Hector Berthelot. Les mystères de Montréal par M. Ladébauche, Montréal, Nota Bene, 2013.

Commented by Julien Vallières, student member (July 2020):

Originally published in 1879-1881. In this easy-to-read novel with a title inscribing it in the series of urban mysteries, Hector Berthelot transports us between Montréal and Saint-Jérôme, in the north. The narration is delegated to a character of the author’s invention, Baptiste Ladébauche, without any justification provided for the artifice of this transparent pseudonym. The story is a succession of events, tied together by a somewhat loose plot, in the spirit of the serial novels of the small press. The style, marked by the neglect of journalistic writing, nevertheless has interesting characteristics, particularly a lexicon associated with the language of characters of modest extraction, which suggests that an almost slang French specific to Montréal was in use among its working classes at the time. A rare urban novel from the period taking the Québec metropolis as its stage—there are delightful references to the city corners of the time, notably Carré Saint-Louis and the Faubourg Québec district, crucial in characterizing the inhabited space of Montréal at the time. The critical apparatus is to the book’s credit, especially the afterword by Micheline Cambron, which offers a rare opportunity to introduce the original personality of Hector Berthelot, a pioneer of Montréal bohemia, and Arthur Buies, one of the most famous journalists of the last third of nineteenth-century Québec.

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