USA > Louisiana > Orleans Parish > New Orleans > Creole families of New Orleans > Part 24
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sight was unimpaired, and his wits, for he was ever a witty and refined "joker." His devoted com- panion (a quaint memory) was a goose who followed him about all day, and slept at his door at night. He died in 1863, four generations following him to the grave. His old servants remained faithful to him; Françoise the cook, cooked his last dinner, for she had persisted in remaining a cook even after her husband attained the dignity of State Senator.
Elie Lavillebeuvre, the son of Jean Ursin, married Mademoiselle Jeanne Roman, the daughter of Governor Roman. After the death of his father he returned to the old square of the city and lived on Dumaine Street between Bourbon and Royal Streets, in a house that was always cited as a typical Creole home, with a handsome courtyard and great drawing- rooms on the second floor, with Louis XVI furniture. Here were given from time to time receptions that united the best society from the old and the American population, Elie Lavillebeuvre and his wife always receiving the guests and presiding over the dances.
The name is extinct. Charles, the only son of Elie, died without children. Of his two daughters, one, Anna, married Thomas McCabe Hyman, son of a late Judge of the Supreme Court of Louisiana; the other, Ida, is married to Monsieur Lezin Becnel.
CHAPTER XXV
GRIMA
T HERE is no name more at home, so to speak, in the city of New Orleans than that of Grima. The first bearer of it in Louisiana was François Albert Xavier Grima who came into the colony about 1780, bearing, if the crudity of the expression be permitted, his patents of nobility not with him but in him.
Albert was the son of Jean Marie Grima, from the Island of Malta, and nothing, practically, is known of his history there. He enters Louisiana history through his marriage with Marie Anne Filiosa, daughter of Sylvain Filiosa, the hero of one of its pretty stories.
A gentleman of Paris, Sylvain Filiosa, came into the colony as a soldier in a troop of French cavalry, which was stationed at the Natchez settlement, and was there in 1727 at the time of the celebrated massacre of the French by the Indians. The massa- cre was so well plotted and carried out that the sur- prise of the French was complete, and their defense useless against the great horde of savages that had been assembled against them. Filiosa, with his troop, was cut off and surrounded; and their annihila- tion seemed inevitable when he, on the inspiration of the moment, seized a pair of cymbals and, jump- ing on his horse, beat them; leading a charge against the howling, blood-drunken, attacking pack. In fact, he played upon the cymbals so masterfully,
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that the Indians stopped short to gaze, fearfully, terrified at the new weapon used against them. *
The savages retired in dismay and thus the command was saved by "le fort Timballier," or "le beau Timballier," or "le vaillant Timballier," as he is called in the various accounts of the affair. Louis XV, to whom it was reported, with his ready politeness always spoke of Filiosa as "Le Sieur Timballier."
The Frenchmen were all slaughtered, but the women and children were captured alive, to be reserved for worse torture and slavery. The family of the Sieur de Foucault were destroyed, with the exception of one young girl who one would like to think was saved by "le beau Timballier," but truth compels the admission that she was rescued by that middle-aged pioneer, Le Sueur, who, as we know, at the first cry of alarm from the Natchez settlement, hastened to the relief of the French with a great force of Choctaws, and he it was who delivered the captive women and children from the hands of the Indians, and took them to New Orleans. There the orphan children and the young girls were received by the good-hearted Ursuline nuns and given a home in their convent. Marie Anne Fou- cault lived with them and was educated by them, until she was given in marriage to Sylvain Filiosa.
Later in life, "le Beau Timballier" followed the peaceful avocation of farming on one of the islands of the Gulf of Mexico lying about the mouth of the
* From the family notes kindly furnished by Alfred Grima, Esq .; grandson of Felix Grima. The dictionary gives Kettledrum as the proper translation of "timballe" and Filiosa may have used a kettle- drum, which would have been just effective against the Indians.
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Mississippi. According to tradition, it was given to him by the French Government in concession. All that is certain is that he lived there and that the island is still called Timballier after him.
In 1785, Albert Grima bought the corner of Tou- louse and Bourbon Streets, a part of the ground upon which the French Opera House stood until it was burned recently. In 1795, he bought the adjoin- ing lot on Toulouse Street, where the family lived until about 1840, when Felix Grima purchased the house on St. Louis Street. For three generations that has been the home of the family.
Albert had two sons: Bartolomeo, who settled in Mexico; and Felix, who remained to found the New Orleans family. Felix was born in New Orleans in 1798. He was taught, as was Gayarré a few years later, in the school kept by Lefort, whom Gayarré has rescued from oblivion in the reminiscences of his childhood. Like Gayarré, his great contemporary, Grima attended the Collège d'Orléans, then in its brilliant first days. He studied law in the office of the great jurist of the old Louisiana Bar, Etienne Mazureau, and was admitted to the Bar in 1819. Mazureau, who was Attorney-General, appointed him Deputy Attorney-General; and, in 1828, he was commissioned by Governor Henry Johnson, Judge of the Criminal Court of New Orleans. He married, in 1831, Adélaide Montégut, the daughter of Joseph Montégut "fils" and Gabrielle Rose Nicolas de St. Céran, a member of one of the fine old St. Domingo families, who, to the enormous benefit of the city, emigrated thence to New Orleans during the Revolu- tion. Her father was a Judge at Port au Prince on the island : her mother, Geneviève de Linois, belonged
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to a Breton family, which gave several captains and one admiral to the French Navy. She was married to Montégut "fils" in 1805, on the same day and at the same ceremony which united her first cousin, the beautiful Madame Moreau, to the great lawyer and patriot, Edward Livingston.
Montégut, who was at one time an officer in the Spanish service, became afterwards a planter and died quite young in 1815. Montégut "père" was a native of Rocos Armagnac, France, and was the son of Raymond de Montégut. He came to Louisiana about 1760, and after the Spanish transfer became an intimate friend of Galvez. He was the chief surgeon of the Charity Hospital as early as 1775; and in 1800, under Claiborne's administration, became Secretary of the Treasury of Louisiana. His wife was Françoise de Lille Dupart, the grand- daughter of Pierre de Lille Dupart, who owned a great concession on the outskirts of New Orleans. One of the ancestral Duparts was burned at the stake by the Indians during the Natchez war. Pierre de Lille Dupart left liberal bequests to the Charity Hospital in his will, which is still extant, dated 1775.
One of the daughters of Montégut "père," Soli- delle, married Joseph de Roffignac, son of the famous Mayor of New Orleans; another daughter of de Lille Dupart married Mandeville de Marigny; a third married Don Bartoloméo MacNamara; a fourth, Don Juan Arnoult. Her father dying young, Françoise de Lille Dupart was reared by her aunt, Madame Mandeville de Marigny. A very interest- ing painting, in the Museum of the Historical
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Society at the Cabildo, represents Dr. Montégut and his family, including Madame de Marigny.
Grima's learning, ability and conscientious work procured for him influential clients and he became attorney for numerous prominent banks and busi- ness firms. He was in full course of a lucrative pro- fessional career when the Civil War, like a cataclysm, overturned the peace and prosperity of the country. His devotion to the State and to the principles of secession exposed him to the rigors of General But- ler's administration, and he was menaced with expulsion from the city, but he was saved by the influence of a devoted friend in the opposite political camp.
This influence, however, was unsuccessful under General Banks, the successor of General Butler; and Grima was banished on a twenty-four hours' notice. He went with his family to Augusta, Georgia, and maintained himself during his exile by teaching school and giving private lessons. In 1865, he returned to his home and from the ruins of his profession established anew his practice which netted him again a large fortune.
He was a sound scholar, a linguist and a lover of good literature-and from time to time he made contributions to the French publications of the city, one of which, "Les Souvenirs d'un Exilé" is still cited with interest and pleasure by lovers of native Louisiana literature. He was noted for his social relations with his professional brethren, particularly for his long friendship and intimacy with François Xavier Martin, the great Chief Justice of Louisiana. The chaste and imposing monument erected over Martin in the St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (on Clai- borne Street) was made from the design selected by
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Grima. The Grima house on St. Louis Street is for- lorn now in its old aristocratic neighborhood; its neighbors have deserted it, forced to retreat before the contaminating advance of lower society. The fine old street with its saintly and kingly name is, sad to say, retrograding into a decadent quarter, but the house stands like a dowager of the old nobility, dignified and self-possessed in her handsome middle age, before the encroachments of undesirable intru- ders. The most careless passer-by could hardly fail to notice and admire it, a typical sample of architec- ture produced by the blending of French and Spanish taste. The windows are wide, the front door is sur- mounted by an elliptical arch with fanlights, with slender columns on each side. It opens with a generous sweep into a great hall that runs the length of the house. From the hall rises majestically a stately, curving stairway, whose newel posts are of brass. On each side of the hall are the four great gala rooms, de rigueur in colonial days, with walls frescoed on canvas-where, so the memory of it runs, were given the most beautiful balls of their day in the city; and beautiful they must have been to be worthy of their setting. To one side is the garden, as broad as the front of the house-so sheltered behind a tall brick wall that from the outside only the tops of trees and shrub- bery are visible; but on the inside filled with pretty conceits, walks and parterres, where still grow the bright, variegated, old-fashioned flowers of a half century ago. It is the kind of garden that used to be planted and tended by the knowing hands of an old slave gardener under the eye of a flower-loving mistress.
For the first time in eighty years the noble old
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house is empty and deserted; its hospitable rooms as useless as withered breasts. Its young families moved away from it. The "Silent Chariot" bore away others. The last of its daughters, Adelaide, was carried out of the old portals only a few months ago to a last station in the Cathedral, and then to her last resting place in the cemetery. She was charming and well beloved, the very incarna- tion of the grace and spirit of old New Orleans. Heaven had endowed her with its choice blessing, a beautiful voice, that ministered to the delight of society. But while it was still fresh and in its full beauty, she withdrew it from the world and conse- crated it to the service of the church-to gaunt old bare St. Augustin. It is pleasant to remember that the poorest and not the richest church, the humblest and not the proudest congregation in the city was chosen by Adelaide.
Sweet singer, dear friend, Requiescat in Pace.
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Vestibule of Grima House-Newel Posts of Brass, Balustrade of Mahogany.
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CHAPTER XXVI
FORSTALL
T HE Forstalls lie like a stratum of rich ore under the soil of New Orleans society. Scratch the sur- face under any prominent name, and you tap a Forstall. The vein is pure and true, and it has yielded in the past a good profit to the city.
The record* of the family leads back, not to France, but to England, the name being originally Forestier, Forster, Forestall. A William de Fores- tier, a Norman knight, crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror in 1066. Among the great Anglo-Norman families which became established in Ireland in the twelfth century was that of Forestier, or Forestall, which possessed a great estate in Kil- kenny. The first of the name in Ireland was Lawrence le Forestier, one of the companions of "Strongbow," Earl of Pembroke, when he invaded the country in 1169. According to the register in
* Taken from the papers kindly loaned by Rathbone de Buys, Esq. The documents and the genealogical record that accompanies them, proving the descent of the family as narrated, are attested "as in every respect true and genuine by the Archbishop and Primate of Ireland, the Archbishop of Juam, the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, the Bishop of Cloin and Ross, in Dublin, October 12th, 1758." The attestation is further guaranteed by the Apostolick Prothonotary, who certifies that "the antecedent lodges and arms of the Forstalls are true and genuine, as recited in the antecedent Genealogy: Signed by Fr. Thomas de Burgos, doctor in divinity and prothonotary Apostolick. 9th of November. 1758."
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the office of Ulster King of Arms in Dublin Castle, the Forstalls of Louisiana descend from Peter Forstall, Esq., one of the descendants of this Lawrence, and are entitled to the same armorial devices-the three broad arrowheads on a shield.
Peter Forstall, whose will was proved in 1683, married Mary, daughter of Nicholas Aylward, Esq., of Shankill. He left several children. His eldest son was Edmond Forstall (the name so well known in New Orleans), who married Eleanor Butler of Dangan, of the noble house of Ormond. All of his three sons became Knights of Jerusalem.
Edmond Forstall entered the military service of France and became Captain of Dragoons under Louis XIV. He married, in Ireland, Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Mead, Esq., of Kilkenny. Their eldest son, Nicholas, emigrated from France to Martinique, taking up his residence in the town of St. Pierre, where he married, in 1725, Jane, daughter of John Barry, K.C. Their eldest son, Michel Edmond Forstall, born in Martinique in 1727, removed to New Orleans and established himself in business there; and in 1761 married Pélagie de la Chaise, granddaughter of the Chevalier d'Arens- bourg, of the Côte des Allemands. In the Cathedral records Forstall is registered simply as "a merchant of this city."
Two years before, Pélagie's sister, Louise, had married Joseph Roy Villeré, the patriot who was killed by the Spaniards in 1769. Forstall took no active part in the rebellion against the Spaniards, but it is stated authoritatively that he used his influence with O'Reilly, whom his family had known in Spain, to save the life of his father-in-law, the
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old Chevalier d'Arensbourg who, heart and soul, despite his age had taken part with the revolutionists, and therefore had been listed by O'Reilly for punish- ment with Lafrénière and Villeré.
When the Spanish Government was organized' Nicholas Forstall was chosen Alcalde for several succeeding terms and was in office when the French took possession of the colony in 1803. He had five children by his marriage with Pélagie de la Chaise: Edmond Pierre Charles; Félix Edmond; Félix Martin; Elizabeth Louise, who married J. B. Poeyfarre, in his day a noted planter and citi- zen whose name is preserved on a street that runs through the site of their old plantation. Their old plantation house is still standing on the street, a venerable reminder of a past day. They left no descendants. Emerante, the youngest daughter, married Jacques de Léry, one of the noteworthy Chauvin family and a first cousin of the famous Lafrénière.
Edouard Pierre Charles Forstall married Céleste Lavillebeuvre, the daughter of Jean Louis Verrault de Lavillebeuvre, Chevalier de Garrois. The six children born of the marriage formed what may be called the Forstall dynasty, that reigned over the social and financial world of New Orleans for a half century. Edmond Jean married Clara Durel. Pla- cide married Marie Borgia Delphine Lopez y Angulla de la Candelaria, the daughter of Don Ramon Lopez y Angullo, an officer holding high rank in the service of Spain, and of his wife Delphine Macarty, who was a woman of such great beauty that when she went to Spain to solicit the protection of the Queen of Spain for her husband, who had incurred a mili-
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tary punishment, she did no more than kneel in a garden where the Queen took her morning walk. Her long black hair was unbound and hanging about her shoulders, her lovely eyes raised in supplication. The Queen stopped at sight of her, so young and so beautiful, and approached her with the words: "Your petition, whatever it is, is granted, you are so beautiful!" It may be said also of her that her daughters and granddaughters to the third and fourth generation merit the same tribute of admira- tion for their remarkable beauty. The daughter of Delphine Macarty, Delphine Lopez y Angulla, was born on board the ship on the young mother's voyage from Spain, to which circumstance the child owed the nickname of "Borquite" (from bord), which she bears even in the memory of the present generation.
The other children of Charles Edouard Forstall and Céleste de Lavillebeuvre were Felix Jean, who married Héloise de Jan, and Louis Edouard, who married Mathilde Plauché, the daughter of General J. B. Plauché, who distinguished himself at the Battle of New Orleans.
It is of tradition in New Orleans that the two young sons of Nicholas Forstall were put in the office of Panton, the great merchant, to learn busi- ness methods. It may be remembered that De Lino de Chalmette wished to do the same thing with his charge, Bernard Marigny, and thereby rather harmed than benefited him. The story is different about the two Forstalls. Panton's clerks, according to the rule of the house, lived with him, but had a separate table assigned them for their meals. The great head of the firm, however, noticing that the young For-
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stalls were superior in station and manner to the other clerks, had places for them at his own table, at which they thenceforth always had their meals. This apprenticeship was the foundation of the busi- ness development of the Forstall brothers and, it may be said, of New Orleans. The history of the house of Panton Leslie is yet to be written. Its rise to the ascendancy it acquired over the entire commerce of the Louisiana colony, holding in subjection as a collateral the trade of the great Indian tribes that still belonged to it, has but been glanced at by Gayarré and other historians, and the character of Panton himself only hinted at. He did more than any political power of his time to hold the vast country together in a common interest of trade, and he ranked with the Spanish Governors as a dominat- ing influence. Panton impressed his type upon the Forstalls, and they transmitted it to the generation beyond them-the type of the great financier who accumulated great wealth while maintaining the ideals of a grand seigneur.
It does not take the memory of an octogenarian to-day to recall the type of the merchant prince of New Orleans-the patron of opera and theatre, dis- tinguished by perfect courtesy of manner, not only in the world of society, but also in his business office: a dilettante of the fine arts, a linguist, speaking with ease, French, Spanish and English, a man who used his wealth as musicians do their instruments to produce results of art, who traveled to London and Paris as their successors to-day to New York and Chicago, bringing back with them the standards of Paris and London to apply to their own life.
Nine children were born of the marriage of Placide
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Forstall with Delphine Lopez. To belong to good society in New Orleans is to know them and their connections. Anatole married Pauline Gelpi Oc- tave, Louise Forstall, his cousin. It was the daugh- ters of the family, however, who carried its prestige in the nineteenth century. Women they were of such beauty that they became a proverb, and of such charm that its memory outlasts even the financial reputation of the men of the family. Céleste became the wife of Henry Alanson Rathbone; Emma married Emile de Buys; Pauline, Eugène Peychaud; Laure, Félix Ducros; Julia, Robert J. Taney, grandson of the Chief Justice of the United States; Delzire married Z. B. Canonge; Delphine never married but reigned a belle, even in her aged spinsterhood, not only in her native city but in Paris.
Henry Alanson Rathbone, who married Céleste Forstall, was the son of Samuel Rathbone of Stoning- ton, Connecticut. John Rathbone, his ancestor, was one of the original purchasers of Block Island from Governor Endicott in 1660, and had a seat later in the Rhode Island General Assembly as representative of Block Island. Henry Alanson Rathbone came to New Orleans after the close of the War of 1812, and he is commemorated in social chronicles as one of the few Americans who was received with distinction in Creole society. He was a man of fine intellectual attainments, charming manners and brilliant con- versation. His wife, Céleste Forstall, retained her beauty to old age. Her stately home on Esplanade Avenue, surrounded by a great garden, maintained its standard of old-fashioned elegance and its luxu- rious appointments long after the Civil War, which
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ended the old standards of living as well as the old régime in New Orleans. She left only daughters: Emma, who married John B. de Lallande de Fer- rières; Pauline, who married Peter Labouisse, Esq .; Stella, who became the wife of James Gaspard de Buys ;* Alice, who married William Phelps Eno of New York; Rita, who married Edgar de Poincy. Edmond, the eldest of the four sons of Edouard Forstall and Céleste Lavillebeuvre, is the one whose name is most often repeated when the family is recalled. From 1832 until 1872, when he died, he held the agency for New Orleans of the Baring Brothers of London, and Hope and Company of Amsterdam, from whom at one time he negotiated the sale of bonds issued by the State in favor of the Citizens Bank, amounting to one million dollars. He was also instrumental in framing the law for the incorporation of free banks in Louisiana. In short, to quote the current account of him in the news- papers when he died, he was the leading spirit in all financial banking and insurance companies in New Orleans for half a century. And it must never be omitted from his history that he fought in the Battle of New Orleans, as corporal of the celebrated (or once celebrated) Battalion d'Orléans. This was Plauche's battalion, which ran the whole distance from Bayou St. Jean to Chalmette to join the column of attack. Many of the battalion were deli- cate young Creole boys, yet they bore their heavy muskets and knapsacks with as much ease as prac- tised veterans. As Alexander Walker, the laureate historian of the battle, says to them: "With their gay
*Rathbone de Buys, Esq., the eminent architect of New Orleans is their son.
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and varied uniforms, characterized by that good taste and regard for proportion and effect which distinguished the French race, with their bold, handsome countenances and uniform size, the Orleans battalion was certainly a corps of which any commander might be proud."
Forstall also owned and cultivated a large sugar plantation in the parish of St. James, a plantation that is still cited as one of the great plantations of the State in ante-bellum days when sugar plantations were, so to speak, in their glory. Upon it he adopted -one of the first Louisiana planters to do so-the advanced scientific discovery of the vacuum process of making sugar. It was a costly experiment and it needed the daring of independent wealth to carry it through satisfactorily, as Forstall did, thereby prov- ing himself to be, like Boré, one of the great benefac- tors of the sugar interests of the State.
He proved himself, too, a benefactor in other interests not profitable financially. As has been said in the life of Charles Gayarre, Edmond Forstall made a valuable contribution to the Historical Society at the time when Gayarre revived it and inspired it by his own brilliant example. When François Xavier Martin, the historian, was elected president of the society, Gayarre headed the Executive Com- mittee. Under him were, besides Forstall, de Bow, the owner and publisher of the best of all magazines ever attempted in the southern country,* J. B. French, the publisher of "French Historical Collec- tions," and John Perkins, that rich lover of Louisiana history, to whom primarily historical students are indebted for the superb work of Pierre Margry,
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