On July 8, 1913, Louis Hémon was killed by a train in Chapleau, Ontario, in circumstances that remain unclear 110 years later due to a lack of witnesses. He leaves behind an impressive and little-known body of work, including the first “bestseller” of French literature, Maria Chapdelaine.
This novel, written by a 32-year-old French adventurer who had broken away from his original bourgeois background (his father was a friend of Victor Hugo), actually had a masterful career at a time when literary novelties rarely made a fortune. their author.
More than 20 million copies have now been sold and translated into 25 languages. Maria Chapdelaine is adapted for the stage, cinema, television, graphic novels and comic strips. But Haemon won’t know anything about it, because the first chapters won’t be published until after his death. When the Grasset publishing house published the first official monograph after a few pirated copies, the short novel achieved enormous success.
Just “literary museum”
“I recently re-read it and discovered a rich work in which a woman plays a central role, which was not very common at the time,” comments Michèle Tremblay, general director of the Louis Hémon Museum, to the Journal. from Péribonka, north of Lac Saint-Jean.
As the only recognized literary museum in Quebec, this cultural institution, where many cyclists stop to explore the lake on the famous Véloroute des Bleuets, is coming back to life. In addition to the fully renovated rooms in the “Espace Péribonka”, which also includes the church, adapted to the best exhibition conditions, the museum also includes the house where Hémon was recorded in 1912.
At the end of a technological feat that also presented conservation challenges due to its status as a Quebec-classified cultural monument, the building was moved 5 km into the village in the winter of 2020.
Louis Hémon at the age of 15 with his mother Public Domain
Among the runners of the forest
It is hard to imagine that Louis Hémon did not plan to stop in Quebec when he set off for Western Canada in 1912, after writing countless short stories and running sports columns in London, where a woman, Lydia O’Kelly, becomes pregnant by him, to her shame Family.
It was a church man he met on the transatlantic who convinced him to take a detour to the land of blueberries. He covered the distance between Montreal and Roberval on foot and took his adventure even further into the black spruce trees. He left his suitcase with the farmer Samuel Bédard.
The farm of Samuel Bédard (inspiration for Maria’s father Samuel Chapdelaine), where the author lived in 1912. University of Montreal (Archives Department)
Louis Hémon (second from left) at the table at the Péribonka University of Montreal (archive department)
With his notebook, like an ethnologist, he notes the habits and customs of the close-knit families of the country where religion and winter play the main role. After a winter of surveying in the forest, he left the Bédard house and rented a hotel room in Saint-Gédéon. There he wrote his fourth novel in one go.
The text was sent to France in an envelope and was identified thanks to the postal receipt found in the bag of the Chapleau train victim. When Maria Chapdelaine found her first readers in the newspaper Le Temps, its author was already dead…
“Ite Missa est” (“The Mass is over” in Latin) are the first words of the novel “Maria Chapdelaine,” published by Grasset in 1916. University of Montreal (Archives Department)