Pierre Lahoud has been known for more than forty years as one of the constant defenders of Quebec heritage. Aerial photographer, he travels the Quebec sky as a lover of the landscape, in search of all corners of the territory. Behind him are more than 800,000 photographs of the country. They tell the story of our shared world, while revealing, from unexpected points of view, its extreme fragility. It is largely on the basis of this knowledge acquired from the air that Lahoud came back down to earth to anchor his perspectives in regional realities, in everyday proximity, in the name of his concerns as a historian.
Under the name of Éditions GID, Lahoud has been offering a collection entitled “Curiosités” for several years. These are historical essays, richly illustrated, devoted to the various regions of Quebec, which allow you to discover them from unexpected angles.
To date, twelve titles have been released. From Trois-Rivières to Lac-Saint-Jean, from Lotbinière to Baie-des-Chaleurs, via the Eastern Townships, Pierre Lahoud and his collaborators provide a view of the country from inside a past rediscovered.
It is from the pen of Lahoud himself that the thirteenth title of this collection appears. It is devoted to the mythical Île d’Orléans. This island, cradle of part of Quebec, is the country of Lahoud. He lives there. He feeds on it.
Like all the books in the collection, printed in an elongated format and dressed in flap covers, Curiosities of Île d’Orléans presents many photographs. They serve to support a series of digressions through which the reader is invited to lose himself to soon be won over by the joy of finding himself more at ease in a world that he learns to discover through a historical perspective.
An inspiration
“In the past, I was passionate about Historical Research Bulletin “, explains Pierre Lahoud, always joyful and enthusiastic, as usual.
Published from the end of the XIXe century under the direction of archivist Pierre-Georges Roy, the Historical Research Bulletin survived until the 1960s. It was intended for a public of specialists as well as scholarly amateurs, or even simple history enthusiasts.
According to the interests of each, one found there, pell-mell, all sorts of facts, discoveries, reminders, links. Local history and national history were brought together in the same spirit. Archaeology, biography, numismatics and various archival items held hands. All of this made it possible to advance knowledge of the past. Not without ambition, Roy wanted his magazine to become the most renowned of its kind in French Canada.
” The Historical Research Bulletin was not shown. There was nothing in there as an image. Only texts, sometimes quite long. Yet we know how important the image is for today’s eye! It gave me the idea of producing books, somewhat on this model, but illustrated, with lots of photos. Books that include all kinds of information that has disappeared over time or that is now hard to find. I wanted to bring it all together, under the same cover, according to the regions of Quebec. »
The surprise of Île d’Orléans
“Honestly, I didn’t expect to find so many new things on Île d’Orléans,” he says. All of this tells us about our society, about life here. »
At the Church of Sainte-Famille, a building that dates from before the English Conquest, we find the largest collection of works by the Baillargé family. “The Île d’Orléans has more than ten paintings by François Baillargé. I didn’t know there were so many. This Baillargé studied in Paris from 1778 to 1781. “It is amusing to see that, as in Europe, we had bishops here who asked that works of art be retouched for reasons of chastity. We end up with sexes that are concealed by an addition of paint…”
A painting by Baillargé inspired by a work by Auguste Coypel is still visible at Sainte-Famille, even if the bishop had demanded that the Christ, originally naked, be covered with a somewhat coarse loincloth. Perhaps it was François Baillargé’s son who had taken it upon himself to retouch the painting in this way, like many others deemed licentious by the dignitaries of the Church.
Still at Sainte-Famille, as in most old Quebec churches, there is a tetragram supposed to represent, in Hebrew, the name of God. “The decorator couldn’t have known what that Hebrew writing was! He simply wrote 777, because it’s not so far from the devil’s 666, after all,” laughs Pierre Lahoud.
I found so many exciting things about Île d’Orléans that I can write another book with everything I have!
“There is an Anglican chapel on the island that no one knows about. She is magnificent. All in red pine. There was never any electricity in there. Nobody knows her. You have to see this! I found so many exciting things about Île d’Orléans that I can write another book with everything I have! This book has so far a hundred curiosities. “I didn’t know, before publishing it, that there had been a nuclear shelter on the Île d’Orléans… That will be for the second volume! »
new discoveries
Throughout the books that Pierre Lahoud edited in the “Curiosités” collection, he never ceased to be surprised by new discoveries. Sometimes it’s the little things that delight him. “Toponyms give an idea of how people liked to live and show how they didn’t take themselves too seriously. In Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, he explains, there is a rue de la Branlette which leads to the rue de l’Église. “No need to invent this kind of thing: it’s already there, around us! »
In the same vein, Pierre Lahoud recalls that in the Gaspé, there was a street called Fourche-à-Ida. “There was a spur, and I think the business there was owned by a lady Ida. It was the time when we spread used oil on the dirt roads, so that the dust remained on the ground when we traveled there. And the priest, at that time, had made a call to the pulpit to advise the parishioners that we were going to grease Ida’s fork… There is really, even in surnames, something that reflects life in common. »
Other titles are planned in the same collection over the coming months. “There will be one in the Laurentians. Another on the Côte-de-Beaupré. Yet another on the Bas-Saint-Laurent. Then the continuation of what we did on the Gaspé Peninsula, further north this time, from Gaspé to Newport,” he concludes.