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"Mrs. Filly" 1942
- University of Ottawa Press
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Albert Laberge Translated by David Homel MRS. FILLY Albert Laberge was born on February 18, 1871, in Beauharnois, the son of a farming family. He was educated in Beauharnois and, later, at the Jesuit College du Gesu (Sainte-Marie) in Montreal. In 1891, he suffered a crisis of faith, however, and the followingyear was expelled for "improper reading" of books on the Index. He subsequently worked in a law office for several years, and in 1896 began writing for La Presse, first as a sports writer and then as an art critic. Laberge's most famous literary work was the novel La Scouine, a roman naturaliste, the first instalment of which appeared in a Montreal journal in 1903. A second appeared in 1908 and was immediately attacked by the clergy— Monseigneur Bruchesi condemned it as "low pornography." Perhaps as a consequence, the complete novel was not published until 1918, and then in a private edition of only sixty copies, so it remained largely unread, or at least unacknowledged , for many years. La Scouine, translated as Bitter Bread (1977) by Conrad Dion, has enjoyed a kind of subterranean success, however: Andre Major was strongly influenced by its harsh realism, and the novel now stands as one of Quebec's most significant works of realist fiction. Although Laberge never wrote another novel, he published five books of short stories: Images de la vie et dela mart (1936); La Fin du voyage (1942); Le Destin deshommes (1950); Fin de roman (1951); and Le Dernier souper (1953). "Madame Pouliche," here translated by David Homel as "Mrs. Filly," first appeared in La Fin du voyage, and in 1962 it was included in Gerard Bessette's Anthologie Albert Laberge as one of Laberge's twelve best stories. It is no less starkly realistic than La Scouine, but as Bessette has remarked, "the blackness or degradation that perhaps constitutes a defect in MRS. FILLY 139 La Scouine may actually be seen as a quality in Laberge's short stories." Laberge died on April 4, 1960, in Chateauguay. "Mrs. Filly" is a translation of "Madame Pouliche" published in Anthologie d*Albert Laberge (Montreal: Cercle du livre de France, 1972). 140 ALBERT LABERGE [3.85.63.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:43 GMT) S he'd surely emptied her share of spittoons in her life, Mrs. Filly had! And swallowed down her share of paregoric, too! You've got to seek consolation somewhere, right, and forget your troubles. Some people do a lot worse than that, for sure. Every day, for almost forty years, she had cleaned the offices of a large insurance company that occupied an entire floor of a vast building. Some sixty men and women worked there. There were a dozen private offices and a large meeting room. At the end of every afternoon, once the employees had left, Mrs. Filly and her assistant would go to work and do most of the cleaning. The next morning, before the clerks arrived, the two women would return to finish their tasks. Sweeping, washing, wiping, dusting, emptying wastepaper baskets and spittoons, cleaning out the washroom —that was the daily ritual. Mrs. Filly had been practising her trade since the age of twenty-four. She was a long plank of a woman, grey and thin. Her hair was grey, her eyes were grey and round and stuck out of her skull, her skin was dry and grey, as grey as the rags she used to wipe the desks. It was impossible to imagine that once her skin had been young and smooth; she looked as if she'd always been grey. To go with that, she had a flat pug nose and a voice like a locust. No, she was neither beautiful nor attractive nor made to excite a man's desires. When she plodded by with her bucket and broom, she seemed to have been born to the job. In a strange way, her mannerisms were astonishingly like those of a chicken. In the morning, before stepping into the manager's office where there was a rug, she wiped her feet on the floor, sliding them back and forth like a chicken scratching with first one foot, then the other, to uncover a kernel of corn, a worm, or an insect in the dusty ground. For nearly forty years, her life had been consumed in sweeping floors, emptying spittoons, and cleaning toilets. Of course, it's more pleasant to be a saleslady in a store, or...