Mari and her children are expelled from Trépagny’s household when Monsieur Trépagny, newly intent on presenting himself as a gentleman, orders them out and assigns René to escort them. The episode turns a domestic dismissal into a collision between seigneurial authority and Mari’s own understanding of home: he treats her departure as a paid passage back to her people, while she names Sipekne’katik and Mi’kma’ki as the places to which her life belongs.

The Seigneur’s Return

More than two years after his absence, Monsieur Trépagny rides back on a fine sorrel stallion in clothes designed to announce his transformation. His pea-green doublet has paned sleeves, and his darker silk breeches are trimmed with knotted ribbons; three silver buckles shine on his belt, crimson heels mark his boots, and six red-dyed ostrich plumes circle the brim of his low-crowned hat. The display makes his return seem almost ceremonial. Its authority, however, is immediately directed downward: when Elphège sneezes onto the doublet’s cuff, Monsieur Trépagny knocks him down and kicks him. Mari throws herself over the boy, and Trépagny kicks her in the ribs too before riding west again.

At supper the following night, his changed appearance finds an everyday counterpart in his changed appetite. Mari serves stewed eels and dried salmon made into a thick fish pudding; Trépagny erupts, dismissing eels as food for savages and demanding a meal fit for a seigneur. The narrative makes the reversal explicit: he had once relished eels, and now condemns them along with the Indigenous people he calls lazy and ignorant barbarians. His new gentlemanly identity is built not only through dress but through repudiation of the food, people, and attachments that had belonged to his earlier life.

The Order to Leave

Trépagny turns that repudiation into an ultimatum. He throws a coin onto the table and tells Mari to pack with her children and leave the next morning: he is to marry a French lady in a fortnight. He presents the coin as payment for her passage east, back to her people, adding that she can eat all the eels in the world there. The money is framed as provision, but the order makes clear that Mari and the children are being removed from the household to make room for a new marriage and a more polished version of its master.

Mari says nothing at supper. René takes her silence for a sign that she is unfeeling and submissive, an interpretation the ensuing journey quietly complicates. In the morning she leaves with only a few possessions in a willow-basket pack; each child carries a bundle. The modest baggage gives the expulsion its material scale: a household is being dismantled into what its members can carry, under the direction of the man who has just kicked both Mari and her son.

Renardette tells Mari in a low voice that she does not want to go to Wobik, where people treat her badly. Mari glances toward Chama, who is sharpening knives while listening. He tells them that they should stay here, come with him, and that the mission is safe. His intervention offers an alternative to the destination René assumes, but the exchange remains guarded: the threatened family must decide where to go in a landscape where safety and belonging are not the same thing.

René Sent Along

As the group descends the steps, Monsieur Trépagny watches from the yard, standing with his legs spread like a colossus. He then orders René to go with them. The instruction is practical as well as coercive: René is to arrange in Wobik for Philippe Bosse to bring out Trépagny’s trunks on a cart, which are apparently at the deputy’s house, and to return within five days. The same command that makes René an escort also keeps the expelled party’s journey tied to Trépagny’s household business.

René carries Theotiste across the river, with Elphège stumbling behind. Mari crosses first, gripping Renardette’s reluctant hand; she moves as though there were a firm path beneath the water, then leads east along the dim trail toward Wobik. The image places her at the front of the displaced group rather than following René’s assumptions. He asks if her people are in Wobik, despite what he has heard, and she answers quietly that they are not.

At midday, while they stop to make tea, Mari finally explains where she belongs. She names Sipekne’katik and describes her people as river people, their life shaped by one river and another. Mi’kma’ki is their place: good rivers, good food, eels and fish, and good medicinal plants. Her brief account answers the question of destination with a geography of sustenance and knowledge, contrasting that remembered home with the inadequacy she finds where they are now. She gives the children corn cakes spread with cacamos, making food part of the journey as well as part of the home she describes.

Wobik and the Mission

René asks how Mari came to Monsieur Trépagny’s house, but she does not answer. They continue in silence until reaching Wobik the next noon. At the edge of the settlement, near the path to the mission church, Mari stops and identifies the place by its practices: confession, mass, and learning to read, write, and speak French with Père Perreault. Wobik is not the home she has named, but the mission is a destination she approaches deliberately.

She gives René two corn cakes for his return journey, then tells him she will soon read and write. He is astonished and jealous; he had seen no evidence of these abilities. Her answer revises his understanding of what she can do and what she has chosen to disclose. She takes the mission path with the silent children, while only Elphège turns to look back at René. The separation thus ends not with Mari returning to a known family in Wobik, but with her and the children entering a place of religious instruction and French-language learning, carrying a future that René has not anticipated.