Evangeline; a romance of Acadie, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Front matter

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II

As I said before, there is a Song of Swords known by my fiddle. From the day of the coming of the Sieur de Champlain to these coasts of Acadie, there has been naught but a record of the clashing of arms between France and England, each striving for foothold on this coast, because of its great stores of game and fish.

And my grandfather, who came on the ship of De Razzily in the year 1632 to these shores, that company of French gentlemen arriving with a new grant from their monarch, Louis the Thirteenth, related that they set foot on this bleak coast with a high hope of conquest and a desire to plant the lily of France firmly in this soil.

So the prelude of this Song of Swords is tuned to the lapping of waves on the sides of the small ship named L'esperance en Dieu. She was an armed pinnace of one hundred tons, bringing, besides the gentlemen and my grandfather, three Capuchin friars and a number of peasants, and such artisans as the Company of New France deemed necessary for the welfare of the Port Royal of Acadie. They found a spacious harbor easy of access, a considerable river and the whole coast from east to west abounding with fish. And a fortification was immediately raised, the ruined foundations of which can still be found not far from our village of Grand-Pre. It stood on a little hillock of three or four acres and was built like all the Acadian forts of that day, a palisaded enclosure, with bastions of stone at the four corners. The Indians were friendly at that time, and De Razilly felt the colony of English to the south at Plymouth too weak to be a menace.

Daily the nets of the Acadian fishers brought in great hauls. They discovered the abundance of cod, sturgeon, halibut, salmon and shad, which we of Grand- Pr6 still enjoy. They hunted the wild cattle, foxes and sea horses, and established themselves as feudal lords of this land, trying to copy the manners and ways of the court of Louis as well as they could in a strange land so many leagues from home.

But that other troupe of wanderers at Plymouth, under the leadership of one Captain Standish, looked with ill feeling on the colony of the Sieur de Razilly. The planting of this French colony was watched at Boston with apprehension, although those Puritans ought to have known that we of France are not a migratory race and have always established indifferent colonies. We are but Frenchmen wherever we be, not pioneers. This matter was spoken of by De Razilly just before he died, three years after arriving at Acadie. He had heard already the echo of clashing swords among our gentlemen. There were La Tour and Charnissay, who sailed with him on L'esperance en Dieu, fellow Frenchmen, but cankerous with hot jealousy and an ambition to rule Acadie.

"Acadie needs not the glitter of arms nor the splendor of titles/' said De Razilly, when he was on his death bed. "The fabric of every nation's prosperity rests on the shoulders of the humble sons of toil. I am leaving my work of strengthening New France unfinished and I see these English colonies growing in might with the years to come, finding a vigor of manhood, while Acadie remains cursed with the weakness of a sickly infancy/'

This prophecy of the Sieur De Razilly was but too true. And the English could not understand, nor can I of to-day, the freebootery of our pirateers. The English had established for themselves a trading post at Penobscot, on the coast. One of our buccaneering pinnaces, seeing the weakened condition of the bastion at Penobscot, landed there, overpowered with the sword the few men who were trying to protect the position for the English, and loaded the pinnace with its entire stores, consisting of three hundred weight of beaver, besides a good amount of trading stores, such as coats, rugs, blankets, biscuit and the like. It was said to value five hundred pounds sterling of their currency. And at the death of the Sieur De Razilly his relative, this Sieur d'Aulnay Charnissay, a much be-laced and jewelled gentleman of the French court, established himself in charge of the bastion at Penobscot. The English had a meeting in regard to the matter at Boston, and said among themselves that it might be the part of wisdom at some future time to remove the French from Acadie and a coast on which there did not seem to be room for both the friars' beads and the long-faced deacons' longer exhortations.

And into this discord came the gallant young Charles La Tour, but a lad when he came to Acadie with his father on L'esperance en Dieu, and brought up like a savage among the Micmac Indians, from whom he learned to be cautious, to aim an arrow straight, and to hate an enemy until death. But La Tour was also a Frenchman with the polish of a courtier and an amazing suavity of speech. He built for himself a fortification of four bastions, one hundred and fifty feet square, on the river named for Saint John, and here he dwelt in state like a feudal lord, with a great number of soldiers and a welcome for the bands of painted savages coming down the river in their canoes with the pelts which were making La Tour rich in trade and a great man of Acadie. Plenty and a life of careless freedom ruled at the castle of La Tour, and Charles took as his bride a fair young Huguenot girl, whose dark eyes reflected the depths of shallow pools in the forest when the shadows of leaves veil them, and her hair was as softly dark as an Acadian night lighted only by the stars.

Within the fort the Lady La Tour led a quiet life of household duties and in a great love of her lord. She found her happiness in the prideful fruit of her looms, her far-famed butter and cheeses, and the simples and herbs of her garden. If she ever sighed for the spinet and the minuets and the brocades she had left behind her in Paris, Lady La Tour never spoke of these things to her lord. She had donned the homespun of an Acadian woman and her heart was bound to our forests as closely as its roots are bound. And she did not hear the echoes of swords which were beginning to ring in the clash of civil war.

Charles La Tour and this Charnissay held a feud of blood, one with the other. There was not room for their two rival bastions in Acadie, in spite of the mighty sweep of our shores. And the court of France was ripe for bickerings in her colony of New France. Anyone will tell you of the weakness of Louis the Thirteenth, and the power over him which the Cardinal de Richelieu exercised so craftily. And when the Sieur de Charnissay brought influence to bear on Richelieu against Charles La Tour, being jealous of the stronghold he had made for himself up there to the north of the Saint John River, his plan succeeded.

In the year 1641 La Tour received an order from the court to return to France and answer charges of intrigue and dishonesty in his conduct of affairs of trade in Acadie.

And this Sieur Charles La Tour, firmly entrenched in his bastion on the River Saint John, although threatened by the forces of Charnissay, refused to obey the royal edict.

Ill

Most composers, trying to translate the voices of women into music, set them to the tempo of a berceuse or that of a pastoral. But listening with the ears of memory to the voice of this Huguenot maid, the Lady La Tour, as it comes to me on the vibrations of my fiddle strings, I hear a more heroic measure whose accompaniment is that of her wandering footsteps as she essayed to follow her lord. Separated by this civil war, in which even the English were drawn on the side of La Tour, from her beloved, she voyaged our shores and was even seen in France, his welfare in her hands and his safety in her beating heart.

Listen to the pleading words of a long time stranger before the dissolute court of France, for thither did the Lady La Tour sail from Acadie alone in a small ship, to beg supplies and arms for the defense of her lord's bastion. Her plain kirtle and wide lace-trimmed cap must have caused much scorn among the powdered and rouged beauties of Louis' favor. But her voice had the notes of an Acadian springtime when the white-throat first sings of the blooming of the arbutus, and she had no thought, no care for anything save the hope for which she had sailed back to France across a perilous waste of waters.

My grandfather says that, bereft of the council and support of his lady, La Tour became as a lost man, himself wandering as far as the little English settlement at Boston, begging for help and men, having waited wearily for months expecting her return by the shores of the Saint John River. Perplexed by a thousand doubts and fears, he appeared before John Endicott, an Englishman, who was at that time the governor of Massachusetts, and his elders. Scant sympathy did this Papist receive from the psalm-singing men of New England, who looked askance at his ruffles and jewelled sword. But they gave him a few provisions and sent the train bands to guard him as his ship sailed out of Boston Harbor, which was a mercy. An armed ship belonging to Charnissay waited for him near Penobscot, from which he escaped.

But scarcely had the battered masts and patched sails of La Tour's ship faded on the sky line when another pinnace, still shabbier, touched the harbor. It docked to the tune of Roger Williams' hymns, that stern elder who had come to New England to found the plantation of Providence. Before she passed the weary sails of La Tour, she had escaped the armed ship of de Charnissay farther north on the coast. And hidden in the hold of this same ship as brought the doughty Roger was a noble lady of Acadie, her kirtle worn and her lace-trimmed apron patched, but with the hope of God in her heart. So the Lady La Tour passed her lord and love on the high seas.

Scarce had she made arrangements at Boston to carry a cargo of arms to the bastion of La Tour and reached her despairing husband, than new tribulations came to Acadie. When Charnissay learned that the Lady La Tour had escaped from Boston and reached her husband with supplies, he was possessed of a blind rage. He indited a letter to the governor of Massachusetts charging the elders of Boston with being responsible for the escape of a traitor to New France and he threatened them with vengeance from his master, the King of France. It is said that the cheeks of the stern Puritan burned with anger when he read the insult in which his honor as a magistrate was attacked. He, in turn, wrote to Charnissay declaring that the God of New England was stronger than the Papist fools who had brought shame to France's lily. And when the letter was received at the bastion at Penobscot, it further enraged Charnissay, so that he lodged the messenger bearing it in a gunner's house without the gate; this was an insult to Endicott. So the breach between New England and New France widened.

There were two friars whom the Lady La Tour had received at her castle and treated with great kindness, but these men, being secretly in the employ of Charnissay, reported back at Penobscot that the bastion of La Tour was in a weakened condition and ripe for attack.

It was an Easter Sunday, a century ago, that the Lady La Tour was at her devotions in the chapel, and outside the air was sweet with the freshness of the wind from the river and the odor of the apple-blossoms. Her lord was again absent, on a mission of trade at Boston, and her garrison was small and in charge of a Swiss whom she greatly trusted. But the singing of the Pentecostal chants drowned the sound of the landing of Charnissay's soldiers that morning at the gates of the La Tour fortifications. And Charnissay bribed the Swiss guard so that his men were well over the walls before the bastion could be roused to arms.

Dressed in white garments and bearing in her arms a spray of lilies, the Lady La Tour led the forces of her husband against the invaders. She so inspired her men that at first Charnissay despaired of taking the bastion. He was repulsed with losses, and under a flag of truce resorted again to base treachery in winning his ends.

The Sieur de Charnissay, her fellow countryman, offered this noble lady freedom and peace to her garrison if she would permit him to enter the fortifications for a day's rest, it being Easter Sunday.

And once inside her walls, he put a rope of execution about the white throat of this lady and compelled her to watch the murder by the sword of her garrison to the last man in the vault of the place, expecting her own death when the others were finished with.

And my grandfather said that her courage was so great that it inspired a fear that she was not of the earth among the band of murderers, so that they allowed her to live.

But her great heart was broken and she felt that her life was done, she not being born for captivity. There she was, you understand, separated from her beloved to whose fortunes she had been so faithful, and she could scarcely expect to see him again, except as the prisoner of his enemy and countryman, the Sieur de Charnissay. So the Lady La Tour took to wandering away from the bastion, unpursued by her captors, who saw that she would never again be able to do them any injury. She would cry aloud for her husband on the banks of the river, or go seeking him along the dim lanes of the forest glades. So she wandered and faded away, day by day, until her spirit left its earthly house and they laid her at rest by the banks of the water which she loved so well and beside which she had lived for so long.

There she lies, among a wilderness of sweet ferns, and in a little time wild flowers blossomed above her, yet none braver after the winter or fairer than she. In a small while the grass was green again where she had stepped in her wandering and her radiant soul rested on the breast of God, herself forgotten in Acadie. Forgotten, did I say, the Lady La Tour unremembered?

My grandfather knows these things, having gone from house to house with his fiddle in those early days of our Acadie, and he told me that civil war weakens a land, and he also felt that we would yet have trouble with the English who have well entrenched themselves along this coast. He said also that the Lady La Tour's spirit lives again in a brave Acadian maiden each generation, whether she sits in industry at her spinning wheel, or walks beside her beloved.

As I said in the beginning, I am waiting here for the summons to play at the betrothal feast of one of our Acadian maidens, the fairest child of all our village of Grand-Pre. They will crown her with garlands of blossoms and dance about her on the green, while I fiddle beside that mighty old apple tree of which her father is so justly proud.

We who live in Grand-Prd now are all descendants of those French colonists who were brought out to the Basin of Minas by the Sieur de Razilly and this Charnissay. The desire of the Sieur de Razilly has now been achieved, for we Acadians have become a farming people, finding our peace and prosperity in our flocks, our orchards and our herds. I doubt if any harm in the world can come to Acadie, and I wonder why I hear these century old songs wandering in echoes over the muted strings of my grandfather's fiddle, instead of the marriage song it will give forth in a moment. I suspect that I am giving way to my fancy and if I were to put down my thoughts with goose quill and paper all Grand-Pr^ would laugh at me, and with good reason. A fiddler is not supposed to be a historian. Neither do I claim, of my own heritage, to be such a prophet. But I am an old man and I have lived many years with an ancient fiddle, and it speaks to me.

So there you have three movements of what would be an Acadian symphony if I had but the wit to set them down for the instruments.

The first piece is played with the winds as we listen to the march of blind Gluskap, the spirit of our Mount of Blomidon, driven away from this shore to make place for the white voyageurs. He cries aloud for vengeance. Then comes the clashing of the brasses as they play a piece about conflict among white men, brothers in that they were born of the same Father, but torn with jealousy and thirsting for conquest. Last, the strings play the pastoral movement in which I carry the melody in my own key above the others, the cry of an Acadian woman seeking for something she has lost and for lack of which she finds no comfort.

Look me straight in the eyes, dear child. A girl has need of her mother on the eve of her wedding day, but I have had to be mother and father both to you for long, the while you have ordered my house like any wife. Yet there are truths unspoken between us, Benedict the most skilled farmer of all the countryside round about Grand- Pre, and you my daughter of seventeen years. I doubt if you have thought at all in regard to your approaching marriage, save of the stores of lavender scented linen of your own spinning and weaving and the good dowry of blooded flocks and herds which I am able to give you, and the new house and barns built for you by the village lads and the love in your heart for the man of your choice.

But there is more to the matter than these and the

music and dancing of the coming day. We sit here alone

for a while awaiting the coming of Rene Leblanc, the

notary of Grand-Pre, who will draw up the marriage

contract. I should like to have had all things made clear

to you by your mother, but I must try to help you to

understand your approaching wifehood in terms of my vocation. I am a fanner, and through working in the soil one grows to feel and know life as I doubt if it is ever felt by other men.

I have had a part in making the barren waste of Grand-Prd, the Great Prairie, fertile through the letting in of a new stream of life and the deep ploughing of fresh soil. I have watched rich grain sprout from this betrothal of seed and fertile earth. By careful grafting I have turned the wild apple into that mighty tree at our doorway rich with the best King apples in all this village. The herds I am settling on you are as fine as any in France, because I know how to breed cattle. All life processes share themselves with the patience and the faith of the farmer, ploughing, planting, grafting, waiting for the new to spring from the hope with which he unites seed and soil.

Did I ever tell you the adventure it was to build that dike of ours down at the end of the meadow? I am seventy years old this harvest season, and I was only a youth when we began it. Do not look so puzzled, dear child. Listen to a story of the soil.

Where our little thatched cottages and the white church now stand, where the wind sings to us down the street of Grand-Prd as it stirs the branches of our great willows and the Lombardy poplars, once upon a time, when I was young, there were nothing as far as the eye could see but marshes. For centuries the sea had rolled in and wandered as its tides willed over this point, but there was fine planting soil underneath, if only the sea could be restrained. So we earlier Acadians decided that we would conquer the tides. We attempted the building of a dike.

On one side of us, if you can see in fancy those old Acadian marshes, lay mile upon mile of rippling green swamp, knee deep if one tried to wade it, but with good black ooze underneath. On the side of the Minas Basin were the tides. It seemed as if naught save God could stop their flowing. But we had youth and a fine scorn of danger in our hearts and we went to work.

You would have laughed, my dear, to have seen your father dressed from head to foot in coarse flannel, wearing clumsy spiked boots and emerging with the sun from one of the huts made of straw and rushes, which were our only shelters along the beach. We had pork, potatoes and good ale to sustain us, but little water, for the springs were vile with the poison from the marsh land. From morning until the twilight dropped down upon us, we dug and carted the earth in wheelbarrows along the slippery planks down to the beach, sweating, weary, hoping, but with no surety of success.

You see we had so little to work with. If we had been able to set in iron supports and buttress the dike with masonry, it would have been a different matter. But we must needs stop the sea with nothing but a clumsy aboteaux. We planted five or six rows of large trees in the places where the sea enters the marshes, and between each row we laid down other trees lengthwise on top of each other. Then we filled up the vacant spaces with clay, so well beaten down that the tide could not pass through it. In the middle we set a flood-gate in such a way as to allow the water from the marsh to flow out at low tide without letting the sea water in. We worked together in this, looking for a common share of the harvest, as we still work to-day, which principle, I believe, gives Acadie the sure foundation of peace and prosperity she will always enjoy.

So a vast plain that had been the bottom of what might almost be called a lake was turned into farming soil, sharp strips of red or orange tawny flats, and a straight street lined with poplar trees was laid out. White farmhouses and the smoke from red chimneys began to rise. Basil the blacksmith, the father of your betrothed husband, set up his forge at the crossroads and lighted the fire for beating out our ploughshares. We felt that we had won a mighty triumph.

We are safer to-day, unarmed, in Grand-Pr£, in the midst of our cornfields and our flocks, within these peaceful dikes besieged by the ocean, than our fathers of New France were in their forts at Louisburg and Port Royal.

We young men of Acadie had driven away forever from the bosom of our adopted country a most dangerous enemy, the sea. We had achieved the means of defending our shores from invasion in time of war. We had conquered the province without tears or blood or the help of generals. Our spades and wheelbarrows had surmounted an obstacle of nature and raised the dike, by means of which Acadie's prosperity was made sure and her place in the glory of New France achieved.

How we had to watch those first dikes! No two of them were alike in the way they had to be built to resist the sea. Here would be one that must be placed in the sea itself; it must reach from the solid earth to the surface of the water, by sinking great rafts of fascines made of our willow osiers, strongly lashed together and making a compact mass. We floated these out over the place they were to occupy and guided them by poles sunk in the bottom, and we loaded them with stones and earth until they sank. Then a second and smaller buttress and a third and sometimes a fourth were made and placed on the first one, and on top the dike was built with two walls, the space between the walls filled in with solid earth.

If a dike was exposed to moving water, it must be further protected by wattles placed upon its slope, or by rows of piles, basket work of straw or rushes. And when we learned to make bricks we used them for the walls of our dikes.

I may seem to you, my dear, very full of words and of the science of my trade of farming, which is of slight interest to a maid on the eve of her wedding day. But all this farm, its broad fields, its orchards, the sheep pasture, the barns full of kine, your bees and flowers and dove-cote lie on our side of a dike built and raised by early Acadians in a hope of a harvest from the drained land. Those first two years of the dikes we had to watch them for even the small track of a mole. And not a mole escaped us. The dikes held.

In the meantime Basil had tempered a plough in his fire and with it deep furrows were cut in the new land which was mine; mine, I say, by the right of my conquest of it. And I planted seed, in faith and love, in the furrows, and waiting with trust for the day of my earth's productiveness.

You, my daughter, and I, have watched together the marvel of the tiny hands of the new corn as they reach their way through the earth in the spring and stretch up toward the sky. Deep furrows and fertile soil set deep with good seed, and then we have the miracle birth of the corn! The soft silk of the ears floating in the breezes of our Acadian summer always reminds me of the softness of your hair in childhood, my dear. And the whispering of the wind among the leaves is as tender as your voice has been since you stood no higher than the corn in the spring.

It has always seemed to me that if men and women, youths and maids, could be brought to think of life as a farmer knows it, a matter of large harvests and wondrously fine stock, if only the planting and breeding be done with faith and patience, we would have a world made new, as the dikes of Acadie have brought about our beauty and plenty of Grand-Pre.

You are the sweet flowering of my farm, my dear, of a part with its fragrant earth, its homely duties of moulding bread and folding linen and lighting candles to glow through our darkness, and yourself our light through all the hours of the day. Your dancing to the merry tunes of Michael's fiddle is like the play of the stippled sunshine on the carpet of the orchard grass, and when I watch you at prayer in our village church, following with young reverence the petitions of Father Felician, I see you as the benediction of my life of toil.

I read from your eyes, my dear, that now I have touched your heart. "Dull tales of muddy dikes!" you say to yourself, "but soon my lover is coming to me. I can fancy I hear his footsteps on the stones of the village street, and when to-morrow dawns he will be made all my own."

I know, my child; I do indeed know all that is in your heart. But I want you to keep in mind this union of iron and earth, the ploughing and planting with good seed which have made this Paradise we call Grand-Pr&

II

And here is our orchard, a small heaven in itself; or as I like to think of it, a symbol of our village of Grand- Pre as it lies in our sun-brimmed vale of the Gaspereau under the sentinel of old Blomidon. A peaceful community is any orchard, and particularly ours, where the bees hum from season to season with the speech of work and courtship and betrothal.

My dike made possible my orchard. When the marshes were drained, we found the richest soil in New France here in this low ridge with its other farms and many wide spreading fruit lands we have harvested this Indian summer. France, or England for that matter, would be proud to raise such fruit as mine. Plums, pears, but mainly the apples! Those pink and gold Gravensteins, whose blossoms so attract the hives in the springtime, are a fruit to be proud of. But close to them in pride are our crisp yellow Bishop's Pippins and the Golden Russets. Small wonder we have such rich honey from our hives when they hang beneath the penthouse of the sycamore tree so close to the apple blooms!