I'll leave the good stuff to the lecture on Thursday, but in the meantime here is an excerpt from Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion, translated by Hannah Josephson as The Tin Flute, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1947), 25-26. (This excerpt found at vehiculepress.com.)
The street was absolutely silent. There is nothing more peaceful than St. Ambroise Street on a winter night. From time to time a figure slips by, as if drawn to the feeble glimmer of a store front. A door opens, a square of light appears on the snow covered street, and a voice rings out in the distance. The passerby is swallowed up, the door bangs shut, and only the spirit of the night reigns in the deserted street between the pale glow of lighted windows on one side and the dark walls bordering the canal on the other.
At one time the suburb had ended here; the last houses of Saint-Henri looked out on open fields, a limpid, bucolic air clinging to their eaves and tiny gardens. Of the good old days nothing is left now on St. Ambroise Street but two or three great trees that still thrust their roots down under the cement sidewalk. Mills, grain elevators, warehouses have sprung up in solid blocks in front of the wooden houses, robbing them of the breezes from the country, stifling them slowly. The houses are still there with their wrought-iron balconies and quiet facades. Sometimes music penetrates the closed shutters, breaking the silence hike a voice from another era. They are lost islands to which the winds bear messages from all the continents, for the night is never too cold to carry over alien scents from the warehouses: smells of ground corn, cereals, rancid oil, molasses, peanuts, wheat dust and resinous pine.
Jean had chosen this remote, little-known street because the rent was low, and because the deep rumble of the quarter, the whistle blowing at the end of day, and the throbbing silence of the night spurred him on to work.
In the spring, to be sure, the nights ceased to be quiet. As soon as the channel was free of ice the sirens blew from sunset to dawn, echoing from the bottom of St. Ambroise Street over the entire suburb, and even as far as Mont-Royal when the wind blew that way.
P.S. Don't forget about STAR ACADÉMIE, put on by the French Club this Thursday at 7 in the Varsity Theatre.
