Moïse Dubois

Moïse Dubois is Touladi’s best-known storyteller and a living link to the village’s past. At the Blanchette store, he recounts the history of the Founder and Grébiche in dramatic, memorable form; his tales preserve local memory even as his habit of enlarging what he no longer recalls exactly blurs the line between history and legend. His rivalry with Noé Bolduc makes that uncertainty visible: in Touladi, the story of the past is itself a subject of dispute.

The Saturday-Night Storyteller

Known as Bonhomme sept-heures, Moïse keeps an exact weekly appointment: every Saturday evening, whatever the weather or the holiday, he arrives at the Blanchette store at seven. In his seventies, corpulent and affable, he is welcomed as much for the atmosphere he brings as for the stories themselves. The store is already lively with the proprietor’s dozen children, who run about, quarrel, and raid the candy supplies; Moïse adds the practiced performance that draws people to stay and listen.

His command of an audience was acquired over a long life of telling. In earlier years, at the lumber camps, he became popular through sentimental stories of mistreated orphans drawn from popular novels. Those narratives could move even the toughest lumberjacks to tears. He knows village history unusually well, including the story of the Founder, whom he knew in his own childhood in Touladi in the 1880s. That personal proximity lends his accounts an air of authority, though it does not make every detail reliable.

A Rivalry in the Store

Saturday nights also bring a contest of styles. Moïse trades the floor with Noé, who follows current affairs and is knowledgeable about history and geography. Their rivalry is lively and sustained: Moïse’s great strokes of epic imagination meet Noé’s smaller, sharper satirical jabs. The two men do more than entertain; their exchanges dramatize competing ways of making sense of the village, one by magnifying the past and the other by puncturing its grander claims.

When the villagers debate whether Grébiche could have learned secrets from the Founder on his deathbed, Moïse argues that she may know more than people think. He points to her long closeness to the Founder and her years working for the D’Anjou family, first for the father and then the son. Noé accepts that she was close to the Founder but doubts that this proves she received Élie D’Anjou’s secrets as he lay dying. Their disagreement establishes the central tension in Moïse’s storytelling: familiarity with a person or place can make a tale plausible, but plausibility is not proof.

Grébiche in the Epic Imagination

Moïse’s stories turn unanswered questions about the Founder into narrative openings. He wonders aloud where the Founder came from, what he did in the United States in his youth, and why he hired Grébiche, a newcomer from Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! whose family was said to be Romani. Rather than treating these gaps as limits to what can be known, he uses them to build an account of hidden intimacy and concealed knowledge. In his telling, Grébiche may have coaxed secrets from the Founder on his deathbed and later used them to boast or to acquire power.

He also repeats the story that Grébiche danced with the devil, a belief shared by some devout women in Sainte-Anne and elsewhere in the village. The tale takes on a life beyond any single teller: after the events associated with her, people at the Blanchette restaurant and throughout Touladi retell her exploits to younger residents and to those who have forgotten them. The accounts vary and grow with each narrator. Moïse’s version is especially expansive because, as the narration observes, his epic cast of mind tends to enlarge what age has left indistinct in memory, creating an aura around the objects and incidents of the past.

Noé’s counterstory offers a concrete alternative to the supernatural account. He was at the inn on the night in question and says that Grébiche, then a beautiful and alluring young woman, danced a quadrille with a familiar American who came to hunt each autumn. Swept up in the dance, she struck an oil lamp and burned her face. She then disappeared from the village for five or six years, prompting rumors that she had taken refuge with Indigenous people or joined Romani travelers; another story linked her to Grey Owl, who had camped at the head of Lake Touladi. She returned with a faint pink scar that rose toward her temple like a flame, almost hidden beneath the rouge she wore. Noé’s account does not erase the legend so much as expose how a remembered accident, a disappearance, and a visible scar could be recast as evidence of a pact with the devil.

Folklore, Memory, and Authority

Moïse’s importance lies not simply in whether each detail he tells is true. He is a carrier of Touladi’s shared memory, giving recurring stories a public setting and a receptive audience. His tales preserve questions about the Founder and Grébiche that the village has not answered, while their changes from one telling to another reveal how oral memory works: gaps invite elaboration, and vividness can acquire the authority of fact.

The contrast with Noé keeps that process in view. Moïse’s dramatic account of a deathbed confidence or a dance with the devil can captivate listeners, but Noé’s presence supplies a challenge grounded in knowledge and eyewitness recollection. Neither the popularity of a story nor the confidence of its teller settles its truth. Through their alternating performances, Moïse becomes both the village’s custodian of the past and an example of how that past is continually reshaped in the telling.