Jacques Michon

Jacques left us on April 1st, a day that feels almost too fitting for a man who could make you laugh mid-sentence and then quote Rimbaud with such tenderness that the room went quiet. I don't know if that was his final joke or just the universe being kind, but either way, I choose to believe he was smiling when he went. He had that effect on people — the sudden warmth, the feeling that you mattered, that your half-formed thought deserved to be heard. I've known few people who made intellectual conversation feel like sitting by a fire on a cold night. He was a scholar of extraordinary range, yes, but don't let that impress you too much. What impresses me is that he built his life around the book — not just studying it, but loving the weight of it in his hands, the smell of old pages, the stubbornness of a good sentence. He co-founded the Groupe de recherches et d'études sur le livre au Québec with Richard Giguère and directed it for twenty-four years, and if you ever sat in on one of his seminars, you'd understand that he didn't just teach literature. He made you feel like every novel you'd ever loved was trying to tell you something personal. He received the Grand prix littéraire de la ville de Sherbrooke in 2006, and I remember how quiet he was about it, how he just shrugged and said the work spoke for itself. Classic Jacques. His family was the other great love of his life, the one he never published but wore on his sleeve every single day. His children and grandchildren could tell you stories I can't — the Sunday mornings, the long walks around Sherbrooke, the way he'd read to his grandkids with voices that made even the grocery list sound like poetry. He retired in 2014 but never really stopped being Jacques. He was still marking up manuscripts, still arguing about Québécois letters over wine, still pulling you aside to tell you about some forgotten author he'd just discovered and was practically vibrating with excitement. He was eighty years old, and he packed more life into each one of them than most people manage in a lifetime. If you ever had the good fortune of knowing him, you already know what I mean. If you didn't, I'm sorry. You missed something rare.