Bilingual Being (25 page)

It turns out that 95 per cent of the immigrant stock that was here prior to 1700 came directly from France, and from key areas in particular. That's why, according to recent research, the genes of 7,800 of what's now known as the
QFP
– the Quebec Founder Population – are detectable in 90 per cent of the inhabitants of every major region in Quebec, except in the east where it's only 76 per cent, due to greater Acadian and Loyalist ancestry.
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Unsurprisingly, it's highest in Quebec City, at roughly 94 per cent. This homogeneity is why Quebec is a goldmine for “founder's effect” – the telltale trail of inherited diseases that marks my extended family and countless others. The population is a collective among which genetic traits and congenital illnesses are shared to virtually the same degree as values and worldviews.

So I'm among the «gens d'la souche» [the root people of Quebec] from both sides of my family. Research through my family tree (St-Onge, Dumont, Blais, Brochu, Paillant, de la Touche, de Champlain) and the naval records (all came by sea, and ships' logs are public)
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show that I'm plausibly related through the road map of names and the sheer odds of the ancestral nets over Quebec City to a number of immigrants who were here by 1700. Among these are labourers, including Pierre Dumont, Louis Martineau dit Saintonge, Pierre Ménard dit Saint-Onge, Jacques Payan – and Marie Péré, a midwife to the growing population, who married Pierre Demont. My list also includes soldiers and officers, such as Jean Brochu dit Lafontaine, Vincent Boissoneau dit Saint-Onge, and Julien Dumont dit Lafleur; as well as seamen, such as François Saintonge, François Dumont, Yves Paillant, and Jean Payan.
It's impossible not to get carried away with the genealogical research around here. There's so much of it, crossing over, and over, and over.

Using the same rationale, I can also trace my family's links to Raymond Blaise, sieur of Bergères and of Rigauville, and his son, Nicolas Blaise des Bergères, both of whom arrived in 1685; Sieur Levy de Vantadour Destouches, Samuel de Champlain's ensign; and Pierre Dugua Sieur De Monts, a merchant who operated out of Acadia beginning in 1685. I also fasten back to Marie-Louise Morin (who married Jacques Payan). She was the daughter by second marriage of Hélène Hebert, widow of Guillaume Hébert, the son of Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet. There's no arrival date for her, though, because Marie-Louise was one of the first French children actually born here.

I stop and take stock. Seriously? Connected to Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet? The history books told me for years that this was the “first family” of New France – the first to winter over, make a permanent home, start a farm, raise children, and so on. They arrived in 1617 and never went back, so that Hébert is considered the first private individual to be given a land grant in the New World – quite the distinction. Of course, the local Aboriginal population had been managing it very well for centuries, millennia even. But when Europeans didn't die doing the same thing, seems it was worth writing a few books about. In fact, it's thanks to invaluable agricultural tips received from indigenous residents that Hébert and Rollet made it, though the history books certainly haven't been gracious enough about that fact. But I'm still proud of them both. Tough enough stock – folks «qu'y ont pris leu' courage à deux mains» [who grabbed their courage in both hands] and made meagre goods stretch and stretch. Kind of a loaves and fishes thing.

Then there was, of course, Étienne Pézard (Pézat), Sieur de la Touche de Champlain,
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also known as Sieur Étienne de Champlain. He was «un Orléanais» who landed in 1661 and was entrusted with the Seigneurie de la Touche-Champlain, which encompassed a large chunk of what's now «La Mauricie,» including Trois Rivières. In 1681, he even
became temporary governor of Montreal. He was married to Madeleine Mullois, part of the extended family of Louis Hébert through her mother, Sébastienne Hébert – cross-currents again. In turn, his daughter, Marie Madeleine Pézard de la Touche and her husband, Joseph de Jordy (Desjordy) de Cabarnac – who apparently had his own claim to nobility – would inherit the seigneurie and raise eleven children there. Meanwhile, de Jordy's nephew, François, would command the territory from Fort Frontenac, present-day Kingston (formerly Cataracouï) all the way to Montreal. No doubt about it, this was a dominant family.

In fact, Sieur Pézard was one of the highest-placed aristocrats in New France during his lifetime. And here he was, attested as being my great-great-great-grand-papa, etc., some 350 years back. To be honest, I'm not very impressed by these aristocratic connections. I've tumbled around too low at various points in my life, at rock bottom, to have any patience for pretension or grandiose delusions. But I'll admit that ever since I found out about him, I visit Kingston differently. I ask myself,
Did they walk here? Is this what they saw when they looked out on the river? What would they all be doing on a Saturday afternoon?
That sort of thing. I can't seem to help it.

LES FILLES DU ROI

More than any of these big-name immigrants, though, I'm touched by «les filles du roi» (the daughters of the king) – just over seven hundred young women in their late teens and twenties who arrrived between 1663 and 1673 as spouses for the French settlers. About three-quarters of them ended up on farms around Quebec City. The way these girls were chosen for their good morals and funded by «l'Ancien Régime» is widely documented. They came unaccompanied by family – many were orphans – and they all had to make the best of it because their lives depended on it. Having ten children or more was common – in fact, there were yearly payments to families raising more than that. And their lives hinged on learning to turn the page, too, when fortune took first and, sometimes, second husbands.

It took courage for this group of largely illiterate «town» girls who «ne savait pas signer» [could not sign their names] – as the official registers put it – to «bûcher» [work at back-breaking labour] on the land as
hard as the men. These were females who successfully protested their marriages, annulled them, and even separated from husbands to take better ones. Brave women of power and an inextinguishable spirit. They would be helped in making their marriage choices and contracts – and housed comfortably, indefinitely, until they did – by none other than Soeur Marguerite Bourgeoys. That's how the line of descent in Quebec adheres so symmetrically to culture that it closes in on itself, forms a full circle, just like the whooping climax «d'une danse carrée.» «Pis el câlleur» [and the square-dance caller] is nowhere to be seen. It's only heard and felt. Intuited.

Funnily enough, even back then, the «patoisant et patoisantes» [male and female patois speakers] were apparently being distinguished from the «franciscant et franciscantes» [male and female standard French speakers] in the public registries – with the minority of women in the first category, and the minority of men in the second. So it was that urban girls with “central French” married rural boys steeped in regional patois; officials thought it noteworthy enough to record it as readily as they did the new babies. Seems that right from the start of the province, linguistic baggage was considered a factor in marriage and life. It certainly carried more weight than the tiny trunk each immigrant bride received as an official «trousseau»: one wig, one shoe ribbon, one spool of white thread, one pair of socks, one pair of gloves, one bonnet, one taffeta handkerchief, one comb, one pair of scissors, two knives, two
livres
of silver, four laces, 100 needles, and a million pins. Even in my most frugal days – nine months when, postpartum and newly single, I lived on welfare with three small children until I found work again – I'm sure I couldn't have made it on the modern equivalent of so little. I'm in awe of them all, patois or no patois.

There are fifteen «filles du roi» whose roots quite likely germinate mine, either through the sheer texture of their names and marriages or the tight knit of our shared genetic fabric: Élisabeth Blais, Marguerite Blaise, Barbe Boyer, Anne Colin, Marguerite Deshayes, Anne-Julien Dumont, Barbe Dumont, Marguerite Latouche, Marie Mullois, Marie-Marthe Payan, Marguerite Raisin, Nicole Saulnier, and Anne Talbot. I'm sure I've left out many for whom the record is elusive. But finding these women inside history matters a lot to me. I let myself imagine
their lives, their homes, their chores. Their goodness, their concerns, their care. I picture them keeping a watchful, loving eye over their children, and their husbands. Biography is a great playground for fantasy.

My personal favourite among them all is Anne Talbot, the illiterate daughter of a master brewer from Rouen, Isaac Delalande, and his wife, Marie. Anne was born on 1 August 1651 and arrived in Quebec in the summer of 1670, aged nineteen, bringing with her the usual dowry of 50 livres from the king and personal belongings estimated at 300 livres. On 13 September 1670, she annulled her first marriage contract to Jean Barolleau, and less than two months later, on 2 November, married Jean Gareau dit Saint-Onge. Together, they raised fifteen children in Boucherville. By 1729, less than sixty years after she got here, she had an astounding 133 direct descendants. It's an incredible bit of math – producing more than two permanent offshoots per year, for more than half a century. And despite the obvious hardships of climate, geography, and resource shortages, she lived to a ripe old age, passing away on 4 August 1740, a few days after celebrating her eighty-ninth birthday. No wonder the population expanded.

In fact, it grew so fast that there were eventually eighty typonyms for Saint-Onge – names intended to be the same but written differently from one region to another, perhaps because of spelling errors. The sheer mass of all these people gives me a feeling of safety, starts to give me my own membership back. And that, in a nutshell, is how the population of «La Nouvelle France» turned into an island of French language and culture in the New World, seamed together by el Fleuve Saint-Laurent, curved like the backbone «d'une vra' bonne vieille» [of a dear old woman].

MAUDITCHRISTDECOTTERPIN

So it turned out that I was an island girl after all, quite outside my wildest dreams of living in a perpetually warm climate. I saw the St Lawrence River to the south, east and west, enclosing the rock-faced peninsula that is Quebec City and winding past my house, just a tenminute walk below our street. I saw the thundering bridge that brought people here (at the time there was only one, not two like today), and
I remember clearly thinking that Lévis, on the south shore, was the United States.

That's how easy it was to be separate – you just needed a bridge and a river. I don't know that I ever thought about what lay to the north, past the great wall of forests we saw on fishing trips. I rarely ever left the city. Of course, there were a handful of trips for a week to a rented cottage here and there, a house away from the house; a few day drives to the country to visit an old aunt or uncle; and a few weekends spent on the other end of logging roads, watching adults measure trout lengths. But for seventeen years of my life, Quebec City was, quite literally, my island (until I moved to that other island, Montreal). And my home town was absolutely a French island.

The start of school complicated my geography only concentrically – fixed an English island inside my French one, like an inner fortress inside thick stone walls. Instead of rivers, my private English Catholic School, Marymount, had the woods to separate it from the rest. And while we did have French teachers, two female lay teachers brought in from France, the French they taught didn't connect with my life in the least. In retrospect, it was telling of what these American nuns thought of their provincial setting that they wouldn't hire locals for this task. But these two Parisians spoke a dialect that I hated, despised even. They could pass effortlessly as legimate French teachers in the eyes of my classmates, who were mostly a random group of well-to-do anglo children of the powerful business owners in Quebec, the folks who'd later relocate to Toronto after the election of the
PQ
. But I thought there was something terribly, terribly strange about them.

Of course, I knew nothing of the fragility and volatility of Quebec in the Sixties, and I had no sense of my larger social context – of the turbulence spinning around language. At six, one's world is small. For example, I thought «Duplessis» was a swear word rather than a name.
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That's how my father used it, liberally mixing it with English, demonstrating his bilingualism remarkably well when he was angry, which was often. So there was a lot of that “goddamduplessis” and “
jesusfuckingchristduplessis” in our home, as he glanced at the paper after work, or when he repaired appliances and furniture around the house.

It took me years to figure out, for example, that “cotter pin” could be said without the prefix, «mauditchristdecotterpin» [damn Christ of a cotter pin]. My French teachers, transplanted Parisian souls in an English-American Catholic school in the heart of this French Roman Catholic province, couldn't hold a candle to my father's brand of bilingualism – far more interesting and frightening. I immediately forgot everything they taught me, words and proper diction falling out of my head as if through a sieve. For me, French was our patois. And it was private, inaccessible to these foreigners' tongue and its pretentious ways.

UNE BONNE FILLE

It should be obvious by now that most of my French acculturation can be attributed to one person: my mother. She's a wonderful chef and a born caterer who dazzles everyone with her «p'tites soirées» [little fancy evenings], complete with themed food, costumes, and decor. Many of these events were planned for our birthdays, my brother's and mine, and there are plenty of pictures to prove I was there, in handmade costumes, though I can't remember a thing about most of these. That's a source of great sadness for my mother, those beautiful moments lost in my efforts to erase the bad, I suppose. But more than anything, she took great delight, throughout my youth, in greeting my father at the door with a cocktail for him in one hand, in sexy clothing and high-heeled shoes, with soft music strategically playing and children sent to their rooms or outside. It was something she'd read about and trained for, with pride and determination.