"Misery Saint, pray for us!
is the litany I heard a terrible October night, a few years ago, while I was hunting in a remote corner of the county of Labelle.
I entered a settler's hut where eight young children, dressed in sackcloth, devoured, as huddled in the corner of misfortune, of buckwheat pancakes. The mother ragged, leaner than snags along this sinister place, looked infinitely far this horrible existence. I noticed that his eyes, his eyes clouded above all an indefinable sadness, no longer kept any glimmer of intelligence. They were deep, cellared, identified, excavated, dug not by lust but hollowed by hunger, sunk by fear, dug misery.
The unfortunate father, a man of thirty years ago and seemed to have fifty, broken in half, broke through labor, no longer had a human face but a mask suffering and submission, a bag of bones or badly burned better strain. His hands rested on the color of earth and the table of unnecessary tools. It was not a man who looked at me, but a beast.
There are no words in any language to describe the awful silence that was when I entered the lair. And as if I myself was in the house, I approached the stove without uttering a word.
Unable longer to endure such a sight, I decided to talk and ask questions. I finally know that these unfortunate people did not eat butter, no dairy, no bread, no meat for just eighteen months. In addition, the colon was under two charges: one for plundering timber and the other for selling some books trout. I remember the rain suddenly began to fall. And it rained as much in our minds that this hut twelve by sixteen feet, where breathing barely ten damned marked with the sign of tuberculosis and terrible sign of "national" of rickets.
I offered the mother a few dollars I had in my pocket.
- I have not the strength to say thank you, "she said. And she burst into tears. "
never forget that the pioneers who built this country there is a sudden misery. This excerpt a pamphlet Valdombre - pseudonym of Claude-Henri Grignon - reminds us in a cruel testimony to truth. A text that touched me.
Preview: The pamphlets Valdombre , 1 st October 1937 p. 477
Photo: Claude-Henri Grignon, in his famous attic of the house in the Rue Morin, Sainte-Adèle (courtesy of Peter Grignon).
