TESSIER, MARGUERITE (1821-1892), French-language poet of Quebec, where she was born, worked as a copyist, and passed the greater part of her life. Her two collections, Les Lampes du fleuve (1854) and La Chambre des cartes (1867), belong to the letters of Canada (q.v.), but have acquired readers beyond that province through translations which convey her intelligence more readily than her sound. Her occupation brought legal descriptions, private letters, and mercantile French under the same attentive eye. The variety can be heard in the poems without their ever resembling exercises in professional vocabulary.
Les Lampes du fleuve, or The Lamps of the River, consists of short poems arranged as a passage from evening to daybreak along the St Lawrence. The sequence does not describe a continuous voyage. The light in one window is followed by a light seen from another, and the object changes its significance with the change of observer. A lamp which promises shelter to the boatman keeps a tired watcher awake ashore. The river binds these separate watches together, without supplying the consolatory fiction that those who keep them know one another's circumstances.
Her verse is more regular upon the page than in the ear. The sentence frequently runs beyond the rhyme and comes to rest early in the next line; the rhyme is heard, but does not have the last word. This divided movement is difficult to preserve in English. Versions which restore a firm close at every couplet give her a certainty she deliberately withheld. Those which suppress the rhyme lose the expectation against which the sentence moves. The misfortune has helped to make her reputation that of a thoughtful provincial poet, when thought and measure are precisely what cannot be separated in her best writing.
La Chambre des cartes, or The Room of Maps, is her more ambitious book. Its central sequence places successive speakers before a map in a room whose furnishings scarcely change. A merchant calculates distance, a child follows a coloured margin, an old woman seeks the bend of a river which the scale has omitted. The same marks offer each an intelligible country and each a different want. Tessier does not make the map false in order to make the persons true. The contest is between kinds of exactness, and the poetry occurs where one proves unable to perform the office of another.
The book's reception was cooler than that of the earlier volume. Readers who had praised the local colour of the river poems complained of abstraction; readers seeking a political declaration found no declaration sufficiently detachable for quotation. Both complaints have some foundation. Several connecting pieces are plainly contrived, and the order of the speakers occasionally supplies an argument which the verse has not earned. The finest passages, however, are also the least reducible to the uses her admirers wished to make of her.
She died at Quebec in 1892. Her place in FRENCH LETTERS IN THE WEST (q.v.) is secure; her place in the general account of Western poetry (q.v.) has been slower to settle. To describe her as a French ornament of an English literature would settle it with great convenience and no accuracy. She wrote a Western literature in French. (H. M.)