A Wedding, but No Wedding Night; or, A Sorry, Tragic Tale of Two Solitudes (in two editions)

Antoinette de Mirecourt
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973
200 pages

Antoinette De Mirecourt,
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989
334 pages

Six summers ago, I made slow progress through Armand Durand; ou, La promesse accomplie, the French translation of Rosanna Leprohon's 1868 novel Armand Durand; or, A Promise Fulfilled. It made some sense to take on the challenge. As I noted at the time, the author's novels had been far more popular in French than in the original English. Consider The Manor House of De Villerai, which first appeared in 1859 and 1860 issues of the Montreal Family Herald. Le manoir de Villerai, E.L. de Bellefeulle's translation, was published as a book in 1861, then enjoyed four more editions, the last being in 1925. It wasn't until 2014, a full 154 years after the end of its run in the Family Herald, that The Manor House of De Villerai finally appeared in book form. Credit goes to academic publisher Broadview Press.

In the late 'eighties I began collecting Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts titles. Antionette De Mirecourt, sixth in the series, was purchased upon publication, taking advantage of the ten percent discount offered by my employer, a library wholesaler. I preferred the bland, jacketless hardcovers editions because they seemed more substantial. Must add that the paperback editions weren't particularly attractive. 

This year being one dedicated to women writers (see my New Year's resolution), I decided, at long last, to read what had been Rosanna Leprohon's most popular novel amongst anglophone readers.

But which copy?

I've owned the first New Canadian Library edition for some time. Where did I buy it? When did I buy it? Somehow, its purchase is nowhere near as memorable as the CEECT edition. Might this have something to do with the ten percent discount?

The decision was easy. Madame Leprohon's title is Antoinette De Mirecourt, not Antoinette de Mirecorte, as the NCL edition would have you believe. What's more, the heroine's name is misspelled throughout the text. I would later discover that a significant spoiler appears on the front cover.

I still don't know what to make of the author portrait on the back cover.

The novel begins in November 1763, nine months after the Treaty of Paris, with Antoinette De Mirecourt's arrival in Montreal from her widowed father's Valmont seigneury. On the edge of seventeen, she has been invited by her cousin Lucille D'Aulay to pass the winter at her elegant rue Nôtre-Dame home. Cousine Lucille is older, though by how much is never disclosed. Her husband would appear to be older still, perhaps much older. A contemplative man, he spends his days holed up in his library reading philosophical works. Lucille's tastes run more toward romantic novels and sentimental verse.

Theirs was an arranged marriage.

Young Antoinette has always been intrigued, so "with her childish inexperience, rich, poetic imagination, and warm, impulsive heart," wastes no time in asking Lucille whether she was in love with her husband when they wed:

"Oh dear, no! My parents, though kind and indulgent in other respects, showed me no consideration in this. They simply told me Mr. D'Aulnay was the husband they had chosen for me, and that I was to be married to him in five weeks. I cried for the first week almost without intermission. Then, mamma having promised me I should select my own trousseau and that it should be as rich and costly as I could desire, a different turn was given to my feelings, and I became so very busy with milliners and shopping, that I had not time for another thought of regret, till my wedding day arrived. Well, I was happy in my lot, for Mr. D'Aulnay has ever been both indulgent and generous; but, my darling child, the experiment was fearfully hazardous, – one which might have resulted in life-long misery to both parties."

"Remember Antoinette," concludes Lucille, "that the only sure basis for a happy marriage, is mutual love, and community of soul and feeling."

Is the D'Aulnay marriage happy? Not that this reader could see, though it is comfortable. Monsieur D'Aulnay is content to spend his days and nights surrounded by his books, while his wife delights in being surrounded by men in uniform. With the departure of the gentry to la vielle France and the retreat of the seigneurs to their seigneuries, Lucille happily fills the social void with English officers. Chief amongst these is Major Aubrey Sternfield. Monsieur D'Aulnay thinks of him as a "long-legged flamingo," but Lucille and sees an altogether different man:

A tall and splendidly-proportioned: figure – eyes, hair and features of faultless beauty, joined to rare powers of conversation, and a voice whose tones he could modulate to the richest music, were rare gifts to be all united in one happy mortal.

So say all the ladies.

Though Antoinette had been raised on a seigneury, she all but overcome by the decor, perfume, gauzy dresses, and music of the contra dance of a Montreal soirée. I get it. This was Montreal when I was her age:

Major Sternfield, "handsome as an Apollo," not only pursues Antoinette but succeeds in capturing her heart before the first letters from her father and governess reach the rue Nôtre-Dame address. The former contains a mild bloomer:

The first, which was from her father, was kind and affectionate; spoke of the void her absence made in the household; told her to enjoy herself to her heart's utmost desire; and ended by warning her to watch well over her affections, and bestow them on none of the gay strangers who might visit at her cousin's house, for assuredly he would never under any circumstances countenance any of them as her suitors.

A third letter arrives shortly thereafter. Written by Monsieur De Mirecourt, it serves as notice to Antoinette that she will be marrying neighbour Louis Beauchesne, her childhood playmate. What follows is uncomfortable. Louis himself has delivered the letter. Antoinette, an only child, has great affection for her neighbour, but as a brother. Louis, who has siblings, knows that his love for her is very different than the one he feels for his sisters. What remains hidden in the encounter is this: Antoinette accepted Sternfield's ring.  

Lucille has been living vicariously through her cousin. Whether under the influence of romantic prose and poetry or the regrets of her own arranged marriage, she has pushed Antoinette into the major's embrace. This secret engagement is known only to the betrothed, and of course Lucille D'Aulney.

Antoinette De Mirecourt and Aubrey Sternfield are married at the D'Aulay residence during a particularly stormy winter evening. The master is in his library, entirely oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in this house. Regimental chaplain Doctor Ormsby is the officiant. Lucille is troubled by his appearance and manner. All is so different from her Catholic faith, but she's keen on seeing it through.  

After the ceremony, Antoinette makes an uncharacteristic stand, insisting that her new husband that will keep their union secret until it is blessed by her own church. Sternfield readily agrees. As we shall see, the major has his reasons. The evening becomes even more dramatic with the unexpected arrival of Antoinette's father. He is, of course, ignorant as to what has transpired, and so is too late in laying down the law using another mild bloomer:

"I forbid you child, to, have any intercourse, beyond that of distant courtesy, with the men I have mentioned; and if you have entangled yourself in any disgraceful flirtation or attachment, break it off at once, under penalty of being disowned and disinherited."

Unstated is that the "gay strangers" with whom Antoinette is not to partake in "intercourse" are the English. This is perfectly understandable. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham had taken place just four years earlier. The capitulation of Montreal was a year after that. 

A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762
Thomas Davies, 1762

I'll say no more for wont of spoiling, except to recommend Antoinette De Mirecourt to lovers of nineteenth-century romance, lovers of gothic romance, and to Montrealers who share a love of reading. I was born in Montreal two hundred years after the novel is set and one hundred years after it was written, yet its past was not a foreign country. Descriptions of the island, the weather, and the climate are recognizable. This passage raised a smile:

It was the first really good sleighing of the season, for the few slight falls of snow that had hitherto heralded winter’s approach, descending on the muddy roads and sidewalks, had lost at once their whiteness and purity, and becoming incorporated with the liquid mud, formed that detestable, combination with which we Canadians are so familiar in the spring and fall, and which we recognize by the name of “slush.”

And here I'd assumed that "slush," like "smog," was a twentieth-century term.

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (née Mullins)
12 January 1829, Montreal, Lower Canada
20 September 1879, Montreal, Quebec

Rosanna Leprohon has much in common with her darker, even more successful New Brunswick contemporary May Agnes Fleming, whose Wedded for a Week; or, The Unseen Bridegroom I read earlier this spring. They may not have been sisters under the skin exactly, but they were cousins. Both were adept at writing complex plots involving romance, marriage, duplicity, nefariousness, and death. If you've enjoyed the company of one you'll like spending time with the other. And so, I've ordered a copy of  Broadview's The Manor House of De Villerai.

God bless our academic publishers.

Bloomer (not mild):

"God bless my soul. Miss De Mirecourt!" he ejaculated, involuntarily starting back.

Trivia (not really): The first sentence has it that the novel takes place "in year 176–, some short time after the royal standard of England had replaced the fleur-de-lys of France." As editor John C. Stockdale notes in the CEECT edition, this can only be 1763: "The year is confirmed by the fact that Madame D'Aulnay's St. Catherine's Eve party was held on a "Thursday" night; in 1763 St. Catherine's Day was Friday, 25 November.

Fun fact: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007) tells us that The Manor House of De Villerai was once considered for inclusion in the New Canadian Library.

Object and Access: Antionette De Mirecourt was first published in 1864 by John Lovell & Sons. A second printing followed the very same year. Such is the sorry state of Canadian literature that a first edition can be purchased online for a mere $255.

Interestingly, the Lovell edition was the last until 1973 when both McCelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library and the University of Toronto Press's Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry returned the novel to print.

The CEECT edition is still available through McGill-Queen's University Press. Penguin Random House is selling an ebook of the last New Canadian Library edition, complete with copyright-free stock photo of an American Revolutionary War reenactor.

Penguin Random House charges $9.95 for a text that has been in the public domain since the nineteenth-century.

Related post:

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

A Red, White and Blue Baron: For Minnie's Sake

The American Baron

James De Mille
New York: Harper & Bros, 1872
144 pages

Of all the novels I've read this past year – perhaps the past fifteen years – no line of dialogue has made me laugh so much as this:

That's what they all do, you know, when they save your life. Always! It's awful!"

The speaker, Minnie Fay, has come all a fluster to her older sister, the young widow Mrs Willoughby, with news of a marriage proposal from Count Girasole. To this early point in the novel, the nobleman has been depicted as a great hero. In the second chapter, he rescued Minnie from certain death after an avalanche swept her petite form into a deep gorge in the Italian Alps.

Mrs Willoughby – "Kitty" to her family – is taken somewhat aback by the news. She'd noticed the count's interest in Minnie, and so had taken care to keep them apart. It seems her efforts have only been so successful. Says Minnie:

"This dreadful man – the Count, you know – has some wonderful way of finding out where I go; and he keeps all the time appearing and disappearing in the very strangest manner."

Kitty does her best to reassure. If the the count can't be shaken, they'll simply return home to England. It's at this point that Minnie reveals her reason for coming to Italy in the first place. Count Girasole is not the first to save her life. There is another man!

Not only another man, but at least one more! At this point in her young life Minnie has been rescued from certain death on no less than three occasions by no less than three different men. Each was a stranger before the rescue, but all proposed shortly after.

Kitty, by which I mean Mrs Willoughby, hardly knows what to make of it all.

The head spins, all fades to grey, then opens on two gentlemen, Scone Dacres and Lord Hawbury, who are sharing drinks and stories in a Naples apartment. The former has a tale to tell about the day's adventure. He'd rescued a young woman, an "angel child," from certain death at Mount Vesuvius. Now, he wants to marry her. Hawbury understands fully, he was similarly smitten after having once saved a woman from a forest fire whilst hunting outside Ottawa.

Minnie Fay is the young woman Dacres rescued, suggesting that he is the fourth man to have done so.

Given her history, I'm betting there are there are others.

By great coincidence, the woman Lord Hawbury rescued in Canada is Miss Ethel Orne, who happens to be Minnie's cousin. He would like to marry her, but has no idea as to her whereabouts. Lord Hawbury himself was once rescued from Indian captivity by an American named Rufus K. Gunn.

There is no suggestion that Rufus K. Gunn wants to marry Lord Hawbury.

We're now well into the novel, and still the titular character has not been revealed. His identity is made known on the the 58th of its double-columned 132 pages. I'm sharing the 59th because it features an illustration.

The American Baron is, of course, a Victorian novel. One expects great coincidences, but not humour of the sort that might resonate today. It brought laughter from beginning to end, most of which was almost certainly intentional.

Rufus K. Gunn is the American baron. He'd rescued Minnie from a shipwreck in the waters of the St Lawrence. A Haliburtan Yankee in nearly every way, he's brash, loud, aggressive, brave, and a bit of an idiot.

Rufus K. Gunn believes he is Minnie's fiance for no other reason than she's accepted his proposal. But then the same could be said about the Englishman and Count Girasole. Much as he would like, Scone Dacres cannot propose because he has a secret so dark that he has hidden it from his friend Hawbury:

Ten years earlier, a young man just out of Oxford, Dacres met a young woman on a steamer. Her name was Arethusia Wiggins. Her father was a genial gent. Dacres and Arethusia married in South America, honeymooned in Switzerland, then settled in his family home where things soon went sour.

That's gotta hurt.

The couple split. Under the terms of separation, Arethusia received £20,000 (roughly £1,960,000 today), and was obliged to adopt another surname so as not to disgrace the Dacres family. The name she chose is Willoughby.

Mystery arises when Dacres catches sight of Minnie's sister, Mrs Willoughby.

Mrs Willoughby!

Dacres, who doesn't even know her name, is certain that she is his estranged wife. None of this makes any sense. How is it that she does not recognize him? The widow Willoughby's background is nothing like that of Arethusia Wiggins. A right proper lady, she seems the very opposite of a bigamist. Surely, she can't be Arethusia, can she?

There's action and adventure in this novel – Minnie's rescue from the avalanche is only the beginning – but Dacres' delusion is more interesting.

The novel reminds me of nothing so much as fellow Canadian Grant Allen's 1886 novel For Mamie's Sake as a satirical novel centred on a young woman whose innocence and ignorance causes havoc. I'm more partial to the latter because it features assassination by exploding cigar. But if romantic adventure with the threat of brigands is your thing, The American Baron is the novel for you!

Bloomer:

"Sconey, allow me to inform you that I've always considered you a most infernally handsome man; and what's more, my opinion is worth something, by Jove!"

   Hereupon Hawbury stretched his head and shoulders back, and pulled away with each hand at his long yellow pendent whiskers. Then he yawned. And then he slowly ejaculated,

   "By Jove!"

Object: A slim volume bound in dark green boards with gilt lettering. The novel is fine print in double columns with 45 illustrations by William L. Shepard, this being my favourite:

The novel itself is followed by twelve pages of adverts for other Harper titles. I purchased my first edition copy six years ago as part of a lot. It set me back a half-dollar.

Access: The American Baron novel made its debut in the pages of Harper's (February - December 1871). The book is not at all common, though first editions are cheap. A New Jersey bookseller is offering a Very Good copy at US$50.

You will not regret the purchase.

The American Baron can be read online – here – thanks to the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive.

Related posts:

Susanna Moodie's Bloomers
Grant Allen's Wicked Novel

My Mistake in Reading Richardson

Hardscrabble; or, The Fall of Chicago
Major [John] Richardson
New York: Pollard & Moss, 1888
113 pages

A forgotten novel about forgotten bloodshed, Hardscrabble isn't about the fall of Chicago because at the time there was no Chicago. It does concern an April 1812 assault on a farm, Hardscrabble, which was located south of the South Branch of the Chicago River. Winnebago warriors killed two men, while two others escaped.

And so the fiction begins. In Richardson's imaginings, the farm belongs to a man named Heywood, who "by dint of mere exertion and industry" amassed a small fortune in the wilds of Kentucky. He then moved on to South Carolina, where he took as his wife a woman with an even greater fortune. After that, it was back to the Bluegrass State, where he killed a man just to watch him die.

I jest.

Heywood kills a lawyer from a prominent family in a duel – no cause of contretemps given – and then fearing retribution, flees west with his wife and daughter. In the Territory of Illinois they establish two homes, the nicer being a charming cottage across the river from Fort Dearborn. The other dwelling is, of course, the farmhouse at Hardscrabble.

News of the attack on the farm is carried by a hired hand, but Captain Headley, fearing an attack on the stockade, decides against sending his men. This puts him at odds with "high-spirited Southerner" Ensign Harry Ronayne, who is in love with Heywood's daughter Maria. The smitten man disguises himself as a drunken Pottawattamie so as to be ejected from the fort and sets out to rescue the man he hopes will be his future father-in-law.

As in many a historical novel, romance trumps fact. Hardscrabble existed, but it belonged to men named Russell and Lee, neither of whom were present at the time of the killing. Heywood, his wife, and his daughter are fictions. Ensign Ronayne too is a fiction, as is Captain Headley, though a strong argument may be made that the latter is modelled on Captain Nathan Heald, who was from 1810 to 1812 Fort Dearborn's commander.

This student of the War of 1812 expected Fort Dearborn to fall – something to do with the title, you understand – but this never happens. I suggest nothing ribald in writing that the climax comes during the July 4, 1812 wedding of Maria Heywood and Ensign Ronayne. I won't spoil anything either, except to say that there is strong implication that another man's love for Maria will lead to Fort Dearborn's destruction.

The ending is abrupt, as if Hardscrabble, like Richard Rohmer's Ultimatum, is the first half of a longer novel. Sure enough, Wau-nan-gee; or, The Massacre of Chicago, followed its publication. 

I've not read it, and likely never will.

Clearly, Hardscrabble is not the place to start in on Richardson. I read it only because I happened upon a copy being sold for a dollar and had long been intimidated by Wacousta. Richardson's big book in more ways than one, my Carleton University Press Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts edition amounts to 688 dense pages. The Canadian Brothers, its sequel, is very nearly as long. Hardscrabble seemed much more manageable.

My judgement is no doubt influenced by irritation over its bait and switch title. While the romantic dialogue between Maria and Ronayne is strained, Hardscrabble is well written. At the very least, it's interesting as a novel of the months leading up to the War of 1812 written by a man who had lived through the conflict. And so, I'm willing to read more Richardson.

Wacousta?

No, I'm more interested in his risqué The Monk Knight of St. John, which is set during the Crusades and features a countess Richardson scholar David Richard Beasley refers to as a "Fatal Woman."

Now, if I can only find a copy for a dollar.

Bloomer:

At this early period of civilization, in these remote countries, there was little distinction of rank between the master and the man – the employer and the employed. Indeed the one was distinguished from the other only by the instructions given and received, in regard to certain services to be performed. They labored together – took their meals together – generally smoked together – drank together – conversed together, and if they did not absolutely sleep together, often reposed in the same room.

Object and Access: A cheap, very delicate paperbound book. Mine is falling apart, revealing a glue remarkably similar in colour to that used on the front cover. It was was purchased five years ago.

The novel first appeared serialized in Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art (February - July, 1850). It was first published in book form in 1854 by DeWitt & Davenport, two years after Richardson's death. My 1888 Pollard & Moss edition appears to have been the last.

As I write this, no copies of the first edition are listed for sale online, though two American booksellers are offering hardcover copies – in variant bindings – of the 1888 Pollard & Moss edition. At US$150.00 and US$159.50 respectively, War of 1812 obsessives may find them tempting.

You're out there, right?

Related post:

Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

Acadian Driftwood

The Lily and the Cross: A Tale of Acadia
Prof. James De Mille
Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875
264 pages

Like De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, reviewed here last January, The Lily and the Cross opens with a vessel adrift on a calm sea. The Rev. Amos Adams (known affectionately as the "Parson") is a New England schooner belonging to Zion Awake Cox (known affectionally as "Zac"). It has been chartered by his friend Claude Motier to voyage from Boston to Louisbourg. Père Michel, a newly-met Catholic priest, is along for the ride. Because the year is 1743, Zac is understandably anxious, considering the French as his natural enemies. 

"O, there’s no danger,” said Claude, cheerily. There’s peace now, you know — as yet.”
   Zac shook his head.
   "No,” said he, “ that ain’t so. There ain’t never real peace out here. There’s on’y a kin’ o’ partial peace in the old country. Out here, we fight, an’ we’ve got to go on fightin’, till one or the other goes down. An’ as to peace, ’tain’t goin’ to last long, even in the old country, ’cordin’ to all accounts. There’s fightin’ already off in Germany, or somewhars, they say.”

The plan had been to make quick, deposit Claude and Père Michel onshore not too far from Louisbourg, then hightail it back to New England. But the wind stopped blowing and a dense fog had moved in, making Zac all the more antsy. Who knows what's out there?

What's out there is a small portion of either a round-house or poop deck – De Mille is only so specific – upon which seven survivors of the shipwrecked French frigate Arathuse stand, sit, and kneel. As three of the seven belong to the French aristocracy, it can't be said that the group is representative of their home country. There's the Comte de Laborde, who isn't much more than a ghost. The sensitive reader will give the author a pass as the character is close to death. Laborde's gorgeous daughter Mimi is far stronger; from the moment of her introduction, we know that she will play a key role in what is to transpire. The other count, the Comte de Cazeneau, just happens to be new governor of Louisbourg. One would think he would be forever in gratitude to his rescuers, but Claude, Zac, and the crew of the "Parson" soon find themselves in imprisoned.

Might the incarcerations have something to do with the comte having eavesdropped on an intimate conversation between Claude and the gorgeous Mimi; the tête-à-tête in which he shared his recent discovery that Jean Motier was not his real father, rather the Comte de Montressor?

Describing The Lily and the Cross in further detail would invite spoilers, but not confusion. The web is tangled, but not so much that the reader cannot foresee the directions and intersections of every thread.

This is not a criticism.

De Mille deserves credit for his ability to keep things straight. The Lily and the Cross is one of those historical novels in which nearly all primary and secondary characters are connected by backstory, spoon-fed over the course of its twenty-six chapters.

The Comte de Laborde and the Comte de Montressor were close friends until they became romantic rivals vying for the hand of the same woman. That woman would become the Comtesse de Montressor, who would in turn give birth to the young man introduced to the reader as Claude Motier. She and her husband fled France for New France, victims of a conspiracy orchestrated by the Comte de Cazeneau, but known to the Comte de Laborde. The latter did nothing to expose the malfeasance, not even after the villain Cazeneau seized Montressor's property for himself. Shortly after the ruined couple's arrival in Quebec, the Comtesse de Montressor died. Her grief-stricken husband wandered off into the wilderness, never to be heard from again. It is presumed he died. The Comte de Laborde's purpose in crossing to the New World had to do with finding the son of the Comte and Comtesse de Montressor so as to make amends. I'll add that the commandant of Louisbourg is an old acquaintance of the Comte de Montressor. As for Père Michel, père is enough to break that code.

C'mon, you knew. You can't say that was a spoiler.

The Lily and the Cross is interesting enough, but nowhere near so much as A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, the novel for which De Mille is best remembered. As a historical romance it is somewhat unusual in that its hero, Claude, is so often reliant on others, namely Zac and Père Michel. At the novel's climax, his execution is thwarted and his freedom gained through the chance arrival of a ship from France.

Okay, that was a spoiler.

At the end of the novel's 246 pages, what strikes most about The Lily and the Cross is De Mille's pandering to the American market. Its subtitle, A Tale of Acadia, echoing Longfellow's Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), is the least of it. Throughout the novel, France is invariably described as corrupt (which it was), while New England is depicted as pure (which it was not). Old England receives no mention and is therefore spared judgement.

Claude had hired Zac's schooner in an effort reconnect with his French heritage and return to the country of his mother and father, but in the final pages Père Michel, his surviving parent, advises against it (emphasis mine):

"What can France give you that can be equal to what you have in New England? She can give you simply honors, but with these the deadly poison of her own corruption, and a future full of awful peril. But in New England you have a virgin country. There all men are free. There you have no nobility. There are no down-trodden peasants, but free farmers. Every man has his own rights, and knows how to maintain them. You have been brought up to be the free citizen of a free country. Enough. Why wish to be a noble in a nation of slaves? Take your name of Montresor, if you wish. It is yours now, and free from stain. Remember, also, if you wish, the glory of your ancestors, and let that memory inspire you to noble actions. But remain in New England, and cast in your lot with the citizens of your own free, adopted land.”

Cut to the Rev. Amos Adams – the Parson – on which we find Jericho, very much a minor character:

He was a slave of Zac’s, but, like many domestic slaves in those days, he seemed to regard himself as part of his master’s family, — in fact, a sort of respected relative. He rejoiced in the name of Jericho, which was often shortened to Jerry, though the aged African considered the shorter name as a species of familiarity which was only to be tolerated on the part of his master. 

Would he? Would Jericho have regarded himself as part of the family? His master's family? Zac isn't shown to have a family, and does not treat Jericho as a brother.

I will say this for Zac. He was right about the fighting in Germany.

Object and Access: The novel first appeared in Oliver Optic's Magazine (January-June 1874), a Lee & Shepard publication.

Is my copy a second printing? A third? I ask because I've seen some bound in green boards. Mine features six illustrations credited to John Andrews & Son, a Boston firm that produced work for Lee & Shepard.

As far as I can determine, the novel enjoyed two further editions in the nineteenth century before falling out of print. It was revived in the twenty-first century – 2010 to be precise – as a Formac Fiction Treasures title. It benefits from an introduction by Michael Peterman. Copies can be purchased through this link. At $16.95, they're a steal.

The edition I own can be read online here courtesy of the Internet Archive. I much prefer the green.

Related posts:

James De Mille's Antarctic Death Cult

A Very Acadian Scandal

A Very Acadian Scandal

Quietly My Captain Waits
Evelyn Eaton
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [c. 1943]
355 pages

I first learned of Louise de Freneuse last autumn during a visit to Nova Scotia. A historic plaque outlining her life served as my introduction. Something I came upon during an early evening stroll through Annapolis Royal, the story it told beggared belief. Her entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography will explain my reaction.

There is little wonder that Louise de Freneuse inspired a historical novel. This description of the lady comes from original publisher Harper & Bros:

As courageous as she was captivating, she defied every convention and all the wilderness in a gallant fight for love and happiness.

New York Times, 8 September 1940

Quietly My Captain Waits was a critical and commercial success; comparisons were drawn to Gone With the Wind and Hollywood came calling:

Boxoffice Barometer, 22 February 1941 

Here I note that Evelyn Eaton's novel is set well before the "French and Indian Wars [sic]" and the capture of Quebec. It's likely that Louise de Freneuse's death pre-dates the Battle of the Plains of Abraham by more than four decades.

Quietly My Captain Waits begins on an early evening in 1691 with young Raoul de Perrichet's return to his family home in the French commune of Draguigan. Not twenty-four hours earlier, he'd caught serial adulterer Vanina in the arms of the Compte de Callian, "old enough to be her father and Raoul's grandfather, Bigre!" Sixteen-year-old Raoul had wanted her for himself – he'd enjoyed Vanina's delights in the past – and in anger and frustration molests petite Marie "who had always loved him."

Raoul now finds himself under threat of imprisonment; not for the molestation, you understand, rather for what he witnessed in Vanina’s bedchamber. The Comte, who has the King’s ear, cannot entrust his reputation to a boy’s discretion. Raoul finds a saviour in his dashing uncle, Pierre de Bonaventure, captain of the Soleil d’Afrique – “the fastest vessel in the world!” – who enlists his nephew in the navy and sets sail for New France.

Armed Services Edition, 1945

Raoul doesn’t prove much of a seaman, but de Bonaventure is happy to have him aboard for games of bezique and to share the occasional bottle. One drunken evening, l’Oncle Pierre tells a tale about a raven-haired beauty. All occurred seven years earlier in New France; she was the sixteen-year-old daughter of an important man while de Bonaventure was then a twenty-six-year-old nothing. When the important man learned of the relationship, he sent the girl to a convent. She escaped, cut her hair, dressed as a boy, and made for her lover’s ship as it was about to set sail for France. Her idea was that they could marry in the Old World, but de Bonaventure turned her away.

In Quebec City, Raoul meets the raven-haired beauty, and falls in love with her himself. This is, of course, Louise de Freneuse, the girl his uncle loved – and still loves – who is now a twice-married woman with children. De Bonaventure does all he can not to avoid her, but fails. When the Soleil d’Afrique is tasked with transporting the Madam de Freneuse to her second husband’s Acadian home, the two old flames come together and things become very hot.

De Bonaventure is so ignorant of his Raoul’s love for Louise that he hands over the nephew who is so ill-suited to life at sea. Raoul arrives at the settlement built by Louise’s husband, Mathieu de Freneuse, and is tasked with tutoring her children. 

Mathieu de Freneuse is a force to be reckoned with, matrimonial bedroom excepted. His passion for Louise is equal to de Bonaventure’s, but the poor man has long recognised that her own passion lies in the memory of an old love (see: Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure). A Frenchman who has come to be accepted as a member of the local “Micmacs,” Mathieu finds sexual outlet amongst the tribe’s women. He encourages the teenaged tutor to undergo the same initiation he endured, and then enjoy the same benefits.

This Raoul does, but only to prove his love for Louise.

It’s complicated.

Remarkably – improbably – Raoul grows to become a great Micmac leader, but not before Mathieu de Freneuse and his settlement are destroyed by Iroquois warriors. Mathieu expires in the arms of the miller’s daughter, with whom, it turns out, he’d been having an affair.

New York: Permabooks, 1951

Quietly, the reader turns eighty pages, awaiting Captain de Bonaventure's return.

In her Author’s Note, Evelyn Eaton writes of the research she put into writing Quietly My Captain Waits.

Let us consider the nameless miller's daughter, who enters and exits the novel during Mathieu de Freneuse's final minutes. Gervais Tibault's existence spans no more pages. In the author's fiction, he is a favoured child, the first-born of her first marriage. A sensitive soul, better suited for the salons of Paris than the backwoods of Acadia,  Gervais Tibault is killed by Iroquois arrows. Eaton places characters she created – those not based on historical figures – as if they are all of equal weight, and yet the actions of the fictitious Raoul de Perrichet are far more consequential than those of Louise and Pierre.

Eaton uses the “fragments” from which she wove her novel to good effect, but she does not tie them to fact. It is true that, Louise did in fact cross the Bay of Fundy in open canoe in winter, but it was not to meet de Bonaventure in a remote inlet, as in the novel. In reality – sans conjecture – Louise made for English-occupied Annapolis Royal. At the time, de Bonaventure was dead and buried in France.

At its heart, Quietly My Captain Waits is a love story inspired by scandale. Louise's very public relationship with the married de Bonaventure produced a son. We have avocat Mathieu de Goutins to thank for documenting their relationship. A pathetic figure in Eaton’s novel, he sent several letters to Paris complaining of the lovers’ conduct. De Goutins' puritanical outrage was shared twenty-three decades later by an anonymous reviewer in St Petersburg Times (30 June 1940):

You will soon be hearing a great deal about this book but take this reviewer’s advice if you are thinking of buying or renting it – save your money. Wait until you can see the movie version of it that will have to be censored.
     It is said that Hollywood paid $40,000 for it before it appeared in print – only a paltry $10,000 less than was paid for “Gone With the Wind.” It is a type of book that is this reviewers particular bete noir.
     We review few novels for the present trend is toward a particularly disgusting realism that seems to be increasing.

René Baudry, who wrote Louise de Freneuse's entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, had other issues. He makes no mention of Quietly My Captain Waits by title,  rather concludes with a veiled reference:

An American novelist has written a questionable novel about Mme de Freneuse. What need is there of adding imaginary episodes to the ardent and courageous life of this woman, the heroine of a true romance filled with adventure and passion?

The late M Baudry is mistaken. Evelyn Eaton was not an American novelist, although she did apply for citizenship in her forties. Eaton was born in 1902 to Canadian parents in Montreux, Switzerland, and lived much of her early life in New Brunswick. After the death of her father at Vimy Ridge, the family moved to England. She studied at Heathfield School and the Sorbonne. While at the latter, Eaton became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Therese, whom she raised. Eaton married a Polish count, fled the Nazis, made her way to the United States, and wrote for the New Yorker. She published more than thirty books, encompassing novels, poetry, non-fiction, and biography. Her name doesn’t feature the Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, or the Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature, but she does have a highly informative entry at the Canada’s Early Women Writers.

Returning to René Baudry's comment, I remind that Quietly My Captain Waits is a historical novel.

Historical novels are works of fiction.

Works of fiction feature imaginary episodes.

Quietly My Captain Waits is a hell of a story.

Hollywood could not have done better.

Bloomer:

At first he thought the ship was sinking, and that the two snoring men with whom he had gone to bed had left him there to die.

Trivia:  Hollywood has yet to adapt of the novel. Consensus is that another war intruded. Eaton used money from the sale to build a summer home on the Bay of Fundy.

Object: For the life of me, I cannot remember when and where I bought this book. What I can say for certain is that I paid no more than a dollar. I may have paid nothing. It once belonged to Cicely and Scottie Mitchell, a couple who lived at 12 Elmwood Avenue, Senneville, Quebec. If the notation on the frontispiece is accurate, it was added to their library on 18 March 1943. I found this postcard within its pages.

I'm happy to report that the Mitchells' house still stands. It's quite beautiful.

Access: The novel was first published in 1940 by Harper (New York) and Cassell (London). The Grosset & Dunlop followed a Literary Guild of America edition. In 1945, American GIs were treated to an Armed Services edition. In 1951, Permabooks' published the second paperback edition. Fifteen years later, Pyramid published a the first of its two mass market paperback editions.

The novel is currently in print from Formac as one of its Fiction Treasures titles. First editions, Armed Services copies, and vintage paperbacks are always tempting, but I recommend the Formac for its introduction by Barry M. Moody. It can be purchased through this link.

Surprisingly, there is no French translation, though there is a Portuguese: Até um dia, meu capitão!

Quietly My Captain Waits was read for the 1940 Club.

Related post:
Blue Plaque Special: Maritime Edition

May Agnes Fleming: Lost Lady of CanLit

No surprise that I'm a devotee of Lost Ladies of Lit, "the podcast dedicated to dusting off books by forgotten women writers." For over two years, hosts Kim Askew and Amy Helmes have covered works by writers I thought I knew (Edna Ferber, Ouida), writers I knew only as names (G.E. Trevelyan  Gene Stratton-Porter), and others who were wholly unfamiliar (Kay Dick, Hilma Wolitzer). Always informative, I've looked forward to each new episode. 

And so, I was honoured when Kim and Amy invited me to talk about a Canadian lost lady.

Who to choose?

Why, May Agnes Fleming, of course! Our first bestselling novelist, no Canadian writer is so forgotten. With Halloween approaching, I settled on her 1863 gothic novel The Midnight Queen for dusting off.

And then I came down with Covid... Appropriate, really, as Fleming's novel takes place during the Great Plague of London. "Cries and lamentations echoed from one end of the city to the other," writes Fleming, "and Death and Charles reigned over London together."

Recorded on an early day in the reign of Charles III, things weren't nearly so tragic when we sat down to speak, though you can hear that the virus still has a hold on my voice.

The podcast episode was posted today:

May Agnes Fleming — The Midnight Queen with Brian Busby

Related posts:

May Agnes Fleming's Wronged Wife (of many)
May Agnes Fleming's Very Worst Marriage?

We All Win with May Agnes Fleming!
The Parents of the Children of the Revolution
Soldiering On with Edith Percival 

Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming

Gothique Canadien

Cameron of Lochiel [Les Anciens Canadiens]

Phillipe[-Joseph] Aubert de Gaspé [trans Charles G.D.

     Roberts]
Boston: L.C.Page, 1905

287 pages

Pulled from the bookcase on la Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, returned on Canada Day, I first read this translation of Les Anciens Canadiens in my teens. It served as my introduction to this country's French-language literature. Revisiting the novel four decades later, I was surprised at how much I remembered.

Les Anciens Canadiens centres on Archibald Cameron and friend Jules d'Haberville. The two meet as students at Quebec City's Collège des Jésuites. Cameron, "commonly known as Archie of Lochiel," is the orphaned son of a father who made the mistake of throwing his lot behind Bonnie Prince Charlie. Jules is the son of the seigneur d'Haberville, whose lands lie at Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, some eighty kilometres north-east of Quebec City.

Montreal's Lakeshore School Board – now the Lester B. Pearson School Board – was very keen that we study the seigneurial system.

And we did!

We coloured maps using Laurentian pencils; popsicle sticks and papier-mâché landscapes were also involved. There was much focus on architecture and geography, but not so much on tradition and culture.

We were not assigned Les Anciens Canadiens – not even in translation – which is a pity because I find it the most engaging historical novel in Canadian literature. 

It was through Les Anciens Canadiens that I first learned of Marie-Josephte Corriveau – la  Corriveau – who was executed in April 1763 for the bloody murder of her second husband, Louis Étienne Dodier. Her corpse was subsequently suspended roadside in a gibbet (left). Just the sort of thing that would've caught the attention of this high school Hammer Horror fan.

La Corriveau owes her presence in the novel to José Dubé, the d'Haberville's talkative trusted servant. Tasked with transporting Jules and his "brother de Lochiel" Archie from the Collège to the seigneury, he entertains with legends, folk stories, folk songs, and tall tales. José's story about la Corriveau has nothing to do with the murderess's crime, rather a dark night when "in her cage, the wicked creature, with her eyeless skull" attacked his father. This occurred on on the very same evening in which his dear père claims to have encountered all the damned souls of Canada gathered for a witches' sabbath on the Île d'Orléans (also known as the Île des Sorciers). Says José: "Like an honest man, he loved his drop; and on his journeys he always carried a flask of brandy in his dogfish-skin satchel. They say the liquor is the milk for old men."

Seigneur d'Haberville [Les Anciens Canadiens]
Phillipe Aubert de Gaspé [trans Georgians M. Pennée]
Toronto: Musson, 1929

Les Anciens Canadiens is unusual in that José and other secondary characters are by far the most memorable. We have, for example, M d'Egmont, "the old gentleman," who was all but ruined through his generosity to others. The account of his decent, culminating in confinement in debtors' prison, is most certainly drawn from the author's own experience. And then there's wealthy widow Marie, "witch of the manor," who foretells a future in which Archie carries "the bleeding body of him you call your brother."

The dullest of we high school students would've recognized early on that Archie and Jules' friendship is formed in the decade preceding the Seven Years' War. The brightest would've had some idea as to where things will lead. The climax, if there can be said to be one, has nothing to do with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, rather the bloodier Battle of Sainte-Foy.

Not all is so dark. Aubert de Gaspé, born twenty-six years after the fall of New France, makes use of the novel to record the world of his parents and grandparents: their celebrations, their food, and their games ("'does the company please you,' or 'hide the ring,' ''shepherdess,' or 'hide and seek,' or 'hot cockles'"), while lamenting all that is slipping away:

In The Vicar of Wakefield Goldsmith makes the good pastor say:

     "I can't say whether we had more wit among us than usual, but I'm certain we had more laughing, which answered the end as well."
     The same might be said of the present gathering, over which there reigned that French light-heartedness which seems, alas, to be disappearing in what Homer would call these degenerate days.

Les Anciens Canadiens is so very rich in detail and story. Were this another country, it would have been adapted to radio, film, and television. It should be assigned reading in our schools – both English and French. My daughter should know it. In our own degenerate days, she should know how to make a seigneurial manor house out of popsicle sticks. 

Object: Typical of its time. As far as this Canadian can tell, what's depicted on the cover is the Cameron tartan. The frontispiece (above) is by American illustrator H.C. Edwards. 

The novel proper is preceded by the translator's original preface and a preface written for the new edition.

Twelve pages of adverts for other L.C. Page titles follow, including Roberts' The Story of Red Fox, Barbara Ladd, The Kindred of the Wild, The Forge in the Forest, The Heart of the Ancient Wood, A Sister to Evangeline, By the Marshes of Minas, Earth's Enigmas, and his translation of Les Anciens Canadiens.

Access: Les Anciens Canadiens remains in print. The first edition, published in 1863 by Desbarats et Derbyshire, can be purchased can be found online for no more than US$150.

First editions of the Roberts translation, published as The Canadians of Old (New York: Appleton, 1890), go for as little as US$28.50.

In 1974, as Canadians of Old, it was introduced as title #106 in the New Canadian Library. This was the edition I read as teenager... and the edition I criticized in middle-age. Note that the cover credits the translator, and not the author:

 

That said, the NCL edition is superior to Page's 1905 Cameron of Lochiel – available online here thanks to the Internet Archive – only in that it features Aubert de Gaspé's endnotes (untranslated).

Les Anciens Canadiens has enjoyed three and a half translations. The first, by Georgians M. Pennée, was published ion 1864 under the title The Canadians of Old. It was republished in 1929 as Seigneur d'Haberville, correcting "printer's errors" and "too literal translation." Roberts' translation was the the second. The most recent, by Jane Brierley, published in 1996 by Véhicule Press. is the only translation in print. It is also the only edition to feature a translation of the endnotes.

Jane Brierley's translation, Canadians of Old, can be purchased here through the Véhicule Press website. Ms Brierley also translated Aubert de Gaspé's Mémoires (1866; A Man of Sentiment, Véhicule, 1987) and Divers (1893, Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, Véhicule, 1990).

Lester B. Pearson School Board take note.

 

Related posts:

Old Folks
Remembering la Corriveau

For All Its Faults: Remembering the New Canadian Library

Blue Plaque Special: Quebec City Edition

Portrait of a Former Mistress
Ontario Gothic Romance (with the scent of Brut)
Alberta Gothic