Image: Rue Fabre près de Laurier cc François Hogue
In the early nineties, my dad lived on Rue Fabre, just above Avenue Mont Royal. He was working a day job and composing a novel; his roommate was an actor who hung his bicycle from hooks in the stairwell.
The rent was affordable (the cupboards bred roaches) but from my earliest memories, the Plateau was synonymous with gentrification and I suppose we were among its pioneers. The underlying implication was that we were dwelling in place to which we were not quite entitled, our presence effacing some more “authentic” Plateau way of life.
Yet it wasn’t until I read Michel Tremblay’s Chroniques du Plateau Montréal series that I finally got a sense of what the Plateau was like long before the artists, students and finally yuppies paraded in.
La Grosse Femme d’à Coté est enceinte is set right on rue Fabre, on first day of spring in 1942. In the bars, voices are raised over whether the men should join the war effort and defend France (who had, after all, abandoned Quebec long ago). Fathers of large families can duck the draft and all the wives up and down the street are, coincidentally, pregnant.
It is the story of people packed explosively, too-intimately into a Plateau apartment. Five adults and four (soon to be 5) kids share a 7-and-a-half (the kind that, upon closer examination, turns out to be a large 5-and-a-half with only one proper bedroom).
Like the apartment, Tremblay’s novel is bursting with life: a catholic-school girl toying with new-found powers of seduction; an alley-cat in love with a 4-year-old boy; a prostitute playing hooky in park Lafontaine; far off, but not quite out of reach, theatre lights shining on the Main.
And then there are the Grandparents whose roots are still in the country-side but whose front-porch tall-tales, fiddle-tunes and guardian angels have followed them to the the brick triplexes and iron-railed balconies of the Plateau.
La Grosse Femme d’à Coté is one of my favourite books, a story that is epic and magical, intimate and sad. A must read for anyone who’s ever created a home on the Plateau. (It can easily be read in French, even if you’ve never read a book in French before).
Here’s an little taste:
“Mercedes avait rencontré Béatrice dans le tramway 52 qui partait du petit terminus au coin de Mont-Royal et Fullum pour descendre jusqu’à Atwater et Saint-Catherine, en passant par la rue Saint-Laurent. C’était la plus longue ride en ville et les ménagères du Plateau Mont-Royal en profitaient largement. Elles partaient en groupe, le vendredi ou le samedi, bruyantes, rieuses, défonçant des sacs de bonbons à une cenne ou mâchant d’énormes chiques de gomme rose. Tant que le tramway longeait la rue Mont-Royal, elles étaient chez elles, elles faisaient tous les temps, se donnant parfois des claques dans le dos quand elles s’étouffaient, interpellaient d’autres femmes qu’elles connaissaient, elles aillaient même parfois jusqu’à demander au conducteur comment il se faisait qu’il n ‘était pas encore parti pour la guerre.
Mais quand le tramway tournait dans la rue Saint-Laurent vers le sud, elles se calmaient d’un coup et se renfonçaient dans leurs bancs de paille tressée : toutes, sans exception, elles devaient de l’argent aux Juifs de la rue Saint-Laurent, surtout aux marchands de meubles et de vêtements, et le long chemin qui séparait la rue Mont-Royal, de la rue Sainte-Catherine était pour elles très délicat à parcourir.”
8 comments
Thanks Alana, I’ll pick this one up!
It’s entertaining but it is fiction, not history – and to some extent myth-making fiction with a hint of magic realism. I doubt the Plateau was a monoculture even in those days.
So weird, I saw someone reading this on the metro last week and thought to myself I should surely pick this up and read it over the holiday break. This must be a sign! Thanks for the heads up Alanah!
so strange, because this book is sitting in my bag right now, waiting for me to finish my current book so I can move on to it.
And also, i think it will officially be the first francophone novel i ever read.
I am now looking much more forward to it.
My mother was born there in 29 and whenever Tremblay was mentioned she would become very upset, denying his fictional universe any link to her reality.
Alain, I’d be interested to know whether your mother could suggest another work of fiction or non-fiction that she feels better captures the neighbourhood as she knew it?
I suppose the danger is that, as a novel eventually outlasts living memory, it can paint an entire neighbourhood or era with a single stroke. Although that’s probably also true of our high school history textbooks as well…
My father-in-law bought a building at the corner of Fabre and Laurier for his appliance business in the late 70s because it was the cheapest place he could find in Montreal. The store’s still there, (Electromenagers R.V. Dupuis) but it’s nowhere near the cheapest part of town anymore. I find it amazing how all over the world, people who are active in gentrifying neighborhood rarely realize this fact, and then mourn for some sort of loss after an area is finally gentrified.
Yeah, I lived right there – actually just east of Papineau, on Chabot opposite pretty little parc de Lorimier – in the late 1970s when the book came out. I moved there from Drolet just north of carré St-Louis because there were so many speculative fires.
There are a lot of things NOT to be nostalgic for, which Tremblay does mention, such as the suspicion of reading or of creativity. There was a little épicerie out of a village on Laurier east of Papineau, but also Fruiterie Roger, which belonged to an Italian fellow, Romeo, and which was an essential purveyor of fresh fruits and vegetables, so I didn’t always have to walk up to Italo at the corner of Beaubien and Papineau or down the the Main. The LGBT-friendly café Les Entretiens also had its origins in that time. I suppose that could be described as a gentrification factor, but the owners were working-class lads, one of them from the area, and his mum was very much a Tremblay character sociologically, but more soft-spoken and dignified than his ménagères.
There was also a Belgian lady who ran a very small boulangerie where I bought baguettes at the corner of Papineau and Laurier; she was la copine de Patrick Straram le Bison ravi, a bohemian poet who died of alcohol and drug abuse – he was already quite ill when I met them.
I did have a very elderly downstairs neighbour who was rather poetic, but once again much more eloquent and dignified than the Tremblay characters, and very open to other cultures for a working-class Montréalaise of her generation – she had a lovely relationship with a small boy of Vietnamese origin whom she thought exceptionally bright and well-brought-up, and she also had kind words for the few Haitian people in the neighbourhood then.
Ah the floodgates! But my tiny black cat Nadja was the most important character of all. Dear Nadja was killed by a car at 13. Still love cats and hate cars, many years later.
Kyle, there is also an FLQ- October Crisis link to the area. I think one of the cells, or at least some members, lived there above a pizzeria on Laurier East between parc Laurier and Papineau.