A MAIDEN WHO WILL NOT MARRY
Midway between the times of Lufki-Humma and those of her proud
descendant, Agricola Fusilier, fifty-two years lying on either side,
were the days of Pierre Rigaut, the magnificent, the "Grand Marquis,"
the Governor, De Vaudreuil. He was the Solomon of Louisiana. For
splendor, however, not for wisdom. Those were the gala days of license,
extravagance and pomp. He made paper money to be as the leaves of the
forest for multitude; it was nothing accounted of in the days of the
Grand Marquis. For Louis Quinze was king.
Clotilde, orphan of a murdered Huguenot, was one of sixty, the last
royal allotment to Louisiana, of imported wives. The king's agents had
inveigled her away from France with fair stories: "They will give you a
quiet home with some lady of the colony. Have to marry?--not unless it
pleases you. The king himself pays your passage and gives you a casket
of clothes. Think of that these times, fillette; and passage free,
withal, to--the garden of Eden, as you may call it--what more, say you,
can a poor girl want? Without doubt, too, like a model colonist, you
will accept a good husband and have a great many beautiful children, who
will say with pride, 'Me, I am no House-of-Correction-girl stock; my
mother'--or 'grandmother,' as the case may be--'was a _fille à la
cassette!_'"
The sixty were landed in New Orleans and given into the care of the
Ursuline nuns; and, before many days had elapsed, fifty-nine soldiers of
the king were well wived and ready to settle upon their riparian
land-grants. The residuum in the nuns' hands was one stiff-necked little
heretic, named, in part, Clotilde. They bore with her for sixty days,
and then complained to the Grand Marquis. But the Grand Marquis, with
all his pomp, was gracious and kind-hearted, and loved his ease almost
as much as his marchioness loved money. He bade them try her another
month. They did so, and then returned with her; she would neither marry
nor pray to Mary.
Here is the way they talked in New Orleans in those days. If you care to
understand why Louisiana has grown up so out of joint, note the tone of
those who governed her in the middle of the last century:
"What, my child," the Grand Marquis said, "you a _fille à la cassette?_
France, for shame! Come here by my side. Will you take a little advice
from an old soldier? It is in one word--submit. Whatever is inevitable,
submit to it. If you want to live easy and sleep easy, do as other
people do--submit. Consider submission in the present case; how easy,
how comfortable, and how little it amounts to! A little hearing of mass,
a little telling of beads, a little crossing of one's self--what is
that? One need not believe in them. Don't shake your head. Take my
example; look at me; all these things go in at this ear and out at this.
Do king or clergy trouble me? Not at all. For how does the king in these
matters of religion? I shall not even tell you, he is such a bad boy. Do
you not know that all the _noblesse_, and all the _savants_, and
especially all the archbishops and cardinals,--all, in a word, but such
silly little chicks as yourself,--have found out that this religious
business is a joke? Actually a joke, every whit; except, to be sure,
this heresy phase; that is a joke they cannot take. Now, I wish you
well, pretty child; so if you--eh?--truly, my pet, I fear we shall have
to call you unreasonable. Stop; they can spare me here a moment; I will
take you to the Marquise: she is in the next room.... Behold," said he,
as he entered the presence of his marchioness, "the little maid who will
not marry!"
The Marquise was as cold and hard-hearted as the Marquis was loose and
kind; but we need not recount the slow tortures of the _fille à la
cassette's_ second verbal temptation. The colony had to have soldiers,
she was given to understand, and the soldiers must have wives. "Why, I
am a soldier's wife, myself!" said the gorgeously attired lady, laying
her hand upon the governor-general's epaulet. She explained, further,
that he was rather softhearted, while she was a business woman; also
that the royal commissary's rolls did not comprehend such a thing as a
spinster, and--incidentally--that living by principle was rather out of
fashion in the province just then.
After she had offered much torment of this sort, a definite notion
seemed to take her; she turned her lord by a touch of the elbow, and
exchanged two or three business-like whispers with him at a window
overlooking the Levee.
"Fillette," she said, returning, "you are going to live on the
sea-coast. I am sending an aged lady there to gather the wax of the wild
myrtle. This good soldier of mine buys it for our king at twelve livres
the pound. Do you not know that women can make money? The place is not
safe; but there are no safe places in Louisiana. There are no nuns to
trouble you there; only a few Indians and soldiers. You and Madame will
live together, quite to yourselves, and can pray as you like."
"And not marry a soldier," said the Grand Marquis.
"No," said the lady, "not if you can gather enough myrtle-berries to
afford me a profit and you a living."
It was some thirty leagues or more eastward to the country of the
Biloxis, a beautiful land of low, evergreen hills looking out across the
pine-covered sand-keys of Mississippi Sound to the Gulf of Mexico. The
northern shore of Biloxi Bay was rich in candleberry-myrtle. In
Clotilde's day, though Biloxi was no longer the capital of the
Mississippi Valley, the fort which D'Iberville had built in 1699, and
the first timber of which is said to have been lifted by Zephyr
Grandissime at one end and Epaminondas Fusilier at the other, was still
there, making brave against the possible advent of corsairs, with a few
old culverines and one wooden mortar.
And did the orphan, in despite of Indians and soldiers and wilderness,
settle down here and make a moderate fortune? Alas, she never gathered a
berry! When she--with the aged lady, her appointed companion in exile,
the young commandant of the fort, in whose pinnace they had come, and
two or three French sailors and Canadians--stepped out upon the white
sand of Biloxi beach, she was bound with invisible fetters hand and
foot, by that Olympian rogue of a boy, who likes no better prey than a
little maiden who thinks she will never marry.
The officer's name was De Grapion--Georges De Grapion. The Marquis gave
him a choice grant of land on that part of the Mississippi river "coast"
known as the Cannes Brulées.
"Of course you know where Cannes Brulées is, don't you?" asked Doctor
Keene of Joseph Frowenfeld.
"Yes," said Joseph, with a twinge of reminiscence that recalled the
study of Louisiana on paper with his father and sisters.
There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable determination to
make a fresh start against the mortifyingly numerous Grandissimes.
"My father's policy was every way bad," he said to his spouse; "it is
useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them out by duels; we
will try another plan. Thank you," he added, as she handed his coat back
to him, with the shoulder-straps cut off. In pursuance of the new plan,
Madame De Grapion,--the precious little heroine!--before the myrtles
offered another crop of berries, bore him a boy not much smaller (saith
tradition) than herself.
Only one thing qualified the father's elation. On that very day Numa
Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere child, received
from Governor de Vaudreuil a cadetship.
"Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we shall
see! Ha! we shall see!"
"We shall see what?" asked a remote relative of that family. "Will
Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?"
* * * * *
Bang! bang!
Alas, Madame De Grapion!
It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever left a
braver little widow. When Joseph and his doctor pretended to play chess
together, but little more than a half-century had elapsed since the
_fille à la cassette_ stood before the Grand Marquis and refused to wed.
Yet she had been long gone into the skies, leaving a worthy example
behind her in twenty years of beautiful widowhood. Her son, the heir and
resident of the plantation at Cannes Brulées, at the age of--they do
say--eighteen, had married a blithe and pretty lady of Franco-Spanish
extraction, and, after a fair length of life divided between campaigning
under the brilliant young Galvez and raising unremunerative
indigo crops, had lately lain down to sleep, leaving only two
descendants--females--how shall we describe them?--a Monk and a _Fille à
la Cassette_. It was very hard to have to go leaving his family name
snuffed out and certain Grandissime-ward grievances burning.
* * * * *
"There are so many Grandissimes," said the weary-eyed Frowenfeld, "I
cannot distinguish between--I can scarcely count them."
"Well, now," said the doctor, "let me tell you, don't try. They can't
do it themselves. Take them in the mass--as you would shrimps."