How They Remembered

In May 1960, four men gathered in Jean Marchand’s room at the Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal to discuss whether they would be candidates for Jean Lesage’s Quebec Liberal Party: Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and René Lévesque. For a variety of reasons, Lévesque was the only one prepared to make the leap, and he walked over to the Windsor Hotel to let Lesage know that “the others just aren’t ready.”

Jean Provencher quoted Lévesque as saying this in his 1973 biography. Lévesque recalled saying it in his 1986 memoir. And I used the anecdote in my own book about the Parti Québécois. But Jean-François Lisée consulted the accounts of the others placed in the room that night, and none of them mention being together. It is a small but telling example of the rigour that Lisée used in checking and double-checking the versions given by Lévesque and Trudeau, now almost mythical figures to those under forty-five.

The Trudeau papers are accessible...