them.”
Right, on with the story, then.
FOR THE POPULATION of New France, the Conquest and the long war that preceded it were disastrous. “Le Canada est écrasé,” the historians tell us. “La Nouvelle France s’efface de la carte.”2 Many people were left homeless, farms and settlements lay in ruins, the economy lurched to a halt. To make matters worse, a gang of obnoxious new arrivals had burst onto the scene, intent on turning the crisis to their own advantage. They were English-speaking entrepreneurs from England and Massachusetts, looking to make a quick buck. Boisterous and entitled, they encouraged the incoming authorities to rule with an iron hand, by subjecting their new French subjects to the full force of British law and tradition. If that meant barring the entire Papist population of the colony from medicine, the military, and most other professions, so be it. Roman Catholics were denied civil rights in Britain: making an exception for mere colonists, the incomers said, would violate “our most sacred Laws and Libertys” and tend to “the utter subversion of the protestant Religion.”3
The new colonial governor, however, was unmoved by this argument. His first priority was to ensure a peaceful transition. The last thing anyone wanted was an armed insurrection like the one already brewing in the Thirteen Colonies. If all it took to win the loyalty of the king’s new Francophone subjects were a few minor concessions, then the way forward was clear.
In due course, legislation was passed to recognize the French land-tenure system—thereby protecting the riverfront holdings of habitant farmers like the Blondins and Parents—and to remove the legal restrictions that were imposed on Roman Catholics in other parts of the British Empire. In Québec alone, a Catholic male could serve on a jury or train as a pharmacist without denying the teachings of his church. As for the Anglo business lobby, they were, in the governor’s candid opinion, a bunch of “Licentious Fanaticks”4—bigots and schemers—whose secret purpose was the complete subordination of the Canadiens. But they wouldn’t get away with it on his watch.
Still, even this kinder, gentler takeover came as a shock. A cabal of English-speaking interests was swaggering around the colony, accusing the population of disloyalty and casting scorn on the Catholic Church. Freedoms that had previously been taken for granted now had to be bargained for. The heart-connection with France—the ties of family, custom, and language—had been broken, once and for all. A troubadour of the day expressed the mood in verse.
Amant, que j’t’ai donc fait
Qui puiss’ tant te déplaire?
Est-c’que j’tai pas aimé
Comm’tu l’as mérité? 5
Lover, what have I done
That so displeased you?
Did I not love you
As you deserved?
“I’M STILL A little mad at her, you know,” I admit to Keith over supper that night. We are at home, seated in our dining room, with the kitchen to the west and the living room to the east, midway between the Rockies and the Laurentians.
“Which her would that be?” he asks, mildly. After all our years together, he is no longer alarmed when I break out of a private reverie with a seemingly random remark. For better or worse, however, he has not learned to read my mind and occasionally requires clarification.
“Clara. Clara Blondin. And I’m not actually mad at her. More disappointed, really.” A sigh. “I mean, I know that we all live in context. As much as we might like to go into our little houses and shut all the windows and doors, we can’t seal ourselves off. We live in history. You know what I mean?”
He nods encouragingly.
“Things that are beyond our control can make or break any of us.”
“The four horsemen of the apocalypse,” he says. “Death, famine, war, and conquest. There’s a famous painting by a Russian artist—what’s his name?—Vasnetsov.” Keith is an art historian and knows this kind of thing.
“Yes,” I say, “that’s exactly it. Conquest. French Canada was conquered. And I get it that being under the boot of an enemy causes damage, even if the boot was, I don’t know, the satin slippers that English gentlemen wore in the eighteenth century.”
“And you’re angry with Clara Blondin because—?”
I pick up my fork and put it down, reach for my glass of wine.
“It’s just that I’ve been reading about what happened after the Conquest, trying to see the big picture. What would make a person refuse to speak, or even be spoken to, in her own language?”
Another nod of agreement. “That’s pretty extreme.”
“I’ve been trying to convince myself that it goes way back, that the despair set in a long time ago. But, you know, lots of people never gave up. Think of the people who started my choir, for example. I want Clara to have been like them.”
The choir in question, my choir, is Le Choeur des plaines, a community choral society dedicated to performing “les plus belles chansons du répertoire francophone,” the most beautiful songs of the French repertoire. Choeur translates as choir, but it happily invites confusion with coeur, or heart, and the ensemble is proud to identify itself as an important element in maintaining Francophone culture in this English-speaking stronghold. Curiously, I first learned about it thanks to a performance of a musical masterpiece that comes to us direct from eighteenth-century Britain, from the very decades when the English military was making mincemeat of the French. On this particular evening, however, an amateur choir was making mincemeat of the Messiah. Seldom had the yoke of Handel’s allegros been less easy, or the footfall of his trills and runs more burthensome. In fact, the whole thing quickly became so unbearable that Keith and I walked out at intermission, something unheard of for us, but not before we’d taken note of the tenor soloist, whose clear, pure voice had provided the evening’s one saving grace. The program identified him as the conductor of Le Choeur des plaines.
Fortunately for me, Le Choeur turned out to take an open-door approach to new admissions. “I’ve never known us to turn anyone away,” a voice on the other end of the line told me when I called to inquire. And so ever since, I’ve spent one happy evening a week in the music room of l’École canadienne-française, a few blocks from my house, practicing les plus belles chansons of the likes of Gabriel Fauré, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Gilles Vigneault.
“The people who started the choir treasured their language. Napoléon and Clara, their ancestors had spoken French forever. Then pfft, they throw it away as if it doesn’t matter.”
Keith raises an eyebrow and fixes me with a skeptical gaze. “When exactly was the choir founded? Twenty-five years ago, isn’t that what you said? And when did the Blondins live here? The 1920s versus the 1990s: you’re talking about two different worlds.”
He has a point. I shrug in acquiescence.
“You wouldn’t do that for no reason,” he continues, “give up your mother tongue. Maybe your Blondins were just trying to survive. I don’t think you’ve drilled down far enough to find the answers yet.”
