FullReads

June 20, 1841.–M. Gerbeau has dined here again. What a singular story he tells me. We talked of my grandmother and Madame Carpentier, and what does M. Gerbeau tell me but that Alix had not finished her history when my grandmother and my aunt returned, and that he had promised to get it to them. “And I kept it two years for want of an opportunity,” he added. How mad Grandmamma must have been! How the delay must have made her suffer!

Well and good! Then Alix did write her story! But if she wrote for both her “dear and good friends,” Suzanne and Francoise, then Francoise, the younger and milder sister, would the more likely have to be content, sooner or later, with a copy. This, I find no reason to doubt, is what lies before me. Indeed, here (crossed out in the manuscript, but by me restored and italicized) are signs of a copyist’s pen: “Mais helas! il desesperoit de reussir quand’ il desespe rencontra,” etc. Is not that a copyist’s repetition? Or this:”–et lui, mon mari apres tout se fit mon marim domestique.” And here the copyist misread the original: “Lorsque le maire entendit les noms et les personnes prenoms de la mariee,” etc. In the manuscript personnes is crossed out, and the correct word, prenoms, is written above it.

Whoever made this copy it remains still so simple and compact that he or she cannot be charged with many embellishments. And yet it is easy to believe that some one, with that looseness of family tradition and largeness of ancestral pride so common among the Creoles, in half-knowledge and half-ignorance should have ventured aside for an instant to attribute in pure parenthesis to an ancestral De la Houssaye the premature honor of a San Domingan war; or, incited by some tradition of the old Prime Minister’s intimate friendship with Madelaine’s family, should have imputed a gracious attention to the wrong Count de Maurepas, or to the wrong count altogether.

I find no other theory tenable. To reject the whole matter as a forgery flies into the face of more incontestable facts than the anachronisms do. We know, from Suzanne and Francoise, without this manuscript, that there was an Alix Carpentier, daughter of a count, widow of a viscount, an emigree of the Revolution, married to a Norman peasant, known to M. Gerbeau, beloved of Suzanne and Francoise, with whom they journeyed to Attakapas, and who wrote for them the history of her strange life. I hold a manuscript carefully kept by at least two generations of Francoise’s descendants among their valuable private papers. It professes to be that history–a short, modest, unadorned narrative, apparently a copy of a paper of like compass, notwithstanding the evident insertion of two impossible statements whose complete omission does not disturb the narrative. I see no room to doubt that it contains the true story of a real and lovely woman. But to come back to my attorney.

While his grave negotiations were still going on, there met me one evening at my own gate a lady in black, seeking advice concerning her wish to sell to some publisher a private diary never intended for publication.

“That kind is the best,” I said. “Did you write it during the late war?” I added at a guess.

“Yes.”

“I suppose, then, it contains a careful record of each day’s public events.”

“No, I’m sorry to say–“

“Nay, don’t be sorry; that lack may save it from the waste-basket.” Then my heart spoke. “Ah! madam, if you had only done what no woman seems to have seen the importance of doing–written the women’s side of that awful war–“

“That’s just what I have done,” she interrupted. “I was a Union woman, in the Confederacy. I couldn’t talk; I had to write. I was in the siege of Vicksburg from beginning to end.”

“Leave your manuscript with me,” I said. “If, on examining it, I find I can recommend it to a publisher, I will do so. But remember what I have already told you–the passage of an unknown writer’s work through an older author’s hands is of no benefit to it whatever. It is a bad sign rather than a good one. Your chances of acceptance will be at least no less if you send this to the publishers yourself.”