Secret letters on sexuality take centre stage in new film

Who is Brother Marie-Victorin?

Marie-Victorin was an intellectual monument in Quebec throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s. As well as a writer, an educator and a cleric, he was a staunch nationalist and a firm defender of French language rights in Canada at a time when those rights could not be taken for granted.

His real passion, however, lay in botany and its place in the formation of the eco-social cradle of the Saint Lawrence River Valley. Almost single-handedly over the course of two decades, he travelled up and down the province, cataloguing its plant life, finally publishing what would instantly become the standard reference work on the flora of Quebec – La Flore laurentienne. As soon as it was published in 1935, it was hailed, both within Quebec and internationally, as a major work.

Marie-Victorin then almost immediately set to work on his next project: creating a botanical garden for Montreal. It is is now the third largest of its kind in the world.

How were the letters between Brother Marie-Victorin and Marcelle Guavreau found?

A colleague working on Marie-Victorin’s most famous student, the ecologist Pierre Dansereau, alerted me to a section of papers in the archives at the University of Québec at Montréal relating to Marcelle Gauvreau, his research assistant, that were mysteriously sealed. At that time, I was looking into the Gauvreau family and I wanted to know why these papers were closed. I waited years for the university to liaise with lawyers about opening them.

Then in 2014, I showed up in Montreal and was finally allowed to view the documents if I signed a non-disclosure agreement.

I soon learned, however, that the historian of science Professor Yves Gingras, the world expert on Marie-Victorin, was already aware of the letters, and was waiting for the opportunity to publish the first set written by Marie-Victorin, which were out of copyright. These came out in 2018 under the title Lettres biologiques (Biological Letters) and created quite a stir in Quebec. We joined forces to get the rights for the second set of letters (written by Gauvreau to Marie-Victorin), which we published the following year.

Why is the discovery of these letters so significant? What do they tell us?

The letters contain detailed exchanges between two people — two talented writers, two committed scientists — who wanted to learn about human sexuality. They wanted to understand, as scientists do, the workings of a biological process to which their religion and culture denied them access. What is most astonishing is that their explorations were less physical than they were epistolary, essentially reading and writing about sex — complemented, when necessary, by exchanges about their own bodies.

They were also in love. Denied physical contact, their sexual desires were sublimated through writing scientifically about sex. To put it in classical terms, their libido sentiendi was subsumed under a higher libido sciendi.

What do you think the consequences would have been if the letters were published at their time of writing?

There remains no trace of Marie-Victorin’s letters. Perhaps he destroyed them himself after reading. But what is more likely is that they went straight into the fire after his untimely death in 1944. If the letters had come out then, written by as prominent a member of the Church as Marie-Victorin, it would have sent shockwaves through society. Francophone Quebec was exceedingly Catholic right up until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when the state took over many of the institutions that had been controlled by the Church. Quebec, for example, did not have a ministry of education until 1964.

Marcelle, however, kept her letters preciously concealed. When she died, her family debated whether the correspondence — still shocking even in 1968 — should be destroyed. Luckily it was decided to leave it to the university, but under strict embargo. Her nephew, André Gauvreau, holder of the copyright, initially refused to countenance the idea of the letters becoming public after some had leaked in the 1990s. But he was persuaded to allow us to publish them by the undeniable historical value of the exchange itself.

What do these letters reveal about Quebec’s history?

This exchange bears witness to an important moment in the history of French Canada. Before the sexual liberation of the 1960s, before the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, Marie-Victorin and Marcelle Gauvreau show themselves to be modernisers in their way, but still remain part of an earlier vision of French Canada. Their very particular love affair has something of 17th-century literature about it, a delicate eroticism of distance and proximity (I am thinking of the Princesse de Clèves), even as they worked together as botanists on bringing Quebec squarely into the modern age.

Social and gender conventions in Quebec tended to lag behind those of France or the rest of North America. Marcelle Gauvreau became the first French-Canadian woman to earn a Masters degree in Natural Science in 1939; by contrast, Marie Curie was appointed professor at the University of Paris in 1906.

These letters have now been turned into a film, titled Tell Me Why These Things Are So Beautiful. How did the idea for the film come about?

When the letters were published, they came to the attention of Roger Frappier, himself a legend of 20th-century Quebec cinema, and he decided to produce the film. Indeed, when I first began reading the letters, I said to myself that this would make an incredible movie!

It will be premiering in the UK on 18 March at The Garden Cinema, hosted by the Quebec and French Canada Research Network (QaFCaRN). Thanks to the generosity of the Association internationale des études québécoises, we will have the director Lyne Charlebois with us for an audience Q&A after the screening.

How does the film accurately capture the topics and sentiment of the letters?

It’s a traditional biopic in many ways but it’s approached from Gauvreau's point of view – it’s richer for that. Much of the script is taken verbatim from the letters, so the language is very much respected. It’s a lovely rendering of this relationship. And the acting is brilliant.

The director Lyne Charlebois has overlaid a second temporal frame, so that the actors playing Marcelle and Marie-Victorin appear “in real life” and discuss their own affair, sometimes in the period costumes of the characters they play, sliding back and forth between the temporal frames.

Finally, André Dufour’s cinematography is truly wonderful, with the landscapes and the flora appearing almost in a supporting role rather than as a background for the action.

QaFCaRN is also hosting an exhibition of Marie-Victorin’s botanical photography alongside images by British photographer Keir Watson. Why did you choose Watson’s work to include in the show?

My initial idea was to show just Marie-Victorin’s photographs, but then I thought it would be interesting to bring them into dialogue with some contemporary work to create a visual conversation across time and place.

When I came across Keir’s photos, I thought they were absolutely stunning. Like many of Marie-Victorin’s photos, they really capture the botanic beauty of the flower or plant, so I wanted to include them in the exhibition, Botany Through the Camera’s Eye.

We’ll be showing the work almost like a dark room or a botanical laboratory, so that they won’t be presented as framed works of art but as images you might actually consult.

The show is launching on 20 March, preceded by a roundtable discussion on representing nature on film with the director Lyne Charlebois, the cinematographer André Dufour, Professor Sarah Cooper from the Department of Film Studies, and Keir Watson and myself.