Claude Trépagny and Mélissande du Mouton-Noir’s wedding transforms a furious, near-aborted arrival into a ceremony and feast at Trépagny’s forest estate. The celebration briefly gathers the settlement around a lavish display of food, drink, and music, but the marriage offers no stable ending: almost as soon as it is over, Trépagny leaves to pursue Charles Duquet, and the stolen canoe left behind bears Duquet’s mocking signature.

The Bride’s Arrival and Disillusionment

The guests hear Mélissande before they see her. Her cries carry through the forest, startling three deer into bursting out in different directions. She declares that she has been deceived and insists on returning to Paris; even before her cart reaches the allée, the wedding party has learned how sharply the promised future differs from what she finds on arrival.

When Philippe Bosse’s fur-lined cart finally appears, Mélissande confronts the estate’s owner, Claude Trépagny, and disparages his house as a shack rather than the fine manor and future city her guardian uncle had been led to expect. She arrives with a lady’s maid and the imported priest Père Beaulieu. Her dismay is not a passing complaint: the guests remain outside while she argues with Trépagny in the house, and their voices dominate the scene for an hour.

Trépagny answers her objections by cajoling, explaining, and returning to the promises that had persuaded her to come: rich forests, vast tracts of land, fertile soil, abundant fish, powerful rivers, future cities, and the domus. The voices change as the confrontation continues: Mélissande’s anger softens while Trépagny’s grows more confident. The marriage proceeds not because her initial objections disappear from view, but because his assurances ultimately prevail over them.

Ceremony and Feast

As twilight falls, the waiting guests turn toward the feast Mari has laid out. The spread includes stewed eels, roasted sturgeon, duck in sugar sauce, corn cakes, moose cacamos, venison, porridges, sauces, and cherry brandy. Before anyone can begin, Trépagny calls the guests inside for the ceremony, with Mélissande standing behind him on the stone doorstep.

The drawing room sets the ceremony between signs of an unfinished settlement and a deliberate performance of grandeur. Guests sit on still-splintery plank benches, while the parquet floor, ornamented couvre-feu, and crystal chandelier lend the room a cathedral-like air. Wobik’s women regard the wrought-iron chimney crane with envy. The juxtaposition makes the estate’s promise of refinement tangible without concealing the roughness of its surroundings.

After the ceremony, the wedding becomes a communal feast. Trépagny offers red wine, rum, brandy, whiskey, and champagne; voyageurs bring out fiddles, and singing, clapping, and dancing overwhelm the guests’ efforts at gentility. Mélissande joins the dance, as does Trépagny. The celebration briefly converts the house and forest clearing into a social world larger than the isolated estate that had appalled her on arrival.

A Celebration Interrupted by Duquet

The wedding’s festive pause ends when talk of Duquet reaches Trépagny. The brothers describe him as strong and enduring, a rising legend who makes deals of his own and has friends among powerful fur-trade figures. Trépagny recognizes him as the man who had contracted to work for him for three years and then fled. He responds with a threat to recover Duquet and make him serve out the contract.

Although Toussaint warns that Duquet is dangerous, Trépagny orders his horse saddled. Mari offers him a pot of pudding, but he rushes into the house, glaring at her. During the few minutes he spends making an excuse to his new wife, Toussaint and Fernand take his canoe and race downstream toward Wobik. Their departure turns the post-wedding gathering into the start of a pursuit.

Trépagny reaches Wobik late in the afternoon, too late to find the brothers or Duquet. The stolen canoe lies on shore with a marten pelt draped over its thwart, Duquet’s mocking signature. Exhausted and furious, Trépagny waits for the deputy to return from the wedding and swears out a warrant for Duquet’s capture and return. The marriage therefore concludes not with the couple setting out together, but with the groom recommitting himself to the conflict that had already divided the settlement.

Significance

The episode sets spectacle against precariousness. The feast and ceremony display the resources and status Trépagny can assemble, yet Mélissande’s arrival has already exposed how grand claims about the estate can collide with its actual remoteness. The repeated sales pitch about forests, land, rivers, and future cities makes marriage part of the same project of persuasion through which Trépagny represents the settlement to outsiders.

The sequence also places domestic alliance beside frontier rivalry. Trépagny’s marriage is achieved through extended explanation and a public ritual, but his attention is quickly seized by the escaped worker he considers bound to him. The canoe and pelt carry the conflict back into the wedding’s aftermath: even amid food, music, and dancing, Duquet’s defiance remains present, and Trépagny’s pursuit prevents the ceremony from serving as a lasting resolution.