LISA FITTERMAN Special to The Globe and Mail - Voluble, erudite and curious, Georges-Étienne Cartier was a modern-day Renaissance man who could speak as passionately to the minutiae of fly fishing as he could about Voltaire, colonialism and why Quebec needed to separate from the rest of Canada.
A psychiatrist by training who also studied law to enhance his understanding of politics, he was a fierce opponent - be it across a dinner table with friends and a bottle of good red wine - or on the stump for the Parti Québécois during a provincial election campaign in a riding he knew he could not win.
"In 1973, we were sent as kamikaze candidates to run in suicide ridings, so called because they were Liberal bastions. Georges ran in Westmount and I ran in Bourassa," recalled Yves Michaud, a hard-line, outspoken separatist whose public comments often got him in trouble with the party's leadership. "From that moment on, we were close friends, the chorus who stood for principles the party no longer wanted to consider. We questioned its orientation - a lot."
It was the principle more than anything that mattered to Cartier, who died July 31 at the age of 69 from cancer of the appendix. He loved to question and to be challenged in turn, and he always gave as good as he got. In one way, his story was a far cry from that of his ancestor, George-Étienne Cartier, the lawyer and former Quebec patriote turned federal politician who was named for King George III and, alongside Sir John A. Macdonald, became a Father of Confederation. But in another way, they were not so different at all, for they were two men from different times who believed they knew what was best for their beloved province and would give their all to achieve it, no matter what others thought.

"Party leaders do not like mavericks," Michaud chuckled. "But Georges didn't care. He was, simply, a joy."
His wife, Nicole Bérubé, a psychiatric nurse who first met her husband in the mid-1970s when she was offered a job on his team in the emergency department at Saint-Luc Hospital in Montreal, noted that he loved to read about historical figures such as Alexander the Great, not only to learn about their achievements but also to gain insight into himself. "He'd ask, 'What would I do if placed in their situation?' He was always trying to make that extra leap," she said. "He didn't like people who didn't have principles or were weak."
Cartier was born in Montreal on September 17, 1940, the eldest of Georges-Etienne Cartier and Georgette Simard's seven children. His father was a vascular surgeon while his mother was a voracious reader and a sometime writer who first met her husband after he read one of her articles in the newspaper, Le Devoir, and fell in instant love. They taught their offspring to value reading, music and politics, and to be unafraid of an argument as long as they believed in their position but were willing to consider another point of view. Dinner table conversations were lively and lasted long after the food had been eaten; they spoke of the survival of the French language and the problems with Maurice Duplessis's provincial Union Nationale party. They spoke of books, of André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and the cadences in the compositions of Robert Schumann.
Slight, bespectacled and bearded, Cartier lived by those lessons all his life. His library of classical music, of records, singles and CDs, surpassed 7,000, and he read a minimum of six hours a day without fail, going to sleep only at three or four in the morning - novels, histories, newspapers or any one of the 32 magazines he subscribed to, from politics to the French version of Popular Mechanics. "He could fix anything," said his wife. "He did all the plumbing, all the repairs."
Perhaps because his was a life of the mind, he chose a career that dealt with it in all its quirks, terrors and terrible beauty. After completing his medical studies and psychiatric specialty in the early sixties at the Université de Montréal, he could have settled into a practice with rich clients and a well-appointed office, complete with thick rugs and burnished wood furniture. Instead, he went straight for Saint Luc, located in what was then a rundown part of the city near the freeway, with patients that ran the gamut. There were the homeless, the drug addicts and desperate single parents, and there were patients with AIDS-related conditions who were facing down their new reality. Ms. Bérubé, who had practised on wards but never in the emergency department, said she was nervous the first time she went to speak to Cartier about the possibility.
"I told him that rather than him having to interview me, I wanted to interview him," she recalled. "He took me seriously and answered my questions carefully. He told me they were a team and that everyone had to work in concert, as if we were an orchestra or a piece of music."
Sometimes, he continued, the work could be hard and jarring. But he liked to think the team was making a difference in the lives of individuals, at least. Their conversations continued over several months inside and outside the hospital until they realized they were in love. Although Ms. Bérubé was then 45 and Cartier nine years younger, their age difference did not matter.
"He knew so much, it was like he knew everything, or at least wanted to" she said. "We listened to music, to Bach, Haydn and Mozart. Before, I couldn't put names to the music. He taught me."
In the end, as his body failed, Cartier continued to read, thick glasses magnifying his eyes as he lay in his hospital bed. Invariably, visitors would find him with a magazine or maybe even Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of his favourite writers. He loved the notion of the polite, fearless little boy who could see beyond boxes, spoke his mind oblivious of the consequences, and spent much of his time removing the baobab trees that would surely turn his asteroid to dust if allowed to take root.
Because, whether or not people agreed with him, that was how Cartier lived, too.