EDMUNDSTON, New Brunswick – Seraphin Poudrier was an old miser who used his money and his stature to manipulate people in the tiny Quebec village of Sainte-Adele during the 1890s, according to legend. Poudrier, who was the village’s mayor and undertaker, became a folkloric character among the French-speaking people of Quebec, New Brunswick and northern Maine.

Poudrier and his miserly ways inspired Claude-Henri Grignon’s best-selling novel “Un Homme et Son Peche,” published in 1939. The character also was the basis for a popular radio serial on Radio-Canada, a TV series, “Les Belles Histoires des Pays-d’en-Haut,” and two movies.

Now Poudrier is back again in Montreal filmmaker Charles Biname’s adaption “Seraphin: Un Homme et Son Peche [A Man and His Sin],” which has held its own against hits such as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” in Montreal and Quebec City. The film recently wrapped up a five-week run in Edmundston.

In Edmundston, across the St. John River from Madawaska, the movie has kindled stories and memories from decades ago. It was the only showing outside the province of Quebec and people have flocked to see the Quebecois film. Most of the crowd has consisted of folks in their 50s and older.

“Some people came two and three times, filling the seats for two showings a night,” Jacques Gallant, the owner of Cinema V, said. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but I am sure more than 6,000 people saw the movie here.”

Gallant said he had to pull some strings to get the film, because the film’s Quebec brokers thought Edmundston was an English-speaking city.

“Only ‘Titanic,’ which ran here for 12 weeks, brought in bigger crowds,” he noted.

“Seraphin: Un Homme et Son Peche” is set in Sainte-Adele, Quebec, about 30 miles northwest of Montreal, in the 1890s. The film actually opened there last year during the community’s 150th anniversary. Clair Grignon, the novelist’s daughter, attended the opening.

“Seraphin: Un Homme et Son Peche,” a production of Alliance Atlantis VivaFilms, features some of Quebec’s top stars. Among them are Pierre Lebeau as Seraphin, Karine Vanasse as Donalda, and Roy Dupuis plays the jilted lover Alexis.

In the movie, Seraphin, a man in his 50s, gets a wife, Donalda Laloge, a woman still in her teens, by paying off the debts of a storekeeper, keeping him out of bankruptcy. He only helps the man after making a deal to get the hand of his daughter. Donalda’s father attempts to convince her that he made the deal because of his monetary woes and to keep her from misery.

“Misery,” she replies, “is being married where there is no love.”

Donalda, who first refuses to honor her father’s deal, goes along after finding her father trying to hang himself in the storage room of the store, while creditors are moving merchandise out the front door. She agrees to save her father’s honor and the well-being of her family.

Donalda, however, is in love with a lumberjack who had promised they would get married when he comes home from his winterlong job of cutting trees in the northern Quebec forests. When Alexis Labranche returns to Sainte-Adele during the spring thaw, he finds his beloved Donalda married to Seraphin. She reveals to him that while they cannot be together, he is her eternal love.

Alexis and Seraphin become bitter enemies. Their animosity leads to a near-fatal fight in the woods.

The film is laden with examples of Seraphin’s sin – his love of money. He is shown destroying people’s lives, driving some to suicide. Another young woman, an orphan girl who was Seraphin’s live-in maid, dies during a botched abortion before Seraphin’s wedding.

The period movie is stark, conveying the harsh life in Quebec in the 1890s. The tending of crops with horses and oxen, the cutting of trees with axes and straight saws, twitching of logs through the woods, and the simplicity of the homes and buildings is well-portrayed.

Having listened to Seraphin on radio and watched him on television, I found the movie a bit of a letdown. I was not ready for the film’s finality, the death of Donalda to a severe cold, and Seraphin’s death while attempting to get money out of his burning home.

In northern Maine, 50- to 70-year-old residents remember sitting on the kitchen floor listening to Seraphin’s terrible deeds. It was a radio program rarely missed in the early evening during the 1950s and ’60s. The radio program was listened to by French-speaking people throughout the St. John Valley.

Seraphin’s raspy, gravelly voice sent shivers down the spines of children as they listened to the radio program. The clinking of coins as he counted his money, the creaking of doors as he entered his secret room, and the shuffling of feet all were part of the mystique.

In northern Maine, we still can see Seraphin on TV. Some segments of “Les Belles Histoires des Pays-d’en-Haut” still air Sunday nights on a French-language program broadcast from Quebec. So long after the movie, French-speaking folks can continue to be entertained by the miser giving people a hard time, counting his money while letting it fall between his fingers with his face contorted into a sneer.