The Woes of Evangeline
During high school, I received an underappreciated Christmas gift from my Downeaster grandparents—a book of poetry, essays, and illustrations featuring aspects of Maine history, legend, and culture. I don’t remember the book’s title or where it may have ended up along the road of life. But one thing I recall with clarity: Within its pages I made my first acquaintance with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline and the woes of the French Acadians.
Why did this poem appear in a coffee table book on Maine folklore? As a teenager, I made this connection that the Acadians formed part of Maine history. The first attempted French settlement in America, on St. Croix Island, Maine, happened about as far back in our state’s history as we can go in written records. After a single disastrous winter, the French relocated across the Bay of Fundy and/or to the St. Lawrence Valley. But still, their story has been laced into our own.
So naturally, in following the trail of Rose Michaud last year, the woeful tale of the Acadians and the French diaspora came to mind. I consider myself—and Rose—more Brayonnes than Acadiennes (see this post), BUT I wondered how I could weave Evangeline and Longfellow’s romantic recounting of her sad life into the story I’m telling about Rose.
You’ll have to wait a while to find that out.
“Patience, accomplish thy labor; accomplish thy work of affection! Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike. Therefore accomplish thy labor of love, till the heart is made godlike, Purified, strengthened, perfected, and rendered more worthy of heaven!” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
Life at Port-Royal
But in the meantime, there we were last summer, camping only a few kilometers from Grand-Pré and not more than an hour or two’s drive from Port-Royal, the capital of old French Acadie.
In the early years of our missionary career, we occasionally visited a church near there at Annapolis Royal, amid the strawberry fields and apple orchards that Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley is famous for. Aside from the iconic seaside beauty, I best remember staying with a lovely older couple—her name was the same as my real French grandmother—and dashing from the dinner table to toss my shortcake. (I was expecting our first child!)
On our 2024 re-visit, you’ll remember we detoured to the aviation museum before heading farther south to the Port-Royal National Historic Site. This living history experience features the detailed reconstruction of a French “Habitation.” In The Search for Rose Michaud, the writer/character stops to tour the place on her drive to Maine. So did we.
Most of the site’s early 17th-century buildings lie within a weathered, enclosed quadrangle known as the Habitation. Visitors can step back into the initial days of French settlement and experience colonial life in Acadie. Each room—from kitchen and dining hall to forge, chapel, artisans’ workshops, and governor’s quarters—offers interaction and a chat with costumed staff.
I especially loved the French ballads, the diamond-paned windows, the pewter plates—and the piles of pointy-toed wooden shoes! I never knew that French peasants, as well as the Dutch, wore them.
After the Saint Croix fiasco, French merchant-explorer Sieur de Mons and his cartographer, Samuel de Champlain, chose the upper Annapolis and Minas Basins of Nova Scotia. Its sheltered microclimate, friendly indigenous Mi’kmaq, reliable water sources, and prime woods and farmlands made it an excellent choice.
Good Times in Acadie
Those who endured the early hardships never forgot and worked to make fun a regular part of Port-Royal life. They founded the Order of Good Cheer (l’Ordre du Bon-Temps) which lives on with their legacy to this day. Lavish meals and frequent festivities helped to pass the long winters.
I wonder if Evangeline, Longfellow’s heroine, danced in those clogs? Life in Acadie, as described in the poem, sounds idyllic.
But the paradise was destined to be but a brief blip on the radar of history, apparently. Early on, an English expedition from Virginia looted and burned the first Habitation (1613). Though French colonists continued to deepen their roots in the Annapolis Valley, they experienced frequent attacks and harassment. These military conflicts during the first half of the 18th century led up to the French and Indian (or Seven Years’) War.
So on another weekend, we moved on to the rest of the story at Grand-Pré, the “great meadow” opening setting of the tragic tale of Evangeline. For many years, we had participated in a youth camp at nearby Cape Blomidon. The Bay of Fundy’s challenging high tides, red-mud beaches, and popular rock hounding (amethysts for the picking, anyone?) made this a great spot to spend a week.
But we’d never chanced to visit the Grand-Pré National Historic Site before.
The Great Deportation
This emotionally powerful monument highlights the French Acadian people of Evangeline who lived in this area from 1682 to 1755. It also commemorates their heartrending expulsion from their homes by the British several times until 1764. Labeled Le Grand Dérangement (the Great Upheaval), this catastrophic event in Acadian history has shaped the narrative and culture of modern-day Acadians across the continent.
What a fascinating journey through time for me that day. The tour begins as you sit in the “hull” of a deportation ship for a state-of-the-art cinematic presentation of history. Afterward, you can read the list of names of the exiles stenciled onto the wooden bulkheads. It reminded me of the Holocaust memorials I’ve visited.
“Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment…” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Museum exhibits demonstrate daily life in the village of Grand-Pré. Then you can stroll along a serene emerald-green path bordered by weeping willows to the Memorial French Church, reconstructed in 1929, with Louis-Philippe Hébert’s sculpture of the legendary Evangeline in its courtyard. Inside the church, a wonderful collection of paintings tells the story of the Great Deportation.
For many Acadians throughout the world, Grand-Pré remains the heart of their ancestral homeland and the symbol of the ties that bind them still. It’s easy to see why it became Canada’s 16th UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.
Longfellow’s Poem
How did a complete Yankee like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow happen to write a poem in English about a pair of French lovers? Likewise, how does any writer come up with a story?
Often, the seeds are/were passed on from a friend of a friend of a friend…and sprout in a fertile imagination. Longfellow and the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, etc.) were students together at Bowdoin College (Maine), only later becoming lifelong friends. Hawthorne heard the story of separated Acadian lovers from a Boston minister. The Rev. Horace Conolly got it from some of his parishioners.
Then Longfellow penned the long poem after months of researching the histories and background of Nova Scotian families. It was published in 1847. He used unrhymed dactylic hexameter, imitating Greek and Latin classics. Not everybody loved his poetic choices by a long shot. Yet Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie became one of his most famous and enduring works and the first important long poem in American literature. Longfellow’s wife, Fanny, called it “sonorous like the sea which is ever sounding in Evangeline’s ear.”
“Alike were they free from Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics. There the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance.” –Longfellow, Evangeline
The Plot Thickens
The poem opens with a prologue that presages the end: “This is the forest primeval… but where are the hearts that beneath it leaped like a roe…? …Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.”
Beginning with a description of pastoral beauty and a way of life long disappeared even in Longfellow’s time, the poet spins his tale of the simple farmers and fishermen who once inhabited French Nova Scotia’s colony of Acadie. Only the “murmuring pines and hemlocks, bearded with moss” and the “deep-voiced neighboring ocean” remain to tell the story.
“Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Then we are introduced to Evangeline Bellefontaine, daughter of the locale’s most prosperous farmer, and her lifelong love, Gabriel Lajeunesse, son of the village blacksmith. Just as they become betrothed, the British arrive to crash the wedding plans. In the chaos and dérangement of the Deportation that follows, the lovers are separated.
“So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil,
Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Longfellow then traces Evangeline’s life as an exile. She spends years waiting and searching for Gabriel, wandering from Michigan to Louisiana, before settling to tend the sick and needy as a Sister of Mercy. Finally, in old age, Evangeline finds her lost fiancé dying of the plague in a hospital.
“Fair was she and young, when in hope began the long journey; Faded was she and old, when in disappointment it ended.” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Lovers’ Legacy
Not only did Evangeline become Longfellow’s most well-known and widely-read work in his lifetime, it also generated a wave of sympathy for the plight of the Acadians with an Anglo-American Protestant audience. And as he shared the 150-year legacy of Acadian presence in Nova Scotia, historians began to acknowledge that the province’s foundation lay much earlier than the 1749 founding of Halifax.
The poem also had a powerful impact in redefining and reviving Acadian identity and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its romantic symbolism kept hope alive amid loss and heartache. Furthermore, it promoted recognition and respect for the Acadians as a scorned minority.
“Man is unjust, but God is just; and finally justice Triumphs” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline, a short book by Felix Voorhies which you can pick up for free on Amazon, expands on Longfellow’s material. He claims that the “real names” of the characters Evangeline and Gabriel were Emmeline LaBiche and Louis Arceneaux. The lovers are supposed to be buried in St. Martinville and Lafayette, Louisiana, respectively.
Though relatively few sources about Acadian culture and experience exist, Longfellow’s epic initiated a quiet but compelling renaissance around the globe. Like the Acadians of Port-Royal and Grand-Pré, vibrant modern-day descendants cherish family life, hard work, and religious values as central tenets of their lives.
On the Other Hand…
Longfellow was a poet, not a historian. More recent scholarship has revealed some misconceptions and (probably intentional) omissions in his narrative. He condemns the British for the Deportations and disregards the complex politics of the times and the mixed motives on all sides.
For example, Evangeline depicts Acadie as a sort of utopia and the Acadians as passive, peace-loving people incapable of violence, suddenly caught in a horrific situation. That ignores their extensive military involvement as well as their resistance efforts. Many Acadians gave discreet aid to the French, sometimes under pressure but not unnatural, by any means. The British considered, likely correctly, that there was no such person as an Acadian neutral.
“Death, the consoler, Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever.” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Longfellow, as an American, also glosses over the active cooperation of New England authorities with the British in planning and executing the Expulsion. (They were at war, after all.) Longfellow’s portrayal of the United States as a refuge for the French-speaking exiles may be overplayed.
Many indeed settled in the Louisiana Territory, BUT it then “belonged” to France though was ceded to Spain during the war and restored later. The US didn’t acquire the area until around 50 years later. Some refugees did land and stay on in English colonial cities such as Baltimore (where Rose’s husband later came from). There the Acadians established an ethnic community known as “French Town” along South Charles Street near Lombard Street.
Other Acadian exiles fled—simply vanished into the forests—and popped up again in other French colonies: Quebec, Madawaska, and Fort Louisbourg on Île-Royale (present-day Cape Breton Island). A few returned to France and reassimilated.
Writing Epic Romance
So, I’m thinking now as I write my seat-of-the-pants way through my Work-in-Progress, is it possible that Rose Michaud was an Acadienne, after all? Since she was born in New Brunswick and spent much of her youth in Maine, it seems a gossamer-fine link to Evangeline, doesn’t it?
Except for those threatened deportees who escaped. Maybe…
“When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.” –Longfellow, Evangeline
Most people have no idea what happened to their ancestors in the 1700’s anyway. So who knows? The writer in me picks and chooses among these intriguing gems of historical background for The Search for Rose Michaud. I could rename it The Woes of Rose. Or not. 😊
“I had the fever a long time burning in my own brain before I let my hero take it,” Longfellow said of his poem. “Evangeline is so easy for you to read, because it was so hard for me to write.”
Doesn’t that ring true for every book and every story? It’s one of the woes of being a writer. But oh, the joy of making it work, of transforming the tidbits of history into a tale worth reading.