Herve Bertrand remembers the day well -- March 18,
1955 -- when a nun told him and the others in his third-grade class at
the Mont Providence orphanage in north Montreal that they had all been
declared "mentally deficient."
He was 12 and did not fully realize the
implications. The nun, Sister Colette Francoise of the Sisters of
Providence, was in tears. Outside the small windows of the massive
redbrick structure, the sullen gray sky was like a slab of cold steel.