CANADA: Pere de Famille

(4 of 7)

A few years later St. Laurent built a 17-room house on the Grande Aliée, a cow-path then, but now Quebec City's most fashionable street. The house seemed large (the St. Laurents had only three children at the time), but Louis was looking ahead. Said he: "This is a house for a Canadian family." Within the next five years, he had two more children.

A Big House. The rising St. Laurent could afford a big house. Most of his legal business was unspectacular (company reorganizations and civil lawsuits), but profitable. He made a name by unraveling business snarls and working out compromises that satisfied opposing parties. It was a time when big British and U.S. companies were coming to Quebec to develop the province's timber, mineral and hydroelectric resources, and the biggest of them were St. Laurent's clients. He was regularly on the go (sometimes at a fee of $200 a day) pleading cases before the Supreme Court in Ottawa and the Privy Council in London. He collected company directorates, became one of the few French Canadians to sit on the board 9f directors of the Bank of Montreal.

By the '30s St. Laurent's law firm occupied ten rooms in the Price Building, Quebec City's only skyscraper. St. Laurent was elected president of the Canadian Bar Association and ranked by lawyers throughout the country as one of the three best in Canada.

In the midst of it all, St. Laurent found time for his family in the yellow brick house on the Grande Allée. There he was Père de famille (father of the family), and he filled the role in the best French Canadian manner. His children used the formal vous as an old-fashioned mark of respect for their parents.

An Evening Walk. Every evening after dinner, Père St. Laurent went walking with his youngsters on the Grande Allée or on the nearby Plains of Abraham. Thursday evenings were set aside for the comics, with father reading aloud. He had his own ideas about what was funny. When young Renault came home from school with an old joke about lawyers ("They're like wheels; they have to be greased"), father told him plainly that one does not make jokes about honorable professions.

There were nightly sessions of homework with Père in charge. The boys' schoolwork got more attention than the girls'; father explained that girls got married and became wives & mothers, while boys could become priests or lawyers. He was a stern taskmaster. When his two sons entered his office as clerks, St. Laurent paid them $2.25 a week with the explanation : "When you have no money to spend, you have more time for your books." Père St. Laurent also laid down the rules for his daughters' courtships. Said daughter Madeleine: "Father's word on any subject was final."

The St. Laurents spent their summers at He d'Orléans, near Quebec. It was there that Lawyer St. Laurent, master of the house and the law, failed to master the automobile. Time & again he smacked the family car into the gateposts. At the wheel, he sat up so ramrod-straight that the children often giggled. Thereupon he would stop the car and refuse to go on until the laughing stopped. He still does not drive a car; when he wants to ride in Ottawa, he calls a taxi.