La Corriveau: a legend

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Canada, Legends

Tags

Aesop's Fables, Arché, Jules, legends, Les Anciens Canadiens, Marie-Josephte Corriveau, New France, Philippe-Aubert de Gaspé, Quebec

The Corriveau of Legend is a woman who killed several husbands and was condemned to be hanged and put in chains in an iron cage. She scarred travellers. But there was a real Corriveau, Marie-Josephte Corriveau (1733 -1763).

Les Anciens Canadiens

In Philippe Aubert de Gaspé‘s Les Anciens Canadiens, as Jules and Arché travel from the Jesuit College in Quebec City to the Gaspé family’s manoir, Arché is told about La Corriveau.

The Real Corriveau

Marie-Josephte Corriveau (1733 at Saint-Vallier, Quebec – 18 April 1763 at Quebec City) was married at the age of 16 to Charles Boucher, 23, a farmer. She gave birth to three children, but Charles died on 27 April 1760. At the time, his widow was not suspected of murder.

Marie-Josephte remarried on 20 July 1761, to another farmer from Saint-Vallier, Louis Étienne Dodier, who was found dead on 27 January 1763. He had wounds to his head and it was suggested he had been trampled by horses. There was an inquiry into his death and Marie-Josephte was suspected of murdering him. She was tried, convicted and condemned to death.

To protect her, her father took the blame for the murder. She was his only surviving child. However, before being put to death, he told his confessor about his lie and, as a result, the real murderess was tried in Quebec City, convicted of murder and hanged on 18 April 1763. What is told in a confessional cannot be revealed, but it would appear the priest talked.

The dissemination of the Legend

Of particularly interest is the fact that the Corriveau was to be exposed to the public view, put in chains in a cage, called gibbet, at Pointe-Lévy. She was to remain exposed until 25 May at the earliest. She was then buried.

Never had a body been exposed to the public in the land that had just become the Province of Québec. There was a culture shock. Moreover, it was presumed that if she had killed her second husband, she may also have killed her first husband. The number of murdered husbands kept growing, and a legend was born.

The Nineteenth Century and the importance of folklore and legends

Moreover, during the nineteenth century, as of the Congress of Vienna (September, 1814 to June, 1815) to be precise, the final act of which was signed nine days before Napoléon’s final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815, many countries were wiped off the map of Europe. So people started to gather folklore. It was a way of giving themselves an identity.

It is not surprising therefore that, in answer to Lord Durham’s[i] deprecatory remarks to the effect that Canadiens were “a people with no literature and no history,” French-speaking Canadians were galvanized into creating a literary homeland including in their writings all the legends they could dig up.

So, the new relevance given folklore (songs, myths, legends, the supernatural) would explain why Aubert de Gaspé inserted legends and a few strange characters into his Anciens Canadiens. Jules’s mother tells a fascinating legend about a woman who has lost her daughter and is finally made to see that her dead daughter is quite literally drowning in the tears her mother is shedding. Moreover, Aubert de Gaspé creates a sorceress, Marie, whose predictions and prophecies come true. Finally, Jules tells Arché about the feu-follet (the will-o’-the-wisp).

—ooo—

Where la Corriveau is concerned, in the years following her execution, she was basically forgotten, but according to Wikipedia, the 1849 “discovery of the iron cage buried in the cemetery of St-Joseph parish (now the Lauzon district) served to reawaken the legends and the fantastic stories, which were amplified and used by 19th century writers[,]” and beyond. Folklore had been legitimized. Between 1849 and 2006, La Corriveau inspired eighteen stories or works of art. But Aubert de Gaspé was the first to tell about La Corriveau.

I should point out again, but for different reasons, that the Corriveau was the first person to be executed after the Treaty of Paris, which means that when Archibald Cameron of Locheill travelled to the d’Haberville’s manoir, la Corriveau had yet to perform her dastardly deed. Arché went to the Manoir several years before the Corriveau was hanged and then suspended in a chained gibbet. So it is not possible for Archibald Cameron of Locheill to have been grabbed by her body.

—ooo—

Fortunately, fiction has its prerogatives. We must therefore give Aubert the Gaspé some latitude in the name of poetic licence and good storytelling. Fiction and the art have their own rules which allow even the idealization of New France. I have looked upon Gaspé’s idealization of the past as a flaw, but I have since meditated upon this matter, fiction in particular, and revised my last blog accordingly, but not drastically.

For instance, Blanche remains too pure. She knows that as a British soldier, Archibald had to follow orders and burn down the Manoir. She knows it broke him. She therefore forgives him and so does Jules. Consequently, there is more to Blanche’s story, but she will not marry Arché.

La Corriveau, illustration by Charles Walter Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The nineteenth-century is Edgar Allan Poe’s century. In former years one had dreaded the supernatural, but Victor Hugo was communicating with the dead.

La Corriveau’s skeleton terrorising a traveller one stormy night.[ii]

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[i] John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham GCB, PC (12 April 1792 – 28 July 1840)

[ii] Charles Walter Simpson (1878 – 1942), illustration for his Légendes du Saint-Laurent, 1926.

http://pegasusgallery.ca/artist/Charles_Simpson.html

The Aftermath (cont’d): Aubert de Gaspé’s Anciens Canadiens

30 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Canada, Literature

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Arché, Canadien, French Canadian, Longue-Pointe, Montreal, Montreal Canadiens, Quebec, Seven Years' War

The Ice Bridge at Longue-Pointe, by Cornelius Krieghoof, 1847-1848

Cornelius Krieghoof’s paintings show a mythical Quebec. Similarly, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé‘s (30 October 1786 – 29 January 1871) Les Anciens Canadiens (1863) mythifies the Canadians of Old. Les Anciens Canadiens, a novel, was first serialized in Les Soirées canadiennes, a magazine founded in 1861 by H. R. Casgrain, A. Gérin-Lajoie, the author of Un Canadien errant (the words only), F. A. H. La Rue and J. C. Taché.

A Literary Homeland Novel & an historical novel

Aubert de Gaspé wrote his Anciens Canadiens, Quebec (1863) when he was in his mid-seventies and did so in response to the Report of John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham GCB, PC (12 April 1792 – 28 July 1840), in which Durham stated that the Canadiens did not have a history or a literature. Les Anciens Canadiens therefore constitutes a Patrie Littéraire achievement. In 1890, Charles G. D. Roberts‘s KCMG, FRSC (10 January 1860 – 26 November 1943) translated Gaspé’s novel entitled The Canadians of Old, but I have yet to explore translations of Les Anciens Canadiens.

Given that it was written one hundred years after the Treaty of Paris (1763), one may think this novel has little to do with the aftermath of the “conquest,” except that it is a historical novel in which events take place as the Province of Québec replaces Nouvelle-France, which Aubert de Gaspé memorialized and idealized.

Les Anciens Canadiens‘s main protagonists are Jules d’Haberville, the son of a seigneur, and Archibald Cameron of Locheill, an exiled Highlander, both of whom are students at the Jesuit seminary in Quebec City and both of whom are fated to fight on opposite sides during the Seven Years’ War or French and Indian War.

Moreover, while visiting Jules’s father manoir, Archibald meets Blanche, Jules’s sister, and the two fall in love, which almost takes us back to Krieghoof’s two major themes: the habitant and the Amerindian. Krieghoof was fond of genre themes and, among these themes, a “typical scene” was one where “a British soldier flirts with a young francophone woman, the intimate moment interrupted by her husband or a parent.”^[i]

Archibald, renamed Arché, is not “a British soldier flirting with a young francophone woman.”^[^ii] However, like a “parent,” the parents of a French-Canadian girl, Blanche herself does not think she should marry Arché. She is the daughter of a seigneur and she rejects Arché who is not just “un bon Anglais,” but Scottish and extremely handsome. Blanche is simply too pure. It is at times possible to correct the accidents of history.

Dumais’s gratitude & the habitant as voyageur

However, being Scottish does save Archibald’s life. The novel contains two perilous and related events. Early in the novel, Dumais, an habitant, crosses the Rivière-du-Sud when the ice is too thin and breaks. The Canadiens made ice bridges, as depicted in Krieghoff’s painting above. In fact, Dumais is the victim of a genuine débâcle. He breaks a leg and is hanging from a tree hoping to be rescued. Archibald turns into a formidable athlete and saves Dumais’s life.

Later in the novel, Dumais will save Archibald’s life. The British have attacked New France and Archibald is ordered to burn properties, including the d’Haberville’s manoir, which he doesn’t want to do. However, as he is destroying properties, Archibald is captured by Amerindians and is about to be tortured and burned when Dumais surfaces, looking like an Amerindian, and tells the Amerindians that their captive is not an Englishman, but Scottish and that “les Écossais sont les sauvages des Anglais[,]”^[iii]or “the Scots are savages to the English.” Dumais then goes on to tell that Archie is the young man who saved his life on the day the ice broke.

Dumais even reveals that is not altogether the Amerindian he appears to be, but a sort of “voyageur,” the often métissé French-Canadian who manned the birch-bark canoes, first for fur-traders and later for Scottish explorers who crossed the continent, the voyageur who spoke the Amerindian languages and married Amerindians.

Reference to Cooper and Chateaubriand

Interestingly, Les Anciens Canadiens, contains a reference to James Fenimore Cooper and, indeed, written by a Cooper the tragic events at the Rivière-du-Sud may have been better told. “Only a Cooper or a Chateaubriand could have done justice to a depiction of the tragic events taking place on the shore of the Rivière-du-Sud.” « La plume d’un Cooper, d’un Chateaubriand, pourrait seule peindre dignement le spectacle qui frappe leurs regards sur la berge de la Rivière-du-Sud. »^[iv^] Given Chateaubriand’s masterful style and Cooper’s quickly penned realism, this comparison is not altogether felicitous or convincing.

A Flaw, but not too tragic

Yes, there is the flaw. Like Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Aubert de Gaspé’s Anciens Canadiens is a page-turner, but Aubert de Gaspé so idealizes New France that a comparison with Cooper is again rather inappropriate. The seigneur is too cordial and life at the manoir, too perfect: the meal, the May Fest, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the spontaneous singing, the good gentleman who has been imprisoned because others spent his fortune, the priest (le curé), the gentle treatment of the seigneur’s black slave, the friendship between Jules and Arché: frères (brothers), the much too “noble” Blanche. In fact, even Archibald’s heroism is also a little too heroic, but it is the tone of mythologies. They provide a glorious past.

__________________

^[i] Arlene Gehmacher, “Cornelius Krieghoof,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/cornelius-david-krieghoff

^[ii]Ibid.

^[iii]Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, Les Anciens Canadiens (Éditions Fides, collection Bibliothèque québécoise, 1988[1864]), p. 239.

^[iv]Les Anciens Canadiens, p. 79.

^[v]Arlene Gehmacher, “Cornelius Krieghoof,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/cornelius-david-krieghoff