Édifice de l’Est

Édifice de l’Est is the old parliamentary building in Ottawa where Loïc works for a year as a speechwriter in the prime minister’s cabinet and encounters what he understands as ghosts. Its Gothic corridors, offices, and windows turn the seat of political authority into a space where personal unease and the country’s accumulated history seem to become audible and visible. The building’s significance lies not only in its architecture or its temporary role as a workplace: it gives physical form to the past that shadows Loïc’s political present.

Setting and Architecture

During Loïc’s final year working there, Édifice de l’Est houses the prime minister’s cabinet. It is described as the only parliamentary building to have remained more or less intact since the beginnings of Canadian Confederation. Loïc reaches his first-floor office by a broad, two-flight staircase lined with portraits of the successive viceroys, a solemn procession extending back more than a century. The portraits make the building’s history part of the daily route to work, rather than something confined to a distant archive.

The building presents itself almost as a palace. Its long corridors are punctuated by Gothic pointed arches, while the largest offices contain marble fireplaces with rounded mouldings. The narration gives those mouldings an explicitly bodily, sexual association, likening their openings in the walls to vulvas. Against the formal portraits and stately fittings, this unsettling image makes the old architecture feel less inert and decorous than charged with concealed life. The imagined scene of ladies in fitted gowns and extravagant hats taking afternoon tea with their ministerial or senior civil-servant husbands further suggests the building’s former social world, but as a projection of the past rather than an event Loïc witnesses.

Loïc’s Place in the Building

Loïc comes to Ottawa at Régis D’Anjou’s invitation, accepting a position in the prime minister’s office despite the political reservations that make the decision difficult. At university, he had opposed Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s use of emergency measures during the October Crisis; now he works close to the government whose actions he had protested. Édifice de l’Est is therefore not a neutral backdrop to his employment. Its halls enclose a contradiction in his political life: he has entered the establishment he once resisted, and does so in the service of a cousin whose political commitments will continue to strain their relationship.

The building also fits Loïc’s work as a ghostwriter. He helps Régis carry the burden of government, but remains a hidden author, present through words that appear under another political figure’s name. The narration deepens that parallel by presenting Loïc as having gone to merge with the building’s shadows. His professional invisibility and the building’s lingering past converge: he inhabits the corridors as a working man, yet is cast as another shadow among those already there.

The Haunting

About a month after Loïc begins the job, he and Régis stay late to finalize the Throne Speech scheduled to open the parliamentary session the following day. As Loïc walks through the dark, deserted corridors, he hears strange sounds rising and fading behind the padded office doors: whispers, low complaints, and what seem like clandestine conversations. He knows the offices are empty. When he presses his ear to a door, the sounds immediately disappear, as though the unseen signals have shifted frequency. The scene leaves the source unresolved: the building may be haunted, or the sounds may belong to Loïc’s uncertain perception, but their recurrence prevents him from dismissing them as a single moment of fright.

Loïc considers telling Régis, then holds back. When he later raises the subject indirectly, he discovers that Régis distrusts paranormal claims and treats them as hallucination, sorcery, or fraud. Régis rejects the possibility of manifestations by God, the Devil, Christ, the Virgin, or the saints. Fearing ridicule and condemnation, Loïc tells neither him nor anyone else what he experiences. The silence makes the haunting a private relation between Loïc and the building, one that cannot be tested or shared with the colleague who brought him there.

The experiences continue and intensify during Loïc’s year in Édifice de l’Est. He glimpses top-hatted figures passing through the central aisle; hears fragments of animated English conversation, the clink of bottles, and curses; and, at other times, catches angry French whispers, prayers, and repeated pleas in which he thinks he can distinguish the word mother. He increasingly interprets the walls as retaining traces of prominent people who once passed through them. In his account, history behaves like a broadcast: powerful past events return as vibrations, transmitted through the building in an invisible, subliminal frequency. The spectral quality of the place thus grows from the building’s specific function as a long-lived seat of national power, not from an isolated apparition alone.

Political Shadows and Departure

The haunting is set against a moment Loïc regards as a critical convergence in Canadian and Quebec history. He wonders whether the country’s political tensions, or the psychoanalysis he has recently begun, have drawn forgotten material into view. In this account, the building’s ghosts are both historical presences and a way of imagining the past’s persistence: Macdonald’s anger, Laurier’s troubled conscience, and Mackenzie King’s private recourse to mediums and spirits all become part of the sequence of forces Loïc believes the walls preserve. The narrative presents these as his spectral interpretation, not as independently verified events occurring in the corridors.

The building’s supernatural atmosphere also appears at its exterior. After leaving the Langevin Building one night and walking down Wellington Street toward a bus, Loïc passes Édifice de l’Est and suddenly thinks he sees shadows moving behind the Gothic windows where his office had been the previous year. A pale light shifts inside, and the devilish figure seems to grimace in the rose window. He feels a chill and quickly turns his gaze toward the arriving bus. The moment recalls the demonic figure he had seen in the blackened rose window when he first arrived to work there, an image he had questioned as a possible projection of latent anxiety about entering a political undertaking that might become infernal. The prime minister’s cabinet has since moved across Wellington Street to Édifice Langevin, but the former workplace remains, in Loïc’s recollection, a threshold where political history, private fear, and the apparitions he cannot confide in continue to overlap.