American ghosts

"David Plante was born and brought up in a French-speaking Catholic parish in Providence, Rhode Island, that was like an isolated fortress in Yankee New England. The nuns of the parish school wore long black veils and taught the children that they lived in le petit Canada, where they preserved the beliefs of le grand Canada, a country of suffering eased by miracles. This invisible country - with its history of long-lost French North America, of Jesuit missionaries devoted to converting the Indians, of the hard lives of fur traders and woodsmen and the Indian squaws who became their wives -…