Laura Beeston's
article is the first of three recent articles in the Toronto Star about Montrealers' reaction to the death of Cohen.
Montrealers continued to mourn on Friday, as a memorial to the late, great Leonard Cohen grows with each passing day.
Swelling and waning all day, crowds made their solemn pilgrimage to 28 Rue de Vallieres, where the famous poet and songwriter owned a home, laying flowers, lighting candles and listening to his famous baritone blast through a boom box decorated by a black fedora.
The mood is sombre. Real tears fall down the cheeks of those who have gathered here; a sense of loss is visceral. What is Montreal without its patron saint of songwriting?
“We love him, I will not say we loved him. We love him,” said Chantal Ringuet, who published a French-language anthology Les revolutions de Leonard Cohen last April (published by PUQ in 2016), which features artists, translators, researchers and personal essays about the prolific poet.
“I think that he had this ability to help us dream, to love, to live through the difficult moments… and he was what we call a passeur in French, a bridge builder between cultures.”
Cohen is part of the Canadian literary canon, but Quebec - and especially Montreal - also fiercely claim him as their own, and one of the few symbols, other than the Habs, that unite both English and French Montrealers with pride.