Renardette Meillard

Renardette Meillard, René Sel’s adopted daughter, returns to his home after his death and claims that he left the property to her. Her repeated visits with Démon Meillard grow from an unsettling presence into a direct challenge to the Sel siblings’ right to remain: she and Démon ultimately arrange a sale to Jean Mague, who orders them to leave. Her claim is decisive not simply because it removes a household from its home, but because it reveals how white legal and racial authority can override the family’s understanding of its own inheritance.

Identity and return

For years, drinkers from Wobik came out of the woods calling for Renardette. Démon Meillard appeared often, and she went into the woods with him. After René died, she went to Wobik to join Démon, a widower whose taste for spirits matched hers. The narrative establishes her through these visits and through her relationship with Démon; it does not give an independent account of the terms on which René adopted her or of the inheritance she later invokes.

Renardette’s return changes the siblings’ daily life at the old house. She and Démon come back often, bringing liquor and urging it on Achille. She moves through the house examining its spoons, wooden cups, pots, and cloths, claiming that the objects belong to her. Noë resists by taking things from her, while Zoë calls her assertion a lie and Noë tells her to go away. These disputes over ordinary household things make the larger conflict tangible: Renardette’s claim to the house is also a claim over the possessions and life the siblings have maintained there.

The claim to René’s property

Renardette states that René gave her the house, saying he had promised it to her after his death. The siblings reject this account. Their father’s home is not an empty asset to them: Achille keeps up the work René did, trapping fish, hunting, cutting firewood, and making potash, while Noë and Zoë gather food and medicinal plants and tend the household. Their continuing life there gives the property a familial and practical meaning that Renardette’s assertion does not acknowledge.

Achille comes to suspect that the visits are meant to prepare for taking the house. He refuses liquor from the couple’s jug because he fears it could leave him helpless while they killed him and his sisters and blamed the deaths on bounty killers. He also gradually comes to believe that Renardette and Démon were responsible for René’s death. The account establishes this as Achille’s suspicion, not as a confirmed finding about the murder; its importance lies in the fear and mistrust the couple’s repeated visits produce.

Word of the couple’s alleged plan to kill the siblings and seize the property reaches Elphège and Theotiste. They also hear of Renardette’s claim that the house belongs to her. Elphège understands the threat through the power imbalance between white settlers and the Sel family: in his view, white people believe they can simply take the property. Their expectation that the claim may prevail foreshadows the forced departure that follows.

Sale and dispossession

Before discussions of price can begin, Renardette and Démon arrive with Jean Mague, riding together on a black horse. The two are sober and grim. Démon addresses Jean Mague rather than the Sel siblings, describing René as the former owner with notarized title and Renardette as his adopted daughter and heir. He calls René and Renardette pure French, dismisses the siblings as squatters, and denies that they can establish their parentage. His case makes racial classification part of the property transaction: the siblings’ relationship to René and their claim to the home are treated as less credible than Renardette’s asserted descent and status.

Démon presents the proposed sale as white legal business, promising that it will be entered in Captain Bouchard’s ledger and made binding. Achille asks Theotiste whether the ledger does not already record René’s ownership and his marriage to their mother, Mari, under white law. Theotiste replies that Captain Bouchard showed her nothing in the book, although she saw rough pieces of torn paper in its cleft. Her account suggests that the written record supporting the family’s claim may have been removed. The siblings are therefore confronted not only with an adverse claim but with the apparent disappearance of evidence that could have supported their own.

Jean Mague, Démon, and Renardette make their arrangement apart from the family under the trees. They shake hands; Jean Mague then faces Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, Zoë, and Noë, declares that he has agreed to buy the property from its owners, and raises a loaded gun as he orders them to leave. The sale’s asserted legality is backed by armed force. Achille stands rigid with anger, but Elphège urges him to go rather than become tied to the house and its potash work. He insists that they can hunt and fight elsewhere and refuses the labor of turning trees into ash. Achille believes Captain Bouchard removed René’s claim from the ledger and recognizes that the captain’s earlier friendliness toward their white father did not extend to Mari and her children.

Narrative significance

Renardette’s story shows inheritance being contested on several levels at once: through conflicting accounts of René’s promise, through the authority given to legal documents, and through racial judgments about whose kinship and testimony count. The scene does not resolve the siblings’ suspicions about René’s death, but it does make the loss of their home explicit. The ledger, the handshake, and the raised gun form a sequence in which documentary authority and physical threat reinforce one another.

Her role also marks a sharp contrast between the siblings’ attachment to a lived-in home and the outsiders’ treatment of it as transferable property. Achille and his sisters have continued to gather, hunt, make goods, and care for the place; Renardette’s assertion reduces that relationship to a dispute over ownership, and the transaction dispossesses them. The episode thus connects one family’s removal to the wider pattern in which colonial power defines legitimate ownership while denying Indigenous people the authority to establish their own claims.