In the St. Lawrence the 1,445-ton French frigate, L'Aventure, had been idling for days awaiting an important passenger: Count Jacques Juge de Bernonville, 50. A wartime collaborator, he had been sentenced to death in France for "violence, treason, arson and looting." As soon as Canada handed him over, L'Aventure would rush him home. But L'Aventure would not sail right away. De Bernonville was in the middle of a political row between Quebec nationalists and the federal government.
Until he got into the political big time, De Bernonville was unknown in Canada. That was the way he wanted it. Two years ago, using a forged passport and the name of Jacques Benoit, he had sneaked into the Dominion from the U.S. At first he kept out of sight by working in the Quebec woods. Then he settled in Montreal's fashionable Côte des Neiges district, was joined by his wife and three daughters, gradually began to move about in the French-speaking community. He drifted from one job to another, working for a while with a Montreal dairy and then as a clerk in a Sherbrooke Street store.
An Appeal. Eight months ago, De Bernonville grew bolder. He went to immigration authorities in Montreal, confessed his fraudulent entry, asked immigration to forget about it and let him become a permanent resident of Canada. Just then, former members of the French Resistance, now living in Montreal, spotted De Bernonville. They lost no time telling the authorities that as a Vichy collaborator he had betrayed French patriots to the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation.
A check with French police showed that the tipsters knew what they were talking about. During the war Jacques de Bernonville was propaganda director under Marshal Henri Pétain and a director of operations against the French underground. Furthermore, the French police reported, he had caused the deaths of Frenchmen and other Allied soldiers "probably including Canadians from the Royal Canadian Air Force." That settled Count de Bernonville's appeal for Canadian citizenship. Ottawa ordered him out of the country.
But to Montreal's 267-lb. mayor, Ca-millien Houde (who spent some of the war years in a Canadian concentration camp for advising French Canadians not to register for the draft), De Bernonville's war record didn't look so bad. Houde and his nationalist friends were cooking up a new political party, Le Parti Canadien. De Bernonville looked like just what they needed to bring French Canadian voters running. He was a Roman Catholic. He could be made to seem a martyr to Ottawa's "implacable hatred" for Frenchmen and Roman Catholics.
A Protest. Opportunist Houde pulled out all the stops. He barged into the Montreal offices of the British United Press, dictated a blast against Ottawa's treatment of De Bernonville. "A crying injustice," charged Houde. Gustave Jobi-don, a Quebec City notary, cabled to ex-French Premier Robert Schuman: "French Canada is scandalized . . . Vive Pétain. Vive De Bernonville." Other Parti Canadien backers called De Bernonville "a hero of epic and legendary stature."