gloated:
“Things will be easier with Joe Clark in power.”
Trudeau was a thorn in the side of the sovereigntists. The worst was that he had star charisma: he was the man the majority of Quebecers loved, and that others loved to hate. And now he was gone from headlines, no longer undermining the enthusiasm of the Péquistes.
“Certain ministers want us to hold the referendum immediately. They’re in a rush. But I’d rather wait a little longer, until the fall or next year.”
Lévesque lit another cigarette. A deck of cards on the table. At eight o’clock they played poker.
“Do you wager we’ll win this referendum?”
The question was in vain. With Trudeau out of power, the chances of victory had never been so good.
René Lévesque was not prone to effusiveness. He had only cried twice: when Pierre Laporte died, and then more recently, when his mother died.
Diane Dionne had worn the pants in the family. At retirement age, she still travelled. By ship, because she hated airplanes. Alert, independent, after taking language courses, she decided to leave: once for Italy, another time for the Soviet Union.
Lévesque called her “Madame Pelletier” partly to aggravate her, but also because he had never really forgiven his mother for her remarriage to Albert Pelletier, a nationalist lawyer, long since passed away.
The death of his mother and his whole childhood resurfaced, carefree, happy images.
In New Carlisle, on the Baie des Chaleurs, a little boy, wild and free, looking at the ocean, as blue as his eyes.
The Son of Maître Lévesque, Esquire
“We’ll call him René, like in “renaissance.”
In the hearts of Diane Dionne-Pineault and Dominique Lévesque, their son, born August 24, 1922, in some way replaced André, the elder brother, who had died prematurely.
Custom would have dictated that they name him for his godfather, John Hall Kelly, an Irishman, powerful financier, and Bonaventure County politician, who was his father’s partner in the law firm they had opened together.
Nowadays, when René Lévesque wanted to amuse his family, he proclaimed himself John Lévesque, sovereigntist premier! Tit-Jean, to close friends. “I had a narrow escape!” he would add.
René Lévesque, age three.
René Lévesque, student of rhetoric at Collège Carnier in Quebec City.
Remembering his childhood, RenéLévesque compared francophones’ social inequality to that then suffered by the blacks in Rhodesia: “we were colonized: the good schools, the nice homes, all the wealth was in the hands of people who identified with the victors of the Conquest.”
But in New Carlisle, the Lévesques were not exactly poor French Canadians. True, the first house they lived in, on rue Principale, facing the sea, had no running water, but this lack of resources didn’t last long. Dominique Lévesque was a gifted lawyer. He had charm and managed to make a name for himself. In 1925, he announced to his wife that he had the twenty-three hundred dollars needed to buy a fine house at auction, at the corner of Mount Sorel and Second Streets. The white wooden house had a large balcony and a sloping roof. The windows of the upstairs rooms looked out over the Baie des Chaleurs. A view to make a small, unruly boy dream. Constantly fidgeting, he was such a handful that sometimes his mother had to fasten him to a post of the staircase.
“It’s time we send René to Rivière-du-Loup,” decreed Diane, who needed rest, having given birth to three more children after René, the eldest.
Staying with his grandparents was no punishment. He loved taking the train, with its rustic cars, a railway reminiscent of movie westerns. How grand to be free, play at selling penny candy in Grandpa’s general store, and to see Grandma again.
“René,” she would say affectionately: “let’s have a game of poker. If you lose your dollar, we’ll cancel the debt. But if you win…”
Clever and astute, René often won the kitty and left for New Carlisle with his card winnings like a jackpot in his pocket. His taste for gambling he derived from his grandmother Alice. The sound of cards being shuffled, the waiting, heart pounding – little by little he began to love this exquisite moment when anything was possible. There was a thin line between winning and losing: he was walking a tightrope. He calculated his chances, then took a wholehearted leap into the unknown.
René Lévesque would remain a gambler his entire life.
“The most important man in my life.” In 1986, René Lévesque dedicated his memoirs to his father Dominique. In New Carlisle, the well-known lawyer was his son’s hero. The two resembled one another. A love of books brought them together. In this city at the world’s end, the train brought in the newspapers when the snow wasn’t falling too heavily. They would throw themselves on the Montreal Standard and attack the crossword puzzles, ready to compete. Who would be first to finish filling in the boxes? To lose was humiliating.
“It’s not fair; you speak better English than I do,” the son would sulk; “after all, your clients write to you in English.”
He had observed that the father’s correspondence was addressed to Dominique Lévesque, Esq. Where did this unusual title come from? “Esquire” – a word found in the work of Jacques Ferron – used to mean a squire of the minor nobility. Here, the title simply meant “Mister.” As dictated by the sociolinguistic context, “Esquire” seemed chic because it sounded like English. In such an environment it was quite natural that from a very young age René was bilingual: when little English kids shouted at him “pea soup! pea soup!” he answered them back in their language, throwing pebbles at them.
Defiant and impudent, he would run from the forest to the sea. Paspébiac Point was his kingdom. He was fearless. In September he went to the country school and thought about what he would do on Saturday afternoon. In the church hall, the parish priest had just announced they would show a movie.
“Jungle Princess with Dorothy Lamour!”
He was on cloud nine. For days, he would go around softly singing the refrain: “I love you, you love me.” His little heart throbbed for the beautiful Hollywood star and even harder for the mermaid of Baie des Chaleurs who, the week before, had saved him from drowning.
His
