I went to meet her at her home. She lived in a small apartment in a large, soulless building, in the heart of a working-class neighborhood in Montreal. Violet Chambers lived alone. Her Gabriel was dead. Her brother, the fiery trade unionist Michel Chartrand, asked me to greet her on his behalf, while begging her to excuse him for coming to see her so infrequently.
She spoke French with a delicious British accent. Near her, to talk to me better about it, she had placed a portrait of her Gaby. A lovely photograph taken in the studio, according to an aesthetic which showed, beyond a particular man, an entire era that had vanished with him.
Because of her accent, whatever topic was being discussed, Violet Chambers always talked a little about England. In 1945, in London, she married Gaby. How did they get to know each other? I don’t know very well anymore. A soldiers’ ball, I think. But perhaps I am confusing it with another war story, with another of those love stories born during a leave of absence, between two visits to the outposts of death, as in one of the disturbing news by Roald Dahl.
Gabriel Chartrand had a narrow escape. In 1943, under the name Claude Carton, he was dropped off in France by a small plane. A hundred spies like him crossed the Channel.
His mission was simple. At least in theory. He had to teach what he knew how to do so well: using explosives and weapons to free himself from the Germans. In this France under the heel of the Nazis, the spy Chartrand was welcomed by Claude Malraux, the brother of the writer André Malraux. He joined two resistance networks.
Before the war, Gaby Chartrand worked for an insurer. In France, his only assurance was that he would end up being pinched. Sure enough, the Gestapo caught him. He risked everything. At the first opportunity, he took off. He was shot. By a miracle, he escaped death. Then he managed to return to England.
There were several other deceivers of the same type as Chartrand engaged in the secret services. Around twenty Quebecers were spies during the war. Some left their skin there. Others were tortured, without any treatment. It was them that I thought of while listening to the first two episodes ofIXE-13 and the race for uranium, the new television series scripted by Gilles Desjardins. The character of Agent IXE-13 corresponds to a sort of intersection of their lives. Of course, Agent IXE-13, “the ace of Canadian spies”, is a fiction. Captain Jean Thibault, played brilliantly by actor Marc-André Grondin, never existed. And yet.
Originally, IXE-13 was a series of spy novels written in haste by Pierre Saurel, pseudonym of actor Pierre Daignault. Between 1947 and 1966, in the form of booklets, these adventures were sold in tobacco shops, restaurants and newsstands. More than 300 IXE-13 adventures were published. It is, in the half-country of Quebec, one of the greatest successes of popular literature. Gilles Desjardins recomposed an identity for this character, as we were able to do recently in France with the figure of Arsène Lupin. Is it successful? Hell yes!
Jacques Godbout had already put his nose on the side of IXE-13. He rightly felt that there was something strong there. It was in 1971. The director had nevertheless decided to revisit the popular world of IXE-13 with a lot of lightness, looking up a little, it seems to me, at this popular world, offering a a series of pirouettes in the form of a musical comedy, with psychotronic accents combined with the schoolboy humor of the Cynics. What IXE-13 could express about an entire society was somehow neutralized, then swept under the rug, as if it was not worth seriously considering the aftermath of the war from popular culture.
Gilles Desjardins envisaged the figure of IXE-13 quite differently. A secret agent, this dual personality, isn’t this, to begin with, the perfect symbolic representation of Quebec’s identity malaise? Hubert Aquin understood this instinctively. It is not difficult to imagine that we are still swimming in the fears swirling around IXE-13 at the end of the war. Fear of strangers. Fear of immigrants. Fear of being replaced. Fear of strikes and worker demands. Fear of vice. Fear of sexuality. Fear of war. Fear of nuclear weapons. Fear of Asian spies. Fear of Moscow’s appetite.
Is the time of Duplessis blowing again? In any case, we have echoes of it. On February 14, during a radio appearance, sports columnist Réjean Tremblay, always sure of his ideas, recounted a party private with people from Quebec. People who have “a lot of money” and who are afraid, he clarified. “Mayor Marchand scares them. The rest of them say to themselves: “Hey, I didn’t vote and I didn’t live to have a communist city”. Quebec became the Quebec Soviet Socialist Republic. ” Really ?
When, in 1951, the Trois-Rivières bridge fell due to incompetent engineers, Duplessis pointed the finger, once again, at the communists. The Red Scare served to justify in many ways the maintenance of the privileges enjoyed by those who had taken control of the common wealth. Some people still seem tempted today to brandish this scarecrow in order to maintain their privileges.
Basically, the new series scripted by Gilles Desjardins is timely. The universe of IXE-13 does not exactly allow you to return to childhood, enjoying traces of an outdated past lined with secret agents, as one might believe at first glance. Above all, it offers us the opportunity to regain humanity, by learning to understand a little better the fears that continue to haunt us.