The windows accompany our lives, punctuate them, bright or shadowy depending on the light,seasons and our moods. Mediation between inside and outside, they embody openness or confinement, escape or refuge. Along her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand opens a few windows giving here or elsewhere, very contemporary or rcalling history. Third of seven articles in our Windows series.
Two long white swans cross the sky above the former convent of La Baumette, near Angers, France. I had never seen swans in flight; I have always seen them posed on a stretch of calm water, in pairs, as if kneeling, out of sight. Pastedechouan had seen bustards and white geese flying above Tadoussac, always in flocks and garish, so beautiful, so appetizing, prepared by his mother. From the small window of his cell in La Baumette, was he also able to observe the flight of large swans, immaculate as the day? Was there even an opening in his monk’s cell embedded in the cliff, on which the Récollets convent was built?
1620. The young Innu Pastedechouan had been entrusted by his father to the missionary Jean Dolbeau — yes, the one from the city of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean — so that he could take him to France to learn the language and customs of the whites. The young man would be a sort of economic ambassador and he would bring back to his community valuable information aimed at facilitating trade (mainly in furs) with the French. An unknown part of our history, these exchanges were not so rare. They “fit in well with Innu culture, since children were traditionally given away to cement important new alliances,” writes Emma Anderson, whose doctoral thesis was written around the character of Pastedechouan and published by Université Laval. in 2009. “In addition, other young Innu had already crossed the Atlantic to negotiate military or economic pacts. »
But the Récollets, themselves, nourished other objectives, essentially religious, for their protege. First the salvation of his soul. Pastedechouan would also be used to raise funds for their missions in New France. And back home, he would help convert his people to the Catholic faith. In addition, the young catechumen would teach his language to the Récollets, who would then be better able to evangelize the Innu.
This is how Pastedechouan spent five years at the convent of La Baumette, from the age of 12 to 17.
From impetuous Saguenay to lazy Maine
The places have changed little for four centuries. Timeless places, in exile from the rest of the world and the city of Angers, prominent with its massive Saint-Maurice cathedral. The owners, Yolande Robert and Jean-Marie Stern, show me around the old convent.
You have to imagine the boy, accustomed to the impetuous courses of the Saguenay and the St. Lawrence, which cross in front of his home in Tadoussac, putting down his small luggage – nothing, to tell the truth – at the convent of La Baumette, located on the banks of the Maine slow and loamy which will flow into the Loire, a little beyond.
You have to imagine him, the bird free from the forests and the wind, enlisted in domestic tasks in the heart of austere days, all the same, punctuated by eight periods of daily prayers in this chapel flanked by stained glass windows where I enter. Did those odd circular windows colored by the sun remind him of the golden star filtering through the spruce and birch trees in Tadoussac?
You have to imagine Pastedechouan sleeping in his den, from where the stone oozes humidity, he who comes from a country where you fall asleep at the foot of a dying fire, in the rustle of conifers. “At night, we locked the monks in their cell so that they wouldn’t run away,” says Yolande. But where could Pastedechouan have escaped? He knew nothing of this country where he had landed. Some of the young recluses have engraved keys on the walls, which my hosts show me—keys as in “taking the key to the fields,” which they obsessively dreamed of.
You still have to imagine him climbing those same gloomy stairs, adorned with crosses, which I take with my hosts to the refectory where the adolescent was eating under a mortified Saint Jerome, harnessed in his hair shirt and beating himself with a stone. Pastedechouan swallowed his wheat porridge there, far from the furry and feathered game that was rather his usual Tadoussac. “At that time, Jean-Marie told me, only the nobility here had the right to hunt game. »
And then, there was his baptism with great pomp, in front of the All-Angers meeting, on April 25, 1621, a year after his arrival. The crowd was jostling, eager to see the strange being from the New World. The teenager “was stripped, coated with a large quantity of holy oil”, describes Emma Anderson, “and then baptized by sprinkling”. He became Pierre-Antoine Pastedechouan, from the names of his godfather and godmother, Pierre de Rohan and Antoinette de Bretagne, Prince and Princess of Guémené.
Painful return to Tadoussac
I can no longer go to Tadoussac without thinking of him. He returned there after five years, dressed in French clothes, hardly recognizing those who had missed him so much and struggling to speak the language of his family. Pastedechouan “was no longer identifiable as one of them,” said Emma Anderson.
In truth, he had implored the Récollets to keep him in the convent of La Baumette. “Don’t send me back among those beasts that don’t know God,” he had begged them.
His reimmersion among his people proved to be a series of defeats and disappointments. He, torn between two loyalties, that to the Innu and that to the priests, the body here and the spirit elsewhere, trying to reconnect with the culture of his childhood and despising it all at the same time. “The expressions of repugnance toward Aboriginal beliefs and practices attributed to her,” argues scholar Anderson, “were characteristic of the reaction of many Aboriginal children from the 17e century torn from their society. They had become dependent on the French language, religion and culture.
Driven by a panicky fear of meeting Aboriginal people, Pastedechouan refused to take part in Innu ceremonies, dying at the same time to be accepted by his community. No longer knowing how to hunt, he was the laughing stock of his people, for whom hunting success was the cardinal virtue associated with virility, sustenance and survival. His successive marriages were failures. He remained tragically incapable of assuming his life as a man, husband, son, brother. Confit of guilt, unsuitable for both, torn between two spiritualities, that of the manitou of the Innu and that of Christ of the French.
Tadoussac, April 2022. I scan the landscape still flecked with snow. Pastedechouan died alone, of hunger and cold, somewhere in this forest with feet soaked in the Saguenay River and the St. Lawrence River. It was in the winter of 1636; he was 28 years old. I see him, stretched out in the whiteness between spruce trunks, no longer moving. It snows gently on his face. The pale sky is an open window, perhaps that of deliverance. He will no longer have to choose.