It is cold, dirty work, and my hands and lips turn blue (as do Hugo’s — not an effect of cyanide; this is because the body directs the blood to the major organs, the heart and brain, for example, to keep the warm). We are all cold and wet and miserable.
At length, we get back into the car and drive with the windows open to the lab (basement rec room) where I wait with the dogs while Hugo (Willa) returns the jar of cyanide (shotgun) to its glass-doored shelf (deer-antler rack). He seems to take an exceptionally long time, and I imagine him (we are creatures of each other’s imagination) lost in thought, surprised and troubled, amongst the whispering plants, arrested, as it were, by the thunderous echoing whispers of things which, daily, he compels with his thoughts. Momentarily, he understands, as my father and I did, what it means to finish the sentence.
Home again, we shake our clothes outside and wash the dogs in the tub (the evening has turned into a complete horror show for Bismarck), and then take turns holding the shower attachment over each other. I keep my eyes and mouth shut while Hugo gently and carefully hoses my face, my neck and ears and hair. I do the same for him and have to bite my lip, seeing him with his eyes closed, naked, blind and trusting.
It is after 2 a.m. when we finally go to bed. We’re both exhausted. Hugo curls up with his back to me and begins to snore. Bismarck’s nails click nervously up and down the hallway outside our door, then he goes and curls up beside his friend under the kitchen table.
I lie awake thinking, thinking about what happened to Hugo back there by the car, what made him run after me, embrace me and weep — some inkling, I think, some intuition of the truth, that I am leaving, a truth that only now begins to spread like imperfectly oxygenated blood through my arteries and capillaries, turning my limbs leaden and my skin blue.
THE CANADIAN TRAVEL NOTES OF
ABBÉ HUGUES POMMIER, PAINTER, 1663-1680
Bertrand de Latour describes Pommier as an artist whose paintings were all bad, although he considered himself a neglected genius.
— Harper, Painting In Canada
Envoi
Tomorrow I embark for France on the last ship before the river freezes.
In disgrace.
The bishop has ordered it, though he was happy enough to embrace me sixteen years ago in Vendôme when, inspired by the Jesuit martyrs and an unfortunate incident with Mme de A__’s girl Alice, which was bound to get out, I begged him to send me among the savages that I might atone for my sins or perish in a state of grace.
I have with me two satchels of sketches, woodcuts and watercolours, as well as three larger works on ship’s canvas, tied in a roll, which His Grace has let me keep.
Besides these, I possess nothing but my cassock, torn and muddy at the hem, and a broad-brimmed hat much eaten by rats.
For shoes the last nine years, I have made do with the wooden sandals of the Recollets. And I am much heartened at the thought of a new pair of leather ones my sister Adele has written she will buy for me the moment I reach Paris.
I hear the watch passing the seminary gate, tracing his path along the ramparts, reluctant to be away from his fire this cool, autumn night. I pull the worn trade blanket tighter around my shoulders and crouch towards the candle. Someone shouts in his sleep.
I am forty-three and, in the nature of things, cannot expect to return to Canada before I die.
The Voyage Out
Bishop Laval and the new governor, Mézy, were my shipmates on the voyage out, both treating me with exemplary kindness and piety.
Laval was but forty-two or -three, thin-lipped and balding, with a forehead like a dome. Much given to mystical exercises, he encouraged me to follow his example. This consisted of fasting and squatting in uncomfortable positions on the open deck in all weathers.
Mézy, a bluff, soldierly fellow, an old friend of the bishop’s, often humbled himself as well by picking up sailors and carrying them about the ship on his shoulders, whether they wanted him to or not (one or two were nearly lost overboard when the governor missed his grip in high seas).
I followed Laval’s regimen until my stomach felt like a prune, my legs burned and my head split; after which, I discovered that he often became quite oblivious during his meditations, so that I could go off and gnaw a piece of leathery pork while I sketched an old tar repairing sail or splicing sheets. (The bishop discouraged the drawing of sailors, sea birds, etc., on the grounds that my time would be better spent making copies of religious scenes for the edification of savages and children when we reached Canada.)
As we approached landfall, an incident occurred which surprised me and made me doubt my vocation.
One day the bishop was deep in ecstasy (or else he had fainted from lack of food) when a large herring gull lit upon the spar above him and dropped a load of dung on His Grace’s sleeve.
The bishop awoke with a start and licked up the slime with relish, exclaiming to me that it was the best thing he had tasted in weeks.
I was afterward violently seasick for upwards of an hour.
First Holy Work
They put me off shortly after at a fishing station called Sheep Death on an island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence where the curé had recently met his end at the hands of the local savages.
I rowed ashore in the ship’s boat with a little pack, which contained my portable altar, wine, wafers, holy water and extra stockings, a sword at my waist and a travelling paint kit up my sleeve, where the bishop failed to notice it. I had a little paper for writing my annual letters of report to the King’s minister in Paris and the papal curia in Rome, and I thought tree bark or animal skin would do for canvas till I reached civilization again.
The village Sheep Death consisted of five families far gone in debauchery, but full of good humour nevertheless. Every female above the age of twelve was pregnant and possessed of a voice like a bull having its stones cut off. The men were small, bearded, coated with fish oil and carbon from the rendering fires and addicted to brandy.
One and all greeted me with enthusiasm and then seemed to forget my presence.
I kept my hand on my sword the first two weeks, not knowing precisely what fate had befallen my predecessor.
A fellow named Fanton, whom I suspected of being a Huguenot though he denied it, took me to the place where the curé had died. There was nothing left of him but six charred ribs and a bit of jaw. We gave him a Christian burial, and I said what I could for the sake of his soul.
I did eight sketches of Fanton’s wife as the Virgin, in a shawl made from an old sail, with the latest of her fourteen children at her tent-like breast for the Christ-child.
For the first month, I swam in the ocean to keep clean, but as the weather closed in, I abandoned myself to the filth of the place and became a haven for eight varieties of insect life.
There being no church or manse, I bedded in a shack with the Fantons, usually with five or six children draped over my body for warmth, the husband and wife grunting disgustingly a yard or two away.
I drew up plans for a little chapel on a piece of birch bark and got Fanton to organize the men for the building, a project which was greeted with much public enthusiasm, but nothing came of it.
I married two couples, one with five children, the other, three.
A third couple, boasting no less than seven offspring, swore they were married, though I knew they were not. When I taxed the wife with her sin in the confessional (at other times used as a toilet in foul weather), she admitted to an earlier union with a man in France who she thought might be dead. Even so, her Canadian lover refused to marry her on the grounds that it might force her unwittingly into bigamy, a sin, he believed, as much frowned upon in the Bible as murder or eating beef on Friday.
I became suddenly depressed listening to her babble and dismissed her with a penance of five Hail Marys and one Act of Contrition, which earned me a reputation for being ov
erly lenient.
During the idle winter months, the men traded brandy for furs with the local savages, a practice strictly forbidden by the Church, on pain of excommunication, and by the King, on pain of death.
When the Indians were drunk, they traded their weapons, their clothes, their wives and their children for more liquor. The men of my parish being given to venery, there were many half-breed children in the Indian camp. Some wandered back and forth half-naked between their white and red families.
Indeed, it was not uncommon for me to wake in the morning to find some lice-ridden savage child with its arms wrapped tightly around my neck and snot dribbling into my cassock.
The savages painted themselves with red ochre, then pranced around naked as though they were dressed in court finery. It was a repellent sight, but I made many an interesting sketch of it.
In order to cleanse my mind and render myself worthy of the death I was certain awaited me the next summer at Québec, I tried to fast and meditate as the bishop had instructed. But my bowels seized up and gave me the most painful hemorrhoids which Mistress Fanton soothed with the application of a savage remedy and some incantation in the native tongue.
In the spring, I was relieved by the first ship from France (five ship’s officers contracted lice from the circumstance of my sharing their cabin) and left the place, I failed not to believe, far better than I found it.
Québec
Québec, the capital of the country, was a hamlet of seventy mean houses and about four hundred Christian souls, with as many savages sleeping in the streets. On the rock above, Bishop Laval had built his seminary, the Ursulines their convent, the governor his palace and Jean Boisdon his tavern.
The bishop met me at the pier, but soon went off with eight Jesuits new from France, who were on the same ship.
Later, he saw me in the seminary library and greeted me as Pierre. He said he had heard great things of my mission in Sheep Death (this seemed strange, as I thought myself the only person to come out of that place in a year).
He noticed me scratching an armpit and smiled. Drawing up his robe, he showed me a veritable hive of insect activity on his privy parts.
He then strongly urged me not to turn or change the straw on my pallet as this might accustom my body to unwonted ease.
We were getting along so well, I took the opportunity to ask the bishop if I might paint his likeness for the Hôtel-Dieu, wherein it would serve as an inspiration to the sisters, the sick and the poor.
The bishop said no.
Notwithstanding His Grace’s instructions, I hired the bathtub at the rear of Jean Boisdon’s establishment and took there a fine dinner of turnips, salt pork and dried crab apples, while his wife boiled my clothes.
I became drunk on cheap trade brandy and said a requiem mass for the poor dead mites which floated about me in their hundreds. (Later, Bishop Laval heard of this by some spy, and it was marked down as one of the reasons for my exile to Boucherville.)
I also sketched Boisdon’s servant girl as Mary Magdalene, with her bodice uncovered and half a dozen angels looking on.
The town was in a mood of religious exaltation with half the populace expecting martyrdom at the hands of the Iroquois every night and the other half drunk with terror. War parties haunted the woods and byways and crept into the town under cover of darkness to murder and kidnap. Every cabin had a small cannon and a statue of the Virgin.
I carried my sword again, though the bishop disapproved. I explained to him it was not so much to protect myself as: 1) to make the savages bethink themselves before they brought upon their heads the terrible sin of priest-killing, and 2) to give myself an opportunity to escape should they happen to fall upon me whilst I was not in a fit spiritual state.
(I recall one alarum when we took refuge in Notre Dame — there were five men in the rood loft before the holy sacrament preparing to die and Arlette Boisvert at the door with an iron fry pan — but this is getting ahead of my story.)
I went to visit Governor Mézy whom I found alone in his apartments suffering from the grippe and in a chaotic state of mind.
He and Bishop Laval had disagreed. Mézy was under threat of excommunication for discharging the bishop’s friends from the governing council, which, he said, was made up of frauds, profiteers and illegal traffickers in beaver hides. The bishop had accused Mézy of being a Huguenot, a Jansenist and an illegal trafficker in beaver hides.
Upon investigation, Mézy had discovered that Bishop Laval and the Jesuits themselves were trafficking in beaver hides. For a man who had been wont to carry sailors about the deck to humble himself before God, it was a bitter draught.
Hearing of my visit, the bishop ordered me to preach a sermon against Mézy in the pulpit the following Sunday as a test of my loyalty. The look on the governor’s face as I proclaimed his sins and listed the torments he would suffer in Hell as a result has haunted me ever after. He does not know it, but I continue to pray for the old soldier to this day.
I was assigned to teach Latin and logic at the seminary. The students were mostly boys from the local seigneuries, rude, stupid and over-fed. Farting during the recitation of declensions was considered by many to be the height of wit.
Though these boys were especially selected by the parish authorities for their religious aptitude, I never observed any but the most grudging respect for Our Lady and her Holy Son. Most left school before they were fifteen to marry girls in advanced states of pregnancy. The rest ran away to the forests to trade in beaver hides.
One boy, Boisvert, could draw somewhat and became a favourite of mine. (The Boisverts were an old Québec family, having been there upwards of eight years.) In my spare time, I taught him the rudiments of figures, composition, Christian and heroic symbolism, etc.
Shortly thereafter he was expelled from the seminary and sentenced to the stocks for making a series of sketches of an Ursuline nun named Thérèse de la Sainte-Assomption being ravished by the Flemish Bastard, a noted Iroquois chieftain. Boisvert rendered the sketches on birch bark scrolls which he sold at five sous apiece to his classmates.
Though my role in this affair was concealed from the general public by the good offices of the bishop, I was enjoined to refrain from practising my art and given a severe penance which consisted of two hundred Hail Marys to be said while standing up to my thighs in an ox midden.
His Grace further ordered me to cease bathing, which occasioned much surreptitious delight amongst my remaining students.
Martyre des Pères Jésuites chez les Hurons
Notwithstanding the bishop’s command (he no longer spoke to me, or recognized me in public, though I would see him nearly every day in the street), I soon received my first major commission. This came from the Hôtel-Dieu Sisters who, by the vagaries of gossip, received the impression I was the artist responsible for young Boisvert’s Ursuline scrolls.
The sisters wanted a large, suitably inspirational canvas for the chapel wall, depicting the deaths of the Jesuit brothers at the hands of the savages.
I set to work immediately on a piece of sail cloth, mixing my own paints as best I could and using the back room of Jean Boisdon’s establishment as a studio.
A Huguenot hog gelder named René Petit had taken up residence in the back room while he plied his trade in the farms roundabout. A muscular fellow, with a Roman nose and cruel eyes, he modeled for me as an Indian brave.
Jean Boisdon’s chambermaid, Paulette, stripped to the waist, with her skirts tucked up between her legs, did nicely for Indian maidens in the background.
For the martyrs, I painted myself as Brebeuf, using a small hand-mirror Boisdon kept by the bathtub. Boisdon posed as Lalement, showing, after consuming half a flagon of arak I was forced to purchase for the company, a remarkable talent for rolling his eyes and heaving out his chest in a counterfeit of agony.
Later he told me arak gave hi
m gas.
Thrown constantly together in their work with me, René and Paulette conceived a sudden, immoderate passion for one another, which ended in Paulette becoming pregnant and demanding to be married. With the painting only half-done, René ran away to live with the savages.
Meanwhile, the studio was still in use as a bathroom, so that customers were always coming in to use the tub whether I was painting or not. (Boisdon charged ten sous for clean hot water, eight for moderately warm water used only once, and so on.)
Word got abroad about my work-in-progress, and I soon became a source of entertainment for the local drunks and bawds and trappers come to town to sell beaver hides.
The latter were often thunderously abusive, roaring with laughter at my woodland settings, my savages and the horrific poses of my martyrs — thus several well-meaning inaccuracies were avoided, including classical Grecian elements (amphorae, Macedonian lances and leg armour, a lyre, Ionic columns in front of the longhouses, etc.) which I had unwittingly imported into my representation of native life.
It was in this way that several of Québec’s least respectable citizens made their way into my painting of the holy martyrs.
And, though I believe they enhanced the liveliness of the scene, the result was that the Hôtel-Dieu Sisters recognized two prostitutes, the Huguenot hog gelder, and a man under sentence of death for killing his wife and running away to the forest to trade in beaver hides. This man, who modeled for the wise, old sachem in the top right-hand corner, was arrested, tried, hung, cut down before he died and castrated, then burned to death in the Lower Town.
The whole of Québec society turned out for the occasion with a festive air. Two young ladies fainted straight away at the sight of the condemned man’s mutilated body, and afterwards made a show of needing to be carried thence by several gallants who made a sort of invalid’s litter with their arms.
Guide to Animal Behaviour Page 5