Mathilde

Mathilde is the estranged daughter of Élie D’Anjou who fled her family home after her mother died in childbirth and eventually made a life in Cuba. For decades, her story survived in fragments: a sister’s private knowledge, childhood memories of Canadian winters, and family recollections on the island. When Loïc recognizes her name in Rodrigo Lerbier’s family history, Mathilde’s exile becomes a bridge between two distant lines of kinship and a return of the D’Anjou past that the family had largely erased.

Identity and Rupture

Mathilde’s break with her family began in grief and anger. In 1889, her mother died in childbirth after Élie D’Anjou refused a caesarean section, which the Church prohibited. Mathilde rebelled against her father over that refusal. During a family gathering years later, Marthe recalled her sister’s flight: Élie denounced her as a pagan, and Mathilde, trembling with fear and anger, sought refuge in the bed she shared with her elder sisters. By the following morning she had disappeared.

The rupture marked Marthe as well. She later decided to become a missionary nun and leave too. Unlike the rest of the family, however, she secretly received news that Mathilde had been living in Cuba for a long time. Her knowledge did not restore Mathilde to the family; it preserved only the fact of her survival and distance. When the family’s conversation turned to what had become of the absent daughter, even that limited knowledge left open the question of whether she was still alive.

Mathilde’s disappearance belongs to a wider history of family silence. In the same gathering, Marthe disclosed that Élie had told her he was adopted, knew nothing of his birth family, and feared a valuable stone he kept hidden in his clothing. The secrets are not presented as the same story, but together they show a family in which origins, grief, and forbidden objects are carried privately rather than openly explained. Mathilde’s flight is the most personal version of that concealment: the daughter expelled from the household becomes a person the family can scarcely speak about.

Exile and Life in Cuba

The history preserved by Mathilde’s descendants fills in the route that the D’Anjou family had lost. She left her birthplace at seventeen and made her way to Lowell, Massachusetts, where she worked for a time in the manufacturing mills. There she met a man of Spanish origin and went with him to Cuba, not long after the island gained independence from Spain in 1898. She spent much of her life working in the sugarcane industry with her Cuban husband and had several children.

Her new life did not erase the northern home she had left. Mathilde spoke French and told stories of Canada: houses buried in snow, subzero cold, and winds that seemed to howl like beasts. She also remembered hunting and fishing in dense forests and on immense lakes, and described maple sugar and maple syrup made from trees unfamiliar in the Caribbean. In those recollections, a distant landscape became intimate through ordinary particulars: weather, food, forests, and the work of gathering sweetness from trees.

Her husband’s family, meanwhile, had its own history of dispossession. The account of Mathilde’s life places them among Cubans whose plantation was taken early in the period of U.S. control over the sugar industry. The novel thus sets her private exile within a larger history of migration and colonial power. She left a family that had rejected her, entered another family and a different country, and lived through the transformation of the sugar economy that affected her husband’s kin.

Memory and Recognition

Mathilde’s past reaches Loïc through more than one inherited recollection. Rodrigo Lerbier remembers his mother telling him about his great-grandmother Matilda, a Canadian woman who spoke French and described snow and freezing winds. In another family account, Maria recalls knowing her grandmother Matilda, a formidable woman with a forceful personality and a great, cascading laugh. Her stories ranged beyond snow to Canadian hunting and fishing, forests and lakes, and the maple sugar that fascinated her Cuban listeners.

The maple syrup became a small, durable keepsake of a life remembered at a distance. Rodrigo had brought Maria a tin of syrup given to him by Québec tourists in Varadero. Maria treasured it for years, taking half a spoonful each Sunday and thinking of her northern grandmother. The tin does not reunite the two branches of the family, but it gives memory a material form: a taste that carries a place and a person across generations.

As Loïc walks with Rodrigo, the family resemblance in their histories becomes suddenly legible. Loïc recalls that a daughter of Élie D’Anjou fled her father’s home and ended up in Cuba; Rodrigo’s ancestor was Matilda, the French-speaking woman whose stories came from Canada. Loïc identifies her as his mother’s aunt, his grandfather’s sister, Mathilde. The discovery turns what had seemed like separate family lore into a shared genealogy. Mathilde had not merely vanished into an unknown elsewhere: her life had continued within the ancestry of people Loïc had just encountered.

Later Years and Narrative Significance

Maria’s memories also establish the limits of what Mathilde could pass on. Mathilde died in a Havana hospital in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, aged over ninety. By then Alzheimer’s disease had taken away her recollection of who she was and where she came from. She could no longer tell others that she had fled her birthplace at seventeen after her mother’s death, worked in Lowell, and built a life in Cuba. The family story therefore survives not as a complete testimony from Mathilde herself but as scattered memories transmitted by those who knew her or heard her stories.

That broken transmission gives her rediscovery its force. In the D’Anjou household, Mathilde persists as the daughter who rebelled and disappeared; in Cuba, she is the northern grandmother whose stories and laugh remained vivid. Loïc’s recognition brings the two accounts together without undoing the estrangement or recovering everything that was lost. Through Mathilde, the novel makes family history cross borders by way of oral memory, names, and small inherited details—and reveals how a person excluded from one family can remain central to another’s sense of origin.