CANADA: Virtue’s Students

Three students of French blood from small Canadian towns last week fired their fellows at Laval University to take up walking sticks against Vice in the big city of Quebec. Laval’s Three Musketeers, Gilles Ayotte, Paul Emile Brazeau and Jean Paul Tremblay, did not act until they had on their side a recent angry declaration in the Quebec Court of Sessions by Judge Laetare Roy that the authorities were “flagrantly failing in their duty” to stamp out Vice. After reading this the French-Canadian students sallied forth one night last week, broke into eight houses of prostitution in succession, whacked naked inmates upon the buttocks, upset beds and tore up bedding, ripped lighting fixtures from the walls and otherwise proved their collegiate Virtue.

By this time Quebec cohorts of Vice, in the persons of the city’s taxi drivers, had gone violently to the rescue of girls and madams, swinging monkey wrenches and auto jacks in their onslaughts upon Virtue’s students. In the thick of the battle Quebec patrons of the resorts attempted to preserve a neutral attitude, diving into closets and under beds. When finally police began to arrive and make arrests the students were nearly victorious, shoving the few remaining girls out of doors into the cold autumn night.

Proudly in court appeared bandaged Musketeers Ayotte, Brazeau and Tremblay to answer charges of “disorderly conduct, creating a disturbance, and causing damage to property.” Proudly behind them on spectators’ benches sat scores of students who had escaped arrest but not injury, as their bandages and sticking-plaster showed.

Quebec braced itself for a Vice trial in which the students’ lawyers prepared to expose in detail conditions in that city and in Montreal.

Looking wise, local journalists wrote that tourists seldom learn of these cities’ numerous resorts, mostly patronized by Canadians. Worst of Montreal Vice, opined local reporters, is the depression-bred habit of some impecunious high school girls, who earn pin money by stopping briefly after school in questionable houses, then go on home to their unsuspecting and respectable parents.