Paris is both a place of remembered suffering and a stage for self-fashioning. In Mari’s account, it is the city where she and her family were taken in a wagon amid noise and weeping; in Charles Duquet’s later visit, it is where he chooses the velvet, satin, shoes, and great wig through which he hopes to look like a wealthy man.

Mari’s account of the city

Mari recalls being taken to France after many days of illness. In Paris, the family rode in a noisy wagon, wept, ate badly, and slept in a box. Her brother coughed and choked before Wenuj took him away, and her mother died. Mari herself fell ill with a fever and a large sore. By the time a ship carried the survivors home, she was the only one left besides a baby.

The return brought a brief moment of joy when the Mi’kmaq people ran out laughing to greet them. That relief did not last: nearly the entire tribe died in the following months, and Mari names sickness as the cause. Paris thus enters the narrative not as a destination freely chosen, but as one stop in a forced passage whose losses continued after the return.

Duquet’s return to France

When Duquet later reaches La Rochelle, its smells of poverty recall the hunger, chilblains, beatings, and curses of his childhood. The memory of his father ends with a pair of receding legs. Against those recollections, he summons images of Kébec’s clear rivers and forest air to recover his composure, even as he feels exposed by clothes that mark him as a country bumpkin in French streets.

He responds to that exposure by studying and acquiring the outward signs of gentility. In La Rochelle he buys a flexible, ambidextrous Walloon sword after noticing that swords, rather than the war hatchets familiar from New France, belong to the streets around him. He silently resolves to order fine clothes and a rich wig. Paris becomes the place where he can put that resolve into practice.

Clothing, commerce, and self-fashioning

Five days before sailing for China, Duquet and François Toppunt persuade the captain to let them travel by coach to Paris. The jolting ride is so unpleasant that Duquet repeatedly gets out and runs beside the coach. They lodge near the street of wigmakers and tailors, and the next day visit the shops to place their orders.

Duquet chooses blue velvet for his coat and striped blue satin for his culottes, despite the tailor’s recommendation of English cloth. He also accepts the suggestion to buy delicate, rounded-toe shoes from the neighboring boot maker. At the wigmaker’s, he rejects the newer, smaller style with “pigeon wings” in favor of the large, costly mass of curls and frizz that, to him, signifies wealth. Toppunt accepts the modern style; Duquet’s choice is more than a matter of fashion, since he has already fixed his idea of what a wealthy man should look like.

The purchases are arranged on credit only in the sense that payment must be made in advance: the wigmaker warns of shipwreck, pirates, plague, and scurvy among travelers to the Far East, and insists that the men pay before sailing. The exchange connects Duquet’s carefully planned transformation to the hazards of the voyage. Paris supplies the materials for his desired appearance, but the goods must be ordered before the uncertain journey begins.

Narrative significance

The city’s two appearances place sharply different experiences of France beside one another. Mari’s Paris is remembered through confinement, hunger, illness, and bereavement; Duquet’s is approached through shops, consumer choice, and a calculated effort to escape the identity associated with poverty. The contrast is also carried by objects: the wagon and the box in Mari’s account give way to Duquet’s velvet, satin, shoes, and elaborate wig.

Paris therefore marks neither a simple homecoming nor an uncomplicated promise of advancement. For Mari, passage through the city belongs to a chain of losses that reaches back across the ocean. For Duquet, it offers the means to perform a new social identity, while the advance payment and dangers of the China voyage keep that ambition tied to risk.