FRENCHVILLE — This year’s recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Maine at Fort Kent offered glimpses Friday into the life of a St. John Valley enigma, perhaps one of the most colorful figures to cut a swath through local history.

Drawing upon a paper trail left by Joseph Audibert (1820-1857), Dr. Beatrice Craig painted a portrait of Audibert’s ascent from his lowly origins in a working-class Quebec City parish to a lifestyle of relative gentility in mid-19th-century Fort Kent.

Why did the fifth-generation Quebecer claim to be from France? Why didn’t his sisters blow his cover when they visited him in Fort Kent after he became established there? Did he somehow manage to dupe the locals or was he hiding something that the locals felt was worth helping him keep hidden?

Speaking to about 20 workshop participants gathered at the St. John Valley Technology Center in Frenchville on Friday, Craig was careful to keep fact separate from “sheer speculation.”

Craig’s presentation, titled “Passport to the Past: The Journal of Joseph Audibert of Ste-Luce Parish,” was based on what she refers to as “The Audibert Papers,” a collection that spans the period from 1842 to 1855.

The collection includes documentation of Audibert’s travels, transactions, family marriages and births, letters and correspondences, and miscellaneous notes. What else is known about the man is supplemented through parish registers, land records and military documents.

The internationally known historian admits she was intrigued when she learned of the existence of the Audibert family documents. Such finds are “extremely rare,” she said, because few residents of the St. John Valley at that time were literate, and those who were left behind few clues about their daily activities.

Craig’s decision to take a closer look at the man who claimed to be from France was prompted, in part, by her recollection that St. Bruno (Van Buren) Parish records included records pertaining to another Audibert of that era.

She traced Audibert’s real roots to a working-class parish in Quebec City. Records show he was born at Ile d’Orleans, and that his family had been in Canada, then considered New France, for some time.

Records show that Audibert came from downwardly mobile stock in a shipbuilding district. Three of his sisters married men who made livings with their hands — a shoemaker, a carpenter and a day laborer.

Craig speculated that Audibert might have found his way into the U.S. Army — and to Fort Kent — as a deserter from the British navy, which was then known as “hell on water” for its harsh treatment of sailors.

Craig’s hypothesis is that Audibert was probably a carpenter who joined the navy as a result of a drunken lark and then jumped ship and “made a beeline for Maine.” Documents show that he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1842 at Fort Sullivan in Eastport, and that Fort Kent was one of the first places his regiment was sent.

During the two years Audibert was stationed in Fort Kent — from 1843 to 1845 — he formed close ties with several notable local figures, including wealthy landowner Chrysostome “Thomas” Martin. It was also then that he met and wooed Martin’s unmarried daughter, Marguerite.

Audibert’s papers indeed reveal that he was probably quite a lady’s man: During his military career he corresponded with young women from Fort Kent to Boston.

After a five-year military tour that took him as far south as Florida, Audibert made his way back to Maine — but not before splurging three-fourths of his pay on clothes and accessories for himself, and trinkets for his intended, Craig noted.

Among the goods his accounts show he bought on his way North were four pairs of boots (but only six pairs of socks); a stack of shirts (three of them “fine”) and several removable collar and dickey sets worn to avoid laundering; five pairs of pants (among them one pair of lined “pantaloons” of the sort worn by the well-off); and several coats, including one of silk.

He is believed to have spent the summer of 1847 in Bangor before returning to Fort Kent in November, where he married Marguerite Martin four days after his arrival. His shopping spree included such presents for her as an engagement ring and other jewelry, a shawl, silk fabric and ribbon.

Once in Fort Kent and married into the well-established Martin family, Audibert fathered eight children in nine years before dying at the age of 37. A few years before his death, his occupation was listed as “gentleman,” proof that while he may have done manual labor in his early years in the community, he had risen above that within a few years of his death.

How he managed to obtain such good credit and have so much cash at his disposal remains one of the mysteries surrounding Audibert’s life.

Records indicate that he at some point became the “brains” behind a lumber partnership with a wealthy southern Maine man who supplied the cash.

“Now why the tall tale about being French?” Craig asked about Audibert. Both the local parish priest and the census taker in Fort Kent in 1850 have Audibert listed as a native of France.

Neither they nor Audibert’s sisters, who visited him in Fort Kent after he established himself as a gentleman there, indicated that he was anything other than a Frenchman. Craig notes that correspondence from his sisters after the visit to Fort Kent shows no sign of dismay at his passing himself off as a Frenchman, but rather their delight at his social station, his charming in-laws and his good fortune.

Among some of the other interesting tidbits Craig uncovered through Audibert’s papers were that St. John Valley residents had ample access to liquor from nearby Canada when Maine was on a Prohibition kick in the mid-1800s, and that local women snorted snuff.