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"Hay Fever" 1917
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
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Sylva Clapin Translated by Wayne Grady HAY FEVER Sylva Clapin was born in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, on July 15, 1853, and studied at the Seminaire de Saint-Hyacinthe until 1873, when he joined the United States Navy and served aboard the Kansas. He returned to Saint-Hyacinthe to become the village librarian, to run a bookshop and a music store, and to edit the Courrier deSt-Hyacinthe. Before long, however, he was off again:to London and Paris in 1879, and to Montreal in 1880, where he began writing for Le Monde, Le Canadien, and L 'Electeur. He published his first short story, "Victor et Marie," in UAlbum desfamilies in October 1882, then returned to Saint-Hyacinthe, married his second-cousin, Marie-Archange Clapin, and moved with her to Paris, where he spent the next sixyears as a correspondent for Le Monde. Clapin returned to Montreal in 1888 and edited L'Opinion publique for a year, then once again found himself serving as a gunner in the U.S. Navy. Following the decisive Battle of Santiago, he was decorated for braverybut discovered that he was becoming deaf, a condition that somehow did not prevent him from accepting the post of translator in the House of Commons in Ottawa, which he held from 1902 until his retirement in 1921. He wrote continually: one acquaintance noted that Clapin wrote the waysome people play cards. He wrote dozens of short stories, a sequel to Maria Chapdelaine (entitled Alma-Rose, neverpublished), and a history of the United States for Quebec schools. He even compiled a Dictionnaire canadien-fran$ais (1894), a New Dictionary of Americanisms (1902), and, the year before his death in 1928, edited the Canadianedition of the Dictionnaire Larousse complet. "La fievre des foins," translated by Wayne Grady as "Hay Fever," was first publishedin 1917, and is taken here HAY FEVER 69 from Clapin's Contes et nouvelles, a collection of his short fiction that appeared in 1980. It is an extremely humorous story, with the kind of gentle, rural charm that is nonetheless sly and somewhat satirical: consider, for example,that the story was first published in the 52nd edition of the Montreal annual Almanack Rolland, and that its plot turns, in part, on the unreliability of almanacs. "Hay Fever" is a translation of "La fievre des foins" published in Contes et nouvelles (Montreal: Fides, 1980). 70 SYLVA CLAPIN [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 01:09 GMT) ne afternoon in February, while the snow outside was blowing to beat the devil, Ambroise Latourelle, justice of the peace and postmaster of the little village of X in the region of Lac Saint-Pierre, was dozing beside his woodstove when the door was suddenly flung open and in walked a stranger, bringing with him a gust of cold air. Old Ambroise (as he was known thereabouts), roused from his reveries, recognized the newcomer as the man who had come in the day before to ask if there had been any mail for him, saying he was a salesman for a large farm-equipment company in Ontario. "Not very good weather for selling farm machinery," muttered Old Ambroise. The young man didn't reply at first, but busied himself with brushing the snow off his clothes, and then went over to the stove to warm his hands. "It could be better, that's the truth," he said after a moment, "but I can't complain. I've sold a few threshing machines and a couple of separators. But I can't sell a hay-baler to save my life, and I'm damned if I can figure out why." Old Ambroise knew why. "Hay-balers," he said. "We used to buy a lot of them back when we could grow hay. But for the past few years it hasn't been worth our while even to think about hay in these parts, on account of the rain we've been getting every year just at haying time. Last year, for example, it came down and didn't stop for four days, never mind what it said in all those worthless almanacs, that there'd be sunny skies for the whole month of July. Sunny skies. Ha! And here you are trying to sell us balers! I'm not surprised if balers are a hard sell around here." At the mention of almanacs, the stranger pricked up his ears and, when Ambroise finished speaking he walked over to the chair where...