1882-89.
True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real
men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic
whole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry
or gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony of
values and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not
so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself.
Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen oftener than once I
thought they did. Within the last few years there have dropped into my
hands by one accident or another a number of these natural crystals, whose
charms, never the same in any two, are in each and all enough at least to
warn off all tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without being
necessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and follow
one another like the days of a week. They are mine only by right of
discovery. From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the
story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's interest, have to abridge;
but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no unconfessed
"restorations," not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essential
feature, I give them as I got them--strange stories that truly happened,
all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana.
In the spring of 1883, being one night the guest of my friend Dr. Francis
Bacon, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the conversation turning, at the
close of the evening, upon wonderful and romantic true happenings, he
said:
"You are from New Orleans; did you never hear of Salome Müller?"
"No."
Thereupon he told the story, and a few weeks later sent me by mail, to my
home in New Orleans, whither I had returned, a transcription, which he had
most generously made, of a brief summary of the case--it would be right to
say tragedy instead of case--as printed in "The Law Reporter" some forty
years ago. That transcription lies before me now, beginning, "The Supreme
Court of the State of Louisiana has lately been called upon to investigate
and decide one of the most interesting cases which has ever come under the
cognizance of a judicial tribunal." This episode, which had been the cause
of public excitement within the memory of men still living on the scene,
I, a native resident of New Orleans and student of its history, stumbled
upon for the first time nearly two thousand miles from home.
I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one after another.
None remembered ever having heard of it. I appealed to a former
chief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal remembrance of every
member of the bench and the bar concerned in the case; but of the case he
had no recollection. One of the medical experts called in by the court for
evidence upon which the whole merits of the case seemed to hang was still
living--the distinguished Creole physician, Dr. Armand Mercier. He could
not recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the
vaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took down
from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court
decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the old
newspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasure
speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions
to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in
those days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a
steamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded
in ten lines of colorless statement. I went to the courts, and, after
following and abandoning several false trails through two days' search,
found that the books of record containing the object of my quest had been
lost, having unaccountably disappeared in--if I remember aright--1870.
There was one chance left: it was to find the original papers. I employed
an intelligent gentleman at so much a day to search till he should find
them. In the dusty garret of one of the court buildings--the old Spanish
Cabildo, that faces Jackson Square--he rummaged for ten days, finding now
one desired document and now another, until he had gathered all but one.
Several he drew out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of the
floor, as if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found. Yet I
was content. Through the perseverance of this gentleman and the
intervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the courtesy of
the court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story of the poor lost
and found Salome Müller. How through the courtesy of some of the
reportorial staff of the "New Orleans Picayune" I found and conversed with
three of Salome's still surviving relatives and friends, I shall not stop
to tell.
While I was still in search of these things, the editor of the "New
Orleans Times-Democrat" handed me a thick manuscript, asking me to examine
and pronounce upon its merits. It was written wholly in French, in a
small, cramped, feminine hand. I replied, when I could, that it seemed to
me unfit for the purposes of transient newspaper publication, yet if he
declined it I should probably buy it myself. He replied that he had
already examined it and decided to decline it, and it was only to know
whether I, not he, could use it that I had been asked to read it.
I took it to an attorney, and requested him, under certain strict
conditions, to obtain it for me with all its rights.
"What is it?"
"It is the minute account, written by one of the travelers, a pretty
little Creole maiden of seventeen, of an adventurous journey made, in
1795, from New Orleans through the wilds of Louisiana, taking six weeks to
complete a tour that could now be made in less than two days."