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- Sidonie
de la Houssaye
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Sidonie de la Houssaye (1820-1894)
Sidonie de la
Houssaye was born in 1820 to a rich Creole family of both
French and German descent that had played an important role in colonial Louisiana. As a girl,
she was tutored by a French governess who instilled in her a love for the
French language and its literature. At fourteen she married Pelletier de la Houssaye and settled
down in Saint Martinville, a town that was nicknamed "Louisiana's
little Paris".
Since the late Eighteenth Century, St. Martinville had served as a refuge for
French noblemen seeking to escape from the guillotine. Sidonie de la Houssaye gave birth to
fourteen children of whom only three survived. She and her family moved to Franklin, Louisiana
in 1841 and soon faced serious financial problems. These difficulties became
worse when in 1863 Raymond Pelletier de la Houssaye died and
Sidonie de la Houssaye
undertook the task of raising and educating her children by herself. She
began to earn money for her struggling family by teaching her neighbors’
children along with her own. She opened a school for girls in 1849, reopened
it after the Civil War in 1867, and opened another school, with the help of a
Miss Wallis, in 1882. Her daughter, Lilia, died in 1875, leaving her eight
small children in the care of their grandmother. It was during this period
that Mme de la Houssaye
began to publish serial stories and various other literary works in
newspapers like L’Abeille, her main goal being to meet her family's
financial needs. Her texts were written in French and some of them were later
translated into English by her grandchildren. She also wrote many stories for
her grandchildren, most of which have never been published. Mme de la Houssaye found, in a
diary written by her grandmother that she discovered in her attic, much of
the material she used in writing her short fiction. The well-known writer
George Washington Cable soon bought the rights to de la Houssaye’s work and
borrowed from her grandmother’s diary in search of material for Strange
True Stories of Louisiana (1889) and perhaps also for Old Creole Days (1879)
and The Grandissimes, A Story of Creole Life (1880). In "How I
got them," the introduction to this book, Cable briefly alluded to Mme
de la Houssaye. The
manuscripts borrowed or bought by Cable from de la Houssaye were
photographed for Cable's text Strange True Stories of Louisiana. In
1878, Sidonie de la
Houssaye began Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans, seen here in both manuscript and published forms.
These texts were published in the newspaper Le Méschacébé, but their
subject matter was so controversial that the author signed them with her nom
de plume, Louise Raymond. The stories were centered around the legendary
beautiful women of mixed blood in New
Orleans, known for arousing guilty passions in the
men of high society. In 1890
L'Athénée louisianais awarded Mme de la Houssaye a gold medal
for her active contribution to the promotion of the French language in Louisiana. She died in
1894, at seventy-four. Being in-step with the particular rhythm of Louisiana, punctuated
as it was by upheavals and other historical troubles, Sidonie de la Houssaye was a
privileged witness to the century. She saw creole life take shape on the
plantation and in the Antebellum slave society, endure the Civil War and
Reconstruction, and reemerge as the tenacious Creoles tried to preserve their
unique culture.
See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en
Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932).
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