at his deathbed. The documents left 
by the heads of two families that 
finally settled on Belle-Ile showed a 
typical pattern: Michel Boudrot had 
a brother and sister-in-law in New 
York and another brother in New 
Orleans; Claude Dion was separated 
from ten brothers and sisters, who 
were distributed in Halifax, Boston, 
Plymouth, and New York, with only 
one in France, near Saint-Malo. 
Like the Acadians, the natives of 
Belle-lie’s four parishes were 
ambivalent about the proposed 
resettlement. During this period the 
official directly responsible for the 
administration of Belle-Ile was Baron 
de Warren, a Scotsman who had 
been exiled after leading the last 
fruitless charge against Carlisle for 
Bonnie Prince Charlie. Although de 
Warren was filled with “eagerness 
and longing” to see the Acadians 
settled on the island, he quickly 
learned of opposition to the plan 
among the inhabitants of the parishes 
on the island — an attitude that had 
been fostered by the largest and most 
important parish, Le Palais. Local 
officials informed the baron in a 
letter of March 30, 1763, that the 
smaller parishes, “seduced by the 
bad example of Le Palais, have 
haughtily declared to Messieurs the 
officials that they do not wish to give 
up their villages to strangers.” De 
Warren was further hampered by a 
continual and acerbic argument 
between officials at every level of 
authority — local, provincial, 
departmental, and royal — as to which 
budget should assume the costs of 
carrying out the projected settlement. 
That some of the Acadians were 
finally settled on Belle-Ile was due in 
great measure to the persistence of 
the abbe Le Loutre, a missionary- 
priest who had worked among the 
American Indians. Le Loutre, 
concerned with saving Acadian souls 
from the Protestant English, had 
actually helped to provoke the 
deportation whose ill-effects he now 
sought to alleviate. Once back in 
France, however, his concern turned 
to preserving the Acadian heritage 
from corruption by what he regarded 
as decadent French Catholicism. It 
was above all owing to the energies of 
this man, whom de W'arren called the 
“grand mufti” of the Acadians, first, 
that in April of 1764 Louis XV paid 
the monies (56,000 livres) that the 
Pir# 
