True stories are not often good art. The relations and
experiences of real men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical
order as to make an artistic whole. Until they have had such
treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in the rough they
seldom group themselves with that harmony of values and brilliant
unity of interest that result when art comes in—not so much to
transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself.
Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen
oftener than once I thought they did. Within the last few years
there have dropped into my hands by one accident or another a
number of these natural crystals, whose charms, never the same in
any two, are in each and all enough at least to warn off all
tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without being
necessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and
follow one another like the days of a week. They are mine only by
right of discovery. From various necessities of the case I am
sometimes the story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's
interest, have to abridge; but I add no fact and trim naught of
value away. Here are no unconfessed "restorations," not one. In
time, place, circumstance, in every essential feature, I give them
as I got them—strange stories that truly happened, all partly, some
wholly, in Louisiana.
In the spring of 1883, being one night the guest of my friend
Dr. Francis Bacon, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the conversation
turning, at the close of the evening, upon wonderful and romantic
true happenings, he said:
"You are from New Orleans; did you never hear of Salome
Müller?"
"No."
Thereupon he told the story, and a few weeks later sent me by
mail, to my home in New Orleans, whither I had returned, a
transcription, which he had most generously made, of a brief
summary of the case—it would be right to say tragedy instead of
case—as printed in "The Law Reporter" some forty years ago. That
transcription lies before me now, beginning, "The Supreme Court of
the State of Louisiana has lately been called upon to investigate
and decide one of the most interesting cases which has ever come
under the cognizance of a judicial tribunal." This episode, which
had been the cause of public excitement within the memory of men
still living on the scene, I, a native resident of New Orleans and
student of its history, stumbled upon for the first time nearly two
thousand miles from home.
I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one
after another. None remembered ever having heard of it. I appealed
to a former chief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal
remembrance of every member of the bench and the bar concerned in
the case; but of the case he had no recollection. One of the
medical experts called in by the court for evidence upon which the
whole merits of the case seemed to hang was still living—the
distinguished Creole physician, Dr. Armand Mercier. He could not
recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the
vaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly
took down from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume
of supreme court decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No.
5623. I went to the old newspaper files under the roof of the city
hall, and had the pleasure speedily to find, under the dates of
1818 and 1844, such passing allusions to the strange facts of which
I was in search as one might hope to find in those days when a
serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a steamboat
explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded in
ten lines of colorless statement. I went to the courts, and, after
following and abandoning several false trails through two days'
search, found that the books of record containing the object of my
quest had been lost, having unaccountably disappeared in—if I
remember aright—1870.
There was one chance left: it was to find the original
papers. I employed an intelligent gentleman at so much a day to
search till he should find them. In the dusty garret of one of the
court buildings—the old Spanish Cabildo, that faces Jackson
Square—he rummaged for ten days, finding now one desired document
and now another, until he had gathered all but one. Several he drew
out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of the floor, as
if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found. Yet I
was content. Through the perseverance of this gentleman and the
intervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the
courtesy of the court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story
of the poor lost and found Salome Müller. How through the courtesy
of some of the reportorial staff of the "New Orleans Picayune" I
found and conversed with three of Salome's still surviving
relatives and friends, I shall not stop to tell.
While I was still in search of these things, the editor of
the "New Orleans Times-Democrat" handed me a thick manuscript,
asking me to examine and pronounce upon its merits. It was written
wholly in French, in a small, cramped, feminine hand. I replied,
when I could, that it seemed to me unfit for the purposes of
transient newspaper publication, yet if he declined it I should
probably buy it myself. He replied that he had already examined it
and decided to decline it, and it was only to know whether I, not
he, could use it that I had been asked to read it.
I took it to an attorney, and requested him, under certain
strict conditions, to obtain it for me with all its
rights.
"What is it?"
"It is the minute account, written by one of the travelers, a
pretty little Creole maiden of seventeen, of an adventurous journey
made, in 1795, from New Orleans through the wilds of Louisiana,
taking six weeks to complete a tour that could now be made in less
than two days."
But this is written by some one else; see, it
says
Voyage de ma grand'mere
"Yes," I rejoined, "it purports to be a copy. We must have
the little grandmother's original manuscript, written in 1822; that
or nothing."
So a correspondence sprang up with a gentle and refined old
Creole lady with whom I later had the honor to become acquainted
and now count among my esteemed friends—grand-daughter of the
grandmother who, after innumerable recountings by word of mouth to
mother, sisters, brothers, friends, husband, children, and
children's children through twenty-seven years of advancing life,
sat down at last and wrote the oft-told tale for her little
grand-children, one of whom, inheriting her literary instinct and
herself become an aged grandmother, discovers the manuscript among
some old family papers and recognizes its value. The first exchange
of letters disclosed the fact that the "New Orleans Bee"
("L'Abeille") had bought the right to publish the manuscript in
French; but the moment its editors had proper assurance that there
was impending another arrangement more profitable to her, they
chivalrously yielded all they had bought, on merely being
reimbursed.
The condition that required the delivery of the original
manuscript, written over sixty years before, was not so easily met.
First came the assurance that its spelling was hideous, its writing
bad and dimmed by time, and the sheets tattered and torn. Later
followed the disclosure that an aged and infirm mother of the
grandmother owned it, and that she had some time before compelled
its return to the private drawer from which the relic-loving
daughter had abstracted it. Still later came a letter saying that
since the attorney was so relentlessly exacting, she had written to
her mother praying her to part with the manuscript. Then followed
another communication,—six large, closely written pages of
despair,—inclosing a letter from the mother. The wad of papers,
always more and more in the way and always "smelling bad," had been
put into the fire. But a telegram followed on the heels of the
mail, crying joy! An old letter had been found and forwarded which
would prove that such a manuscript had existed. But it was not in
time to intercept the attorney's letter saying that, the original
manuscript being destroyed, there could be no purchase or any need
of further correspondence. The old letter came. It was genuine
beyond a doubt, had been written by one of the party making the
journey, and was itself forty-seven years old. The paper was poor
and sallow, the hand-writing large, and the
orthography—!
Ma bien chair niaice je ressoit ta lette ce
mattin
But let us translate:
st. john baptist[1] 10 august 1836
My very dear Niece. I received your letter this morning in
which you ask me to tell you what I remember of the journey to
Attakapas made in 1795 by papa, M. ——-, [and] my younger sister
Françoise afterward your grandmother. If it were with my tongue I
could answer more favorably; but writing is not my forte; I was
never calculated for a public writer, as your grandmother was. By
the way, she wrote the journey, and very prettily; what have you
done with it? It is a pity to lose so pretty a piece of writing....
We left New Orleans to go to the Attakapas in the month of May,
1795, and in an old barge ["vieux chalant qui senté le rat mord a
plien nez"]. We were Françoise and I Suzanne, pearl of the family,
and Papa, who went to buy lands; and one Joseph Charpentier and his
dear and pretty little wife Alix [whom] I love so much; 3 Irish,
father mother and son [fice]; lastly Mario, whom you knew, with
Celeste, formerly lady's maid to Marianne—who is now my
sister-in-law.... If I knew better how to write I would tell you
our adventures the alligators tried to devour us. We barely escaped
perishing in Lake Chicot and many other things.... At last we
arrived at a pretty village St. Martinville called also little
Paris and full of barons, marquises, counts and countesses[2] that
were an offense to my nose and my stomach. Your grandmother was in
raptures. It was there we met the beautiful Tonton, your aunt by
marriage. I have a bad finger and must stop.... Your loving aunty
[ta tantine qui temme]
Suzanne —— née ——
The kind of letter to expect from one who, as a girl of
eighteen, could shoot and swim and was called by her father "my
son"; the antipode of her sister Françoise. My attorney wrote that
the evidence was sufficient.
His letter had hardly got into the mail-bag when another
telegram cried hold! That a few pages of the original manuscript
had been found and forwarded by post. They came. They were only
nine in all—old, yellow, ragged, torn, leaves of a plantation
account-book whose red-ruled columns had long ago faded to a faint
brown, one side of two or three of them preoccupied with charges in
bad French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin à dames," "jaconad,"
dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.;
but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in
orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the
page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here
was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the
transcriber had not expanded the work of the original memoirist.
The manuscript passed into my possession, our Creole
lady-correspondent reiterating to the end her inability to divine
what could be wanted with "an almost illegible scrawl"
(griffonage), full of bad spelling and of rather inelegant diction.
But if old manuscript was the object of desire, why, here was
something else; the very document alluded to by Françoise in her
memoir of travel—the autobiography of the dear little countess, her
beloved Alix de Morainville, made fatherless and a widow by the
guillotine in the Reign of Terror.
"Was that all?" inquired my agent, craftily, his suspicions
aroused by the promptness with which the supply met the demand.
"Had she not other old and valuable manuscripts?"
"No, alas! Only that one."
Thus reassured, he became its purchaser. It lies before me
now, in an inner wrapper of queer old black paper, beside its
little tight-fitting bag, or case of a kind of bright,
large-flowered silken stuff not made in these days, and its outer
wrapper of discolored brief-paper; a pretty little document of
sixty-eight small pages in a feminine hand, perfect in its slightly
archaic grammar, gracefully composed, and, in spite of its flimsy
yellowed paper, as legible as print: "Histoire d'Alix de
Morainville écrite à la Louisiane ce 22 Aout 1795. Pour mes chères
amies, Suzanne et Françoise Bossier."
One day I told the story to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of
Harvard University. He generously offered to see if he could find
the name of the Count de Morainville on any of the lists of persons
guillotined during the French Revolution. He made the search, but
wrote, "I am sorry to say that I have not been able to find it
either in Prudhomme, 'Dictionnaire des Individues envoyés à la Mort
judiciairement, 1789-1796,' or in the list given by Wallon in the
sixth volume of his very interesting 'Histoire du Tribunal
Revolutionnaire de Paris.' Possibly he was not put to death in
Paris," etc. And later he kindly wrote again that he had made some
hours' further search, but in vain.
Here was distress. I turned to the little manuscript roll of
which I had become so fond, and searched its pages anew for
evidence of either genuineness or its opposite. The wrapper of
black paper and the close-fitting silken bag had not been
sufficient to keep it from taking on the yellowness of age. It was
at least no modern counterfeit. Presently I noticed the total
absence of quotation marks from its passages of conversation. Now,
at the close of the last century, the use of quotation marks was
becoming general, but had not become universal and imperative.
Their entire absence from this manuscript of sixty-eight pages,
abounding in conversations, meant either age or cunning pretense.
But would a pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of
fortifying the manuscript in every possible way against the
sallowing touch of time, lay it away in a trunk of old papers, lie
down and die without mentioning it, and leave it for some one in
the second or third generation afterward to find? I turned the
leaves once more, and lo! one leaf that had had a large corner torn
off had lost that much of its text; it had been written upon before
it was torn; while on another torn leaf, for there are two, the
writing reads—as you shall see—uninterruptedly around the torn
edge; the writing has been done after the corner was torn off. The
two rents, therefore, must have occurred at different times; for
the one which mutilates the text is on the earlier page and surely
would not have been left so by the author at the time of writing
it, but only by some one careless of it, and at some time between
its completion and the manifestly later date, when it was so
carefully bestowed in its old-fashioned silken case and its inner
wrapper of black paper. The manuscript seemed genuine. Maybe the
name De Morainville is not, but was a convenient fiction of Alix
herself, well understood as such by Françoise and Suzanne.
Everything points that way, as was suggested at once by Madame
Sidonie de la Houssaye —There! I have let slip the name of my
Creole friend, and can only pray her to forgive me! "Tout porte à
le croire" (Everything helps that belief), she writes; although she
also doubts, with reason, I should say, the exhaustive completeness
of those lists of the guillotined. "I recall," she writes in
French, "that my husband has often told me the two uncles of his
father, or grandfather, were guillotined in the Revolution; but
though search was made by an advocate, no trace of them was found
in any records."
An assumed name need not vitiate the truth of the story; but
discoveries made since, which I am still investigating, offer
probabilities that, after all, the name is genuine.
We see, however, that an intention to deceive, were it
supposable, would have to be of recent date.
Now let me show that an intention to deceive could not
be of recent date, and at the same time we shall see the need of
this minuteness of explanation. Notice, then, that the manuscript
comes directly from the lady who says she found it in a trunk of
her family's private papers. A prominent paper-maker in Boston has
examined it and says that, while its age cannot be certified to
from its texture, its leaves are of three different kinds of paper,
each of which might be a hundred years old. But, bluntly, this
lady, though a person of literary tastes and talent, who recognized
the literary value of Alix's history
, esteemed original documents
so lightly as, for example, to put no value upon Louisa
Cheval's thrilling letter to her brother. She prized this Alix
manuscript only because, being a simple, succinct, unadorned
narrative, she could use it, as she could not Françoise's long,
pretty story, for the foundation of a nearly threefold expanded
romance. And this, in fact, she had written, copyrighted, and
arranged to publish when our joint experience concerning
Françoise's manuscript at length readjusted her sense of values.
She sold me the little Alix manuscript at a price still out of all
proportion below her valuation of her own writing, and counting it
a mistake that the expanded romance should go unpreferred and
unpublished.
But who, then, wrote the smaller manuscript? Madame found it,
she says, in the possession of her very aged mother, the daughter
and namesake of Françoise. Surely she was not its author; it is she
who said she burned almost the whole original draft of Françoise's
"Voyage," because it was "in the way and smelt bad." Neither could
Françoise have written it. Her awkward handwriting, her sparkling
flood of words and details, and her ignorance of the simplest rules
of spelling, make it impossible. Nor could Suzanne have done it.
She wrote and spelled no better at fifty-nine than Françoise at
forty-three. Nor could any one have imposed it on either of the
sisters. So, then, we find no intention to deceive, either early or
recent. I translated the manuscript, it went to the magazine, and I
sat down to eat, drink, and revel, never dreaming that the brazen
water-gates of my Babylon were standing wide open.
For all this time two huge, glaring anachronisms were
staring me, and half a dozen other persons, squarely in the face,
and actually escaping our notice by their serene audacity. But
hardly was the pie—I mean the magazine—opened when these two birds
began to sing. Wasn't that—interesting? Of course Louis de la
Houssaye, who in 1786 "had lately come from San Domingo,"
had not "been fighting the
insurgents"—who did not revolt until four or five years afterward!
And of course the old count, who so kindly left the family group
that was bidding Madelaine de Livilier good-bye, was not the Prime
Minister Maurepas, who was not
"only a few months returned from exile," and who was
not then "at the pinnacle of royal
favor"; for these matters were of earlier date, and this "most
lovable old man in the world" wasn't any longer in the world at
all, and had not been for eight years. He was dead and
buried.
And so, after all, fraudulent intent or none,
this manuscript, just as it is, could
never have been written by Alix. On "this 22d of August, 1795," she
could not have perpetrated such statements as these two. Her memory
of persons and events could not have been so grotesquely at fault,
nor could she have hoped so to deceive any one. The misstatements
are of later date, and from some one to whom the two events were
historical. But the manuscript is all in one simple, undisguised,
feminine handwriting, and with no interlineation save only here and
there the correction of a miswritten word.
Now in translating madame's "Voyage de ma Grandmère," I
noticed something equivalent to an interlineation, but in her own
writing like all the rest, and added in a perfectly unconcealed,
candid manner, at the end of a paragraph near the close of the
story. It struck me as an innocent gloss of the copyist, justified
in her mind by some well-credited family tradition. It was this:
"Just as we [Françoise and Alix] were parting, she [Alix] handed me
the story of her life." I had already called my friend's attention
to the anachronisms, and she was in keen distress, because totally
unable to account for them. But as I further pondered them, this
gloss gained new significance and I mentioned it. My new inquiry
flashed light upon her aged memory. She explained at once that, to
connect the two stories of Françoise and Alix, she had thought it
right to impute these few words to Françoise rather than for mere
exactness to thrust a detailed explanation of her own into a story
hurrying to its close. My question called back an incident of long
ago and resulted first in her rummaging a whole day among her
papers, and then in my receiving the certificate of a gentleman of
high official standing in Louisiana that, on the 10th of last April
(1889), this lady, in his presence, took from a large trunk of
written papers, variously dated and "appearing to be perfectly
genuine," a book of memoranda from which, writes he, "I copy the
following paragraph written by Madame S. de la Houssaye herself in
the middle of the book, on page 29." Then follows in
French:
June 20, 1841.—M. Gerbeau has dined here again. What a
singular story he tells me. We talked of my grandmother and Madame
Carpentier, and what does M. Gerbeau tell me but that Alix had not
finished her history when my grandmother and my aunt returned, and
that he had promised to get it to them. "And I kept it two years
for want of an opportunity," he added. How mad Grandmamma must have
been! How the delay must have made her suffer!
Well and good! Then Alix did write her story! But if
she wrote for both her "dear and good friends," Suzanne and
Françoise, then Françoise, the younger and milder sister, would the
more likely have to be content, sooner or later, with a copy. This,
I find no reason to doubt, is what lies before me. Indeed, here
(crossed out in the manuscript, but by me restored and italicized)
are signs of a copyist's pen: "Mais helas! il desesperoit de
reussir quand' il desespe
rencontra," etc. Is not that a copyist's repetition? Or
this:"—et lui, mon mari apres tout se fit mon
marim domestique." And here the copyist
misread the original: "Lorsque le maire entendit les noms et
les personnes prenoms de la
mariée," etc. In the manuscript personnes is crossed out, and the
correct word, prenoms, is written above it.
Whoever made this copy it remains still so simple and compact
that he or she cannot be charged with many embellishments. And yet
it is easy to believe that some one, with that looseness of family
tradition and largeness of ancestral pride so common among the
Creoles, in half-knowledge and half-ignorance should have ventured
aside for an instant to attribute in pure parenthesis to an
ancestral De la Houssaye the premature honor of a San Domingan war;
or, incited by some tradition of the old Prime Minister's intimate
friendship with Madelaine's family, should have imputed a gracious
attention to the wrong Count de Maurepas, or to the wrong count
altogether.
I find no other theory tenable. To reject the whole
matter as a forgery flies into the face of more incontestable facts
than the anachronisms do. We know, from Suzanne and Françoise,
without this manuscript, that there was an Alix Carpentier,
daughter of a count, widow of a viscount, an
emigrée of the Revolution, married to a
Norman peasant, known to M. Gerbeau, beloved of Suzanne and
Françoise, with whom they journeyed to Attakapas, and who wrote for
them the history of her strange life. I hold a manuscript carefully
kept by at least two generations of Françoise's descendants among
their valuable private papers. It professes to be that history—a
short, modest, unadorned narrative, apparently a copy of a paper of
like compass, notwithstanding the evident insertion of two
impossible statements whose complete omission does not disturb the
narrative. I see no room to doubt that it contains the true story
of a real and lovely woman. But to come back to my
attorney.
While his grave negotiations were still going on, there met
me one evening at my own gate a lady in black, seeking advice
concerning her wish to sell to some publisher a private diary never
intended for publication.
"That kind is the best," I said. "Did you write it during the
late war?" I added at a guess.
"Yes."
"I suppose, then, it contains a careful record of each day's
public events."
"No, I'm sorry to say—"
"Nay, don't be sorry; that lack may save it from the
waste-basket." Then my heart spoke. "Ah! madam, if you had only
done what no woman seems to have seen the importance of
doing—written the women's side of that awful war—"
"That's just what I have done," she interrupted. "I was a
Union woman, in the Confederacy. I couldn't talk; I had to write. I
was in the siege of Vicksburg from beginning to end."
"Leave your manuscript with me," I said. "If, on examining
it, I find I can recommend it to a publisher, I will do so. But
remember what I have already told you—the passage of an unknown
writer's work through an older author's hands is of no benefit to
it whatever. It is a bad sign rather than a good one. Your chances
of acceptance will be at least no less if you send this to the
publishers yourself."
No, she would like me to intervene.
How my attorney friend and I took a two days' journey by
rail, reading the manuscript to each other in the Pullman car; how
a young newly married couple next us across the aisle, pretending
not to notice, listened with all their might; how my friend the
attorney now and then stopped to choke down tears; and how the
young stranger opposite came at last, with apologies, asking where
this matter would be published and under what title, I need not
tell. At length I was intercessor for a manuscript that publishers
would not lightly decline. I bought it for my little museum of true
stories, at a price beyond what I believe any magazine would have
paid—an amount that must have filled the widow's heart with joy,
but as certainly was not beyond its worth to me. I have already
contributed a part of this manuscript to "The Century" as one of
its "Wax-papers." But by permission it is restored here to its
original place.
Judge Farrar, with whom I enjoyed a slight but valued
acquaintance, stopped me one day in Carondelet street, New Orleans,
saying, "I have a true story that I want you to tell. You can dress
it out—"
I arrested him with a shake of the head. "Dress me no
dresses. Story me no stories. There's not one of a hundred of them
that does not lack something essential, for want of which they are
good for naught. Keep them for after-dinner chat; but for the
novelist they are good to smell, not to eat. And yet—tell me your
story. I have a use for it—a cabinet of true things that have never
had and shall not have a literary tool lifted up against them;
virgin shells from the beach of the sea of human events. It may be
I shall find a place for it there." So he told me the true story
which I have called "Attalie Brouillard," because, having forgotten
the woman's real name, it pleased his fancy to use that name in
recounting the tale: "Attalie Brouillard." I repeated the story to
a friend, a gentleman of much reading.
His reply dismayed me. "I have a faint impression," he said,
"that you will find something very much like that in one of Lever's
novels."
But later I thought, "Even so, what then? Good stories repeat
themselves." I remembered having twice had experiences in my own
life the accounts of which, when given, would have been great
successes only that they were old anecdotes—great in their day, but
long worn out in the club-rooms and abandoned to clergymen's
reunions. The wise thing was not to find out or care whether Lever
had somewhere told something like it, but whether the story was
ever a real event in New Orleans, and, if so, to add it to my now,
to me, priceless collection. Meeting the young judge again, I asked
boldly for the story's full authentication. He said promptly that
the man who told it of his own knowledge was the late Judge T.
Wharton Collins; that the incidents occurred about 1855, and that
Judge McCaleb could doubtless give the name of the notary public
who had been an actor in the affair. "Let us go to his office right
now," said my obliging friend.
We went, found him, told him our errand. He remembered the
story, was confident of its entire verity, and gave a name, which,
however, he begged I would submit for verification to an aged
notary public in another street, a gentleman of the pure old Creole
type. I went to him. He heard the story through in solemn silence.
From first to last I mentioned no name, but at the end I
asked:
"Now, can you tell me the name of the notary in that
case?"
"Yes."
I felt a delicious tingling as I waited for the disclosure.
He slowly said:
"Dthere eeze wan troub' 'bout dat. To
which case do you
riffer? 'Cause, you know, dey got t'ree, four case' like
dat . An' you better not mention no name, 'cause
you don't want git nobody in troub', you know. Now dthere's dthe
case of——. And dthere's dthe case of——. And dthere's the case of——.
He had to go away; yes; 'cause when he
make dthe dade man make his will, he git
behine dthe dade man in bade, an' hole
'im up in dthe bade."
I thanked him and departed, with but the one regret that the
tale was true so many more times than was necessary.
In all this collection the story of the so-called haunted
house in Royal street is the only one that must ask a place in
literature as partly a twice-told tale. The history of the house is
known to thousands in the old French quarter, and that portion
which antedates the late war was told in brief by Harriet Martineau
as far back as when she wrote her book of American travel. In
printing it here I fulfill an oft-repeated promise; for many a one
has asked me if I would not, or, at least, why I did not, tell its
dark story.
So I have inventoried my entire exhibit—save one small
matter. It turned out after, all that the dear old Creole lady who
had sold us the ancient manuscript, finding old paper commanding so
much more per ton than it ever had commanded before, raked together
three or four more leaves—stray chips of her lovely little
ancestress Françoise's workshop, or rather the shakings of her
basket of cherished records,—to wit, three Creole African songs,
which I have used elsewhere; one or two other scraps, of no value;
and, finally, a long letter telling its writer's own short story—a
story so tragic and so sad that I can only say pass it, if you
will. It stands first because it antedates the rest. As you will
see, its time is something more than a hundred years ago. The
writing was very difficult to read, owing entirely to the
badness—mainly the softness—of the paper. I have tried in vain to
find exactly where Fort Latourette was situated. It may have had
but a momentary existence in Galvez's campaign against the English.
All along the Gulf shore the sites and remains of the small forts
once held by the Spaniards are known traditionally and
indiscriminately as "Spanish Fort." When John Law,—author of that
famed Mississippi Bubble, which was in Paris what the South Sea
Bubble was in London,—failed in his efforts at colonization on the
Arkansas, his Arkansas settlers came down the Mississippi to within
some sixty miles of New Orleans and established themselves in a
colony at first called the Côte
Allemande (German Coast), and later, owing to its
prosperity, the Côte d'Or , or
Golden Coast. Thus the banks of the Mississippi became known on the
Rhine, a goodly part of our Louisiana Creoles received a German
tincture, and the father and the aunt of Suzanne and Françoise were
not the only Alsatians we shall meet in these wild stories of wild
times in Louisiana.
1782.
The date of this letter—I hold it in one hand as I write, and
for the first time noticed that it has never in its hundred years
been sealed or folded, but only doubled once, lightly, and rolled
in the hand, just as the young Spanish officer might have carried
it when he rode so hard to bear it to its destination—its date is
the last year but one of our American Revolution. France, Spain,
and the thirteen colonies were at war with Great Britain, and the
Indians were on both sides.
Galvez, the heroic young governor of Louisiana, had just been
decorated by his king and made a count for taking the forts at
Manchac, Baton Rouge, Natchez, and Mobile, and besieging and
capturing the stronghold of Pensacola, thus winning all west
Florida, from the Mississippi to the Appalachicola, for Spain. But
this vast wilderness was not made safe; Fort Panmure (Natchez)
changed hands twice, and the land was full of Indians, partly
hireling friends and partly enemies. The waters about the Bahamas
and the Greater and Lesser Antilles were fields for the movements
of hostile fleets, corsairs, and privateers. Yet the writer of this
letter was tempted to run the gauntlet of these perils, expecting,
if all went well, to arrive in Louisiana in midsummer.
"How many times," says the memorandum of her brother's now
aged great-granddaughter,—"How many times during my childhood has
been told me the story of my aunt Louise. It was not until several
years after the death of my grandmother that, on examining the
contents of the basket which she had given me, I found at the
bottom of a little black-silk bag the letter written by my
grand-aunt to her brother, my own ancestor. Frankly, I doubt that
my grandmother had intended to give it to me, so highly did she
prize it, though it was very difficult to read. The orthography is
perfect; the difficulty is all owing to the paper and, moreover, to
the situation of the poor wounded sufferer." It is in
French:
To my brother mister Pierre Bossier. In the parish[3] of
St. James.
Fort Latourette, The 5 August, 1782.
My Good Dear Brother: Ah! how shall I tell you the frightful
position in which I am placed! I would that I were dead! I seem to
be the prey of a horrible nightmare! O Pierre! my brother! hasten
with all speed to me. When you left Germany, your little sister was
a blooming girl, very beautiful in your eyes, very happy! and
to-day! ah! to-day, my brother, come see for yourself.
After having received your letter, not only my husband and I
decided to leave our village and go to join you, but twelve of our
friends united with us, and on the 10 May, 1782, we quitted
Strasbourg on the little vessel North Star [Étoile du Nord],[4]
which set sail for New Orleans, where you had promised to come to
meet us. Let me tell you the names of my fellow-travelers. O
brother! what courage I need to write this account: first my
husband, Leonard Cheval, and my son Pierre, poor little angel who
was not yet two years old! Fritz Newman, his wife Nina, and their
three children; Irwin Vizey; William Hugo, his wife, and their
little daughter; Jacques Lewis, his daughter, and their son Henry.
We were full of hope: We hoped to find fortune in this new country
of which you spoke with so much enthusiasm. How in that moment did
I bless my parents and you my brother, for the education you had
procured me. You know how good a musician my Leonard was, and our
intention was on arriving to open a boarding-school in New Orleans;
in your last letter you encouraged the project—all of us, movables
with us, all our savings, everything we owned in this
world.
This paper is very bad, brother, but the captain of the fort
says it is all he has; and I write lying down, I am so
uncomfortable.
The earlier days of the voyage passed without accident,
without disturbance, but often Leonard spoke to me of his fears.
The vessel was old, small, and very poorly supplied. The captain
was a drunkard [here the writer attempted to turn the sheet and
write on the back of it], who often incapacitated himself with his
first officers [word badly blotted]; and then the management of the
vessel fell to the mate, who was densely ignorant. Moreover, we
knew that the seas were infested with pirates. I must stop, the
paper is too bad.
The captain has brought me another sheet.
Our uneasiness was great. Often we emigrants assembled on
deck and told each other our anxieties. Living on the frontier of
France, we spoke German and French equally well; and when the
sailors heard us, they, who spoke only English, swore at us,
accused us of plotting against them, and called us Saurkrouts. At
such times I pressed my child to my heart and drew nearer to
Leonard, more dead than alive. A whole month passed in this
constant anguish. At its close, fevers broke out among us, and we
discovered, to our horror, there was not a drop of medicine on
board. We had them lightly, some of us, but only a few; and [bad
blot] Newman's son and William Hugo's little daughter died, ... and
the poor mother soon followed her child. My God! but it was sad.
And the provisions ran low, and the captain refused to turn back to
get more.
One evening, when the captain, his lieutenant, and two other
officers were shut in their cabin drinking, the mate, of whom I had
always such fear, presented himself before us surrounded by six
sailors armed, like himself, to the teeth, and ordered us to
surrender all the money we had. To resist would have been madness;
we had to yield. They searched our trunks and took away all that we
possessed: they left us nothing, absolutely nothing. Ah! why am I
not dead? Profiting by the absence of their chiefs they seized the
[or some—the word is blotted] boats and abandoned us to our fate.
When, the next day, the captain appeared on deck quite sober, and
saw the cruelty of our plight, he told us, to console us, that we
were very near the mouth of the Mississippi, and that within two
days we should be at New Orleans. Alas! all that day passed without
seeing any land[5], but towards evening the vessel, after
incredible efforts, had just come to a stop—at what I supposed
should be the mouth of the river. We were so happy to have arrived
that we begged Captain Andrieux to sail all night. He replied that
our men, who had worked all day in place of the sailors, were tired
and did not understand at all sufficiently the handling of a vessel
to sail by night. He wanted to get drunk again. As in fact our men
were worn out, we went, all of us, to bed. O great God! give me
strength to go on. All at once we were awakened by horrible cries,
not human sounds: we thought ourselves surrounded by ferocious
beasts. We poor women clasped our children to our breasts, while
our husbands armed themselves with whatever came to hand and dashed
forward to meet the danger. My God! my God! we saw ourselves hemmed
in by a multitude of savages yelling and lifting over us their
horrible arms, grasping hatchets, knives, and tomahawks. The first
to fall was my husband, my dear Leonard; all, except Irwin Vizey,
who had the fortune to jump into the water unseen, all were
massacred by the monsters. One Indian tore my child from me while
another fastened my arms behind my back. In response to my cries,
to my prayers, the monster who held my son took him by one foot
and, swinging him several times around, shattered his head against
the wall. And I live to write these horrors!... I fainted, without
doubt, for on opening my eyes I found I was on land [blot], firmly
fastened to a stake. Nina Newman and Kate Lewis were fastened as I
was: the latter was covered with blood and appeared to be
dangerously wounded. About daylight three Indians came looking for
them and took them God knows where! Alas! I have never since heard
of either of them or their children.
I remained fastened to the stake in a state of delirium,
which saved me doubtless from the horrors of my situation. I recall
one thing: that is, having seen those savages eat human flesh, the
members of a child—at least it seemed so. Ah! you see plainly I
must have been mad to have seen all that without dying! They had
stripped me of my clothing and I remained exposed, half naked, to a
July sun and to clouds of mosquitoes. An Indian who spoke French
informed me that, as I was young and fat, they were reserving me
for the dinner of the chief, who was to arrive next day. In a
moment I was dead with terror; in that instant I lost all feeling.
I had become indifferent to all. I saw nothing, I heard nothing.
Towards evening one of the sub-chiefs approached and gave me some
water in a gourd. I drank without knowing what I did; thereupon he
set himself to examine me as the butcher examines the lamb that he
is about to kill; he seemed to find me worthy to be served on the
table of the head-chief, but as he was hungry and did not wish to
wait [blot], he drew from its sheath the knife that he carried at
his belt and before I had had time to guess what he intended to do
[Enough to say, in place of literal translation, that the savage,
from the outside of her right thigh, flayed off a large piece of
her flesh.] It must be supposed that I again lost consciousness.
When I came to myself, I was lying some paces away from the stake
of torture on a heap of cloaks, and a soldier was kneeling beside
me, while I was surrounded by about a hundred others. The ground
was strewed with dead Indians. I learned later that Vizey had
reached the woods and by chance had stumbled into Fort Latourette,
full of troops. Without loss of time, the brave soldiers set out,
and arrived just in time to save me. A physician dressed my wound,
they put me into an ambulance and brought me away to Fort
Latourette, where I still am. A fierce fever took possession of me.
My generous protectors did not know to whom to write; they watched
over me and showed every care imaginable.
Now that I am better, I write you, my brother, and close with
these words: I await you! make all haste!
Your sister, Louisa Cheval.
Louisa Cheval letter
"My grandmother," resumes the memorandum of the Creole
great-grandniece, "had often read this letter, and had recounted to
me the incidents that followed its reception. She was then but
three years old, but as her aunt lived three years in her (
i.e. , the aunt's) brother's family, my
grandmother had known her, and described her to me as a young woman
with white hair and walking with a staff. It was with difficulty
that she used her right leg. My great-grandfather used to tell his
children that his sister Louise had been blooming and gay, and
spoke especially of her beautiful blonde hair. A few hours had
sufficed to change it to snow, and on the once charming countenance
of the poor invalid to stamp an expression of grief and
despair.
"It was Lieutenant Rosello, a young Spaniard, who came on
horseback from Fort Latourette to carry to my great-grandfather his
sister's letter.... Not to lose a moment, he [the brother] began,
like Lieutenant Rosello, the journey on horseback, procuring a
large ambulance as he passed through New Orleans.... He did all he
could to lighten the despair of his poor sister.... All the members
of the family lavished upon her every possible care and attention;
but alas! the blow she had received was too terrible. She lingered
three years, and at the end of that time passed peaceably away in
the arms of her brother, the last words on her lips being
'Leonard!—my child!'"
So we make way for the bright and happy story of how
Françoise made Evangeline's journey through the dark wilds of
Atchafalaya.
FOOTNOTES: [3] County.
[4] If this was an English ship,—for her crew was English and her
master's name seems to have been Andrews,—she was probably not
under British colors.—TRANSLATOR.
[5] The Treeless marshes of the Delta would be very slow coming
into view.—TRANSLATOR.