Cleaning up a cupboard in the laundry room the other day I came across an old briefcase.
It had lots of stuff inside—as if I had been getting ready to go somewhere with lots of material and then for some reason decided to put it in the cupboard and promptly forgot about it for more than a decade.

Included in the long-forgotten material was something that made me smile. It was my student card from my days as a doctoral history student at the Université Laval. That period was 1995-98.

I have very fond memories of my time at the Université Laval. The arrangement was that the university allowed me to travel there for periods of about two weeks several times a year. When I was there, I stayed in a basement apartment of a very nice elderly couple who lived about a 15 minute walk from the campus.

My thesis supervisor was Jacques Mathieu, and he was excellent in that role.

The dissertation that I wrote to complete the doctoral programme at Laval ended up becoming Control and Order at French Colonial Louisbourg, published by Michigan State University Press.