The Secret of the Blue Trunk (3 page)

The order for Armande Martel’s arrest, issued at Rennes, Brittany, on December 5, 1940.

For my dearest Lise,

A
s
far back as I can remember, I have always kept a diary. Writing has brought me much comfort. It has allowed me to express my joys, and my anger, too. It also caused my downfall, since I couldn’t help describing what was happening around me.

Let’s begin at the beginning, with my grandparents. My father, Onésime Martel, was the son of a farmer. He lived in the parish of Saint-Wilbrod, at Hébertville-Station, in the Lac Saint-Jean area. In June 1908, he married the village schoolteacher, my mother, Virginie Martel.

A year later the two of them settled in the Bassin Quarter of Chicoutimi. This was essentially an industrial town, where, on the Chicoutimi River, two pulp-and-paper mills were built, which grew into the largest businesses in the Saguenay region.

My father was hired by one of those mills. Actually, there were a great many construction sites; there was plenty of work in the town. The company built houses for its employees to live in with their families. My parents rented one of these. They were small wooden dwellings, all constructed to the same design. So we would recognize ours, my mother had put a wooden crate painted blue on the porch.

I was born in the parish of Sacré-Coeur on April 6, 1912, three years after my brother Armand, the family’s first child, who only lived for a few months. I don’t know the cause of his premature death, but my mother’s grief must have been immense, since she called me Armande. A third child was born, Rosaire, then a girl, who also died shortly after birth. Then, in 1918, another brother, Louis-Georges, arrived. Mom died of the Spanish flu a couple of months after his birth. She was thirty-three, I was six. I remember that her health deteriorated in the space of a few hours. She seemed perfectly fine, and then, the next moment, she was in bed, sweating profusely, coughing, unable to breath normally. She died two days later.

My father was devastated. He cried a great deal. He was in such despair that he seemed to have forgotten about us. His one concern was to stop us from playing outside because of the epidemic. Since most of the people around us thought that everyone was infected, no one went outside.

I recall seeing our neighbours leaving on stretchers. In fact, all the members of one family went to the hospital like that and were never seen again.

People covered their mouths with masks and we were very scared. I remember that my brothers, Rosaire, four years old, and Louis-Georges, six months, cried constantly.

Alice, my father’s sister, took care of us. My father had nicknamed her “the Crow” because of her jet black hair. She looked extremely stern, which frightened me.

When she arrived at our place, she was terrified of catching the virus, so she wore a piece of cloth in front of her face and would only touch the baby. She was nearly always in a bad mood and chronically impatient. She made sure we knew we were a chore for her. Needless to say, I didn’t like her.

I was heartbroken by my mother’s death and cried a lot. Aunt Alice did nothing to comfort me. Not once did she give us a consoling hug. I missed my mother’s caresses. I had been the child she had longed for, the one who had survived, the apple of her eye.

One evening after supper, Alice announced to her brother that she no longer had the strength to bring us up since she already had three children of her own. She agreed to look after my two brothers because her two daughters, who were older, could mind them, but caring for me was out of the question. My father didn’t know what to do. There was no one else in the family who could look after us. Alice suggested he should place me in the orphanage run by the Augustinian nuns de la Miséricorde de Jésus. She gave him a week to make a decision.

Being just six years old, I was incapable of looking after my brothers. My aunt had tried to teach me housekeeping, but I was much too young to cook the meals and take care of the children while my father was working. The only thing I knew how to do was soothe the youngest one when he cried so Alice wouldn’t get annoyed. My father worked six days a week. We hardly ever saw him anymore. It’s at this time that he started drinking after work. When he came home at night, we were already in bed.

So, what was meant to happen happened. A few days after Alice spoke to my father about the orphanage, she woke me up earlier than usual while letting the others sleep. She bathed me, washed my hair, and dressed me in clean clothes. During this ceremonial, she talked to me in an emotionless voice. She told me I had to go and live somewhere else for a while, and from now on I would be looked after by nuns.

“Those women are the brides of the Baby Jesus,” she said, “the very one you pray to every evening for your mom. They take care of sick people and children who have lost their parents. For you, it will be like going to school, but you’ll sleep there at night so you’ll get to the classroom earlier.” She painted a detailed picture of what my life at the convent would be like, praising the good meals I was going to have and the friends I would make. To ease her conscience, she tried to convince me that I should consider myself lucky to be given a new life where I’d be able to get an education, since even her own children wouldn’t have that chance.

I remember I wasn’t terribly excited about the plan. To begin with, I had no idea what she was talking about because I had never seen a nun. Jesus was just a man with a beard in a picture on the kitchen wall, in front of which Mom asked us to kneel every night without ever really explaining who he was. Besides, I knew nothing about school, since no one around me had ever gone there. I sensed something didn’t ring true in her speech because, while she explained things, she never dared look me in the eye. She ended her monologue by telling me that my going away was temporary. I didn’t know then that I would never set foot in her house again, nor in mine for that matter. When I’d had my breakfast, my father came to get me and took me to the orphanage.

When I caught sight of the huge grey building, I became very afraid. My father had to pick me up and carry me in his arms because I wouldn’t take another step. I clung to his neck so tightly he could barely breathe. I thought that the closer I clutched him, the harder it would be to tear me from his arms. I sensed that something serious was afoot.

When we went inside the big building, the first thing that struck me was the smell of floor polish and disinfectant. It made me feel sick. We were shown into an office to meet Mother Superior. My father tried to explain why he had decided to send me to this institution, but I understood from his words that my aunt didn’t want me anymore. This confirmed that Alice hated me. I felt a deep sadness welling up inside me and, above all, an immense feeling of abandonment.

When he got up to shake the nun’s hand, I began to scream and vomited my breakfast onto the floor. After wiping my mouth with his handkerchief, my father wanted to kiss me before he left. I threw myself at his feet, gripping his leg. He couldn’t move, and I wouldn’t let go for anything, like a drowning person clinging to a buoy.

Mother Superior shook a bell and Sister Marguerite appeared at once to give her a helping hand. The nun succeeded in detaching my arms from my father’s leg while she spoke to me softly and stroked the nape of my neck. My father was crying, too. He finally left without looking back.

Sister Marguerite took me to a small parlour so my cries wouldn’t draw everyone in that part of the building toward us. While I still rolled around on the floor, gentle Sister Marguerite kneeled down beside me, stroking my hair all the while. She already knew I had quite a temper.

After a few minutes, her reassuring voice managed to calm me down. I had never felt so safe since my mother died. I let her cradle me in her arms, and we both sat like that until my grief faded.

Then my new friend showed me around the convent. I held her hand very tightly. I was impressed by the high ceilings. The windowless doors of varnished wood seemed impenetrable to me.

After climbing stairs and walking down corridors, we arrived at another huge door. The nun opened it. When I saw what was in front of me, I froze. An enormous crucifix hung on the white wall. Lined up below it were about thirty metal beds. Beside each bed stood a chair and a bowl for washing. At the back of the huge dormitory, behind a white curtain, one could make out a narrow room with a bigger bed, for the supervising sister.

Sister Marguerite knew I had lost my mother and she was obviously trying to comfort me, especially after my father had left me in her hands. She rummaged around in a cupboard and gave me an old doll, which must have belonged to a former boarder, to break the loneliness I had been plunged into lately. She explained to me that my mother was in heaven now, and this doll could sleep with me and would help me be less sad. I clasped that doll in my arms as if it were the most important thing in my life.

Then I put it down, with my bundle of clothes, under the bed she assigned to me, and we continued going around the premises. I obediently followed this woman who had been able to gain my confidence and was making a funny noise with her long black robe as she walked.

The bell rang for the midday meal. Right then began for me the first day of a boring daily routine that would last about twenty years.

Every morning, the wake-up bell rang at half past five. We had to make our beds straight away in silence, walking with bare feet on the ice-cold floor.

Next, we slipped into our black uniform, topped by a white collar. Before washing ourselves, we had to kneel at the end of our bed and pray. Quite often I needed to use the chamber pot under my bed because I couldn’t control myself. All the girls would see me and, especially, hear the noise I made as I urinated. Needless to say their taunts were awfully humiliating. But the voice of the nun always called them to order: “Silence, young ladies, and hurry up!” I heard this sentence so often that after a few months I no longer took any notice of it.

After that, we headed with our earthenware basin for a room at the very back of the dormitory to wash ourselves. We only washed from the waist up and it was forbidden to take off our camisoles. We had to wipe our bodies with a linen face cloth without ever looking at ourselves or looking at the girls next to us. The soaked, icy camisoles would take an hour to dry on our bodies.

We then had to attend Mass and receive Communion. Afterwards, we were allowed to have breakfast, which was a cold, pasty gruel.

Then classes started. I was eager to learn. Looking at books, touching them, seeing pictures, discovering figures, using a pencil: it was all new to me. I rarely felt sad on school days. Time passed quickly and I didn’t really have the opportunity to think about anything else.

Before the evening meal there was a study period. At supper, we were almost invariably served a vegetable stew with half a slice of bread. During the meal, a nun would read excerpts from Biblical texts, and then came the vespers ceremony. There was no doubt about it: our life already resembled that of the nuns. We went to bed at half past seven, not before a final study period.

As time went by, the convent became a comforting cocoon for me, and the religious community became my family.

At first I had some difficulty with the discipline. I was a rebel through and through and didn’t always do what was expected of me. I often demanded to be given the reason why it was my duty to perform some chore or other. At those times, Sister Marguerite came to my rescue and tried to calm me down. I was so anxious not to disappoint her that the mere mention of her name would make me toe the line. But altogether I was a good student, with an enormous desire to learn, despite my hot little temper …

I made some good friends, who shared my daily life until our teenage years. Several left the convent then because they were old enough to help out at home. I felt a pang of sorrow whenever a friend left. And I couldn’t help thinking of my family. Since the day my father had consigned me to the nuns’ care, he had only come to see me once, for barely fifteen minutes, and his breath reeked of alcohol. He told me how my brothers were doing, whom I hadn’t seen since I left home. My father’s visit disturbed me profoundly. I was twelve, and I remember feeling tremendously angry. I accused my father of being nothing but a weakling. He hadn’t been able to face up to his responsibilities and defy my aunt. Why had my brothers, but not I, been allowed to remain part of the family? It was terribly unfair.

I ended up deciding I didn’t want to have any more visits from my father, since he opened a wound that was slow to heal after he left. Whenever I felt homesick for my family, I talked about it with Sister Marguerite, who would listen to me and explain certain things. I was able to go to sleep then, my mind at ease until the next time.

My teenage years were obviously peaceful. I performed all the tasks required of me. I was taught housekeeping, cooking, and sewing, the nuns’ way, which meant with diligence and perfection. I was a quick learner. I had a special gift for sewing, and in my free time I devoted myself to it. Little by little, sewing became a passion. I was the one who had to mend the used clothes that would be distributed afterwards among people in the parish. I took care of the seams, the hems and the other alterations. I often dreamt of making a dress and choosing the pattern myself. Quite early on, I knew that sewing would be part of my life. The nuns often told me in fact that I was better at manual work than studying.

When I was sixteen, in 1928 to be more exact, I had an important encounter. Sometimes I accompanied the nuns outside the convent when they gave a helping hand to the Pères Eudistes, whom the bishop of Chicoutimi had entrusted in 1903 with the Parish of Sacré-Coeur. The parish priest and the curate were French Eudist fathers who had gone into exile in Canada because of the precarious situation of religious communities in France. To ensure the smooth running of the presbytery and to help the community, one of the fathers had brought back with him from a journey to Rennes three nuns of the congregation of the Soeurs Sainte-Marie de la Présentation: Sister Wenseslas, Sister Romuald, and Sister Adolphine. It’s Sister Adolphine who, with Sister Marguerite, became my great confidant and mentor. She never ceased to encourage me, comfort me, and, if necessary, calm my anguish.