UNTIL THE SPRING Of 1944 a withered, shawl-wrapped hag came to beg for food at the back doors of houses in the neighborhood of St. Ann and North Rampart Streets in New Orleans. Sometimes she stopped passersby in the streets and held out a hand like a crushed leaf. Sometimes she was seen at dawn kneeling in the center aisle of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, a rosary tangled in her crooked fingers.
Whenever they saw her the people of that section of the city would begin to tell of her history, and the listeners could not help wondering what voluptuous memories must sometimes creep through the crevices of her aged mind, like the young tendrils of the green ferns that are always fighting their way through the cracks in the decaying tombs in old New Orleans cemeteries.
Euphrasine Tabouis was the only child of a jeweler who kept a shop in Royal Street. Her mother had died at her birth and she and her father lived quietly, but not unhappily, in living quarters above his place of business. During the day Euphrasine went to school with the sisters at the convent and in the evenings she read to her father, while he dozed beside the fire in their neat parlor, or sewed and chattered away of the day's adventures--of how some wicked girl had placed
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a huge green frog in Sister Marguerite's desk or of how exciting it was that Georgette Ducoyeille was already engaged to be married, and before she was sixteen!
It was the summer that Euphrasine was fifteen that the doctor told Monsieur Tabouis the truth about his heart. It would not be very long before the end of these peaceful evenings would come and Euphrasine would be alone. He said nothing to the girl, but grieved secretly. It was not good that such a tender creature should be left so alone. Besides, New Orleans was a wicked city, filled with temptations. M. Tabouis knew of only one solution. Before he died his daughter must be safely married.
The distracted father thought that surely God had answered his prayers when, just a few weeks after receiving the doctor's verdict, one Monsieur Pigeon, a recent arrival from Paris and a watchmaker by trade, appeared in the shop seeking employment. Jules Pigeon was hired immediately--as soon as Tabouis had ascertained that he was a bachelor--and was invited to make his home in the apartment upstairs.
The father did not wait long to approach the Frenchman regarding what was uppermost in his mind. One evening, after Euphrasine had retired, the two men sat before the fire sipping bourbon and water, while Tabouis told of his fears, at last frankly suggesting that Jules marry his daughter. "All this," he said, waving a hand to indicate the shop, the living quarters, his whole world, "will then be yours. In return I ask only that you cherish and protect my little Euphrasine all the days of your life together."
Jules was stunned, but he agreed almost at once. The truth was that he had been almost mad with love for the girl from the first moment he had set eyes upon her. With her creamy skin and dark eyes and great mass of curling jet hair, she was, despite her youth, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. "She is like one of these Louisiana magnolias," he had written a friend in Paris.
When they told her, Euphrasine turned very pale, but consented immediately. Then she went to weep in her room. She
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did not love Jules Pigeon. He was very gentle and kind, but he was so old--thirty-six, a middle-aged man!--and he was so peculiar looking. She knew how the urchins in the neighborhood made fun of him. They said he looked exactly like his name; they even made it diminutive because of his lack of height, and to be more insulting. "Monsieur le Pigeonneau!" they called after him in Royal Street. "Monsieur le Squab!" Even the girls at the convent teased her by inquiring, "How is Monsieur le Squab?" And now she was to marry him.
No time was wasted. Two weeks after it had been arranged Euphrasine and Jules Pigeon were married. A month later Monsieur Tabouis passed away in his sleep.
Though she knew she could never love him, Euphrasine was a well reared Creole girl, so she tried to like and respect her husband; but as the months passed she found this increasingly difficult. Jules' passion for her grew more and more intense and every day his caresses became even more repulsive. She began to discover that he was her slave, not the master a husband should be, and soon she was treating him with indifference and with contempt. Sometimes she would catch herself thinking, "Monsieur le Squab! Madame la Squab!" At first she was ashamed of her feelings. Then she no longer cared.
Euphrasine had enjoyed none of her youth. Except that she had a husband now instead of a father, her life was almost unchanged. Jules was tired in the evenings. He liked to doze by the fire, with his belt loosened after a huge supper, while she read to him just as she had done for her father. She had not even the convent to go to now. Besides, when her young married friends invited them out Jules did not care to go. He did not dance and he did not care for the theatre, and parties bored him. At last she began to go out without him, and he, after seeing that she was properly chaperoned, did not seem to mind. When she returned from a soirée, still excited and gay, her eyes and cheeks bright with laughter and wine, he would be in bed snoring. And he snored very loudly.
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They had been married over a year when Euphrasine was invited to go to a Voodoo meeting. She was attending a large party on St. John's Eve when someone present, remembering the date, suggested that they all go, and everyone agreed instantly. Euphrasine had heard of Voodoo all her life, had even been thrilled at the sight of Marie Laveau, sweeping down Royal Street, with a crowd of her people following her, and the idea of seeing a real ceremony delighted her, so she was one of the first to support the idea. An hour before midnight the entire crowd climbed into carriages and set out for the wilderness edging Bayou St. John.
When they reached their destination they found a scene as wild as any they had imagined. Flares and torches circled a cleared space where the Voodoos were gathered. In the center a tall woman in a tignon clapped her hands and screamed instructions to the devotees. A great mass of nearly naked blacks--with a few white bodies here and there--danced and gyrated about her, chanting and answering the cries of their queen. In the background someone beat an ass's thighbone on a deerskin stretched taut over a beer keg.
Most of the women wanted to go home and some of the mien were disgusted but Euphrasine crept as close as she dared. The beat of the tom-tom seemed to be her own heartbeat, and the flames of the torches fired her blood. She felt as if she had suddenly opened a door and walked into another life.
Then something happened. The beating of the drum ceased, the dancers sprawled on the ground on their faces and there was such a silence that the watchers could hear the mosquitoes singing in their ears. Out into the clearing whirled a Man.
Euphrasine had never seen such a man. He was well over six feet tall, with a slender waist and a torso of rippling muscle, while his legs had the symmetry of a ballet dancer. He wore a red madras handkerchief about his loins and the rest of his body glowed in the firelight as if he were carved out of pure gold. On one ankle a ring of tiny bells tinkled
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as he danced. On one ear something gleamed--a great ornament of living jewels.
And how he danced! Whirling and leaping into the air, spinning on his toes so fast it made the spectators dizzy to watch him, striking obscene, almost impossible, postures, trembling and quivering as if currents of electricity were passing through his body. "Who is that?" one of the women asked. "Prince Basile," answered a man. "Just a quadroon witch doctor." Another man said hastily, "I think we should go."
But Euphrasine drew her cape about her, turned away from her friends and walked straight into the brush circling the clearing.
They called after her, but she didn't answer. Then they spent more than an hour searching for her. The torches went out and the Voodoo began to disband. At last, the women hysterical, the men puzzled and shocked, they all rode slowly back toward the city. They were never to see Euphrasine Pigeon again.
It is said that when they told Jules, poor Monsieur le Squab fell to the floor, striking his head, and was unconscious for two days. When he recovered he summoned the police and a relentless search was begun. The officers even went to the home of Marie Laveau. She vowed she knew nothing of the girl. Many young ladies came to view her "harmless and entirely religious" ceremonies these days. Prince Basile was mentioned, but only casually, since there was no reason to connect him with the disappearance of Madame Pigeon. Finally the police notified Jules that they were of the opinion that his wife had probably in some way fallen into Bayou St. John and been drowned.
Jules did not believe this, but there was nothing else to do. As weeks extended into months he grieved more and more. He became a silent man who spoke only when he was first addressed, and his hair grayed. Each morning and evening he went to pray at the Cathedral and each night he sat late before the fire in his parlor weeping into his hands.
But Euphrasine was not dead. When she left her friends
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she had remained close to the edge of the clearing, walking through the trees until she came to the place where Prince Basile had entered the area. Here she concealed herself in the shadows and waited, trembling and scarcely conscious of what she was doing, until, with a magnificent gesture, Prince Basile swept aside the brush and passed but a few inches from her. Then she spoke to him and he came close, gazing down into her upturned face. No one knows what she said or what he replied, but when he left the orgy she went with him.
Prince Basile--his real name was Joseph Howard, and he was a quadroon from Gretna, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans--lived in a one-room shack near Lake Pontchartrain, a dirty, almost unfurnished but. On a shelf built against one wall were some skulls and half-burned candles. In one comer a pile of old and filthy quilts served as a bed. In another a charcoal furnace served for heat and cooking. It has been said that the night he brought home Euphrasine there was a mulatto woman there and that he threw her out bodily and installed Euphrasine as his new concubine.
It is also said the girl, despite the poverty and dirt, despite the savage brutality of her lover, was deliriously happy for the next few months. Nowadays we would delve into Freud to understand Euphrasine. It is probable that she was a highly sensual woman with some abnormal tendencies, perhaps edging on nymphomania. But whatever it was, nights in the arms of Prince Basile on that loathsome bed of quilts compensated for and were more important to her than the mere comfort and middle-class security of the establishment in Royal Street and the kindness of Monsieur Pigeon.
But Prince Basile changed his woman often. This white one was a novelty, but he had no intention of keeping her forever. He took great delight in beating and torturing her. He would use his fists upon her. He would pull her long hair until she screamed in agony. Sometimes he scratched her White body with his nails or bit her tender breasts until the blood flowed. The pièce de résistance of this tale is that he
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would sometimes bend over her as if to kiss her throat or her breasts, then, quickly turning his head, he would scratch her horribly with the jagged ornament of jewels that never left his right car. Euphrasine must have been cursed with masochism that matched his sadism, for none of this lessened her passion for the Voodoo dancer. On the other hand, perhaps she was bewitched--perhaps she was fixed.
It lasted a year. At the end of that time, on the next St. John's Eve, Prince Basile brought home a buxom, coal-black Negress and told Euphrasine to leave the shack. We are told that she fell to her knees and begged him to keep her, but that he and the Negress beat her and drove her away.
No one knows exactly what happened in the interim, but a few weeks later Euphrasine, Pigeon appeared in a house of prostitution located on Basin Street, in that notorious section of the city known as "Storyville." Perhaps, feeling that there was nowhere else to go, she had knocked at the door of the place the very night that her quadroon lover had dismissed her, and that the "Madame," seeing her potentialities, had taken her in and kept her hidden away until she had recovered from the marks which a year with Prince Basile must have left upon her. We must remember that she was only seventeen and that youth recuperates quickly. In any case, she was introduced to Storyville as "Lottie" and as having recently arrived from Vienna, and she was soon the most popular girl in the house.
The bagnios of the New Orleans of that period were unbelievably luxurious. There were elegant drawing rooms in which "guests" were received, filled with fine black walnut and mahogany pieces, thick Oriental rugs and oil paintings and ornate mirrors. The boudoirs occupied by the girls were equally sumptuous. In the more expensive establishments only gentlemen in evening clothes were admitted, and they were received by the ladies in handsome and costly evening gowns. Champagne and the finest foods were served. Most of the houses offered music and other entertainment apart from their principal type of business. Gentlemen could come to call
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and spend an evening dancing. If one desired to spend the night he would choose his girl and be escorted to a splendid bedchamber with walls of tufted satin or mirrors. In the morning breakfast would be served.
For nearly two years "Lottie" was the reigning beauty of the house in which she worked. She had many assets besides her beauty and sensuality. She had a charming voice and would occasionally entertain guests by singing, while another girl accompanied her at the piano. She had an educated speaking voice and an air of refinement that gave her clients the illusion that she was anything but a prostitute available to any man who had the price. Several men fell in love with her, and she received expensive gifts of clothing and jewelry wholly apart from her usual fees. She was not unhappy. She had no distaste for the life, and everything that was sordid or unpleasant was kept outside the hand-carved mahogany front doors. Only one thing bothered her. She kept dreaming of her Voodoo lover.
There is no way we can know now, but her decision to visit the witch doctor must have come after a long battle within herself and the decisive moment must have arrived with that same characteristic impulsiveness which had caused her to forsake her former respectable life the night of the Voodoo meeting. One summer evening, complaining of a headache from the heat, she retired to her room and bedecked herself in the most captivating of her finery. When she was dressed she covered her face with a heavy veil and left the house by a rear exit in order to avoid the gay crowd in the rooms to the front of the house. Outside a rented carriage awaited, and soon she was following the winding course of,Bayou St. John. This was to be a great triumph!
She dismissed the carriage when the familiar outline of the shack was in sight, and went the rest of the way on foot. As she approached she called his name. The door of the hut opened, and Prince Basile came toward her in the moonlight. He was probably simple enough to be impressed for a while. At any rate, he welcomed her with passion and soon she was
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inside the shack. She was gratified to find no woman there, and she must have decided with feminine logic that after all he had been grieving for her and had come to a realization that he could love no woman but her. Accordingly she played the great lady, flashing her jewels in the candlelight and making him beg and plead before she yielded herself to him.
Toward morning she awoke from a heavy sleep, crawled out of his still-encircling arms and shook him roughly so that he would awaken. Now she was seized with sudden hatred for this man who had been so long a fixation. She must have recalled his cruelties, most of all how he had driven her away that night to put a black woman in her place. With narrowed eyes she studied his powerful, cream-colored body, then his face with the thick, faintly Negroid features and the jeweled earring gleaming from that right ear.
She began to pour forth a torrent of abuse. She called him names, cursed him in language learned in Storyville, laughed scornfully, called him a "nigger." At last she stopped to catch her breath. His face was without emotion, mysterious and impassive. He had said not a word in reply. She was almost disappointed that he did not fall upon her and beat her as he had done before. Now she felt that he was her slave, that he had become like Monsieur le Squab. She rose and began to put on her clothes, continuing to revile and insult him. When she was nearly dressed she turned and spat in his face, then laughed contemptuously, for he still said not a word. Then she extended a naked foot, a small, white, very pretty foot, and demanded that he kiss it.
Prince Basile fell to his knees before her and took her ankle between his hands. He bent low over the foot and Euphrasine raised her black brows, waiting in a sort of ecstasy for his kiss. But the quadroon did not touch the slender arch with his thick red lips. Instead, he turned his head quickly and the jagged ear-ornament stabbed into her sensitive flesh. With another swift movement of his head he slashed open the foot from ankle to toes. Then he stood up, raised a hand and slapped her in the mouth with his open palm.
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They say it was three days later that Euphrasine wandered into the Royal Street shop of Monsieur Pigeon. He was alone, working at his bench, when he looked up and saw a woman, her clothing in tatters, her hair disheveled and her face covered with blood and dirt. With a cry of delight he gathered his Euphrasine up in his arms, as if she had been a child, and carried her quickly to the rooms upstairs. It is an important part of this story that as he climbed the stairs he is supposed to have said over and over, "Marie Laveau brought you back to me! Marie Laveau brought you back to me!" For, when his prayers at the Cathedral were unanswered, Jules had at last gone to the cottage of Marie Laveau and asked her help. Her opinion had been that his wife was somewhere suffering under a curse, which could be removed and the girl returned for a fee of a thousand dollars. Jules is supposed to have paid this price. Now she had come home.
It is also said that while he washed the filth of her three days of wandering from her body and combed the tangles from her beautiful hair, he whispered no words other than those of affection and thanksgiving that she had returned. Whatever wonderment went through his mind as to her whereabouts during the three years was not expressed. She spoke not a word.
It happened when poor Jules began to bathe her injured foot. He cleansed the gash tenderly, applied medicines of some sort and began to bandage it. Then he is supposed to have cried, "Oh, my dearest, the cobblestones have cut your little foot terribly!" The girl burst into insane laughter and screamed, "Monsieur le Squab! Monsieur le Pigeonneau!" Then she fainted.
During the years that followed no one ever saw Madame Pigeon. Gossip said she was quite mad and that her husband kept her locked in a room above the shop. Jules lived to be very old. It was nearly forty years later when he died and that Madame Pigeon appeared on the streets of New Orleans. All her beauty had long been gone, and she was already a hag. {p. 158} Her funds vanished, and she became a street character and a beggar.
She never spoke to anyone except to ask for food, and if she were asked a question she would answer in as few words as possible. It was impossible to determine how sane she was or what was in her mind. Once she was asked about Marie Laveau.
"Marie Laveau was a big Voodoo," she said. "That's all I know. I wish people would talk to me in French. I don't know English so good."
Euphrasine had been speaking English all her life.
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