Elphège

Elphège, Mari’s son, is a quiet witness to colonial violence whose experience links the early household of Monsieur Trépagny to later generations confronting dispossession, family trauma, and the loss of Mi’kmaw language and culture. First seen among Mari’s French-named children, he grows into a woodsman, returns from Odanak carrying knowledge he cannot initially express, and eventually tells René how Monsieur Trépagny died. His story later reaches beyond his own lifetime through the violence suffered by his family and the residential-school trauma that shapes his descendants’ lives.

Identity and Background

Elphège is one of Mari’s sons with Monsieur Trépagny. When René first encounters the household, he hears the children’s names, including Elphège’s, but they are difficult for him to distinguish; the children look alike and resemble their Mi’kmaw mother. Their French names sit alongside Mari’s mixed-language speech and the Mi’kmaw knowledge she carries into daily life.

As a boy, Elphège takes part in hunting and trapping. After returning from Odanak with his brother Theotiste, he brings traps and snares, along with whistles and calls used to lure game. Mari is interested in these tools, but Monsieur Trépagny dismisses them and throws Theotiste’s beaver funnel trap into the fire. Elphège’s story is thus set within a household where the children’s inherited practices meet the seigneur’s contempt for them.

Loss and Silence

Elphège later returns to Mari’s clearing during the spring thaw, limping and severely weakened. His right ankle is badly swollen, and his body bears signs of hardship. Mari tends him with a sleep potion, nourishing moose broth, and a poultice made from white cedar cones and fern root and leaf. René asks where Monsieur Trépagny is, but Elphège cannot answer.

Through questions that require only a nod or shake of the head, Mari learns that Monsieur Trépagny is dead. Elphège spends nine days largely quiet and half-asleep; after recovering strength, he joins René in the woods to chop. He remains silent and rarely smiles, habitually lowering his eyes as though the world is too painful to look at. His return restores him to the family, but not to his former ease.

The household’s apparent uncertainty about the death persists for a time. Chama, Madame Trépagny, and the Spanish maid leave for Kébec; the maid discovers a metal box hidden beneath the manor’s doorstep, containing human teeth and locks of hair. Mari claims the unmilked cow from the abandoned house, while porcupines begin moving into it. These details frame Elphège’s silence within the physical dissolution of the Trépagny household and its possessions.

The Account of Monsieur Trépagny’s Death

Many months after his return, Elphège speaks at the evening meal. His voice is rough from disuse, and he declares that he will someday take revenge on the Iroquois and their English allies. Later, during a winter rest from girdling trees, he tells René what happened to Monsieur Trépagny: Iroquois women disabled him and sealed his body’s openings, and after two or three days he swelled and burst.

Elphège asks René not to tell Mari, believing that she would suffer if she knew the details. René keeps the account to himself, though he doubts that Mari would grieve for Trépagny. The disclosure gives Elphège’s earlier silence a history: what he had been unable to explain on his return becomes, much later, a carefully guarded account shared with René. His vow of revenge also places his personal loss inside the wider conflict with English power.

Family and Intergenerational Trauma

Elphège’s family becomes a refuge for Achille after English soldiers kill Achille’s wife and younger children and destroy their home. Kuntaw and Auguste bring Achille, wounded and overwhelmed by what he has seen, to Elphège’s wikuom. Elphège’s wife attempts to treat him, but Achille refuses care and sits speechless beside his brother. Elphège’s household receives a survivor of violence that has obliterated another household.

The consequences of such violence continue through Kuntaw and his son Tonny. While repairing a weir, Kuntaw listens as Tonny recounts the suffering of Malaan and the death of Hanah; he admits his own failures as a father and says he did not teach Tonny what he needed to know. He then begins telling the old stories of their people and their lineage. This scene does not make the inherited wounds disappear: Kuntaw cannot speak about the full horror of his own losses, but he recognizes that family stories and responsibilities must be passed on.

Much later, residential-school abuse repeats the pattern of harm against Mi’kmaw families. Elphège’s descendant Egga is sent away as a child; instead of receiving the education his parents expect, he is made to work and is abused. He escapes without being able to tell his parents what happened, leaving them frightened and uncertain. When Egga later begins speaking about his old life to his wife and daughters, their desire to write to his parents and visit the family home helps him consider Mi’kmaq identity as something beyond pain and humiliation. Across these generations, Elphège’s story belongs to a larger history in which violence produces silence, while kinship, memory, and renewed storytelling offer a limited means of continuity.