Burn it all

On April 25, 1849, Montreal, the capital of United Canada, was under serious threat. While the government was preparing to compensate the French-Canadian victims of the 1837 Rebellion, Orangemen set fire to the Parliament building and the 25,000 books of the National Library. Governor-General Elgin hesitated to launch the imperial army against his compatriots. With their murderous ambitions camouflaged behind this smokescreen, influential men attempt to seize the immense fortune of Henry Blake, the gas magnate, who is found murdered in his castle. The life of Marie-Violaine Blake, his young widow, and that of his father, the chief engineer Gustave Hamelin, are threatened. Stéphane Talbot, the heir to the Grand-Remous seigneury, will stop at nothing to save Marie-Violaine, his beloved. At the end of this day of fire, the story of the characters will have changed so unexpectedly that one must admit that one rarely receives one's gift from Divine Providence, but rather, as the author writes, according to the tortuous ways of poetic justice EXCERPT: It always happened late in the evening, when the magnate had just gone down to one of the brothels in the port, where he demanded that all the residents, one after the other, come to pay their respects to him and tried, always at length and often in vain, to get him to grant their caresses. As Blake mistreated his servants to the point of fearing that one of them might try to kill him in his sleep, he locked them in the basement of his manor at 9:00 every night, except for his coachman, to whom he entrusted the mission of freeing the servants at dawn. This jailer's behavior allowed Mrs. Blake to receive her lover without the risk of prying eyes and to move freely in all the rooms, especially in the living room where Stéphane asked her to get naked and take poses identical to those of the statues around them. He would then have fun correcting the mistakes she made in her imitations, raising the elbow of the arm she wore on her forehead in a tearful gesture; accentuating the bending of her neck, the spacing of her thighs in this sketch where she played the nymph admiring herself in the water of a stream. Sometimes he even lifted her hair in a bun or wove it into braids at each temple, so that the resemblance to the marble or bronze model was even more striking. In his hands, she became totally malleable and docile, except when he stroked her as if by mistake at the tip of a breast or in the hollow of a buttock, and she could not hold back a shudder of pleasure. In this game, she was stronger than he was, for he was always the first to break the enchanted circle of the statues and lay her down on the high wool carpet in front of the cedar fire in the hearth. She continued the comedy a little longer, pretending to be dead under him, until she, too, flared up REVIEWS: "At the end of this day of fire, the story of the characters will have changed so unexpectedly that one will have to admit that one rarely receives one's gift from Divine Providence, but rather, as the author writes, according to the tortuous ways of poetic justice." – Jean Chartier, le Devoir ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Quebec City, October 9, 1947 - Novelist and essayist, Pierre Turgeon published his first novel, Sweet Poison, when he was only 22 years old. Several works followed 22 titles in all: novels, essays, plays, film scripts, and historical works. He won twice the Governor General's Award. As a publisher, he released more than a thousand authors, amongst which Magaret Atwood, Peter Newman, and Jack Higgins. He is also the only Canadian publisher to have one of his books, a biography of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin, Unmasked, reach the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. He also authored 16 movie scripts, one of which, The Mighty River, became an Oscar finalist.