Duquet kidnaps Père Naufragé to learn to read and write

Charles Duquet’s kidnapping of Père Naufragé turns his commercial ambition into a coercive apprenticeship: unable to read or write, Duquet takes a Jesuit missionary from the road so the priest can teach him the skills he believes will keep merchants from cheating him. The episode lasts nearly two years and ends with the missionary returned to the Huron mission as Duquet prepares to travel to France on business. Literacy is its prize, but the means of obtaining it reveal how readily Duquet treats another person as an instrument of his plans.

The obstacle of illiteracy

Duquet has a larger commercial future in view. He plans to profit from the fur trade for several more years, prepare himself, and eventually move into timber and wood. He sketches that plan to the Trépagny brothers, inviting them to remain his partners when he makes the change, but they answer without enthusiasm. The conversation turns to the obstacle he considers more immediate: he cannot read or write and fears being cheated in dealings with merchants. He recalls that René Sel had once doted on a single letter, but Duquet himself knows not even that much.

Toussaint Trépagny identifies the Jesuits as a practical solution. They can read and write, Toussaint argues, and could teach Duquet while also converting Indigenous people. The proposal makes education one element of a business arrangement, not an end in itself. The missionary’s religious work and Duquet’s commercial lessons are imagined as parallel uses of the same captive teacher.

The abduction

The Trépagny brothers and Duquet watch a small missionary party and its Huron guides for several days before acting. Toussaint proposes waiting until one priest steps away alone. Duquet chooses the man who seems quickest and most capable: he rises first, makes a fire with a burning glass when the sun permits, handles the party’s goods briskly, and spends comparatively little time in prayer. The selection is practical, as if the qualities that make a person useful to the group also make him a promising instructor.

When the priest enters the shadows to relieve himself, the three men seize him. Toussaint gags him with leather, Fernand binds his hands behind his back, and Duquet frog-marches him away through the forest to their camp. Once Duquet removes the gag, Père Naufragé learns that his captors are French, not Indigenous attackers, and protests that he is travelling to the Hurons and has been taken from his brothers.

Duquet answers that the Hurons can wait: Père Naufragé will remain with them until Duquet has learned to read and write. He promises that the priest will be treated well and warns him against trying to escape, invoking the danger of capture by the Iroquois. Père Naufragé replies that martyrdom holds more appeal than teaching illiterates the alphabet and warns that the outrage will cost Duquet dearly. The exchange establishes the terms plainly: Duquet regards the abduction as an imposed but manageable arrangement; the priest names it as a violation and refuses to mistake his captors’ assurances for consent.

Lessons in the wilderness

Fernand produces a stained, worn copy of Les Quatrains de Pibrac, a book given to him by his mother and never before parted from. He offers it as the instruction book, quoting a verse about honoring God, father, and mother and insisting that everything in the world can be found in Pibrac’s pages. The volume supplies an inherited moral text for lessons conducted under captivity, although Duquet’s purpose is less reverence for its counsel than mastery of the tools that will serve his affairs.

Père Naufragé eventually accepts the arrangement, but sets conditions of his own: daily devotions, a weekly mass, and time for disputation on a theological subject he selects. The lesson schedule therefore includes a measure of religious practice negotiated by the captive, even as the larger circumstance remains coercive. The priest becomes part of the small group and, as time passes, closes his eyes to its whiskey trades and to the ambition and greed he sees in his pupil.

Duquet learns quickly. He covers hundreds of pieces of birch bark with letters and numbers, and arithmetic soon joins the curriculum. His paddler’s heavily muscled hands struggle with the fine coordination required to shape elegant letters; the handwriting stays coarse, but it is legible. That distinction captures the education’s practical standard: fluency and polish matter less than a usable capacity to read, calculate, and keep himself from being cheated.

The priest is struck by how much Duquet retains. He remembers not only the lessons but fragments of German, Greek, Latin, and English, as well as prayers Père Naufragé utters. By the end of the first year, wear has sent Pibrac back into Fernand’s bag, but Duquet has memorized its contents. He has acquired quatrains for every sort of situation, yet prefers to despise the book. The episode thus separates memorization from assent: Duquet can absorb words and deploy knowledge without accepting the moral authority of the text that supplied his first lessons.

Release and departure

In early spring, two years after the abduction, Père Naufragé leaves unwillingly. His cassock has shredded in the brush, and he now dresses like a woodsman. Duquet announces that it is time to go and cites Pibrac’s saying that man’s steps are directed by God, presenting the release as though it were an orderly conclusion to the lessons. He says the party will take the priest to the Hurons because Duquet must travel to France on business.

Père Naufragé still sees what Duquet might have gained from continuing: another year, he says, could have given his pupil considerable facility in Latin, which he calls the most important language for a man of business. Duquet only twitches his mouth; his thoughts have already turned elsewhere. Education has equipped him to proceed, but not satisfied him with the full course his teacher proposes.

The journey to the mission takes six days, skirting burning fields and woods. Fernand remarks that the Huron country seems to be on fire every time he visits. At the edge of the forest around the mission, the Trépagny brothers embrace Père Naufragé and wish him good fortune. Duquet stands aside as the priest makes his way toward the clearing and disappears into the smoke. The closing image returns the released missionary to the destination from which the captors had diverted him, while Duquet turns toward France with the literacy, numeracy, and remembered languages obtained through the kidnapping.

Knowledge as an instrument

The episode makes learning inseparable from power. Duquet’s stated fear of being cheated is concrete, and so is the education he pursues: letters, numbers, arithmetic, legible handwriting, and languages. Yet he gains these things by depriving Père Naufragé of his freedom and interrupting the priest’s journey to the Hurons. The practical value of literacy does not erase the violence of its acquisition; rather, the contrast shows Duquet translating a human relationship into a resource for commerce.

Its extended, episodic form also gives the apprenticeship a double movement. Duquet’s concentration and memory make him an unusually successful pupil, while the priest’s daily devotions, mass, and disputations preserve a religious routine inside an arrangement imposed by force. Pibrac’s worn book becomes both a teaching aid and a test of what education means: Duquet memorizes its contents, but his preference is to despise it. His new competence serves the business future he has imagined, not an evident conversion to the moral lessons his captors’ chosen text contains.