It took place Tuesday, March 15 1977, in Montréal. Only three people knew it would happen.

Except for the hockey news, there was nothing in the morning’s headlines to excite the urgent attention of most Montréalers:

Hence we felt free to enjoy the mild weather that was such a relief after another hard winter. By noon that day the temperature reached six degrees Celsius, and the last of the lingering snow began to melt. While an overcast sky cast a slight pall over the city in the morning, by early afternoon the cloud cover thinned and the sun came out...

Andrée Yanacopoulo (widow of Hubert Aquin):

We took leave of each other in a state of renewed harmony . . . As such I cannot consider his suicide a failure; I consider it a success.

Lucille Aquin (mother of Hubert Aquin):

Hubert’s “catastrophe” shook me, shook me . . . My heart was torn apart. At my age, Monsieur, imagine . . . And the way he did it! You prepare a steak that way. I found that abominable, oui Monsieur.

MM (friend of Hubert Aquin):

The Tuesday he killed himself . . . I had the strong impression that...

Sheppard: Friday morning, March 18th, after the memorial service for Hubert Aquin held at the nearby Église Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, some fifty friends and acquaintances gather at his home to honour his memory with sandwiches and wine.

When the guests arrive at the Aquins’ seven-room, two-story, semi-detached brick house on the rue Vendôme, they are greeted by the cherubic, smiling face of Aquin’s nine-year-old son Emmanuel, and by his widow Andrée, who is grave but composed. To those who venture to ask her the question on everyone’s mind – “Why did he do it?” – she gives general replies: “Out of work...

Sheppard: Do you know how long Hubert had been thinking of committing suicide?

Andrée: You must not imagine that he suddenly got the idea to say, “Okay, it’s over.” It goes back a long time – in fact to when he had finishedNeige noire– in the spring of 1974. He felt depressed at that point, he kept saying to me, “Neige noireis my last book,” and I kept responding:

– Écoute, each time you have begun to write a novel you have told me that you were capable of writing ten or twenty more. So explain to...

Sheppard: To try and find out why Hubert committed suicide, I’d like to investigate in detail the periods during the last three years of his life that seem closely related to his suicide; that is:

just after he’d finishedNeige noireand when he was teaching at Carleton University in 1974;

when he had his difficulties with La Presse in 1975–76;

when he had his troubles withLe Jourand the new PQ government in 1976–77;

when he made his trip to Europe in February 1977; and

his final two weeks in Montréal after his return from Europe....

Sheppard: You say Hubert thought seriously of committing suicide after finishingNeige noirein the spring of 1974. I wonder if there’s something in that novel which gives a clue as to why he had suicidal thoughts at that time.

Andrée: First of all, when I read a text or a novel by Hubert I am always amazed, always under the spell of his style, of what he has to say, of what happens, of the form – of everything in fact. As I used to say to him, “You are assuredly my favorite author.” Bon . . . What...

Sheppard: You said that when he finishedNeige noirein the spring of 1974 Hubert had been unemployed for months. Since when exactly?

Andrée: Well, except for the four-month period between September and December 1972 when he taught French literature as a visiting professor at the University of Buffalo, he was unemployed from December 1971 until September 1974, when he began teaching at Carleton University. In other words, he remained almost three years without a single offer of full-time employment.

Sheppard: Did he look for work during that time?

Andrée: He looked everywhere he could. At one point he had...

Sheppard: After thinking of committing suicide in 1974, the next time Hubert said openly that he wanted to kill himself was after he was fired from La Presse in August 1976. In newspaper articles following Hubert’s suicide, you’re reported as saying that his firing had left him “completely undone.” In your view, what role did La Presse play in his suicide?

Andrée: A central role. Hubert had invested an enormous amount in Les Éditions La Presse in terms of work, of thought, of energy – so when he got fired he felt reduced to zero.

In fact the whole year...

Jean Remple [Journalist with Radio-Canada International]: Hubert and I loved to get together over drinks and talk . . . I saw him for the last time in the winter of 1976, a few months before he left La Presse. We ate lunch together at the Saint-Amable Restaurant on place Jacques Cartier in Old Montréal, and we got quite drunk. Hubert said to the waiter:

– I don’t want to see the wine list. Bring us the most expensive wine in the house! We drank a couple of bottles of wine worth a hundred dollars apiece – all paid for...

Sheppard: How did Hubert come to be hired as editor-in-chief ofLe Jour?

Yves Michaud: The situation atLe Jourhad become very tense following a meeting we had with the journalists in May 1976. Essentially, the newspaper’s journalists wanted more say in the editorial decisions of the paper, and wanted to emphasize social issues rather than independence; and we in management were opposed on both counts.

In August, I knew Hubert was available – he’d just published his open letter to Roger Lemelin – and I sounded him out on becoming editor-in-chief ofLe Jour. I did so because...

Sheppard: What did Hubert tell you about the November 15 election?

Mm: At the beginning of the election campaign he told me the Parti Québécois had proposed that he be a candidate, but he hadn’t wanted to because of us – he wanted to be free to move about so we could meet and be together. I wondered sometimes if he didn’t regret having refused . . . because nobody was counting on the PQ winning.

Sheppard: How did he react to the PQ victory?

Mm: Immediately afterwards he was happy and optimistic. He thought it would work in his...

Prime Minister Pierre - Elliot Trudeau (1919–2000): No one can say that his life is free of all ordeals and hazards.

Everyone must protect his life and defend it if necessary. And that is true for individuals as well as for societies.

There is no country whose history has been one of complete tranquility and peace. Perfect peace, like the happiness of fairy tales, has never existed. To suppose that it does is unrealistic, for it assumes that all life, including our day-today existence, is something static and unchanging.

While the annals of certain countries are covered in blood,...

The Parisian daily newspaper Le Monde – “The World” – is the New York Times of France.

Imagine there’s no heaven.

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today . . .

Imagin there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace . . .

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

Imagine...

Sheppard: Right now I’m going to take a breather from interviewing living witnesses who knew Aquin, and instead try to get evidence from witnesses who are, for the most part, dead. Why this sudden fit of the necromantic third-degree? Well, the evidence gathered so far makes it clear that Aquin lived the lore of suicide. Intensely. He read about it, talked about it, wrote about it. Obviously, for him suicide was an abiding obsession, a constant companion, a menacing shadow. In fact, I can’t think of anyone as soaked in suicide as Aquin was. How many people, for example, know...

Sheppard: Between his firing from La Presse in August 1976 and his suicide in March 1977, Hubert remained unemployed, is that correct?

Andrée: Yes, and it was very hard on him. As he said to me: “In my upbringing as a male, I was taught to value myself by what I did in my profession, in my job, so when I’m out of work I feel I’m of little worth.”

Sheppard: But in some newspaper reports following his suicide, you spoke of a course he was giving at the Université de Québec in Montréal [UQAM].

Andrée: Yes, in September ’76...

Sheppard: You said that in October ‘76 Hubert made a trip to Ottawa. What did he do there?

Andrée: From October on he was in the habit of going off alone every week for a couple of days, and when I asked him, “My goodness, what is going on that you keep going away like that?”, he explained to me that life was too hard for him in Montréal, that he was not capable of confronting the problems he had here. Since he did not have a job, he stayed at the house all the time – and people kept...

Sheppard: I mentioned to Jacques Languirand that the police had found 99 cents in Hubert’s pocket when they searched his body, and Jacques was surprised and excited to learn that because apparently in esoteric thought the number 99 means “Amen,” “So be it,” “End of a cycle.” Jacques said Hubert surely knew that because he was fascinated by numerology.

Andrée: C’est extraordinaire.

Sheppard: Assuming for the moment that Hubert did deliberately leave exactly 99 cents in his pocket, I wondered if there weren’t other meanings for the number 9 which he may have had in mind. So I did some...

Sheppard: What airline did Hubert take to go to Rome?

Andrée: Alitalia. The 2nd of February [1977] – the morning after our dinner at La Marée when we celebrated the settlement with La Presse – we went together to the Alitalia office on rue Peel to buy a ticket. It was a twenty-two to forty-five-day round-trip excursion ticket – Montréal-Rome-Montréal [Flight #655: Departure: Montréal, 7:05 p.m. Forty-minute stopover in Milan. Arrival: Rome, 11:15 a.m.].

Sheppard: Were you in agreement with his taking this trip?

Andrée: Yes, and I told him, “Because of the airline’s policy on tariffs you will be...

Andrée: I went to get Hubert at Mirabel Airport at 3 p.m. on the 26th of February. It was a Saturday. I was alone because Emmanuel had gone with friends to his skiing lesson at St-Adolphe-de-Howard. I felt a little ill at ease because I had not written Hubert during his absence – which was abnormal for me – and I did not know how to greet him. But his first words were “I find you very beautiful,” and my heart began to melt. He was warm towards me, although he was not quite all there because of the accident...

1)FADE IN ON MID-SHOT [MS] OF[actor playing]AQUIN WRITING AT HIS DESK.

This synopsis is a working document and point of departure for a work of co-creation to be effected by the director and the scriptwriter.

This is a detective movie. If I take the trouble to affirm this at the outset, it’s because the film includes a certain number of elements linked to fear, to threats, to very grave suspicions, as well as to a very precise dramatic buildup, which may not be apparent upon reading the present synopsis. But in my mind, and between Gordon Sheppard and...

Sheppard: From what you’ve told me, I gather that during the last two weeks of his life, apart from yourself and Emmanuel, Hubert saw his mother, your son Claude, his lawyer Pierre Desaulniers, his students at UQAM, Koré LaGrenade, and your cleaning lady, Madame Falk.

Andrée: That is correct. Mind you, perhaps he spoke to others. I was not aware of all his activities.

Sheppard: I got a call this week [October 20 1983] from Jacques Folch-Ribas who asked me to appear on his radio program –Table ronde– to discuss the topic of suicide. During the conversation, Folch-Ribas...

Sheppard: Before getting to the events of Hubert’s last two days and then his suicide, I’d like to go over a list of relevant items that haven’t been dealt with yet.

Andrée: As you please.

Sheppard: First of all, I think it would be helpful to put Hubert’s suicide in a context – local, national and international. To do so, I’ve drawn up some facts derived mainly fromLe Suicide au Québec, a statistical study by Marie-France Charron published in 1983 by the Québec ministry of Social Affairs. Of course, the statistics are dry, but if you go over them...

Sheppard: During the months preceding his suicide, did Hubert write anything else besides the outline forSacrilège, the piece he wrote forMainmise, and the first pages of a new novel?

Andrée: He wrote a number of articles, including one for the magazineQuébec français, which devoted a section to him and his work in its December 1976 issue . . .

Hubert Aquin: Here is my article which, by definition, isn’t worth anything! That’s already saying a great deal! Yours, reader, to savour, if that still occurs, the beautiful insignificance of it. HAme fecit.

The first thing that...

Sheppard: After he announced on the Sunday evening [March 13 1977] that he was going to kill himself, did Hubert ever hesitate?

Andrée: Ah non. I begged him to hesitate, but no . . .

I slept very little that Sunday night, and in the morning I left at 7:30 a.m., as I did every Monday, to go to the college to give my courses, which began at 8 o’clock.

Sheppard: What courses were you teaching?

Andrée: Courses in social psychology. That is, to what extent the presence or the existence of others influences our behaviour.

Réjane Bricault: When Andrée...

Andrée: How did you learn of Hubert’s death?

Christian Benoist: It was Patrick [Jacquemet] who told me. I was working at the time as a stage manager at the Théâtre de Poche. Patrick showed up one night at the end of the performance . . . Afterwards we went walking in the streets.

Hubert’s death affected me a great deal. It seemed to me a foolish way to go, yet I didn’t resent him for it. At the same time I felt very bad to have lost Hubert because he was Hubert and I loved him. It made me feel...

Sheppard: After Hubert had written his farewell letters, what did you do?

Andrée: We spent the night talking. First of all, I asked Hubert’s advice about our son:

– What should I do about Emmanuel? He’s only nine years old. He’s going to miss his father.

– If you keep the friends we have, that will make a landscape of familiar faces for him, and as he grows older he’ll be able to depend on them a little bit. If at a certain point he feels more attracted to one, that man will provide him the masculine image he needs....

Sheppard: You said that Hubert ceased to have any relations with his two sons after he left his first wife in 1966.

Andrée: Yes, in seven years he was able to see one or other of his sons only three times, and the meetings went so badly it was enough to make you want to kill yourself. Their mother had indoctrinated those two children to the point they no longer wished to see their father.

Sheppard: When did he see them?

Andrée: The first time was in San Francisco, in 1969. He met them in the street and both boys...

Andrée: On the Tuesday morning I again got up as usual at quarter to seven. This awoke Hubert, and he asked me:

– What are you doing?

– Well, it’s Tuesday. I am going to give my class.

– Oh, that’s right. Poor you.

– Go back to sleep and I will see you in a little while.

Monday morning I had had a slight accident while going to the college. It was quite humid out and as I was getting ready to make a stop at the corner of the avenue Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and boulevard Westmount, the car stalled. Then,...

Lucille Aquin: My father’s family was related to Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger . . . When we were young, religion was like a mountain on us all . . . The nuns at school were very severe with us. If we put a foot wrong, we were quickly criticized . . . We were obliged to wear very long skirts – and two shifts underneath them.

I attended the Académie Bourget, in the convent of Les Dames de la Congrégation. It was well thought of, you know – it was affiliated with Villa Maria. I even went to take some special...

Sheppard: Do you know what you were doing at the moment Hubert killed himself – that is, about ten minutes after he left you?

Andrée: . . . I had just called Réjane, or else I was at the window watching out for her.

Sheppard: You called Réjane?

Andrée: Yes. The day before she had said, “Tomorrow I will be entirely at your disposal.” And in the morning she had telephoned to tell me the same thing again. After Hubert’s departure I was in a state of collapse, and right away I said to myself, “I must call Réjane.” I...

As Hubert Aquin was a quarter Irish – thanks to his paternal grandfather – and loved to drink and dance and have a good laugh, I imagine he’d enjoy an old-fashioned Irish wake in his honour. Well, old-fashioned but staged in a manner appropriate to the man and his deconstructing times. Post-modern old-fashioned, is more like it.

I imagine the wake taking place in the basement hall of a Catholic church in the Montréal district where Hubert was born – the Église Saint-Louis-de-France would do fine. The hall, which includes a small stage, is filled with mourners of all ages,...

Sheppard: How has Hubert’s suicide affected your life?

Andrée: Now I sleep right through the night, while with Hubert, sleeping was not easy for me, because he had such difficult nights. But what does it really give me to have peace if I no longer have Hubert? Frankly, I don’t know, and this ambivalence is very profound because it expresses itself physically.

Sheppard: In what way?

Andrée: Bien, on October 19, six months after he died, I was putting out the garbage on the sidewalk in front of the house when suddenly I had a curious sensation – that the...

Doctor Huard: When I got to my office that Wednesday morning, before going to see Laniel I looked at the list of corpses that had arrived since yesterday noon, and I noticed the name “Hubert Aquin.” That intrigued me. I thought of the writer Hubert Aquin, the indépendantiste that I had often met at meetings of theRassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale, which we both joined at the very beginning – in the early 60s . . . So I went down to the morgue, and I pulled out the trestle myself – I didn’t ask for help – usually we...

Sheppard: In the last year of his life, was there anyone else who played an important role in Hubert’s life – someone you haven’t mentioned?

Andrée: . . . Yes (sips orange juice on the rocks). That woman MM, whom you met one night with Hubert.

Sheppard: What was her relationship with Hubert?

Andrée: Bien, she is a woman Hubert had met casually at university functions on one or two occasions prior to 1976. She lives in Toronto. In February of 1976, after meeting her again, Hubert began receiving love letters from her, and she began calling him almost every...

Sheppard: Would you have liked to see Hubert after his death?

Emmanuel Aquin: Yes.

Sheppard: Why didn’t you see him?

Emmanuel: Because he wasn’t on display at Urgel Bourgie.

Sheppard: Did you speak about that with Andrée?

Emmanuel: Yes, I talked a lot about it with her. She said, “No, I don’t want to expose him. I cannot.”

Sheppard: Did she explain why not?

Emmanuel: Ben oui. She said it was because he was in his casket in the crematorium.

Sheppard: Did you go to the crematorium?

Emmanuel: No, I didn’t go there, and I willnevergo there ....

Sheppard: So when did you first meet Hubert?

Mm: Mm . . . January 11 1972, at Glendon College in Toronto . . . (she pours tea into a cup, empties the cup back into the teapot, then pours out another cup and hands it to Sheppard) . . . Hubert had been invited there to give a guest lecture that evening – it was a get-together for students and people interested in writers – and I went to hear him. I was expecting another child at the time, so I was quite big.

After his little talk, Hubert, Andrée...

At 10 a.m. on Friday March 18 1977, three days after Aquin’s suicide, a Requiem Mass was held for him in the Église Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, located three blocks from his home. Constructed in 1853 in a New World-Baroque style, this church, manned by Dominicans, prides itself on housing the tomb of Jacques Viger (d. 1858), Montréal’s first mayor, who, in 1835, coined the city’s motto, “Concordia salus.”

An overcast sky, intermittent rain, and cool temperatures create a grey autumnal feeling in Montréal this morning. Inside the church, however, white and warmth prevail. Warmth thanks to a recently-installed hot-air heating system. White...

Sheppard: Bon, I spoke with MM.

Andrée: And?

Sheppard: When you met Hubert you were thirty-six years old, right?

Andrée: Yes, that is correct.

Sheppard: You were teaching at the Université de Montréal, you were married, and you had three children.

Andrée: Yes. So?

sheppard: When Hubert met MM, she was thirty-six years old, she was teaching at the University of Toronto, she was married, and had three children.

Andrée: So?

Sheppard: Do you not see in Hubert’s relationship with MM a reprise of your relationship?

Andrée: No, I absolutely never thought of it.

Sheppard: I see a syndrome. She...

The cremation of Hubert Aquin’s body took place at the Crématorium Notre-Dame-des-Neiges on the 22nd of March between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. The following day an employee of the Urgel Bourgie Funeral Homes transported the ashes to the Cimetière de l’Est for burial.

Situated two miles east of the Olympic Stadium on the rue Sherbrooke East, the Catholic Cimetière de l’Est was inaugurated in 1917. In May 1963 Hubert Aquin’s father, Jean,bought a plot there. It was sold to him “in perpetuity” for use by himself, “his heirs and beneficiaries.” The plot – # 569 – can hold six...

Sheppard: I see you took notes on MM’s testimony.

Andrée: Yes many . . . Let me see (consulting her notes):

First of all, what she says about Hubert’s having an artificial eye when she met him in January 1972 is false – because he didn’t lose his eye until August 1972. En tout cas, perhaps such a perceptual error is normal . . .

What amused me a little was the extent to which she seemed virtually terrorized by the fact I had been trained as a psychiatrist. A number of times she attributes to that a kind of...

Jacques Languirand [Esoterist]: Saturday afternoon, four days after his death, Hubert was seen by a medium in the ethereal – a shadowy zone where there are no colours, just black, white and grey, where it’s foggy and cold – it resembles foggy days in London . . . He was in a foetal position, asking himself what had happened to him, for when he began to come to in the ethereal, he wondered whether he had successfully committed suicide or not. He wasn’t conscious of having passed into the beyond. He had the feeling he was awaking from a dream....