Windows accompany our lives, punctuate them, bright or shady depending on the light, the seasons and our moods. Mediation between interior and exterior, they embody openness and confinement, refuge and escape. Along her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand opens a few windows overlooking here or elsewhere, very contemporary or reminiscent of History. Last of seven articles in our Windows series.
last June. I am blown away by the place, as if the beauty of the world had fallen in concentrate here, in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, north shore of the Saint-Laurent, between Quebec and Baie-Saint-Paul. Huge window open to the sky, the river and, over there in the distance, the Côte-du-Sud, Montmagny, L’Islet, Berthier-sur-Mer.
“You pass the church, you climb the hill and then you take an immediate left. This is before the ski lifts. I did all that well and went straight ahead. Turning around, I see, barely visible in the decor, a plaque: “1909-1983 Here Gabrielle Roy lived and wrote every summer for the last 30 years of her life. »
A fence closes the place. Never mind, I pass below. Gabrielle Roy, wherever she is, will forgive me. I just want, if possible, to see, to glimpse, where the giantess of our letters wrote part of her work, including the famous This summer that sang. I want to see with my eyes the window of his dreams.
I am thinking of what the French writer Sylvain Tesson calls his high geographical places: “Their natural architecture, their formal beauty, he writes, speaks for them. I find myself in one of them without a doubt. High spiritual places “which pull the soul out of its lethargy”. Not that I feel my soul particularly lethargic in this place that makes us bigger than ourselves. Finally, high places of creation. “There, artists have composed eternal works. For Sylvain Tesson, it is the country house of the painter Nicolas de Staël in Provence or the apartment of the poet Anna Akhmatova in Saint-Petersburg. For me, it’s Gabrielle Roy’s window in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François; that of Anne Hébert (1916-2000), rue de Pontoise, in Paris; that of Fernand Leduc (1916-2014), avenue du Mont-Royal, in Montreal.
This summer that sang at the window
The cottage of the one who was born in Manitoba in 1909 is modest, nothing but very ordinary, but all windows, which runs along its length a screened veranda. It is located at the top of a cliff which embraces the whole landscape. Not a cat around. Not a cat, but a dashing deer which suddenly crosses the decor, in no way frightened by the human in the process of pressing the latch on the door. To my amazement, the veranda is not locked, nor the house! How to resist ? I enter.
I hardly dare to look inside, I feel like a voyeur, a sniffler, in a somewhat sacred place. I only have eyes for the window where she wrote her masterpieces. And for his work table, offered like a tray splashed with the light of this late afternoon, where sits an old telescope. Will I put my eyes in his eyes? No.
The river below flows through a gap in the trees.
I see them, Gabrielle and friend Berthe carrying old cousin Martine. She was returning to the country “after fifty years of exile in a dwelling without air or horizon”, to see the St. Lawrence again before dying. They made him a seat with their four hands crossed, explains the writer in This summer that sang. Then arriving on the beach, they left it “alone with the river”. “Martine was no longer moving, she stood on the threshold of immensity. »
The old lady, who had missed the river currents all her life in town, had taken off her shoes. “The water circled her pale ankles. The sea air bathed his worn face. She had suddenly become very present to the invisible […] Suddenly, barefoot at the edge of the summer sky, she began to ask questions—probably the only ones that matter: Why do we live? What did we come to do on earth? »
Words and paintings
She, Anne Hébert, knew why she lived. For writing. Unforgettable, this window of the small apartment in the rue de Pontoise in Paris. A living picture, of branches and antlers. That I had the privilege of seeing one day, an opening under which she wrote for 25 years, “buried in a kind of green case”, facing a small courtyard “which bathes a green light through so many foliage “. These words, I found them in The Torrentwritten by this prodigy of our letters in 1950.
He too, Fernand Leduc, knew why he lived. To paint the light and place it on his canvases. This was the great obsession of this brilliant son of Quebec painting. At 95, after almost sixty years spent in France, he had moved into an apartment facing Mount Royal. There his patriarchal eyes saw their last fall in tall windows. The mountain blazed with red and gold, maintaining like a fire this inner light that never left him. “The eternal is within us,” he confided to journalist Jean-Louis Gauthier.
The white butterfly window
Another window haunts me. This one, further away. That of a painting by Elena Yushina, a Ukrainian artist. The wind blows there with full armfuls, as if to sweep away the madness of men. I found Elena in Crimea. She did not wish to express herself, tormented by fear, preferring to let her painting speak. How else to understand it. This is also war.
On the windowsill she painted, a white butterfly rests on a cup of coffee. I showed this painting to Irina, a former accountant in kyiv, now a chambermaid in a Montreal hotel, welcomed into the country last April. Oh ! the courage of Irina, whose existence starts from zero, pushing, from one room to another, a trolley harnessed with brooms, mops, topped with sheets, towels. Learning French and English. Now her daughter’s morale came with her. Continuing life. “Whatever window I cross, I only see my lost country. Elena’s painting moves him to tears. “If I was this white butterfly, I would fly straight to Ukraine. »
Return to Petite-Rivière-Saint-François. I leave Gabrielle Roy’s chalet as quickly as I entered it. Then go down to the river by a path she must have taken often.
The sun is already disappearing below the horizon. The infinite sky swallows the river and the entire southern coast, in the distance. I find myself before the most unfathomable of windows. “Their domain is always the sky, advances the writer Kamel Daoud, who is the largest model. “Why do we live? For times like this. That’s why we’re on earth, for those moments, of pure presence. Canceled in grace. Finally satisfied. Safe.
PS The day after my visit, I told my “misdeed” to an official of the municipality of Petite-Rivière-Saint-François. She plans to make Gabrielle Roy’s chalet a place of memory open to the public. “It will be a small museum, explains Marc Bertrand, who will respect the modesty of the place and that of the writer. I realized that I was forgiven for my break and enter.