Strange True Stories of Louisiana Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF FRANCOISE AND SUZANNE.

  1795.

  Years passed by. Our war of the Revolution was over. The Indians ofLouisiana and Florida were all greedy, smiling gift-takers of his CatholicMajesty. So were some others not Indians; and the Spanish governors ofLouisiana, scheming with them for the acquisition of Kentucky and theregions intervening, had allowed an interprovincial commerce to spring up.Flatboats and barges came floating down the Mississippi past theplantation home where little Suzanne and Francoise were growing up towomanhood. Many of the immigrants who now came to Louisiana were theroyalist _noblesse_ flying from the horrors of the French Revolution.Governor Carondelet was strengthening his fortifications around NewOrleans; for Creole revolutionists had slipped away to Kentucky and werethere plotting an armed descent in flatboats upon his little capital,where the rabble were singing the terrible songs of bloody Paris. Agentsof the Revolution had come from France and so "contaminated," as he says,"the greater part of the province" that he kept order only "at the costof sleepless nights, by frightening some, punishing others, and drivingseveral out of the colony." It looks as though Suzanne had caught a touchof dis-relish for _les aristocrates_, whose necks the songs of the daywere promising to the lampposts. To add to all these commotions, a hideousrevolution had swept over San Domingo; the slaves in Louisiana had heardof it, insurrection was feared, and at length, in 1794, when Susanne wasseventeen and Francoise fifteen, it broke out on the Mississippi no greatmatter over a day's ride from their own home, and twenty-three blacks weregibbeted singly at intervals all the way down by their father's plantationand on to New Orleans, and were left swinging in the weather to insure thepeace and felicity of the land. Two other matters are all we need noticefor the ready comprehension of Francoise's story. Immigration was knockingat every gate of the province, and citizen Etienne de Bore had just madehimself forever famous in the history of Louisiana by producingmerchantable sugar; land was going to be valuable, even back on the wildprairies of Opelousas and Attakapas, where, twenty years before, theAcadians,--the cousins of Evangeline,--wandering from far Nova Scotia, hadsettled. Such was the region and such were the times when it began to bethe year 1795.

  By good fortune one of the undestroyed fragments of Francoise's ownmanuscript is its first page. She was already a grandmother forty-threeyears old when in 1822 she wrote the tale she had so often told. Part ofthe dedication to her only daughter and namesake--one line, possiblytwo--has been torn off, leaving only the words, "ma fille unique a lagrasse [meaning 'grace'] de dieu [sic]," over her signature and the date,"14 Julet [sic], 1822."