The Tale of Don L'Orignal

The Flea Islanders were constantly at odds with the almost as clever but far more civilized upper crust of the mainland village: the mayoress, the schoolteacher, the merchant, the banker. When they invaded and tried to steal a keg of molasses, the outcome of the mock-heroic battle was unclear, except that La Sainte's son, the hapless young Citrouille, and Adeline, the merchant's lovely daughter, had fallen in love. With the insider's accumulation of oral history, gossip, and shrewd hindsight, Antonine Maillet has conjured up a fictional Acadia that her ancestors would relish. Perhaps those who could read it would have even understood it: she wrote Don l'Orignal in a version of 16th-century domestic French that she adapted for modern readers. In this far-fetched, but always entertaining fable, Maillet holds up a mirror to Acadian history and to an all too fallible human nature.