1795.
Years passed by. Our war of the Revolution was over. The Indians of
Louisiana and Florida were all greedy, smiling gift-takers of his Catholic
Majesty. So were some others not Indians; and the Spanish governors of
Louisiana, scheming with them for the acquisition of Kentucky and the
regions intervening, had allowed an interprovincial commerce to spring up.
Flatboats and barges came floating down the Mississippi past the
plantation home where little Suzanne and Françoise were growing up to
womanhood. Many of the immigrants who now came to Louisiana were the
royalist _noblesse_ flying from the horrors of the French Revolution.
Governor Carondelet was strengthening his fortifications around New
Orleans; for Creole revolutionists had slipped away to Kentucky and were
there plotting an armed descent in flatboats upon his little capital,
where the rabble were singing the terrible songs of bloody Paris. Agents
of 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 cost
of sleepless nights, by frightening some, punishing others, and driving
several out of the colony." It looks as though Suzanne had caught a touch
of dis-relish for _les aristocrates_, whose necks the songs of the day
were promising to the lampposts. To add to all these commotions, a hideous
revolution had swept over San Domingo; the slaves in Louisiana had heard
of it, insurrection was feared, and at length, in 1794, when Susanne was
seventeen and Françoise fifteen, it broke out on the Mississippi no great
matter over a day's ride from their own home, and twenty-three blacks were
gibbeted singly at intervals all the way down by their father's plantation
and on to New Orleans, and were left swinging in the weather to insure the
peace and felicity of the land. Two other matters are all we need notice
for the ready comprehension of Françoise's story. Immigration was knocking
at every gate of the province, and citizen Étienne de Boré had just made
himself forever famous in the history of Louisiana by producing
merchantable sugar; land was going to be valuable, even back on the wild
prairies of Opelousas and Attakapas, where, twenty years before, the
Acadians,--the cousins of Evangeline,--wandering from far Nova Scotia, had
settled. Such was the region and such were the times when it began to be
the year 1795.
By good fortune one of the undestroyed fragments of Françoise's own
manuscript is its first page. She was already a grandmother forty-three
years old when in 1822 she wrote the tale she had so often told. Part of
the dedication to her only daughter and namesake--one line, possibly
two--has been torn off, leaving only the words, "ma fille unique a la
grasse [meaning 'grace'] de dieu [sic]," over her signature and the date,
"14 Julet [sic], 1822."