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LEONA QUEYROUZE (1861-1938) LOUISIANA FRENCH CREOLE POET,
ESSAYIST, AND COMPOSER
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In
The Department of English
by
Donna M. Meletio
B.A., University of Texas San Antonio, 1990
M.A., University of Texas San Antonio, 1994
August, 2005
ii
©Copyright 2005
Donna M. Meletio
All rights reserved
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their support throughout this project and for their patience and love, I would
like to thank my daughters, Sarah, Maegan, and Kate, who are the breath and heart of my
life. I would also like to thank the strong and beautiful women and men who have walked
through this life journey with me: my life-long friend Dr. Denise Baskind and her
husband Steve, my sister Mary Ann Appleby and her husband Bob, Mary Siffert, Susan
and Steve Caspers, Lomeda Montgomery, Pat Nover and Greg, Eileen, and my wonderful
family: my mother, my brothers Carl, Larry, and Richard; Mike and Tami Slater, Ken
Jury, and Quintin Stansell.
While I was LSU, I met many brilliant and compassionate people in the doctoral
program, and if it were not for Shelisa Theus, Susie Kuilan, and Terri and Ryan Ruckel
who offered love, encouragement, and academic passion, this path would have been too
hard to travel. I would also like to offer my heartfelt thanks to my committee, Dr. John
Lowe, Dr. Carolyn Ware, Dr. John Rodrigue, and Dr. Qiancheng Li who made this
project possible. Last, I would like to thank one of the most remarkable teachers I have
ever met, my director, Dr. Edward White, whose humor and kindness always gave me
courage.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS….……………………………………………iii
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………...v
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………...................1
CHAPTER ONE: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………..7
CHAPTER TWO: “WHO ARE THE CREOLES?”……………………..43
CHAPTER THREE: VIEUX CARRÉ…………………………………….67
CHAPTER FOUR: THE SALON CULTURE AS A FOLK GROUP…..92
CHAPTER FIVE: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONFLICT…………..126
CHAPTER SIX: QUEYROUZE IN LITERARY CONTEXT
AMERICAN AND FRENCH………………………..173
CONCLUSION………….………………………………........................216
WORKS CITED……….………………………………………………...223
APPENDIX: POETRY…………………………………………………..234
VITA……………………………………………………………………280
v
ABSTRACT
This new historicist study chronicles the life and work of a Louisiana French
Creole, Leona Queyrouze (1861-1938) who grew up in the turbulent era following the
Civil War. Her articles and poetry, mostly written in French, were published in the local
periodicals, L’Abeille, Comptes-Rendus, the Picayune and the Crusader under the
pseudonyms, Constant Beauvais, Salamandra, and Adamas. She also translated plays
from French into English in New York under at the request of Harpers Bazar and wrote
two symphonies that were performed at the World Exposition in New Orleans in 1884.
Through an ever-widening critical lens, I focus upon her personal life, her ethnic
identity as a Creole, the Vieux Carré, and her salon that included such notables as writer
Mollie Moore Davis, Charles Gayarré, historian; Paul Morphy, chess player; Dr. Alfred
Mercier, novelist and dramatist; General P.G. T. Beauregard, Adrien Rouquette,
bohemian poet-priest, and Lafcadio Hearn who later became an important figure in the
fusion of eastern and western literature. Her salon functioned as a folk group, one that
created the Athénée for the preservation of French culture through its literary organ, the
Comptes-Rendus. In the symbolic acts of conservatism and dynamism, according to the
twin laws of folklore, they were instrumental in preserving the French Creole culture at
the same time they were factors in its change.
In her writing, Queyrouze addresses the key issues of the period and calls for
egalitarian reform and suffrage even as she struggled with her own elitism and
assumptions of racial hierarchy. In the final analysis, I compare her work to that of
mainstream American writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins
vi
Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin who were calling for social reform from
within the patriarchal social structure while Queyrouze was positioning herself as an
outsider in work that was both elegiac and rebellious. Contrary to the Protestantism and
realism of her counterparts, including George Washington Cable, Queyrouze followed the
French romantic aesthetic traditions codified by Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset, and
as such, her work challenges our notions of a monolithic American literature.
1
INTRODUCTION
I discovered Leona Queyrouze in the summer of 1995 when I retreated from a
summer storm into a museum off Jackson Square in New Orleans. As the rain continued
to pour outside, I walked the halls of the Cabildo museum looking at portraits of kings,
bishops, statesmen, and aristocrats. After a while, I came upon the arresting face of a
serious young woman in a simple gown. Leona Queyrouze Barel-- the placard read--poet,
essayist and composer. Intrigued, I asked a woman at the desk for more information about
her, and she promised to send some to me. That moment was the beginning of a long
journey into the research of her life and work, the French Creole culture, and the history
and politics of the region. What emerged was a person as complex as the time and place
she lived. Leona grew up in a time when the face of our nation was changing and when
the conflict of the Civil War illuminated the vast ideological differences in our country. In
this time of sweeping change and growth, America was a vast flood taking all with it, and
cultures that had been dominant in certain areas of the county either became part of the
mainstream or were left behind. While many ethnic groups successfully assimilated into
American culture, the French Creoles consciously chose to separate themselves. Whether
this was due to French chauvinism or as a reaction against Anglo-Saxonism as described
by Nell Painter’s Standing at Armageddon, the Creoles orchestrated their own demise.
Their story, however, is one aspect of American history that deserves recognition because
it demonstrates the dilemma faced by many ethnic cultures: If the French Creoles defined
themselves by their own ethnic markers and pitted themselves against the Anglo-
Americans, they risked marginalization, but if they did not take that risk, they faced an
untenable situation—the loss of their heritage. In the latter case, the Creoles loss is our
2
own, for we lose the depth and richness that this culture would have offered, and we also
lose the ability to see our history and our society in all of its complexity. This
intersection of conflicting dynamics between dominant and non-dominant cultures is one
worthy of investigation because it demonstrates how cultural differentiation can affect the
inclusion of an ethnic group into mainstream culture. To that end, a study of the French
Creole culture, and particularly the personal observations of one of its members in the
person of Leona Queyrouze can enhance our understanding of our own cultural and
political history. According to Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, the value of such a study
can “bring about a much-needed reorientation in historical consciousness [ . . . that] may
force readers to question past and current generalizations about literature and history of
the United States” (9-10). This has been the ultimate goal of my study, and the key in
achieving this objective is to focus on those who experienced the tumultuous period while
being powerless to effect any change or exert any influence other than to share their
opinions through personal correspondence and through the publication of commentary in
the newspapers. Edward L. Ayers points out that “new chronologies and issues emerge
when we look beyond the public realm, when we explore the diaries and fiction as well as
editorial and political correspondence” (vii). Such is the case for Leona Queyrouze who
published her opinions under her own name and under the names of Constant Beauvais,
Salamandra (Greek: “Fire-lizard,” symbol of unshakable courage and faith that cannot be
destroyed by fire), and Adamas (Greek: “Unconquerable,” the metal used to make the
swords for the gods; another name for a diamond).
Leona retained a love of French literature and culture while addressing the cause
of social justice, yet, she like many others, was susceptible to social prejudice. This
3
investigation of Leona’s Queyrouze’s letters, poetry, essays, and short stories will reveal
that her political views were more complex than the polarizing public debates of the
period, which were predominantly divided along partisan lines. She explored ideas in a
manner that was a contradiction of sympathies and allegiances, and a study of her life
reveals that she was as complicated as the Creole culture itself. She was one of the many
forgotten voices in a tumultuous historical period, a voice then can only be described as a
mosaïque of sentiments, which is understandable in someone who experienced first-hand
the political and social upheaval the late nineteenth century. The objective of this
dissertation is to retrieve a portion of our past according to the treatise set forth by
Frederic Jameson who asserts that a slice of history should be “returned to life and
warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message” (“On
Interpretation”19). In pursuit of this goal, this study will provide an intimate glimpse into
the life of a woman who articulates the grieving process of cultural loss though her
poetry, essays, and speeches.
There are several applications to this dissertation that serve its structure and
intent. First, because this study is a precursor to a critical biography, I have written the
first four chapters in a narrative style and have referred to Leona Queyrouze as “Leona”
rather then by her last name. These chapters focus on her with a “close-up lens,”
including a biographical sketch, the definition of the term Creole, a description of her
environment, and a study of her salon as it functioned as folk group. These angles will
investigate all aspects surrounding her life, including the sights and sounds of her streets,
the headlines of newspapers, her intimate companions, her family, and the people she
loved. As my focus shifts towards the political and literary landscape-- and as the camera
4
lens widens to capture the panorama of these issues-- Leona Queyrouze becomes more
peripheral and the perspective more impersonal.
Second, I will use a new historicist infrastructure as a foundation in order to
demonstrate how Leona both defined her culture and was defined by it. Utilizing the
theoretical foundations of Michael Foucault, Gottfried von Herder, and Clifford Geertz,
as applied by Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, I will use the new historicist
lens to reveal how her culture becomes the text that is articulated through her work. Her
oeuvre will be contextualized as it embodies and represents a constructed zeitgeist that
cannot be separated from the value system inherent in any social system. Greenblatt and
Gallagher believe that through this perspective, we can retrieve “figures hitherto kept
outside the proper circles of interest,” such as the “learned women excluded from easy
access to the materials of scholarship” (9-10). One goal of new historicism is to bring
these marginalized voices “into the light of critical attention” (11) because these voices
“did not spring up from nowhere . . . their achievements must draw upon a whole lifeworld”
(13). Thus, we must “treat them as part of the history that needs to be interpreted”
(15). Equally important to my study is the fact that while new historicism is “deeply
interested in the collective, it remains committed to the value of the single voice” (16).
Leona Queyrouze’s work will be subjected to folkloristic inquiry that investigates
not only the definition of the text, but the function it serves. Ormond Loomis states that
because “culture is essentially abstract and ineffable,” we must rely on “cultural
expression, the overt evidence of cultural identity” (7); therefore, a study of a cultural text
can “serve to inform future generations of their cultural past” (3) Pursuant to this, I will
apply the definition of the folk group to the Queyrouze salon, as described by Dan Ben5
Amos, Harris Berger, Giovanna Del Negro, Richard Dorson, Alan Dundes, Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Elliott Oring to show that this salon was an expressive folk
group consciously attempting to safeguard its cultural markers in the face of rising
Americanization.
Third, I have inserted significant passages from original unpublished manuscripts
to serve as a departure point for other scholars who may not have immediate access to
Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library archives. My objective in making her
work available is to assist critical inquiry and to serve scholarship that challenges the
notion of a monolithic national literature. The overarching goal is to re-capture
marginalized voices and to retrieve the faint relics of failed social constructs.
Even though the French Creole culture ultimately failed to retain its hegemony in
Louisiana, an intimate study of this group juxtaposed against the larger canvas of
American literature reveals both common and divergent interests and themes. In viewing
the intersection of rising Americanization and the failing Creolization, one can capture
what Werner Sollors describes in Creole Echoes as a “lost cultural moment” (xvii). He
points out that the literature of the French Creoles has largely gone unrecognized “for it
has tended to be marginalized in both American and French literary studies,” and he
concludes that this may have been caused by the fact that the literature of the period was
imagined in terms of “national location,” and writers who referred to themselves as
Creoles were using a nationally and “racially ambiguous term” (xvii). He observes that
these writers “often drew on French forms but at times infused them with Louisiana
themes. They produced an impressive variety of highly accomplished verse” and while it
is “impossible to press these heterogeneous poems into the service of any single
6
overarching interpretation” (xviii), these poems offer a glimpse into a culture that lost its
place in the forward movement of American literary history. In the Preface to Creole
Echoes Norman Shapiro states that “many of these almost unknown poets had produced a
substantial canon that did not deserve the relative oblivion into which it had fallen”
(xxii). One of those voices belonged to Leona Queyrouze, and this study serves to retrieve
that lost voice.
7
CHAPTER ONE: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Perhaps the most perplexing and laborious
of all tasks, is to annihilate one’s self so
completely as to become qualified for
judging; and that is what must be done to
enable us to look for truth, with some safety,
at ourselves and others
--“Patriotism and Wagner” Leona
Queyrouze
Leona Queyrouze’s journey towards artistic expression began over a century ago
on February 23, 1861 in the parish and city of New Orleans. Mrs. Leon Queyrouze (Anne
Marie Clara Tertrou) registered Leona’s birth on May 24, 1866 with the full name of
Marie Leóna Queyrouze. The five year delay in the registration of her birth, according to
local historians, was customary because the time to register children’s births was before
they entered school rather than at the time of their births. Leona’s mother, Clara Tertrou,
was a descendant of French aristocracy, the Cathelineaus, De St. James of Picardy and the
Beauvais, some of whom came to America during the reign of Louis XIV. To honor her
mother’s family name, Leona would adopt the name, Constant Beauvais, as one of her
pseudonyms when she began her writing career. Leona’s father, Leon Queyrouze, was
born in Beaumont in the Peregrine region of France and moved to Louisiana where he
met and married Clara. While it is not certain whether it was his family or his wife’s that
owned vineyards in France, nor is it certain how they acquired the plantation in St.
Martin’s parish, which was named Leona, records indicate that before the two Queyrouze
children were born, the family moved to New Orleans. Leon Queyrouze registered the
birth of Leona’s younger brother, Maxim (Jacques Maximé) on January 5, 1870, and
records show that he was born at the family home at No. 17 St. Louis Street in New
8
Orleans on November 27, 1866. Leon opened a grocery store with a partner on St. Louis
Street near the family home. He later became a wine importer as a sole proprietor.
What survives of their time in St. Martinville (a town that was also known as “the
little Paris” of Louisiana) can be found next to the St. Martin de Tours church. Next to the
statue of Evangeline is the gravestone of a young Charles Tertrou, who according to
family records, would have been the older brother of Leona’s mother, Clara. Clara’s
ancestors were considered to have been heroes in the French revolutionary war in
Vendee. Her family had lived in Picardy, but had fled France when the head of the James
family had violated Richelieu’s ban against dueling. They eventually settled in Louisiana
under the name of Beauvais. Clara was the daughter of Laurent Tertrou who married
Louisa Beauvais. He died in 1840, and Louisa remarried to Alexander Thenet. Years
later, Louisa Thenet would receive a letter from the French Academy of Sciences in
Bordeaux, France, praising her granddaughter, Leona, for her literary accomplishments.
Little more is known of Leona’s mother and her family, for most of her correspondence
or personal papers are not included in the archive material. Most documents donated by
the family concerned Leona’s papers and those of her father, Leon.
Leona’s father was born in France on February 3, 1818, the son of the first officer
of Napoleon’s empire. At the age of twelve hewas sent to America under the care of his
uncle who was a prominent businessman in New Orleans, and his uncle sent him to
college in Lexington, Kentucky, and then to Havana, Cuba (in 1833) to learn Spanish.
When Leon returned to New Orleans in 1835 he went to work for his uncle. First, he
worked as a clerk at “Carriere, Daran & Co.” for five years, and then became a partner.
9
After his marriage, Leon Queyrouze became a wine merchant, first under the
auspices of “Queyrouze and Langsdorf,” and then as “Queyrouze Bros.” at #17 St. Louis
Street (this is now 523-5 St. Louis). However, with the advent of the Civil War, he closed
his business. On April 12, 1861, he was appointed for a five year term as captain of the
Orleans Guard No. 5, First Division, by Thomas O. Moore, the Governor of the State of
Louisiana and commander in chief of the militia [UU-68 1:3]. He then served as major
and commander of the Orleans Guard Battalion and later became a colonel under General
P.G. T. Beauregard. During the Battle of Shiloh, he was wounded in the knee and
convalesced at Opelousas. When he returned, he was arrested by the Union Army under
General Butler who sent him to prison for two months. Refusing to sign the amnesty oath,
he fled to Cuba where he worked for a brokerage business until the following year. After
that he traveled to Matamoras where he served under General Mejia before returning to
New Orleans. Even though the Queyrouze family insists (as do the newspaper accounts
written for his obituary) that Leon did not sign the amnesty oath when he returned, there
is a document entitled “Amnesty Oath” dated August 22, 1865, signed by the justice of
the peace of Ouachita parish in Louisiana with Leon’s signature[Queyrouze Papers
UU-68 1:3].
Upon his return he re-established his wine importing business under a new name,
“Queyrouze and Bois,” with a partner and then went out on his own as “Queyrouze Co.”
Records indicate that at one time his business was also located on Tchoupitoulas Street.
Housed at the Historical New Orleans Collection is an 1887 Business directory that lists
Leon Queyrouze as a “Wholesale Grocer: Importer of Wines and Liquors: And dealing in
all kinds of Western and Country Produce.” According to letters, he may have imported
10
wine from wine merchants Delhomme Freres in Bordeaux, France. Records also indicate
that he retained ownership of his plantation and other properties after the war, which
would have been impossible unless he had signed the oath. In 1880 he sold the Leona
Plantation in St. Martin’s parish to Emile L. Carriere, and among the family papers there
is a certified copy of the mortgage he held on the plantation dated April 14, 1887. He also
owned property in St. Landry parish. During his lifetime, he became a prominent citizen
and became president of the 5th Ward in New Orleans; he was a member of the
Democratic Club, the Union Francais and the Casadoras Association; he was also one the
principle founders of the Athénée Louisianais, a society organized to preserve French
culture and literature. Until the time of his death he had been active and healthy, but after
a brief illness, he died at age seventy-seven on January 18, 1895. His memorials deemed
him a “soldier, merchant and citizen.” A lengthy funeral procession, which included the
surviving soldiers of the Battalion of the New Orleans Guard, followed his casket draped
with the battle flag of Shiloh.
Leona inherited her father’s independent spirit, and Leon and Clara nurtured this
by making certain that Leona received an extensive privately tutored education. They
wanted their daughter to learn the classics in the original languages of Greek and Latin,
and to study European literature, philosophy, science, art, and music. To that end, Leona
would awaken every morning at five to begin her lessons while her father went to work at
his store. At age fifteen, she spent time in France furthering her education. She was
confirmed a Catholic and received her certificate from St. Mary’s Church in New Orleans
on May 20, 1880 at the age of nineteen. By the time she was a young woman, she was
fluent in seven languages: French, English, Spanish, Italian German, Latin, Greek, as well
11
as regional Creole. Her father treated Leona as a companion, and she was an integral part
of Queyrouze salon soirées. According to Norman Shapiro in Creole Echoes Leona’s
father was an “open-minded and intelligent man [who] frequently hosted soirées with the
city’s intellectual elite. As a young girl, Leona was permitted to attend these evening
discussions, which became part of her already unorthodox education” (143). Edward
Larocque Tinker in Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days describes her education as
very different from that of the typical young person of [a] good French family.
Her father was a man of excellent education, broad-minded and tolerant and his
house was a rendezvous for the best Louisiana French minds of that day . . . . Here
they talked literature, philosophy . . . religion. . . . As she had always been the
constant companion of her father, she was well-fitted to profit by these meetings,
which she always attended, and very soon, her father’s friends accepted her on a
basis of mental equality. Her acquisitive mind broadened and she lost all the
mental inhibitions, false modesty and fanatical religious ideas so often found in
women of her race and class in those days. In addition, she fenced, wrote poetry,
played the piano admirably and sang all the old Creole songs (263).
Some of the members of their salon included Placide Canonge, journalist, art
critic, and director of the French opera house, and Paul Morphy, the champion chess
player. He was the subject of the novel, The Chess Players written by Frances Parkinson
Keyes, who used Leona’s unpublished manuscript about the life of Paul as source
material. Other frequent guests were General P.G.T. Beauregard, Armand Mercier, a
surgeon, and his brother, Dr. Alfred Mercier, a novelist and historian. Paul Deschanel, a
French author, visited the Queyrouze family in 1892. (Subsequently, he was elected to the
Chamber of Deputies as a Progressive Republican in 1885, and then he became President
of the Republic in 1920.) In an interview on June 29, 1932, Leona listed many of the
12
visitors to her home: “Our home on St. Louis street was the meeting place for Gayarré,
the two famous Dr. Merciers, General Beauregard—we even entertained Paul Deschanel
who became president later of France, and other celebrities” [“Reveals New Hearn Data”
UU-71 7:52].
During salon gatherings, Leona often performed recitals for her guests, having
mastered the piano under the tutelage of Paul Morphy’s mother. Several of her
performances included an extensive catalog of works from Beethoven, Chopin, and
Gottschalk, to Weber.1 The Queyrouze Collection includes her longer works, the Victory
Military March and the Fantaise Indienne, which were written for the World Cotton
Centennial Exposition of 1884-5. These were performed by the 8th Calvary of the
Mexican Army Band under the direction of Captain Encarnación Payen on March 25,
1885 in a musical program at the Music Hall Exposition Building.
She was an accomplished woman, well-educated and well-traveled, and one of her
accomplishments included fencing. Letters in the collections indicate that she received
her training in foils from C.S. Jones in New Orleans. She was so skilled, in fact, that her
brother, Maxim, who had won the southern championship in fencing, admitted that his
older sister surpassed him in the art. Leona also spent time in France, and the invoices
and receipts from her personal papers indicate that she spent time there furthering her
education.
But it is her poetry, her essays and her letters that are of most interest, because in
these her independent spirit and her concern for political, social and cultural issues reveal
1 see the list of the sheet music in her possession in the Queyrouze Papers [X-97 9:67-89], as well
as her own compositions, including “The Summer Husband,” “The Last Sigh of the Dude,” The
Passerby,” and “At the Ball” [X-97 9:66].
13
themselves. She published under four names (her own, Constant Beauvais, Salamandra,
and Adamas) in a variety of publications, including the Times Democrat, L’Abeille, The
Crusader, and Les Comptes Rendus de l’Athénée Louisianais. Her first published essay
was “Etude on Racine” [UU-71 8:60], and she held a reading of this for the Athénée
Louisianais at the request of the president and founder, Dr. Alfred Mercier. The event
was held at the Grunewald Hall on Baronne Street. Leona was the only woman granted
membership in the Athénée, and Dr. Mercier proclaimed “that her intellectual
development was so rapid . . . . [that she should be] considered a fellow-scholar and
thinker” [“A Distinguished Lady of the Crescent City” UU-71 7:52]. According to
biographical sketches in various periodical articles found in the archive, Queyrouze is
credited as the first woman to give a speech in public in the city; indeed, this was the first
time in Louisiana history that a woman had read her own work in public. She later
presented two essays in two separate conferences; the first one was entitled L’Indulgence
[UU-71 8:60]. Presented at the Union Francaise, this speech was a plea for religious
tolerance, and it was favorably received. As a result of this conference she received the
appellation “the Creole philosopher,” a term coined by a London journalist who had
attended the conference. Her work was also published in the New Orleans Spanish
language newspaper, El Moro de Paz, and the El Buscapie in Puerto Rico.
Her second conference paper, “Patriotism and Wagner” was presented on June 3,
1887 at the Continental Guards Armory on Camp Street. Under the sponsorship of Alfred
Mercier, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Placide Canonge and after an introduction by Charles
Gayarré, Leona mounted a clear and strong argument regarding the passion and prejudice
of patriotism, and she discussed the true meaning and responsibility of liberty, tyranny,
14
violence, justice, reason and ignorance [“Patriotism and Wagner” UU-70 6:47] As with
any powerful political position, her speech received mixed reviews. Although it was a
“physical, metaphysical interpretation that astonished and charmed” [“Distinguished
Lady” UU-71 7:52], it nevertheless resulted in a flood of controversy, and she was
accused of being too fervently patriotic and too loyal to France. Undaunted, she published
a heated response in the newspaper that defended her love of France and made no
apologies for her position.
One of her greatest accomplishments was her recognition by the Academy of
Sciences at Bordeaux in France for her poem “Vision” (See appendix for complete text in
French and English). First published in the Comptes Rendus, it was later published on
July 9, 1885 in the French newspaper, le Nouveliste de la Gironde and received
recognition and acclaim. The president of the Academy, Mr. Combes applauded the
beauty of her language, saying in a published letter to M. A. Thenet dated January 28,
1885, “Ce sont de beaux vers que ceux que vous avez bien voulu m’offrir de la part de
Mlle Leona Queyrouze, votre petite-fille, et il y a lá l’imagination et l’âme d’une vrai
poète de l’école deLamartine et de Victor Hugo” [UU-71 7 :52]. (“These are beautiful
verses, those you have offered from Mlle Leona Queyrouze, your granddaughter, and in
them is the imagination and the soul of a true poet in the same school of Lamartine and
Victor Hugo.”) Other poems that were widely read and favorably received were “Atlas,”
“Ce qu’ont dit les montagnes,” “Magdalena, “Moise,” and “Samson” among many others.
Two of her sonnets, which were dedicated to the French Republic and to President Sadi-
Carnot, were read at the French colony in New Orleans; this event was presided over by
the French consul, Bosseron d’Anglade on October 13, 1893, to commemorate the arrival
15
of the Russian fleet at Toulon, France. The commander of the fleet, Admiral Makaroff,
personally thanked Leona for her work.
While Leona sought recognition for her work, she also used these opportunities to
express her point of view on such issues as culture, race, politics, literature, art and music.
Her concerns ranged from her own community to those in America and in Europe, and
her correspondence included exchanges with her circle of friends, many of whom were
prominent community leaders, such as Charles Gayarré, Placide Canonge, Charles Testut
(author of poems, historical novels, and Portraits Littéraires de la Nouvelle-Orléans); Dr.
Alfred Bubos who was the editor of L’Abeille, Alcibiade de Blanc who was a Louisiana
Supreme Court Justice, Mollie Moore Davis, who was a New Orleans novelist, and
Adrien Rouquette, the bohemian poet-priest who lived with the Indians in Saint
Tammany parish. She also corresponded with James Redpath who was a war
correspondent during the Civil War as well as an abolitionist, writer, publisher, and the
managing editor in 1886 of the North American Review, and with Sarah Bernhardt and
Emile Zola. Anatole Victor Cousins, an older man who lived on a plantation outside of
New Orleans often corresponded with Leona, and in their love affair of letters (1882-
1889), he was fond of calling her “Ma lionne” (my lioness), an appellation she appeared
to deserve and appreciate.
The portrait of Leona that I saw in the Cabildo museum I have learned since was
painted in 1880 by John Genin (1830-1895), an artist who had studied in Paris under the
guidance of portrait artist Leon Bonnat. In this portrait, he depicts Leona as a serious,
simply clad young woman, standing next to her desk with her bookcase behind her. Mrs.
Harold Queyrouze, who had personally known Leona, said that she was a petite woman,
16
about 5’4”. From a newspaper clipping in the Queyrouze papers entitled “Author
Receives Copy from Japanese Publishing Company” Leona was “described in a New
York magazine article as ‘short, dark, very foreign-looking with an arm on which the
flesh is hard as marble from her constant use of the fencing foils, big mystical eyes and a
masculine mouth’” [UU-71 7:52]. In Edward Larocque Tinker’s Lafcadio Hearn’s
American Days, he describes a bracelet that Leona wore, one that inspired an admirer—or
perhaps her brother-- to immortalize in a poem. Tinker says that it was a “gold bangle of
curious design . . . which her grandfather had given to her grandmother” (264). The
significance of this bracelet is that it symbolized pride of her family as well as her
lineage. The admirer wrote about her bracelet in January of 1890:
And thou quaint bracelet, Leona’s fondest charm,
Ancestral relic of a glorious race,
Thou once encircled a royal Britton’s arm;
And even now a nobler arm grace:
For thou when worn, Leona’s wrist embrace.
And ne’er did’st thou on worthier arm shine-- J.S.M.
[UU-70 6:45].
Another admirer, Ella A. Giles, describes Leona in this way:
Leona Queyrouze [is] the embodiment of literary and aesthetic culture and
philosophic learning, yet unassuming and straightforward as a child . . . . Though
surrounded by all the evidence of a highly conservative training, how frank and
fearless her speeches, how resonant with feeling her deep and melodious voice,
how unaffected and genial, yet perfectly independent and self-reliant in her
manners. There is enough reserve to maintain dignity, enough seriousness to
preserve womanly poise, but there is in her nature no dissimulation, no distrustful
17
“society unsmilingness [sic]” . . . [she] lives a secluded and retired life, but it is
because she is a worker and not because she is a willing victim to inherited
principles of aristocratic aloofness
[UU-71 7:52].
While these sketches are useful in re-constructing her life, I chose to speak to
someone who knew Leona, so I contacted Mrs. Harold Queyrouze (“Jerry”) who is the
daughter in-law of Leona’s brother, Maxim, and I interviewed her and the surviving
Queyrouze family in their modest home in New Orleans the summer of 1996. Jerry
related how Leona loved to wear lace dresses with high black boots and how she was
fond of wearing a comb in her hair with a lace mantilla. The furnishings in her apartment
were exquisite: There was a half table with a white marble top, and an 1840 Rosewood
desk with intricate carving with a hidden drawer. A chandelier that she had made into an
electric one lit the room, and her bed was a four-poster with a crown top.
Although Jerry had described Leona as very quiet and retiring, she was far from
that in her youth. When she was young she had been very bold, vibrant and passionate
about social causes. This passion for literature and concerns for social issues may have
been one of the reasons that in January of 1887, she struck up a friendship with Lafcadio
Hearn. Year later, he would earn worldwide fame as a translator of Japanese folktales into
English, and he would be credited with having “anticipated the modern literary and
cultural contact between the East and the West;” moreover, he would play “a vital role in
the formation of modern cosmopolitan literature” (Yu 21).
At the time she met him, however, he was working as a local reporter, translator,
and commentator on literature, including works by Théophile Gautier, Guy de
Maupassant and Pierre Loti. With Leona’s assistance, and the help of her Martinique
18
servant, Marie, Hearn translated Creole folktales into English. Even though his time with
Leona was brief, I will show that their friendship had a significant impact on her life and
on her writing.
Lafcadio Hearn was a reporter in Cincinnati, but after having read some of the
color sketches of the New Orleans area written by George Washington Cable, he packed
his suitcase and took passage on a steamer down the Mississippi. When he first saw New
Orleans, he was enchanted, but he was soon disillusioned when he found himself in poor
health and in dire financial straits. He finally secured a job at the Item, translating
excerpts from foreign presses and making social commentary on current events. Then he
went to work for the Times Democrat. Jackson describes him as a very observant and
insightful person, in spite of being blind in one eye and having only partial vision in the
other. She relates that he “had been born on the Greek island of Santa Maura, the child of
a runaway marriage between an English surgeon-major in the British army and a local
Greek girl” (288). The marriage ended in divorce and Hearn’s mother went back to
Greece. Soon after his mother abandoned Hearn, his father sent Hearn to live with his
aunt in Wales. Jackson surmises that this was the reason that he became “moody,
distrustful of even the most sincere of friends” (288). Hearn then moved to Europe and
from there to New York, and then finally settled in Cincinnati. While there, he “married”
a woman of color in an unofficial ceremony, but soon thereafter, he left for New Orleans.
In a Hearn biography, American Days, Tinker relates that Hearn’s first work in New
Orleans involved writing sketches about cooking, civic problems, and music-- anything
that took his fancy. He also started work for the Times –Democrat in 1881 and “often
translated the works of French or Spanish writers” into English (Jackson 289). In some of
19
his book reviews, he praised George Washington Cable, “Father Adrien Rouquette . . .
Dr. Alfred Mercier . . . and Elizabeth Bisland” (289). Hearn met Bisland while they
worked for the Times-Democrat, and they remained friends after she left to work at the
Cosmopolitan Magazine in New York in the late 1880s. In 1906, Bisland published a
two-volume biography of Hearn, which included letters to his friends while he was living
in New Orleans and New York.
While in New Orleans, Hearn became very close friends with a young surgeon,
Dr. Rudolph Matas, and Hearn later introduced Matas to Leona. When Hearn published
his novel, Chita (1889), he dedicated it to Matas. Forty-three years later, when Leona
wrote her memoir about her relationship with Hearn, she dedicated her book to Matas as
well, in a gesture that honors her friendship with Matas, but more significantly, reveals
her lingering literary and emotional debt to Hearn.
The immediate and close connection between Leona and Lafcadio was expressed
through their correspondence, and their passion was obliquely channeled through their
discussions of literature. While their association was brief, for Leona, at least, its intensity
lingered for a lifetime, and because of this I have chosen to give attention to this facet of
her life. This serves to inform her biography and to humanize her life work. While I will
avoid biographical fallacies, I will not assume a disconnect between her poetry and
Hearn—particularly involving those poems that were specifically addressed to him. In
addition, some specific biographical detail is necessary to address some discrepancies in
scholarship. Because of conflicting accounts as to the date of their meeting, I have used
excerpts from several sources to corroborate my facts.
20
Some scholars have noted that Leona met Lafcadio when she was in her teens;
however, she was twenty-six at the time of their first meeting. During my interview with
the Queyrouze relatives, they related that Leona may have arranged a meeting with Hearn
or was introduced to him. They said that she met him at a library on Royal Street and that
he accompanied her home. In his biography of Hearn, Jonathon Cott asserts that Leona
and Lafcadio met in January 1887 at “Fournier’s secondhand bookshop on Royal Street,”
and he describes Leona as “a pretty young Creole woman with black hair and brown
eyes” (201). After a brief conversation, Lafcadio escorted her home. Cott’s information
was clearly based on Edward Larocque Tinker’s Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days.
Tinker relates how Hearn met Leona in “Fournier’s old book shop on Royal Street”:
[A] young, pretty girl, unmistakably a Creole from her jet black hair and deep
brown eyes, passed the shop and seeing him inside, hesitated, then entered. Going
up to him she said: “I know you are Mr. Hearn, I recognized you from your
picture in the Times-Democrat . . . . I want to ask your advice . . . . Hearn was
captivated by her youth and enthusiasm and intrigued by the acumen of her
cascade of questions--questions which she had been saving up for months in the
hope of some such opportunity--so he was kindly and offered helpful advice . . . .
They drifted out of the shop together, and Hearn only left her when they reached
her door (262-263).
However, Junko Hagiwara states that they met at Garcin’s bookstore, noting that
“Queyrouze knew that Hearn often stopped by this bookstore because she knew Garcin’s
daughter” (3). While some scholars cite Leona’s age at the time of their meeting as
fifteen, this might have been caused by some confusion between Leona and Elizabeth
Bisland, who met Hearn at the Times-Democrat when she was fifteen or sixteen. By all
21
other accounts Leona met Hearn when she was twenty-six, in 1887, the year she returned
from working in New York.
As in anyone’s life, there are moments of clarity, which are remembered for a
lifetime, and Leona’s recollections of her meeting with Hearn reveal the significance she
placed on this moment. In her memoir, The Idyl (1932), she recalls that “in the Latin
heart of the old Creole town, in the well known second hand dealer’s shop of books rare
and antique, there it was that I first met Lafcadio Hearn, on a mellow spring-like day of
January 1887, the last year of his stay in New Orleans” [UU-70 6:46]. While she admits
that time had blurred many of her memories, she says that some were so clear that they
could have happened yesterday. She vividly remembers their first meeting. This excerpt is
from her original manuscript in the archive:
. . . as I walked in the shop, I heard Garcin’s familiar voice: Ah! Voici justament
ma jeune amie, Mademoiselle Leona Queyrouze, Monsieur Hearn. There was no
further introduction; and it was surely as informal as he could have wished, in his
dislike of conventionalities. His first words to me were: So you are one of the bees
that come to the garden for flowers with the golden dust to make the divine honey
and the tiny goblets of amber colored wax that hold it. I am afraid there shall be
little left for me, I replied. But the garden is large and the flowers are plentiful
[UU-70 6:46].
In several interviews, Leona describes their meeting in reverent detail, which
further underscores the significance of the moment for her. Each time she describes the
event she adds nuance:
I was a girl, romantic and poetic. I had just returned from New York where I had
been working for the Harper’s Bazaarand was then writing for L’Abeilleand the
old Picayune. He showed an interest in me from the beginning. He was not shy,
but full of reserve and of observing powers [UU-71 7:52].
22
In another interview, the reporter summarized Leona’s recollections and quoted
some of her exact words:
[They met] on a Spring [like] day in January [sometime] in the 1880s, in a
secondhand dealer’s shop in the French Quarter. She saw Monsieur Jean Garcin,
the proprietor, whom Hearn had called the “Vendor of Wisdom,” roaming with
lordly mien among his “Isle of books,” and she saw him, the great Hearn, not then
great, but young and striving, standing by the open volume of “L’Origine de tous
les Cultes,” a man sphinx-like, with “the introspective stare of a statue . . . . the
delicate features of his face, the thin sensitive nostrils.”
Monsieur Garcin introduced them, and Hearn compared her to a bee that came to
this garden of flowers, and she replied the garden was big enough for him also
[UU-71 7:52].
In a different interview she described their meeting in this manner:
“I remember vividly, although I was a girl at the time, my meeting with Hearn . . .
. I was in a bookstore flipping leaves of poetry volumes when I noticed the little shriveled
man. He too was looking through books and holding the volumes close to his eyes,
almost to his nose. We were introduced and from then on he became a visitor at my
father’s home at oldNo. 17 St. Louis street, calling frequently [UU-71 7:52].
By the time they met, Hearn had been in New Orleans for almost ten years as a
reporter for The Item and the Times-Democrat and had become disillusioned by New
Orleans society. Indeed, he had a reputation for writing rather unflattering
characterizations of French Creoles in The Item; therefore, his friendship with Leona, a
French Creole, was an unlikely alliance—perhaps for both of them. Regardless of their
cultural differences, their relationship progressed rather quickly as if they both knew that
their days together were numbered, sharing as Hearn described, “a few grains of sand.”
23
In The Idyl, she remembered that the “first call was soon followed by another, and
he became a frequent visitor” (6). Subsequently, there were a series of letters and
personal visits over the next five months that caused some speculation and rumors. In the
same manner as she had described their first meeting, Leona shared some of the details of
their brief relationship. In a newspaper article dated June 29, 1932, she relates how Hearn
came to see her while trying to avoid contact with other visitors at her home:
[Her] home on St. Louis Street was the meeting place for Gayarré, the two famous
Dr. Merciers, General Beauregard . . . and other celebrities. Poor Hearn would
come to see us and when he heard the chatter of visitors would turn away from the
door, leaving the servant mystified or would stick a note for me in her hand and
walk hurriedly off [“Reveals New Hearn” UU-71 7:52].
In Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days, Tinker explains the level of intimacy and
privacy that they both shared. During their time together, Leona taught Hearn about
Creole proverbs, and their passion was channeled obliquely through their discussion s of
literature:
Hearn found excuse[s] for coming back, and that the habit of calling was formed.
She discovered that he left immediately if any one else came in. He explained this
away by saying that he hated small talk, but she believed his sensitiveness had
even more to do with it. So it came to be tacitly understood that on certain
afternoons she was at home to him alone. They always sat on a sofa near the
window in the large high-ceilinged drawing room with its handsome old furniture,
where the light was good so he could read. Here they talked frankly and openly. . .
She helped him with his Creole proverbs . . . He often gave her invaluable literary
advice (263-4).
24
Leona’s description in The Idyl of her home, Hearn’s visits there, and his
friendship with her servant, Marie, will serve to enliven her biography with sensory
detail:
The massive porte cochère or courtyard gate opened and as it closed slowly he
walked through the spacious and shady, arched corridor or hall-way leading to the
immense court-yard all flooded with sun, and in which grew a luxuriant and
partially tropical garden between the great walls covered with creepers and vines
of all kinds. There he paused beneath the lofty arch to take a long look and then
was shown up the high stairs by Marie, our old Creole family servant who
announced in low, soft tones: Massie Lacadie, but stopped short, unable to
pronounce the rest of the name. English and Marie had never grown familiar. As
we met in the parlor, more properly speaking, the library, he said: your strong old
Spanish home and the sudden vision of the unsuspected garden, in fact sometimes
in the atmosphere makes me think vaguely of the Alhambra [UU-70 6:46].
Well into her late seventies, Leona was still able to re-capture their time together.
In an interview, she described the intensity of their discussions, which revealed an
intellectual passion unimpeded by Hearn’s request that Leona view him only as a
“younger brother”:
He came through the big porte cochère. He paused by the lofty arch. He went up
the high stairs. They sat in a room with a huge book case, with statues of dragons
and other monsters, with bacchantes and fauns. And they spoke of his poems
again. Precious thoughts came from his mind like a golden metal.
“I would like for you to look upon me as a younger brother,” he said. They spoke
of philosophy, of Hypatia. They became intellectual friends. He came again and
again. He would say, “I come to claim a few grains of sand of your time.” He gave
her a copy of Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles of Synthetic Philosophy.” They
talked of Heine’s poems [ UU-71 7:52].
25
Hagiwara believes that Hearn was “afraid of falling in love with her [which] can
be observed in his first suggestion to her when he dared to say that he wanted her to
consider him a brother” (2). In her poem, “Le Regret,” Leona may have been expressing
the same fear tinged with regret. She describes two people who are reading together, and
as they read about “love and songs of sorrow,” theyrealize their own passion even as they
know that it can never be acknowledged. By the poem’s end she is left alone with only
the busts of Scevola1 and Diana for company.
Together, they lean towards a book.
Young are these two. The old copper lamp
With its open eyes, pierces the profound darkness
Making them sparkle and shine,
Two pupils under its tawny breath.
They read together in two soft accents
Of thriving love and songs of sorrow,
Of simple things that inspire misfortune,
And the crying voice of the soul.
As he reads again to the woman beside him
One wonders, are they friends or lovers?
The blood of their hearts beat, pressing.
Their blood is the same, their homeland the same
But do they live in each other’s eyes?
No, they are subject to the hand of Chance.
The future lies between them and their eyes
Will never meet, nor cross the impenetrable shadow.
Their hearts shall flee like waves on the sand,
Their happiness will bend like ocean seaweed
Unsettled by the waves; his bitter breast
Will Retreat, rolling far from the dunes.
1 Scevola was the Roman soldier who failed to kill the Etruscan king who was
blockading Rome. Upon his capture, he placed his offending left hand in a fire. So
impressed was King Porsenna by Scevola’s courage that he ended his siege of Rome.
26
They turn to another page,
But as he reads, his voice falters; there is a change
In him as the flood fades.
And with pure clarity the sky opens
tearing open the horizon, showing the way
Because they now know that their hands will never touch
And their lips will remain silent
For they will guard their inner secrets
And scold their hearts despairing
Even as the need to confess rises to overflowing.
Such is the searing wound, like a hot liqueur,
Before it rights itself, trembling for an instant
Before falling without a voice
Revealing nothing, and with silent eyes
They lower their eyes again to the familiar words.
In the shadow of the chamber, now there is one
Figure cast upon the wall, alone.
Nearby, the bust of the wild and menacing Scevola
Smiles at the chaste and fiery mouth
of Diana, reveling under his bronze mask
An obscure angle, put there by the sculptors’ hand
1885 (C.R.A.L. 227) [UU-70 6:47].
(Appendix 267)
This poem suggests that Leona believed that there was much unspoken passion
between them, and that even though their time together was spent on reading and
discussion, for Leona, at least, there was much more than this. Her references to Diana
and Scevola symbolize dedication to courageous passion, juxtaposed against Hearn’s
misplaced propriety. In the poem, “Le Désir,” she describes the “kiss that never reaches
the lips/ the whimsy of a butterfly attracted to a star,” and then says that it is our
“misfortune to live and to love/ where rising suns give birth to our lost tears” [UU-70
6:47].
27
While these poems indicate that Hearn affected Leona emotionally, they also
show that he had a great effect on her writing. When they first met, he told her that he had
seen one of her poems in the L’Abeilleand that he had liked it. Encouraged, she asked if
he would review her next poem, “A Legend of Mainz,” if she left a copy at the bookstore
for him to collect. He agreed, but when he responded the next week, he regretted to tell
her that he found no value in the poem, and she discarded it. What can be gleaned from
the letters between Hearn and Leona is that he discouraged her from writing poetry,
saying that it was of such poor quality that she should not pursue a writing career. He said
to her: “I hope you will be discouraged as much as possible because I have too sincere an
admiration of your power in other directions to wish to see you attempt such valueless
labor” (Idyl 8-11). Leona admitted that “the sting of his sarcasm was sharp and corrosive
like that of the wasp, and the wound it inflicted smarted long and sorely,” but also
acknowledged that “he was gifted with a keen sense of humor” (The Idyl 6).
In another interview Leona described Hearn as “was usually a hard task-master.
He would often read my poems and essays and say, ‘That’s not worth much, Leona,’ and I
would promptly throw them away” [UU-71 7:52]. In The Idyl, she says that often when
she was ready to throw some her work in the fire, he would tell her to wait “until you
have taken out some lines which may be used later, in some other writing.” She “realized
that it was as hard for him to please himself as for others to do so. His criticism of his
own work was merciless until it was completed” (5). He did, however, encourage her
prose and tried to interest her in reading one of his favorite writers, Herbert Spencer.
Significantly, Hearn offered Leona advice that if she had taken heed, might have
changed the direction and outcome of her writing career. Noting her propensity to write
28
flowery and sentimental verse, Hearn advised her against her present course and pointed
the way towards a new direction in writing—that of realism. Founded upon principles
established in French literary circles, realism was taking hold in American literature, and
it paved the way towards a new means of expression embraced by iconic American
writers, such as Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Jack London, and Stephen Crane. These,
among others, defined and dominated the American literary landscape at the turn of the
century. Leona’s failure to utilize the advice offered by Hearn resulted in self-defeating
literary endeavors. Hearn critiqued her attempts at blank verse and encouraged her to find
the true “art-spirit” of undistorted and unadorned depictions of real-life experiences. He
tells her that only these “faithful pictures” will endure through time:
We are all apt, all of us, until something suddenly reveals our error to us, of
rendering blank verse without a thought of its intrinsic value,--without any
definite comprehension of its anatomy. It lives, and it delights: we do not think of
asking why or how, any more than we think of trying to define the laws of grace
revealed in the movements of a thoroughbred . . .
What is wanted, what will succeed, what will endure, are reflections of present
existence, artistic and faithful records of what we hear, see, and feel through the
impressions made upon us by those social forces of which we form integers.
Realism . . . insures originality . . . . no two lives are absolutely alike, no two
minds alike, no two life-experiences alike, one who simply attempts to make a
faithful picture of what is . . . without trying to ornament it or exaggerate it, or
distort it, must become interesting if the true art-spirit is there (Idyl 8-11).
As history will show, it was her misfortune not to follow his suggestions about
realism. While she did take note of his comments concerning blank verse, her resulting
rhymed verse, which adhered to the aesthetics of the Romantic period, only exaggerated
her distance from mainstream American poetry.
29
Unaware that she was disregarding valuable advice, Leona thanked Hearn for his
criticism, and he responded by saying “Thank you for what I have never before received,-
-a kindly word in return for disagreeable criticism” (Idyl 18-19). Together, they began to
work on their own projects, and during his visits he became acquainted with Leona’s
“Martinique-born maid, Marie, who proved to be extremely useful” in helping him
become familiar with the Creole dialect that influenced his novel Chita (Hagiwara 3). At
the same time Leona was working on the Paul Morphy biographical sketch, “The First
and Last Days of Paul Morphy” (that later would be used in Francis Parkinson Keyes’
novel The Chess Players). This intimate working association might have been
opportunistic on Hearn’s part, for he has often been described by scholars as a
“wandering dreamer, a rootless cosmopolite, a self-styled exile, a frightened escapist, a
heartless lover, a shameless friend” (Yu ix). However, he affected Leona deeply, and in
his biography of Hearn, Jonathon Cott states that when Hearn left New Orleans he left
Leona broken-hearted. When I asked the Queyrouze family if they were aware of any
romantic involvement between Leona and Hearn, they could give no definite answer
except to say that there had been “talk.” Apparently Hearn had earned himself a bit of a
reputation because of his nightly excursions into disreputable parts of town accompanied
by a friend who was notorious for getting into fights, and “rumors of his many
indiscretions were brought to [Leona], but she did not believe them” (Tinker 265). All
that the Queyrouze family remembered hearing about their relationship was that Hearn
had spent many evenings at supper with the Queyrouzes and that Leona had assisted him
in translating Creole folktales into English. They believed that her wealthy French
30
Catholic family would have never approved of a romantic association with a person of
such meager means, especially someone who was not Catholic. Tinker cites other
reasons:
At first Hearn attended the reunions of this group of older men who met at her
father’s house, but it is not surprising that this did not last long. Their tempers
were too hair-triggered and his own peculiarities were too marked. When he
began to write Creole proverbs and folklore a feeling arose that he was
encroaching on a field that was theirs by right of inheritance (265).
During their brief association, Hearn avoided, if possible, any contact with the
men of Leona’s salon and only visited the Queyrouze home in the afternoons. Leona said
that “he disliked making new acquaintances, and called when he thought there were less
[sic] chances of meeting outsiders.” Furthermore, he “shunned the crowded avenues to
popularity, including literary clubs which he considered like centers of mutual
admirations or as he once expressed it more forcibly: Praise Exchanges” (Idyl 5). But his
personal visits to Leona ended, according to Tinker, after a quarrel. “Hearn had always
told his friends that he would never marry an intellectual woman, whether this had
anything to do with it is pure conjecture” (265). After their disagreement, he reportedly
told her that he would never speak to her again, and she responded with a poem--perhaps
aimed at Hearn-- in L’Abeille entitled “Solitude.”Tinker summarizes this poem:
It is preceded by a Latin quotation, “De Profundis Clamavi” (from the deeps I
call), and tells how she awaits him, counting each beat of the wing of seconds,
asking whether he does not remember the agonized call for help forced from a
suffering soul anxious for life . . . . “Nevertheless, you have not come, following
your path, your eyes upon a book” (266).
31
They must have resolved their differences soon thereafter because Tinker notes
that Hearn went with her to visit her father’s plantation. Apparently there was an
overgrown and vine-encroached garden behind the main house, which had such a sad
appearance that Hearn wrote about it as though it was a garden where the witch-like
Medea grew “strange herbs [ . . . and made] potions and charms [in] her haunted and
sinister garden” (267). Hearn remarked that Medea had lured a bee-keeper to her island in
order to learn the secret of making honey, and that she seduced him instead—thus, it was
her own fault that she never learned to make honey. Leona responded to Hearn in
L’Abielle with the following verses (translated):
“Résponse” a L.H.”
Medea, you have spoken the words of truth
and have taken your name, thus, woman of somber eyes
with a heart shy yet proud, filled with rebellion and shadow
And you hold the hand of a friend named: Treason!
Poets, make your honey, for she will make it poison
With curses and prayers without end
Calling from the heavens when hope grows dim,
And her screams will shake the walls of your turret.
She drinks deep the dew of the rose’s trembling chalice;
Taking the rays of morning for her own
even as she sees in the night with cold clarity
the places of tombs that give rise to hate
where she will reap her harvest while humanity sleeps
and quietly claim her own like a moth in the night
May 27, 1887 L’Abeille
[UU-70 6:45]
(Appendix 270).
32
When Hearn read “Response” he wrote, “Medea is much too weird. Of course, she
is but a shadow; yet, the shadow is so fantastic that one hesitates to look towards that
which cast it” (Idyl). This response is significant because it serves as a glimpse into the
character of their relationship. Their association appeared to be defined by Leona’s’
willingness to be both pupil and admirer, but when she strayed from that role, Hearn
recoiled. Others were not so put off by the power that cast the “shadow.” One admirer,
Bowman Matthews, wrote this response:
To Medea!
Salve! O Medea! Enchantress of the mystic eyes
Taught by Ancient Magicians the future to Devise
Whose piercing gaze discerns the secret springs of thought,
By occult science reads the lines that Fate has wrought.
Whence comes the power, O Seer, what potent spirit dwells
Within those orbs of darkness to work its wondrous spells?
Art thou the same Medea that to Jason gave the fleece,
When the Argo came to Colchis with the hero band of Greece?
A traitorous friend was Jason, but if I prove to be untrue
Take back the “poet’s honey,” the floral cup of dew!
Give me the draught of poison, and I will drink to you!
[UU-70 6:45]
Hearn, however, seemed to be retreating from more then just Leona’s words, and
as it turned out, she was the last the last friendship he made in New Orleans. Not long
afterwards he departed for Martinique, and Leona described his departure in The Idyl,
making reference to the last grains of sand that had escaped the hour glass of their time
together:
33
Grain after grain the sands have been running, carrying along the hours, days and
weeks, and June was at hand already, leading in the long and languid summer
months. He had accomplished his task of love, Chita. In one of his last visits he
told me that he was making final arrangements to leave New Orleans; and he
handed me a large envelope saying: this is not intended for the family album. It is
to remind Medea sometimes of Aristeus, the honey maker. It was his photograph
with the inscription To Miss Leona Queyrouze—with sincere wishes of her
friend.—Lafcadio Hearn,--June 1, 1887 (11).
On his last visit to her, once again, Hearn offered her advice on her writing. Leona
wrote down his parting words “as soon as he had left the house, to preserve the accuracy
of the meaning” (11). He urged her to look beyond the physical world into the depth of
her psyche to find meaning and significance in her work and advised her against looking
only at earthly beauty for inspiration:
[Do not] seek inspiration merely around you in the exterior world and its powerful
vibrations which fill our senses with the ecstasy of beauty. It is in the psychical
depth of our own Self that we must look to find treasure which Aladdin’s lamp
never could have revealed (Idyl 12).
One has to wonder what would have happened if the tenure of their relationship
had been extended to the point where Leona would have taken his advice, for he was
inviting her to join the realists who expressed their insight in terms of everyday
experience; however, this question presumes that longevity would have granted influence
and does not consider Leona’s significant exposure to literary circles in New York. In
any event, when they parted ways, they were taking different directions in their literary
careers, one leading to recognition and the other obscurity. Hearn departed to find new
inspiration on new soil, and his farewell to Leona was both wistful and poignant, much in
the romantic style favored by Leona:
34
If we don’t meet again on this little planet, which is possible but not probable, we
surely will later in some other cosmic station, before we reach Nirvana, the great
Terminal. Could we not make an appointment and try to remember it?
(Idyl 12).
A short time after Hearn left he wrote to his friend, Matas, on July 1, 1887: “I am
not skeptical now, but I do not know what to do, I fear to write to her. All fire and nerves
and scintillation; a tropical being in mind and physique,--I could never be to her what I
should like to be” (Nishizaki 90-91), and apparently his fear overcame his impulse.
Regardless of the speculation as to whether this was truly a love affair, Hearn’s impact on
Leona was deep and long lasting. Matas, who was a close friend to both Lafcadio and
Leona “treated Queyrouze’s romantic involvement with Hearn as a given” (Hagiwara 2),
and when Leona was questioned in an interview about her about her relationship with
Hearn, she responded in this way:
[She] smiled when asked if Hearn were in love with her and said in her quick
French accent: “That is hard to say. There was perhaps some romantic attachment.
But Hearn was not a man to speak of love. He had a wandering mind then and
couldn’t fit into a conventional marriage” [UU-71 7:52].
After Hearn’s departure, he spent two years writing travel sketches in the
Windward Islands of British Guiana, in St. Pierre, and on the island of Martinique. From
there, he went to New York to review the final proofs of his novel Chita. In 1890 he left
for Japan, never to return (Bisland 98).
While Hearn was in New York in 1889, Leona may have been there at
approximately the same time--but this is only speculation. Leona spent a year there in
35
1886 and once again in 1888-9 to translate French and Creole plays into English for the
American stage at the request of Mary Booth, the editor of Harpers Bazar. Booth had
become acquainted with Leona during the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial
Exposition in 1884. Records indicate that Leona traveled to New York several times.
Whether she saw Hearn there in 1889, however, is impossible to determine. There are
some indications that this may have occurred. In the Hearn biography, Bisland includes
numerous letters, and several in particular that Hearn wrote during this time. One is
written to an anonymous man: it reads in part:
To___________ 1889
. . . I have been shivering here, and have got to get South somewhere soon,--if
only till I can get back to the tropics. I am sorry to confess it, but the tropical Circe
bewitches me again—I must go back to her (469).
Others letters are written to an anonymous woman:
--there are no more mysteries,--except what are called hearts, those points at
which individualities rarely touch each other, only to feel a sudden thrill of
surprise as at meeting a ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what
lies out of soul-sight . . . . . . . . I have been so afraid of never seeing you again
. . . .
To______ March 7-8, 1890
. . . . I shall be very sorry not to see you again . . . .
I might say love you,--as we love those who are dead—(the dead who still shape
lives);--but . . . I cannot say. . . .
. . . . –Forgive all my horrid way, my dear, sweet, ghostly sister.
Good-bye,
Lafcadio Hearn
(Bisland 470-475).
36
Whether or not these letters were written to Leona is uncertain; indeed, this raises
the question as to why they were in Bisland’s possession and not in Leona’s. Perhaps they
were meant for Bisland, but this does not explain Bisland’s reasons for leaving the
salutations in the letters blank when she included them in the Hearn biography.
Regardless of speculation, there remains an interesting correlation between Hearn’s
request for Leona to view him as a “brother,” and his reference in the farewell letter to his
“ghostly sister.”
Hearn left New York and finally settled in Japan where he quickly assimilated.
By 1895, he already had a wife and child and had begun the task of translating Japanese
folktales into English, a life work that won him admiration and widespread fame. As for
Leona, she returned to New Orleans having found the pace and the people of New York
too fast for her. She also realized that her translation work for the New York stage was
not a feasible project “because of the incompatibility of New York and New Orleans
cultural and theatrical interests” (Hagiwara 2).The Queyrouze family told me that Leona
left New York, quite simply, because it was not a French town. Since only twenty years
had passed since the end of the Civil War there was still residual animosity, and Leona
retreated to the security of her traditional and parochial culture.
When Leona returned to New Orleans she seemed a changed person. No one can
say for sure what brought about this change; perhaps it was a final farewell to an
unrequited love or the repudiation of American mainstream literary culture in New York.
Whatever the reason, there was a distinct difference in her writing from that point
forward, almost as if her psyche had been split in two—between the public philanthropic
activities as evidenced by her articles and essays, and the private self as revealed in her
37
poetry. As I shall demonstrate in Chapter Six, her rhetoric articulates the stages of grief as
it vacillates between anger and resigned endurance at her perception of the usurpation of
her culture by those she called “Anglo Saxons.” Her work is elegiac, and her verses are
filled with loss and longing, not only for the loss of her culture, but for the loss of love.
One such example of this can be found in a poem Leona published seven years after
Hearn’s departure entitled “Fantôme D’Occident: A Lafcadio Hearn Au Japon:” She
likens Hearn to a moon and says that once the moon is hidden, the stars can reveal
themselves. However, these stars—like pupils-- cast their lights on the water much like
Ophelia, who falls into insanity and despair after having been ignored and cast away
during Hamlet’s obsessive pursuits (much like Hearn’s).This ultimately leads to her
drowning—a theme that is pervasive in Leona’s oeuvre.
The golden Chrysanthemum now blossoms
unrestrained under the vast night skies
In a place of mystery, and in a strange embrace
The growing slender threads catch the light.
The ghost of the moon appears without a sound
Pretending to hide its face with its hands.
--a distant phantom, with a vague complaint
All at once it disappears, fainting away.
It comes from a country where the pure and blond Night
Can never entirely escape the bonds that tie,
Of azure blooms and white magnolias.
The moon gives birth to the trembling stars
Each one a tearful pupil, where like the shadow of Ophelia
In a deep river, they cast their veils
(L’Abeille December 23, 1894)
[UU-71 7:52]
(Appendix 250).
38
Likewise, in the poem, “Le Désir,” she says that it is our “misfortune to live and
to love/ where rising suns give birth to our lost tears” (C.R.A.L. March 1885/ Appendix
249). These two poems in combination with “Le Regret,”and “Solitude,”indicate the
depth of her feelings for Hearn and explain the sense of reverence she feels for him even
years later when she was asked by the Hokuseido Press in Tokyo to submit The Idyl
(1932) for publication. This clearly indicates that there must have been some significant
connection between the two of them for Leona to have held onto the few brief letters
Hearn had sent to her, the ones that are included in The Idyl. This romanticized
remembrance of Hearn written before her death still holds the hallmarks of young love.
When she was finished with her manuscript, she entrusted it to a friend, and in one of
life’s odd twists of fate, “the man who broughther manuscript to Hokuseido in Japan was
John Garcin, whose father had owned the New Orleans bookstore where Hearn and
Queyrouze first met” (Hagiwara 4).
Her attachment to Hearn also raises the question as to whether her marriage in
1901 was one of convenience. Other than the “Bonds of Matrimony” document
witnessing their marriage at St. Mary’s Church in New Orleans dated December 26, 1901,
there are no letters or keepsakes in connection with a widower Pierre Marie Etienne Barel
whom she married when she was forty-one. The only items in the Queyrouze papers are
of a legal nature, such as his will and ownership of property, succession papers, transfers
and lists of real estate, tax receipts, and the final accounting of the assets of his first
marriage to Marie Jeanne Juilliat. When I asked the Queyrouze family about Pierre, they
told me, simply, that he was a family friend who lived in the neighborhood. There is only
39
one poem written just a few weeks before her marriage that may provide some indication
of her relationship with Pierre. The poem speaks of two people who are joined in
melancholy rather than joy. There is as sense of resignation and a call for peace and
harmony. Note that the setting of the poem is similar to that in “Le Regret,”but it lacks
that same emotional intensity:
“Nocturne”
We come together at this old table in our ennui
Before the hands of ice pass over us.
Yes, a tangled golden glow of light envelops us
And serenity comes to us in this place.
Come, review this book with me. It is the one
That will ease our confusion. Here is the place.
We choose not to believe that our lives are passing, but the trace
Of our tears and the echo of our laughter tells us so.
No, our stirring should be in harmony
Attuned on a lute with radiant chords
As our spirits become an offering to the Divine Breath.
Just as my hand turns these sheets of poetry
So, too, shall we be joined in the end,
I, you, as it has always been, in infinite sweetness
[UU-71 7:54]
( Appendix 261).
Perhaps her decision to marry was also based on the loss of a family circle that
had long supported her. Many of the men in her salon had been like fathers to her, and
they all passed away in the mid 1890s: General P.G.T. T. Beauregard and Placide
Canonge died in 1893; Alfred Mercier in 1894, and her father, Leon, and Charles Gayarré
40
died in 1895. Even after further research and the final edit of her upcoming biography,
these questions might remain unanswered, but what is known for certain is that Leona
seemed to slide into a private retrograde towards the close of the century. Wrapping
herself in sentimentality instead of looking forward, she turned to her poetry and looked
to the French Romantics for her inspiration, concentrating on the themes of death and
loss. Whether this has any biographical associations is perhaps less important than the
fact that her backward inclining is something that she shared with many of her French
Creole contemporaries who constructed a mythical cultural past, imagining it to be a time
when benevolent chivalrous plantation owners enjoyed an agrarian aristocracy.
In public Leona remained socially active and involved, associating with many
members of local organizations who held tightly to their disappearing culture. One such
group was The French Society of the Fourteenth of July, which was founded in 1890, and
presided over by Mr. Romain Senac. They opened a French school for boys at 724
Dumaine Street in the French Quarter, a school which was the “product of the labor and
patriotism of the members.” They chose Leona as the director of the school. Senac
declared that it would be a “patriotic institution inspired by the love of France” and cited
the purpose as the “propagation of the beloved French language and keep it from being
absorbed by the prevailing language of commerce [“French School: Formal Opening”
May 20, 1895. UU-71 7:53].
In addition, this society-- and many like it-- attempted to stem the rising flood of
Anglo-Saxonism by the creation of the Creole myth, which shall be discussed in Chapter
Two. This cultural bunkering sealed their fate, for as the stream of America moved
forward, the Creoles retreated into the backwater where they stagnated, preferring to
41
romanticize an imagined past, a fate that Leona shared. In many cases their cultural
blindness had an element of obstinacy that bordered on fanatic zeal, and many, such as
Charles Gayarré, his friend, Alexander Dimitry, and Placide Canonge went to their deaths
with this carefully nurtured vision. In another ironic twist of fate, Leona, who shared their
narrow vision, gradually began to lose her sight. As she advanced in years, she lost most
of her vision and spent her time as a recluse writing manuscripts with the help of a
companion and her brother Maxim.
Towards the end of her life Leona was still vital, as Jerry remembers her, but
rather quiet. She was almost blind, often kept to herself, and was fearful of strangers.
Jerry recalls that Maxim was very protective of Leona, and that she made no decisions
without him. Other than taking walks with Maxim, she remained at home. Leona did not
have a phone, for she preferred the grace and continuity of letters, and she never quite
mastered the typewriter even though her friends had urged her to do so before she went
entirely blind. In an interview she shared the writing technique she employed late in life
to compensate for her blindness and inability to concentrate for long periods of time:
I jotted down notes on bits of paper, on calendars, grocery bills, or on the back of
letters. I stuck them in my mirror or pinned them on a string stretched across my
room. All were numbered finally and put in a box. When my young friend who
lives with me got ready to type them for me into a book we sorted them out
[UU-71 7:52].
Leona could not even read the final draft of The Idyl when it was sent to her from
Japan. The Queyrouze family told me that until her death in January 1938 due to
congestive heart failure, Leona had a personal maid and one of her duties was to make
42
sure that Leona’s long full skirts did not brush against the small ornate iron coal burner
stove that was situated in the middle of the room. Thus, long into the twentieth century,
Leona remained a woman out of time and out of place, holding on to the vestiges of a
fashion and a culture that had disappeared long ago. She had failed to follow the literary
path that Hearn had urged her to follow, and in doing so, sealed her fate of obscurity. Her
life story serves as a relic of a vanished culture, and one that inhabits and gives meaning
to the concept of a lost cultural moment.
43
CHAPTER TWO: “WHO ARE THE CREOLES?”
Among the great federation of States whose Anglo-
Saxon life and inspiration swallows up all alien
immigration, there is one in which a Latin
civilization, sinewy, valiant, cultured, rich, and
proud, holding out against extinction
--George W. Cable The Creoles of Louisiana (1).
When the historical lens widens, it provides a frame to view not only individual
identity, but cultural identity as well, and in this case, grants a perspective on the
denotation and connotation of the term Creole. Leona Queyrouze was born a French
Creole in a time when Louisiana was being transformed, not only by the Civil War and
the subsequent Reconstruction, but by the changing demographics of her region. Long
before she was born, the fabric of her French Creole culture was unraveling, beginning
with the influx of Americans that began following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and
continuing with the flood of immigrants into the area mid-century. In effect, she became
an immigrant in her own city, New Orleans, and this sense of displacement permeates her
literary work. Throughout her essays and poems, there is a sense of loss and an obligation
to document the people and place of a quickly disappearing culture. Some historians trace
the origin of the demise of the French Creoles to the beginning of the nineteenth century
when the promise of rich soil for farming lured many Americans into the newly acquired
territory that included Louisiana. Rosan Augusta Jordan and Frank de Caro assert that the
“challenge to French ethnic hegemony had begun . . . virtually with the coming of les
américains after 1803, the resulting ethnic strife of the 1820s, and the waves of Irish and
German immigrants who flooded New Orleans between 1830 and 1860” (41). Other
44
historians also point to the French Creole attitude of complacency and lack of industrious
entrepreneurship as a factor in the ultimate demise, which is described by George
Washington Cable in The Creoles of Louisiana (1884). These and many other factors
contributed to the French Creole’s cultural downfall, and Leona was born into a time
when this submergence was almost complete.
Placing Queyrouze’s work into historical context can add nuance to our
understanding of the history of the region during the aftermath of the Civil War in
southern Louisiana and can provide an intimate glimpse into the life a French Creole in
the closing years of the culture. In her, we can find one of the voices of the “Silent
South,” those individuals of complexity and insight who do not fall nearly within the
parameters of political, cultural and ethnic delineation. Such is the case with Leona
Queyrouze who is at once an American woman writer, a French poet, a composer, a
French Creole, and a Southerner. She is all of these-- and none. Her life and work defy
boundaries and encourage us to look past our preconceived notions of literary and cultural
framework and to hear a voice that speaks at the close of the century and at the end of her
cultural place in the New World. While some scholars are quick to point out the flaws in
the economic and social construction of the French Creole culture, this kind of argument
is insupportable if it rests solely on the logical basis that a culture, which is inherently
flawed, represents each individual within that culture, and if it implies that an imperfect
society is one that should be dismantled. If that is the case, then all societies and all
cultures fall within these parameters. I argue that a worthier discussion should involve
one which investigates the resistance to a dominant culture. As such, the work of Leona
Queyrouze serves to chronicle this experience, and her poetry, short stories, essays,
45
music, and articles represent a voice aware of its demise, trying to rise from the ashes of
the South and the French Creole culture, an endeavor that ultimately fails. Many stories
are written of successes, but failures have their lessons, too. Perhaps through the
telescopic lens of history, her failures can lead us to successfully learn more about what is
lost and what is gained when ethnic markers are lost in the flood of mainstream culture.
Before we can fully address the twilight of her culture, we must first understand
what it means to be a Creole. Werner Sollars in Creole Echoes describes the difficulty of
this attempt for the term is “often the subject of debates, adopted or rejected by countless
authoritative-sounding commentators.” He cites Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who
believes that the slaves who came to America from Ethiopia first used the term in the
1700s. Sollors includes Balzac’s definition of Creoles as mixed races from “Europe, the
tropics and the Indies” (xviii), He adds that Mme Reybaud thought the term had to do
with one’s complexion and that Whitman reveled in the exotic confusion of dark
European and African skin tones. Others, such as Mayne Reid, denied that there was any
mixed blood. Still others, like Wilhelm von Humboldt referred to Creoles simply as
“Americans,” or more simply yet, as Gary B. Mills says in the Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture, that a Creole is “‘anyone who says he is one’” (Sollors “Forward” xviii).
Understandably, theses viewpoints point to a persistent confusion regarding the
term, and in order to sort through this, I will focus first on the genesis of the term and
then turn to the contributions made by George Washington Cable and Charles Etienne
Arthur Gayarré who had a determinant hand in the connotation of this term. Granted,
Cable had more influence because his work was more widely read, but I will address
equally each man’s contribution to demonstrate the polarity of the debate. By the end of
46
the nineteenth century, the term Creole was used to describe an exotic culture that was
introduced to the world stage by Cable, but it was also defined by the perpetuation of the
Creole myth fostered by Charles Gayarré.
Cable begins The Creoles of Louisiana, with the question, “Who are the Creoles?”
and likewise I will attempt to answer that question starting with the historical use of the
word and then describing the conflict surrounding it as the cultural demographics began
to shift after the Louisiana Purchase. In Creole New Orleans, Joseph Tregle describes the
historical misconceptions about the use of the word Creole. Some claim that the Spanish
conquistadors used the term to specify the children of white Europeans born in the New
World, and when Louisiana became a Spanish territory, the term “criollo” was used there.
In the 1600s and 1700s the term Creole meant simply “native-born” (136), and prior to
Spanish control, Louisiana people also used the term in this way. Supposedly, it was the
Spanish who considered “Louisiana slaves as criollos” (137), but there is still debate
surrounding this account. The origin of the word is also described in the Harvard
Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups:
“Creole” refers to people, culture, to food, music, and to language. Originally
from the Portuguese crioulo, the word for a slave brought up in the owner’s
household, which in turn probably derived form the Latin creare (create), it
became criollo in Spanish and créole in French (Thernstrom 237).
While there is some debate and speculation over the origin of the word, what is
known for certain is that when Louisiana became an American possession, the French
Creoles found themselves belonging to a nation of English customs and language. In
order to differentiate themselves from the Americans, they began to strengthen their
47
cultural identity and to take measures to solidify the fluid term, Creole. The Harvard
Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups describes this process of identification:
Louisianans of French and Spanish descent began referring to themselves as
Creoles following the Louisiana Purchase (1803) in order to distinguish
themselves from the Anglo-American who started to move into Louisiana at this
time. The indigenous whites adopted the term, insisting, most unhistorically, that
it applied exclusively to them. The life of this dying group is depicted in George
Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days (1879) and in some of the works of
Lafcadio Hearn (Thernstrom 237).
After the Louisiana Purchase, the non-indigenous people who had lived longest in
the region felt that they had greater claim to the land, so they were quick to use the term
Creole because they had been born in the New World and wanted to preserve their
investment in the land. At this point, they did not associate the term with color or
distinguish between white and black, perhaps because “color never enjoyed power to
mandate the language or habits of white men in prewar years” (Tregle139). From the
beginning, the use of the term in the New World revolved around the assertion of culture
and the pursuit of power.
This complex term has occupied the discourse of contemporary scholars because
its use touches on so many aspects of the region—its history, politics, and diversity. Their
responses demonstrate that the term is still highly contentious. Sybil Kein says that
“Creole has come to mean the language and the folk culture that was native to the
southern part of Louisiana where African, French, and Spanish influence was most deeply
rooted historically and culturally” (Kein xv). Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson says that the
“native white Louisianan will tell you that a Creole is a white man, whose ancestors
contain some French or Spanish blood [or . . . ] a Creole is a native of the lower parishes
48
of Louisiana, in whose veins some traces of Spanish, West Indian or French blood runs”
(8). Historian James H. Dormon offers this definition:
The precise definition of the term “Creole” has been the source of unending
controversy in Louisiana studies. My own working definition holds the realities of
historical usage, i.e. “Creole” meant simply “native to Louisiana” during the
period between circa 1720 and the outbreak of the Civil War. As such, blacks
(both slave and free) as well as free persons of color and indeed white Europeans
were all designated “Creoles” if they were born in Louisiana, or if they descended
from those were born there (616).
The definition offered by Dorman, however, changed long before the Civil War,
and it began its transformation during the influx of other cultures in the region after the
Louisiana Purchase, most conspicuously, Americans from the northeastern United States.
At first, when the Americans freely called the locals Creole, whether black or white, the
white French Creoles would correct them as a matter of courtesy. At first the French and
Americans lived together on equal terms according to an account by Alexis de
Tocqueville in Journey to America. “‘The French and Americans may criticize each other
mutually . . . but at the bottom there is no real enmity’” (Hirsch and Logsdon 7).
However, when the French Creoles began to lose their foothold in the area during the mid
1800s--both economically and politically--the Creoles began to feel threatened by the
Americanization of their city and retreated into the bastion of their parochial society.
In Creole New Orleans, Hirsch and Logsdon state that the influx of Americans
into New Orleans was a driving force behind the formation of the Creole identity and the
Creoles often magnified their identity as a buttress against the invading American
cultures. They derided the Americans and called themselves “cultural aristocrats” and the
49
Americans “uncouth backwoodsmen” (91), but as in all polarities, there is some truth and
much fiction. At first, the Creoles felt no threat, “no risk that such definitional partnership
might diminish their social status or prerogative of the dominant class” (Tregle 139).
When they began to feel the sting of associations, however, they used the term ancienne
population to separate themselves from the Americans, blacks, and the foreign French,
but the term did not have a long life, probably because it was equally confusing. Their
intent was to show that they were the descendents of the “casket girls,” (perhaps
legendary) who came from prominent French families who sent their daughters to the
New World with all of their belongings in a trunk (casket) to wed successful Frenchmen
in New Orleans. Creoles felt this background gave them the prestige of land and of pure
bloodlines because they were not of mixed blood, nor were they newcomers like the
Americans and the newly arrived French. Paul F. LaChance further distinguishes the
French Creoles from the “Foreign French” who were not as wealthy as their Creole
counterparts, but who were better educated.
When the Americans began settling in the area, they used the term Creole
indiscriminately, because they did not understand its importance to the locals who were
“engaged in struggle for the very soul of the community” (141). The dividing line
between the Americans and Creoles was Canal Street because it separated the downtown
area, which was predominantly French Creole, and Uptown, which was American. Each
had separate city councils and municipal courts, and each used a different language in
their businesses and schools between 1836 and 1852 (Hirsch and Logsdon 93). This
separation was not discouraged by the Creoles who disassociated themselves from the
Americans for reasons of pride and insecurity. One can imagine the position they were
50
in—they were confronted with the aggressive, entrepreneurial and industrious Americans
who showed early signs of mercantile and industrial success, and they saw their very own
French market place and government buildings being taken over by the English language.
They saw their own resources dwindling and their social circles thinning.
Even so, some Creoles still believed that the two cultures could co-exist, but all of
this changed when “Americans accused some of their Creole rivals of having mixed
ancestry” (Hirsch and Logsdon 98). This “new usage of the word Creole emerged during
the Reconstruction era when the struggle for white supremacy brought about a
fundamental and lasting rapprochement between all white conservatives, regardless of
their antebellum ancestry” (98). Even though they had struggled against the
Americanization of their city, the Creoles soon abandoned their resistance, if not their
disdain, for American culture, and aligned themselves with the Americans. Quick to hold
on to the only power they had left—their whiteness-- the Creoles actually hastened their
demise by trying to associate themselves with white Americans. In doing so, many
abandoned their own cultural history.
Upon the advent of the Civil War, Creoles were further threatened by the
inference that they were a people of a mixed blood, and as a reaction, they sought to
separate themselves socially and semantically. In the pre-Civil war era New Orleans’
social division had been along ethnic lines: “Latin versus Anglo-Saxon, native born
against foreigner . . . Color had played no role in the confrontation [perhaps because] only
white men [were] political persons.” French Creoles had “unchallengeable white
supremacy” which had “made it possible to accommodate pan-racial Creolism. The Civil
51
War changed all that” (Tregle 172). At the knifepoint of the Civil War, the term Creole
split into two halves along the color line.
In the Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward describes the pre-war
social system in New Orleans as a tripartite structure consisting of whites, free persons of
color, and slaves. Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson explains that most ethnic groups
intermingled freely in the crowded neighborhoods of the Crescent city. Many children
were born of these associations. Joan M . Martin notes that the “sexual relations among
European settlers, African slaves, and native Americans during the period of French rule
in Louisiana (1718-1768) resulted in the creation of a third race of people neither white
nor black and neither slave nor completely free” (Kein 57). This occurred largely because
of a miscegenation arrangement called Plaçage where quadroons would enter into longstanding
relationships with white men from Europe. Plaçages were left-handed
marriages, or mariages de la main gauche. These arrangements “created a third race of
people in Louisiana . . . a separatist self-focusing community” (Kein 69). It also created a
“class of free people of color which was well-educated, cultured, wealthy, and powerful”
(69). Joy Jackson describes this group, as “half-white, half-Negro”:
who were the descendents of free person of color who referred to themselves as
colored Creoles. They were, as a whole, a prosperous, educated, French oriented
petit bourgeois faction of local society. From antebellum times they had been a
close-knit group, holding themselves aloof from the darker-skinned slaves. Most
were business and professional men, but some were poets and writers; some,
musicians who studied European music in France (277).
52
The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups also defines this culture as one
based on a Caribbean social structure:
In the United States in the 20th century, Creole most often refers to the Louisiana
Creoles of color. Ranging in appearance from mulattos to northern European
whites, the Creoles of color constitute a Caribbean phenomenon in the United
States. The product of miscegenation in a seigniorial society, they achieved elite
status in Louisiana, and in the early 19th century some were slaveholders. Many,
educated in France, were patrons of the opera and of literary societies. . . .
Louisiana Creoles of color thus constitute a self-conscious group, who are
perceived in their locale as different and separate. They live in New Orleans and
in a number of other bayou towns. Historically they have been endogamous, and
until late in the 19th century spoke mostly French . . . . Their ethnicity is
exceedingly difficult to maintain outside the New Orleans area. Over time, a great
many have passed into white groups in other parts of the country, and others have
become integrated as blacks. This latter choice is not based wholly on appearance,
for many Creoles who choose to identify as Afro-American are white in
appearance (Thernstrom 237).
This unique social system survived in New Orleans largely because the city was a
“continental city, most picturesque, most un-American, and as varied as the streets of
Cairo. Here one would see French, Spanish, English, Bohemians, Negroes, mulattos”
(Jackson 20). There were many “free colored” in New Orleans; in fact, Julia Street was
named after Julia, a free woman of color (26) who owned the land. People of all races
attended the theater, and the French opera house was the first place in the country where
“grand opera was heard” (27) by a diversity of people. It was a “veritable sandwich of
races”(27). The Creoles of color sent their children to France to study; they opened
schools and owned businesses. The ethnic lines were so blurred; in fact, that it was
“difficult to enforce laws against a race when you cannot find that race” (29).
53
Even though New Orleans was the site of slave auctions, most slaves who lived
within the city worked as domestic servants. With some notable exceptions (described in
Chapter Five), many were treated with more respect than those who worked on
plantations. The hardships agricultural slaves endured and the horrors they experienced
were well known among the slave community. In fact, the threat of being “sent down the
Mississippi” was often used to frighten slaves into submission. According to the Slavery
Code of 1724, slaveholders treated slaves as movable property. Slaves couldn’t carry
weapons, assemble, or buy or sell property. They had no property of their own and could
not receive gifts from whites. They could not hold office or be served by the legal system
or give testimony. First time runaways were branded; the second time they were
hamstrung; the third time they were killed. After the Civil War, the Slavery Code was
replaced by the Black Code during a wave of “anti- black fanaticism.” The Creoles,
afraid that their racial purity would be questioned in this new regime or that they “might
be confused with blacks” (Tregle173), joined forces with other whites in order to retain
their dominance in the social hierarchy.
Whereas once the danger confronting them had been humiliating loss of
Gallic identity to a devouring Anglo-Saxon homogenization, now it was
the infinitely more horrible possibility of being consigned to debased
status in the “inferior” race, identified as half-brother to the black, as sort
of mixed breed stripped of blood pride as well as of any claim to social or
political preferment (173).
So strong were their fears of association by blood that, even today, one can
still detect a defensive sensitivity among some French Creoles. Virginia
54
Domínguez investigates the “long history of slavery in the United States and of
white ownership of African slaves has left in Louisiana” and notes the prevailing
“traditional association of white with upper status and of blacks with lower
status.” She points out that “white Creoles today” recoil from “the mere
suggestion of possible African ancestry” because it “invokes a lowering of social
and economic status” (63). Thus, she argues, “to identify someone as Creole is to
invoke in the course of a particular conversation historically linked connotations
of social and economic status . . . . of how things used to be and how in their
opinion they ought to be.” Often, this is used as “the major criterion by which
individuals are identified as Creole” (63). This becomes a vital distinction in
southern Louisiana, where “often, if not always” this becomes “the crucial
variable that individual New Orleanians manipulate in making themselves
members of a group, or in identifying other as member of a group. Status, then, is
frequently more of a determining factor on group membership than genealogical
ancestry” (263).
This hypersensitivity about ethnicity still lingers into the 21st century—where the
term has continued to evolve. Until recently, as Tregle points out, individuals who
belonged to a “mixed race” used the term Creole as an adjective or used the term Creole
of color; the “noun Creole”had only for been used for white (133). In the twenty-first
century, this has changed once again, for one will find the term used by people in
Louisiana in a variety of ways. Thus, the fluidity of the term Creole persists, and its
definition remains dependent on regional, local, and personal interpretations.
55
In spite of the vagaries of the term, one individual was instrumental in influencing
the perceptions of the connotations of this social marker. George Washington Cable was
responsible, in large part, for introducing the Creole culture to the national stage. He
enjoyed immense popularity, and with his friend Mark Twain, he toured the country
giving lectures. They were part of the Local Color movement that followed the Civil War.
After his service in the war, Cable returned to New Orleans, his birthplace, and began
working as an accountant. He also worked for the New Orleans newspaper the Picayune.
After being discovered by Edward King, the editor for Scribner’s Magazine, Cable began
the serial publication of Old Creole Days (1879), a collection of short stories, and The
Grandissimes (1880), a novel describing the lives of the Grandissime brothers, one white
and the other of mixed blood. In these novels, he provided a glimpse into an exotic world
that was largely unknown to the rest of the country.
These works served to fuel the debate concerning Cable’s sympathy and/or
antipathy towards the Creoles. On the one hand, he seems to romanticize their lives,
describing their soft patois infused with the flavor of the West Indies, and the alabaster
skin and rich silks and lace of the women and the dashing good looks of the men. On the
other hand, one of the main characters of the Grandissimes, Joseph Frowenfeld offers an
indictment against the injustices of the caste system and plaçage practices in place during
the time the novel is set (1804). With vivid detail Cable describes the world of the Vieux
Carré, where historical figures walked along the same streets as their fictional
counterparts; he juxtaposes the straightforward industrious Yankee with the hedonistic
and indolent Creole.
56
Lafcadio Hearn praised Cable’s work, hailing it as the “‘most remarkable work of
fiction ever created in the South’” (Tregle 174); however, the French Language
newspaper in New Orleans, L’ Abeille,was harshly critical of Cable, even going so far as
to attack Cable’s personal ethics and character. Dr. AlfredMercier, who was the founder
of the Athénée, a member of the Queyrouze salon, and a personal friend of Leona’s
admitted that Cable “appraised Creole life dismally” (Tregle176). The Creole lifestyle
was exposed for its worst atrocities. These characters were a “searing representation
committed to a dead past, long ago abandoned by enlightened and progressive
communities of the world . . . its hallmarks are indolence, ignorance, cruelty, superstitions
and hypocrisy” (Tregle 175). Cable continued his exposé with his1884 The Creoles of
Louisiana and in his 1885 essay “Freedman’s Case in Equity.”
Not only did Cable’s work bring negative attention to the Creoles, the Creoles
also believed that Cable had transformed their culture into an exotic curiosity. Visitors to
New Orleans in the 1880s often looked for the characters that Cable described in
Grandissimes and Old Creole Days. One local complained, “‘Northern people come here
to New Orleans to study us as curiosities . . . trying to identify the localities and types of
persons” (Jackson 14). The Creoles felt Cable added insult to injury when he used the
word “Creole to mean native born—including white, Negro, and those of mixed
ancestry.” They were incensed, and “in order to redress the grievances which they felt
Cable had inflicted upon them, numerous Creole writers and their sympathizers attacked
his interpretation of their background and culture” (Jackson14-15).
In “Creoles and Americans,” Tregle describes how Cable was vilified by the white
French Creoles because of the perceived betrayal of their culture. Beginning with his first
57
character sketch of 1873 of “’Sieur George,” which described gambling addictions, Cable
experienced a “veritable flood of abuse and damnation . . . In newspapers, pamphlets and
public meetings” (131). But it was less about Cable than his timing, because at the time
he was publishing, there was a “radical transformation of long-established ethnic and
racial conventions in the New Orleans community” (132).
[This was] challenging emerging new concepts of identity and producing
confusion in altered relationships which in many ways continues to
confound out understanding . . . [resulting] in fear and resentments
[which] drove Creole passions to formations of hardened orthodoxy . . . a
veritable mythology” . . . at their very core stand the explication of Creole
itself, rigid, absolute, and closed to any gradation of meaning, it holds that
the word can never be used except to designate a native Louisianan of pure
white blood descended from those French and Spanish pioneers who came
directly from Europe to colonize the New World. Thus, even Acadians, or
Cajuns, are rigorously excluded . . . in the specific insistence that no black
or person of mixed blood can or ever could have been correctly termed a
Creole, no matter his parentage, place of birth, language or cultural
orientation (Tregle 132-133).
When the Americans began to settle in the newly acquired region after the
Louisiana Purchase, the white French Creoles felt the necessity to affirm their separate
identity and the impulse served to foster the creation of the Creole myth. The Creoles
characterized themselves as aristocrats by virtue of “empyrean ascendancy” (Tregle135)
and looked upon the Americans as commoners. They considered the Yankees to be cold
because they were not able to enjoy the simple pleasures of life such as music and dance.
On the other hand, a Creole was someone who had “‘gracious intellectualism,
spontaneous and fecund spirit, subtle, delicate and penetrating refinement, and an
exquisite suavity, delicious perfume and particular cachet” (136). A Creole New World
58
aristocrat devoted his time to “theater and opera . . . thoroughbred horses, dueling, foils
and the pleasures of dining and gaming tables.” The women were “paragons of gentility,
style, grace, cameos of beauty and flirtatious charm” (136). In many ways, Leona
Queyrouze and her brother, Maxim, aspired to represent and to uphold this ideal, even
into the twentieth century.
As an essential ingredient to the formation of the Creole myth, the Creoles would
never admit that the purity of their race had ever been commingled with Africans and the
best way to do this was to deny the entire history of plaçage and miscegenation. Anthony
G. Barthelemy explains that “threatened as they were by the tarbush, white Creoles who
had previously found sexual alliances with non-whites inconsequential now discovered
that their prerogatives literally denigrated them and their families” (Kein 262). Rushing to
protect their identity, the attempted to “cover their tracks, to deny their consanguinity
with their Creole brethren on the other side of the color line” (262). In order to
accomplish this, they created the fantasy of racial “purity.” Barthelemy states that “this
disavowal and hypocrisy reflected white Creole’s most primeval fear, that they would be
made to share inferior status and debasement with those of their own blood whom they
themselves so condemned” (K