A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - Chapter 4 - FASCISMS

 

Le Petit Séminaire de Québec

There were of course happy days during my childhood, so much so that in the denial of reality that I practiced so often, these were the only days that I wanted to remember for a long time. I loved the summers spent in the countryside, elsewhere, always too short to enjoy, especially as my father found them difficult and shortened them as quickly as possible, too rainy, he said, one day blaming Hydro-Québec's rain machines for being responsible. My parents - my mother - first rented a beautiful house in Sainte-Pétronille on Île d'Orléans, with archaic customs - no running water other than a hand pump, no bathroom, but with an outhouse in the back field, spiders everywhere, and lime to be poured with a shovel to cover the excrement and make the place almost decent, — then in the village of Saint-Jean, on the riverside, a miserable chalet built on a flat piece of land, the neighbors stuck to each other, with a bunch of children, soon teenagers, beach companions every day, and games: it was new, it was perfectly happy. In the summer, in the countryside, the children had a fresh look at me, I was carefree, everything in my personal life could start over, for a time that was too brief. Even during the winter, in Quebec, despite the freezing cold, I remember having moments of fulfillment; I remember having long contemplated, with the eyes of a poet, the beauty of the river, when I went sledding on the Plains of Abraham. The few friends I had at the time, GC., DK., and a few others, found it strange that this child would marvel, as evening fell, at the colors of the sea and ice that merged without losing their clarity or purity: I looked attentively, from the top of the Cape, almost without vertigo, at the force of the cold, the sclerosis of time, the great petrified river that trembled with terror and cracked everywhere.

During my first two years of public primary school, I attended a large orange brick school where I had been enrolled like hundreds of other baby boom children. This establishment was the favorite place for a schoolteacher who took obvious pleasure in exercising her systemic violence every afternoon against children who were a little slow in their learning, with a stroke of the ruler across the hands for a lack of French in the daily dictation. The unfortunate children had to offer up both sides of their hands as a sacrifice, and the teacher never eased up on the force of her blows. Making mistakes caused a lot of suffering, which was necessary to turn these thugs into men. There was one, Gaétan P., slightly older than the others, a resistance fighter, a delinquent, absolutely charming, whom I adored, and who loved me, I who was the scum of the classroom and whom the teacher used to discipline all the others, and sometimes to inspire them with a real aversion. Gaétan had been beaten so often, so energetically (the teacher was a woman of good health) that he once ran away for several days. Miss S., completely hysterical, had made us swear not to tell anyone about the drama, especially not our families. She was scared, and perhaps a little ashamed of having abused this young boy so much. He was eventually found, hidden under the family chalet, far, far from the school, somewhere on the south bank of the river. The torturer, who had feared for her job, was waiting for him, her arm always alert, her eyes malicious: she had not learned anything about the incident, she had not been blamed for anything. Every day, half the boys in the class would cry with their heads on their desks, the same boys who had to swear that they would rather die than pound on the crucifix if, worst-case scenario, the communists entered the classroom and demanded that we commit such a crime against God. (I told myself, in the silence of my conscience, that yes, come on, yes, of course I would have crushed the crucifix! I imagine that all the children had at least the same reaction of health and survival.)

Two years later, during the last years of primary school, I attended a small public school that was also a singing school. The director, an emaciated priest with an often musky smell, had a very curious, virile, normative, downright military manner and he did not hide the fact that he to instill discipline and teach musical rhythm to overly distracted schoolchildren, and in the worst cases, when his musical ear felt betrayed, he truly imagined that we were deliberately subversive: we were looking for him, we were provoking him! He would bang his wooden bat on the piano bench to mark the rhythm, and sometimes, when the anger at our mediocrity overwhelmed him, he would throw an object over our heads, for example the terrible ashtray that crashed into the back wall of the music room! That was without counting his gracious participation in choral singing, early in the morning, in the basilica, when he found us so bad that he put on his soprano voice, joined the choir and showed us what a real little Gregorian chant singer was. Down in the nave, the few faithful who were attending mass one weekday morning, stunned and appalled to hear such a croak in a holy place, turned their heads and looked towards the rood screen, amazed that a poor underprivileged child should be so deprived of almost decent vocal cords in this choir which was nevertheless trying to do its best. One of the two teachers who taught at this somewhat worrying school had the curious habit, when he had reached the limits of his tolerance (and he lacked some supplementary teaching resources), of grabbing the children by the throat and lifting them off the ground, and I can still see, the image has remained with me, the small arms, the small legs of a strangled child, flailing about before crashing to the ground, unharmed, which was nothing short of a miracle, the little survivor then getting up again to go and sit at his desk, vowing that he would never laugh at his office neighbor's jokes again. This was how freedom, dignity and respect were taught to the children of working-class Quebec at the time of the very young Quiet Revolution, traumatized by the Cold War and still believing, against all odds, that only force could get the better of children who were essentially bad until they were corrected.

I repeatedly denounced this degrading behavior to my mother, because I was afraid, and because I found it excessive, even insane. Invariably, she would ask me if they were picking on me, if they were “touching” me, and since I replied that they were not, she would retort that she would therefore do nothing, that she would not intervene. It never occurred to her to question the education system itself, free and therefore irreplaceable, that she was inflicting on her young son. And yet, simply to observe it, this violence was obviously monstrous, and I still remember this lady, who passed very close to the school, and who had seen the director, a clergyman, hit a child, again and again, the child powerless, grabbed by the neck, screaming in terror, and the lady letting go, saying of the priest: “But he's crazy, the bastard!” He was indeed crazy, but it took effort to realize it and to act. It was not the time for child protection, especially not for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and they were the ones populating the public education sector, they were the ones the system brutalized and scorned. These children were potential little dangers that had to be broken at all costs. As for me, as an effective avoidance strategy, I took the initiative of breaking on my own to avoid the beatings.

When I was telling François Peraldi the details of this pitiful upbringing offered to the children of the French-speaking proletariat, forcibly enrolled in the Catholic school system of Quebec in the 1950s and 1960s, I could hear him, from time to time, dryly uttering a few scathing remarks about the “cretins”, the ” imbeciles', 'light-fingered larvae' ('you don't know what that is?') who were rampant there, and when he asked me what I thought of these teachers who let children bathe in their urine-soaked pants because they were forbidden to go to the toilet during class, I replied (drawing inspiration from the title of a famous Soviet film) that this was ordinary fascism in which the small, the very small power of education indulged. He did not comment, but I remain certain that he thought no less.

In the spring of my first school year, I suddenly began to fear, without realizing how obviously senseless this sudden anxiety was, the route I would have to take to get to and from school. At the slightest sign of aggression, my body would freeze and stiffen. I would find myself defenceless, exposed to the gaze of anyone who wanted to take advantage of the situation. I wanted to go home and escape from these torturers, who I imagined to be barely older than me, sadists invested by a “law of moral order” that children learn so quickly to recognize, happy to have such a good command of the ways of violence, and who knew how to notice, how to distinguish their prey, their vice, in order to persecute it, to denounce it. I was sure that they wanted to hit and kill the bad child. That was their role. But I didn't know why I was so bad and so clearly singled out for the hatred of others. And yet.

And yet, on the way to the small private school where I did my first year, on Rue Père-Marquette in Quebec City, there was a Brother of the Christian Schools who waited for me day after day and who, as soon as he saw me, rushed across my path, started a conversation, asked me my name, gasped. He was red-haired, as thin as a rake, had a prominent Adam's apple, skeletal hands, and the repulsive smell of an unwashed man who sometimes reeked of urine. He taught at the school my older brother attended, a school for older children. The Brother would come and talk to me every lunchtime, when I went back to school after lunch: as soon as he saw me, he would run up, standing on the pavement so that I couldn't avoid him. Behind him was the schoolyard, the shouts of teenagers playing ball, the shorts, the desire to win, the hatred of losers, cowards and weaklings. “What's your name?” I don't remember ever answering him. He was unaware of my shyness and embarrassment, and was clearly trying to seduce me, offering to take me to his school to visit—something I never did. This brother was just an ugly grasshopper, but he wanted my childish thinness: I understood that, and my mother told me, years later, that I had told her what this Brother was planning. Yet she had neither reacted nor alerted my father or my brother, which makes one wonder about this deliberate silence. I was left alone with a man's desire for a child, and I know, I remember, that he was revealing me to myself, to my frightening thinness, to my impurity, to my secret desires, to my sexuality. He was my older brother's supervisor, he knew it, he mentioned it constantly. I imagine that it kept him from doing anything daring, risky even at the time. My brother, on the other hand, was not afraid of anything; he was already strong. I admired him, I envied him, especially since he was single-handedly restraining, without knowing it, the libidinous urges of this obscene priest. Not even a year had passed since the fantasized mishap with my father at the Val Saint-Michel chalet. I didn't make any connection between the two events, of course, and for a long time one overshadowed the other. I was already in a very difficult situation, and very alone, with an insane shame that excluded me forever from the world of grown-ups and from those very normal ones who played ball for life and death in the schoolyard, behind the Brother and in front of me. “Later, you'll come and study here,” he had said. I set about sabotaging my future, which couldn't be that future. The shock - the trauma, learning about sexuality too quickly and too soon - didn't happen in some secret place on the way to school, but it did happen on the way to school. So, one day, I consciously planned what I was going to say to my mother about how I felt, but I did it badly, in tears, and lying about what I was really experiencing on a day-to-day basis, and more and more violently: “Some men wanted to beat me; they said they wanted to kill me; I had to hide and wait for them to leave. "Funny detail, now that I think about it, is that I had actually hidden, to make my story true, in a building entrance on Moncton Street! I must have learned to survive using means other than the truth, obviously family-related, obviously sexual. As for that school for grown-ups, that Brother's school, my brother's school, I ended up being so afraid of it that for a long time, for years, it symbolized the very meaning of all the fears that were constellating in my head at the time, all at the same time.

Peraldi: “Did someone walk you to school?” “No, nobody. Never. I had to ask someone to help me cross the street.”

During this time, I kept asking myself questions (at six, seven, eight years old!) in bed, when I was trying to sleep, about what was wrong in my head, and I came up with plausible hypotheses that could explain everything, because after all, so many wonders were already being achieved in medicine, and the TV showed science fiction programs that allowed you to imagine any conspiracy against you.

So for a long time, and tragically when I think about it, I believed that my parents were poisoning me, without my knowledge, with the agreement of the family doctor, the good doctor L., just to do an “experiment”, just to see “what it would be like” to make the runt eat this or that. Yet I had never heard of Josef Mengele! Clearly, the “scientific” experiment led to a shocking, inhuman result, a terrified child, terribly ashamed of himself, unable to socialize, who hid in the schoolyard under the windowsills during recess so that no one would come to talk to him, let alone play with him. The result was a child who wondered why he was a boy, and who would look under his genitals to see if they weren't detachable, and if there wasn't something else hidden there that could explain this intense misfortune of being himself. The result was a child developing a phobia of stains, specifically of viscous and whitish liquids, full of small invisible insects that threatened to touch his skin and penetrate him without him ever being able to wash or disinfect himself again. All that remained for the child that I was was God as my only resource, since I had been betrayed in my own home and I no longer trusted anyone. I prayed to Him for a long time to radically change the course of my life, to perform a miracle for me, or to “come and get me” as I was in my prayer. Obviously, the monster of indifference did not hear a word of my pleas. And I increasingly thought that God himself did not love me, that he had abandoned me to my childhood miseries - which had nothing, nothing, in what I felt day after day, of totally imaginary terrors. That child that I was, a wandering lunatic who made everyone laugh, felt terribly alone with his madness, and yet perfectly lucid, at seven, at eight, about what the rest of his life would be like. I had completely dissociated myself from the real experiments that were taking place at home, at night, in my bed, and which I was not to learn about until much, much later, in my mid-thirties, when my life had completely turned upside down.

In those early childhood days, I would genuinely get sick, no tricks, which I knew how to do well, when a boy my age had to spend the night at our house, in my room, the room I shared with my older brother. My mother would of course have to cancel the invitation, worrying about the very real risk of me infecting another child. I learned the method, usually with fake. For a long time, I remained dependent on this perfectly effective stratagem. As an adult, I would become “ill” with my partners to justify my isolation and not “contaminate” them, which required them to leave, at least temporarily. That's how I managed, and to compensate, to make myself believe that I didn't need anyone. I still sometimes feel the temptation of that gentle, winding slope of solitary annihilation, of motionless gape, alone in my bed.

I also thought that you could change sex with a simple injection, but I never really wanted to submit to that horror - I didn't know the word “castration”, but I knew it would have meant cutting something off... I firmly believed that girls did not have a sex, that it was just a tear, with shreds of a penis that had been torn off. And I wondered, of course, as a small child, if I wasn't going to avoid danger and fear, adapt more easily, blossom, laugh and play with others, being able to become a girl without risk or abjection. But as soon as I understood, and it happened very early on, that it involved the concrete, appalling removal of my male child's sex, which fascinated me, which alone was of interest to children and adults alike, I gave up, of course, and withdrew into myself, like the curled-up bodies of Pompeii, frozen, crushed under the ashes of Vesuvius, forever silent and invisible, and in which I remember, at around 8 or 9 years old, immediately recognizing myself. In fact, rather than taking away something that I cared about and that excited me, I deprived myself of my gaze, I cut myself off from that of others. I spent my childhood and adolescence avoiding the influence of others, their questions, their cruelty and often their contempt. I remained alone, with nothing to say and no identity, and obviously without friends for a long time.

One day, in a bar, I met a man I didn't know very well, but who had attended the same college as me, along with his older brother. I asked him how his brother was doing, as they had been friends when they were at the Minor Seminary.

- Oh, J, he's not doing well at all. He's very depressed. He has suicidal episodes. I'd rather not talk about it too much, it's very difficult, it's always worrying.

This boy had a father who was a real bully, a child beater, violently hostile to his son's difference. In class, he had been the victim of a violent attack, without me or anyone else coming to his aid, and certainly not the priests who acted as eminent educators, but who too often looked down at their shoes when they shouldn't have.

Ordinary, everyday, extremely aggressive fascism, destroying teenagers for life, too often driving them to suicide, this fascism has a gender identity, passionately adopted by male children, who were not particularly delicate, and who sought to measure themselves against others, all the time, with their fists if necessary. What they wanted, first and foremost (and what they still want, I imagine), was to be ruthlessly normal - and to hunt down the losers who tainted the cohort. This was particularly the case - concrete, violent - in the time of declining Catholicism in the 1960s. The boys' apprenticeship was a long series of brutal experiences, and all the adult men still remember that, and generally cope with it very well. In secondary school, the thick-headed specimen with a big stick, a sort of independent panzer waging his own war, would inevitably pick on the one who unwittingly identified himself, by dint of hiding as soon as he realized that his voice, his gestures, his overly feminine gait betrayed him. As a young teenager, this is what I constantly feared, of being “identified as” as a docile and silent victim, especially because of what people could tell about me, and reveal what was scandalous about me—this uncertain and fractured sexual identity, this homosexual quest for reconstruction, in order to identify myself, thanks to sex and the love of a proven and desired boy, as a sure thing. For male children, and even for little girls who learn about desire at a very early age, nothing was more despicable than a man who is not a man. I was absolutely alone with my lack of virility; I certainly wasn't going to tell my family about the insults I got for it, even though they suspected it, and sometimes they would humiliate me and report me at the dinner table, just for a laugh. I learned to silence my fears, I learned the gestures of a man, mainly mimicking my brother, without him knowing; all this so as never, never to be doubted and questioned about the direction that my sexual desire was increasingly taking.

And yet, despite the precautions I took, I was sometimes insulted, sometimes harassed. That was the truth, painful, unbearable, that I had not seen coming, in that Petit Séminaire where the teachers never used physical force to straighten out the students who were too particular - who were also denounced, among other things because they wore their hair long, which made them look little, from behind, like girls. At least that's what the director of the institution had stated, without laughing. Years later, a former student and I discovered that he frequented the beaches of Provincetown in the summer!

One day, two students – farmers, as we were called at the seminary, older than me – while we were waiting in a group to enter the study hall, surrounded me and started hitting me several times in the stomach. I was stunned. Why here, why me? The other students moved away, and a circle formed around me. I was exposed, at once very alone and very visible, a prey; I was the victim of an undeniable aggression, and it required intervention, but the priest in charge refused to see me, his gaze fixed on the entrance door to the study hall which remained stubbornly closed. He was a few steps away from me. It was cowardice in a cassock, crucifix around his neck, the withering of whatever civilizing influence religion may have had. Moreover, it wasn't just at school that there was the threat of a beating for miserable microbes of my kind, underdeveloped, skinny and ugly. Sometimes it was also friends of my relatives (very close friends, my little sister's friends, for example) who would scream my name in the street, out of rage, out of hatred, and who wanted nothing more than to gang up on me and beat me up, just to teach me what it means to be a man, and to never, ever even “think about it”, with any of them.

I denied all of this, for a long time, all the time, to, among others, the priest-psychologist at the Petit Séminaire, who had once asked me if I had ever been bullied - I heard him say, rejected. I replied that no, of course not. And he concluded, relieved: good, because it's a terrible experience, it can leave indelible scars. Peraldi, to whom I had confessed, very painfully, that I had been an openly despised teenager, objected that “the others sensed your vulnerability and took advantage of it. ” That was it, precisely that, the genesis of fascism fixed in an exclusive, normal and brutal heterosexuality, it was about taking advantage, it was about enjoying vulnerability before eliminating it. For a long time, heterosexual preference had to crush in order to construct itself (there would be a story to be told about this), at least in Quebec, and as such, occupying the entire field of sexuality, it was at the root of all the little daily fascisms, which it contained within itself.

Yet it was tempting to let oneself be carried away by this fascistic pleasure of heterosexual conformity and its violence, and to hold, for a moment, a piece of the excessive strength of the wild gang. There were two pupils at the Petit Séminaire who were always together and who became the victims of ordinary brutality. They were pushed in the corridors, aggressive shoulder blows against two young people who had the misfortune of being too visible and who were thrown ten times, twenty times a day against the wall without them ever fighting back. I let myself be tempted once. I tried it. I bullied them. I felt an immense pleasure at the time, it's crazy how attractive the norm is, incredible how quickly sadism awakens; but it didn't cure me of anything, and I am still ashamed today that I let myself go and become a neo-Nazi just once.

However, a student, when I was in the first year of secondary school, had taught me a good lesson, and had made sure I remembered it to ensure that I had a pleasant and safe time at school: “in life, there are the dominant and the dominated, you have to choose which side you want to be on”. Being dominant essentially meant always being ready to hit hard and fast, to knock out anyone who “tried to stand in your way and do what they wanted to you”, most often to subordinate you. “Otherwise, you're done for.”

I had known for a long time, from the age of six, that I was homosexual, although at the same age I had been in love with a little girl with dark hair, dark skin and auburn skin, with whom I was paired for the end-of-year school dance. I wanted to marry her, but she was obviously unaware that I had wanted to have sex, in the toilets, at his house, with a little boy my age, a classmate who came from a wealthy family, which also made me want to do that very much. Nothing had happened: “another day, maybe”, and that was the end of it, without ever talking about it again. But I didn't forget, and certainly not the sight of his penis under his white underwear, just as I hadn't forgotten my father's swimming trunks, just as I hadn't forgotten the embarrassment of someone looking at my penis, at the age of two, under my white woolen knickers. I was six years old, and I made the connection, so young, so early, between the vision of those genitals so poorly hidden, which upset me; and when my mother told me that the other little boy's mother had called, I shouted: “It's not even true!” Without realizing that I was confessing a whole host of things, if only someone would take the time to hear the very meaning of my powerful denial... My mother simply said to me, ”She wants to invite you to a birthday party, I said you could go.”

One day, a kid my age, who was always talking about sex and obviously knew a lot about it (it was certainly a family trait, without my knowing more, except that thirty years later, my brother told me that the eldest of the said family did it with his sister, in their bedroom, the curtains open, and that he sometimes saw them, at night, from the window of his own room,) this little neighbor had taken refuge with me at the bottom of the back stairs of the family home and had suggested, out of the blue, without taking the usual precautions, without promising secrecy, to show him “it”:

- It must be beautiful.

I still had no hair and no erection. The temptation to show it was still exciting. That it was beautiful, that made me want to prove it, indeed. And I showed it to him. He had smiled, his eyes sparkling with pleasure; he found it devilishly exciting. He had immediately lowered his pants:

“Look at mine, not as nice as yours. We can play with it if you want. Come on, let's go behind the garages.”

We ran behind there, down a lane out of sight, and lowered our pants again, rubbing our cocks together. The boy was going to suggest that we go to his place, to do more, to caress my penis, to suck it, when absolute, disproportionate panic came over me, totally overwhelmed me. I ran away. I could hear the other one shouting after me, asking me to come back to him, with him. I went up to the house. My parents were doing the dishes and stopped me on my way to my room, the one I always shared with my brother.

“You got good grades, Richard. As a reward, we've decided to buy you a bike. You can go with Dad to choose it.”

I was unable to rejoice, unable to thank him properly. I took refuge in my room and went to bed, anguished, revolted, full of remorse, and sure, sure and certain that my life was irretrievably ruined, that I should kill myself, so much so that what I had just done was worse than anything that could be done, the worst of crimes, a nameless, unforgivable fault. I had been transfixed for hours. I was 12 years old. A friend of my parents had said one day: “A man with a little girl, at least it's normal”. I was abnormal, and even worse than what the particularly twisted idiot had said without anyone contradicting him. This business, this childishness, really a trifle, has long remained the worst memory of my life. In the days that followed, MD blabbed; this child surprisingly had no modesty, no restraint. The little neighbor from above, who never missed an opportunity, knew the details of the affair; he immediately set about persecuting me. He was also a little snake when it came to sex. “Oh, you know,” Peraldi said to me, “that's all the kids think about.” Maybe. But they didn't all have a father like mine who wanted to “whip” all homosexuals, “shoot” them, “beat them to death.” And when his speech was a little more restrained, he reluctantly conceded that they had to “put them in prison”, that “they were vicious”, that “it was worse than worse, and that nothing, absolutely nothing could be more repugnant than that”, that “it was unspeakable, unmentionable” — but that he had spotted some, lo and behold, in the “little kitty cat park” in Quebec City when he was young, and that he had wanted to see for himself what these bastards really were. To hear him tell it, I was a waste product, a real piece of shit, and that was exactly how I saw myself from then on. It wouldn't have taken much for me to end up crouching down and cleaning the sidewalks, to everyone's amusement.

“Wasn't your father the one who saw little green men?” Peraldi asked me.

At the Petit Séminaire de Québec, we were told, from the first year of secondary school, that we would one day be the elite of society, that we would be called upon to govern this society, in a very conservative way of course, strong in solid, immutable Christian values. I didn't understand what the word “elite” meant, and I, the son of an electronics technician, who came from a family of the lower middle class, always penniless, certainly never imagined governing Quebec one day. I realized this quite quickly when I compared my income, my expenses, my leisure opportunities with the sons of bourgeois, privileged families, sons of doctors or deputies, who attended the same college as me. This inequality of wealth was also violence like any other, even worse than the others, an obvious fact that I will never forget for the rest of my life. I understood the deprivation that I had to constantly impose on myself, the tuition fees that I had to pay as soon as I had access to the loan-grant system (and at the same time, pay for my clothes, my transport, my leisure activities), I understood that I would never be part of the elite, any more than those students who were the sons of wealthy farmers who could afford to send their sons to study at the Petit Séminaire. How many times was I told, because I couldn't, for example, take part in a skiing weekend, that this poverty was unbelievable for a student at the Seminary? One day, as I was walking home, chatting with another student about our recent birthdays, he asked me what gifts I had received for my birthday:

- Money.

- Oh, well, me too! My father gave me 25 dollars. And you?

- We don't talk about that kind of information. It's private. We don't brag about it.

The fact is that I had received 25 cents.

At the Petit Séminaire, all the students were assigned to a strictly controlled religious practice, with compulsory mass four middays a week, at that time in history when Quebec was undergoing massive dechristianization. And all the pupils were categorized from the outset, for the duration of their studies, in terms of the academic performance expected of them: and of course it was always the sons of the family who got the best grades. Of course there were some real foundations for this: At home, I had never seen my father read a book in his life, except maybe once, but I learned a few years later that several of my classmates had to take the following year's courses in an accelerated format during the summer before, just to ensure they got the best grades and the most lucrative career paths. When I heard this, from a student who ended up suffering a major breakdown in his early twenties, I was deeply shocked, as if I had been the victim of massive cheating, even the violation of what the priests of the Petit Séminaire called conscience.

I hate religions, elites, private educational institutions. It has never left me. And I have never understood how, even now, we can tolerate this incredible and utterly scandalous segregation in education based on wealth and social class, especially since the majority of workers subsidize, through their taxes, the institutions and education of the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, who are rarely grateful, but who are (discreetly) absolutely delighted. “As long as it lasts,” said Madame Bonaparte, the mother, and the reply has become famous. As long as it lasts, indeed.

As for the relationship between the social classes, between what produces wealth and maintains poverty, Quebec is often grossly ignorant, with an indifference that borders on scandal. But for the bourgeoisie, the French-speaking one most certainly, but even more so for the Canadian bourgeoisie, this little world that is Quebec society, long trained in submission, is the stuff of dreams.

Suite: https://histoiredelahonte.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapitre-cinq-grossiere-illusion.html