O Quebec IV: The Golden Book

Photo by Hallie Cohen

Le Livre d’Or is the name of store on la rue Principale Sud, which is Main Street in Sutton, a high-end tourist destination in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Sutton boasts tasteful shopping nooks and upscale B and B’s, exemplified by Le Pleasant Hotel and Café, whose stark modernity embodies the anomalous cosmopolitanism you’ll find in similar out-of-the-way oases of sophistication like Kinsale in southern Ireland. Le Livre d’Or is one block down from rue Pine and two blocks from rue Maple, the street names reminding us that Sutton, for all its Frenchness, is only a hop, skip and a jump from the English speaking world. On the used book table is the Livre de Poche edition of Ernest Hemingway’s L’Adieu aux armes, published by Gallimard in 1948. It begins, “Cette année là, à la fin de l’été, nous habitons une maison dans un village qui, par-delà la revière et la plaine, donnait sur les montagnes.” Next to L’Adieu aux armes is Milan Kundera’s L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être, published by Folio. It would not be surprising to find these tomes in a bookstall overlooking the Seine, but the proximity of Le Livre d’Or to the U.S. border makes the cultural displacement all the more startling. Signs on the road outside of Sutton alert drivers to la Douane, or customs, which is only a few miles away. No culture wars are being fought on rue Maple, but it’s a different civilization.

O Quebec II: The Eastern Townships

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

The life of Agnes Elizabeth Winona Leclercq Joy is chronicled in the basement of the Missisquoi Museum in Stanbridge East, Quebec, an area just over the Vermont border known as the Eastern Townships. Missisquoi, by the way, is the Algonquin word for “lots of waterfowl.” Joy was born in Franklin, Vermont, in 1844. But, according to the text in the musty display case, she experienced a desire to escape the confines of her world even as a young girl. She joined L.B. Lent’s National Circus and ended up in Cuba. Darkly beautiful, she married the Prussian Prince Felix Salm-Salm after meeting him in 1862. Prince Salm-Salm fought in the Civil War, and in 1866 Joy followed him to Mexico, where he served under Archduke Maximilian. Salm-Salm died in 1870 during the Battle of Gravelotte in the Franco-Prussian war. Joy died in 1912, at the age of 68, in Karlsruhe. It was a long way from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and the Eastern Townships, and she hardly had the notoriety of a Margaret Trudeau, who had seemingly been infected with a similar wanderlust. On a summer’s afternoon, Stanbridge East, which has a history of resistance to authority on a global level that is also chronicled in the Missisquoi Museum, affords another generation of travelers the kind of escape that Joy sought. Joy’s forbears ostensibly came to America, like so many immigrants, because they too were trying to escape from something.