The Lost Flute

A simple wooden flute, carried from France in 1646 and treasured for nearly three centuries — missing from the family since 1934, and still sought.

Among the few possessions ancestor Jacques carried across the Atlantic in 1646 was a simple wooden flute. He is said to have played it for his wife, Marguerite Mulier, in the first hard years along the Côte-de-Beaupré. In the generations that followed it became the family’s most treasured heirloom — handed down, keeper to keeper, for nearly three centuries.

It passed through a long line of Goulets — four men named Jacques, then Alexis, then Maxime — before coming into the keeping of Robert Léon Goulet of Winnipeg, an artist and composer remembered for his “Gigue de la Rivière-Rouge.” Family lore holds that the flute once fell silent, its wood dried and split, until someone drew it through a stream to swell the joints — and, to everyone’s astonishment, it sang again.

The last trace of it is the photograph, taken with Robert on 7 June 1934 for The Winnipeg Evening Tribune. After that the flute simply vanished — no sale, no bequest, no record, only silence. It has not been seen since.