Eerie premonition came too late

Joseph Doutre was unable to save fellow Institut canadien member

It was Dec. 11, 1882, and lawyer Joseph Doutre suddenly had a terrifying thought. He knew that his old friend Joseph Adolphe Hawley had been admitted to Hôpital Notre-Dame several days before. Suddenly, Doutre had an eerie premonition that Hawley was about to die.

With scarcely a moment’s thought, Doutre tore away from his St-François-Xavier St. office. He rushed along Notre-Dame St. to the hospital, which then stood at the corner of Bonsecours St., and arrived just in time to see a man plunging from an upper-storey window. Sure enough, when he reached the crumpled form lying on the hospital’s stone steps, it was none other than Hawley.

Doutre briefly cradled his friend in his arms, but it’s doubtful Hawley could have known. He was taken inside, his neck broken, and died several hours later.

Doutre and Hawley had been friends for years, at least since 1847, when they both were admitted to the bar. Hawley eventually forsook the law and entered the flour business, where he was said to have amassed a fortune. But, like Doutre, he remained active in the Institut canadien.

The Institut was founded in 1844 to promote patriotism and culture free of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In its library and debates, and in the speeches of its members, a reformist, secular view of the world was fostered that the church found unsettling, even dangerous. Doutre served as the Institut’s president in 1852 and again in 1867.

He is best remembered for his role in the Guibord affair. Joseph Guibord was a printer who died in 1869 and who, as an Institut member, was denied a Catholic burial by Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal. This provoked a lawsuit on behalf of Guibord’s widow that was led by Doutre and the Institut, seeking to overturn the bishop’s interdiction. The case went all the way to the Privy Council in London which, late in 1874, ruled that such a burial could not be blocked.

Even so, another year passed before interment could take place. Accompanied by police and soldiers keeping a wary eye on angry Catholic protesters, Guibord’s remains were transferred from a vault in Mount Royal Cemetery to Cimetière Notre Dame des Neiges. Immediately Bishop Bourget, unreconciled to the Privy Council decision, deconsecrated the Guibord plot.

However, it was a hollow victory for the Institut, for soon it was reeling from the unrelenting pressure of the church. Members drifted away, submitting to ecclesiastical authority, or simply died, and there were few new ones to take their place.

Perhaps, by 1882, this pressure was getting to Hawley, though we don’t know precisely what pushed him to take his own life. Certainly, that autumn his health was in marked decline and, on Dec. 8, a Thursday, he was admitted to Notre-Dame, suffering from what the Gazette would call a “softening of the brain.”

At first the hospital authorities weren’t overly alarmed. But on Saturday, Hawley began to slide even more dramatically, irrationally becoming convinced the doctors wanted to get rid of him. It was a self-fulfilling notion, for indeed it was then decided that he could be better cared for at the Longue Pointe Asylum.

However, on Sunday, Hawley still had not been moved. Doutre spent that night with him, leaving only around 9 a.m. Monday. A little later, a nursing sister brought the patient his lunch, then left. Hawley went to the window of his room, somehow managed to pull away a ventilator and threw himself through the resulting opening. It was just then that, uncannily, Doutre arrived outside.

Hawley left $2,500 to the Institut canadien, but it was something of a futile gesture. Just four years later, La Presse reported the Institut no longer existed except in name alone.

A reformist, secular view of the world was fostered that the church found unsettling.