Extracts from Enfance Marine. Chapters 1 and 2.

 

“If I were to consult only my memories, I might say I am almost completely ignorant of where I was born. There is nothing there of my native country, although I was almost four years old when I left. I must have been slow-witted, and really of a different breed to the children of today, who store adult perceptions in their four-year-old brains.

Nevertheless, from the very fact that nothing remains of my early years, that all memories, all images, have faded, I conclude that I was not born in a town. There were no cars around me, no streets, no walls; no cries, no sounds, no smells.

 

There couldn’t have been; my house was surrounded by the sea. And in my memory, the sea crushed the house and washed it away. If I examine my memory, I can just about resurrect the gaping, black hole of the fireplace, the bed curtain which was red and the patch of light that was the window. I have a precise impression of where the fireplace stood and the direction in which the house faced. Its façade was rarely lit by the sun; imprinted on my mind is one summer day when a ray of light from the setting sun fell on it.

 

I try in vain to recall a vision of the sea. Is it because the house had its back to the sea, and you could only see it from inside at high tide, when the pool below the window was filled up? Did the house act as a screen between myself and the sea?

 

I will not conclude, however, that it is a matter of indifference to me whether I was born there or somewhere else. I claim this birthplace washed by the waves. My roots are anchored in this sand, this wind, this sea. I was conscious of it. Its external features are not marked by any impression of colour, volume or surface. It has left me with the impression of a vastness resembling emptiness. I myself was a grain of sand trying to lift myself to the height of the thistles and daturas, rolling among the shells, splashed about by the rising tide. The sea, the sand and the wind were lodged in me and were my first provisions at an age when one first seeks nourishment.

 

It was the sea that suckled my senses. If it is taken away from me with the kind of canvas on which it was laid out, grey or blue for the sky, the vast, flat, bare, dusty fields that extended from it and left no visual image, it is my childhood they're taking away, destroying the impression of the radiant swaddling bands in which I was folded. From a distance you couldn't tell where the sea began and the fields ended; you don’t know where a seaside childhood begins.

 

The house let me leave on my own... It closed up intact on a childhood, like a furrow on a seed. The great light of space fell on me and all the salts of the ocean purified the air.” 

Extracts from Enfance Marine. Chapters 3 and 9

 

"For me there was another house, a house complete, like the ones children draw, with a roof and a chimney out of which an arabesque of smoke curls obliquely, never straight, with a mischievous pirouette and a dragon, a door flanked by two windows, each divided into six panes, and a man standing in front of it, his arms wide open inviting all who will to enter. The man is my grandfather. The house is the house at Pencadénic.

 

I think I was brought there the day my aunt ran along the shore with a child in her arms that she seemed to want to rescue from its woes. The entire Banastère brigade was disbanded, my father stationed on a moor somewhere around Vannes. The departure must have looked like panic because the barracks were vacated on the same day and as many ox carts as there were families had to be fetched from nearby villages. I was sent to my grandparents to get me out of the way while they moved.

 

There was really just a narrow inlet to cross and a few kilometres of shingle, and we were there!

 

My Grandfather’s house, standing apart from the others, was the first one to appear and the only one that was shiny, with its blue slate roof wet and its white façade, the door standing open, which you could see from afar. The yard spread out around it like a skirt of light. My gaze then fell on the well, with its back like a giant snail towards us, and the garden surrounded by a wall topped with a trellis that looked like bunches of green grapes hanging down.

 

The garden was in the shape of a triangle and my gaze fell on the far corner where one of the elms was rustling in the wind. Later I found out that the sea was at the bottom of the garden, and understood why it was the shape of a ship’s prow rising up to be carried along.

 

I was five years old. My grandmother reminded me of it. She was an educated person who was sent to a convent when she was young, and taught her own children to write.

She took care of my education herself; there was a reading session every day, even several times a day. The big book of masses would come out of the cupboard. She would sit on the closed lid of the bed chest; I would take my place on a small bench and lean on her knee... So I learned to read with words that had no meaning. She chose mainly Latin texts in large print.”

“A CHILDHOOD BY THE SEA, lived at the edge of the waves, to the natural rhythms of colossal power before which man bows: the gradual changing of the tide, the trajectories of stars...”
 

“… My grandfather's name was Yvon. When I discovered the name was his alone, that other men who resembled him were not called by this name, his prestige grew even greater in my eyes. I don't know who first said it in front of me. Not his wife, assuredly. She never called him by his name. It’s easy to create opportunities to pronounce a name for those who like pronouncing it. She didn’t try to avoid it, but she never felt the desire to make it rise from her heart to her lips. Besides, it was hardly the custom in the region...” 
 

“… He had done his time with the fleet and sailed all over the world in his youth. A hand injury brought him back to the village. Not his own village. No one knew just where this devil of a man came from, and I still didn't know where he was born. However, a rector from Tour-du-Parc later discovered in some old archives that he was originally from the Basque country and had emigrated to Morbihan with a group of fishermen. Once his career as a sailor was interrupted, he had to invent another occupation that linked him to the sea. He became a ferryman. 
 

His injury didn't seem to bother him. He'd lost his little finger, and it filled me with a superstitious regard for this grandfather who was unlike any other. The loss of the little finger was linked to adventures I could never imagine, but adventures nonetheless. 
 

He used to cross the bay between Cadénic and Pénerf, a crossing well known for its currents. Sometimes they would come to fetch him, whatever the time and whatever the weather; they knew he could always make the crossing. I’d hear the latch rattled violently in the middle of the night, followed by a fist or a stick banging on the door and someone shouting "Père Yvon!”. He would wake up immediately and shout out loud “ho!" to signal that he'd heard, and if some fool persisted in rattling the door he would utter a curse, but under his breath because it was night time. He groped for his trousers and pullover, and pulled on his boots and oilskin with incredible dexterity. This stranger who reminded me of Sergeant Charming or the Cloth Merchant of Cherbourg sometimes explained how he came to be there. He was on his way to find a doctor - an accident or sudden illness involving a relative. Or to notify relatives - a death or a funeral. I didn't really understand the mission. But I understood the gravity of it. It was all tragic, breathless and brief, and the man's voice and the ferryman hurrying...”;
 

“…Grandfather treated everyone the same, brusquely. You shouldn't dawdle when you climbed on board, or worry about getting your clogs wet, or obstruct manoeuvres. When he turned the boat round, you were an idiot if you didn't bend down in time to let the sail pass. To move things along quicker, he carried the women off on his back at low tide on the Cadénic side, because there was no jetty.  

He sometimes took me with him, mainly when he set off with an empty boat to pick up a passenger in Pénerf. How placid he was at those times! I don't remember seeing or hearing him laugh, but on the days I was alone with him, the serenity and mildness of his face expressed his state of mind better than a laugh. He sat by the rudder, the sheet in his hand, perched up high it seemed to me because I was level with his waist and he towered over me, his face relaxed, keeping a watch on the sea and glancing at me from time to time with a look that said we were content the two of us, together. I would sit across from him in the middle of the boat; I loved to look up at the big grey sail from below. The sail stood between me and the wind. That's what kept me warm, I thought. Something in grandfather's eyes warned me that he was about to take in the reef, or change tack, although he didn't say anything, to give me the pleasure of guessing for myself. On the other side of the sail was the sun, a landscape of dazzling waves, the lighthouse that stood out like a great pipe stem, the red buoy lying on top of the water which foamed around it, nothing more dramatic than this manoeuvre…” 
 

“… Another about-turn and this time, oh miracle! There was Pénerf...” 

Extract from Enfance Marine and the story Louis de l'île héros de la vie quotidienne,
works in which Marie Le Franc evokes the lineage of her father,                                           

from Tascon                  

 

My little town is located at a height from which it looks out over Morbihan with its scattering of islands. My father was from one of these islands, so small that it doesn't appear on the map.

 

It contained half a dozen "feux" in all; the small cottages inhabited by fishermen. 

 

In winter the sea birds would screech around, and on freezing cold nights the men would slide down from their box-beds, unhook their rifles, put their boats in the water, and the pursuit of game would commence. 

In his youth, my father was one of these men. His father had drowned in a storm when his boat capsized; he was 25 years old. He left two little boys who were just taking their first steps. A third, my father, was born 10 days after his death. The women in those days could bring up three children on nothing.

 

 "All that remained of the man who died was this stone cottage with enough bread for one day in the pantry, its enclosed yard, its vine and its plot of land; nothing that could provide food immediately for a woman who knew no job other than how to bring up three children, the eldest of which was not yet four... When he was seven, his mother took him away from the island to work as a young shepherd for a farm that worked the land, somewhere out on the moor. The farm was poor... There was no chance of schooling in the middle of the moor. It was the old man at the farm, a paralysed man, who had the idea of teaching this boy with a hankering for everything, to read by the light of a resin candle on winter evenings...  

 

It is from this stock of men, this stock of women, that I was born. In my early childhood, it was my maternal grandparents with whom I spent most of my time. When I came of school age and had to live in Sarzeau, I would run to the coast on days off to try and make out the house by the sea where my father was born, offshore in the Gulf, and imagine the life my ancestors lived there. My life in the village of Cadénic seemed pleasant and easy by comparison. The cracks in their hands, their skin burned by the hot sun and the freezing cold meant nothing to the fishermen from these islets… For them, the most unpalatable fish, the most indigestible shellfish, the oiliest game bird, was their prize. They would not shrink from putting a heron or a cormorant in the pot. They brought back floating kelp to use as fertiliser on their fields, which explains why they produced as many cuttlefish carcasses as potatoes...

       

Would I find the house where he was born still standing on the island, the outline of which I see in the clear light of my memory? Would I recognise the rusty harpoon stuck into a beam, on which the three brothers, as tall as a sailor's boot, would hang to test their strength? Three brothers, born of the same source squatting on the beaten dirt floor, three eternally child-like souls, three giant strengths. Three shepherd's whips slung around three similar necks, three voices of tiny children on the tail of a skinny cow, three pairs of clogs to tramp the moor that served as litter for the cow. Three harvesting scourges with fists not ten years old. Aube, mon père, je crois bien ! It was the dawn that spun his first garment, that brought his first warmth, when at this age he was threshing wheat on the stony ground from sunrise to sunset. These men born on an island, flat and grey like a buckwheat pancake and battered by the winds, and remembrance of them brings relief to the collective memory. We pronounce the names of the three brothers, and we see three rocks appear on a shore.

When Marie Le Franc arrived in Sarzeau after her sojourns in Banastère and Pencadénic, it marked a rupture, as she wrote in Enfance marine:

 

"I think that here is where the second stage of my childhood began, the less interesting stage; that of a coherent world which, when you seek to relive it, did not require the creation of a second childhood. […] And this second stage began at the precise moment when we got down from the cart, beside a ditch full of shadows, although the unassuming Sarzeau could not take the credit for my unexpected start; Sarzeau, which invites one to flee because of the knot of roads it commands, all of which flow to the sea but which I was not to discover until later. A high wall bordered the ditch and beyond it was a wood. The small, low house that was to be ours was on the other side of the road. 

 

This customs house is also mentioned in a short story, Choses de France, published in 1906:

 

 "Do you know, over there at the edge of the Breton marshes, a small house that faces the shore, with a small, enclosed flower garden full of primroses in the spring, and carnations and sunflowers in the summer? Push open the wooden gate, take a look out of the wide-open window, you will see a gentle, grey-haired woman busy with her humble mending of humble clothes. […] Soon you will see the father come home after taking his daily walk along the shore, where he listened to the cries of the gulls and the curlews to see if they foretold a storm.

 

It was in this little house that I grew up, it was here, facing this moving, changing horizon of the Breton Gulf, that I dreamed of bigger horizons; it was this Brittany so grey and gentle on the eyes, that fostered in me the desire to know the harsher, whiter land where we are now.” 

 

The house on Rue Paul Helleu, where the family lived later and which also had a garden facing the Gulf, is mentioned in her letters as "a large barracks of a house that demands care and strength". 
 

Over time though, Marie Le Franc grew attached to this family house which was difficult to heat, and towards the end of her life she wrote: "In spite of the special problems of old houses, I shall leave mine with regret as it represents home, where one grows used to things, especially when it brings the breath of the Atlantic. […] I myself will never give up coming to breathe the air of the Rhuys Peninsula on spring days”. 

 

 She never gave up; she lies close by, facing the Gulf.

Texts by Marie Le Franc, Extracts from "Pêcheurs du Morbihan"

 

“Louise de l’Ile was sitting in her usual place, in a sort of niche under a window set high up in the wall, inside the house. Anyone who entered would not see her immediately, because it was dark in this nook and there was just room enough for her to slide in; a board across the window, holding a row of pots with geraniums, seemed to rest on her head.

“But apart from the people in the house, it was rare for anyone to enter. So when a fisherman came, he was surprised, on discovering Louise, to feel how suddenly she filled the house which he had thought empty.

“The house was the only one on the island that was inhabited. The house that Louise's husband had built at the water's edge, almost on the sand, was now used to store the oyster stretchers. They had lived there in the early years of their marriage. The early years... There had been nothing after those years. François had drowned, his sailing boat had capsized, no one knew how. It was thought he was unable to save himself because of his fishing boots, although he was an excellent swimmer.

Some time later, Louise had suffered a long illness; rheumatoid arthritis had left her semi-paralysed in one leg. She must have come to see her brother Vincent, who lived with his family in his father's house in the middle of the island. The old people had retired to the village of Binic on the mainland, as was the tradition, where they had ended their days.

 

“It was mid-December. Grey daylight filled the room. With her back to the window, Louise could see nothing of the outside, neither the moor where the sheep roamed, nor the sea which surrounded the low island. She had been working all afternoon on a pullover that needed reworking to look like one she'd borrowed from Marielle Le Meur, a "friend" of Arlette who had just moved to the neighbouring island with her husband. Her hands, misshapen with thin fingers, were hurting. She put down her knitting on her lap, raised her eyes and looked at the room in front of her, which in the end she could no longer make out and which was her whole horizon: the large fireplace that had been closed off with two wooden doors since Vincent brought a stove from Sarzeau on his barge, the large beds in the corners, covered with white blankets because the Le Ludec family set great store by beds being neat.

 

“Mrs Arnault had started coming to the island every week, where her husband, a demobilised naval officer who had started up in the oyster trade, was doing business with Vincent. When he went round his oyster beds in his launch, he brought his wife and left her at the Le Ludec house, and picked her up when the inspection was over.

Andrée Arnault did not put on airs with Louise. She knocked softly at the door:

- Can I come in? she would say in her musical voice.

- Come in! Louise would reply in her muted voice ...

 

Despite the apparently calm indifference of her "come in", Mrs Arnault knew that Louise had recognised her. She shook her shoes clean at the door and walked into the house, her eyes seeking out Louise under the window. This glance at Louise was like a hand raised to greet another. It was a look of friendship.”

One night in Roaliguen

“One night, we were alone in the world; one night, the sea and me. For shelter I had a small wood cabin suspended in the storm, like a crow’s nest in the masting but set on the sandy ground. It was as if it were not attached to anything, the wind and the sea made its head spin, as they did mine. It seemed no more substantial than a handful of straw blown about by the squall over the fields at night.

However, we struggled together in fear mingled with a bitter pleasure. I had closed the shutter that opened towards the sea, for fear it would enter my home as if it belonged there, dressed in a robe of spreading, rustling waves. But a sort of porthole on the side that faced the fields, through which you could still see the sea if you leaned out, stayed open, grazed by the black plume of a resinous tree, a thuja grown to its full height - as high as the porthole, and battered by the tide on a grey night that crept in little by little. My gaze and the grey eye of this window were in confrontation with each other all through that night.
 

The cabin, swinging in space, was a navigation light beneath the sunken stars. We did not concede, we did not disarm; the ocean on one side or me on the other in that precarious cell which showed such fortitude. We were face to face, the only survivors in a world that had succumbed. The human spirit which I represented - stripped of all personality - swelled with a sense of pride to acknowledge, in its fragility, the ability to stand its ground.
 

Everything else had been erased, even the few low fishermen’s cottages a hundred steps inland, crouching fearfully against each other, kept awake by the fear of a tidal wave in their livid limewash cocoons beneath their thatched roofs. The fields were motionless, those too flattened, and the darkness that enveloped their pastures was the colour of burnt kelp, deposited by a storm at the equinox. The wind was nothing more than the language of the sea, by which it spit out its spray, bombarded us with its whining messages which, in the boundless expanse, sought us out like points of contact. They fell on us like thousands of arrows become almost harmless through their blind frenzy, their ineffectual rage. 
 

An inner calm eventually reigned in my confined domain, in the swaying to which my mind had grown accustomed. Just as a boat accommodates the swell, so my spirit embraced the rhythm with the kind of intoxication one feels when crossing a terrain where danger lies, tiptoeing on winged feet. And suddenly I knew there were two opposing forces in the night: the brutal, inhuman force of the sea, and the other: that which is latent in all beings and becomes manifest in times of danger. The inhuman force could not touch me, no matter what it did. Well might it ring in my ears with its stormy blast and chime in my head where the little warm glow, which nothing could extinguish, kept vigil, as it set the inundated roof in motion.
 

Outside, the grey night assumed an expression of curiosity at the edge of the grey window, or rather the edge of the porthole, trying to see what we were doing inside. In the end it took our part, harassed like us by the brutality of the assaults. It licked its face, misted up with the sea-spray which we saw through the window was now clearing. Calmer now, I followed the proceedings as a spectator, although I could see nothing of the battle taking place outside in the dark. When the rising sea threatened to overturn its cradle, I was prepared to let myself go with it; if anything happened, an old song would hum beneath my closed eyelids, perhaps the Irish ballad I’d heard a few days before, at home, on the radio.

It was “Grand Louis l’Innocent”, her first novel and winner of the Prix Fémina in 1927, which conveyed the message of her personal trauma and her ideal of a companion for both travel and affairs of the heart.
 

In her personal and love life, Marie Le Franc could find no man who was equal to her culture, her interests and her expectations as a woman. So she brought him to life through her writing. She created her "dream man" as the negative to the "man from the North".

She constructed him through a dual process of recovery from an injury sustained in the Great War, and the creation of a new type of couple in which both Eve and Grand-Louis participated...
 

At the time of writing Grand-Louis l'Innocent, Marie Le Franc was emerging from yet another disappointment in love, in the Great White North. 
 

Consequently, the literature she produced was an antidote to her pain and an appeal for a new world where there is happiness, harmony and heedfulness between beings, between men and women, between humans and between humans and nature, including the moors, the wind, the sea and the changing landscape of snow and tides. 
 

She cultivated the generosity of feelings, the importance of gaiety, the importance of all languages, of words, of gestures, of silence, of noises, of waiting and of respect for the time humans need to evolve in solitude as a person, and the freedom to return to oneself.

She gives prominence to the human dimension in the onset of desire.
 

“Someone was there behind the shutters…
 

The sea and the wind suspended their combined wailing which rose from the pit of darkness like a double groan, and in the silence, someone was breathing.
 

…With stiff little steps she approached the door, and turned the key in a single movement.

The light fell on a tall figure. The man did not step back. His arms hung by his sides. A motionless portrait framed by the moor.

He wore a fisherman's jacket, the sleeves too short, and canvas trousers that fell to his calves. A handkerchief hung out of his pocket. He had long moustaches, blond but discoloured, hollow cheeks, eyes that looked straight ahead with great openness, a face sculpted by the wind. His head of greying hair was bare, and thrown back.”

 

“It was in the evenings, mainly, that he became extraordinary. He no longer tried to cling to a world whose edges slipped through his fingers. He was reclaiming his personality. He was returning to his domain. Eve made no attempt to enter it. He was like the reflection of a landscape inverted in water; a landscape you know is futile to approach. He imparted a mystery into the atmosphere that it would have been sacrilege to try and penetrate. This atmosphere was pleasing to her woman’s spirit. She was living a romance which surpassed her expectations. There was a soul at her side with contours so vast and so fluctuating that it could never touch them. She must continue to move forwards with her arms outstretched. Every day the haze of the unknown between them was renewed, an impenetrable fog. They remained strangers to each other. They would meet every day with a new perspective. They kept their reasons for actions secret, their words held unsuspected meaning. They would never cease their discovery of each other. There would never be the slow, dreadful fusion of two personalities. They each retained their own. They would continue to meet with a smile on their lips and a mask over their eyes... You only build when you're alone; you only create with your hands.

 

“They talked mainly with their eyes. In the absence of other joys, this one was given to them. They looked at each other without weariness, without turning away and without fear, with no sudden impulse to conceal their thoughts behind the screen of their eyelids. There was nothing in their eyes that spoke of an effort to please, only the will to discover each other.

Marie Le Franc loved open spaces, especially the magnificent coastline between Saint-Gildas de Rhuys and the inlet to the Gulf of Morbihan, an area she refers to a great deal in her work.
 

Let's hear how she evokes this seaboard in a flight of great poetry, covering visual and historical landmarks and giving depth and mystery to this end of the peninsula:
 

“She had chosen the main road which ran high and straight across the peninsula. On one side, they could see a dark blue band of ocean along the cold indentation of the coast, on the other the lighter waters of the Gulf of Morbihan, bordered by hamlets, the houses leaning into one another and whispering under their hats. The tower of Saint-Gildas' church, built on a rocky promontory, stood out like a ship's funnel in a sea of mist, and the village was invisible. (…)
 

On the right, towards the coast, rose a sort of giant tumulus which they called the Petit Mont. (…) On the other side of the road they saw a similar one, but higher: Le Grand Mont. Eve, who was perusing the countryside, turned suddenly to her companion. (…) He stood with his arms crossed, his face turned towards the sea. His eyes were half-closed, but he was nonetheless surveying the vast arc of open water. (…)
 

Grand-Louis, no doubt, also felt a blind joie de vivre on that June morning, at the top of the world, and he advanced among the dark forces, vibrating like a mighty mast in the sea breeze.”
 

These pages on Grand-Louis l'Innocent are echoed in a short story, Obsession, in which the marine panorama brings people together, as she says: “These holidays at Saint-Gildas, this running into Suzanne on a windy day, on the high cliff. She had sea legs, sea hair; the sea breeze made dimples in her cheeks then erased them. They had finished the walk together, on the narrow path overlooking the foaming shore. They walked at the same pace, their thick-soled wartime shoes biting into the rock, the wind tossing back strands of their hair like it tossed back the raging waves. The intoxication of the universe mingled with that of their youth. Three months later they were married.”
 

 See also En souvenir de la côte de St-Gildas, LES MOMENTS

Moments of happiness, lively and furtive,

Appear occasionally on the rock at times

when like lizards, in a heartbeat, they touch:

You feel the bright, golden eyes gazing at you.

    

We were overwhelmed with space and light;

A gesture, it seems, would have propelled you

Into the green open chasm beside you,

And now a shiver makes the rock vibrate.

 

But we lay our brows on the rock for hours

With more abandonment and less bitterly

Since we grew certain that the tender moments,

Like a secret, ardent life, would remain.

Marie Le Franc was born in 1879 in the customs house barracks in Banastère, a village belonging to Sarzeau where her father was the appointed customs brigadier.
 

From her childhood, comprising periods in Banastère, Pencadénic, Séné and Sarzeau, she developed a profound attachment to her family, to the sea, and to the wide-open spaces and broad horizons.
 

After completing her primary education in Sarzeau, she was admitted to the Ecole Normale d'Institutrices in Vannes, from which she graduated in 1895. She worked as a teacher in Morbihan for 8 years, before taking a different path.
 

In 1906 she decided to go to Canada. She was 26 years old; it was a plan of escape and adventure that matured into a literary project, writing novels, novellas and short stories, radio interviews and elaborate correspondence.
 

“Marie le Franc could not help being a nomad. But she wanted more, she wanted to be a “writer-traveller”, as author Gwénaëlle Lucas wrote in Montreal in January 2005, as part of a university thesis on the unique career of Marie Le Franc.

The first printed works by Marie Le Franc are to be found in Montreal; they consist of a few articles, poems and short stories published between February and August 1906 in La Patrie and in Olivar Asselin's le Nationaliste.

It was also in Montreal that she self-published her first novel, Grand Louis l’Innocent, in 1925.

Her work was successful even at this stage, and it was the start of a full and prolonged career. Marie le Franc travelled frequently between Brittany and Quebec, and wrote constantly.
 

Her work is divided into two phases: a Breton phase and a Canadian phase.
 

Her Breton phase includes Grand Louis l'Innocent, published by Rieder, for which she won the Prix Femina in 1927, Le Poste sur la dune, Grand Louis le Revenant, Inventaire, Dans l'Ile, Roman d'Ouessant, Pêcheurs du Morbihan and Enfance Marine.

Her Canadian phase, inspired by her stays in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, The Laurentians and Gaspesia, includes the novels Helier: fils des bois, La Rivière solitaire, La Randonnée passionnée, Pêcheurs de Gaspésie, le Fils de la forêt and some essays and collections of short stories: Au pays canadien-français, Visages de Montréal and Ô Canada ! Terre de mes aïeux.

To this can be added some 3,000 letters contained in archives in Canada: Ottawa and Montreal, and in France: the French National Library in Paris, the Departmental Archives of Morbihan, and the Multimedia Library in Vannes.