Guide to Animal Behaviour (7 page)

The sisters wanted a large, suitably inspirational canvas for the chapel wall, depicting the deaths of the Jesuit brothers at the hands of the savages.

I set to work immediately on a piece of sail cloth, mixing my own paints as best I could and using the back room of Jean Boisdon's establishment as a studio.

A Huguenot hog gelder named René Petit had taken up residence in the back room while he plied his trade in the farms roundabout. A muscular fellow, with a Roman nose and cruel eyes, he modeled for me as an Indian brave.

Jean Boisdon's chambermaid, Paulette, stripped to the waist, with her skirts tucked up between her legs, did nicely for Indian maidens in the background.

For the martyrs, I painted myself as Brebeuf, using a small hand-mirror Boisdon kept by the bathtub. Boisdon posed as Lalement, showing, after consuming half a flagon of arak I was forced to purchase for the company, a remarkable talent for rolling his eyes and heaving out his chest in a counterfeit of agony.

Later he told me arak gave him gas.

Thrown constantly together in their work with me, René and Paulette conceived a sudden, immoderate passion for one another, which ended in Paulette becoming pregnant and demanding to be married. With the painting only half-done, René ran away to live with the savages.

Meanwhile, the studio was still in use as a bathroom, so that customers were always coming in to use the tub whether I was painting or not. (Boisdon charged ten sous for clean hot water, eight for moderately warm water used only once, and so on.)

Word got abroad about my work-in-progress, and I soon became a source of entertainment for the local drunks and bawds and trappers come to town to sell beaver hides.

The latter were often thunderously abusive, roaring with laughter at my woodland settings, my savages and the horrific poses of my martyrs — thus several well-meaning inaccuracies were avoided, including classical Grecian elements (amphorae, Macedonian lances and leg armour, a lyre, Ionic columns in front of the longhouses, etc.) which I had unwittingly imported into my representation of native life.

It was in this way that several of Québec's least respectable citizens made their way into my painting of the holy martyrs.

And, though I believe they enhanced the liveliness of the scene, the result was that the Hôtel-Dieu Sisters recognized two prostitutes, the Huguenot hog gelder, and a man under sentence of death for killing his wife and running away to the forest to trade in beaver hides. This man, who modeled for the wise, old sachem in the top right-hand corner, was arrested, tried, hung, cut down before he died and castrated, then burned to death in the Lower Town.

The whole of Québec society turned out for the occasion with a festive air. Two young ladies fainted straight away at the sight of the condemned man's mutilated body, and afterwards made a show of needing to be carried thence by several gallants who made a sort of invalid's litter with their arms.

The sisters refused to pay for my work, which was confiscated by the bishop. Later, they begged it of him at no charge and had gowns and pantaloons painted over the naked members by one Michel Lemelin, a plasterer who owed them money for medical care.

I never saw the painting again.

Mistress Arlette, a Shameful Interlude

I was bitterly disappointed, as you may guess, having found Canada a poor place for an artist to make his way.

I began a period of spiritual decline and excessive drinking. Turning my face from God, I often borrowed money from my students or robbed the poor box to buy the cheap, watered trade brandy which the Jesuits exchanged with the up-country savages for beaver hides.

Several times the night watch discovered me asleep in the gutter, curled up between a couple of snoring braves, with my robe over my face. It was only their affection for me and the belief, happily common in the town, that I was an artistic genius, which kept them from reporting me to Bishop Laval.

That fall, Governor Mézy, ever more scattered in mind and suffering a theological distress, went on a pilgrimage to Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré, crawling the whole way upon his knees whilst clad in his armour. He died the following spring and was buried in a pauper's grave.

His former friend, the bishop, took no notice.

The Iroquois sent a mission to Québec to sue for peace, then killed a farmer named De Lorimier in broad daylight. The new governor tried three soldiers for murdering an Indian and hanged them from the wall by the city gate. The savages were appalled at what to them seemed a wasteful and barbaric punishment. They said they would just as soon have had an apology and some brandy.

A comet appeared in the sky in the shape of a blazing canoe. Everyone agreed it was a difficult sign to interpret.

My former student Boisvert, now aged seventeen, unemployed, and the father of two, picked my pocket during the procession on the day of the Fête-Dieu.

At my request, he was whipped in the Upper Town, then marched to the Lower Town and set up again.

When it was over, I was so horrified I fell on my knees before him and begged his forgiveness. Later I lent him my cloak to hide his wounds, which afterward I never saw again, Boisvert having disappeared into the forest to live with the savages.

(It was difficult to blame the young men for thus liberating themselves from the yoke of wage work in the company warehouses, the drudgery of clearing the land or the hectoring of their young wives. In the forest, they lived the lives of nobles in Old France, hunting large mammals for food and debauching Indian maidens, who were, I was told, nubile and complaisant.)

I took to visiting Arlette, the young man's abandoned wife, to offer her the consolation of my ministry, not to mention taking the price of the cloak out in hot meals served close to the fire.

She was a fat, depressed woman with a nose like a knuckle — but her desire to serve the Lord was ardent. She told me how she volunteered without a second thought to come to the New World when the religious nature of the settlement was explained to her (though I have heard certain malicious tongues say it was because of the prospect of a forced marriage).

There was but one other artist in the colony at this time, a Jesuit missionary to the Iroquois called Father Pierron, a favourite of the bishop's. Mother Marie de l'Incarnation (a pious woman, a letter-writer and a wonderful lace-maker, a skill not often found in these rude parts, with a wen the size of a duck's egg on her chin) was wont to go around saying, “He preaches all day and paints all night.” Which made me ill to hear.

Pierron specialized in miniature scenes, mostly genre pieces illustrating the vices and the virtues, Heaven and Hell, the Temptation of Eve, and so on, which he used for Bible classes among the savages, who were apparently much illuminated on this account.

My triumph came upon the death of Sister Marie-Catherine de Saint-Augustin in the Hôtel-Dieu. (She was a nun famous for the production of miracles: on February 4, 1663, while working in the hospital, she had seen four demons shaking Québec like a quilt with the Lord Jesus restraining them; a year later, she converted a recidivist Huguenot with Brother Brebeuf's charred thigh bone.)

Apparently, she had admired my
Martyre des Pères Jésuites
which reminded her of the great paintings (Raphael, Guido Reni) that hung in her father's house in Rennes. (Also Father Pierron was out of town.)

At this time, I was undergoing treatment — a decoction of sassafras being a sovereign specific, according to the savages — from an old, Christianized Tobacco Indian named Nickbis Agsonbare, for an ailment I had contracted from Jean Boisdon's servant girl.

The Hôtel-Dieu concierge found me fast asleep on a pile of young Boisvert's illegal beaver hides in a corner of Arlette's kitchen (though it was midday and hot as Hades, with the weather outside and the brick-faced mistress sweating over her bake-oven — the hides stank atrociously).

I had not painted for upwards of a year, my classes had fallen off and I had said mass but five times. The sole upshot of my labours since the
Martyre
set-back was the fact that the Boisverts were soon to be blessed with a third child, a circumstance which delighted everyone since the government had embarked on a system of royal grants for the fathers of large families.

Sister Marie-Catherine had been dead a week when I was summoned. She was dry as a nut and a sickening shade of gray-green, with her old white hair hanging in ribbons. I had to work quickly for the smell, and used my imagination liberally.

For once I had access to the best brushes and paints to be found in the colony. The concierge kept me supplied with cognac (I was once nearly caught napping with my feet upon the coffin lid). And I finished in two days, with only an hour or two for sleep.

After the funeral, I stayed on at the Hôtel-Dieu to add some finishing touches, a flight of cherubim, two corner scenes illustrating life among the savages left over from the
Martyre,
and a golden halo with rays.

Sister Marie-Catherine's eyes proved the most difficult test of my art (because they had been closed in death). I painted them upwards of twenty-nine times, till I gave up and bade the concierge sit for me in an attitude of prayer. I gave her his eyes, one brown, one hazel, both slightly squint, with yellow sclerae, gazing heavenward.

Mother Marie de l'Incarnation said she had never seen such a likeness. (This was music to my ears.) It was a vision, she exclaimed. On first entering my studio, she said, she had half-expected my Marie-Catherine to step out of the frame and address her (they used to call each other “little cabbage”).

The sisters hung the
Marie-Catherine
in the public room at the Hôtel-Dieu where the bishop chanced to see it. I thought this would soften his heart toward me, but it did not.

Instead, I was summoned before the master of the seminary. Houssart, the bishop's valet, read a list of offences (including indolence, idolatry, blasphemy — that requiem mass in the bathtub — drunkenness and excessive personal vanity). I lost my job at the seminary and was exiled to Boucherville, near Montréal, where it was hoped curatorial duties would mend my soul, or I would find a martyr's end.

Among the Anderhoronerons

Boucherville was a one-year-old village of eight log hovels, a two-room, half-timbered manse for the seigneur, and a makeshift dock with the pitch still dripping from the timbers (which fell down when the ice went out in the spring), where pigs outnumbered the human inhabitants by five to one.

There were but three hundred English yards of muddy street in all, and the narrow fields running down to the river were studded with stumps as tall as a man's shoulders between which a few meagre spikes of Indian corn struggled for life.

I was much torn up leaving Arlette behind, but my good friend and medical consultant, Nickbis Agsonbare, eased the pain of departure by agreeing to remove with me.

I was also somewhat relieved to be temporarily out of the bishop's eye, whence I had heretofore found nothing but censure and contempt, despite my good efforts to win favour.

Unfortunately, the ignorant villagers took me for the bishop's man, there being considerable jealousy between the Jesuits of Québec and the Sulpician monks of Montréal (including disputes over who could produce the best miracles).

They gave me a former hog barn (“former” only in the sense that they moved some hogs out that I might have the space) for accommodation and refused to entertain construction of a parish church until their crops were in, after which they decided it was too cold to commence extensive outside work. (I was blamed for this delay when the bishop moved me to Sorel two years later.)

Meanwhile, I discovered that Nickbis Agsonbare was trafficking in illegal beaver hides and was using his friendship with me to conceal this activity from the authorities. (After seven years in the colony, I had yet to see a live beaver — something like a large, flat-tailed rat, I supposed.)

Nickbis assured me that this was not the case, but I could not forbear remonstrating with him about the piles of beaver pelts which reached the ceiling on all sides, and I did not afterward trust him in quite the same old way.

I took to wearing an old shirt done up around my head like a turban and calling myself a priest of the prophet Mahound, but no one paid any attention.

I heard by the express canoe foreman that in my absence, a fresh, new face had appeared on the Québec art scene, a Recollet brother called Frère Luc, styled Painter to the King. In two months, Frère Luc had surpassed my total output since arriving in Canada, having already completed a portrait of the intendant and three large religious scenes for the Church of Our Lady.

All at once, painting and sketching, which had heretofore been a great joy to me, seemed tedious, nothing but daubs of colour and stark lines, without any meaning.

Nickbis, seeing my melancholy, suggested a trip to visit his in-laws hard by the Lac des Chats, or Lake of the Erie Nation, far inland.

At this time, it was a capital offence to spend more than twenty-four hours in the forest — a measure meant to stem the traffic in illegal beaver hides and keep young men from running away to the savages. Nevertheless, I agreed, scarcely caring if I was hanged or not.