Touladi cemetery stands above Lake Squatec, where the orderly rows of tombstones mark not only the dead but also the stories the living carry about them. For Loïc, it is a place of burial and inherited fear; in a dream, it becomes a landscape where the dead of Touladi rise and the boundary between memory and vision gives way.

Setting and Burial History

Seen from an aircraft, the cemetery lies above the lake beyond the village. Its rows of stones prompt Loïc to imagine the people beneath them as enclosed in boxes, like the living villagers housed in the small houses below. The image turns the cemetery into a continuation of the village: lives and memories contained above ground in homes, the dead enclosed below in graves.

That sense of enclosure is sharpened by the story Loïc recalls hearing from adults. When the cemetery was moved after the 1944 landslide, a child’s body was found turned over in its grave, its jaw clamped onto its own forearm. The child had been a victim of the Spanish flu and, amid the epidemic’s many deaths among Touladi’s children, had been buried too soon. Loïc imagines the terror of waking in a coffin underground, unable to cry out for air. The cemetery’s history thus joins a specific disaster and a premature burial to his wider fear of being trapped among the dead.

Disturbance Among the Tombstones

The cemetery also becomes the setting for Mathieu Bérubé’s public breakdown. After a feverish attempt to keep track of Touladi’s descending generations, Mathieu runs nearly naked along the main street and stops among the graves. There he dances Saint Vitus’s dance and shouts at the fading moon. He is committed to Saint-Michel-Archange Asylum in Québec.

His stays follow a recurring pattern: the following spring he returns to Touladi, apparently recovered, and resumes genealogical research and stamp collecting; in the autumn his illness returns and he goes back to the asylum. This cycle continues year after year until his death. The cemetery’s presence in the episode links Mathieu’s unstable pursuit of ancestry to the village’s accumulated generations, while the episode’s consequence is a permanent break in the D’Anjous’ hope that he will trace the Founder’s origins.

The Cemetery in Loïc’s Dream

In a later dream, the burial ground expands into a forest of tombstones, their branches imagined as dried human arms reaching toward a leaden sky. Grébiche appears enlarged, carrying a long black staff. She strikes a grave slab and calls the dead of Touladi: pioneers and patriarchs, women who died in childbirth or after many pregnancies, young victims of tuberculosis or the Spanish flu, people drowned or killed in accidents, and children stillborn or dead soon after birth.

At her summons, the stone graves burst open and the dead rise. Men appear with their axes and scythes, women with clusters of children, and young women laughing with the promise of eternal youth. Among them Loïc recognizes people he had known, including his grandfather Josias Bolduc. A young woman with a familiar, sad smile approaches him; her face recalls a faded photograph. Joy gives way at once to intense pain, and Loïc breaks into tears as the dream vanishes.

The dream is described as prophetic of Grébiche’s death and occurs during a period of psychological upheaval in Loïc’s adolescence. The cemetery therefore functions not simply as the village’s burial place but as a storehouse of its losses, where family memory, local history, and Loïc’s vision of the dead converge. Its graves hold the past in the waking world; in the dream, they open, making that past visible and emotionally immediate.