Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci Page B

parents and students with great success.” Success seems to have been the point for him. A few days earlier he had taken it very hard when he had lost a student election to his friend and great rival at Brébeuf, Jean de Grandpré, the same man who would later come to advisehim not to run for the Liberal leadership. By now, as if to reconcile the double life he had begun to lead, Pierre had taken to including his matronymic, Elliott, as part of his name, but he had cause to wonder if it had cost him the election. In Citizen of the World, John English describes how Trudeau learned of an accusation made behind his back that he was “mediocre, Americanized, and Anglicized, in short, I would betray my race.” For Trudeau the accusation was “a profound shock.” “I would never betray the French Canadians,” he wrote in his journal. But he was also determined to retain his own Englishness, which he thought—not entirely correctly, it seems—helped give him the strength to resist simply following “the popular spirit.” “I am proud of my English blood, which comes from my mother. At least it tempers my boiling French blood. It leaves me calmer and more insightful and perspicacious.”
    This kind of reflection on a dual heritage is very familiar to the children of immigrants, who grow up fighting dual claims in almost every arena. What is surprising with Trudeau is how seldom the issue seems to have come up for open discussion, not only in his youth but also in his later political life. Even though his doubleness formed an important part of his public image, there always seemed a taboo around any actual allusion to it. One infamous breaking ofthis taboo was René Lévesque’s snide and ill-considered reference to Trudeau’s “Elliott” side just days before the 1980 referendum, in much the same terms as the anonymous accusation levelled at Trudeau back at Brébeuf. This time, Trudeau was able to give as good he got, in a rousing speech at Paul Sauvé Arena that cost Lévesque the high ground and may have cost him the referendum. Back at Brébeuf, however, Trudeau, for all his self-reflection, showed little understanding of the essentially irreconcilable conflict between his own Englishness and his growing allegiance to an anti-English ethnic nationalism.
    As a young man, in an apparent compromise, Trudeau came to refer to his mother not as English but as Scottish. At Brébeuf, however, what may have helped him to abide his contradictions was that his mother had inherited French blood from her own mother, along with an ardent Catholicism that was always to remain a strong point of contact between her and her son. When Trudeau was at home, he never missed a Mass with his mother, and their shared faith may have served as a sort of bridge for him, a point of reconciliation between the English world of home and French one of Brébeuf, where he attended Mass as often as three times a day. Trudeau, for all his aura of rationalism and secularism, was to remain a staunch Catholic the rest of hislife, faltering briefly in his faith, according to friends, only at the time of the death of his son Michel. One reason, perhaps, that his Catholicism remained so central to him was because of this unifying role it had had for him as an adolescent, holding together his disparate selves.
    TRUDEAU EMERGED from Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf steeped in views that were fairly typical for his time and place and social class. Trudeau himself, however, was hardly typical. At Brébeuf he had been, as he would later be, a star. That quality would perhaps remain the real constant in his life, his ability to excel, to shine in the right ways and at the right moment. The skill seemed less the result of some natural flair than of an iron discipline, one that went back to the pains he had taken to please his father but that had been honed to a razor edge by the Jesuits at Brébeuf. He had mastered every subject there, and in his final year beat even his