Solange

Solange, the young daughter of Touladi’s newly arrived doctor, becomes for Loïc less a companion than an idealized figure glimpsed at a distance. Their first meeting takes place during the three-day wake for Maurice Bolduc: while the family gathers around the coffin, Solange’s presence redirects Loïc’s attention from death toward a poetic childhood infatuation. She scarcely acts or speaks in the episodes recounted; the force she acquires in his life comes chiefly from what he sees, remembers, and imagines about her.

First Appearance at the Wake

Loïc first notices Solange as a girl about his age, timidly clinging to her mother’s skirt. Her mother, dressed in an elegant purple taffeta gown, tells her not to tug at the dress. Solange’s blond curls catch Loïc’s attention as the women talk, and he watches her furtively. The contrast is striking: he has just encountered a dead body for the first time, and has been unsettled by the cold stillness of his brother in the coffin; now his attention settles on a living child across the room.

As the wake proceeds, the gathering thins and the salon grows dimmer. Solange falls asleep on a sofa, her head tipped against its arm, her curls spread across her cheek, and her white-stockinged legs tucked beneath a red velvet dress. Loïc pretends to sleep in his rocking chair while observing her through nearly closed eyelids. When the adults leave to pray beside the coffin, he remains in the room with her. The scene gives his fascination its secluded, watchful character: Solange is asleep and unaware of him, while the quiet of the house makes her breathing, the clock, and the stove’s faint crackle especially noticeable to him.

A Figure Seen from Afar

The wake does not lead to a close relationship. Solange lives at the other end of the village, and Loïc has few further opportunities to see her. He looks for her at church, learning where the Provencher family sits. From a distant pew, he waits for her return from communion: she walks alone down the aisle with lowered eyes and joined hands, wearing a blue coat and navy beret, blond curls escaping beneath it. He follows her with his gaze until she disappears among the adults and the pews.

He sometimes catches sight of her leaving the convent after class, running and laughing among other girls. Her curls move as she runs, and her laughter remains in his mind after she has turned out of sight at the end of the main street. The account presents these meetings as brief visual impressions rather than conversations or shared experiences. Distance is not incidental to Loïc’s attachment: it is what allows isolated glimpses to become occasions for anticipation and memory, without either child having to establish what the other feels.

The Romance Loïc Invents

Unable to follow Solange into ordinary life, Loïc recreates her in imagined adventures. He draws stories in which he confronts a boy who has quarreled with her at school, defeats him in a duel, and carries Solange away on a white horse. The horse becomes an airplane, and the two fly toward lands of sumptuous houses he has seen in American magazines. In these stories, danger gives Loïc a role: he can defend Solange, rescue her, and imagine her as loving the chivalrous hero he has made of himself.

The flight is the scene he savors most. It turns the distance between them into an imagined closeness, with Solange pressed against him as the airplane carries them away. At the funeral vigil, her name has already become bound in his mind to oranges eaten at his grandfather’s home at New Year and to the soft, diaphanous angel hair his mother puts on the Christmas tree. The playful chain linking angel, orange, and Solange shows how readily the child’s attraction transforms a name into an atmosphere of warmth, sweetness, and wonder. The story he tells himself supplies the intimacy their real encounters never provide.

Departure and Narrative Significance

The adult account distinguishes Solange’s idealized place in Loïc’s imagination from the more troubling desire he associates with Florence, his sister. He feels shame about that desire and imagines that he could not confess it, even in confession; years later, he will disclose it to a psychoanalyst. Solange, by contrast, represents a poetic ideal, although she, too, becomes part of an emotional life that Loïc experiences chiefly through fantasy rather than reciprocal knowledge.

Solange eventually marries an anglophone at nineteen, moves with him to New Zealand, and gives no further sign of life. Her departure closes the possibility of renewed contact without resolving the childhood image Loïc built around her. As a character, she is therefore defined both by a few concrete scenes and by the space between those scenes: the girl at the wake, the distant figure at church and school, and the beloved heroine of stories Loïc invents. The difference between Solange as a person glimpsed briefly and Solange as a fantasy is central to her narrative role.