It is said that reality surpasses fiction. But is it always true? In the series Tales and Facts, The duty explores the real and fictional dimensions of Quebec’s legendary stories and tales. Today, the first text in the series, the terrifying destiny of Auguste Lemieux, which led to the writing of the novel Maria Chapdelaine.
In Louis Hémon’s novel, Maria Chapdelaine’s heart beats for an adventurer, François Paradis, who gets lost and dies in the forest during an expedition. “He moved away,” wrote Louis Hémon simply as an explanation for the disappearance of François Paradis.
But reality often surpasses fiction. And in real life, the character of François Paradis would be inspired by Auguste Lemieux, a hunting guide who died in the forest, in much more atrocious conditions. The man was probably devoured by his companions in 1907, a few years before Louis Hémon’s arrival in Péribonka. This is at least what Damase Potvin, himself from the region, told in his book The novel of a novelpublished in 1950, which traces the stay of the writer in this village.
The story was already a lot of talk at the beginning of the XXe century: Auguste Lemieux, who left in the fall to return for Christmas, disappeared in the forest with two Europeans, the Belgian Gabriel Bernard and the Frenchman Joseph Grasset, during a hunting expedition to bring back furs. He was found dead, skinned and partially devoured, possibly by a human, a year later. Like François Paradis, Auguste Lemieux is from Mistassini. But Lemieux is already married to a woman, called Maria, and is the father of several children.
At the time of the discovery of Lemieux’s body, a search warrant was launched to find the two Europeans who accompanied him. To date, Gabriel Bernard has remained untraceable. But Joseph Grasset, who had walked, it is said, to James Bay, returned to face justice and was exonerated from the murder of Auguste Lemieux. However, according to Damase Potvin, who would have heard it by hearsay from a former employee of Hudson’s Bay, a certain Grasset, chief of post in 1910 for Revillon Frères, “was a misanthropic and gloomy man. He had made the trip from Lac Saint-Jean to James Bay on foot and had arrived half dead, having almost died of starvation on the way. He drank a lot, and when he was in the Lord’s vineyards he used to say that he had eaten his companion; which he denied when he came back on an empty stomach and was told what he had said”.
“I looked for the truth and I couldn’t find it,” says Josie-Anne Lemieux, unpacking a voluminous file of old press clippings. Auguste’s great-granddaughter researched her great-grandfather to clarify his origins, and also made an experimental short film on the subject.
“When I was little, I was told that my great-grandfather had died eaten by two French people,” she said in an interview. So she wanted to know more. Auguste Lemieux’s wife having had to remarry following the death of her husband, Josie-Anne’s grandfather was placed very early with the Trappist fathers. When he in turn marries, his wife, like the Laura of Maria Chapdelainedid not enjoy clearing ever more distant lands and the couple moved to Abitibi, says Josie-Anne Lemieux.
Fear of Windigo
In this world with blurred borders, where the runners of the woods rub shoulders with the pioneer pioneers and the sedentary, as still presented very recently in the film Maria Chapdelaine, brought to the screen by Sébastien Pilote, the whole country reveals its pitfalls. At the limit of colonization, beyond the lands cleared by Samuel Chapdelaine, or by those who inspired his character in Louis Hémon, kilometers and kilometers of a wild universe unfold towards the north.
It is in this universe that at the beginning of the XXe century, Malec Bégin, a native of the region, first found several objects that had belonged to Auguste Lemieux, as well as, 50 miles (about 80 km) from his body, a leather bag with a human bone next to it. belonging to him. “Men of the medical art found that the bone came from Lemieux’s body and that the shreds of flesh from the fleshy part of the leg had been eaten by some animal or man”, can we read in an article by the Sun of April 10, 1909 relating the event, and entitled Who killed and ate Lemieux?.
During a second trip, Bégin turns back, terrified by noises he hears in the forest. “He says he heard walking in the water and logging in the wood: he thinks it’s a Windigo, that is to say in the circumstances, he thought it was Bernard turned into a wolf -garou”, we still read in the newspapers of the time.
In the mythologies of several First Peoples, the Windigo is a supernatural, cannibalistic being that seizes humans who have been forced into cannibalism by hunger, cold and extreme loneliness.
The story of Auguste Lemieux, Samuel Bédard told it many times to Louis Hémon, when the French writer worked at home as a henchman, during the few months that he spent all and for all, in 1911, in Peribonka. For Damase Potvin, it is neither more nor less from the history of Auguste Lemieux that was born Maria Chapdelaine, world literary success of the time, still brought to the screen today. “This drama is the one of which François Paradis, in the novel, is the victim. Hémon modified it, no doubt having wanted to lessen its horror”, writes Potvin, in The novel of a novel.
A story that still intrigues
Between reality and fiction, David Bélanger chose fiction. Based on the story of the murder of Auguste Lemieux, he, with Thomas Carrier, developed a reading of Maria Chapdelaine making the murder of François Paradis the hidden text of the novel.
Their book He moved away, investigation into the death of François Paradis, published in 2019 by Nota Bene, explores a subtext that would make the conquest of Maria Chapdelaine the motive for the murder of Paradis by one of his two other suitors, Lorenzo and Eutrope. “The inspiration of this detective reading” of the work Maria Chapdelainesays David Bélanger in an interview, “it’s because the death of François Paradis secretly recounts the death of Auguste Lemieux”.
When the story is transposed into fiction, and is reduced to the issue of a love square, it is only when François Paradis, the chosen lover, the desirable adventurer, disappears in the forest that the two other suitors of Maria can dream of achieving their goals, with her. Meanwhile, the terrifying and savage death of Auguste Lemieux remains unsolved.