Colline parlementaire

Colline parlementaire is presented as a center of Canadian political authority and as a vivid setting for the novel’s satire of power. Its offices and grounds bring Loïc into close working contact with Régis D’Anjou, while its public spaces become a stage for strange, comic, and faintly unsettling scenes around Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Seat of Power and Daily Work

At the Canadian prime minister’s cabinet, described as a center of power that would increasingly become a place of torment for its occupants, Loïc was soon promoted to Régis D’Anjou’s trusted confidant. In the intervals between urgent duties and while revising speeches together, Régis entertained him with satirical portraits of Quebec’s grande bourgeoisie and stories about his youthful circle, many of whose members would later distinguish themselves in literature or politics. The work of government thus shares space with private conversation and a cultivated, irreverent view of the society surrounding it.

Grounds, Spectators, and Political Theatre

The grounds of Colline parlementaire also host the recurring figure Loïc privately called the perpetual worshipper: a middle-aged woman who seemed to follow Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Dressed at times in conspicuous, ill-matched clothes, including a pink-and-white striped pajama-like outfit, she could spend hours gazing toward the Peace Tower. She was reportedly a prominent socialite familiar to security staff, had access to Parliament, and sometimes followed Trudeau on official trips abroad. Her presence remains unexplained; the cabinet did not know what, if anything, passed between her and the prime minister.

Loïc once saw her from a bus on Sussex Drive, opposite the War Museum, as Trudeau’s steel-gray limousine passed. She raised her arms and waved; the car seemed, briefly, as if it might slow, though Loïc could not tell whether it had or whether the impression belonged to the scene’s peculiar atmosphere. The woman lowered her arms and walked on alone. Repeated sightings made her a familiar presence around Parliament, set in contrast with the well-fed cat that senators regularly fed on their side of the grounds: the cat gravitated toward the Senate, while she seemed fixed on the House of Commons and the prime minister.

Eccentricity and Uncanny Atmosphere

Other episodes deepen the setting’s comic unease. Some evenings, a couple of senior Privy Council officials, one a youthful friend of the prime minister, dressed as Romanian Orthodox prelates and went across the Ottawa River to Hull to bless its water tower. A venerable senator, unwilling to endure the parliamentary session without diversion, had a young House page tattoo Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper on his back. The scenes are not accounts of formal political business; instead, they make the political precinct feel permeable to private spectacle and absurd ritual.

Loïc’s narration gathers these peculiarities into an image of Colline parlementaire as a place touched by Faustian disorder, with himself, in his own way, among its dissenting presences. The location consequently carries more than the machinery of government: its proximity to authority sharpens the satire, while its procession of watchers, disguises, and eccentric acts lends the political center an uncanny theatricality.