![]() ![]() I hoped for a miracle, but time had shattered the icons of my childhood. I pushed the barrier that defended the access of a gravel road and I went down a steep hill. To the left of the bridge, a sign announced a property for sale or for rent. I was certain that at the foot of this formidable concrete wall would still huddle the power station that once electrified Quebec City.Īfter hours of wandering, I finally came across a railway bridge where, as a child, I had often gone to play with my cousins. I only had one landmark: the dam my grandfather had built, and which was a five-minute walk from his property. Many times, at the bend of the road or from the top of a hill, I thought I recognized the vast house where I had been so happy. But the vague memories of a six-year-old did little to help me locate a lost paradise that I didn’t even know if it still existed. After an absence of forty years, nothing seemed to have changed in the rocky landscape, bristling with tall pines from another age. I had stopped believing that happiness demanded that we run away from our past. Some time ago, I felt the need to find the river and the country house in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier that my family had left forever. It originates in the mountains north of Quebec, meanders through a valley cluttered with erratic boulders, digs fjords in the crumbly soils of Pont-Rouge, then joins the Saint-Laurent at Donnacona, thirty kilometers upstream from the Cap Diamond. The Jacques-Cartier River bewitched the summers of my childhood. The two men come face to face… Les Torrents de l’espoir is a superb historical saga, full of breath and exoticism, written by one of Quebec’s best novelists, twice winner of the Governor General’s Award, the local Goncourt. During a stopover in Montreal, he meets Gustave Hamelin, an engineer who has just been hired by Henry Blake, Stéphane’s sworn enemy: he controls La Montreal Gas and Light. Catherine, destitute, is forced to work as a maid while Stéphane joins the steamships of the St. Until the day Mervynn was sent to China with his regiment. So Stéphane is not happy about the liaison between the Irish soldier Mervynn Parker and Catherine, his mother. ![]() During a skirmish with soldiers of the British Empire, Stéphane Talbot’s father, an ardent Republican, disappears, leaving behind a distraught and penniless family – the family mill is in ruins – and a son animated by a ferocious hatred towards the English and especially towards Henry Blake, the officer responsible for this destruction. ![]() La vallée du Richelieu, Bas-Canada, 1837. ![]()
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