Leonard, Maria, Peribonka, and me HEATHER DAVIS
I think every family has a famous-person story. Maybe even two. My family has two and the first one is even true.
Years ago, my aunt was working for Bell Canada in Montreal when a customer came in and said he wanted a phone. My aunt starting filling in the necessary paperwork. "What is your occupation?" she asked.
"I'm a poet," he replied.
"Well," she told the poet, "we are going to need a $50 deposit."
The guy kicked up a fuss so my aunt called her boss and complained, "There's a Leonard Cohen here who wants a phone and he says he's a poet."
All they said was, "Give him a phone."
I know this is true because my aunt is still embarrassed. But the second story is debatable and has to do with my grandparents and Maria Chapdelaine.
Maria Chapdelaine is the heroine of a famous novel, written in 1912 about the life of a pioneer family in Peribonka.
The book, written by travelling French writer Louis Hemon, was such a success that by the mid 30s the book had been translated worldwide and it's printing run was second only to the Bible.
My late grandparents lived in the same village in the Lac St-Jean area of Quebec for four years during the 1920s and their one lasting souvenir is a black and white of a serious and respectable looking lady, signed Maria Chapdelaine.
Curiously, I searched the net for information about Maria Chapdelaine, but what I found was all about the author, who incidentally, was hit by a train and died shortly after dispatching the book to his mother. (In other words, he isn't any help here)
I began to doubt the story behind the picture. Was Maria Chapdelaine even real? Or was it an urban family myth? It looked like nothing short of a trip to Peribonka would do.
We showed up at the Louis Hemon historical house only to find that it was still closed for the winter. But we poked our heads into the neighbouring museum and a kind lady loaned us her keys so we could check things out.
The house, freshly white-washed on the outside, was musty and aged on the inside. Not surprising considering it is the only original settler's house still standing in the Lac St-Jean area. The early houses were so poorly built they all collapsed decades ago.
But this house had been preserved since the hoopla about Maria Chapdelaine began. Louis Hemon had slept here, behind the red door, when he worked as a farm labourer for Samuel Bedard. The house seemed comfortable, full of ghosts and impossibly small.
The kind lady at the museum also helped to solve my family's famous-person mystery. She produced a picture exactly like the one my grandparents had kept all those years.
She said that the picture was of Eva Bouchard and that when the book was in its heyday, tourists had flocked to the small, isolated town, demanding to know where Maria Chapdelaine was. The local people, who for the most part had never laid hands on the book, happily sent them to Eva Bouchard, the daughter of Hemon's host and one of the only females he had spent time around.
But although some of the facts in the book correspond with Eva Bouchard's life, no one knows if Maria Chapdelaine was a real person or not. In fact there are many who would dispute it.
But I'm not one of them. It's my family's story and I'm sticking to it.
Copyright © 2000 Heather Davis/Log Cabin Chronicles/06.2000 |
