69. Henry Boernstein [Heinrich Börnstein], The Mysteries of St. Louis, ed. Steven Rowan and Elizabeth Sims (Chicago: Kerr, 1990), esp. introduction.
70. See Cazden, A Social History, 591.
71. George C. Schoolfield, “The Great Cincinnati Novel,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 20 (1962): 44, 54. For a general survey of the works of German-American authors, see Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German-American Literature (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977).
72. For basic biobibliographical information on Klauprecht, see Robert E. Ward, A Bio-Bibliography of German-American Writers, 1670-1970 (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1985). I have recently published a translation of the novel: Cincinnati, or The Mysteries of the West: Emil Klauprecht’s German-American Novel, trans. Steven Rowan, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, New German-American Studies, no. 10 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).
73. The revolutionary nature of Reizenstein’s treatment is underscored by the fact that Jeannette H. Foster, in Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956; Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1985), 63–67, is unable to turn up anything as forthright as Reizenstein in the French literature known to her, let alone English-language literature. The lesbian was usually treated as a lonely aberration.
Memoranda
1. Eugène Sue (1804–57) was author of the immensely popular Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43). His Fleur-de-Marie was a well-born girl who was orphaned, sank briefly into prostitution, and was doomed to permanent loss of status despite all efforts of her relatives, the Gerolsteins, to redeem her. See Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Dorothee Fritz-El Ahmad, and Klaus-Peter Walter, eds., Der französische Feuilletonroman. Die Entstehung der Serienliteratur im Medium der Tageszeitung, Impulse der Forschung, no. 47 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986), 103–4.
2. Sue’s sequel to Les Mystères de Paris was Gérolstein, which was the basis of Jacques Offenbach’s popular opéra-bouffe of 1867, La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.
3. The disreputable E. Z. C. Judson, alias Ned Buntline, published a novel entitled The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans, ca. 1851, concerned chiefly with the events surrounding Narciso Lopez’s raid on Cuba in 1851. A copy of the novel is in the Louisiana Collection of Tulane University.
4. See Henry Boernstein (Heinrich Börnstein), The Mysteries of St. Louis, trans. Friedrich Münch, ed. Steven Rowan and Elizabeth Sims (Chicago: Kerr, 1990).
5. The author of Cincinnati, oder Geheimnisse des Westens (Cincinnati, 1854–55) was Emil Klauprecht. See Cincinnati, or The Mysteries of the West: Emil Klauprecht’s German-American Novel, trans. Steven Rowan, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, New German-American Studies, no. 10 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).
6. This purported work by Joseph Lakanal (1762–1845) is unknown to his principal American biographer; see John Charles Dawson, Lakanal the Regicide: A Biographical and Historical Study of the Career of Joseph Lakanal (University: University of Alabama Press, 1948).
7. Don Francisco Luis Hector, Baron de Carondelet (François-Louis Hector, Baron de Carondelet et Noyelles), was Spanish Governor of Louisiana, 1791–97; see Joseph G. Dawson, III, The Louisiana Governors from Iberville to Edwards (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 64–70.
Prologue
1. Construction on the Atchafalaya Bank on Magazine Street, designed by W. L. Atkinson, was begun in the autumn of 1835 and completed in March 1837, at an expense of $125,000. Its columns were of the Corinthian order. Gibson’s Guide and Directory (New Orleans, 1838), 320, 322.
2. The Canal Bank was at the northwest corner of Gravier and Magazine Streets, see Gibson’s Guide and Directory (New Orleans, 1838), 323.
Book I
Book I was published with 107 numbered pages, New Orleans: Druck und Verlag von G. Lugenbühl und E. H. Bölitz, 1854.
1. John McDonogh (1779–1850) was a wealthy New Orleans merchant and philanthropist, noted for his support of Negro repatriation to Africa and free public education.
2. This is a hint at Prince Paul of Württemberg, who becomes a major participant in Book II.
3. J. M. Cassidy, restaurateur, was at 9 Union Street and 107 Gravier Street (Cohens New Orlean’s Directory for 1853 [New Orleans, 1852], 48).
4. J. M. Laborde, an importer of Havana cigars, was located at 18 Royal Street (Cohen’s New Orleans City Directory, 1854 [New Orleans, 1853], 150).
5. Cross-dressing is also an element in Charles Testut, Les mystères de la Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans, 1852), 2:109: “C’est Lavinia qui m’a habillé—au masculin ou au feminin, comme tu voudras—et elle m’a donné des leçons.”
6. January 8th is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
7. Algiers is a community directly across the Mississippi from New Orleans, reached by ferry.
8. As noted in the author’s prologue, Fleur-de-Marie was the heroine-victim in Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris.
9. Moritz Gottlieb Saphir (1745–1858), born Moses Saphir in Hungary, was a widely read Austrian humorist, drama critic, and essayist. Edward Maria Oettinger (1808–72) was a German dramatic novelist, essayist, and humorist, noted for his humorous lampoons of anti-Semites. Louis Schwarz had a German bookstore in 3 and 4 Duncan’s Buildings, Exchange Alley (Cohen’s New Orleans Directory, 1851, 172).
10. The February Revolution in Paris in 1848 led to the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of a French Republic, which was soon subverted by the rise of Louis Napoléon, who eventually became Emperor Napoléon III.
11. Family columbidae or columbiformae, Ectopistes migratorius. This North American pigeon once traveled in vast flocks, but it was sought as food by commercial hunters and became extinct in 1914.
12. Agave, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, led a band of bacchantes that ripped her own son Pentheus to shreds, and in her madness she carried his head in triumph (portrayed in Euripides, Bacchae), see Konrat Ziegler and Walther Sontheimer, eds., Der Kleine Pauly (Munich, 1979), 1:120.
13. Louis Charles Alfred de Musset (1810–57) was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist.
14. “Measured Love” is Massliebchen, the daisy. “Male Fidelity,” or Männertreu was the ironic popular name for a number of flowers whose petals fell quickly, referring usually to the speedwell or the veronica.
15. The character of the “Cocker” has been interpreted as a lampoon of Michael Hahn (1830–86), later the wartime Governor of Louisiana (1864–65), a prominent German-American politician who was a consistent supporter of the Union and progressive causes in Louisiana (according to J. Hanno Deiler and those who rely on him). The historical Michael Hahn was born the illegitimate son of a widowed woman in the Bavarian town of Klingemünster and orphaned shortly after his arrival in America in 1840. He studied law under Christian Roselius, and he began his political career in 1851 as a member of the New Orleans School Board. In 1854–55 he advertised regularly in the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung as a notary public (e.g., vol. 6, no. 34, 9 February 1855). The chief similarities between the Cocker and Hahn consist of physique (Hahn was short and fat, walking with the help of a crutch due to a short leg), name (the Cocker’s is Caspar Hahn), and the general notion that both cultivated an image as a “man of the people.” Unlike the real Michael Hahn, who was a successful crossover politician, the Cocker knows neither English nor French, and unlike the courageous, scrupulously honest Hahn, the Cocker is a sleazy coward. The Cocker’s similarity to Michael Hahn might have struck later readers more than strict contemporaries. See Joseph G. Dawson, III, The Louisiana Governors from Iberville to Edwards (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 148–52.
16. “Shellroad Mary,” who appears further on in this story, became a character in her own right in another short piece probably also by Reizenstein. A rather irreverent mock obituary appeared in the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung, vol. 5, no. 34, 9 February 1854, praising her as “an ornament of the city” for her contributions to the community in the form of numerous fine
s paid to the Recorder’s Court. The article concluded with an epitaph declaring that only a dog and her hairdresser attended the burial.
17. Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835), a popular American poet. Count Emmanuel de Las Cases (1766–1842), a member of the Spanish Las Casas family, published his eight-volume Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène in 1823, based on his own diary as a companion of the deposed Emperor Napoléon I on St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic. It was a major source of the Napoleonic legend in the nineteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and author of Faust, was the central figure of German classic literature in the nineteenth century.
18. German, “Two fellows crossed the Rhine.”
19. A Hecker hat was a type of soft hat popularized by the revolutionary Friedrich Hecker (1811–81), leader of the radical wing in the 1848 revolutions in Baden.
20. The German Society of New Orleans functioned from 1847 to 1928, primarily to aid immigrants settling in or passing through the city. See Reinhart Kondert, “The New Orleans German Society (1847–1928),” In Their Own Words 3, no. 2 (summer, 1986): 59–80, with an extensive bibliography. It was located in this period at 42 Toulouse Street (Cohens New Orlean’s Directory for 1853, 107).
21. An eagle was a ten-dollar gold piece.
22. St. Antoine’s was a mortuary chapel on the corner of Rampart and Conti, erected in 1826–27, see Gibson’s City Directory, 1838, 308.
23. Anathema (“let him be condemned”) is a Greek word used in church Latin.
24. The Pontalba buildings face Jackson Square on the north and south sides, and they were prestigious residences constructed in the 1850s.
25. A line of ellipses in European novels of the time indicated where a censor had required that a passage be removed. Here it is a literary device, rather like a fade to black in film, to bring a violent or sexual episode to a close.
26. The St. Charles Hotel, built in 1837, was one of the most elegant in New Orleans, containing rooms, restaurants, and a central cupola where slaves were regularly sold. This structure burned down in 1851 and was rebuilt without the great dome. See Robert Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850–1860 (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1989), 151–52, 208–9.
27. The Veranda Hotel was on Common Street, at the corner of St. Charles Street (Cohen’s New Orleans Directory for 1853, 263).
28. Part of Bank’s Arcade still stands on Magazine Street, “constructed in the 1830s from designs of Charles Zimpel; it was a three-story block-long brick building … Dividing the building was a glassed-in arcade, which ran from Gravier to Natchez streets; the building contained a hotel, offices, the armory of the Washington Artillery (Armory Hall), saloons, a restaurant, and the Tontine, a spacious, lushly decorated coffee house which—at least by one account—could hold 5,000 persons. Combining size with food and drinks, it was, quite naturally, a favorite center for political rallies.” Reinders, End of an Era, 210–11.
29. Napoléon Bonaparte was first consul of a reorganized French Republic, 1800–1804.
30. Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70), famous author of many serial novels, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, had a black grandmother from Santo Domingo and made much of his African ancestry. As a result, Dumas was a hero to African Americans in the pre–Civil War period. A “Hotel Dumas,” described in Emil Klauprecht’s novel Cincinnati, was an actual free black hotel in Cincinnati in the early 1850s. See Emil Klauprecht, Cincinnati, or The Mysteries of the West: Emil Klauprecht’s German-American Novel, trans. Steven Rowan, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 283–84.
Book II
Book II was published with 96 numbered pages, New Orleans: Druck und Verlag von G. Lugenbühl und E. H. Bölitz, 1854.
1. Here, as elsewhere, Reizenstein is playing on the politics of the Kingdom of Bavaria.
2. The St. Anna Damenstift in Munich was an institution that provided stipends for Catholic noblewomen and maintained a school for young women (which still operates). Ludwig von Reizenstein’s eldest sister, Konstanze, was a Stiftsdame at St. Anna’s until she became engaged to be married, when her place was taken by her younger sister, Adolfina. See Helene Freifrau von Reitzenstein, ed., Ein Mann und seine Zeit 1797–1890. Erinnerungen von Alexander Freiherr von Reitzenstein-Hartungs (Eggstätt: Helene Freifrau von Reitzenstein, 1990), 102–3.
3. Apollo Street is now Carondelet Street, one block above St. Charles Street (formally Nyades).
4. The Bissell’s Island described in the novel is fictional, but Reizenstein locates it precisely near Bissell’s Point, an angle of the Mississippi at the foot of East Grand Boulevard, opposite the mouth of the Chain of Rocks Canal. It was originally the location of an estate built in the 1820s by Captain Lewis Bissell, and later of a waterworks and a sewage plant. See “Bissell’s Point: A Spot Replete with History,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 October 1934. Mosenthein and Gabaret Islands, further upstream, which resemble the island described, are in Illinois. Reizenstein shows intimate knowledge of the St. Louis area in his accounts, a result of his residence there as the apprentice of the surveyor Frederick Egloffstein in the early 1850s.
5. The Lucas and Chouteaus families of St. Louis were wealthy French Creole lineages that continued to be prominent through the era of the Civil War. The Chouteaus were the illegitimate descendants of St. Louis’s founder Pierre Laclède through his mistress, Madame Chouteau.
6. Bremen, or New Bremen, was a development laid out by Emil Mallinckrodt, E. C. Angelrodt, and partners north of St. Louis in 1844. It was still an independent municipality in the early 1850s but would soon be annexed by the city of St. Louis. Today the area is usually described as the Hyde Park neighborhood.
7. Jefferson Barracks was a military post established by the War Department in 1826 on part of the commons of the village of Carondelet. It was a marshaling place for expeditions and a depot for cavalry and artillery. During the Civil War, its main function was as the site of a military hospital. William Hyde and Howard L. Coward, eds., Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis (New York, 1899), 2:1120–22. It was closed as a military facility on 30 June 1946. See “Jefferson Barracks Closes,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 2, no. 4 (July 1946): 54–55. It is now managed by the St. Louis County Parks System. See William C. Winter, The Civil War in St. Louis: A Guided Tour (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1994), 4–7.
8. Looking-Glass Prairie lies in southern Illinois, due east of St. Louis, between Lebanon and Trenton, Illinois, commencing at a hill two miles east of Lebanon. This information was provided by David Braswell of Maeystown, Illinois.
9. The bloomer costume, consisting of a skirt reaching to the knees and “Turkish pants,” was first introduced by Elizabeth Smith Miller, but it received its name from the feminist reformer Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94), Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1898), 1: 296.
10. Meran is in what was once Austrian South Tyrol, now Merano in Alto Adige Province, Italy.
11. The Schönheitskabinet was a collection of paintings of legendary and contemporary beauties placed by King Ludwig I in his Nymphenburg Palace, in what was then the outskirts of Munich. All of the beauties are clothed in white, except for Ludwig’s own Lola Montez.
12. This poem puns on the German name for the daisy, Massliebchen, “measured love.”
13. Many such illustrations are preserved as a part of the record of sale in the Notarial Archives of Orleans Parish. Ludwig von Reizenstein painted a large number of them himself.
14. Leffingwell and Elliott, real estate brokers, were located at 125 Chestnut Street; see Green’s St. Louis Directory for 1851 (St. Louis: Charles and Hammond, 1850), 211; Hiram W. Leffingwell was a St. Louis land developer who had a major role in the development of Forest Park. See Caroline Laughlin and Catherine Anderson, Forest Park (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986).
15. This is a reference to the German lyric poet Heinrich Hei
ne (1797–1856), who was in exile and wasting away of a debilitating disease in Paris.
16. Bettina von Arnim, née Brentano (1785–1859), wife of the Prussian Romantic author Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), grew up under the personal influence of Goethe at Weimar, and after her husband’s death she supported herself as an author in her own right.
17. Judah Touro (1775–1854), born in Newport, Rhode Island, spent his early years in Jamaica and Boston, moving to New Orleans in 1801. He was severely wounded at the Battle of New Orleans and lived virtually as a recluse while cultivating a large fortune as a merchant. He donated heavily to Jewish causes only in his last years. See Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), vol. 15, cols. 1288–89.
The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures) Page 75