Like the province of Quebec, St Michael’s College underwent, in the sixties and early seventies, a form of “quiet revolution.” Several priests and sisters left their communities, the laity were called upon to play a greater role, and women were admitted to what had previously been all-male bastions. Coupled with these changes was a major demographic explosion (the number of students enrolled at St Michael’s more than doubled, from 889 in 1959-60 to 2,074 in 1971-72), which meant that new staff had to be hired to meet the demand. In the Department of French, though the increase was dramatic – from eleven full-time members in 1959-60 to a high of nineteen in 1971-72 – the student-faculty ratio actually rose and continued to be greater than that of French departments at the other colleges. The number of students remained high (2,114 in 1975-76), but

fiscal considerations forced a drop in the number of full-time members of the department to fifteen, just before the creation of the University Department in 1975.

PhD from Yale University in 1956, with a thesis, written under the supervision of Erich Auerbach, on the relationship of Spanish and French medieval liturgical drama, later published by the Pontifical Institute under the title The Liturgical Drama in Mediaeval Spain (1958). This contribution to scholarship earned him, in 1960, the title of corresponding fellow of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona.

worried, in the late sixties, when some of these teachers (Fink, Fitting, Holmes, O’Neill, entre autres) went on regular skiing expeditions – he felt that tennis was dangerous enough – that the foundation of his academic programme would be compromised. But the daredevil skiers always returned safely to their classrooms. In 1977 Father Donovan accepted an appointment as college registrar. Though this position left him little time to teach, he did, until 1984, continue to give one first-year course and used his new position to steer students into what he still considered to be an excellent French programme. After he left the post of registrar in 1988, he continued to serve the college and its former students through his work with the director of Alumni Affairs.

Others who, like Father Donovan, came on staff during the fifties, did much to

Fellows, obtaining his PhD in 1960. After passionate discussions with colleagues and many years’ work he published a greatly revised version of his thesis, Diderot the Satirist (1971), which caused quite a critical stir. While he continued to publish articles on Diderot, his research interests were wide-ranging, including Voltaire’s Candide, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, and Marcel Dubé’s Les Beaux Dimanches. Father O’Gorman’s enthusiasm carried over into his teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and into the years he spent as discipline representative. But the time came when this work was no longer enough for him, and in 1984 he asked for and received a leave of absence in order to turn his enthusiasm to a new project, the Institute for the Study and Application of Integrated Development (isaid), dedicated to the problems of the poor in developing countries. He subsequently retired from the University of Toronto and became the pastor of a parish in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Mother Mary Bernadette (Mary Culman), who had been a student of Mother Olga, obtained her ba and ma at the University of Toronto. During the few years she spent at St Michael’s College, she taught language-practice courses, as well as filling the position of dean of residence at Loretto College. Sister M. Eleanor (Loretto Breen) studied at St Joseph’s College. After attending the Ontario College of Education, she entered St Joseph’s Novitiate in 1931 and spent many years teaching high school French at St Joseph’s College School and other venues before doing graduate work at Université Laval. After defending a PhD thesis in 1959 on “Le Réalisme dans Georges Duhamel,” she was hired by St Michael’s College, where her lectures were peppered with anecdotes gathered during a year spent in France. She made her students see, through her eyes, the glories of the châteaux of the Loire and the enchantingly lit paintings of Georges

de la Tour at the Louvre. These and many other digressions were as much part of her courses as Descartes and Pascal. Sister Eleanor was an enthusiastic teacher of part-time students and was appointed honorary fellow of Woodsworth College, the University of Toronto’s college for part-time students. When the Hon. Pauline McGibbon was sworn in as chancellor of the University of Toronto, Sister Eleanor was asked to say the opening prayer at convocation, the first woman to have had this privilege.

Kevin Kirley graduated from St Michael’s College in Modern History and Modern Languages in 1949, and his yearbook motto was “goodness, discipline, knowledge.” After joining the Basilians and being ordained, thus taking care of “goodness” and “discipline,” he continued his pursuit of “knowledge” in France before returning to Toronto. “After nine years in France, 1953-1962, first as a

graduate student in Paris and Lyon, and then as a teacher in the classical college in Annonay, it was a relatively simple matter to stand before groups of students at St Michael’s in 1962 and lecture in French. I was used to examining French in the light of English and vice versa, so that grammar and conversation classes were pleasant teaching experiences for me in those years 1962-1967.” Not only did Father Kirley find delight in teaching, he even claims to have enjoyed departmental meetings. “I think we were a happy department, by and large, we looked forward to our department meetings, imagine! because it gave us a chance to be together for a brief while, we who enjoyed so much in common.” Though he was enjoying his work in Toronto, Kevin Kirley’s tenure in the department was to be brief. As he described it, “The first two years of teaching on the university level kept me very busy preparing lectures and correcting written work ... I was just

about ready to teach in earnest when fate or fortune directed my steps back to France to my old teaching post in Annonay.”

It was to Annonay that Father Donovan turned when he realized that the department needed to expand, and he asked Basilian confrères who were then studying in Lyon, not far from the Basilian motherhouse in Annonay, for help in finding staff. They recommended Philippe Lafaury, who was not only an outstanding student at the Université de Lyon but was actually willing to teach in the far-away city of Toronto. Lafaury was the first lay professor of French recruited by St Michael’s directly from France and the first lay person to teach in the department for any length of time; Philippe’s wife, Geneviève Lafaury, was the second. Along with his degrees and his youthful enthusiasm, Philippe Lafaury

brought with him recipes for culinary wonders whose fragrant odours would waft for many years through Department of French offices, adding a great deal of spice to our days. In addition to serving as discipline representative from 1981 to 1985 and again from 1986 to 1988, Lafaury was, for many years, responsible for the St Michael’s language laboratory, which he founded in 1971 in what is now Phelan House. He created an impressive audio-visual library for classroom use and pioneered the installation of computers for the study of language.

During this period, yet another religious from Loretto College, Sister Magdala Grisé, joined the St Michael’s staff. Catherine Grisé had received all her degrees from the University of Toronto, and her PhD thesis, completed in 1964 and entitled “The Lyric Poetry of Tristan L’Hermite,” was written under the

Three new staff members were appointed to the college in 1966. Catherine Holmes, originally from Winnipeg, completed her doctorate in Paris under the direction of Antoine Adam. Her thesis on an unusual topic, L’Éloquence judiciaire de 1620 à 1660, was published by Nizet in 1967. In the short time she spent at the University of Toronto, Holmes provided a great deal of intellectual stimulation. She conscienciously read the latest books and always shared her discoveries with colleagues and students. Peter Fitting, a graduate of St Mary’s College, California, and the University of Minnesota, obtained his PhD in 1969 from Harvard with a thesis entitled “Bernanos and the Problem of the Novel.” His research interests have been varied, including twentieth-century French literature, sociocritique, Marxism, science fiction, and utopias. In 1979 Fitting was cross-appointed to New College, where he was already very much involved in

the college programme.

At the Ma and PhD levels at the University of Toronto, Mariel O’Neill-Karch, another St Michael’s recruit in 1966, had concentrated on courses related to theatre, ranging from medieval theatre with Robert Harden, through Racine with Sister Olga and mise en scène with Clarence Parsons, to Modern Drama with Laure Rièse. After joining the staff, her focus shifted first to nineteenth-century French literature, especially George Sand, Gérard de Nerval, and Baudelaire, then to Quebec literature. She produced an anthology entitled Options in 1974 with P.P. Karch and several articles before returning to her first love, theatre, with courses on Quebec theatre and the emerging Franco-Ontarian corpus, which she analysed in a book, Théâtre franco-ontarien: espaces ludiques (1992).

” directed by George Trembley, and a second from the Université François-Rabelais in Tours four years later, where his thesis was entitled “Esquisse d’une sociologie sensorielle de la tragédie grecque: l’exemple d’Eschyle.” He was appointed to St Michael’s College in 1969. De Kerckhove has won numerous awards and grants for his work on media and culture, arts and communication technologies, and neuro-cultural research, and since 1972 he has been associated in various capacities, ranging from associate researcher to co-director, with the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology. His scholarly and professional work is far-reaching and ranges from translations into French of seminal works of Marshall McLuhan to articles, papers, and books on language, literacy and new technologies, transinteractivity, multi-media performances, and televised publicity. Among his publications is La Civilisation vidéo-chrétienne, brought out in Paris in 1991.

Somewhat older manifestations of Christianity have interested Peter Grillo, who studied at Harvard University, obtaining his PhD in 1969 with a thesis on “The Old French Continuations of the Conquête de Jérusalem.” The same year he joined the staff of St Michael’s College. He has continued to probe more deeply into his subject and has published well-received scholarly editions of medieval texts that are part of the Old French crusade cycle, the Jerusalem Continuations. La Chrétienté Corbaran appeared in 1984 and La Prise d’Acre, La Mort de Godefroi and La Chanson des rois Baudoin in 1987.

François Des Roches, after graduating from the Université de Montréal, obtained his doctorat du troisième cycle from the Université de Strasbourg, where he wrote a thesis entitled “L’Expression poétique de Saint-Denys Garneau.” Hired as St Michael’s first linguist that year, at a time when interest in linguistics was growing

in the department, Des Roches created a course on French-Canadian language that became very popular. He also occasionally taught Quebec literature, especially poetry. Another recruit in 1970 was Jacqueline Hanna. After obtaining a certificat d’études littéraires générales from the Sorbonne, she was awarded an ma from Boston University in 1968. She returned to Paris to teach at the École de l’Alliance Française. In 1969 she came to Toronto and taught briefly for the Ontario government before taking a position at St Michael’s College, where she was a lecturer from 1970 to 1977 and then a senior tutor from 1977. She has taught many appreciative students the full range of language courses, several in the field of translation, and a very successful course in Francophonie, which she created. From 1980 to 1983 she was the co-ordinator for French courses offered through the School of Continuing Studies, including those of the Summer School at Saint-Pierre.

During the sixties and early seventies, one of the major factors contributing to a congenial atmosphere in the department was the French House (now Phelan House) on Elmsley Place, where most members had their offices. On the ground floor, the parlour was first occupied by Father Bondy, then by Catherine Holmes, the conservatory housed the language lab, Donal O’Gorman presided in the dining-room, and Paulette Collet received in the kitchen. The second-floor master bedroom was reserved for the chairman, Richard Donovan, who surrounded himself by younger staff. To the right of the stairs was Bernard Clérin, who opted to do his military service drilling students in French verbs, before taking a job at Radio-Canada. His office was later occupied by Sister Marie-Thérèse. To the left of the chairman’s suite, a pleasant room with a fireplace and several desks was used at various times by Gisèle Kayser, a St Michael’s College graduate who

obtained her ma in 1964 from the University of Toronto; Thérèse Villatte, a Parisian agrégation student; Marie-Madeleine Thépot, who had a French doctorate in anthropology; all of whom kept Mariel O’Neill company. The next two offices were those of Philippe Lafaury and Peter Grillo.

Up the servants’ stairs, several colleagues were installed tant bien que mal, the most incongruous accommodation being that of Robert Fink, who did what he could to mask the fact that he was ensconced in the former bathroom. With him on the third floor at various times were several other staff members, including Peter Fitting, Derrick de Kerckhove, Denis Saint-Jacques, Françoise Khettry, Joseph Sablé, Germaine Laurens, and Jacqueline Hanna. Some of these lively attic dwellers did not stay at St Michael’s long. Saint-Jacques, a specialist in Québécois literature with wide interests and many connections, went back to

Quebec to assume a position at Laval. The inimitable Germaine Laurens taught oral and phonetic classes. Her booming voice and infectious laugh echoed through the halls of the French House and of the faculty dining-room, where almost all members of the French Department used to congregate at noon – much to the chagrin of some of the more conservative Basilians, who had a little trouble digesting so much French.

Last, but by no means least, Joseph Sablé, a secular priest from Paris’s prestigious Institut Catholique, helped bridge the gap between the French House, where he had an office during a term as visiting professor in 1968-69, and Elmsley Hall, where the department was to locate when he returned, with a regular appointment, in 1971. Father Sablé was known for his thunderous

lectures, very much in the tradition of Leonard Rush, and for his untiring devotion to his students. His greatest contribution to the college and to the department was his gift to the John M. Kelly Library of a major research collection of nineteenth-century French romanticism known as the Sablé Collection, including priceless books, manuscripts, and artifacts. Both his generosity and his erudition were recognized by the college in the fall of 1992, when he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa, and by the department in 1993, when the chairman recommended that he be made a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.

In 1971 the French House was converted into a residence for Basilians, and the French Department moved to Elmsley Hall, which at that time housed male college residents on the fourth floor, along with colleagues in German, Classics,

and English. The French Department’s second-floor quarters were more democratic, since the offices were identical, but it took several years to recreate, in this homogeneous space, the heterogeneous creativity of the old French House.

The first person hired after the move was Jean-Claude Susini, who had obtained his licence and des from the Université de Montpellier and in 1962 his agrégation de grammaire in Paris. He then taught at French lycées in Alès, Nîmes, and Bordeaux and at the University of New York at Albany, before coming to St Michael’s College in 1971. Most of Susini’s publications deal with aspects of the poetry of Baudelaire, and his enthusiasm for both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature has infused his very successful courses on French romanticism and the twentieth-century novel. He has also shared with several groups of fortunate students the history and culture of his beloved Midi, since he

served as director of the department’s Third Year Elsewhere programme at Aix-en-Provence for a record four years. In his Toronto office, North American antiques and folk art have greeted students and colleagues in what has become, over the years, a veritable salon for the display of wit and the exchange of ideas. Another French expatriate hired the same year, Françoise Khettry, obtained her licence from the Université de Strasbourg and her ma and PhD from the University of Toronto. Her thesis, completed in 1976 under the direction of Peter Moes, studied the “Évolution de la conception de l’amour conjugal dans la comédie française de Molière à Beaumarchais.” Though it was on a literary topic, she was soon attracted to linguistics, especially the sociolinguistics of French as spoken by people in her native Alsace. Her interest in orthoépie led her to develop new materials for the undergraduate course in this field. Her administrative contributions to the department include serving for two years

as director for study at Laval and as discipline representative for Woodsworth College from 1987 to 1992.

The last person appointed to the St Michael’s French Department before 1975 was, appropriately, a Basilian. Charles Principe did his undergraduate work in arts and theology at St Michael’s College and his ma at the University of Toronto. In France he obtained a licence from the Université de Lyon and his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1978. His thesis, “Les Portraits du sauvage dans les Relations de la Nouvelle-France écrites par le Père Paul Le Jeune de 1632 à 1642,” was awarded the Sainte-Marie Prize that year. An archivist at heart, Principe has photographed almost all of the groups of students he taught, carefully noting their names so that he would recognize them at alumni gatherings. He has been equally interested in his colleagues, serving a term as discipline