Poring over one of my topographical maps — 021M12 Lac St-Henri in the Baie-Saint-Paul region — I had noticed that two lakes from different bloodlines were situated in the same area: Lac Lapalme ( LA-5 ) and Lac Legault ( LE-4 ). I had nicknamed these waypoints the “Émile” tongues, as two historical figures in Quebec with these family names share a surname: Georges-Émile Lapalme and père Émile Legault.
Georges-Émile Lapalme (1907 - 1985) was a politician, a member of the Legislative Assembly of Quebec, and the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party. He is often said to have been the thinker behind the Révolution tranquille, inspiring Jean Lesage with the electoral programme he wrote for the Liberal Party (Pour une politique) in 1958. It was because of G.E. Lapalme’s association with Lac-à-l'Épaule, that I substituted the more remote LA-5 and LE-4 waypoints with this lake.
Émile Legault (1906 - 1983) was a key figure of 20th century theatre as a playwright, stage director, professor and critic. Ordained as catholic priest in 1930, he founded a troupe of young actors in 1937, Les Compagnons de Saint-Laurent. The chapter on the early beginnings of the theatre troupe (1937-1952) in Hélène Jasmin’s Père Émile Legault : Homme de foi et de parole (2000) was a fascinating read. With few financial means and an overload of enthousiasm, all the actors in the troupe worked together towards a common goal, sharing administrative tasks and creating the decors and the costumes. Madame Dullin sewed the latter from burlap bags and a goat brought from the Savoie provided meager rations of milk and cheese to the troupe (7). For Legault, compagnonnage and anonymity went hand in hand, and was essential to preserving team spirit. Not one actor took the spotlight, as the roles were inter-changeable; the troupe members who did not have assigned roles learned each other’s lines to take on the role of souffleur (11). In the mid-forties, the actors lived in a commune for a short while in Vaudreuil in the area of les Chenaux, a small colony looking out on the Deux-Montagnes lake (24).
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Montagne du Père-Legault
(46° 51' 0" N 75° 13' 18" O)
North-East of Mont-Laurier in Antoine-Labelle, nestled between Lac Placide and Lac Cadieu there is a mountain (400 m) named after Émile Legault. |
The section on Legault’s origins in Ville Saint-Laurent were also of interest, especially the paragraphs detailing the enterprising spirit of his father, Omer-Wilfrid Legault. At a time when business was down at the branch of the Ville-Marie bank that he managed, O.W. Legault, along with some friends, founded a manufacture in Joliette to transform cultivated tobacco. The manufacture supplied chewing tobacco to lumber camps and even went on to launch its own cigar brands: Le Pélican, Le Champagne and Le Blue Bonnets, (38) in reference perhaps to the Blue Bonnets Raceway. Georges-Émile Lapalme’s father, Euclide, was also a tobacco manufacturer in Saint-Esprit-de-Montcalm.
What interested me about O.W. Legault, was that he invented an English associate to attract a larger customer base: Legault & Thompson. This borrowed name helped him through difficult times, though the sudden rise in popularity of the cigarette around the world would soon decimate cigar sales. (39) What linked these two stories for me was the sense of mutability — inter-changeability and invention. As Émile Legault’s theatre troupe philosophy was centered on compagnonnage and anonymity, the various roles in the group could be freely interchanged. O.W. Legault not only borrowed a name for his business, he invented an associate who existed by name only.
As an adoptee born with another name (Monique Legault), I've always been intrigued by the ghost figure, how blood ties and kinship form families and create bonds. When one adopts a child, that child then adopts the adoptive family’s history as her own. If she does not know her own genealogical history, then this new history is indeed a substitution. If she does know details of her pre-adoption past, she simply adds the mix to the equation. A mash-up of family trees using the splice and tongue graft technique known in horticulture. Though I may share blood ties with the first Legault ancestor on Quebec soil, I also share kinship ties to the Lapalme family tree through the process of adoption.
This brings me to wonder, what is a name? Does our identity rest on a haphazard mixture of inherited values and created values? What is the role of invention in the ever-changing process of identity formation?
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