Roy

Roy is roi, king, in the spelling French kept on the page long after the sound had settled, the same noun that stands inside Leroy and Le Roy with the article pulled off. What it is not, and never was, is a title. A byname of this sort fastened on a man because his neighbours thought he carried himself like one, or because they crowned him for an afternoon: king of a guild's feast, king of a shooting match, the man who wore the crown in the play. Anyone with a real crown had no use for a surname saying so.

The name went west with the founding settlers of New France and did better there than at home, until it stood among the two or three commonest surnames in Quebec. For every Roy in Paris there is a Roy in Quebec City, Lévis, Manitoba or Acadia, in the archives, the seminary, the legation and, later, the rink.

There is a false twin worth naming. Robert Roy MacGregor, Raibeart Ruadh MacGriogair, who lived from 1671 to 1734, carried a Roy that is the anglicised sound of Gaelic ruadh: roux and not rouge, since Gaelic gives dearg for red. He was called it for hair that browned as he aged, and his story belongs to Clan MacGregor.

Pierre-Charles Roy was born in Paris in 1683 and died there on 23 October 1764, a poet who spent his working life writing for the musical stage. His first libretto, Philomèle, was mounted at the Paris Opéra on 20 October 1705. By 1718 he had supplied the texts for seven tragédies en musique and was being hailed as the successor to Quinault, the highest praise a French librettist could get. André Cardinal Destouches set his Callirhoé in 1712 and his Sémiramis in 1718.

His most durable monument is a sentence written by a man who could not stand him. In a letter of 1719 to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, the young Voltaire explained why he had abandoned his own name: he had been so unfortunate under the name of Arouet, he wrote, that he had taken another one expressly so as to be confused no longer with the poet Roy. Roy's temper did the rest. He brawled in public with Rameau after writing a derogatory poem about the composer, and the Académie Française refused him again and again.

The court thought better of him. He was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, and in 1742 he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Saint-Michel, the first man of letters ever given it. Between 1747 and 1751 Madame de Pompadour had his pieces performed at her Théâtre des Petits Cabinets at Versailles: a long way, for a name that began as a joke about acting like a king.

The name reached the French Atlantic early and in unlikely company. Jean Roy, who lived from 1617 to 1707, was a flibustier, one of the buccaneers of the Caribbean, and he ended a very long life as a member of the conseil souverain of Martinique, sitting on the bench of the colony's highest court.

Philippe Roy was born on 13 February 1868 and trained as a physician before politics took him. In 1906 he was appointed to the Senate of Canada for the division of Edmonton, Alberta, and while he sat he launched Le Courrier de l'Ouest with the future Alberta senator Prosper-Edmond Lessard: a French-language paper published out on the prairie, which reached a circulation of 8,000 among people a long way from the St Lawrence. A Liberal, he gave the seat up in 1911.

He resigned it for France. From 1911 to 1928 he was Canada's commissioner general there, and from 1928 to 1938 the first envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, the first Canadian to hold that rank. He was at the same time Quebec's agent-general in Paris, from 1911 until 1912, when the federal government told him he could represent only one of the two: a quiet collision between Ottawa and Quebec, settled inside one man's job. He died on 10 December 1948.

Maurice Roy was born in 1905 and made bishop of Trois-Rivières in 1946. He held that see for a single year before being moved in 1947 to the archbishopric of Quebec, which he then kept until 1981, and he was created a cardinal. He died in 1985. A generation before him Paul-Eugène Roy (1859-1926) had also worn a mitre in Canada, and on the other side of the Atlantic Jean Roy (1921-1977) was the second father abbot of Notre-Dame de Fontgombault.

Pierre-Georges Roy was born at Lévis on 23 October 1870 and went into newspapers, writing for the Canadien and the Quotidien. In 1895 he founded the Bulletin des recherches historiques, and he was still at that work a quarter of a century later when, in 1920, the province appointed him its first Chief Archivist. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great in 1919 and a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1927, and in 1932 the Royal Society of Canada gave him its J. B. Tyrrell Historical Medal. He died at Lévis in 1953, in the town he was born in.

Joseph-Edmond Roy (1858-1913) did much the same work in the same generation: a notary and politician who was also a historian, an editor-in-chief and a public servant. Nothing in the record makes the two men kin, and that is the point. The name was thick enough in Quebec for two of its bearers to take up the province's history with no document connecting them.

Gabrielle Roy was born on 22 March 1909 at Saint-Boniface in Manitoba, now part of Winnipeg, one of eleven children, and was educated at the Académie Saint-Joseph. The family lived on rue Deschambault, a street she would later put into one of her best-known books; the house is a National Historic Site and a museum today.

She trained at the Winnipeg Normal School and taught, first in the rural schools at Marchand and Cardinal and then at the Institut Collégial Provencher in Saint-Boniface. On her savings she got herself to Europe, and the outbreak of war in 1939 forced her home with several works near finished. She did not go back to Manitoba. She settled in Quebec and kept herself as a sketch artist while she wrote.

The book she was carrying came out in 1945. Bonheur d'occasion set a starkly realistic portrait of working-class life in Saint-Henri, a neighbourhood of Montreal, in front of a province that had not been shown itself that way before, and it is reckoned one of the works that laid the ground for the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. The French text took the Prix Femina in 1947. In English as The Tin Flute it took the Governor General's Award for fiction the same year and the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal, and sold more than three-quarters of a million copies in the United States. The attention was such that she went back to Manitoba to get away from it.

In August 1947 she married Marcel Carbotte, a doctor of Saint-Boniface, and the two went to Europe, he to study gynaecology and she to write. Where Nests the Water Hen followed, and Alexandre Chenevert in 1954, ranked among the most significant works of psychological realism in Canadian literature. She won the Governor General's Award three times, the Prix David twice, the Prix Duvernay and the Molson Prize, and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967.

She died in 1983 at seventy-four, and her autobiography, La Détresse et l'enchantement, appeared posthumously. On 29 September 2004 the Bank of Canada put a quotation from her 1961 book La Montagne secrète on the twenty-dollar note of the Canadian Journey series, a rare afterlife for a novelist. In 2009 the government designated her a National Historic Person, the citation naming her clear writing and her compassion for the people she wrote about, and the plaque stands at 375 Deschambault Street.

Patrick Roy, born in 1965, is the goaltender and coach who carried the name far past French Canada. His brother Stéphane Roy, born in 1967, played the same game, and his son Jonathan Roy, born in 1989, played it before turning singer: three men of one household in one sport, with the kinship actually on the record, which for a surname this common is rarer than it sounds. Diane Roy, born in 1971, races for Canada in a wheelchair.