« Entre l’arbre et l’écorce »

« Entre l’arbre et l’écorce » is the image Loïc uses for being trapped between his Quebec identity and his loyalty to Régis. First applied to the political strain of election night in Ottawa, it expands into a pattern of divided belonging: the public conflict over Quebec echoes Loïc’s private history of being caught between fathers.

Election Night and Divided Allegiance

The expression appears on November 15, 1976, as Loïc waits in his office in the Langevin Building for the Quebec election results. The prospect of a sovereignist victory makes the vote seem capable of deciding Canada’s future. Loïc’s sense of being caught between the tree and its bark gives that national tension a personal shape: the tree and its roots stand for his Quebec identity, while the bark represents his newer fidelity to Régis, who chose him as a close collaborator in the prime minister’s office.

The image captures more than uncertainty about an election. Loïc is eager for the result, yet anxious about what it may demand of him; he watches the darkening sky while the Westminster chimes mark six o’clock and the polling stations are about to close. The surrounding political pressure turns his divided loyalties into an immediate predicament. He is being asked, inwardly, to belong to a Quebec whose political future may break with the federal government, while remaining loyal to the cousin who has given him a place at the centre of that government.

From Political Balance to Personal Conflict

After the sovereignists win, Loïc sees Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his team taking a combative position against Quebec. The balance he had tried to maintain between the two camps no longer seems possible. The metaphor thus marks a turning point: what had been a strained dual allegiance becomes an increasingly untenable contradiction between loyalty to Régis and fidelity to himself.

The difficulty is not simply how to announce a political disagreement. Régis has come to occupy a paternal place in Loïc’s life, making the prospect of separation resonate with an older conflict between his biological father and his adoptive father, Guillaume D’Anjou. Loïc again finds himself in the position of concealing his attachment to one from the other. The political predicament therefore repeats a familial structure: being claimed from opposing sides, unable to give each relationship open and undivided acknowledgment.

The Cost of Remaining Between

The text develops the image of entrapment through a series of related balancing and concealment figures. Loïc tries to communicate his decision to Régis delicately, as though walking a tightrope or stepping over eggshells; at night he writes resignation letters, then tears them up at dawn. These actions give the expression a cost in bodily and emotional strain: his sleep and health suffer as he tries to suppress contradictions that the election has brought back with greater force.

Régis’s importance makes that strain harder to resolve. He has opened intellectual and cultural horizons for Loïc and supplied a moral and spiritual vision of the world. The relationship is nurturing, but maintaining it now seems to require sacrifices of personal integrity and selfhood. The image of being caught between tree and bark consequently describes not a stable compromise but a painful narrowing of available choices: Loïc’s attachments pull in different directions, while silence and self-concealment preserve neither an easy political position nor an undivided sense of self.

A Recurrent Structure of Division

The expression’s force comes from its movement between scales. It first renders a specific political moment—the Quebec election and its consequences for the federal relationship—as a personal split. It then reveals that this split is familiar to Loïc because it repeats his earlier division between paternal claims. The phrase is therefore both a description of his immediate dilemma and a compact pattern for the recurrence of divided loyalty in his life.

Its paired image also resists a simple choice between two sides. The tree’s roots and the bark belong to the same figure, just as Loïc’s Quebec identity and his attachment to Régis cannot be cleanly separated from his lived experience. Yet the election exposes the limits of holding both allegiances in balance. In that tension, the expression connects political identity, intimate dependence, and the difficult demand to act with personal integrity.