Papillons

Papillons are the butterflies displayed in the gatekeeper Charles Lemay’s hut, where they bring scientific curiosity and imaginative wonder together. To the child Loïc, their colored wings and resonant names open a world beyond the ordinary; later, a dream of riding a Monarch carries that fascination into a strange landscape of flight and escape.

The Collection at the Gate

During autumn rounds with his adoptive father, Loïc passed through the Pain-de-Sucre, where the company’s camps and garages stood. The barrier hut was presided over by Charles Lemay, a large, booming-voiced man who recorded timber loads and checked permits for hunting and fishing. Inside, amid his pipes and the traffic of trucks, Lemay kept a well-stocked library, American magazines, and a glass display case of butterflies caught in a net and pinned for preservation.

The collection was part of a wider appetite for knowledge. Lemay had served at the front in World War I, made imposing bows and long arrows fletched with partridge feathers, and pursued natural history as a self-taught scholar. His interests extended beyond butterflies: he assembled a substantial herbarium and corresponded with Brother Marie-Victorin to identify rare plants gathered on the slopes of the Pain-de-Sucre. The specimens in the hut thus belonged to a working practice of observation, classification, and collecting, not simply decoration.

Names, Color, and Fragility

Loïc stood open-mouthed before the pinned butterflies. Their names, read aloud from colored plates displayed beside the case, sounded to him like a procession from a celestial court: Monarch, Viceroy, Admiral, Painted Lady, Blue Argus, Giant Swallowtail, Hummingbird Hawk-moth, Tiger Moth, Pearly Heath, Northern Crescent, Mourning Cloak, and Red Admiral. The sequence gives the collection a second life in language. Each name distinguishes a specimen, but together they also enlarge the child’s imaginative world, making the display feel like an assembly of splendid, almost otherworldly presences.

Lemay sometimes took a specimen from its case and examined it through a magnifying glass. Holding a Red Admiral or Blue Argus delicately between the fingers of his large, hairy hand, he explained that the colored marks on its wings were made of tiny overlapping scales. A touch could make those scales crumble into dust. The lesson joins precision to vulnerability: what appears richly patterned is also materially fragile, and the act of handling can damage the very surface one wants to understand.

Loïc’s Attention and Wonder

The butterflies meet a child already absorbed by the act of seeing. In the surrounding childhood scenes, Loïc runs through fields and woods, taking in trees, houses, sky, and church tower; when he falls, he can lie still beneath the immense sky, overwhelmed by the scene above him. The display at the hut concentrates that expansive attention on particular objects. The narrator presents his gaze as wide-eyed and intent, eager to grasp and encompass each new thing as it emerges from the indistinct unknown.

This response is more than admiration for attractive wings. The narration describes discovery as nearly mystical: an unfamiliar object seems to acquire a sacred force when it first becomes perceptible and distinct. The butterflies therefore mark a moment in which looking becomes a form of encounter. Lemay offers names, specimens, and an explanation of their structure; Loïc receives all three with an intensity that exceeds the lesson itself. The collection makes natural knowledge and wonder coexist rather than cancel one another.

The Monarch in the Dream

One evening, returning from the Pain-de-Sucre, Loïc falls asleep in the jeep and dreams that he is riding a fairy-tale Monarch alongside Lemay. They travel through an uncanny country whose houses have walls as translucent and silky as butterfly wings. Then they must flee as enormous nets descend over them in a deluge of fine golden dust. The apparent assault gives way to the waking scene: the lights of the village are already shining on the vehicle’s windshield.

The dream transforms details from the real collection without resolving them into a simple allegory. The Monarch becomes a mount, the delicate texture of wings becomes the architecture of houses, and the net used to catch butterflies returns at an impossible scale as a threat to the riders. Golden dust recalls Lemay’s explanation that wing scales crumble when touched, but in the dream the material seems to fall everywhere. The episode carries the butterflies from the glass case into Loïc’s imaginative life, where their beauty, fragility, and capture become part of a moving, unsettling adventure.