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Daily Archives: June 16, 2012

Séraphin: Un Homme et son péché, or Heart of Stone

16 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in French-Canadian Literature, Régionalisme

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Antoine Labelle, Canada, Claude-Henri Grignon, Cornelius Krieghoff, Donalda, Germaine Guèvremont, La Famille Plouffe, Les Belles Histoires des pays d'en haut, Quebec, Un Homme et son péché

Winter Scene in the Laurentians, Cornelius Krieghoff (1867) (Courtesy La Galerie Klinckhoff, Montreal) 

Cornelius Krieghoff (19 June 1815 – 8 March 1872)
(you will find a movie trailer hidden under Séraphin: Heart of Stone)

There are fine novels telling about life in mostly rural Canada. These could be included in a our series on Regionalism in Quebec Fiction. Among such works, two stand out. The first is Claude-Henri Grignon‘s (8 July 1894 – 3 April 1976) Un homme et son péché, and the second, Le Survenant, published in 1945 by Grignon’s cousin  Germaine Guèvremont (16 April 1893 – 21 August 1968). It had a sequel: Marie-Didace.

But we are no longer in Charlevoix. We have moved to Saint-Adèle in the Laurentian mountains, north of Montreal. It is pictured above by Dutch-Canadian artist Cornelius Krieghoff.   

The importance of the novels mentioned above lies to a considerable extent in the popularity of radio (Un Homme et son péché) or television dramatizations of both. Together with Roger Lemelin‘s La Famille Plouffe, not a roman du terroir, these were programmes, one never skipped. There was a time when French-speaking Canadians watched: Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut or d’en-haut  (Un Homme et son péché [A Man and his Sin]), La Famille Plouffe, and Le Survenant, as faithfully as they attended Mass on Sunday morning. 

For the time being, I will tell you about Les Belles Histoires (televised) or Un Homme et son péché (the novel).

Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut

Grignon’s Un Homme et son péché, 1933, featured three main characters: 

Séraphin Poudrier, the miser
Donalda Laloge, his wife
Alexis Labranche, Donalda’s true love

Séraphin Poudrier, the miser, mistreats his beautiful wife, Donalda, and lets her die because calling in a doctor would cost money. The lovely Donalda dies of pneumonia.  As for Séraphin, he also meets a sorry end. He lets himself die holding on to his  money as a fire burns down his house while everyone is attending Donalda’s funeral. Alexis Labranche, Donalda’s true love, tries to save him repeatedly, but Séraphin will not be separated from his money. After his death, villagers find money inside his clutched hand. 

If you click on Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut, you will note, among other things,  that Un Homme et son péché was a 495-episode television series, a téléroman, that featured not only fictional characters, but also real-life celebrities. 

  • One of these is Antoine Labelle, le curé Labelle, who directed unemployed French-Canadians/Québécois, mostly farmers out of a land, to settle North.
  • Another is Honoré Mercier (15 October 1840 – 30 October 1894) the 9th Premier of Quebec (Parti Libéral; in office from 1887-1891). 
  • Finally, the cast also included Arthur Buies, a journalist, as were Grignon and Guèvremont, an advocate of colonization and the first French-Canadian/Quebec writer to express well-articulated anticlerical views.  

These three characters, Labelle and Buies in particular, are known to everyone and, in Quebec, a miser is called un séraphin.  

Allow me to quote Arthur Buies:

The clergy are everywhere, they preside over everything, and no one can think or wish anything except what they allow. . . they seek not the triumph of religion, but the triumph of their own dominance.[i] 

Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un Homme et son péché (1933) can be included in our list of regionalist novels but only as a borderline example of le roman du terroir. Claude-Henri Grignon was a journalist, known for his “trenchant satire of the government of Maurice Duplessis.” (Wikipedia) Duplessis was the 16th and profoundly corrupt Premier of the Province of Quebec (in office from 1936 to 1939, and from 1944 to 1959). 

However, it is a novel of the land inasmuch as le curé Labelle and Arthur Buies are advocates of colonisation.

Grignon, who became a member of the Royal Society of Canada, was not just another journalist no more than he was just another novelist. He was an exceptionally keen observer of Quebec society and provided an excellent chronicle of “la belle province.”  Un Homme et son péché is a satire of rural life in Quebec that mesmerized both readers and television viewers. As I noted above, the televised series was preceded by a radio-drama.   

Un Homme et son péché has been adapted into at least two films. The second film dates back to 2002. It is entitled Séraphin: un Homme et son péché and it has an English-language version: Heart of Stone (trailer), a third film (?). As for the novel, Un Homme et son péché, it was translated into English as The Woman and the Miser (1978).

—ooo—

Next, we will look a Grignon’s cousin’s Le Survenant (The Wanderer) and Marie-Didace, Le Survenant‘s sequel which aired briefly in the late 1950s. Guèvremont’s novels are closer to the roman de la terre, or roman du terroir, the novel of the land, or regionalist, than Grignon’s Un Homme et son péché. Yet, Germaine Guèvremont wrote Le Survenant in 1945, after Ringuet or Philippe Panneton’s Trente Arpents (1938).

  • La Terre paternelle, Patrice Lacombe (1846)
  • Charles Guérin, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau (1846)
  • Maria Chapdelaine, Louis Hémon (1914)
  • Un Homme et son péché, Claude-Henri Grignon (1933)
  • Menaud, maître-draveur, Félix Antoine Savard (1937)
  • Le Survenant, Germaine Guèvremont (1945)
_________________________
[i] Francis Parmentier, “Arthur Buies,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=40711
  
© Micheline Walker
16 June 2012
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Saturday, June 16, 2012: The News

16 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Canada, Sharing

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Gazette, Globe & Mail, Le Devoir, Montreal, National Post, New York Times, WordPress

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Good morning everyone

I need Cerberus, the three-headed dog who  in Greek and Roman mythology, guarded the Gates of the Underworld, to prevent those who had crossed the river Styx from ever escaping. However, I will settle for Fido, to the left.

Old News

I believe I need a little help so I can forget a better world.  I remember my blue house, my office, my classroom, my students, my artist friends…

I cannot understand why I was overworked out of my position as university professor.  I cannot understand why I was not replaced when I started feeling too tired to work.

Nor can I understand why an Insurance Company employee did not tell me that my application for permanent disability had not been approved.  She sent me to a doctor who reported that I needed to rest for an undetermined period of time, but asked her to tell me not to leave my little town, as I would recover and was too sick to make a serious decision.

Some individuals recover from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but others do not, at least not fully, which is my case.  But I had learned to live quite normally despite Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, now called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).  I had a very limited social life and went to bed early.

The Chair of my department should have been a little protective of me.  I was already working very hard and I was always ready to help my colleagues.  I was a good and particularly knowledgeable teacher, productive, resourceful and disciplined.

Had I been allowed to leave the classroom when I presented a doctor’s note, I may have recovered rather quickly.  However, the Chair of my department told me he could not take my doctor’s note seriously.

As well, had I stopped working at the time I presented my doctor’s note, my “case manager” at the Insurance Company, might not have taken me for an imaginary invalid and punished me by letting me move, which was a mistake.

The Chair of my department reported to the administration and others that I had disrupted members of my department to a great extent.  That was a lie.  He, the Chair, had helped me for about two weeks, on the condition that I finish my teaching assignment and prepare and grade my final examinations, which I did.  They would not replace me because I “could still walk.”

My workload was quite onerous:  French classical literature; French-Canadian/Quebec literature; language courses (French as a second language); the creation of language lab components, etc.

Moreover, I was writing articles, etc.  But suddenly, during a sabbatical I was devoting to writing a book on Molière, he, the Chair of my department, asked me to prepare and teach a course on Animals in Literature.

I would have refused, but I was afraid of him.  He had got very angry at me in the past, so angry that once I fainted.  I could not say ‘no.’  Not at that point in time.

I have to tell you

I am telling you, because I have to tell you.  ME affects my blogging.  I skip or repeat words and I write ‘and’ when I mean ‘an,’ or ‘has’ when I mean ‘as.’   It’s a comedy.

But I enjoy blogging.  It allows me to use some of the knowledge I acquired to earn a PhD and worked as a university teacher.  In fact, I have been President of the Canadian Association of University and College Teachers of French, etc.  I was also a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities (now Humanities and Social Sciences).  I have lectured abroad…

I loved my little house, I loved my work, but a member of the administration had told a few years earlier that persons who suffered from a chronic illness were not good candidates for the classroom and that he was anxious to …  Yet I could work under normal circumstances.  I was once bullied into an episode of ME by colleagues who then put obstacles in my way so I would not return to teaching.

One cannot “get rid of” (quotation) a …

No, one cannot “get rid of” a teacher on the basis of a disability, but it happens.  I know it happens because it happened to me.  It was done in a subtle manner.  I cannot tell for sure whether or not the Chair of my department acted deliberatly.  But whatever his intentions, he worked me out of my position and then failed to tell the truth.

It has been ten years.  No, I was not compensated yet I need to buy a little house because the soundproofing in my building is inadequate.  I am a pianist.  Selling the apartment will not buy me a little house.  There are problems with the building.

* * *

Yes, I sometimes forget the spelling of a word.  And there are times, rare times, when I cannot concentrate on my work.  I hope you will understand.

But I am old news, so let us return to today’s news.  There will be an election in September.

I should tell you that I am very proud of my WordPress community.  You are dear to me.

English
The Montreal Gazette: http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html
The National Post: http://www.nationalpost.com/index.html
The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/
 
CBC News: http://www.cbc.ca/news/
CTV News: http://montreal.ctv.ca/
 
French 
Le Monde: http://www.lemonde.fr/
Le Devoir: http://www.ledevoir.com/
La Presse: http://www.lapresse.ca/
 
German
Die Welt: http://www.welt.de/
 
Micheline Walker©
June 16, 2012
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