the Government Mr. Ross was in a fury ... Dale and VanderSmissen seemed to be afraid we had gone too far. But I felt highly elated. I knew that we had succeeded in making ourselves felt and feared.

extravagance which has sometimes run riot in the field of French letters”(191). He undoubtedly found greater pleasure in 1911 in collaborating with Pelham Edgar of Victoria College in an excellent edition of representative poems of Victor Hugo.

We have not yet described Squair’s major publishing achievement, the result of

a long and fruitful collaboration with Fraser, who, after graduating in Modern Languages three years before Squair, had taught French and German at Upper Canada College for seven years prior to his appointment as lecturer in Italian and Spanish at the university in 1887. Their High School French Reader (1890) and High School French Grammar (1891), combined in one volume and improved in 1900 and revised again in 1912 and several times thereafter, made “Fraser and Squair” almost synonymous with French for half a century in schools, colleges, and universities across Canada, the United States, and Britain. This famous book offered a highly appreciated combination of graded lessons, copious exercises, a practical reference grammar, and a well-made index, and it was a major contribution to the learning of French. It was also one of the major publishing coups of the century in terms of popularity, distribution, and financial return to authors and publishers. During World War I, besides playing a leading role in

teaching French to officers and men in training in Toronto, Squair wrote over a hundred newspaper articles reflecting his intense concern about the progress of the war and its effects at home, and he published an anthology of wartime articles and documents. After the war Squair, now retired, resumed his “journalistic tilting” on educational matters, most dramatically in his “Open Letter to the People of Ontario on the Teaching of French,” accepted (with reluctance) by the Globe in December 1918 and also distributed as a pamphlet by Squair himself. How contemporary it sounds to us – as does his editorial a few months later in the University Monthly – that the study of French should begin earlier in the schools; that our libraries should acquire more French books and newspapers; that ability in French conversation should keep pace with reading and writing skills; that all Canadians, teachers and students alike, should make more use of Quebec for the purpose of learning French in a French environment and in order to understand

Squair was closely associated with the Bonne Entente, a movement organized in the fall of 1916 in an attempt to bridge the rapidly widening rift between Ontario, irritated by the slow rate of enlistment in French Canada, and Quebec, resentful of such criticism from the province that made no effort to understand its history and refused to resolve the injustice of the French language issue. In October a group of Ontario citizens, largely professional and business men, were warmly welcomed and entertained for four days in Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Quebec, and Sherbrooke. In January 1917 a Quebec delegation of eighty-five, including Premier Sir Louis Gouin and other notables, was received with fervent hospitality for three days in Toronto, Hamilton, and Niagara Falls. Quebec again played host to Ontarians that May, this time for five days. But before another exchange could be arranged in the fall, Bonne Entente had foundered on the widespread

honour of the Bonne Entente, for an advanced student at Laval’s Petit Séminaire de Québec, “attribué à l’élève de Rhétorique qui a obtenu le plus de succès dans l’étude de la langue anglaise.” The subject of Squair’s lecture on that occasion was “Les Bases de l’union sacrée des Français.”

The new lecturer appointed in July 1891 was John Home Cameron, who had been a fellow for two years after he graduated in 1885 and then had studied in Paris and Leipzig. His term of service in the department was to be thirty-six years, twenty-five under Squair (who wrote that there could not be a more faithful colleague) and the last eleven as head after Squair retired in 1916. Photographs of Cameron confirm the image in the memory of colleague A of “a gentle man and a gentleman, impeccably conservative in his gray suits, his brush moustache, carefully clipped.” Modest and self-effacing, Cameron could easily be

misunderstood and unappreciated, as he was by colleague B, who recalled him as “stuffy and conventionalized” and cited his first encounter with Cameron shortly after his arrival as a lecturer. “I announced that my wife and I had found comfortable lodgings. ‘Very good, and where, may I ask?’ – ‘On Huron Street.’ – An apprehensive look on his face: ‘North of Bloor, I presume?’ – ‘No, south.’ – Apprehension turns to anguish, followed by a flicker of hope: ‘East side, I trust?’ – In replying that we were on the West side, I was only too aware we were beyond the pale, and that a move was in order.”

This is a delightfully evocative example of early-twentieth-century geographical and social prejudices in Toronto, but as a judgment on Cameron it should be tempered. Colleague A recalled that in the classroom Cameron lost his obvious shyness as he gave scholarly lectures on French literature, enlivened by gentle wit,

and that he had a pleasant sense of humour which expressed itself in an understated way, so that people often took seriously remarks that he made in fun. He encouraged students in many ways, not least in sending them to academic friends in France for guidance. Books were his passion, and he collected many during his journeys abroad, especially in France. Although his scholarly publication came only after 1920, he earlier collaborated with Squair in two French reading texts (Labiche’s Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon and Enault’s Le Chien du capitaine) and a book of prose exercises. His own Elements of French Composition was published in New York and London. In the earliest listings of graduate courses offered in French, Cameron was one of the seven pioneers, his own being in the field of French theatre, seventeenth-century and modern.

with easy competence his cultural role as the first president of the Alliance Française de Toronto, founded in 1902. Nor did de Champ teach courses in written French. Yet for countless students he is the French professor they remember best, and often the only one. Some students knew him better than others; he was an inveterate concert-goer and his guest-companions were invariably a pair or more of students. There is no denying that he had a special eye for the pretty girls in his conversation groups; it was not for nothing that Monsieur de Champ was sometimes referred to as Musher de Champ. But to all he was a dedicated guide to good pronunciation and speaking facility, demanding effort from his students, but in a kindly manner. We shall look forward to meeting him again in the next chapter, as his host of friends anticipated each autumn his return from a summer spent in France with his wife (who tried a Toronto winter only

once), his family, and his vineyard.

Two other members of the Department of French who had long and outstanding careers were both well established before 1920, and we situate them here. Joseph Stanley Will, born in Walkerton, Ontario, in 1874, was an industrious, ambitious lad, the son of a Methodist minister and a graduate of Newmarket High School, who earned his way through University College, graduating with honours in Moderns in 1897. After a year of graduate work at the University of Chicago and another spent teaching at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, he returned to Canada as lecturer at Manitoba College in Winnipeg, eventually becoming head of the Department of French and German, dean of residence, and registrar. His energy, both physical and intellectual, is reflected in his diverse activities: playing on a championship curling team, directing and playing in

performances at the Winnipeg Theatre, and studying all the theology requisite for ordination in the Presbyterian Church. He was never ordained but had a large Sunday school class of men and frequently preached, a proclivity dating back to the age of two, when, armed with his mother’s parasol, he had set out to evangelize the waterfront and was discovered “preaching” to the sailors. After teaching for ten years at Manitoba College, Will resumed graduate work, this time in History at Columbia University, and then came back to Toronto in 1910 as lecturer in French and registrar at University College. Two years later he became associate professor. In 1916, having completed his doctorate at Columbia, he was named professor, a position he was to hold until his retirement in 1945.

Will’s immediate impatience with the academic “system” at the University of Toronto was voiced in a peppery article of April 1914 in the University Monthly,

the beginning was in the graduate Department of Romance Languages, where he could select his own subjects of specialization and change them almost at will. The earliest graduate courses in French announced in the undergraduate calendars of 1912-15 include three offered by Will: Old French Drama, Social Forces in French Literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and Social Forces in Modern French Literature. The first graduate calendar, published in 1916, lists him as offering courses in Elements of Romance Philology (in which for a time he alternated with H.E. Ford), The Romantic Drama, and Seminar in the Intellectual and Religious History of Modern France. Before 1920 he was also offering seminars in The French Renaissance and The Development of French Thought and Ideals from the Renaissance to Modern Times.

Sixteen years younger than J.S. Will, François Charles Archile Jeanneret

fortified and stimulated his love of French – the language of his Swiss forbears and of thousands of his fellow Canadians – and sparked his lifelong concern for its future. His excellent undergraduate record in college led to his appointment in 1912 as head of Modern Languages at Upper Canada College and in 1913 as lecturer in French at University College. Four years later he succeeded Will as registrar, a post he held until 1922. Like Will, Jeanneret had the interests of the best students at heart and was always proud of their scholarly achievements. Unlike Will, however, he was deeply attached to the long-standing traditions of the Modern Language programme, which he saw, we might say, as rich furrows, not as ruts. As our story unrolls, we shall see responsibilities and honours fall to the steady, astute, cautiously innovative traditionalist, thus increasing the impatience and exasperation of the often brilliant, but mercurial, older colleague.

Of a dozen others who taught in the French Department at University College before 1920, special mention must be made of several. Alexander Frederick Bruce Clark, Moderns graduate of 1906, was instructor from that year until 1910. A kindred spirit to J.S. Will, whom he knew since he stayed for four more years to teach English in University College while completing his Harvard PhD, Clark had a similar gift for caustic prose. At the University of British Columbia, where he had a distinguished career, he was an equally prickly colleague, much loved by gifted students. One might call him the Will of the West, except that Clark’s scathing attacks on academic inertia and mediocrity were made more effective by his own published work. With his fine books on Boileau (1925) and Racine (1939), both highly deserving of their recent reprintings, he was almost the only Canadian scholar of international stature in the field of French literature before World War II.

We should like to know more about instructor Lewis Hamilton Corbett; Alexander Edwin Hamilton, instructor from 1910 until his death in 1912, of whom Principal Maurice Hutton wrote in the President’s Report 1911-12 that he was “emphatically a student and scholar [possessing] even – that rare gift in this country – hereditary culture”; lecturer John Benjamin Wallace; and instructor Guy de Lestard. Thanks to clippings in the University of Toronto Archives we know more about two other Frenchmen hired as instructors by Squair in 1911: Paul Balbaud, French trade representative, and Louis A. Bibet, in the Provincial Forestry Service. Both went back to France on active service in 1914. Balbaud returned to Toronto in 1919 but remained in Canada as a trade representative, responsible for such things as French participation in the Canadian National Exhibition. Bibet was twice wounded; rewarded in 1916 with the cross of a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and the Croix de guerre

avec palme (decorations enthusiastically hailed by the Varsity in March 1916); fêted at a banquet at the York Club when he returned for a short furlough; and welcomed back in 1918 not only to his old job in University College but also to appointments at Upper Canada College, Trinity (1919-27), and Victoria (1922-24). When he retired in 1927 and sailed in May for France, the Toronto Star reported that thousands of people in the city would miss Captain Bibet, who was a great favourite with his pupils. His death in France was announced in February 1932, and the Varsity commented that all those who knew him, staff and students, had come to have a real regard and affection for this quiet, courteous, brave Frenchman.