As a youth, Laurier was a loner. Laurier didn't play sports; he read a lot. His mother was a woman who was interested in both English and French literature, and although she died when he was very young -- when he was six -- she seems to have given him a literary interest. He was a good student and he was liked when he went to Le College Classique because he was a charmer. But it wasn't because he was a leader, he was just a fine person and everybody liked him. He had these literary interests and he had a literary style and part of it is attributed to his heath. At the time everybody believed he had consumption, that is, he had tuberculosis. In those days tuberculosis was fatal. We didn't have a cure for it and if you got tuberculosis, you were going to die. It was the AIDS of its day. Clearly what he had was sort of bronchial inflammation and so forth. It stayed with him and he regularly had a bad cough and sometimes coughed up blood, as they did with tuberculosis. So he didn't have the energy to be "sportif" and so he found refuge in literature and was fascinated with English literature, Victorian novels and the like, just as with French literature -- a sense of style in both languages. And, of course, this became a crucial part of his political persona.
