Family
Wilfrid Laurier married Zoé Lafontaine in Montreal on 13 May 1868. She was the daughter of G.N.R. Lafontaine and his first wife, Zoé Lavinge dit Tessier. Laurier's wife Zoé was born in Montreal and educated there at the School of the Bon Pasteur, and at the Convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, St. Vincent de Paul. The couple lived at Arthabaskaville until they moved to Ottawa in 1896. She served as one of the Vice-Presidents on the formation of the National Council of Women and was Honorary Vice-President of the Victorian Order of Nurses. The couple had no children. Beginning in 1878 and for some twenty years while married to Zoé, Laurier had an "ambiguous relationship" with a married woman, Émilie Lavergne, with whom he fell in love. Where Zoé loved plants, animals and home life, she was not an intellectual. Émilie was, and relished literature and politics like Wilfrid, whose heart she won. Rumour had it he fathered a son (Armand) with her, yet Zoé remained with him until his death.
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Famous quotes containing the word family:
“Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;Mthe heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery.”
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“English people apparently queue up as a sort of hobby. A family man might pass a mild autumn evening by taking the wife and kids to stand in the cinema queue for a while and then leading them over for a few minutes in the sweetshop queue and then, as a special treat for the kids, saying “Perhaps we’ve time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.””
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1940)
“It was occasions like this that made me more resolved than ever that my family would someday know real security. I never for a moment doubted that I myself would ultimately provide it for them.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)