Those Bad Quebecers

"We have such a bad reputation among the rest of Canada,” said my friend G., grinning as she lifted her wine glass. “Oh yes. It’s always, ‘What do they want? What does Quebec want?’” She laughed and we all laughed with her. “But of course they all want to come to Montreal and visit!”

She was the only native Quebecoise at the table; we are, of course, American, and G.’s friend S. is originally from Saskatchewan. We were talking about what had drawn us to this city, and how it was a place where each one of us felt like we could finally be ourselves, free from different sorts of repression and personal constraint that we'd felt elsewhere. I’ve been hearing plenty about this subject lately. Another friend, who happens to be a priest, told me she thought we should all get the t-shirt she’d seen in the gay village recently: “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to Montréal.” (Probably other cities have the same t-shirts, but they seem particularly appropriate here.) The Catholicism that held Quebec in a near-stranglehold for centuries may have been thrown off hard, but it clings like lingerie, close to the skin, in a kind of gleeful, creative delight at being naughty, especially about sex and religion. Quebec delights in playing the French libertine against the Anglophone prude, and Montréal is certainly seen as the warm bosom of libertine French life by the envious and somewhat scandalized eyes of the rest of Canada.

Last night G. told about a cartoon that had recently appeared (I believe) in Montréal’s Le Devoir, lampooning the opportunistic relationship between Prime Minister Stephen Harper, of the Conservative Party, and the Liberal leader of Quebec, Jean Charest. Harper had pledged a lot of federal money to the province, in an attempt to defuse one of the main objections of the separatist Parti Quebeçois – that federal money was not being distributed fairly, or sufficiently, to Quebec; the added dimension was that a Conservative alliance with the Liberals would weaken the Parti Quebeçois’ chance for winning back the leadership of the province in the next election, and lessen the chances of a new push for a separatist referendum. Anyway – the cartoon (which I’ve not seen, so take this at face value) apparently showed Harper and Charest cuddled up in bed making moon-eyes at each other and sharing a cigarette, with the caption, “Was that as good for you as it was for me?” Outrageous! And, I think, very funny. (But can you imagine such a thing appearing in a mainstream American newspaper, with GW as one of the caricatured figures, lounging in bed with, say, a Saudi crown prince? or maybe Ariel Sharon? Forget it.)

We talked on, and eventually the conversation turned to French-Canadian, and the honorable Quebec tradition of cursing with words derived from religion. G., who is a liberal feminist but an anomaly up here in being, as well, a practicing Catholic, said, “Well, I don’t use those words, personally.” But when her friend mentioned that she’d be staying late at church on Sunday for a meeting, G. smiled mischievously and said, “You know what we call those ‘professional’ church ladies in French: “les grenouilles d’eau bénite.” “L’eau bénite” is holy water, so the English translation she offered was “font frogs”. What an image! Baptisms are now ruined for me, forever!

One final story: a priest (the same one who suggested the t-shirts) recently attended an interfaith clergy meeting at the Oratoire St. Joseph, the big Catholic shrine on top of Mt. Royal. She had recently been made a canon of the Canadian Anglican Church, so she was wearing all her special canon regalia, and one of the Roman Catholic priests came up to her and asked, “Etes-vous une cardinale?” to which she replied, “Pas encore!”

 

Comments

[Peter]

I was just catching up, and you snagged me with "les grenouilles d’eau bénite" -- unchurched as I am, I know the type well and by George, they are froglike, except for their screechy voices. Some of them, of course, are wonderful people and would be hurt to be compared to frogs, but durn it, if it's squat, prone to jumping (and lashing out with the tongue), and hangs around the holy water, it's a grenouille!

I think that the United States' insistence on religious freedom might leave everybody a lot more choice, but it makes the churches themselves much more serious, as if being subject to the marketplace of ideas means you can never let up. Or maybe it merely frees us to get much nastier when we turn to bad language.

I had no idea that Montreal was "sin city" for eastern Canada. I have this theory that every region has somewhere to go to let one's hair down, more or less, and for the rest of the region to look down upon. The U.S. has several, like New Orleans (that was), or Las Vegas and certainly New York. I once read a blurb about a church planning a bus trip to Sin City... Absurd as it sounds, Cleveland's entertainment district had a run as a draw for sleazy conventioneers that drew folks from all over the state until things got out of hand.