Heavysege's only novel, The advocate, a melodramatic tale which makes use of English and French antagonisms in Lower Canada. It is a classic of Canadian historical fiction. Heavysege left school at nine, to return only briefly later. He wrote in another letter that his father, through romantic idealism, had sold his patrimony and divided the money among relatives. The product of a circumscribed mind in a circumscribed environment, they contain flashes of acute human insight into moral problems and passages of great beauty. They are a monument to Heavysege's perseverance.