Clémentine

Clémentine is the D’Anjou household’s steadfast domestic presence: a servant who becomes family, a caregiver who outlasts the generations she helped raise, and a devout witness to the family’s decline. Her life is shaped by work and loss, but also by a durable commitment to remain in the home on Grande-Allée, even as the house grows increasingly burdened by illness, secrecy, and grief.

Background and Arrival in the D’Anjou Household

Born in 1925 into a farming family in Arthabaska, Clémentine grew up in severe poverty during the Depression. Her mother died when she was young, and she was introduced early to the hard labor of farm life. At fifteen, when her father remarried, she left her childhood home and went to Québec City in search of small jobs. By the late 1940s, her work had brought her to the D’Anjous.

Clémentine entered the household in 1947, when Jean D’Anjou was its head. The previous housekeeper, Anastasie, had become seriously ill and disabled that year. Georges and his sister Georgia, both in their early twenties, were still living with their parents, Jean and Caroline. In 1948, Georges married Lucille Lemire, who joined the household; Georgia later left to study at the Beaux-Arts in Montréal, eventually settling in Paris. Clémentine’s arrival thus coincided with a change in the household’s generations and responsibilities, and she remained in its service for more than six decades.

Caregiver and Substitute Mother

Clémentine’s employment became a familial role. She cared for Georges’s children day and night—nursing, feeding, and raising them—because Lucille was described as having little maternal instinct and returning quickly to her social life after childbirth. The children mostly left home early; Isabelle was the exception, remaining close to her mother. The account makes Clémentine’s care more than a matter of household routine: she supplied much of the daily maternal labor on which the family’s children depended, though emotional attachments within the family were not evenly distributed.

Her care continued into the later lives of the household. After Lucille’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Clémentine lived amid the confusion and paranoia of her decline. Lucille sometimes accused people around her, including Clémentine, of searching through her drawers and stealing from her. The accusations place the housekeeper inside the intimate strain of the illness: she remained responsible to a household in which a familiar person could become, in Lucille’s eyes, a suspected intruder.

Faith, Habit, and Private Distress

Clémentine’s Catholic devotion distinguishes her from the changing social world around the family. While the period is described as one that had cast religion and the sacred aside, she remained observant, attending Mass at Saint-Dominique on Grande-Allée every Sunday and often during the week. She particularly kept up her devotions during Advent and the two weeks before Easter. Proverbs and old sayings served her as a practical philosophy, a store of inherited guidance through which she judged events.

Her piety did not prevent her from enjoying television. She was especially fond of serial dramas whose hedonistic values and mores ran counter to her own. That contrast gives her characterization a quiet complexity: devotion and popular entertainment coexist in the same life, rather than dividing her neatly into a relic of religious tradition. Her appearance, too, records time passing in domestic service: the hair in her immaculate bun changed from black to salt-and-pepper and then white, while her patient, discreet manner remained a defining feature.

As the consequences of the New York events spread through the family, Clémentine’s private distress became audible in muttered prayers as she dusted the large house. Its charged silences, grief, and bitterness had become difficult to bear, and she was nearing eighty. An unspoken understanding held that she would remain in the household for the rest of her life, but she began to wonder whether she should seek a place in a seniors’ residence. Her hesitation shows that loyalty did not make the burden costless: she had spent decades caring for the family, yet the family’s accumulating troubles were wearing on her.

Lucille’s Death and the Family Investigation

Clémentine was one of the two people in the house with Lucille on the night Lucille went outside and died in the cold. Georges reported the disappearance to the police that morning. Officers questioned him and Clémentine, and returned repeatedly to record their statements as investigators examined the house, searched for fingerprints, and reconstructed Lucille’s route and approximate time of departure. Clémentine’s presence made her part of the official inquiry, but the evidence does not establish that she caused or assisted Lucille’s death.

The investigation unfolded publicly, amid accusations and speculation directed at the D’Anjou family. Clémentine had to give evidence while the home she had served for decades was searched and its occupants scrutinized. Investigators eventually established that the fingerprints on the door belonged to Lucille, who had opened and closed it herself; Georges was cleared. The conclusion clarified Lucille’s actions, but did not undo the damage to the family’s reputation or remove the burden of the events from those who had lived through them.

Decision to Stay

During this period, Clémentine discreetly made a novena at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré to decide whether to leave the Grande-Allée house. She returned resolved to stay until the end of her life. The decision was rooted in duration and attachment: the house had been her home for more than sixty years. It had also become the place where her caregiving, religious practice, and personal history were bound together.

After Georges suffered a heart attack in the aftermath of the scandal, he remained in the house, greatly weakened. Clémentine cared for him there; his grandson Mathieu D’Anjou soon moved in with his wife and two young children and also helped look after him. Clémentine’s role thus extended into another generation, as she continued to tend the family amid physical decline and the ruins of its former public standing. Her endurance does not resolve the household’s suffering; it gives that suffering a constant human presence, expressed through the repeated, unglamorous work of staying and caring.