René Lévesque. Marguerite Paulin

rue Principale, facing the sea, had no running water, but this lack of resources didn’t last long. Dominique Lévesque was a gifted lawyer. He had charm and managed to make a name for himself. In 1925, he announced to his wife that he had the twenty-three hundred dollars needed to buy a fine house at auction, at the corner of Mount Sorel and Second Streets. The white wooden house had a large balcony and a sloping roof. The windows of the upstairs rooms looked out over the Baie des Chaleurs. A view to make a small, unruly boy dream. Constantly fidgeting, he was such a handful that sometimes his mother had to fasten him to a post of the staircase.

      “It’s time we send René to Rivière-du-Loup,” decreed Diane, who needed rest, having given birth to three more children after René, the eldest.

      Staying with his grandparents was no punishment. He loved taking the train, with its rustic cars, a railway reminiscent of movie westerns. How grand to be free, play at selling penny candy in Grandpa’s general store, and to see Grandma again.

      “René,” she would say affectionately: “let’s have a game of poker. If you lose your dollar, we’ll cancel the debt. But if you win…”

      Clever and astute, René often won the kitty and left for New Carlisle with his card winnings like a jackpot in his pocket. His taste for gambling he derived from his grandmother Alice. The sound of cards being shuffled, the waiting, heart pounding – little by little he began to love this exquisite moment when anything was possible. There was a thin line between winning and losing: he was walking a tightrope. He calculated his chances, then took a wholehearted leap into the unknown.

      René Lévesque would remain a gambler his entire life.

      “The most important man in my life.” In 1986, René Lévesque dedicated his memoirs to his father Dominique. In New Carlisle, the well-known lawyer was his son’s hero. The two resembled one another. A love of books brought them together. In this city at the world’s end, the train brought in the newspapers when the snow wasn’t falling too heavily. They would throw themselves on the Montreal Standard and attack the crossword puzzles, ready to compete. Who would be first to finish filling in the boxes? To lose was humiliating.

      “It’s not fair; you speak better English than I do,” the son would sulk; “after all, your clients write to you in English.”

      He had observed that the father’s correspondence was addressed to Dominique Lévesque, Esq. Where did this unusual title come from? “Esquire” – a word found in the work of Jacques Ferron – used to mean a squire of the minor nobility. Here, the title simply meant “Mister.” As dictated by the sociolinguistic context, “Esquire” seemed chic because it sounded like English. In such an environment it was quite natural that from a very young age René was bilingual: when little English kids shouted at him “pea soup! pea soup!” he answered them back in their language, throwing pebbles at them.

      Defiant and impudent, he would run from the forest to the sea. Paspébiac Point was his kingdom. He was fearless. In September he went to the country school and thought about what he would do on Saturday afternoon. In the church hall, the parish priest had just announced they would show a movie.

      “Jungle Princess with Dorothy Lamour!”

      He was on cloud nine. For days, he would go around softly singing the refrain: “I love you, you love me.” His little heart throbbed for the beautiful Hollywood star and even harder for the mermaid of Baie des Chaleurs who, the week before, had saved him from drowning.

      His true childhood ended abruptly in September 1933: his luggage ready, the next day, he would leave for the Séminaire de Gaspé. René was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer, according to his mother’s wishes. One thing was certain: he would not be a priest, for he had no religious leanings. For him the seminary was above all a place of intellectual discovery, which made him eager to hop aboard the train, to go away, to try his wings.

      The journey was long and rather uncomfortable: for five hours, he watched the scenery go by. Gaspé was so far, it seemed as if the public officials had forgotten it. For the Mi’Kmaq people, Gaspé meant the end, the extremity. The tip of the country. When he got off the train, René had arrived at the end of his journey, at the dawn of a new life.

      At the seminary, the young student distinguished himself from the others. While the majority swotted for hours, he devoted only about twenty minutes a day to his work. Afterwards, he would shut himself up in the library, where he combed the shelves for biographies of famous men. History fascinated him. Professors spoke of this teenager as a future leader. He was one of the few who didn’t like hockey, far preferring tennis, at which he excelled. At age fourteen, he won the Gaspé Junior Championship. On the court he ran easily to the net, his serve impeccable. An ace!

      The Lévesque family supported the reds, in memory of Liberal Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the French Canadian born in Saint-Lin who succeeded in governing Canada for fifteen years. What an achievement! In the mid nineteen-thirties Mackenzie King was the heir apparent worthy of his illustrious predecessor, while his provincial counterpart, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, was becoming embroiled in scandals exposed by Maurice Duplessis, the member from Trois-Rivières. People even went so far as to predict that on August 17, the Union Nationale, which he had just founded, would sweep the province. In 1936, René was a teenager who had landed a summer job at a radio station. Not a fan of politics, he nevertheless attended a meeting held in the area, and, excitedly reported to his father that he had gone to see Philippe Hamel, the leader of the Action libérale nationale.

      “He’s a politician with some strange ideas: he wants to nationalize electricity companies. He’s taken up Reverend Groulx’s slogan, Maîtres chez nous, Masters in our own house. Do you think that could ever come to pass?”

      Dominique Lévesque was a shadow of the man he’d been. Thin, prematurely aged, and in pain, he had to be driven to Campbellton Hospital. His condition was more serious than originally thought: he would receive better care in Quebec City. Suitcases were packed. In June 1937, just returned home, René saw his father leave.

      “You are the eldest. Take care of your mother, and your brothers, Fernand and André. Your little sister Alice will also need you. When I come home, we’ll go to the seashore and look for twenty-five-cent lobsters, the way we do every summer.”

      There was no reason that the New Carlisle lawyer should not return; he was only forty-eight years old.

      In The Ocean, the legendary train following the voyageur route right to the Atlantic, René looked out the window at the calm river in the moonlight. Sleep remained elusive. He had a sense of foreboding. What did it mean? In Rivière-du-Loup, his grandparents met him at the station. There was no longer any need to go to Quebec City. Dominique Lévesque was dead.

      It was his first great sorrow. An absence never to be filled. The father’s presence was forever etched in his memory and gestures, such as the son’s odd habit of holding a pencil between his index and middle fingers. Dominique had also written like that.