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"Yellow-Wolf, Malecite Chieftain of Old" 1893
From: The Quebec Anthology
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After de Gaspé’s death in 1871, one of his sons, Alfred-Patrice, found a manuscript of stories among his father’s papers. This was published in 1893 as Divers. Jane Brierley, whose translation of Divers (as Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence) appeared in 1990, notes a parallel between the proud chieftain Yellow-Wolf and de Gaspé himself, "the last seigneur of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli." The determination to preserve the old order is certainly one of the main themes of Les Anciens canadiens, and there is no doubt that the aging, exiled de Gaspé sympathized with Yellow-Wolf’s desire to maintain contact with his own heritage.
Contributors
Philippe Aubert de Gaspé
On the 30th of October in the year 1786," Philippe Aubert de Gaspé wrote in his Mémoires, "in a house within the walls of Quebec where the archbishop's palace now stands, a puny little thing first opened his eyes to the light." Shortly after, the de Gaspé family moved to Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, a village on the St. Lawrence with which Philippe-Joseph was to be associated for the rest of his life. He studied law and in 1816 was named sheriff of Quebec, but in 1822 he began to get hopelessly into debt and was relieved of his office. The following year, he was committed to the Quebec penitentiary. Upon his release in 1841, he retired to Port-Joli and began to write. The result was a novel, Les Anciens canadiens (1864), and the Mémoires (1866), both of which were resounding popular successes. Among de Gaspé's admirers were the influential Abbé Casgrain and the historian François-Xavier Garneau, who were working to initiate a cultural revolution in Quebec.
