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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #12577.
George Washington Cable’s Strange True Stories of Louisiana gathers a series of factual episodes drawn from the state’s legal, social and wartime past, presenting them as a cohesive collection rather than a single narrative. The book opens with a reflective essay on the rarity of “good stories” in real life, then moves into a personal recounting of how the author, prompted by a conversation in New Haven, uncovered a forgotten Supreme Court case involving a woman named Salome Müller. From there he describes his painstaking research, consulting judges, physicians, newspaper archives, and even hiring a clerk to sift through the dusty records of the old Spanish Cabildo, until he assembles the surviving documents that form the core of the tale. The introduction sets the tone for a work that blends courtroom drama, historical memoirs, and fragmented personal letters, all rooted in Louisiana’s 19th‑century milieu.
The narrative voice is that of a learned 19th‑century gentleman, marked by a formal, almost scholarly diction and a penchant for digressive, detail‑rich commentary. Cable’s style reflects the period’s reverence for primary sources, interweaving quotations from legal reports, newspaper clippings, and handwritten French manuscripts with his own observations. Readers who enjoy historical nonfiction that reads like a detective’s notebook, especially those fascinated by Louisiana’s Creole culture, Civil‑War era society, and the quirks of early American jurisprudence, will find this collection rewarding.
The opening · free to read
STRANGE TRUE STORIES OF LOUISIANA.
HOW I GOT THEM.
1882-89.
True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself.
Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen oftener than once I thought they did. Within the last few years there have dropped into my hands by one accident or another a number of these natural crystals, whose charms, never the same in any two, are in each and all enough at least to warn off all tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without being necessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and follow one another like the days of a week. They are mine only by right of discovery. From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's interest, have to abridge; but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no unconfessed "restorations," not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essential feature, I give them as I got them--strange stories that truly happened, all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana.
In the spring of 1883, being one night the guest of my friend Dr. Francis Bacon, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the conversation turning, at the close of the evening, upon wonderful and romantic true happenings, he said:
"You are from New Orleans; did you never hear of Salome Müller?"
"No."
Thereupon he told the story, and a few weeks later sent me by mail, to my home in New Orleans, whither I had returned, a transcription, which he had most generously made, of a brief summary of the case--it would be right to say tragedy instead of case--as printed in "The Law Reporter" some forty years ago. That transcription lies before me now, beginning, "The Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana has lately been called upon to investigate and decide one of the most interesting cases which has ever come under the cognizance of a judicial tribunal." This episode, which had been the cause of public excitement within the memory of men still living on the scene, I, a native resident of New Orleans and student of its history, stumbled upon for the first time nearly two thousand miles from home.
I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one after another. None remembered ever having heard of it. I appealed to a former chief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal remembrance of every member of the bench and the bar concerned in the case; but of the case he had no recollection. One of the medical experts called in by the court for evidence upon which the whole merits of the case seemed to hang was still living--the distinguished Creole physician, Dr. Armand Mercier. He could not recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the vaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took down from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the old newspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasure speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in those days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a steamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded in ten lines of colorless statement. I went to the courts, and, after following and abandoning several false trails through two days' search, found that the books of record containing the object of my quest had been lost, having unaccountably disappeared in--if I remember aright--1870.
There was one chance left: it was to find the original papers. I employed an intelligent gentleman at so much a day to search till he should find them. In the dusty garret of one of the court buildings--the old Spanish Cabildo, that faces Jackson Square--he rummaged for ten days, finding now one desired document and now another, until he had gathered all but one. Several he drew out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of the floor, as if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found. Yet I was content. Through the perseverance of this gentleman and the intervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the courtesy of the court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story of the poor lost and found Salome Müller. How through the courtesy of some of the reportorial staff of the "New Orleans Picayune" I found and conversed with three of Salome's still surviving relatives and friends, I shall not stop to tell.
While I was still in search of these things, the editor of the "New Orleans Times-Democrat" handed me a thick manuscript, asking me to examine and pronounce upon its merits. It was written wholly in French, in a small, cramped, feminine hand. I replied, when I could, that it seemed to me unfit for the purposes of transient newspaper publication, yet if he declined it I should probably buy it myself. He replied that he had already examined it and decided to decline it, and it was only to know whether I, not he, could use it that I had been asked to read it.
I took it to an attorney, and requested him, under certain strict conditions, to obtain it for me with all its rights.
"What is it?"
"It is the minute account, written by one of the travelers, a pretty little Creole maiden of seventeen, of an adventurous journey made, in 1795, from New Orleans through the wilds of Louisiana, taking six weeks to complete a tour that could now be made in less than two days."
But this is written by some one else; see, it says
"Yes," I rejoined, "it purports to be a copy. We must have the little grandmother's original manuscript, written in 1822; that or nothing."
So a correspondence sprang up with a gentle and refined old Creole lady with whom I later had the honor to become acquainted and now count among my esteemed friends--grand-daughter of the grandmother who, after innumerable recountings by word of mouth to mother, sisters, brothers, friends, husband, children, and children's children through twenty-seven years of advancing life, sat down at last and wrote the oft-told tale for her little grand-children, one of whom, inheriting her literary instinct and herself become an aged grandmother, discovers the manuscript among some old family papers and recognizes its value. The first exchange of letters disclosed the fact that the "New Orleans Bee" ("L'Abeille") had bought the right to publish the manuscript in French; but the moment its editors had proper assurance that there was impending another arrangement more profitable to her, they chivalrously yielded all they had bought, on merely being reimbursed.
The condition that required the delivery of the original manuscript, written over sixty years before, was not so easily met. First came the assurance that its spelling was hideous, its writing bad and dimmed by time, and the sheets tattered and torn. Later followed the disclosure that an aged and infirm mother of the grandmother owned it, and that she had some time before compelled its return to the private drawer from which the relic-loving daughter had abstracted it. Still later came a letter saying that since the attorney was so relentlessly exacting, she had written to her mother praying her to part with the manuscript. Then followed another communication,--six large, closely written pages of despair,--inclosing a letter from the mother. The wad of papers, always more and more in the way and always "smelling bad," had been put into the fire. But a telegram followed on the heels of the mail, crying joy! An old letter had been found and forwarded which would prove that such a manuscript had existed. But it was not in time to intercept the attorney's letter saying that, the original manuscript being destroyed, there could be no purchase or any need of further correspondence. The old letter came. It was genuine beyond a doubt, had been written by one of the party making the journey, and was itself forty-seven years old. The paper was poor and sallow, the hand-writing large, and the orthography--!
[Handwriting: Ma bien chair niaice je ressoit ta lette ce mattin]
The kind of letter to expect from one who, as a girl of eighteen, could shoot and swim and was called by her father "my son"; the antipode of her sister Françoise. My attorney wrote that the evidence was sufficient.
His letter had hardly got into the mail-bag when another telegram cried hold! That a few pages of the original manuscript had been found and forwarded by post. They came. They were only nine in all--old, yellow, ragged, torn, leaves of a plantation account-book whose red-ruled columns had long ago faded to a faint brown, one side of two or three of them preoccupied with charges in bad French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin à dames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber had not expanded the work of the original memoirist. The manuscript passed into my possession, our Creole lady-correspondent reiterating to the end her inability to divine what could be wanted with "an almost illegible scrawl" (griffonage), full of bad spelling and of rather inelegant diction. But if old manuscript was the object of desire, why, here was something else; the very document alluded to by Françoise in her memoir of travel--the autobiography of the dear little countess, her beloved Alix de Morainville, made fatherless and a widow by the guillotine in the Reign of Terror.
"Was that all?" inquired my agent, craftily, his suspicions aroused by the promptness with which the supply met the demand. "Had she not other old and valuable manuscripts?"
"No, alas! Only that one."
Thus reassured, he became its purchaser. It lies before me now, in an inner wrapper of queer old black paper, beside its little tight-fitting bag, or case of a kind of bright, large-flowered silken stuff not made in these days, and its outer wrapper of discolored brief-paper; a pretty little document of sixty-eight small pages in a feminine hand, perfect in its slightly archaic grammar, gracefully composed, and, in spite of its flimsy yellowed paper, as legible as print: "Histoire d'Alix de Morainville écrite à la Louisiane ce 22 Aout 1795. Pour mes chères amies, Suzanne et Françoise Bossier."
One day I told the story to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University. He generously offered to see if he could find the name of the Count de Morainville on any of the lists of persons guillotined during the French Revolution. He made the search, but wrote, "I am sorry to say that I have not been able to find it either in Prudhomme, 'Dictionnaire des Individues envoyés à la Mort judiciairement, 1789-1796,' or in the list given by Wallon in the sixth volume of his very interesting 'Histoire du Tribunal Revolutionnaire de Paris.' Possibly he was not put to death in Paris," etc. And later he kindly wrote again that he had made some hours' further search, but in vain.
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