I first heard the story of the Acadian Civil War years after I left high school. My initial response was admiration for the
courage figure of Madame LaTour and the defenders of her fort. My second response was, “How did I never hear this before?” It is, after all, the kind of story that teachers should seize upon to fire their students’ imagination and destroy the misconception of Canadian History as boring. With its gallant heroine, treacherous villain, and curious twists of fortune, it is a tale that you might find unbelievable as a work of fiction. Yet it happened in our own backyard.
Nova Scotian
author Alfred Silver has expanded this story, which in its sketchy original form is riveting enough, into a captivating novel. The actors in this drama are indistinct and fragmented characters in the historical record, but he gives them new flesh and blood, sometimes challenging commonly held opinions in the process. He supplies Madame La Tour, more properly known as Françoise Marie Jacquelin, with an earlier career as an actress and makes her much earthier and coarser than one might want to believe. And he presents mitigating circumstances that almost explain away Charles D’Aulney’s crime. Driven by the ever-pressing debts that poisoned his happiness, D'Aulney comes very close to commanding our sympathy. D’Aulney’s wife, Jeanne, and D’Aulney’s bitter rival, Charles LaTour, round out the main cast of characters and provide strong contrasts to each other. Jeanne Motin's sheltered, middle class upbringing couldn’t be further from Françoise’s disreputable past, and D'Aulney’s pride of blood and aristocratic aspirations are opposed to LaTour’s practice of living close to the land and its
people.
With all the richness of characterization in these four, Mr. Silver doesn’t commit the novelist’s sin of neglecting his minor characters. He uses Nicolas Denys, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the land and people of Acadia, to frame the narrative and to connect some of the parts together. A down-on-his-luck entrepreneur with a heart of gold, he provides an emotional centre and some light comic relief to the story. Another stroke of genius on the author’s part is the conception of de Rainville, LaTour's step-brother, whose character is revealed so gradually that we are discovering new facets of it up until the very end.
In an Author's Note, Mr. Silver describes the writing of historical fiction as "trying to put yourself in the skin of people whose skin went back to dust hundreds of years before you were born." He inhabits these skins so comfortably that we are transported to seventeenth century Acadia by the end of the prologue. He has employed for this purpose the sometimes incomplete, sometimes conflicting contemporary accounts, and, where details are lacking, his imagination supplies a plausible reading. He uses the plain fact that Jeanne Motin had five children with her second husband to bring the novel to a happy conclusion, without letting us completely forget Françoise's tragic end.