Disaster in Montreal

One night, after long prayer, Ste. Cunegonde, wife of Henry II, emperor of Germany, fell asleep and was lifted into bed. Her reader fell asleep soon afterward and, dropping her candle, set fire to the palliasse and bedclothes. The empress and her reader were roused from sleep by the noise and heat of the fire, and making the Sign of the Cross, the fire instantly dropped out. Although the empress was lying on a bed blazing with fire, and the flames burnt fiercely all around her, yet her night clothes were not touched, nor did she suffer any injury whatever.

--Papal Bull issued in 1200.

With Ste. Cunegonde as their patron, the Grey Nuns founded an asylum in Montreal's St. Henri tenement quarter in 1895. The grim, grey stone building was a haven for orphans and old people. The aged, living out their days on $25-a-month government pension checks, were lodged in bare upstairs rooms in the western side of the building; the children lived in the east wing.

Last week a long awaited improvement was under way at Ste. Cunegonde's. Workmen with acetylene torches were installing a new elevator. The old folks, who daily shuffled up four flights of stairs to their fifth-floor quarters, were overjoyed. Only Fortunat Taillefer, 70, who once had been a welder's helper, fretted about the acetylene torches blazing away so close to the tinderlike stairwell and the old wooden floors.

Taillefer was leaving the third-floor chapel after noon prayers when he saw smoke billowing up from the new elevator shaft. He cried "Fire!" An alarm was sounded. Taillefer and the other old men had time to hobble downstairs. The 182 orphans on the east side held each other's hands in a human chain and filed out.

But on the upper floors flames raced to the old women's quarters before firemen could head them off. The Mother Superior, Sister Rita Gervais, dashed in with a fire extinguisher; she never came back. The blind, bedridden and crippled were trapped. All hope of rescue went when the roof crashed and the old building blazed like a well-flued furnace.

Within an hour, the fire had spent itself. Thirty-five women, including two nuns, were dead in Ste. Cunegonde's ashes.

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