The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)
Page 76
Book III
Book III was published with 184 numbered pages, New Orleans: Druck und Verlag von G. Lugenbühl und E. H. Bölitz, 1854, and in the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung, vol. 5, no. 52, 2 March 1854.
1. Although Ludwig von Reizenstein’s mother, Baroness Philippine von Branca (divorced after an estrangement beginning in 1841, when Baron Ludwig was fifteen), was of Italian descent, there is no indication in his father’s memoirs that Baron Ludwig visited Italy as a child. The date of the novel’s completion (December, 1853) would indicate this encounter should have taken place in 1844.
2. The three municipalities were united in 1852.
3. Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801–36), Romantic poet and dramatist.
4. H. Schlüter was at 78 Common Street (Cohens New Orlean’s Directory for 1854, 214).
5. Luisa von Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1776–1810), wife of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, was regarded as a style-setter in the Romantic era.
6. The Pelican Warehouse was at the corner of Girod Street and Commerce Street, and Judah Touro lived at 128 Canal Street (Cohens New Orlean’s Directory for 1853, 207, 258).
7. Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg (1797–1860) was the son of Duke Friedrich Heinrich, brother of King Friedrich II (ruled as duke 1803–6, as king 1806–16) of Württemberg. His family had ruled in Württemberg since the early twelfth century. After leaving the military in 1817, Duke Paul became an explorer and collector of natural specimens of flora, fauna, and minerals, gathering the largest private collection of his day, although he never managed to publish much about it. He traveled extensively in North America, Mexico, South America, and Africa, making four major American expeditions between 1822 and 1857. See the introduction to Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg, Travels in North America, 1822–1824, trans. W. Robert Niske, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), a translation of Paul’s Erste Reise nach dem nördlichen Amerika in den Jahren 1822 bis 1824 (Stuttgart; Tübingen: Cotta, 1835). The enthusiastic reception accorded Paul by the social elite in New Orleans in October 1853 is said to have been one of the irritations that led Reizenstein to compose this novel. See Robert T. Clark, Jr., “The German Liberals in New Orleans (1840–1860),” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20 (1937): 146, citing J. Hanno Deiler.
8. Speculation on the personal life of Madame de Pontalba was a Reizenstein favorite—at one point he specifically declared that her daughter was not the model for his lesbian heroine Orleana, Louisiana Staats-Zeitung, vol. 5, no. 42, 18 February 1854, 1. On this complex and troubled woman, see most recently Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba (Baton Rouge; New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).
9. Inferno, canto 2, 11. 37–39.
10. Literally, “nuns’ little farts.”
11. Junker, literally “young lord,” is the term for a landowning squire in northern Germany and Prussia.
12. The French term poste restante is used throughout Continental Europe for general delivery mail, which is left at the post office and called for by the addressee in person.
13. Hermann, Prince von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), remembered today for a particular type of frozen dessert named Fürst Pückler, was a famous nineteenth-century noble wastrel and conspicuous consumer, noted particularly for bankrupting himself to build a vast decorative garden on his estates.
14. Jeanne, Marquise de Pompadour (1721–64) and Marie, Comtesse du Barry (1746–93) were successive mistresses to Louis XV of France.
15. David Garrick (1717–79), English actor and producer of plays, was noted for his Shakespearean performances; August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) was a major German actor with a “common touch.”
16. Justus Baron von Liebig (1803–73), was the founder of organic chemistry; Jean Baptiste Boussinggault (1802–87) was a leading French agricultural chemist.
17. Johann Philipp Rothaan (1785–1853), born in the Netherlands, was the twenty-first superior general of the Society of Jesus (1824–53).
18. Alain René Le Sage (1668–1747), French dramatist and novelist, published his immensely popular novel, Le diable boîteaux (translated into English as The Devil on Two Sticks) in 1707. He was noted for his daring description of social turmoil and competition, and he was a major interpreter of Spanish literature for the rest of Europe. Reizenstein returned to this theme in a satirical novel whose serialization began in the Deutsche Zeitung on 29 September 1861, Wie der Teufel in New Orleans ist und die Dächer von den Häusern abdeckt [The devil in New Orleans, and how he lifts the roofs off houses], based on Le Sage. See Robert T. Clark, Jr., “The New Orleans German Colony in the Civil War,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20 (1937): 1006.
19. This was a common euphemism of the period for pregnancy.
20. Narciso Lopez (1798–1851) led two separate expeditions to end Spanish rule in Cuba and annex it to the United States, the second ending in his arrest and execution. This expedition’s aftermath in New Orleans is described in the last book of Emil Klauprecht’s novel, Cincinnati (1854–55). Ned Buntline (alias Edward Z. C. Judson), The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Bros., ca. 1851) also dealt with the episode, and Heinrich Börnstein once planned a sequel to Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis, entitled Das Blutbad auf Cuba (The bloodbath on Cuba).
21. Isabella II, Regnant Queen of Spain, ruled 1833–68.
22. Bertel Thorvaldsen, or Thorwaldsen (1770–1844), Danish sculptor.
23. Ellipses indicate that a portion of the text has been removed for decency’s sake. This space obviously was meant to contain a narrative of Merlina’s murder and her subsequent sexual assault.
24. This “grail,” or assembly, of lesbian women resembles the secretive female “Association des sorts” led by a “queen” and priestesses described by Charles Testut in Les mystères de la Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans, 1852), 1:34–49 and 2:67, 68, although Testut makes no specific reference to same-sex physical relationships and the proceedings are in French.
Book IV
Book IV was published with 188 numbered pages, New Orleans: Druck und Verlag von G. Lugenbühl und E. H. Bölitz, 1855.
1. In the German text of this passage, Reizenstein uses the erroneous Crasche-Creek, but the rest of the account closely adapts Marcy’s account of his encampment on Cache Creek. Cache Creek enters the Red River from the north, out of Oklahoma, a few miles west of the mouth of the Big Wichita River. The following episode takes place in what is now Cotton County, Oklahoma.
2. Randolph Barnes Marcy (1812–87), from Massachusetts, graduated from West Point in 1832 and went on to serve in the Black Hawk War and the Mexican War. He was engaged in exploring the Red River in 1852–54, as well as a later expedition to Utah and the Seminole War in Florida. During the Civil War he served as chief-of-staff to his son-in-law, General George B. McClellan, and he achieved the permanent rank of Brigadier General after service in the postwar army. He was a noted sportsman and author, particularly famed for his guide for westward pioneers, The Prairie Traveler: A Hand-Book for Overland Expeditions (Washington, D.C.: War Department, 1859; reprint, Old Saybrook, Conn.: Applewood Press, 1990). His report on the expedition, Randolph B. Marcy, with George B. McClellan, Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana in the Year 1852, House of Representatives, 33d Congress, 1st session (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, Public Printer, 1854) has profuse illustrations, particularly of Palo Duro Canyon. Marcy republished parts of this report in his Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (New York: Harper & Bros., 1866). An edition of the narrative portion of this report appears in Grant Foreman, ed., Adventure on Red River (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937).
3. According to Marcy, the Red River began in Palo Duro Canyon of the Llano Estacado (“staked plain”) that extended across the Texas border into New Mexico. He actually had reached 31° 35’ 3” N, 101° 55’ W, but he placed the source at 34° 40’ N, 103° 15’ W. See Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmis
sissippi West 1540–1861, vol. 3: From the Mexican War to the Boundary Surveys, 1846–1854 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1959), 14–16, with the Marcy map of 1853 facing p. 13, description of the map, pp. 327–28.
4. St. Patrick’s was on Camp Street, between Julia and Girod Streets. St. Joseph’s was on Common Street, opposite the Charity Hospital (Cohen’s New Orleans Directory for 1853 [New Orleans, 1852], 319, 320).
5. Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1876), was author of a taxonomy of plants published in 1789. Oliver de Serres (1539–1619) was a famous French agronomist.
6. The arms of the Barons von Reitzenstein consist of a red shield with a silver bar running diagonally left to right.
7. Déjeuner a la fourchette or Gabelfrühstück are terms for brunch, especially Sunday brunch.
8. Themis was the Greek goddess of divine order or law and the elementary obligations of family. In her representations she bore the scales, which later became the symbol of justice itself. See Konrat Ziegler, Walther Sontheimer, and Hans Gärtner, eds., Der Kleine Pauly (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1979), vol. 5, col. 676.
9. General Arthur Görgey was a charismatic soldier in the Hungarian army who defied Lajos Kossuth, the nationalist leader of the revolution of 1848–49, and undermined his authority. He eventually surrendered himself and his troops to the Russians. See Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 287–303.
10. General Rosza Sandor was a Hungarian revolutionary commander who refused to surrender, managing to maintain himself as a robber chieftain until his capture in 1857. See ibid., 301.
11. Lajos Kossuth (1802–94), escaped via Turkey with his chief supporters and became a popular speaker in the United States on behalf of the Hungarian cause in the 1850s.
12. Lewis Bach’s beer house was on 190 N. Fourth Street, Green’s St. Louis Directory for 1851 (St. Louis, 1850), 38.
13. The Demokratische Presse, edited by lawyer Christian Kribben, was published from May 1852 to June 1854. The Anzeiger des Westens, then edited by the histrionic Heinrich Börnstein (a.k.a. Henry Boernstein, 1805–92), former cohort of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was the oldest German newspaper west of the Mississippi and was published in one form or another from 1835 to 1912. On Börnstein’s stormy career in St. Louis, see the introduction to Henry Boernstein, The Mysteries of St. Louis, ed. Steven Rowan and Elizabeth Sims (Chicago: Kerr, 1990), vi-xiv. A translation of part of Boernstein’s memoirs was published as Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, trans. and ed. Steven Rowan (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1998).
14. Construction on the Old Courthouse, a domed structure occupying the block between Fourth and Fifth Streets and between Market and Chestnut Streets, was begun in 1839 and was still unfinished in 1852 (it was declared completed in 1862). It is now part of the Jefferson National Expansion Historical Park.
15. Planters’ House was on the west side of Fourth Street, from Pine Street to Chestnut Street (Green’s St. Louis Directory for 1851, 276).
16. The Virginia Hotel was on the northwest corner of Main Street and Green Street (ibid., 353).
17. Hyde Park is bound by Salisbury Street, Bremen Street, Blair and Twentieth.
18. Doppelgängers (doubles) were commonplace in Romantic fiction, used to personify the multiple personalities of a protagonist or to trace alternate realities, as any reader of Poe would attest. They function in a manner similar to time paradoxes and alternate realities in the time-travel stories of modern science fiction. They were used with particular dexterity by E. T. A. Hoffmann in his Die Elixiere des Teufels, 1815–16.
19. Alessandro Stradella was a popular opera in three acts composed by Friedrich von Flotow (1812–83), libretto by Friedrich Riese, based on a French comedy. It was first performed at the Hamburg Stadttheater on 30 December 1844. Its protagonists are the lovers Alessandro Stradella and Leonora; Barbarino and Malvoglio are vagabonds who are hired to kill Stradella but experience a conversion to virtue at the end.
20. Boursier School is listed at 184 St. Peter Street, Second District, in Cohen’s New Orleans Directory for 1853, 33.
21. Karl Egon, Ritter von Ebert (1801–82) was an Austrian Romantic poet; Nikolaus Lenau was the pen name for Nikolaus Franz Niembsch, Edler von Strehlenau (1802–50), a melancholic Romantic Austrian poet. Gottfried Kinkel (1815–82), a professor at Bonn University, was a leading “Forty-Eighter” and a popular poet and author. His Otto der Schütz, eine rheinische Geschichte in zwölf Abenteuern (Stuttgart, 1846) was a bestseller, often reprinted. Kinkel was rescued from a prison in Spandau by his student Carl Schurz, and they both later fled to the United States.
22. Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) was a German Romantic novelist; Friedrich Leopold, Count du Stolberg (1750–1819) was a noted poet.
23. Karl Peter Heinzen (1809–80) was a leftist emigré who became a major figure in the German-American press after 1848.
24. This is a pun on the title of the late-classical philosophical miscellany, Noctes Atticae [Attic Nights], by Aullus Gellius.
25. The Odd Fellows’ Hall was on Camp Street, at the corner of Lafayette Street (Cohen’s New Orleans Directory for 1853, 200).
26. The Masonic Hall was at the corner of St. Charles Street and Perdido Street.
27. Latin, “the name is the omen.” This is a pun of Highland with the German word Heiland (savior). Highland is a town on Looking-Glass Prairie in Madison County, Illinois, that was settled by Swiss immigrants. There is an extensive description of Highland circa 1849–50 in Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 103–18.
28. Castalia or Kastalia was the sacred spring at Delphi, named for a nymph who leapt into it to escape Apollo. The water was used to clean the Delphi temples. Ziegler, Sontheimer, and Gärtner, eds., Der Kleine Pauly, vol. 3, col. 150.
29. Wahlverwandtschaften (1808), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), dealt with the affections a married couple had for two persons outside the marriage.
30. Arthur Thompson’s foundry was near the Third District Ferry in Algiers (Cohen’s New Orleans Directory for 1853, 255).
31. In the early nineteenth century, U.S. letters sent “general delivery” (poste restante), without specific home addresses, were held at the post office, and the names of the addressees were published in the newspapers. Those addressed in English were advertised in English-language newspapers, and those addressed in German script were published in the German-language press. In each case, the letter lists were an important reason for reading newspapers. Sometimes the post office would withhold these lists from newspapers that opposed the party currently in power.
Book V
Book V was published with 166 numbered pages, New Orleans: Druck und Verlag von G. Lugenbühl und E. H. Bölitz, 1855.
1. This refers to Senator Stephen A. Douglas (1813–61) of Illinois, who introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in January 1854, upsetting the principles of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, limiting the expansion of slavery in the western territories by calling for “popular sovereignty” over the question of slavery. See Gerald M. Capers, Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 93. This shows that Reizenstein made at least some additions to the text of the novel after its stated date of completion in December 1853.
2. Yellow fever is a viral disease carried by mosquitos. Within three to six days of being bitten, infected persons develop fever, headache, muscle pain, and dizziness. The skin often turns yellow, and the victim bleeds from the gums and in the stomach. After an apparent recovery, some victims will experience a sudden return of fever, followed by coma and death. The specific course of the disease was established by Walter Reed, and its viral nature was established in 1927. Until the development of a vaccine in 1937, the only means of control was to suppress the mosquito population. Treatment includes complete bed rest and replacement of lost fluids. See The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, 15th ed. (Rahway, N.J.:
Merck Sharpe & Dohme Research Laboratories, 1987), 189–93. The 1853 outbreak in New Orleans precipitated intense controversy over the proper policy to prevent future epidemics; see particularly Bennet Dowler, Tableau of the Yellow Fever of 1853 with Topographical, Chronological and Historical Sketches of the Epidemics of New Orleans since their Origins in 1796 Illustrative of the Quarantine Question (New Orleans, 1854).
3. Annunciation Square was created by the intersection of Camp Street and Felicity Street, fronting Orange and Race Streets.
4. They are referring, of course, to the praying mantis (Mantis religiosa).
5. Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–95), born Giuseppe Balsamo, was a noted alchemist and imposter who visited London and Paris in 1771 claiming to be the master of a new form of freemasonry. In 1785 he was implicated in the “affair of the golden necklace” involving Marie Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan, but he escaped punishment. He was arrested in Rome in 1789, condemned to life imprisonment as a heretic, and died in the custody of the Holy Office. See the article in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1963), 5:608–15; see also, but with caution, Pierre Mariel, Cagliostro (Paris: Celt, 1973).