In 1955, Gabrielle Roy wrote Rue Deschambault, an autobiographical text about her early years in Saint-Boniface. Why did she feel the need to rework the same material in La route d’Altamont ten years later? Many critics have noticed the difference between the two texts, La route d’Altamont striking the reader as more profound, poetic, and philosophical. How can we account for this difference? Roy was great reader of Proust. Is it possible that, like him, she discovered that suffering sets the powers of the mind in motion? Between 1955 and 1966, Roy discovered her husband’s homosexuality. She could not write about it in her novels, or even in her correspondence. But did the mourning of love find its way in La route d’Altamont, seeped as it is in images of loss? Each of the four stories comprising La route d’Altamont makes reference to some kind of loss, for example, in «The old man and the child», a story that echoes Lamartine’s «Le lac» and the theme of lost love. The street and the road are not simply binary opposites. Rather, the loss of love sharpens the author’s insights and transforms the local street of rue Deschambault into the universal road of Altamont.