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Curé Labelle and Dubouquet

Colour photograph of two actors in a forest setting. A man in a cassock, playing Curé Labelle, points to something in the distance. The man accompanying him, wearing a coat, scarf and hat, stands close to him and gazes into the distance.

Photographer: Pierre Grignon
Date: Around 1965
Source: Private collection of Pierre Grignon

The novel Un homme et son péché, by Claude-Henri Grignon, was a major success after its publication in 1933. Grignon soon had other novels on his mind, and told his friend Jules-Édouard Prévost that he planned to write one about the life of Curé Labelle. The author’s father, Wilfrid Grignon, had known Curé Labelle well; in fact, it was at Labelle’s urging that the elder Grignon moved to Sainte-Adèle to open his medical practice. As a boy, Claude-Henri heard countless stories about Curé Labelle—and after his father died, he inherited the family archives, which included several letters from Labelle. It was not until the 1956 première of the TV series Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut, however, that the curé appeared as a character in the work of Claude-Henri Grignon.