Page one from the manuscript Alix de Morainville wrote on the story of her life, dated August 22, 1795, excerpted from Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana.
A dead end seemed a good place to start in early 2020—the lost year. Life put on hold, I filled time returning to a familiar brick wall—the identity of my fourth great-grandmother on my father’s Planchard line. According to family lore, she was a French countess who fled the palaces of Versailles during the French Revolution and traveled under an assumed name to America, settling among Acadians on Bayou Teche, not far from where my grandmother Bonnie May grew up. In the 1960s, an uncle circulated a mimeograph copy of the story. When I recently asked relatives, no one remembered the document, which had likely served as a coaster for bourbon highballs during family get-togethers. But they all recalled snippets of the story.
Few Planchards knew that “our countess” was also immortalized in George W. Cable’s Strange True Stories of Louisiana, published in 1888. Cable (1844 –1925), a distinguished writer who chronicled the lives of Creoles in his native New Orleans, is often required reading in Southern literature courses. I read some of his work in English class at LSU in the mid-‘70s, though not Strange True Stories. In 2003, I ran across a tattered copy in a French Quarter vintage bookstore during Jazz Fest weekend. Flipping pages, I came across a passage about a countess who fled the French Revolution and ended up in Louisiana.
Could this be her?
Breathless, I bought the book and shepherded it through the Quarter like it was uranium, vowing to discern if this was my relative and to track down what became of her.
In the book, Cable explains how the countess’s papers originally came from Sidonie de la Houssaye—a little-known writer from Franklin, Louisiana, my grandmother’s hometown. (My family is also related to the de la Houssayes.) When Cable acquired the sixty-eight-page, French-language document, he translated it, established its authenticity, and included it among other stories in his book.
It describes the life of Alix de Morainville, the child of French nobility, who grew up during the 1780s. She married a count and served in the court of Marie Antoinette, as did her mother. Her father and husband served King Louis XVI and were both beheaded during the French Revolution. Her mother died shortly after fleeing to England. So, disguised as a peasant, teenage Alix, escorted by the gardener’s son Joseph, fled aboard a ship bound for America. Traveling under the name Carpentier, they arrived at the port of New Orleans, where French agents hunted for escaped French noblesse, intent on returning them to Paris to face the guillotine. Unsafe in New Orleans, Alix and Joseph headed west, hoping to blend in with Acadian immigrants settled in more rural parts of the region.
Cable’s book traced the pair’s 1795 flatboat journey from New Orleans to St. Martinville with a few other families, including the Bossier sisters, who Alix befriended. When the flatboat reached the Attakapas region, where many Acadians had settled, Alix and Joseph decided to stay. Alix hastily jotted down her story and gave it to the Bossier sisters in confidence. Years later, one sister, Francoise, began recounting the tale of that flatboat journey before finally writing it down. She stowed it with Alix’s memoir in a trunk, where decades later, Francoise’s granddaughter Sidonie discovered the crumbling documents, which were passed along to Cable.
I knew Charpantier was a family name, but this doesn’t necessarily prove Alix, who was traveling under the name “Carpentier” is my storied fourth great-grandmother.
I found scant online information from the 1790s in St. Mary Parish. However, on various academic blogs, I saw plenty of banter by Southern literary professors insisting that Cable’s story was a myth. They could find no “Morainvilles” among French records of the royal court, nor any nobility by that name guillotined during the French Revolution. This threw me, as did the realization that I wasn’t the first to search for my relative’s identity. I reached out to one of the professors to challenge his theory, arguing that Alix and Joseph had changed their real names to Carpentier, which became Charpantier in America. He insisted that no one had proven the accuracy of Cable’s story and noted that both Cable and de la Houssaye had a reputation for fictionalizing the truth.
Unwilling to give up, I perused genealogy sites and digital records from France and Louisiana. Meanwhile, my New Orleans cousin Lisa ventured down to Patterson, Louisiana and found the Charpantier family graves, including Joseph Charpantier and his wife, Marie Adelaide Guerne de Tavanne—a name I’d never heard.
I wandered beneath the ancient limbs toward the bayou, which was, after all, the one thing connecting Cable’s story to my family’s.
Was that Alix? Why didn’t she take her husband’s name? I searched “Tavanne” in French royal court records but found no match during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Getting nowhere, I decided that on my way to visit my sister and her husband in St. Gabriel, I would to go to St. Martinville to browse the library’s genealogy archives. This was in the summer of 2015.
I left my home in Dallas at dawn, and made good time to St. Martinville. I parked by the Evangeline Oak on the banks of Bayou Teche, where legend holds the Acadian couple that inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline were reunited. A placard tells the story of how the lovers were separated by Le Grand Derangement—the violent exodus of French Acadians from Nova Scotia beginning in 1755, and the migration of many to South Louisiana.
I wandered beneath the ancient limbs toward the bayou, which was, after all, the one thing connecting Cable’s story to my family’s. The Teche begins in Port Barre, where it draws water from Bayou Courtableau before flowing southward to meet the Lower Atchafalaya River at Patterson. During the Acadian migration, the Teche was the exiles’ primary means of transportation to the Attakapas region.
Alone on the bank, I pictured Alix (Adelaide) some two hundred-plus years before, with mud on her embroidered silk shoes, wondering how she’d gone from the opulent gardens of Versailles to these remote, untamed backwoods. Just then a distant bell sounded from up the bayou. Leaning out, I saw a small boat heading my way, followed by another, and another. Within minutes a flotilla was passing before me.
As the bell called townspeople to gather, I was swiftly joined upon the Teche’s banks. Residents emerged from shops and restaurants, lining up on either side of me. For once, I arrived early enough to an event to get a ringside seat. Does it count if I didn’t plan it?
The boats, loaded with robed priests swinging incense from starboard to port, docked at a pier next to the Evangeline Oak. The lead boat supported a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary. Tuxedoed Knights of Columbus in full regalia—cape, sash, sword, medallion, and plumed hat—arranged themselves next to a small platform upon which priests placed the statue. Women laid flowers at Mary’s feet, before six strapping men hoisted the platform onto their shoulders like pallbearers. Everyone followed the statue, processing down the street.
Alone on the bank, I pictured Alix (Adelaide) some two hundred-plus years before, with mud on her embroidered silk shoes, wondering how she’d gone from the opulent gardens of Versailles to these remote, untamed backwoods.
Despite descending from a staunch New Orleans Catholic family, I had never seen anything like this. I knew my devout grandmother would turn over in her above-ground New Orleans grave if I didn’t participate in praising the Blessed Mother. So, I folded into the crowd, singing “Ave Maria” with the others. The parade merged onto Main Street, where white banners strung overhead pronounced the “Fête Dieu du Tech: St. Martinville celebrates 250 years of Acadian Ancestry.”
There it was. I had landed in the middle of a historic event, walking the same path my great-great-great grandparents and other relatives had walked. The very people I had come to research had hijacked my plans and cloaked me in their traditions.
Alix and Joseph didn’t immigrate to Louisiana due to Le Grand Derangement, but by settling in this area shortly after the Canadian exiles arrived, their bloodline merged with the Acadians, making this event as much a part of my family story as the French Revolution.
When the procession came to a stop at a small church, I crossed my forehead with holy water, raced to my car, and hustled to the library where the clerk corrected my pronunciation of Bayou Teche. “Te-shhhhh,” she said, leading me to an Acadian genealogy room stacked floor-to-ceiling with fraying cloth-bound books, some locked in glass cases. Those by local genealogist Father Hebert listed Joseph Charpantier and his wife Marie Adelaide Tavanne beginning around 1797, living in Patterson on Charpantier Plantation, which remained in the family for several generations. They had one son, Charles Michel Charpantier. Charles Michel married Clarisse Verret, with whom he had twelve children. I traced the line to my grandmother, proving with finality that I was a direct descendant of Marie Adelaide Tavanne and Joseph Charpantier.
Yes, but was Marie Adelaide Cable’s Alix? Out of time, that question would have to wait.
Skirting the Bayou Teche, I continued along 31, picking up 182 in New Iberia, going through Jeanerette, along the Old Spanish Trail, passing Charenton and Baldwin to Franklin, where my grandmother grew up.
Franklin’s turn-of-the-century townscape grew out of the prosperous sugarcane industry from the antebellum period, going back to 1800. On the neutral ground down the middle of historic Main Street, ornamental streetlamps with triple globes still bear "no hitching” signs from horse and buggy days. Grand columned, porched, and balconied homes, some in the National Register of Historic Places, anchor the area alongside structures in various stages of dilapidation.
Cable said Alix and Joseph built their plantation at the bend where Bayou Teche meets the lower Atchafalaya River. That matched one library document’s reference to “Charpantier’s Bend” near Patterson. I drove slowly, hoping to spot the bend. I didn’t.
What I saw were acres of tall sugarcane and enormous live oaks, a few classic plantation homes, some crumbling brick ruins, abandoned houses consumed by vines, and farm equipment squatting in fields. In Patterson, I passed bayou-front homes, scrap-metal yards, and a lively sign advertising “Captain Caviar’s Swamp Tours.”
At the cemetery behind oak-shaded St. Joseph’s Church in Patterson, I spotted the tall marble Charpantier mausoleum. I couldn’t find Joseph’s tomb or Mary Adelaide’s, but I figured the high grass hiding the bottom section had concealed their graves. Besides, I’d gotten what I came for—validation that Alix/Adelaide and Joseph Charpantier did in fact exist, did settle here in 1795, and were my ancestors. Although I was pretty sure that Cable’s countess was my relative, I still needed hard proof. And if she was, despite Cable’s flawed account, there was enough truth to the story to keep me interested in finding out who Adelaide and Joseph had been in France.
Rather than backtrack to I-10 towards Baton Rouge, I took rural backroads to St. Gabriel, traversing land where my ancestors’ names once meant something, and where I assume their descendants still live.
Driving through Berwick, I accidentally crossed the expansive I-90 bridge into Morgan City and I wound up on a sketchy road lined with strip joints, adult bookstores, no-tell motels, topless bars, and raunchy casinos.
So, this was the Morgan City that Louisiana guys talked about after working offshore summer jobs, and where oil roughnecks and blue-collar laborers let off steam between shifts. From the looks of it, that practice was still in full swing, as cars crowded the red-light district parking lots. And it wasn’t even noon!
Heading east, I plowed through deep green vegetation flanking curvy Highway 70, tracing the worm-like waterway where barges threaded the narrow canal. I eased up on the gas to take in the endless green fanning out in all directions like wallpaper, only to be pressed by semi-trucks appearing out of nowhere, riding my back bumper.
I passed signs for Grassy Lake, Avoca Island Cutoff, Attakapas Landing, and Belle River. My heart leaped upon seeing a sign for Lake Verret—the family name of Charles Michel’s wife. I felt I owed it to my Charpantier/Verret relatives to stop and see the lake.
Catching flashes of water through the trees, a dinky sign caught my eye—Shell Beach Road (1016-1). What the hell. I pulled onto the narrow blacktop road, passing trailer homes, loose stray dogs, rusty cars, and dense scrappy trees. It wasn’t one of my best spontaneous decisions.
Further down the way, rustic fishing camps lined picturesque Lake Verret before the road narrowed and the shoulder became slush. Swamp water lapped the tar and ringed cypress trees, drooping with Spanish moss. I slowed to a crawl. The stark eyes of a Blue Heron stared out from a cypress stump, and it seemed plausible that alligator eyes might also be trained on me. At a bend in the road, I hit the brakes, worried I might have to back out.
I left my sister a voicemail: “In case I never see you again, you’ll find my body near friggin’ Shell Beach Road on the edge of Lake Verret in the middle of a remote swamp near Pierre Part.”
[Read about editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's visit to Shell Beach Road during 2020, here.]
Inching around the bend, I imagined Jean Lafitte’s pirate ancestors, surrounding my car and driving off with my purse, charging outboard motors, whisky, and Orbis fishing rods on my credit cards.
The image dissolved as I completed the turn to find an upscale fishing camp with a three-car garage and a boat hitched to a shiny SUV. Relieved, I turned around in their driveway and headed back the way I came.
Inching around the bend, I imagined Jean Lafitte’s pirate ancestors, surrounding my car and driving off with my purse, charging outboard motors, whisky, and Orbis fishing rods on my credit cards.
A couple of hours later in St. Gabriel, I recounted my swamp detour to my Cajun brother-in-law Ronnie Breaux as he peeled boiled shrimp at the kitchen counter. “Yeah, sure, I know Shell Beach Road. That’s in Pierre Part. I’ve got buddies with fishing camps out there.” He noted it’s where part of the classic movie Tarzan of the Apes was filmed. I can definitely see why.
Back in Dallas, I attempted to follow up on my findings, but life got in the way, and I put my research on hold. On and off, I’ve returned to my project. But it wasn’t until the COVID lockdown of 2020 that I gave it the time it warranted. That’s when my family history took a significant turn, uncovering my connection to key Louisiana figures—including relations to many of the names I passed from St. Martinville to St. Gabriel during my detour in 2015. Hell, I’m even related to Pierre Part.
As for Marie Adelaide Guerne de Tavanne, a.k.a. Alix de Morainville? My quest to track her and her story continues—from New Orleans, down along River Road to the Archives de National in Paris and through the backroads of Normandy. Stay tuned.
