Alfred Mercier, Adrien
Rouquette, Placide Canonge: The Doctor,
the Priest and the Dandy. Alfred Mercier, Adrien Rouquette and Placide Canonge stood side by side on the New Orleans cultural stage where they played founding roles in the establishment of Creole literature and music. The variety of their interests typifies the vibrant cultural life of Nineteenth Century New Orleans in which people preferred dabbling in many artistic disciplines to specializing in just one. Mercier, a scholarly and kind-hearted physician, was as skillful in writing novels as he was in writing prescriptions. He was surrounded by an erudite group of Creole doctors, including Charles Deléry and Charles Testut, that shared his love of Francophone literature. While Adrien Rouquette dedicated his many talents to his work as a Catholic priest, he also diligently created poetic and musical compositions. Louis Placide Canonge was a jack-of-all-trades, working tirelessly on many journalistic, literary and theatrical projects. While these three men lived and worked primarily in Louisiana, they traveled often to France to oversee the publication of their work. Mercier, Rouquette and Canonge shared their considerable talents and recognized the importance of their colleagues literary efforts. |
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Case 9 Alfred
Mercier was born in Louisiana in 1816. His family, immigrants to
Louisiana from South-West France, sent him to Paris at a very young
age for his education. While he attended the prestigious Collège
Louis le Grand and then went on to law school, he felt a greater
love for literature than for the law. After several years spent in Louisiana
and Boston, Mercier left in 1842 for a grand tour of Europe. His five-month
stay in Italy and Sicily provided him with the inspiration for a novel
he would publish in 1873, Le Fou de Palerme (The Fool of Palermo).
During the 1848 Revolution in France he contributed articles to Louisiana
newspapers about the events leading to the crowning of Napoleon III.
He also married the daughter of the owner of his boarding house after
a long and serious illness from which she helped him to recover. At
33, Mercier began his medical studies in Paris. After graduating, he
moved his family back to New Orleans where he established his medical
practice. During the Civil War Mercier returned to Paris and played
an important part in efforts to convince France to support the Confederacy.
Back in New Orleans again after the war, Mercier wrote reviews of performances
given at the French Opera House for the New Orleans Picayune. A
great lover of literature, Mercier spoke several languages and devoted
himself to the preservation of the French language in Louisiana. He
was a founding member of L'Athénée louisianais, and
served as the organizations secretary and treasurer until his
death . In an article entitled "Progrès de la langue française"
("Progress of the French Language"), published in Les Comptes-Rendus
de l'Athénée louisianais in September 1883, Mercier
forecast the extinction of Francophone New Orleans in this nostalgic
yet visionary prediction: See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932). |
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Case10 Adrien Rouquette was born in New Orleans in 1813.
His father, a Frenchman from Bordeaux, established himself as a wine
merchant in New Orleans in the early Nineteenth Century. He soon married
a young Creole woman and had five children, two of whom would later
become well-known Louisiana poets. Shortly after Adrien's birth, the
Rouquette family moved to the outskirts of New Orleans near the Native
American settlements along Bayou Saint John. Adrien quickly learned
the language of his neighbors and later in life found in these early
experiences a great source of poetic inspiration. Rouquette was first
educated in New Orleans at the Collège d'Orléans and
later continued at schools in Kentucky and New Jersey . Because he had
lost most of his skills in French, he planned to pursue his education
in the Collège Royal in Paris, but the political turmoil
in the French capital drove him to the West of France--first to Nantes
then to Renne. After traveling for a period in Europe, he returned to
Louisiana in 1833 and settled in Bayou Lacombe, where he lived near
another settlement of Native Americans. The following years were punctuated
by comings and goings between France and Louisiana; many of Rouquette's
poems bear the mark of his time in Paris and his unhappy love affairs.
In 1841 he published one of his best collections of poems, Les
Savanes. The well-known French critic Sainte-Beuve offered the
following praise of Rouquettes first poetic effort: See: Dagmar-Renshaw Lebreton. Chahta-Ima. (Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 1947). |
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Case 11 Louis
Placide Canonge was born in Louisiana
in 1822. Canonges father, a distinguished New Orleans lawyer,
was originally from Marseille but lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue
(Haiti) before coming to Louisiana. Louis Placide Canonge was sent to
Paris for his education where he attended the Lycée Louis
le Grand. Paris sharpened Canonges love for arts and literature
and he returned to Louisiana a sophisticated and elegant man, known
for his sharp wit and for being always on the lookout for cultural novelties.
Because of his worldly interests, refined opinions, and sophisticated
tastes, New Orleans came to regard Canonge as the prototypical Frenchman.
Canonge was involved in many literary and journalistic projects, most
of them short-lived. A true gentleman, Canonge fought in several duels
(for which New Orleans was famous) risking his life to defend his honor
or the honor of one of his friends. As the editor of the Courrier louisianais
during the Civil War, he was forced into exile for too loudly expressing
his distaste for the Yankee occupiers of New Orleans. After the war
he created his own newspaper, L'Époque , and, when this
venture failed, took a job at L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans
which he held from 1882 until his death. Canonge contributed music
and theater reviews to LAbeille, often signing his articles
with his pen name: René. He also found time to teach French.
But Canonges true love was the theater. He wrote several plays,
including Le comte de Carmagnola which debuted in New Orleans in 1852
and later had a run of one hundred performances in Paris. Canonge created
two amateur theater clubs and served as the manager of the Orleans Theater
in 1860 and of the French Opera House for two consecutive seasons between
1873 and 1875. Léona Queyrouze, with whom Canonge had a regular
correspondence, dedicated the poem: "À l'Opéra"
, to her friend. His life-long friendship and correspondence with Henri
Vignaud, an old friend living in Paris, reveals the fragility and insecurity
hidden beyond the confident veneer of this influential man . Canonge
died in 1893 at the age of seventy-one. top See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932). |
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Armand
Lanusse and Les Cenelles: The First Collection of Poems
by African Americans published in the United States. The free people of color in New Orleans occupied a precarious middle position between black and white, between their French education, language, and culture and their American citizenship, between relative financial independence and profound social oppression. The Gens de Couleur Libres of New Orleans were free, but they faced many restrictions in a city where they aroused both jealousy and suspicion. In 1845, defying the ban put on the publication of works by people of color, New Orleans educator and poet Armand Lanusse gathered eighty-five poems written by seventeen free black Louisiana poets and published them under the title Les Cenelles. While Lanusse remained in the increasingly hostile New Orleans to continue his activism in the defense of people of color, several of the other contributors to Les Cenelles left Louisiana. Pierre Delcour, Camille Thierry and Victor Séjour preferred life in France, where they might encounter the luminaries of the French literary world, to the increasingly restrictive atmosphere of their Louisiana home. top |
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Case 12 Armand Lanusse was born in New Orleans in 1812.
Historians disagree on the question of whether or not he was, like many
young free men of color of his generation, sent to Paris to be educated
in the finest institutions. Whatever the circumstances of his education,
Lanusse was at an early age already distinguishing himself from his
peers with his impassioned dedication to the cause of all people of
African descent, whom he considered to be his own people, without drawing
distinctions in skin shades. Lanusse's poetry resembles that of the
other contributors to Les Cenelles in its idolization of French
romanticism in general and of Alphonse de Lamartine's Méditations
Poétiques in particular. Lanusses work comments on
the plight of people of color in New Orleans. The poets who wrote for
Les Cenelles tended to draw exclusively on commonplace romantic
themes of melancholy and fantasy, individualism and the mal du siècle,
while remaining silent about the political implications of their racial
status. But in his poetry Lanusse alludes to highly charged issues like
the institution of plaçage (see Épigramme
)--the arranged extra-marital unions between young free women of color
and wealthy white men. As he wrote in the introduction to Les Cenelles,
Lanusse was convinced that education was the only way that people of
color might hope to improve their situation in life: See: Régine Latortue and Gleason R.W. Adams. Les Cenelles: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century. (Boston: G.K. Hall 1979). |
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Sidonie de la Houssaye et Léona Queyrouze: Beyond the Belle Créole Sidonie de la Houssaye and Léona Queyrouze both led lives that defied the traditional roles reserved for the mythic "belle créole". More than simply beautiful women distracted by idle pastimes, dependent on their husbands in all respects, and blindly faithful to the established order, de la Houssaye and Queyrouze were both able to make their voices heard in the mans world in which they lived. After the death of her husband, Sidonie de la Houssaye turned to teaching and writing to support her large family. Léona Queyrouze, who was raised in the elite and culturally rich world of wealthy New Orleans, boldly pursued her literary ambitions. She made several amorous conquests among men of letters in pursuit of her dream of being a well-known writer. Both writers were progressive and emancipated women of letters writing in a mans world. top |
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Case 13 Léona Queyrouze was born in New Orleans
in 1861 to a wealthy Creole family. Her father was the son of a veteran
of the Napoleonic wars who immigrated to New Orleans and sold wine and
groceries imported from France. Her mother was a Creole from Saint Martinville.
As she grew up Queyrouzes parents held salons at their home that
attracted the luminaries of the Creole intellectual world. Because she
joined adult conversations at a very young age, the precocious Léona
earned the nickname "little Mme de Staël," a reference
to the woman writer who then enjoyed enormous popularity in France and
Europe. At 15 Queyrouzes parents sent her to France to improve
her skills in the French language. Soon after she returned to Louisiana,
she befriended the locally famous writer Lafcadio Hearn, forming a partnership
that would play a great role in her future literary career. Their relationship
soon became the talk of the town. Hearn encouraged her to write and
he read her first poems. Queyrouze soon published poems in L'Abeille,
which she signed with her male pen-name: Constant Beauvais--the name
of her grandfather, a former Louisiana governor. "Vision",
here displayed in manuscript and published versions, was one of her
most well-known poems. From an early age, Léona Queyrouze was
surrounded by older men who were at the same time her mentors, confidants
or suitors. Her correspondence with Victor Cousin, a man forty years
her elder, is typical of her relationships with the men in her life.
When he first met her in 1881, Cousin recited the following lines to
her: See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932). |
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Case 14 Sidonie de la Houssaye was born in 1820 to a rich
Creole family of both French and German descent that had played an important
role in colonial Louisiana. As a girl, she was tutored by a French governess
who instilled in her a love for the French language and its literature.
At fourteen she married Pelletier de la Houssaye and settled down in
Saint Martinville, a town that was nicknamed "Louisiana's little
Paris". Since the late Eighteenth Century, St. Martinville had
served as a refuge for French noblemen seeking to escape from the guillotine.
Sidonie de la Houssaye gave birth to fourteen children of whom only
three survived. She and her family moved to Franklin, Louisiana in 1841
and soon faced serious financial problems. These difficulties became
worse when in 1863 Raymond Pelletier de la Houssaye died and Sidonie
de la Houssaye undertook the task of raising and educating her children
by herself. She began to earn money for her struggling family by teaching
her neighbors children along with her own. She opened a school
for girls in 1849, reopened it after the Civil War in 1867, and opened
another school, with the help of a Miss Wallis, in 1882. Her daughter,
Lilia, died in 1875, leaving her eight small children in the care of
their grandmother. It was during this period that Mme de la Houssaye
began to publish serial stories and various other literary works in
newspapers like LAbeille, her main goal being to meet her
family's financial needs. Her texts were written in French and some
of them were later translated into English by her grandchildren. She
also wrote many stories for her grandchildren, most of which have never
been published. Mme de la Houssaye found, in a diary written by her
grandmother that she discovered in her attic, much of the material she
used in writing her short fiction. The well-known writer George Washington
Cable soon bought the rights to de la Houssayes work and borrowed
from her grandmothers diary in search of material for Strange
True Stories of Louisiana (1889) and perhaps also for Old Creole
Days (1879) and The Grandissimes, A Story of Creole Life
(1880). In "How I got them," the introduction to this book,
Cable briefly alluded to Mme de la Houssaye. The manuscripts borrowed
or bought by Cable from de la Houssaye were photographed for Cable's
text Strange True Stories of Louisiana. In 1878, Sidonie de la
Houssaye began Les
Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans, seen here
in both manuscript and published forms. These texts were published in
the newspaper Le Méschacébé, but their subject
matter was so controversial that the author signed them with her nom
de plume, Louise Raymond. The stories were centered around the legendary
beautiful women of mixed blood in New Orleans, known for arousing guilty
passions in the men of high society. In 1890 L'Athénée
louisianais awarded Mme de la Houssaye a gold medal for her active
contribution to the promotion of the French language in Louisiana. She
died in 1894, at seventy-four. Being in-step with the particular rhythm
of Louisiana, punctuated as it was by upheavals and other historical
troubles, Sidonie de la Houssaye was a privileged witness to the century.
She saw creole life take shape on the plantation and in the Antebellum
slave society, endure the Civil War and Reconstruction, and reemerge
as the tenacious Creoles tried to preserve their unique culture. top See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932). |
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Louis
Moreau Gottschalk and Basile Barès:
Crossing the Musical Color Line Louis Moreau Gottschalk was the most prominent figure in Creole New Orleans music of the Nineteenth Century. His contemporary, Basile Barès was perhaps the first man of color ever to have had his music published while still a slave. Their compositions can be construed as two different models of the creolization of music. In his early work, Gottschalk capitalized on the stereotypes of Black Creole music, giving to his works titles such as "Bamboula, a Negro Dance", Barès was also inspired by Creole culture, notably the emblematic figure of the "Belle Créole". However unlike Gottschalk, Barès did not explicitly refer to the African influences on Creole New Orleans culture. It is interesting to notice that each of these two composers borrowed cliched images and stereotypes from the other's culture and how this borrowing enriched and complicated Nineteenth Century Creole music. top |
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Case 15 Louis Moreau Gottschalk , the first American pianist
and composer to achieve international fame, was born in New Orleans
in 1829. His Creole mother and British father raised him in an environment
full of contrasts. In the first years of his musical education in New
Orleans, Gottschalk was influenced by the diverse culture of New Orleans,
as Le Bananier (The Banana Tree and Bamboula,
Danse des Nègres (Bamboula, Negro Dance), would
later show. In 1842, at the age of 13, he went to Paris to pursue his
studies and soon entered the elite circles of French culture, rubbing
elbows with Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Frédérique
Chopin, Jacques Offenbach and Hector Berlioz. During his first years
in Paris, the young Gottschalk gave many public recitals. The novelty
of his work, which displayed influences from the black and Creole cultures
of New Orleans, earned Berliozs admiration. In 1846 and 1847 the
two musicians performed together for a series of concerts at the Théâtre
des Italiens. Before returning to America in 1853, Gottschalk performed
hundreds of concerts in the major cities of Europe. While he had been
praised in Paris as the Louisiana pianist and composer,
Gottschalk realized upon disembarking in New York that his fame had
arrived before he did. New York in turn brought him success and glory,
but the death of his father brought Gottschalk new financial responsibilities,
and he became the main bread winner for his large family. In 1854 Gottschalk
traveled to Cuba to give a series of concerts. He went back to New York
and became famous for his expensive piano lessons and adventurous love
affairs. In 1857 he returned to the West Indies to begin a tour with
Adelina Patti, the young singer who was later to perform with great
success at the Theaters of New Orleans. Everywhere they traveled in
Central and South America jubilant crowds greeted the pair. It was in
the course of his five-year stay in the West Indies that Gottschalk
started to keep a diary. His sister Clara later translated and published
this diary under the title Notes of a Pianist. In Cuba, Gottschalk
set up gigantic festivals and concerts during which he would perform
such compositions as La Fête champêtre cubaine
(The Cuban Village Feast), La nuit des tropiques
(The Tropical Night), and La Grande Marche (The
Great March). Adamantly opposed to slavery, Gottschalk renounced
his loyalty to Louisiana and sided with the Northern cause before leaving
Havana in 1862. During the Civil War, he toured frenetically around
the United States, giving more than a thousand concerts between 1862
and 1865. While in California, Gottschalk was involved in a scandal
with one of his students. The incident drove him back to Latin America
in 1865 and he was never again to return to the country where he was
born. Gottschalks life was characterized by intense travels, outstanding
success wherever he performed and admission into the highest spheres
of local societies. Gottschalk would often play concerts of his own
music with immense orchestras of local musicians. He continued to compose
new works throughout his lifetime and his published music sold well.
Under the influence of Louis Fors, he became something of a local reformer,
giving speeches in Buenos Aires or Montevideo about the advantages of
the American public school system. In the spring of 1869 in Rio, he
appeared weakened by an illness (probably yellow fever) that he had
carried along with him most of his life. Gottschalk stopped his concert
tour to rest. In November of the same year he collapsed over his piano
in the middle of a concert. His doctor diagnosed an infection of the
intestines and urged him to get some rest away from Rios heat.
But on December 18, 1869, Gottschalk died at the age of forty. Rio gave
him a majestic funeral but New York claimed his body the next year,
and he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. top See: William E. Korf. The Orchestral Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. (Henryville: Institute of Midaeval Music, 1983). |
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Case 16 Gottschalks success on the world stage demonstrated
the vitality of the Nineteenth Century New Orleans music scene. Several
composers of color born in Louisiana had successful careers in Europe.
Edmond Dédé, probably the most well-known of this group
of artists, studied at the Paris conservatory and served as a conductor
and composer in Bordeaux. Basile Barès was another prolific and
popular composer of color from New Orleans. Although little is known
about his early life, Barès was probably born the slave of a
New Orleans piano merchant; his 1860 piano piece Grande Polka
des Chasseurs à Pied de la Louisiane, (The Great
Polka of the Louisiana Infantry) was published while he was still
a slave. Barès studied with New Orleans musician and composer
Eugène Prévost, also teacher to the young Dédé.
Barès traveled several times to Europe, but unlike Dédé,
chose to remain in New Orleans and to there pursue his musical career.
He often performed with two other Creoles of Color, Samuel Snaër
and Victor-Eugène Macarty , to whom Barèss dedicated
his piano piece, La Belle Créole . These musicians
performed in a variety of settings including benefits for Creole of
Color benevolent organizations and off-season concerts in the theaters
of the city. Barèss popularity grew even outside of the
Creole sector of New Orleans. He published over twenty pieces of piano
music, with both French and English titles, and led a popular string
band that performed at carnival balls . As is evident in his published
sheet music Barès frequently invoked the iconography of Creole
New Orleans made popular by Gottschalk. Unlike Gottschalk, however,
Barèss Creole Music for Piano does not explicitly
refer to the African influence on Creole culture. While Gottschalk incorporated
the imagery of an exoticized black New Orleans into his music, Barès
chose romanticized Creole images and titles for his own published compositions.
top See: Lester Sullivan. Composers of Color of Nineteenth Century New Orleans: The History Behind the Music. in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisianas Free People of Color. ed. Sybil Kein. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000). |
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