Читать книгу The Crimson Sign - H. A. Cody - Страница 3

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Someone has said that history is fiction, or words to that effect. This is a rash statement. It is truer to say that history is mixed, more or less, with fiction. The historical novelist candidly uses both. Many writers have done so, and are doing it to-day. A scrap of history here, a juggling with dates there, compounded with a liberal supply of fiction, make up their brain creations. For to them the story is the thing, although bits of history are thrown in to give zest and a semblance of reality. And this method is not altogether without value. People reading fragments of history, highly colored though they may be, obtain fleeting glimpses of other days, other manners, and are often induced to study those periods in more solid and enduring works. Henty mingled fiction with history, and so did Sir Walter Scott. Many have entered the grand palaces of history through the lowly porches of the so-called historical novels.

Such is my humble aim. This book deals with incidents in the history of Acadia which have been almost overlooked in the press of more stirring and spectacular events elsewhere. Villebon in his little log fort on the Nashwaak, a tributary of the Saint John River, trying to govern a vast wilderness with but a handful of men, is pathetically real. The D'Armours brothers, the first farmers on the river, come before us from the past as examples of the trials of those early pioneers. And Madame Louise, called the "Acadian Cleopatra," rises as a living personality, who gave the authorities no end of trouble. The beautiful and adventurous Judith la Valliere, betrothed to Villieu, lieutenant to Villebon, deserves a high place among the brave women of Acadia. The rangers, the _Coureurs de bois_, were not all renegades, but many of them were men of noble birth and character who chafed at the cramping restraints of rulers, and fled to the woods for freedom of mind and body. The rest may be considered as fiction, but to the discerning mind its reality is obvious. Upon that period, not only of adventure and romance, but of suspicion, intrigue and cruelty, the imagination may be allowed to play where history is silent.