USA > Louisiana > Orleans Parish > New Orleans > Creole families of New Orleans > Part 19
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self-torment of thought. Therefore a pure and sound mind ought ever to have its eyes fixed on heaven."*
Don Juan Antonio Gayarré was one of the brilliant young Spanish officers who effected practically the union of Louisiana with Spain by marrying into the families of the French officials of the province. According to the precise notes left by him in his own beautiful handwriting, he was born "or bap- tized in the Catholic faith, for in Spain no differ- ence is made between them," on the 14th of March, 1752. On April 23rd, to follow the venerable record of the Cathedral, "the Sieur Jean Antoine Gayarré, legitimate son of Sieur Etienne Gayarré and Dame Marie François Cochard, was married to Dame Constance Grand-Pré, native of this parish, and legitimate daughter of M. Louis de Grand-Pré and Dame Thérèse Galar de Chamilly," in the Cathedral of St. Louis." The record bears the interesting signature of Fr. Dagobert, grand vicar and curate of the parish.
The Chevalier de Grand-Pré had come into Louisiana in the time of Bienville and had received the Cross of St. Louis for his long and faithful service. It is of significant interest to note that this Chevalier de Grand-Pré was a descendant of the Sieur Pierre Boucher, the early Governor of Trois Riviéres in Canada, and the first Canadian ennbloed by Louis XIV. He was also the author of the first published account of that country.
Carlos Anastasio Estevan de Gayarré (the father of the historian) was born on January 2nd, 1774, and, "to conform to the custom of this country," was baptized on the 12th of February, 1775.
* From "The Spanish Domination."
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The godparents were the grandparents, with Don Luis Nicola de la Landa and Donna Juana Sophia de la Landa. Antonio Estevan de Gayarré, the second son, was born in 1775. Luis Estevan de Gayarré was born in 1777.
Don Juan Antonio Gayarré distinguished himself second only to his brilliant commander-in-chief, Galvez, in the glorious little campaign against the English in 1779, which resulted in the conquest of Manchac, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile and Pensacola, or the whole English Province of West Florida. In the distribution of honors and rewards that followed the successful termination of the war, Don Juan Antonio Gayarré was appointed Contador Real of the rich post of Acapulco. He died there and his wife returned to her birthplace, bringing her three sons with her.
Of these, Carlos married the youngest daughter of Etienne de Boré. He lived with de Boré on his plantation and became the father of the historian. Although born in Louisiana, he remained fixedly loyal to Spain and to his Spanish ancestors. Always at the head of his bed, relates his son, hung his coat of arms with its three mountains spanned by a bridge, surmounted by the turbaned head of Abderahman, the testimonial of the proud day when the Gayarres defeated the Sultan in their native valley of Roncal, about the year 800. When Napoleon invaded Spain, Carlos Gayarre, in the presence of his father-in-law, respectfully suppressed his feelings. But when came the announcement of French triumphs in Spain he would retire to his chamber in which his little son would hear the sound of passionate playing of the
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guitar and the passionate singing of Spanish patriotic songs.
He held an office under the Commissary of War when the colony was transferred to France and was one of the Spanish officers who consented to receive a commission from the French Republic. The colonial prefect, Laussat, appointed him First Lieutenant of the Third Company of Louisiana Militia in 1803. In 1807, he was appointed Captain of the Fourth Company by Governor Claiborne. His name is enrolled in the first Masonic Lodge founded in Louisiana. To quote his own note, "On the 1st June, 1799, I was received as Mason in the 'Parfaite Union.'" One of the relics remaining of him is a little packet which contains his regalia and the certificate of the degrees that he took in the order. His portrait represents him in the prime of his youth and manly beauty; he did not live beyond them, dying in 1813, in New Orleans. He was buried in the tomb of his wife's family in the old St. Louis Cemetery.
Like his father, he left behind him a "note de ma naissance et celle de ma famille":
22nd January, 1774, I was born.
19th January, 1783, was born Dame Marie Elizabeth Boré, my wife.
9th January, 1805, was born Charles Etienne Arthur, my eldest son.
12th June, 1807, was born Ferdinand Etienne Gayarré, my second son.
*Ferdinand Gayarré had an unhappy life, and died in consequence of it in his early prime.
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CHAPTER XVII
CHARLES GAYARRÉ
C HARLES GAYARRE, the historian of Louisiana -name and title came almost together ninety- three years ago, and so closely has the slow process of time welded them that it would take as many years again to divorce them or for our ears and tongues to unlearn their habit of coupling one with the other. To Louisianians, indeed, it seems that Gayarré was not only the historian of Louisiana but the history of it as well; and when, upon the morning of February 11th, 1895, it became known that Charles Gayarré had passed away, when the little black-bordered notices of his death were affixed to the posts on the street corners of New Orleans, according to the local custom, the feeling aroused was not simply that a great and a good and a useful life had ceased to exist in the community, but also that a great, good and useful volume had been closed-the volume of the past of city and state- which had stood so long open and ready for all who wished to profit by it that, like old folios and precious classics in public libraries, it seemed chained to our eternal service.
Charles Gayarré was born in the month of January, 1805, and baptized in the parish church of the Cathedral of New Orleans, receiving the name of Charles Etienne Arthur, or, as it stands in the
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Spanish, Carlos Estevan Arturo. The ceremony was performed, registered and signed by Fr. Antonio de Sedilla, the Père Antoine whose name is connected with the church of Louisiana in the same indis- soluble manner as the name of the infant he baptized with its history.
The cession of Louisiana to the United States was still a recent event in the city. The official act and pageant of transfer had taken place only the winter before. Of the large group at the baptismal font, the infant was the only American; the others were all colonists-French or Spanish. Ninety years later, Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré was again borne into the church of St. Louis to receive its last, as he had received its first, blessing on his life.
His life had been a long one, overspanning the average, not by years but by generations. He had seen the new things of his parents' day become old, and the old linger along in the heart like the echo of a cathedral chant; he had seen the transplanted flag, language and government become home bred to the soil, and the people who had stood around his baptismal font disappear in the dim distance of tradition. In his childless old age, when time was bearing him ever farther and farther from his native time, he used to sigh over his isolation and the dreariness of that land of exile in which octogenarians live. Of all the friends that he started with in youth, a goodly circle, but one, a schoolmate, survived to accompany him to the end.
Fr. Antonio's certificate of baptism, with other certificates antedating it, signed by him or his no less celebrated predecessor, Père Dagobert, recording the baptism, marriage, death, of father, mother, grandparents, uncles, granduncles, together with
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testaments, titles of property, and preciously guarded letters, remain in the archives of the Gayarré family. They must have been laid aside in some miraculous casket, it would seem, to have been preserved entire through the fierce tempest of war, ruin and devastation that scattered and made flotsam and jetsam of all that the lives that they chronicled held as tangible possessions.
Like poets, historians are born, not made. As a child, Gayarré lived in intimate touch with the chronicles of a century earlier than his own. By merely listening to his home gossip, the tales of maternal and paternal reminiscence, and the talk of nurse, teacher and playmate, he could see and feel in imagination not only the very beginning of the Colony, but the conception of its beginning, in Canada and in Normandy. What followed thence- forth-French and Spanish Domination, the cession to France, and the cession to the United States-he knew as the child born seventy-five years later, knew the events of the Civil War and of the recon- struction era. What historians of to-day study painfully from documents (now that Gayarré is no more), he knew as he knew his family ties. Our historical questions were to him questions of mem- ory; and his memories have become to us historical documents.
Gayarré tells us in some of the most charming and valuable pages he ever wrote, "A Louisiana Planta- tion of the Old Régime,"* how he passed his child- hood on the plantation of his grandfather, Etienne de Boré. It was situated six miles above the city, measuring from the Cathedral, and was reached by the public road winding along the river bank.
* Harper's Magazine. March, 1887.
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In front, it presented an imposing appearance. The avenue of pecan trees that led from the high- road was arrested by a deep moat, edged on its farther side by an impenetrable hedge of Yucca or "Spanish Bayonet." Behind this was a great grass- covered rampart bearing a massive brick wall. But Nature then, as now, proved a mocker of the im- posing. The waters of the jealous moat became in time thick with dainty fish. The Yucca hedge, with its sharp-pointed dagger leaves, sent up such luxuriant staffs of its beautiful waxen, bell-shaped flowers that it made the spring glorious to the child, and the sturdy rampart and surrounding brick wall so protected an inner hedge of wild orange that its golden fruit made the winter as resplendent. The drive to the house described a circle, and was bordered with sweet orange trees, whose golden fruit made it glorious.
Gayarré tells us that he learned his alphabet from one Lefort, who lived in a house on the upper limit of the Foucher plantation and kept a school which was well attended by the children of the planters on both sides of the river. Lefort was a man of culture but rough and given to whipping his pupils unmercifully. When past eighty, the historian related that he had not yet forgotten the blows given him, when a child of six, for imperfect pronunciation of the English word "the." At nine years of age, Gayarré was promoted from this teacher and sent as a boarder to the College of Orleans. In the opening pages of "Fernando de Lemos," he describes this historic institution of learning, with its courtly President, Jules d'Avezac, whom the students affectionately nicknamed
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"Titus," and its corps of professors, composed of original types of scholars and gentlemen. The rules of life and study there were Spartan in their austere simplicity, and they were enforced with Spartan sternness. No puerilities, except in age, were permitted the scholars. Even the afternoon walks and weekly visits to the theatres were admin- istered with rigid regard to duty rather than to amusement.
Gayarré was in this college in the memorable year of the British invasion. He relates that, on the second of December, about three o'clock, there was a great commotion in the learned precincts. The news had arrived in New Orleans that the British had landed in Louisiana and that they had been seen on a plantation below the city. Studies were sus- pended, classrooms closed, alarmed pupils hurried to and fro, parents poured in to take their children away. Gayarré and his cousin, Frederic Foucher, were left so long that they began to fear they had been forgotten and had been left to shift for them- selves in the face of the British invasion. At the last moment, however, an aunt sent for them. She lived in a house on Dumaine and Royal Streets, and the two boys stood on the gallery, with her and other ladies of the household, and looked at the troops marching by, hastening to meet the enemy below. At seven o'clock the fighting began, "and the roar of artillery and discharge of musketry were almost as distinctly heard as if the battle were in the immediate neighborhood. There was not the slightest noise in the city; it held its breath in awful suspense."
The two boys and the ladies, petrified into absolute
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silence by their apprehensions, stood on the balcony until half-past nine o'clock, when the firing gradually ceased; and then they passed a never-to-be-forgotten hour of anxiety. Were their defenders retreating, pressed by the enemy? What was happening? About eleven o'clock the city's awful silence was broken; the furious gallop of a horse was heard, and the cry of the horseman, shouting as loud as he could, "Victory! Victory!"
Early the next morning the children were sent to their homes. On the eighth of January, when the decisive battle on the field of Chalmette was fought, the child stood on the gallery of his grandfather's house, with the ladies of the family, who were pale and trembling with fear. No man was visible: the only one, de Boré, who had remained at home, on account of age, had, when the battle began, gone up to the top of the balcony for observation. When the firing ended he came down from his post and an- nounced to his daughter that the Americans were victorious. His soldier's ear had distinguished that the American guns had silenced the English.
All that is known of Gayarre's youth is what can be gathered from his descriptions of other people. He stayed at the College of Orleans until he com- pleted his education in 1825; when twenty years old, he published his first work-a pamphlet on the subject of the Livingston Criminal Code, opposing some of Livingston's views, and particularly his recommendation of the abolition of capital punish- ment, which the young Creole combated as an innovation of dangerous application in the State of Louisiana. The pamphlet, whether it aided public opinion on the subject or not, certainly reflected it;
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Eighteenth Century Piano. Mahogany, Inlaid With Brass.
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for Livingston's system of penal law for the State of Louisiana, though it was admired and commended by the most celebrated philosophers, philanthropists and statesmen of that day, was never adopted by the State for which it was framed.
In 1826, Gayarré went to Philadelphia and re- mained there for three years, for the double purpose of studying law and of perfecting himself in the English language, which was still taught and spoken as an alien tongue in New Orleans. He studied in the office of William Rawle, the distinguished jurist and legal author. He was admitted to the Pennsyl- vania Bar in 1828; a year later, upon his return to New Orleans, he was admitted to the practice of law in Louisiana.
The man of that era whose character to us of to- day was most strongly marked, whose individuality was most clearly cut against the background of the time, was François Xavier Martin, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, and author of a then recently published "History of Louisiana." No one, to judge by the accounts that have come down to us, received so keen, so just and so true an impres- sion of Martin's greatness of intellect as Gayarré, and no one so fully showed the effect of it. Martin was the determining force in Gayarré's life. He was, in effect, Gayarré's literary progenitor.
The two volumes so rare nowadays and so dear to Louisiana book lovers-Martin's first edition of 1827 and Gayarré's "Essai Historique sur la Louisiane," 1830-stand to one another in a nearer and more sentimental relationship than that of mere literary succession, as the product of each shows. In addressing himself, as an old man, to "Louisiana's
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youthful citizens," Martin not only enumerates the steps by which Louisiana advanced from Indian barbarism to state sovereignty in the Federal Union, but also traces for the young historian a plan of future work which Gayarré faithfully carried out in later years.
Gayarré's preface in his first essay at writing his- tory is an ingenuous response to Martin's appeal. "A Louisianian by birth and blood," he describes himself, "who has read with emotions of filial piety the 'History of Louisiana,'" which Judge Martin has published in English. Gayarre acknowledges that he owes most of his material to the venerable magistrate and makes a timid apology for his feeble essay at an attempt to bring the history of Louisiana within reach of those whose tongue is French.
Upon his return from Philadelphia (before he published his "Essai Historique") he was elected, by a unanimous vote, a representative of the city of New Orleans in the Legislature. There he received the compliment of being chosen by the Legislature to write an address complimenting the French Chamber on the revolution of 1830. In 1831, he was appointed Assistant Attorney-General. In 1832, he became presiding Judge of the City Court of New Orleans. In 1835, when he had barely reached the constitutional age, he was elected to the Senate of the United States.
The calamity of his life, as he always felt it, over- took him here. A distressing form of malady had fastened upon him, and it seriously impaired his capacity for work. He decided to go to France and seek medical assistance before assuming his duties at Washington. Three eminent physicians pronounc-
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ing his case too far advanced for relief, he resigned his seat in the Senate and remained in France for medical treatment until 1843.
Readers of Fernando de Lemos can follow him as, under the thin disguise of a pseudonym (a favorite literary device of the period), he travels hither and thither in France, now to some springs to drink the waters, now to some city or town in search of his- torical information, conversing on the road with his fellow travelers of all conditions and storing their expressions and opinions in his wonderful memory. The prestige of his name, wealth and official title, enhanced by his rare intellectual gifts, gained him a welcome into the literary and political salons of Paris in its brilliant period before the revolution of 1848.
The book is but a dull substitute for the personal recital which, with its infinite charm of manner and language, remained to the last moment of the author's life a delight to his friends. The balls at the Tuileries; the salon of Madame Ancelot; the fancy ball at the Spanish Ambassador's; Louis Philippe; the old Maid of Honor to Josephine; de Tocqueville; Balzac; Lamartine; Casimir Perier, the famous physician; Koreff, the hangman of Paris; Mademoiselle Lenormant, and all the long list of historic Louisiana families then living in Paris, with their anecdotes and their experiences-many a dreary hour in his own life and in the lives of others he beguiled into a pleasant one by these reminiscences. He learned to know Paris as he knew New Orleans; and he loved it only second to his native city. But the cure he sought there he did not find and he was a chronic sufferer throughout his long life.
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Shortly after his return from France he married a beautiful, charming and most intelligent lady- Mrs. Ann Buchannan, a member of the prominent Ricks family of Mississippi. The union proved a perfect one, although childless, and, as the husband always avowed with emotion, she was life's great compensation to him for the many disappointments and misfortunes he had suffered.
The absence, which apparently cost the loss of his services to the State for eight years, proved, on the contrary, a period of unexpected usefulness. As soon as his health permitted, he threw himself ardently again into the study of the history of Louisiana, working now, not from the material furnished by Martin and local traditions, but from the vast collections of historical documents lying stored in the archives of the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies in Paris-a field hitherto unexplored by American historians. His researches in it were so thorough that little of moment has been added to them by after gleaners.
Gayarré's family connections gave him access to private archives and documents that but for him would never have been exhumed. When he returned to Louisiana he brought with him, therefore, a new history of Louisiana practically complete. He wrote it in French to preserve the text of the official documents copied from the French archives, which form the bulk of the volume, and published it in New Orleans. The first volume appeared in 1846; the second, in 1847.
The work has been so long out of print that it is rarer now than the "Essai Historique," but covering, as it does, the official history of Louisiana from its
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colonization by Iberville to its cession by France to Spain, it is a treasure of reference to the student. The only rival it has in Louisiana bibliography is Gayarre's later and last history. A good appraise- ment of its value can be made by comparing it with other histories of the same scope published in the United States at that date, or for a score of years afterwards. Had it been written in the language of the country and brought thus within the reach of the ordinary writers and teachers, it is but truth to say that it would have elevated the standard of historical research of the time and advanced by a generation the method of the study of original documents that is the rule to-day. But it could not fail to awaken local enthusiasm and a revival of interest in the past of the State whose future greatness was becoming the political creed of the hour.
The work has its defects in the rigidity of a con- tinuous series of copied documents. Even while composing it, Gayarré conceived the plan of a larger, freer, more comprehensive use of the same material, and the addition to it of a volume to be collected from American archives, and written in the language of the country.
At this period, the "People's Lyceum" (New Orleans having so far progressed in its Americaniza- tion) invited Gayarré to deliver one of its twelve annual lectures. As a bird from a cage, his heart seems to have bounded from the hard-and-fast con- fines of the official documents that encompassed him into the open air and flowery pastures of "The Poetry and Romance of the History of Louisiana." He culled from it not one lecture, but a series of lectures that form the first volume of the publication
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entitled "The American Domination." In his preface he confesses to a humble imitation of Sir Walter Scott in this use of the imagination as a bait to lure readers into a knowledge of history. Time abounds with such attempts and history has lost rather than gained from the concession of gilded facts to readers, for these prove generally the most annoying errors to get rid of afterwards.
In this case, however, the damage caused may well be overlooked in comparison with the good achieved. "The Poetry and Romance of Louisiana" is the portal through which most readers enter the history of Louisiana. If, thereafter, one never feels quite sure of the true reality of the realm one enters, if there happens to the reader what the author con- fesses happened to him, that in it the things of the heart became confused with the things of the mind, the gain has been that in Louisiana the popular senti- ment for the history of the State is vivid and pic- turesque, and that there is not only a popular but also a true poetic sentiment for it that has made itself felt most notably in the educational systems of the day. As a source of inspiration to the dramatist, poet and novelist, it has been in truth too generously prolific. To withdraw its contributions, if such an experiment could be made, from the fiction and drama of the country since its publication, would produce indeed something like a collapse in our native pseudo-historical literature.
The second volume, "The French Domination," is also formed from a series of lectures, but the author says it is, so far as he could make it, detailed and accurate history; in other words, there are in it no adventitious charms. While, however, it holds fast
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to the chronological documents, it is not shackled by them. It rises out of them and above them, expanding with freedom and ease into a narrative that in truth gives such a full satisfaction of charm and interest as makes a Louisianian well-nigh afraid to express any other opinion of it than this-the difficulty is not how to praise it, but how not to overpraise it.
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