The 1944 landslide and the ensuing relocation of Touladi’s cemetery turn a local disaster into a lasting disturbance of the village’s memory. During the cemetery move, a child buried too hastily amid the Spanish flu epidemic was found in its grave, an unsettling discovery that later generations encountered through adult conversation, rumor, and stories of the dead rising from the earth.

The Cemetery Is Disturbed

The cemetery overlooked lac Squatec. In the autumn landscape seen from an airplane, Loïc looks down toward its orderly rows of gravestones and imagines the people beneath them enclosed in boxes under the ground. The image leads him to recall the child uncovered when the cemetery was moved after the 1944 landslide: a victim of the Spanish flu, one of the children lost during the epidemic’s devastation in Touladi, and someone buried before death had come. The account does not present the discovery as a settled public record; Loïc had learned of it by overhearing adults.

The child’s grave unsettles the distinction between burial and safety. From above, the cemetery appears orderly, but the story Loïc has inherited gives that order a fearful underside: a person might be shut underground before life had ended. The episode’s force lies not only in the child’s fate but in the terrible possibility it leaves in the imagination of anyone who hears the tale.

From Discovery to Village Legend

The cemetery’s disturbance entered a wider current of local stories about the dead. A later account of the 1944 autumn describes the dead as seeming to come out of the earth, while La Grébiche’s curses and the earthquake became part of the remembered scene. Donat Côté, years afterward, appeared to return mentally to that day; the narration links his breakdown to the upheaval and to the words and cries associated with it. These are presented as elements of recollection and village lore, not as proof of a supernatural cause.

Touladi’s storytelling culture helps explain how the event could persist in this form. Moïse Dubois was known as a gifted teller of local history, including the history of the Founder, and villagers gathered to hear stories shaped for effect. Elsewhere, talk of a jewel emerging from a tomb is said to have stirred the village as deeply as an earthquake. Such accounts show how burial, disaster, and inherited rumor recur together in the community’s imagination, though the novel does not establish that the jewel’s emergence was part of the 1944 cemetery relocation.

Loïc’s Inherited Fear

For Loïc, the event survives not as a personal memory of the landslide but as a story absorbed from adults. Looking down at the cemetery, he imagines the dead as trapped beneath the gravestones and then recoils from the thought of the child buried too soon. The view from the airplane thus connects the village’s visible landscape to a hidden past that cannot be safely seen or forgotten.

The episode also makes communal memory unstable. A specific discovery—the child’s grave during the cemetery move—becomes entangled with the earthquake, La Grébiche’s warnings, and later stories about restless dead. The result is not a single authoritative account but a fearful local history passed between generations, in which the ground beneath Touladi holds both its buried dead and the stories the living cannot put to rest.