in
9, 111, 188, 196, 213, 224, 275
inde x • 320
Quebec, 121 childhood abuse, 213; and education

romanticism: in adolescent girls, 137, in masochism, 235–6; and rejection
143, 159, 223 by mother, 234
Rougemont, Denis de, 47 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 187, 223
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 97 Sauvé, Jeanne, 212
Roy, Gabrielle: and ambivalence Schulte Van Kessel, Elisja, 36
regarding the mother, 236–41; and self-censorship, 4, 207; in Alice Des-
the autobiographical pact, 238; saulles, 122; in Henriette Dessaulles,
and autobiographical writing, 238; 155; in Michelle Le Normand, 175,
and the French language, 238–9; 186–7; in Joséphine Marchand,
and guilt and maternal sacrifice, 158–9. See also censorship
239–40; and novelistic quality of her self-hatred: in Nelly Arcan, 263; in
autobiography, 239 Denise Bombardier, 214; in Marie
Roy, Gabrielle, works of: Alexandre de l’Incarnation, 33, 44, 46–7; in
Chênevert, 238; Bonheur d’occasion Paule Saint-Onge, 235. See also
(The Tin Flute), 210–11, 217, 221, 222, hatred
228, 237, 239; La détresse et l’enchan- self-sacrifice, 112, 159, 188, 205, 235, 276;
tement (Enchantment and Sorrow), and Michelle Le Normand, 179; and
238–41; Le temps qui m’a manqué, mothering, 173. See also abnegation;
236–8 sacrifice
Rubinger, Catherine, 80 sense of self, 4, 5, 9, 188; in Nelly Arcan,
260; in Denise Bombardier, 218; in
sacrifice, 4, 9, 10, 20, 23, 59, 76; in Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine
Nelly Arcan, 263; in Michelle Le Marchand, 146; in Marie de l’In-
Normand, 136, 181; in Joséphine carnation, 41, 49; in Lise Payette,
Marchand, 150, 152; in Julie Papin- 211. See also autonomy; identity;
eau, 92, 96, 101, 112–13; in Thérèse individuality
Renaud, 233; in Paule Saint-Onge, separate spheres, 88, 93, 96
233–4. See also abnegation; body: sexuality, 116, 159, 186, 260
mortification; self-sacrifice shame: in Nelly Arcan, 259, 273–4; in
Saint-Bernard, Dom François de, 44 Denise Bombardier, 212, 220; in
Saint-Bernard, Dom Raymond de, 42, Claire Martin, 199–200, 206; in
44, 46, 48, 50, 54, 57 Francine Noël, 253–4; in Lise Pay-
Saint-Jacques, Joséphine, 148, 154, 161 ette, 211; in France Théoret, 248–9.
Saint-Jacques, Maurice, 148, 153–7, See also body; guilt; Jansenism
161–2 spiritual autobiography, 3, 8, 41; and
Saint-Martin, Lori, 238, 247, 255 women, 14–15, 34–5
Saint-Onge, Paule: Une vie défigurée, subjectivity: and aim of women’s auto-
232–6; and autobiography as biography, 279; emergence in the
search for autonomy, 212–13; and sixteenth century of, 8; and gender,
inde x • 321
68, 69, 88; and the mother, 111, 231, poverty, 210, 215–18
242, 255; and openness to the other, Théoret, France, works of: Une belle
196, 243. See also agency; autonomy; éducation (Such a Good Education),
sense of self 215–18; Hôtel des quatre chemins,
submission, 97, 227, 228 246–50; Journal pour mémoire, 216
suffering: in family backgrounds of Tout le monde en parle, 257, 259, 274
the Québécois, 254; for the nuns transcendence: in Nelly Arcan, 272–3
of New France, 23–5; and religious Trépanier, Hélène, 45, 46
consolation, 169, 173–4, 183–4, 188;
in Élisabeth Bégon, 71; in Henri- Ursulines, 3, 10, 18, 20; constitution of,
ette Dessaulles, 154; in Joséphine 26, 42; and destruction of monas-
Marchand, 150, 160; in Marie de tery by fire, 63–4; in New France,
l’Incarnation, 35, 37–8, 43, 45, 48, 29, 30, 34, 60–1, 63; in Claire Mar-
50, 52, 55; in Julie Papineau, 89–90, tin, 204, 207–8; and Julie Papineau,
107, 110 88, 91
suicide: in Nelly Arcan, 256, 260–1,
270; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 54; Vadeboncœur, Pierre, 9, 264
in Francine Noël, 252; in Paule Van Roey-Roux, Françoise, 8
Saint-Onge, 233 Vaudreuil, Pierre de Rigaud de, 83–5
Villebois de la Rouvilliere, Michel de,
temporality: in autobiography, 8, 116, 23, 24, 70–2, 78–83, 83–5
195, 201–3; in correspondences, 68;
in diaries, 116 wars of religion, 45
Teresa of Avila, 8, 14–15, 41, 47, 49 winter: in New France, 4, 23–5, 31, 60,
Théoret, France, 7; and construction 64, 76–7, 80; spiritual dimension
of self, 218; and the denial of the of, 25
individual in Quebec culture, woman-object, 229, 232; in Nelly
9–10; and education in submission, Arcan, 7, 261, 265–6, 274; in France
228, 246–9; and father, 217; and Théoret, 249
inner voice, 218, 249; and mother, women’s autobiographies, 3–4, 7–8,
217–18, 232, 241, 247–50; and need 189–275; and the mother, 7, 190,
for beauty, 216; and precision and 229–55; and relationality, 5–8, 19,
unsentimentality of writing, 215–16, 47–9, 196
246; and Prix David 2012, 279; Woolf, Virginia, 178, 186
recurrent images in, 216; and trap of

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Writing Herself

Q u e b e c Wom e n’s Autobi og raphi cal

McGill-Queen’s University Press

First published in French as De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan

ISBN 978-0-7735-5118-3 (cloth)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2017

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Smart, Patricia, 1940–

Writing herself into being : Quebec women’s autobiographical writings from

ISBN 978-0-7735-5118-3 (hardcover). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5119-0 (softcover). –

1. Canadian literature (French) – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Canadian

PS8103.W6S6213 2017 C840.9’9287 C2017-904387-0

This book was typeset by Sandra Friesen in 10.5/13 Minion.

PA rt O n e L i v i n g A n d W r itin g fOr gOd :

9 Growing Up Poor in Montreal, 1930–1960: Lise Payette,

I am grateful to the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program for a gen-

This book is my own translation of a work I originally wrote in French,

the New World offered them a paradoxical realization of self, anchored in

In part 4, “Writing Oneself into History: The Age of Autobiography

women’s relationship to it. The first spiritual autobiography of the West-

was “impossible to speak of oneself […] Those who speak of themselves

Modern autobiography and the adventure of New France have their

and activities of their communities in Annales, or annual reports, which

writings of the other foundresses. All of these women display an admira-

At the origins of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec literature are

in fr An Ce : the dreAM tAKeS Sh APe

Although many of the women’s religious orders in France were founded as

world – the parlour, the church – were to be protected by narrow-meshed

ne W fr AnC e : the JOy fOund i n Suffe ri ng

encountered instead a radical otherness of climate, geography, and cul-

but languished without the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in their

All of them lived as saints, in a piety and spirituality such as one

A different WAy O f W riti ng – A nd Seei ng

If there is a gender specificity in these writings, it is certainly linked to

For example, she notes geological changes observed in several regions of

The founding paradox of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec is that

everyday life, including her life as a mother. “God never guided me by

MArie And he r SOn

According to Elisja Schulte Van Kessel, female mystics experienced their

mother’s death in 1672, assembled her numerous writings and published

MAternity: An indiSSOLubL e b Ond

By leaving her son, Marie de l’Incarnation broke with the restrictions

Your reproaches cause me pain and require a response […] Indeed,

“there iS MO re thAn One AuthO r, there A re

Like most other women’s writings of the period, Marie de l’Incarnation’s

he sometimes modifies the text to make it conform to the Catholic ortho-

S tePS t OWA rd the di SSOLutiOn Of Se Lf:

A We LL- bALA n Ced yO ung gi r L

Often spiritual autobiographies begin with a conversion experience,

It happens in the confessional, where, in spite of knowing she has done

i nundAted by the inf i ni te: the e ArLy

beCOM ing “Li Ke irO n in the hA ndS Of A

t O WA it And t O burn: the “betrO th AL”

VOUS ÊTES MON MOI , “ yO u A re My S eLf” :

longer myself, I became him in an intimate and loving union, in such a

b e C OM ing An urS uLine : fALLing “frOM A high

Although each of Marie’s chapters (or “states of prayer”) ends in a state

Raymond. “When I was doing my spiritual exercises, I was quite ashamed

n e W fr A nCe : LA nd O f deS ire And nO thingneSS

In his book Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, Pierre Nepveu describes the

classroom. In one of her letters, Marie mentions that it is often impossible

the eM ergen Ce Of the fe Mi ni ne

Gabriel Lalement at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons in 1649 and a fire

The letters of these two women – the only women’s correspondences

Patricia Smart - Writing Herself into Being_ Quebec Women's Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l'Incarnation to Nelly Arcan (2017, McGill-Queen's University Press) [10.1515_9780773552654] - libgen.li

Patricia Smart - Writing Herself into Being_ Quebec Women's Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l'Incarnation to Nelly Arcan (2017, McGill-Queen's University Press) [10.1515_9780773552654] - libgen.li