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 noth
ing 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.
We set off in June, without a word to the congregation, in an elm bark craft that would have sunk except for constant bailing with an alms bowl. For paddlers, we had Nickbis and his nephew Henderebenks, a simple-minded boy with a snapping turtle tattooed on his left shoulder and two fingers missing from his hand.
We cleared Montréal in a day and carried the canoe past the rapids at La Chine that night. Thence we threaded our way upriver through myriad rocky islands infested with black flies and mosquitoes. We saw no other human for a week, which made my heart lighten.
It is customary for explorers’ accounts to include lists of wonders encountered and lands claimed for the King. I saw eight fire-breathing dragons, a tribe of elves which shot arrows at us the size of knitting needles, a giant bustard as big as a house, with a beak as hard as stone, two man-like creatures which bounced rapidly over the ground on a single leg, and a mermaid (possibly a large pike).
I claimed the following lands for King Louis: Pommierland, Pommier Island, the River Pommier, Lac Pommier, Baie Pommier, Painter’s Reach, etc. (Our progress was delayed considerably on account of my insistence that we get out of the boat and put up birch bark signs to mark these geographical features.)
On the eighth day, about five leagues from La Salle’s trading fort at Cataraqui, we were captured by a roving band of Anderhoronerons who fell upon us in our sleep (we generally took a nap after lunch). There were nine of them, two old men without teeth, six teenage boys and a younger lad of about seven years, all stripped naked, covered with grease and red war-paint against the flies, and nearly starved.
We spent two more days in camp while the Anderhoronerons ate what was left of our provisions.
On the third morning, we set out for their village, but had only gone a league or two when the little boy began to weep petulantly, saying it was his first war, and he wanted to kill one of the enemy.
The two eldest Anderhoronerons consulted and agreed to let him kill Henderebenks who immediately fell on his knees and began to sing his death song, “Woe! Henderebenks, the dancing turtle, is no more. Woe! Woe! Woe! The dancing turtle is no more!”
I gave him the sacrament of Extreme Unction, after which he and Nickbis Agsonbare fell into a theological argument as to whether the sacrament was any good without wine and wafer (these having been eaten by the Anderhoronerons).
The little boy struck Henderebenks with a stone club, knocked him to the ground, then proceeded to scalp him with a flint knife barely sharp enough to cut the skin. Henderebenks woke up part-way through the operation and resumed singing, “Woe! The dancing turtle is no more!” until one of the older boys clubbed him with Nickbis’s arquebus.
Nickbis said he was sorry I had had to see this, that he hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him, that really he had taken all the precautions he could, and that these Anderhoronerons were nothing but filthy savages to whom his people would never have given the time of day.
After a five-day forced march, we reached the main Anderhoroneron village or “castle” (a pleasant little town of thirteen bark-covered sheds or longhouses, with a sort of picket fence all around) where a young, wolf-clan widow named Sitole adopted me to replace her late husband.
Sitole took my tattered cassock and presented me with her husband’s beaded moccasins, his breech clout, a five-point trade blanket, a bear lance, two bows, a dozen iron-tipped arrows and a complete set of polished stone wood-working tools.
The next day the clan mothers elected me to the post of civil chief, or royaneur, with the name (which had also previously belonged to Sitole’s husband) Plenty of Fish.
Nickbis admired my moccasins, but said to watch out that I didn’t get my paint brush caught in the honey pot, a turn of phrase I did not at once comprehend. Nickbis had been adopted by an old man whose wife had died in childbirth, leaving him with twin girls to bring up.
Indeed, as I began to get about and observe things, I came to realize that more than half the Anderhoroneron population consisted of prisoners taken in war: Passamaquoddy, Mississaugua, Nanticoke, Mahican, Winnebago, Tutelo, Delaware, Chippewa, Maqua, Cree and enough French, English and Dutch to make a small interdenominational congregation for Sunday service. The ragtag war party we had encountered at our camp on the St. Lawrence River was the entire military strike force remaining to this once thronging nation.
To tell the truth, I have never felt so welcome as I did living with Sitole among the Anderhoronerons.
I took my duties as a tribal chief seriously from the beginning, sitting up many a night before the fire, smoking tobacco and sipping trade brandy (called “darling water” or “spirit helper” by the savages), discussing local political issues with the other head men (and warrant I would have had a notable impact on their history had it not been for the language barrier which made it difficult for all but one or two of us to understand each other).
Sitole’s cornfields were ripening beyond the stockade and required little attention. We lolled together day after day in a nearby creek, naked under the hot summer sun. I even began to sketch and paint a little, taking classical subjects such as Leda and the swan (for which I substituted a wild goose Sitole was raising for the pot), the judgment of Paris, Venus at her bath, that sort of thing.
By the end of the second month, she was with child. (Nickbis, who was called Mother Nickbis by the Anderhoronerons, scowled at the news and said we ought to be thinking harder about escape.)
Instead, I learned to hunt, finding myself adept at tracking deer and bear in the nearby forest, though I hardly needed to as the savages were more than happy to trade me supplies of meat for portraits. These I rendered on stretched doe skin with paints Sitole helped me manufacture from herbs and min
erals. By first frost there wasn’t a longhouse in the village without an original Pommier hanging in the place of glory.
At midwinter, I helped the Anderhoronerons kill the white dog and myself ate of its heart. I joined the Little Water Medicine Society, participated in the ancient dream-guessing rites and laughed uproariously at the antics of the False Face dancers.
But as the winter wore on, food became scarce. The deer no longer rushed to impale themselves upon my arrow points. Sitole was forced to cut my beloved paintings into strips and boil them with tree roots to make a soup. One by one, the old people began to die. Nickbis Agsonbare’s husband was the first to go, despite my old friend’s valiant efforts to keep him alive.
The last day of February, our son, Adelbert Pommier Adaqua’at, was born. I baptized him and said mass, and we ate the last of the pictures (Venus-Sitole admiring herself in a hand-mirror) in celebration of his name day, inviting as many of the neighbours as could fit into our home to join us.
That night a stranger stumbled into the village, a half-starved white man, burning with fever and covered with festering boils. He had come, he said, because he had heard there was a Black Robe, or priest, among the Anderhoronerons, and he wished to receive absolution before dying. As I made the sign of the cross upon his forehead, I recognized the face of young Boisvert, my former student, Arlette’s husband, now aged and deformed beyond belief.
The next day Boisvert died. Within a week, half the Anderhoronerons followed him. The other half fled into the forest where many starved or froze to death. Sitole went mad with the fever and drowned herself in the icy creek where the summer before we had been wont to dally. Adelbert expired in my arms one or two days later. I don’t know when exactly, for I carried him about for at least a week without noticing, while I nursed the sick.
Nickbis Agsonbare and I were spared, God alone knows why.
Guide to Animal Behaviour Page 6
