Ottawa, Ontario

Ottawa, Ontario, is more than a place of government in the novel: it is where Loïc and Régis D’Anjou’s kinship becomes a close intellectual partnership, and where their final meeting acquires the weight of a farewell. The city links Régis’s changing public life—from religious and journalistic circles to service at the federal level—to Loïc’s own work, memory, and eventual reckoning with their estrangement.

A setting for Régis’s public life

Régis’s route to Ottawa followed a series of exclusions and conflicts in Quebec. In the late 1940s, while still a member of a religious order, he supported striking miners at Asbestos alongside Archbishop Charbonneau. The stand brought him into contact with the unconventional lawyer Pierre Elliott Trudeau, but also into conflict with religious authorities. Rather than risk the punishment they might impose, Régis left the order. He hoped to pursue an academic career, but found the doors to university work closed in the Quebec of that period; journalism remained the available intellectual profession.

Régis nevertheless built a substantial career. He became a regular contributor to Cité Libre, the journal founded by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the early 1950s as a center of resistance to Maurice Duplessis’s paternalistic and repressive regime. His essays on Quebec society established him as a leading intellectual of his generation. A later generation of revolutionary and neo-nationalist writers rejected him, and by the end of the 1960s he was working in Ottawa as a speechwriter for the prime minister. He eventually became a senator. Ottawa thus marks not a simple ascent, but a change in the form of his public engagement: from religious controversy and critical journalism to writing within federal government and, finally, the Senate.

A shared workplace and an intellectual inheritance

Loïc and Régis worked together in the prime minister’s office in Ottawa. Their common work deepened their bond beyond their distant family relationship; Loïc came to regard Régis as a spiritual father. The work also included revising translations for Senate committees, an assignment Régis arranged by bringing Loïc to Ottawa. It was their last collaboration before the 1995 referendum dispute estranged them. The shared setting therefore holds both parts of their relationship: the professional closeness that helped make them confidants, and the political division that ended their partnership.

After Régis’s death, Loïc received his papers and read the correspondence the two men had exchanged after working together in Ottawa. The letters stirred him because their voices seemed to renew a conversation cut short. The papers were not a formal diary but an extensive working archive: handwritten notes, reading observations, reports, and drafts of articles and essays, kept with typewritten pages in ring binders and black-covered school notebooks. Loïc found pages missing and could initially examine the material only in passing. The archive nevertheless gave him access to discoveries Régis had not shared with him after their rupture, including research into the family’s cameo and the Founder’s origins. Ottawa’s former collaboration becomes, through these documents, a dialogue resumed after the possibility of direct conversation has passed.

The last meeting, May 1994

The novel returns to Ottawa in May 1994 for Loïc’s last visit with Régis. A violent storm delayed Loïc as he drove along the expressway crossing the city to Régis’s house, which faced a park beside the Ottawa River. When Régis met him at the door, Loïc noticed how much his cousin had physically declined: his walk had slowed, his frame had grown thin and stooped, his white hair was sparse, and arthritis had deformed his hand. His mind and memory remained alert, although he spoke more slowly and laughed less often. His indignation, by contrast, was undiminished. He spoke of the age’s degradation and of what he saw as an encroaching barbarism, while wishing that he could withdraw before age brought further infirmity.

Loïc had recently written about a new edition of Régis’s best-known book, a sharp examination of French-Canadian society that had won several prizes in the early 1960s. He had described its author as an exorcist of the society’s inner demons and was anxious to learn Régis’s response to his article. The visit therefore joined literary recognition to personal affection: Loïc was engaging with Régis’s public legacy while confronting the frailty of the man whose judgment mattered to him.

Farewell and the city’s signs

As Loïc left the house, Régis raised his trembling, arthritic hand in a final greeting. The gesture struck Loïc as almost ceremonial, and the image stayed with him as he looked back at his cousin in the rear-view mirror. He wondered whether Régis sensed that they would not meet again. The narrative makes the possibility painful partly because their later estrangement would turn this visit into an occasion of remorse for Loïc.

On the drive out of Ottawa, the radio reported two events in Quebec: plaster had fallen from the ceiling of the National Assembly, striking one Liberal member and injuring two others, and a meteorite fragment had landed near Sorel. Loïc connected the reports to signs of political and worldly upheaval. The black rock, described on the radio as roughly ten centimeters across and possibly three to five billion years old, sharpened his sense of the disparity between cosmic time and human lives. Yet the scene returns to the intimate scale of the visit: Loïc was grateful to have been able to speak with Régis about such matters, and uncertain how much time remained.

Narrative significance

Ottawa concentrates the novel’s movement between public history and private inheritance. It is the workplace where a former religious intellectual became a government writer and senator, and where Loïc’s collaboration with him developed into a father-like attachment. It is also the setting of their final meeting, recalled through the later knowledge of their rupture and Régis’s death. The city’s political institutions, their correspondence, and the farewell at the riverside house form a connected record: public arguments continue in books and government work, while the most consequential exchange for Loïc is the personal conversation whose continuation he can only imagine.