Once a month, Le Devoir de literature, written by writers from Quebec, proposes to revisit, in the light of current events, the works of ancient and recent history of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
The siege of kyiv, capital of Ukraine, is still remembered. It will have lasted almost two months, from February 25 to April 2, 2022, and ended with the retreat of the Russian army in front of the Ukrainian resistance. In the south of the country, the siege of Mariupol will have meant three months of almost complete destruction between February 24 and May 20, 2022 and ended, conversely, with the victory of the Russian army. As these lines are written, the war in Ukraine continues and one can think, alas, that other cities on the planet will be besieged in the event of conflicts, since this is a tried and tested tactic.
There was the siege of Sarajevo by the Serbs (1992-1996); that of Leningrad by the Wehrmacht (1941-1944); that of the Protestant La Rochelle by Louis XIII (1627-1628). As for the siege of Troy by a coalition of Greek city-states, if it probably did not take place, it has for him to have been at the origin of two immense poems of which all (yes, all) the Western literature, like the goddess Athena, will come out, helmeted and armed.
Quebec literature is obviously part of the whole. Obviously ? In the nineteenth century, this belonging was far from obvious for the simple reason that Canadian literature, as we then said of works published in French in Canada, was not even certain to exist. We groped ourselves, we wondered, we counted the number of works published, we submitted them to criticism, we were seized with doubts.
Quebec literature is no longer asking the question of its existence. Rather that of its status and its distribution abroad. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century, he found a poet, Octave Crémazie, to work, with his scholar friends from the Canadian Institute of Quebec, for the emergence of a local literature, by creating reviews and circles conducive to the life of the mind and, in the case of Crémazie, by relentlessly filing verses in the then very modern sensibility of the Romantic School. For singing so convincingly The flag of Carillon and The Old Canadian SoldierCrémazie thus achieved, during his lifetime, the status of national poet.
The Franco-Prussian War
But we were talking about the siege of cities. Let’s go back on the arrow of time: 1er September 1870. The war is not world, it is Franco-German and declared since July of this same year. At Sedan that day the Prussian army of William Ier defeats the French army commanded by Emperor Napoleon III, who is taken prisoner. The defeat is total. On September 17, two of the Prussian armies surrounded Paris, which decided to fight. The siege of Paris begins.
Octave Crémazie had been living there in exile for eight years, under the assumed name of Jules Fontaine. He has known many miserable garnis, and he now lives in rue de l’Entrepôt, a small icy room which obliges him to haunt the public places open free of charge to find a little warmth there. He is 44 years old, his health is poor, he hardly sees anyone, lives meagerly on his wages as a representative of the trading house Bossange, whose owner, Hector Bossange, a friend, lived for a few years in Canada and married a Canadian.
What a contrast with his Parisian life of yesteryear! It’s because there were two Octaves. In Quebec, a squat, bald man, with an ungrateful physique, a bachelor fleeing from women, leading the modest lifestyle of a poet-bookseller who lives only by books, can cite Sophocles and the Ramayana, Juvenal and the Arab poets. But as soon as he arrived in Paris, where he trod the pavement almost every year from 1850 onwards, the same little man was transformed into a rich merchant, socialite, strolling the boulevards with a top hat and a cane with a golden knob, receiving in cafes and restaurants its business relations.
It was from Paris, in fact, that Octave Crémazie supplied novelties to the J. & O. Crémazie bookstore which he owned with his brothers, Jacques and Joseph, at 12, rue de la Fabrique, in Quebec. To this bookstore, whose sign was a big golden book swaying in the wind, Octave will therefore have delivered for years cases of books, wines, cheese wheels, umbrellas, church ornaments, all heterogeneous objects, stamped Paris. And too bad if such extravaganzas didn’t always sell out.
In 1906, at the time of inaugurating his monument in Montreal, in the Saint-Louis Square, his friends made Octave Crémazie a “martyr of the Ideal”, a “victim of the dream”. Let’s also say a dazed, intoxicated with his Parisian life. A skilful younger brother, who will have bamboozled Joseph, the latter having left him free rein with the suppliers. Something more serious: a forger who counterfeits signatures as collateral for loans contracted.
The day comes when headlong rush is no longer possible. Under the guise of prosperity, the bookstore is forced into bankruptcy. On the evening of November 10, 1862, some lawyer friends and his brothers got together to try to help him, because the man was kind and loved. At this last chance meeting, Octave does not show up. The next day, he embarks for France, his creditors on his heels – like Balzac, well…
Down and Out
But then, without resources, it’s over for him of the shimmering Paris of yesteryear. Moreover, his muse left him. Admittedly, he turns verses in his head, without managing to put them in writing. And the poem The walk of three deadthe first part of which had appeared in review in TheCanadian nightsshortly before his departure, and had earned him praise, will forever remain unfinished.
But his poetic slump is precisely what will ensure his posthumous reputation. As he had said in a letter of “impossible verses” from a certain M. Benoît: “Why the devil does this man write verse? It’s so easy not to do it”, Octave Crémazie seems to us today at his best when he renounces poetry. His letters sent to his family are of an agile style, abound in savory details and have not aged. And in his letters to his friend Abbé Casgrain, another figure of an original scholar, Crémazie shows himself so perceptive on certain questions that several passages have become pieces of anthology, including this famous word, written in 1866, on the lack of culture. of his compatriots: “unfortunately we only have a society ofgrocers. I call grocer any man who has no other knowledge than that which is necessary for him to earn his living. »
It was then that, locked up in a capital starved by the Prussians, Crémazie decided to hold a Diary of Paris headquarters. These notes, which go from September 13 to December 19, 1870, will become letters addressed to his mother and his brothers in Quebec. “I will not tell you the great facts of the siege, he warns them from the outset, but only the small facts, the rumors, the gossip”, which does not prevent the political opinions of the author, often reactionary, to have a good place there. the Journal of the siege of Paris was not intended for publication. So much the better. Far from his lyre, Crémazie unbuttons and the pleasure of reading is all the greater. Some examples.
October 20: “Yesterday we were served donkey. Roasted, this meat tastes like fresh pork. She is heavy. We are assured that in the suburbs people eat rats. Gourmets claim that rat ham is a marvel of delicate flesh. I don’t want to taste master raccoon. »
October 24: “We are told that the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène, which crosses the [11e] arrondissement, will henceforth bear the name of Voltaire […] We removed the mayor who made war on crucifixes, but to console the radicals, we give them the statue of the one who wrote: Let’s crush the infamous ! »
October 28: “We almost had a coal riot. […] a charcoal maker had the triumphant, but somewhat scoundrel, idea of selling small pieces of wood soaked in ink for real charcoal. Perfectly justified anger of the housewives, who want to hack the Auvergnat guilty of this bad and dishonest joke. »
November 19: “We killed, for lack of fodder and to make the fresh meat last longer, the animals of the Jardin d’acclimatation. Thanks to the massacre of these poor beasts, Parisians will be able to eat llama, deer, gazelle, bison, bear and elk. We now have a new market, the Rat Market, established in Town Hall Square. They live in cages like rabbits. »
The siege of Paris lifted, the letters will continue, just as tasty. During the Commune, which horrified him, Octave Crémazie moved to Orléans, then to Bordeaux, working for the shipping agency run by the son of his benefactor Bossange. Then again in Le Havre, where he died, in the greatest solitude, on January 16, 1879. The three dead are now four.