he had no religious leanings. For him the seminary was above all a place of intellectual discovery, which made him eager to hop aboard the train, to go away, to try his wings.
The journey was long and rather uncomfortable: for five hours, he watched the scenery go by. Gaspé was so far, it seemed as if the public officials had forgotten it. For the Mi’Kmaq people, Gaspé meant the end, the extremity. The tip of the country. When he got off the train, René had arrived at the end of his journey, at the dawn of a new life.
At the seminary, the young student distinguished himself from the others. While the majority swotted for hours, he devoted only about twenty minutes a day to his work. Afterwards, he would shut himself up in the library, where he combed the shelves for biographies of famous men. History fascinated him. Professors spoke of this teenager as a future leader. He was one of the few who didn’t like hockey, far preferring tennis, at which he excelled. At age fourteen, he won the Gaspé Junior Championship. On the court he ran easily to the net, his serve impeccable. An ace!
The Lévesque family supported the reds, in memory of Liberal Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the French Canadian born in Saint-Lin who succeeded in governing Canada for fifteen years. What an achievement! In the mid nineteen-thirties Mackenzie King was the heir apparent worthy of his illustrious predecessor, while his provincial counterpart, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, was becoming embroiled in scandals exposed by Maurice Duplessis, the member from Trois-Rivières. People even went so far as to predict that on August 17, the Union Nationale, which he had just founded, would sweep the province. In 1936, René was a teenager who had landed a summer job at a radio station. Not a fan of politics, he nevertheless attended a meeting held in the area, and, excitedly reported to his father that he had gone to see Philippe Hamel, the leader of the Action libérale nationale.
“He’s a politician with some strange ideas: he wants to nationalize electricity companies. He’s taken up Reverend Groulx’s slogan, Maîtres chez nous, Masters in our own house. Do you think that could ever come to pass?”
Dominique Lévesque was a shadow of the man he’d been. Thin, prematurely aged, and in pain, he had to be driven to Campbellton Hospital. His condition was more serious than originally thought: he would receive better care in Quebec City. Suitcases were packed. In June 1937, just returned home, René saw his father leave.
“You are the eldest. Take care of your mother, and your brothers, Fernand and André. Your little sister Alice will also need you. When I come home, we’ll go to the seashore and look for twenty-five-cent lobsters, the way we do every summer.”
There was no reason that the New Carlisle lawyer should not return; he was only forty-eight years old.
In The Ocean, the legendary train following the voyageur route right to the Atlantic, René looked out the window at the calm river in the moonlight. Sleep remained elusive. He had a sense of foreboding. What did it mean? In Rivière-du-Loup, his grandparents met him at the station. There was no longer any need to go to Quebec City. Dominique Lévesque was dead.
It was his first great sorrow. An absence never to be filled. The father’s presence was forever etched in his memory and gestures, such as the son’s odd habit of holding a pencil between his index and middle fingers. Dominique had also written like that.
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