The other day I caught in a bookstore The oblique city, comic strip published by Alto. Having grown up and lived in Quebec, the works evoking my cradle attract me like magnets. A comic on her! Great ! Of course, Michel Rabagliati in Paul in Quebec had opened to my hometown its huts nourished by mourning, new beginnings and bittersweet daily life. This time, on magical texts by Ariane Gélinas and sumptuously Gothic drawings by Christian Quesnel, I discovered an album with a fantastico-historical flavor dedicated to these places laden with memories full of cobblestones.
The authors retrace the pthe course of New France until the Conquest under the high protection of the goddess Elkanah. Here is Quebec recreated in its dreamlike and mythical dimension, with Aboriginal people as tutelary spirits, in a work inspired by the stories of the great American writer HP Lovecraft, master of horror.
The author of Cthulhu mythos had re-energized himself three times in Quebec during the 1930s, fascinated by the memory of the place. The past of old towns invites you to dig into their roots. Thus Lovecraft had laid down rather boring writings on this one and its French colony (published posthumously under the title To Quebec and the Stars). A poet of darkness level with the macadam, it shrivels up.
Driven by his prose but reanimating it, the authors of The oblique city therefore made this universe truly Lovecraftian. And to combine myths and terrors with sections of our hallucinated history in blood and gushing color, against a backdrop of bats, treacherous springs and skulls grafted onto bodies in uniforms. We enter familiar but bewitched territory.
Closing this phantasmagorical album with flying vessels and the Frontenac masked like the cannibal of the silence of the lambs, I thought of the artists whom the charms of Quebec had been able to inspire in all tones, in many fields. They are legion to forge its legend. “It is whispered in the alleys that the cats are the guardians of this walled city sheltered from time,” says Lovecraft in The oblique city. So let haunted cities have the power to make people dream. Clichés? Tributes instead. And my finger of chauvinism helping…
Didn’t Hitchcock film her in I Confessbefore Robert Lepage followed in his footsteps through The confessional ? Trenet will have sung it in the moonlight, in gray weather, in dry weather. Charlebois flew to her on the wings of an angel. Its cape and its walls have inspired painters like Jean Paul Lemieux and Cornelius Krieghoff as well as Sunday daubers. Its Château Frontenac waltzes in towers and gables over a thousand watercolors of the rue du Trésor. In The Plouffes, the novelist Roger Lemelin, then the filmmaker Gilles Carle made the inhabitants of the foot of the Pente-Douce swing. Jacques Poulin walked through its alleys and its urban cemetery in the company of the cats of his life. Anne Hébert took us on a tour of her meanders in her first garden. So many other creators celebrated it. Everyone makes their own list.
Last Sunday, for the saga of the third link, François Legault urged Montrealers to no longer look down on the people of Quebec. But why rekindle deadly vanished inter-city quarrels? Montreal has adopted the mayors of the capital and joins in its problems of traffic jams. Quebec asserted itself. On the chicane side, there is nothing more to see. Circulate!
Admittedly, my cradle has a conservative side, trash radios, huddled politicians and tourist hordes with overly flashy appointed businesses. All rise to the assault of its steep coasts. A muse is worth it. No but ! Contemporary and encrusted, this city in its past-present, with its museums, its Diamond, its dog that gnaws the bone and its rue Sous-le-Cap on the side of the rock, could smile at the condescension of others. . We live there as elsewhere with the phone in hand, but in an impregnable setting captured between two text messages. Many Montrealers, although crazy about the hectic pace of the city (I am one of them), sometimes envy Quebecers their Plains of Abraham, their Breakneck staircase and their languid steps. To each city dweller his demons and wonders.
And when the poet Émile Nelligan wrote these verses: “What do the old streets tell you / Of the old cities / Among the increased dust / Of their dilapidated state / Dreaming of things that have disappeared / What do the old streets tell you? », it seems to me that he must have been thinking of the secrets whispered under the vaults of Quebec. Moreover, passing through there, I think I hear these ancient voices again, exclaiming: how full of mysteries is this city! Before returning dreamy, like a half-awakened child.