USA > Louisiana > Orleans Parish > New Orleans > Creole families of New Orleans > Part 5
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* Metairie Ridge, as it is known to-day, is the truck farmers' locality. A portion of it at present is Gentilly Terrace, the most beautiful of the suburbs of New Orleans.
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Here Mathurin Dreux was joined by his brother Pierre. The two became partners and engaged in the business of cutting timber, making bricks and raising cattle-enterprises that at that time offered a sure road to wealth. Their own forests furnished the timber, their soil the clay for bricks, their clear- ings the pasture for the cattle, and their slaves the labor needed.
The place was called Gentilly from home senti- ment (Gentilly being a Commune in the Depart- ment of the Seine) and in a few years the brothers became known as the Sieurs de Gentilly, and are so designated in official documents.
In 1732, according to the Cathedral archives, "Mathurin Dreux, inhabitant of Gentilly, an officer of militia of this province, son of Louis Dreux, citizen of Savigny Anjou, and of demoiselle Françoise Harant, native of Savigny, diocese of Anjou, and demoiselle Claudine Françoise Hugot, daughter of the deceased 'garde magazin général of the con- cessions of Monseigneur LeBlanc' and of Françoise Martin, widow of Sieur Moriset," received the nuptial benediction in the Parish Church.
In the year following, 1733, Pierre Dreux, desig- nated also as an officer of militia, was married to demoiselle Anne Corbin Bachemin, daughter of Jean Corbin and Anne Marie Judith le Hardy, natives of St. Malo, parish of St. Lawrence. Only the immediate relatives signed the record.
The two brothers occupied a joint home-a hand- some house with spacious rooms and galleries, sur- rounded by gardens. It was for a century the show place of New Orleans, to which all strangers were conducted. Laussat, in 1800, writes that he was
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taken out on "Bayou Road, the fashionable drive of the city."
The further life of the two brothers follows the uneventful history of the happy and prosperous. Living in a style of stately independence, and main- taining an attitude of aristocratic supremacy over what was virtually their seigneurie Gentilly, the large family did not apparently become involved in any of the political complications that troubled the serenity of life in New Orleans. Perier, Vaudreuil, Kerlerec, followed one after another in the govern- ment; the Natchez massacre, which, like an earth- quake horror, shook the colony; the Chickasaw war, the retirement of Bienville to France-there is no trace of these events in the records of the family that have been preserved. Neither the heroic, daring revolution against the Spaniards nor the fighting of 1815 counted the name of Dreux in any of their gatherings and proceedings.
The name, in fact, is to be found only in the record of the marriages of the six children, and of their children into the great families of the province.
François, the eldest son, married a de Lorme. Gentilly, a Bermudez.
Guy, a Beauregard, the great-aunt of General Toutant Beauregard. Guy's second wife was Félicité Trudeau de Longueuil.
Françoise Claudine, the eldest daughter, mar- ried the Chevalier Soniat du Fossat.
Jeanne married Robin de Logny.
Charlotte married Jean Gabriel de Fazende. Their daughter became the wife of Jacques
Philippe Villeré, first Governor of Louisiana. On the death of Mathurin, in 1718, his extensive
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estate was divided among his children, and in the course of two generations the great fortune of the Dreux, like that of the Marigny and the Livaudais, became subdivided into insignificant fractions among their descendants.
Guy, the youngest son, was maintaining the brick- yard in 1796, when de Pontalba, as he mentions in his letters to his wife, visited it and bought from Guy five thousand bricks, at eleven dollars per thousand. De Pontalba mentions the gay parties that used to make pleasure excursions to the Dreux plantation at Gentilly; and he always pauses, in his letters, to pay his compliments to the "Widow Guy Dreux," the most beautiful, charming and agreeable lady in the city. Before her marriage she was Félicité Trudeau de Longueuil.
The military spirit, however, of the descendants of "Louis the Fighter" was dormant only, not extinct, in the Louisiana branch. It awoke to glory and to fame in 1861, in the person of Charles Didier Dreux, the son of Guy Dreux and Léontine Arnoult, and grandson of Didier Dreux and Mathilde Enould de Livaudais (daughter of Jacques François Enoul de Livaudais and Marie Celeste de Marigny).
Charles Dreux answered the first call of arms made by the Confederate Government, three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter. He left New Orleans for the battlefield as Lieutenant Colonel of the Louisiana Guard Battalion. Three months later, at Young's Mills, Virginia, he fell at the head of his command, with the words on his lips, "Steady, boys! Steady!"
He was the first Confederate field officer killed during the war. His body, brought to New Orleans,
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was accorded a funeral that has passed into history as Louisiana's tribute to her first dead. The children, who were taken by their parents to see the funeral procession, have grown old and white-headed, but the memory of the martial music, the draped flags, and solemn files of soldiers in gray uniform, the flag- draped coffin, has never grown old or hoary. Many a child's heart passed from the innocent security of childhood at that hour into the full mature realiza- tion of what is meant by war, sorrow, country, patriotism and heroism.
Charles Dreux is described by those who knew him as a man of great personal magnetism; brilliant, eloquent, dashing. His picture shows him to have been, indeed, truly noble if not royal in appearance. His widow, on the fall of the city to the Federal forces, sought refuge in Havana, where their only child died. A brother of Charles Dreux, Pierre Edgar Dreux, who married Célestine Sanchez, was also killed in battle during the first years of the Civil War.
The name, transplanted from France over two hundred years ago, still maintains its freshness and vitality in New Orleans, contributing its quota to census and directory. The proud lineage still runs, straight, connecting the old families of the past with those of the present. The descendants of Mathurin . Dreux are to be met to-day in society and the busi- ness world, under the names of Beauregard, Dugue, Verret, de la Vergne, Livaudais, Jumonville, Destré- han, Fazende, Villeré, LeBreton, Déléry, and Soniat du Fossat.
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CHAPTER V
A ROMANCE OF THE BAYOU ST. JEAN
O' THER settlers besides those of flesh and blood have given their name to the pleasant country- side of the Bayou St. Jean. Gayarre relates a romance, which the historians make a place for in their narratives, and which is still repeated by all guides. It deals with Charlotte, the beautiful daughter of the Duke of Brunswick, a paragon of virtue, beauty and talent, who was married to Alexis, the son of Peter the Great, after she had given her heart to the Chevalier d'Aubant, an officer of her father's household. On the day of her marriage he received a passport and permission to leave the country.
To continue, in Gayarré's words:
"Whither he went no one knew, but in 1718 he arrived in Louisiana with the grade of Captain in the colonial troops. Shortly after this, he was stationed at New Orleans, where, beyond what was necessary in the discharge of his duties, he shunned the con- tact of his brother officers and lived in the utmost solitude.
"On the banks of the Bayou St. Jean, on the land known in our day as the Allard plantation, there was a small village of friendly Indians. With the consent of the Indians, d'Aubant formed there a rural retreat where he spent most of the time he could spare from his military avocations. Plain and rude was the soldier's dwelling, but it contained, as ornament, a full length and admirable portrait of a female, surpassingly beautiful, in the contemplation of which d'Aubant would frequently remain absorbed as in a trance. Near the figure represented stood a table on which lay a crown, resting, not on a cushion as usual, but on a heart which it crushed with its weight, and at which the lady gazed with intense melancholy.
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This painting attracted, of course, a good deal of observation, but no one dared to allude to it. By intuition, every one felt that it was sacred ground, on which enquiry ought not to tread.
"Where was all the while the Princess Charlotte, the gilded victim of Imperial misery? One day, entering his wife's apart- ments, her husband requested her to receive a female scullion of
i her kitchen on whom he had bestowed his affections. She refused; he, heated by the fumes of his deep potations, worked himself into a paroxysm of frantic rage, and with wild gestures and terrific shrieks of a maniac, rushed upon her, and with repeated blows, laid her prostrate on the floor, senseless and cold in apparent death. 1
"The Princess recovered from her swoon, and found herself alone with her friend and bosom companion, the Countess of Kôenigs- mark. Long did they discourse together in subdued tones. That night the Countess of Koenigsmark entered secretly the Princess' room, and there was re-enacted that scene where Friar Lawrence counsels Juliet to feign death. The imperial funeral took place according to the plan which had been laid; the whole of Europe was deceived.
"With the two hundred emigrants who had arrived in March, 1721, there had come a woman who, by her beauty and by that nameless thing which marks a superior being or extraordinary destinies had, on her arrival at New Orleans, attracted public attention. She immediately enquired for the Chevalier d'Aubant, to whom she pretended to be recommended. She was informed that he was at his retreat on the Bayou St. Jean, and that he would be sent for. But she eagerly opposed it, and begged that a guide should conduct her to d'Aubant's rural dwelling.
"It was a vernal evening, and the last rays of the sun were : lingering in the West. Seated in front of the portrait, which we : know, d'Aubant, with his eyes rooted to the ground, seemed to be plunged in deep revery. Suddenly he looked up-the dead was alive again, and confronting him with eyes so sweet and sad, with eyes so moist with rapturous tears, and with such an expression of con- centrated love as can only be borrowed from the abode of bliss above! What pen could do justice to the scene? Suffice it to say that on the next day the Chevalier d'Aubant was married to the mysterious stranger, who gave no other name to the enquiring priest than that of Charlotte. In commemoration of this event,
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THEMBOOMI Briquette entre Poteaux (bricked between posts). Type of Pioneer house in country outside of New Orleans.
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A ROMANCE OF THE BAYOU ST. JEAN
they planted two oaks which, looking like twins and interlocking their leafy arms, are to this day to be seen standing side by side, on the bank of the St. Jean, and bathing their feet in the stream, a little to the right of the bridge in front of the Allard plantation.
"Certain it is, that although d'Aubant and his wife kept their own secret, and lived in almost monastic retirement, rumors about their wonderful history were so rife in the colony, and the attention of which they became the objects subjected them to so much un- easiness, that d'Aubant contrived to leave the country soon after, and went to Paris, where his wife, having met the Marshal of Saxe in the garden of the Tuileries, and being recognized by him, escaped detection with the greatest difficulty. D'Aubant departed for the Island of Bourbon, where he resided for a considerable time. In 1754, on his death, his widow returned to Paris with a daughter, the only offspring of her union with d'Aubant, and in 1781 she died in a state bordering on destitution."
The painstaking, conscientious historian, Hanno Deiler, after quoting Gayarré's account, ends by saying of it: "It is a pity to destroy such a pretty legend." Nevertheless he does so pitilessly. His cold-blooded investigations prove beyond a doubt that no such name as d'Aubant is to be met with in colonial documents. The marriage records of the St. Louis Cathedral between 1720-1730 register no such marriage.
"The legend, therefore," says Deiler, "may be pronounced a myth, although Allard's plantation is still pointed out as the dwelling place of the lovers, and the two leaf-locked trees by the bridge still bear witness to their happiness."
Picket, in his "History of Alabama," claims the couple as residents of Mobile. Tschokke, the Ger- man novelist, places them on the Red River. But no fact in her history is so firmly believed by the romantic people of New Orleans as this lovers' tale, and their dwelling place has been assigned to various other localities favorable to the seclusion of true love.
CHAPTER VI
DE PONTALBA
0 F all the good old French names that her mother country contributed to New Orleans, not one has become so firmly rooted in the soil as that of de Pontalba. It has kept up so evenly with the growth of the city that it bids fair to become one of our most enduring landmarks.
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The family came originally from the old province of Quercy, the country of the Cadurci, as indicated by the patronymic Delfau, a corruption of Delfaon (beech tree) in the Romanic language .* Jean Joseph Delfau de Pontalba, the first of the name in Louisiana, came to the colony in 1732, at the age of nineteen, with the grade of "enseigne en second," with the promise of promotion that would seem to stand for a certificate of friends in the best place for an officer to possess them-in the court or government circle.
The colony at the time was what would be called to-day in a strenuous period of her history. Périer was closing, with doubtful honors, his campaign against the Natchez to punish them for their massacre of the French a few years before. The
* From "Etats des Services du Sieur de Pontalba, Capitaine d'Infanterie. Archives du Ministere de la Marine." Paris.
De Pontalba was the name of a fief belonging to this family (in the environs of Higeac Depot); first assumed as a family name by the Louisiana officer.
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Company of the West had just again ceded their charter to the King; Périer was about to be recalled and Bienville was already selected to succeed him and take up again his old authority as Governor of the colony. Pontalba was at once ordered to the Natchez Fort, which was under the command of M. de Bénac. For a year he was busily employed learning something of Indian warfare for, as he wrote, the fierce, irreconcilable Natchez harassed the fort continually and kept the French on a con- stant pursuit of them.
After Bienville's arrival the young officer was ordered to New Orleans, where he remained three months. In token of the terms upon which he stood with Bienville, we have the following endorsement by the Governor, in his official report of the French officers employed in Louisiana:
"Pontalba has always conducted himself well; is intelligent, good looking, sensible, and attached to his profession.
"(Signed)
BIENVILLE."
During the two years following, Bienville was employed first in trying to detach the powerful Chickasaws from their alliance with the Natchez, and when this failed in preparing an expedition against them. Pontalba was stationed in command of the post at the Tunicas-the Baton Rouge post. When Bienville's armament was ready to proceed to Mobile, he and his garrison were ordered down the river to join it.
The interest in Bienville's graphic account of his unfortunate expedition in the Chickasaw country culminated, as all who have read it remember, in the description of the attack of a picked company of one hundred and twenty-nine grenadiers under the
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command of de Noyan, upon the stronghold of the Acquia village. Pontalba figured in the list of officers who led the attack and made a gallant effort to rally the men under the deadly discharge of the hidden savages. Our chronicle contains a short extract from de Pontalba's account of the expedition. The whole of it is a valuable addition to our archives, for we have only Bienville's report, or rather defense of it, and d'Artaguette's bitter arraignment, written in indignant grief over the cruel death in it of his young brother.
The year following this campaign, de Pontalba was made the commander of the post of Pointe Coupée, one of the most flourishing settlements in the colony where, as Bienville, writing the same year, states, a hundred thousand pounds of tobacco were produced annually.
Pontalba remained there twenty months, or until his services were needed in Bienville's second expedi- tion against the Chickasaws-the one by the way of the Mississippi. He was put under the command of de Coustillac, who was engaged in establishing a dépôt at the mouth of the St. Francis River. He was sent twice into the Illinois country for provi- sions for Fort Assumption, and acquitted himself with such diligence that he accomplished the dis- tance in a space of time so short as to seem incredible to his contemporaries.
When the futile campaign was ended by an un- satisfactory treaty with the Chickasaws, Pontalba came down to the city with the Governor; and two months later he obtained a leave of absence and sailed for France. Bienville's next report of the officer's serving in Louisiana recommended him for
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promotion with the annotation, however, affixed to his name: "Has served very well; seems to have corrected himself his very marked taste for com- merce."
Pontalba remained in France for a year, and upon his return was sent by Bienville to the post of the Balize, perhaps to remove him from the temptations of again yielding to his mercantile inclinations. He remained at the Balize, however, only until Bienville departed from the colony and Vaudreuil arrived and took possession of it. He at once reappointed de Pontalba to his old post at Pointe Coupée.
According to the marriage certificate in the Cathe- dral Archives we read that in New Orleans, on the 4th of November, 1743, in the Parish Church, Messire Jean Joseph Delfau de Pontalba, Lieutenant of Infantry and Commandant of the post at Pointe Coupée, son of Messire François Delfau, Baron de Pontalba, Seigneur de Roquefort, Pontalba and other places, and of Dame Louise de Lombard (his father and mother natives of Montauban) was married to Dame Marguerite Madeleine Broutin, daughter of Messire François Broutin, Captain of Engineers of the King in the province, and of Dame Marguerite Madeleine Lemaire, native of the province. The bride was, as we remember, the widow of François Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville; her sister mar- ried Delino de Chalmette.
Pontalba remained at his post of Pointe Coupée ten years, serving the King and colony, doubtless with honor and with profit, but also to his own interest, according to gossip. Kerlerec relieved him from his position on account of the gossip, but stated explicitly that he, personally, did not believe it.
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Pontalba's ten years' administration at the post of Pointe Coupée was signalized by great prosperity. In 1749, he was advanced to the grade of Captain, and in 1759 was made Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis. He died in New Orleans in 1760.
Joseph Xavier Delfau de Pontalba, the son of the foregoing and the New Orleans de Pontalba, as he may be called, was born in New Orleans in 1754, but taken at a very early age (presumably upon the death of his father) to France, where he was educated. He entered the French Army at Sèvres. Louisiana, having become a Spanish possession, his history diverges from it. He was twenty-eight years of age before he returned to his native city. To copy briefly his record in the "Archives de la Marine," he was named to the regiment of Montauban; four years later was transferred to the regiment of Guadeloupe; attained the grade of Lieutenant and later of Assistant Adjutant of the regiment; took part in the campaign of Ste. Lucie, Granada. He gained distinction at the siege of Savannah, his conduct being praised in the highest terms in written certificates from his commanders, the Baron Stredink, the Count d'Estaing, and the Marshal de Noaille, on behalf of his son the Count de Noaille, in whose division Pontalba served.
Two years later, he figures as the hero in "A duel in the army in 1797," of which elaborate details were collated from official documents by his great-grand- son, the late Baron Edouard de Pontalba (Paris, 1904). It appears that the young lieutenant, sta- tioned then with his regiment in Martinique, too young, as he acknowledged, to know better, took upon himself to resent an affront which concerned
Ellsworth Woodward
Villa on Levee Road below New Orleans, facing West (now demolished).
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in truth only his superior officer. In consequence, he was assaulted in the street by the enemy he had made and received three sword thrusts before he could defend himself. Bathed in blood, he was carried to the hospital, where he remained eight months. As soon as he was able to walk with a cane he left the hospital, determined to seek his adversary until he found him, which he did shortly afterwards in the street. He attacked him, but again fell wounded from a thrust in the side, his quick-footed foe making his escape.
On the advice of his friends and to save himself from a civil prosecution, Pontalba sought refuge in Martinique and remained there until his wound healed, returning to his regiment more determined than ever to call his foe to account. But after searching for him for six weeks he learned that "X" (so the adversary is designated in the Lieutenant's account) had returned to France. De Pontalba was disposed to let the affair rest there, biding his time for revenge until chance should bring him face to face with his opponent. But a letter from his superior officer, written in the name of all the officers of the regiment, assured him that his honor required him to pursue "X" to France.
There was no avoiding the issue or the hint conveyed. De Pontalba obtained a leave for a year and hastened to France where, after diligent search, he found the man he sought and forced him to give satisfaction.
A duel in form took place. This time the ad- versary was wounded in the right hand and, refusing to continue the fight with his left, promised on his honor, in the presence of the four seconds (officers),
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that he would meet de Pontalba on the same spot in fifteen days. De Pontalba and his seconds awaited him punctiliously at the time and place appointed, but the Sieur "X" did not make his appearance, for he had left the country. Papers were drawn up and signed by the seconds, attesting the facts; and these, with certificates of what had taken place in Guadeloupe, were submitted to the Count de Genlis, Marquis de Sillery, Captain of the Gardes du Duc de Chartres, who was the supreme French authority at the time in questions of honor. This high officer, after careful study of the papers submitted to him and due consideration of the delicate affair, pro- nounced the decision that de Pontalba had acted as man of honor in every particular, and was entitled to the "esteem and friendship of his brother officers." De Pontalba was ordered to rejoin his regiment at Guadeloupe and resume his service. The fine im- posed upon him for his infraction there of the public peace was remanded.
He retired from the army with the grade of Captain in 1782, and returned to Louisiana, casting his fortunes in with the Spanish Government. He was given a company in the native regiment of Louisiana, stationed in New Orleans, and later was made Colonel and Commandant of the Regiment des Allemands.
In 1789, he was married to Jeanne Louise le Breton, daughter of Barthelmy le Breton des Charmeaux, Mousquetaire of the King, and of Françoise de Macarty.
Louise le Breton des Charmeaux des Chappelles came, as the old Creole ladies would say, from far back in Louisiana history. She was the grand-
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daughter of de Noyan, Bienville's grand-nephew, who had married the daughter of Nicolas Chauvin de La Frénière, the glorious Louisiana patriot executed by O'Reilly. It may be remembered that, on account of his youth and his very recent marriage, the young man was offered a pardon and his life by the Spanish General, but he refused to abandon his companions and his father-in-law, La Frénière, whose last words were addressed to him. The young widow of de Noyan afterwards married Louis Césaire le Breton des Chappelles. Their son, Louis Césaire le Breton, married Louise Françoise Ma- carty; and the daughter of this couple became the wife of Joseph Delfau de Pontalba.
After his marriage Pontalba entered the service of Spain with the grade of Captain. Seven years of peaceful, happy life followed, the only important event of which was the birth of a son, Joseph Xavier Celestin de Pontalba (1791).
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