One morning many years ago, when some business had brought me into a
corridor of one of the old court buildings facing the Place d'Armes, a
loud voice from within one of the court-rooms arrested my own and the
general ear. At once from all directions men came with decorous haste
towards the spot whence it proceeded. I pushed in through a green door
into a closely crowded room and found the Supreme Court of the State in
session. A short, broad, big-browed man of an iron sort, with silver hair
close shorn from a Roman head, had just begun his argument in the final
trial of a great case that had been before the court for many years, and
the privileged seats were filled with the highest legal talent, sitting to
hear him. It was a famous will case[26], and I remember that he was quoting
from "King Lear" as I entered.
"Who is that?" I asked of a man packed against me in the press.
"Roselius," he whispered; and the name confirmed my conjecture: the
speaker looked like all I had once heard about him. Christian Roselius
came from Brunswick, Germany, a youth of seventeen, something more than
two years later than Salome Müller and her friends. Like them he came an
emigrant under the Dutch flag, and like them his passage was paid in New
Orleans by his sale as a redemptioner. A printer bought his services for
two years and a half. His story is the good old one of courage,
self-imposed privations, and rapid development of talents. From printing
he rose to journalism, and from journalism passed to the bar. By 1836, at
thirty-three years of age, he stood in the front rank of that brilliant
group where Grymes was still at his best. Before he was forty he had been
made attorney-general of the State. Punctuality, application, energy,
temperance, probity, bounty, were the strong features of his character. It
was a common thing for him to give his best services free in the cause of
the weak against the strong. As an adversary he was decorous and amiable,
but thunderous, heavy-handed, derisive if need be, and inexorable. A time
came for these weapons to be drawn in defense of Salome Müller.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] The will of R.D. Shepherd.