It seems that the majority of young men who attended St Michael’s College, many of them destined for the priesthood, were not very interested in studying French. Father Henry Carr, a long-serving president of the college, reminisced about the year 1906-07, when he was a student in Rhetoric class (the approximate equivalent of today’s first year): “In the morning we had class from 9.00 a.m. to 10.45 a.m. For a few minutes or so, there was religious knowledge. The rest of the time for five mornings a week was devoted to Latin. One morning a week was given to English ... There was a French class at 11 o’clock open to all classes. It was optional. Few took it. I don’t think any in our class took it.”¹⁹ In spite of this apparent reluctance, Honour courses in French (and German) had been

A generous offer from University College to register St. Michael’s students and to provide them with any necessary instruction while leaving them also members of their own college was formally accepted by St. Michael’s on 14 November 1907. This arrangement made possible the establishment of the kind of faculty of arts prescribed by the act of 1906. On 8 December 1910 St. Michael’s became an arts college in the University of Toronto; the arrangement was not formally written into an act of the Ontario Legislature until 1913.²⁰

We have very little information about those who taught French during these years, but Albert Pierre Dumouchel is listed as a professor of French in the Faculty of Arts in the college yearbook for 1910, the year before the first St Michael’s students received their degrees from the university. Father Dumouchel was born in Grand Marais, Ontario, (now part of Windsor) of Franco-Ontarian parentage. He did some of his theological studies at the Grand Séminaire in Montreal and at the Basilian novitiate in Annonay, France, before being ordained in Toronto in 1883. He spent in total some twenty-four years at St Michael’s College in various capacities, including director of studies from 1890 to 1895 and master of scholastics from 1910 to 1916. He is best remembered as a “traditionalist” who “did not approve of the trend away from the old classical course”²¹ and as the author of early college calendars.

These calendars also list, as a professor of French in the Faculty of Arts, Robert McBrady. During the long years he was at St Michael’s College, Father McBrady was religious superior from 1912 to 1915 and also served on the Senate of the University of Toronto. He is listed as teaching, in addition to French, Latin (“as a writer of Latin prose [he] was unequalled in Ontario”) and occasionally Greek. McBrady had been educated in France, where he went “as a youth of sixteen for a full college course. He drank their spirit deep into his soul; he returned after many years, a humanist in the good sense of the term.” He was to teach his beloved humanities in both the high school and collegiate divisions of St Michael’s College for almost seventy years. “Father McBrady was at his best in the class-room. But it was the better students who profited most. His impatience with mediocrity of any kind led him unconsciously at times to finish of phrase and exactness of expression which aroused admiration but nothing more in

(to use one of his gems) the rag-tag and bobtail.”²² One of his oft-repeated comments has come down to us intact: “Eh, eh, young man, you know about as much about the construction of that sentence as I do about the architecture of the dome of heaven.”²³

Another Basilian, who spent many years studying in Montreal at the Grand Séminaire, John Joseph Purcell is listed in the 1913 yearbook as teaching French; as is a layman, C.P. Donovan, about whom very little is known except that the following year, he seems to have switched to teaching Latin in the junior division. Towards the end of this period, the name of J.J. Sheridan appears, along with that of W.H. Murray.²⁴ Father Murray spent the years 1922-25 in France; there he met Louis J. Bondy, whose assistant he later became.

Federation with the University of Toronto in 1906 had brought changes that were to reshape the college, the most revolutionary of these being the admission of women. The two women’s colleges, Loretto and St Joseph’s, petitioned President Robert Falconer for participation in federation. According to Father Bondy, “Falconer gave as his opinion that the two women’s colleges were not likely to be admitted to the university as additional distinct arts colleges. He suggested as an alternative that St. Michael’s be asked to enrol women students and to add the sisters to the college staff, an arrangement quite possible under the terms of the act.”²⁵ In 1911, then, St Michael’s began registering women students, and Loretto and St Joseph’s were to share in the instruction of these students in Latin, French, English, and German, which had been designated “college subjects.” One notes here the absence of another college subject,

Philosophy, which women, we presume, were not deemed fit to teach. “The arrangements were in full operation in 1912 when there was one woman enrolled in third year ... and seven enrolled in each of the second and first years. The event was, on the local scene, quite as revolutionary as federation itself.”²⁶

The first St Michael’s women to receive University of Toronto degrees had been registered in university courses as students of University College. In 1914 one of these women, from St Joseph’s College, obtained her degree in Modern Languages with specialist standing. Mary Agnes Murphy then entered St Joseph’s Convent and in 1918, as Sister Mary Agnes, began her long and distinguished career teaching French at her alma mater. More will be said about her in the next chapter. At Loretto College the first three graduates formed the class of 1915. The professors listed are Bertha Clapp and Mother Dorothea (Mary Louise

Barry), who had obtained her ba and ma at Queen’s University and her PhD in English from the University of Toronto. “She specialized in Early and Middle English, and edited a fifteenth century manuscript, The Pilgrimage of the Soul.”²⁷ Mother Dorothea was certainly better qualified to teach English than French, but it was not unusual in those days for professors to teach more than one subject.

With the official inclusion of women at St Michael’s – though they were excluded from taking lectures with the men and were segregated in their own colleges – came a growing interest in French and an expansion of the department. This interest was manifested in the rise of French clubs, the first of which seems to have been created at Loretto College in the academic year 1912-13. The poster announcing a play, La Poudre aux yeux, by the Jeaunne (sic) d’Arc Club, is worth quoting: “Seats at popular prices: admission, ten cents; reserved seats, two cents

extra; box seats, twenty-five; children who have not attained the use of reason go by weight, three to five cents. The ‘gods’ and back-stairs will, as usual, be open to the financially embarrassed at five cents.”²⁸ The expansion of the department in the following years will be the focus of the next chapter.