Since it was fairly early, Bernard Street, which in the past few years had undergone frantic, nearly hysterical ­development, was buzzing with activity. It was the hour when filmgoers were emerging from the Cinéma Outremont. The terraces were packed. Some even overflowed onto the sidewalk, blocking traffic. To avoid being jostled you had to walk around the scrawny trees that were languishing in their squares of earth and the more robust flowers proliferating in their green metal tubs, or walk right on the road. I wasn’t in the mood to hear people sing the praises of Alain Tanner so I kept heading west, without stopping for the espresso I craved. After Outremont Avenue, things suddenly became calmer, as if I’d crossed a frontier. A few couples were looking for their cars and the line outside Bilboquet, the trendy ice cream parlour, was quite impressive, but after that, nothing. Immutable Outremont, hated by some, secretly dreamed of by others, former fortress of wealthy French Canadians, cradle of most of the influential politicians of the sixties and ­seventies, both far right and moderate left, of both the ­federalist and the nationalist persuasion, favourite target of east-end workers, the tight-lipped snob who had long thought the French she spoke was international when in point of fact her accent would set your teeth on edge, Outremont for so long had been not a place to live but a way of life, a social status, sleeping Outremont now offered me her luxuriant lawns, her flowerbeds, her pretty, always-empty balconies (you wonder why they were built, since nobody ever sits on them) and most of all, her magnificent, tranquil parks.

I walked for a long time, craning my neck to peek inside subtly lit living rooms, stopping in front of my favourite houses, the ones I’d singled out when I first arrived in Outremont, the ones that make me wish I were rich, though I’ve never had that kind of ambition, rich and ­powerful and owner of a home on Kelvin or Pratt or Antonine-Maillet. Walking through the streets of Outremont at night makes you ambitious though; I should have acquired that quality when I was younger, then maybe I wouldn’t be living on Bloomfield today, but farther west, on the flank of the mountain or opposite a park. In the end, these morose thoughts made me smile. I needed that. I saw myself emerging from my castle to turn on the automatic sprinklers or check to see if my domain was truly safe from intruders, and the absurdity of it cheered me up.