File

This file chronicles the friendship and affection between Louis-Antoine Dessaulles and Frances Louise "Fanny" Leman Dessaulles (1844-1914), as illustrated in more than thirty years of letters sent by Louis-Antoine. The daughter of Dr. Dennis Leman and Agathe Honorine Papineau, in February 1869 Fanny married Louis-Antoine's brother, Georges-Casimir, in Saint-Hyacinthe with a "dispensation of consanguinity in the second to third degree." She was therefore the second cousin and sister-in-law of Louis-Antoine, who often called her his "niece" and referred to himself as her "uncle." This was perhaps due to the fact that Louis-Antoine was the same age as Fanny's mother, whom he had actually courted at one point. According to Yvan Lamonde (Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, 1818-1895 : un seigneur libéral et anticlérical, Fides, 1994, p. 176-177), these letters are among the few to reveal the private side of this icon of the Rouge Party.

The correspondence in the file begins in 1864 when Fanny was about 20 years old and Louis-Antoine was 46. The first group of letters, which Dessaulles sent from Quebec (usually Montreal), concludes in March 1874, one year before he went into exile, first to the United States, then to Europe. After a ten-year hiatus, the letters start up again in September 1884, this time from Paris, and continue until April 2, 1895, several months before Dessaulles' death at the age of 77 on August 4, 1895. An undated letter, written before the death of his wife Catherine-Zéphrine in 1891 and perhaps when he was in exile in Europe, completes the file.

His Quebec letters discuss his family life, the comings and goings of various relatives between Montreal, Saint-Hyacinthe and La Petite-Nation, their state of health (notably the illness of Émilie Mondelet, Georges-Casimir's first wife), as well as births, weddings and deaths. Written in an affectionate, intimate and often sarcastic tone, his missives are full of amusing anecdotes, personal reflections, and even recipes. Among other topics, they reveal Dessaulles' views on his resistance to the clergy and his legal battles, and the resulting social stigma. They also reflect Dessaulles' often condescending view of women: although he asked for and valued Fanny's opinion, he nonetheless implored her not to become a "bluestocking," a pejorative term for an intellectual woman. The correspondence also illustrates Montreal's social and cultural life in its descriptions of weddings and balls accompanied by lengthy comments about the beauty of the ladies and their attire; its reporting of a series of burglaries and fires in March 1866; and its stories about séances involving Spiritualism and magic, including a performance by the Davenport Brothers, American magicians who passed through the city in June 1864.

The letters from Paris describe Dessaulles' life in France and Europe, notably his financial woes and efforts to keep himself afloat. They provide details on his unsuccessful attempts to market new inventions, his visits to Paris museums and churches, and several significant events like the funeral of Victor Hugo. The correspondence conveys Dessaulles' sense of isolation in exile, his regrets and sadness following the death of his wife, for example, as well as the difficulty of maintaining long-distance relationships with his family in Quebec. His letters document a number of trips by family members to France and Dessaulles' travels in Europe to England, France and Switzerland. Dessaulles also expounds on various topics like the evolution of the species (December 18, 1893, after touring the British Museum) and the Jesuits (April 1894).