Blue Plaque Special: Maritime Edition

The latter half of October was spent on a long road trip through Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Anyès and I travelled over four thousand kilometres in all, and yet didn't come close to hitting Prince Edward Island or Cape Breton. My European cousins would laugh at the notion that the Maritime provinces are small.

A first leg of the drive, getting to New Brunswick from our eastern Upper Canadian home, involved a stopover at Quebec City. We spent the first night at le Monèstere des Augustines, in which we'd stayed two years earlier. This time, instead of a suite, we chose to sleep a nun's cell. As I discovered, I'm considerably taller than a seventeenth-century woman.

I won't dwell on our time in Quebec City, though I would like to share a plaque I'd somehow missed on our previous trip.

I'm pleased to report that plaques are every bit as common in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Fredricton, New Brunswick (pop. 58,200) may have more plaques per capita than any other Canadian city. Amongst the earliest is one affixed to the side of a house that once belonged to Loyalist poet Jonathan Odell.

The plaque honouring Odell can found across from Christ Church Fredericton's Anglican cathedral. Its former rectory once served as home to Sir Charles G.D. Roberts.

Across the street, a few doors down, we found the home of sister Elizabeth. This discovery brought us to a very interesting news story:

A name of one's own:

Heritage plaque celebrating Fredericton writer will finally identify her

In fact, the heritage plaque was not altered to identify her, as the headline suggests, rather it was replaced with another:

Can't help but feel the Fredericton Heritage Trust missed a teaching opportunity there.

Remarkably, there are no plaques dedicated exclusively to Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, though I know of one in Westcock, New Brunswick. It would appear brother Theodore Goodrich Roberts has no plaques at all! The home in which cousin Bliss Carman was raised has two, the earliest of which was installed at his Shore Street home by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire in New Brunswick.

The more recent is the doing of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

Halifax was the easternmost point of our travels. We found blue plaques aplenty, including this one affixed to the house in which we stayed:

Sadly, the city's blue plaques aren't terribly informative.

I doubt Halliburton House has anything to do with Thomas Chandler Haliburton, but can't say for sure.

Curiously, given its rich literary history, Halifax has little in the way of plaques honouring writers. The only one I encountered was affixed to the mothballed Court House.

That's me taking a photo at the top of this post.

The discovery surprised in that it honoured Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé. The author of L'Influence d'un livre, Canada's first French-language novel, lived his final months in Halifax.

The last night of our trip was spent in Rivière-du-Loup. We had trouble sleeping, and so got up early. The place I'd most wanted to visit this trip was the reconstructed Aubert de Gaspé manor, but St-Jean-Port-Joli was pitch black when we passed.

Next year.

I'm a huge Aubert de Gaspé fan.

Related posts:

Blue Plaque Special

Blue Plaque Special: Quebec City Edition

Gothique Canadien

Gothique Canadien

Cameron of Lochiel [Les Anciens Canadiens]

Phillipe[-Joseph] Aubert de Gaspé [trans Charles G.D.

     Roberts]
Boston: L.C.Page, 1905

287 pages

Pulled from the bookcase on la Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, returned on Canada Day, I first read this translation of Les Anciens Canadiens in my teens. It served as my introduction to this country's French-language literature. Revisiting the novel four decades later, I was surprised at how much I remembered.

Les Anciens Canadiens centres on Archibald Cameron and friend Jules d'Haberville. The two meet as students at Quebec City's Collège des Jésuites. Cameron, "commonly known as Archie of Lochiel," is the orphaned son of a father who made the mistake of throwing his lot behind Bonnie Prince Charlie. Jules is the son of the seigneur d'Haberville, whose lands lie at Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, some eighty kilometres north-east of Quebec City.

Montreal's Lakeshore School Board – now the Lester B. Pearson School Board – was very keen that we study the seigneurial system.

And we did!

We coloured maps using Laurentian pencils; popsicle sticks and papier-mâché landscapes were also involved. There was much focus on architecture and geography, but not so much on tradition and culture.

We were not assigned Les Anciens Canadiens – not even in translation – which is a pity because I find it the most engaging historical novel in Canadian literature. 

It was through Les Anciens Canadiens that I first learned of Marie-Josephte Corriveau – la  Corriveau – who was executed in April 1763 for the bloody murder of her second husband, Louis Étienne Dodier. Her corpse was subsequently suspended roadside in a gibbet (left). Just the sort of thing that would've caught the attention of this high school Hammer Horror fan.

La Corriveau owes her presence in the novel to José Dubé, the d'Haberville's talkative trusted servant. Tasked with transporting Jules and his "brother de Lochiel" Archie from the Collège to the seigneury, he entertains with legends, folk stories, folk songs, and tall tales. José's story about la Corriveau has nothing to do with the murderess's crime, rather a dark night when "in her cage, the wicked creature, with her eyeless skull" attacked his father. This occurred on on the very same evening in which his dear père claims to have encountered all the damned souls of Canada gathered for a witches' sabbath on the Île d'Orléans (also known as the Île des Sorciers). Says José: "Like an honest man, he loved his drop; and on his journeys he always carried a flask of brandy in his dogfish-skin satchel. They say the liquor is the milk for old men."

Seigneur d'Haberville [Les Anciens Canadiens]
Phillipe Aubert de Gaspé [trans Georgians M. Pennée]
Toronto: Musson, 1929

Les Anciens Canadiens is unusual in that José and other secondary characters are by far the most memorable. We have, for example, M d'Egmont, "the old gentleman," who was all but ruined through his generosity to others. The account of his decent, culminating in confinement in debtors' prison, is most certainly drawn from the author's own experience. And then there's wealthy widow Marie, "witch of the manor," who foretells a future in which Archie carries "the bleeding body of him you call your brother."

The dullest of we high school students would've recognized early on that Archie and Jules' friendship is formed in the decade preceding the Seven Years' War. The brightest would've had some idea as to where things will lead. The climax, if there can be said to be one, has nothing to do with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, rather the bloodier Battle of Sainte-Foy.

Not all is so dark. Aubert de Gaspé, born twenty-six years after the fall of New France, makes use of the novel to record the world of his parents and grandparents: their celebrations, their food, and their games ("'does the company please you,' or 'hide the ring,' ''shepherdess,' or 'hide and seek,' or 'hot cockles'"), while lamenting all that is slipping away:

In The Vicar of Wakefield Goldsmith makes the good pastor say:

     "I can't say whether we had more wit among us than usual, but I'm certain we had more laughing, which answered the end as well."
     The same might be said of the present gathering, over which there reigned that French light-heartedness which seems, alas, to be disappearing in what Homer would call these degenerate days.

Les Anciens Canadiens is so very rich in detail and story. Were this another country, it would have been adapted to radio, film, and television. It should be assigned reading in our schools – both English and French. My daughter should know it. In our own degenerate days, she should know how to make a seigneurial manor house out of popsicle sticks. 

Object: Typical of its time. As far as this Canadian can tell, what's depicted on the cover is the Cameron tartan. The frontispiece (above) is by American illustrator H.C. Edwards. 

The novel proper is preceded by the translator's original preface and a preface written for the new edition.

Twelve pages of adverts for other L.C. Page titles follow, including Roberts' The Story of Red Fox, Barbara Ladd, The Kindred of the Wild, The Forge in the Forest, The Heart of the Ancient Wood, A Sister to Evangeline, By the Marshes of Minas, Earth's Enigmas, and his translation of Les Anciens Canadiens.

Access: Les Anciens Canadiens remains in print. The first edition, published in 1863 by Desbarats et Derbyshire, can be purchased can be found online for no more than US$150.

First editions of the Roberts translation, published as The Canadians of Old (New York: Appleton, 1890), go for as little as US$28.50.

In 1974, as Canadians of Old, it was introduced as title #106 in the New Canadian Library. This was the edition I read as teenager... and the edition I criticized in middle-age. Note that the cover credits the translator, and not the author:

 

That said, the NCL edition is superior to Page's 1905 Cameron of Lochiel – available online here thanks to the Internet Archive – only in that it features Aubert de Gaspé's endnotes (untranslated).

Les Anciens Canadiens has enjoyed three and a half translations. The first, by Georgians M. Pennée, was published ion 1864 under the title The Canadians of Old. It was republished in 1929 as Seigneur d'Haberville, correcting "printer's errors" and "too literal translation." Roberts' translation was the the second. The most recent, by Jane Brierley, published in 1996 by Véhicule Press. is the only translation in print. It is also the only edition to feature a translation of the endnotes.

Jane Brierley's translation, Canadians of Old, can be purchased here through the Véhicule Press website. Ms Brierley also translated Aubert de Gaspé's Mémoires (1866; A Man of Sentiment, Véhicule, 1987) and Divers (1893, Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, Véhicule, 1990).

Lester B. Pearson School Board take note.

 

Related posts:

Old Folks
Remembering la Corriveau

For All Its Faults: Remembering the New Canadian Library

Blue Plaque Special: Quebec City Edition

Portrait of a Former Mistress
Ontario Gothic Romance (with the scent of Brut)
Alberta Gothic

Blue Plaque Special: Quebec City Edition

In the early days of the Dusty Bookcase – more than twelve years ago! –  I heaped praise upon London's blue plaques, singling out favourites affixed to the former homes of George Frideric Handel, Jimi Hendrix, and Canadian British Prime Minister Andrew Bonnar Law. "Despite all good intentions, and a great deal of effort, we have nothing that compares in this country," I wrote.

I was wrong.

As I discovered last week during a visit to my home and native province, plaques abound in Quebec City! Consider the above, which recognizes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1942 stay at 25, avenue Sainte-Geneviève (below).

One night? Two?

Never mind, it's worthy of a plaque.

As in London, the plaques of Quebec are blue. I saw them on nearly every street in the old city. Here we have two plaques, both dedicated to literary figures – Félix-Antoine Savard (1896-1982) and Luc Lacourcière (1910-1989) – who at different times called 2, rue des Remparts home:

Below is a photo of 5, rue Hébert, once the residence of  Sir James MacPherson Le Moine (1825-1912). A lawyer and historian, Sir James is the author of Quebec Past and Present (1876) and, appropriately, Picturesque Quebec (1882).

(A mystery: The Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec website lists the plaque as being located at 1½, rue Hébert when in fact it is at number five. Installed in 2001, it would appear to have been moved one address over at some point after 2006. Waymarking.com has a photograph of the plaque in its former location.)

My favourite plaque bleu is found at 34, rue St-Louis, which served as residence of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé (1786-1871) between the years 1816 and 1822. Built in 1675, one of the oldest standing houses in old Quebec, it's now home to the restaurant Aux Anciens Canadiens.

You can't see the blue plaque in this photo, but it's there.

Sadly, the pleasure derived in seeing Quebec's blue plaques was tempered by the knowledge that Montreal has no similar programme.

Why not?

I speculated as to the reason in that twelve-year-old post... and have not changed my thought on the matter.

My last day in the province found me walking through Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. I passed 6879 Monkland Avenue. It once belonged to Irving Layton. The poet owned and lived in the house for more than four decades.

There is no plaque of any kind.

O Montreal!

Related post:

Blue Plaque Special

Young Mister Richler on the New Canadian Library

Further goodness from the May 1958 issue of The Montrealer with Richler reviewing the New Canadian Library's inaugural offerings. An interesting choice. Richler was no cultural nationalist – never was, as is evident in this piece, written at the age of twenty-seven. He spends the first two-thirds debunking the very notion of a Canadian literature:

Canadian writing is really regional North American writing and not a separate body. English-speaking Canadian novelists obviously have much more in common with their counterparts in the United States than with the French-Canadian writer around the corner.

And Canadian writers:

For my money the man who writes the best prose in Canada is Morley Callaghan. Yet he has surely been more influenced by Hemingway and Fitzgerald than by Frederick Philip Grove. He is an American writer. He just happens to live and write about Toronto just as others do about Boston, New Orleans, or Detroit.

Before surprising us all:

Whether or not the series goes further will, I guess, depend on public response. The New Canadian Library certainly deserves support.

Support it we did – though not always willingly. I'm still a bit pissed off about the copy of Canadians of Old I had to buy for a CEGEP course.

Over the decades the NCL has embraced then dumped many more titles than it has kept  – au revoir Jean Rivard – but the first four remain. In fact, all have been subjected to the sixth and most recent series redesign. Expect another before the end of the decade. Here are some excerpts from Richler's review for The Canadian Publisher™ to consider as blurbs:

Over Prairie Trails
Frederick Philip Grove


"It's too bad that the series has begun with Over Prairie Trails, because if there is a book that epitomizes all that is boring, ponderous, and self-important about Canadian literature than [sic] this is surely it."

Such Is My Beloved
Morley Callaghan


"I've got a blind spot when it comes to innocent priests and good whores although Mr. Callaghan, no literary slouch, certainly avoids the more obvious sentimentalities."

Literary Lapses
Stephen Leacock


"It seems to me, that this book is only unevenly successful, is already available in numerous editions – even, I think a thirty-five cent pocketbook – and that this further reprint is a redundancy."

As for Me and My House
Sinclair Ross


I'm much more grateful – maybe because it was completely unknown to me – for Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House… it is, as Professor [Roy] Daniells writes in his preface, "a genuine artistic achievement."





Richler also quarrels with Frank Newfeld's "singularly unattractive" series format, singling out As for Me and My House: "Mr. Ross, whom I've never met, is drawn here to look like a comic strip detective."

I wonder what he thought about this 1965 Newfeld cover for New Canadian Library No. 45.

A bonus: The "thirty-five cent pocketbook" of Literary Lapses to which Richler refers is almost certainly the 1945 Collins White Circle edition. There had been no other. However, he is mistaken as to availability and price: the imprint ceased to be in 1952; all printings were priced at 25 cents.

The cover is by Margaret Paull, whose work also graces the Collins White Circle Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Related posts:

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

(with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

Devolution, Evolution and Lateral Moves

Remembering la Corriveau

Executed 250 years ago today, Marie-Josephte Corriveau – la Corriveau – was a survivor. Just thirty at the time of her death, she'd long outlived her ten brothers and sisters, all of whom died in childhood. Marie-Josephte also survived her first husband, Charles Bouchard, the father of her three children. Widowed at twenty-seven, in 1761 she married Louis Étienne Dodier who, like Charles,was a farmer from St.Vallier on the St. Lawrence, just south of Ile d'Orléans. A little over eighteen months later, poor Louis was found dead in the barn, his head nearly caved in. The horse was to blame... or so it was thought at first. Then the rumours began to circulate.

In the spring of 1763, Marie-Josephte and her father, Joseph, were brought before a military tribunal. Joseph was found guilty of the murder and was sentenced to death. Marie-Josephte would've been flogged and branded as an accessory had it not been for her father's confession to a priest. Seems she'd been more than willing to see dear old dad swing for a crime she had in fact committed. At a second trial she confessed.

After Marie-Josephte was hanged, her body was placed in a gibbet – quite possibly the one pictured above! She was then transported across the St Lawrence and was suspended for five weeks from a post at the intersection of what are today Rue St-Joseph and Boulevard de l'Entente in Lévis.

Now, watch those property values soar.

An Anglo Quebecer, I first read of la Corriveau as a teenager in Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé's Les Anciens Canadiens. Her presence in English-language Canadian literature is negligible, though she did get off to an early start; William Kirby featured Marie-Josephte in his 1877 novel The Golden Dog. Here la Corriveau is a poisoner for hire, a direct descendant of Catherine Deshayes, the 17th-century serial killer known as la Voisine.

The Golden Dog: A Romance in the Days of Louis Quinze in Quebec
William Kirby
Toronto: Musson/Montreal: Montreal News Co, n.d.

Others, historians included, have added to the legend. Charles, her first husband, has come to be seen as one of her victims; in some tales,  five more ill-fated husbands are added to the mix. And what about the ten dead siblings?

The 20th-century brought more novels, a ballet, and plays by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Anne Hébert and Guy Cloutier.. She lives on in this century:

There's even something for the kiddies:

Were I not so far away, I'd make the effort to attend this evening's Marie-Josephte Corriveau Commemoration in Quebec City.

As it is, I'll be raising a glass, if only in recognition of the contribution she made – unwittingly – to the country's literature.

A black oatmeal stout with ruby highlights, la Corriveau seems the obvious choice, but like the lady herself, it's rarely seen in Upper Canada.

A bonus:

Just look at what the sorry souls at VDM Publishing have on offer:

Old Folks

Jean-Louis Lessard has just completed a very fine series on early Canadian writer Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé, the seigneur best-known for Les Anciens Canadiens (1863). I first encountered this historical romance as part of a CEGEP course on the literature of Quebec (if memory serves, Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode and David Fennario's Without a Parachute were also on the reading list), but the words I read belonged to translator Sir Charles G.D. Roberts.

I've always viewed Roberts and his translation, The Canadians of Old, with a dab of derision, an irrational discourtesy that originates with the cover of the New Canadian Library edition used in the course. Those familiar with the NCL's second series design will be grateful that the only image I could find is so small. It was such an ugly book, made all the worse by the inexplicable presence of Roberts' name in place of the author's. Even the title is wrong: Canadians of Old, when it should be The Canadians of Old. Of course, none of this had anything to do with Roberts, who was three decades dead when this particular edition appeared. Like I say: irrational.

To be fair to Sir Charles, his name doesn't even appear on the cover of the handsome 1890 first edition, despite the fact that he was at the time a poet of some acclaim. I don't believe Roberts ever really considered himself a translator. The idea for the book came from New York publisher Appleton, and was accepted at a time when he was in dire need of cash. That said, it wasn't a bad match. Roberts may not have shared Aubert de Gaspé's interest in Boileau and Racine, but both he and the seigneur were readers of Sir Walter Scott. The name of the novel's protagonist, Archibald Cameron of Locheill, provides a good indication of the depth of the baronet's influence. This was raised to the surface in 1905, when publisher L.C. Page reissued the book as Cameron of Lochiel - dropping the double 'l', thus bringing the character's name into line with Cameron of Locheil in Waverley, Scott's hugely successful first novel.

This second title has received a good amount of criticism these past ten decades, but let's again be fair; though adopted in Canada by Copp Clark, it was first imposed on the book by a Boston publisher with an eye on the American market. I'll add that the 1865 theatrical adaptation was titled Archibald Cameron of Locheill ou un épisode de la guerre de Sept Ans au Canada, and that the plot has more to do with Archie than pal and fellow protagonist Jules d'Haberville.

Les Anciens Canadiens holds a unique position in this country as a novel translated by four different hands. The first, by Georgina M. Pennée (The Canadians of Old, 1864), was later revised by Thomas Guthrie Marquis and published in 1929 as Seigneur d'Haberville: A Romance of the Fall of New France. I imagine that Roberts' translation is the most read (the NCL edition sold nearly 1800 copies in the first six months alone); a great shame since it has been surpassed by Jane Brierley's 1996 translation. The only one currently in print, it is highly recommended, as are her translations of Aubert de Gaspé's Mémoires (A Man of Sentiment, 1988) and his posthumous Divers (Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, 1990), which received a Governor General's Award.

Oh, and Prochain épisode and Without a Parachute? Also recommended.