It was among such people that the hero of The Money Master, Jean Jacques
Barbille, lived. He was the symbol or pattern of their virtues and of
their weaknesses. By nature a poet, a philosopher, a farmer and an
adventurer, his life was a sacrifice to prepossession and race instinct;
to temperament more powerful than logic or common sense, though he was
almost professionally the exponent of both.
There is no man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced as
the French Canadian. He is at once modest and vain; he is even lyrical in
his enthusiasms; he is a child in the intrigues and inventions of life;
but he has imagination, he has a heart, he has a love of tradition, and
is the slave of legend. To him domestic life is the summum bonum of
being. His four walls are the best thing which the world has to offer,
except the cheerful and sacred communion of the Mass, and his dismissal
from life itself under the blessing of his priest and with the promise of
a good immortality.
Jean Jacques Barbille had the French Canadian life of pageant, pomp, and
place extraordinarily developed. His love of history and tradition was
abnormal. A genius, he was, within an inch, a tragedy to the last button.
Probably the adventurous spirit of his forefathers played a greater part
in his development and in the story of his days than anything else.
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