Mathieu Bérubé

Mathieu Bérubé, Touladi’s municipal secretary and a devoted genealogist, becomes the focus of an episode in which the orderly work of tracing ancestry erupts into a dream of overwhelming, uncountable generations. His breakdown carries him from a private vision to the cemetery above the lake, and its yearly recurrence eventually defeats the D’Anjous’ hope that he can uncover the Founder’s origins.

Identity and Genealogical Pursuits

Mathieu has spent years cultivating an interest in genealogy. More than thirty and still unmarried, he is described as having a special devotion to the dead: he visits cemeteries in his leisure time and studies parish registers across a wide area, as far as two hundred kilometres around. His work is not merely a casual pastime. He is a determined collector of generations, someone who tries to assemble the lives and names preserved in records and graves.

The narrative contrasts that solitary archival enthusiasm with the extraordinary fertility attributed to his own family. His elder brother Thomas already has twenty-five children from two marriages in twenty-seven years. Mathieu, by contrast, is still single; he pursues family history by reconstructing the past rather than extending the family through descendants of his own. The contrast gives the dream that follows a pointed context: genealogy, for him, is both a scholarly occupation and an encounter with the sheer scale of kinship.

The Dream of the Ancestors

On the night before the election, Mathieu dreams that a crowd overwhelms him, descending like monkeys from the countless branches of a family tree that disappears into the clouds. The vision turns genealogy into a torrent. Generations arrive not as names to be entered into a register but as a succession of bodies, faces, and features: heads of every shape, crooked or pointed noses, prominent or detached ears, startled eyes, hanging or turned-up lips, broken teeth, and bodies ranging from lanky to bulky. The comic grotesquerie of the catalogue also conveys its pressure: no single person can contain or classify the multitudes pouring down the branches.

As the ancestors tumble faster, Mathieu grows excited and feverish, trying to hold them back, count them, and keep them in his head. But his head swells like a helium balloon and lifts away—or, more precisely, his head flies off. The dream takes the basic acts of his genealogical practice, retaining and counting, and makes them impossible through excess. The family tree is no longer a structure he can survey; its endless descent overwhelms the very capacity meant to record it.

The Cemetery and First Admission

At daybreak, early risers see Mathieu running along the main street toward the lake wearing only his underwear. He does not throw himself into the water. Instead, he stops at the cemetery on the rise above the lake and gestures frantically among the tombs, dancing what the narrative calls the Saint Vitus dance between the gravestones and shouting at the moon as it fades from the morning sky. The movement from dream to cemetery makes his private vision visible in public: the genealogist who visits the dead among their records now behaves as if caught up among them.

Mathieu is committed to Saint-Michel-Archange Asylum in Québec City. The episode is subsequently attributed to the poisoned atmosphere of the election, but the account establishes that attribution without reducing his collapse to a fully explained cause. The election supplies the immediate setting; the narrative also places the disturbance beside his long-standing absorption in the generations of the dead.

Recurrence and Consequences

The following spring, Mathieu returns to Touladi apparently sane. He takes up genealogical research again and resumes collecting stamps. His return does not end the crisis: the following autumn his madness recurs, and he goes back to the asylum. The pattern repeats year after year until his death. The alternation between recovery and relapse gives his story a recurring shape, while the resumption of his ordinary interests makes clear that the return home is not a final resolution.

His recurring illness has a consequence for the D’Anjou family. They had counted on Mathieu to trace the origins of the Founder, but his repeated admissions leave that investigation unfulfilled. The man whose life has been devoted to assembling lineages cannot supply the family history they seek. His skill and interest remain real; what fails is the prospect that they can be made into a reliable service for the D’Anjous.

Narrative Significance

Mathieu’s episode turns genealogy into an image of abundance beyond human control. The dream begins with the familiar form of a family tree but makes its branches spill generations too numerous and physically various to count. His attempt to preserve them in his mind ends not in mastery but in the flight of his own head, while the waking scene relocates the same disturbance among actual tombs. The sequence binds his occupation, his vision, and his public breakdown without providing a definitive diagnosis of their relationship.

His return to research and stamp collecting, followed by another autumnal relapse, also resists a simple story of cure. Instead, the narrative gives his life a repeated interruption, ending only with his death. That recurrence closes off the D’Anjous’ genealogical project as well: the hoped-for account of the Founder’s origins remains beyond Mathieu’s reach, despite his years of attention to the dead and their records.