New Orleans Nostalgia

    Ned Hemard's Weekly Column Remembering New Orleans History, Culture and Traditions

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A Rose by Any Other Name

Her name was Rose, and one day she would become an empress (the direct ancestor of the present heads of the royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden).  It all started with a hurricane.

Travel back in time to Les Trois Îlets on the Caribbean island of Martinique.  The year is 1766.  A baby girl named Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie had been born there three years earlier and was now living on the first floor of a sucrerie (sugar factory) on her family’s plantation, with France over 4,000 miles away.  And then disaster struck.

On August 13-14, 1766, a huge and treacherous hurricane ravaged the island so that its effects were felt for some twenty years after.  It commenced at ten o’clock in the evening with a strong northwest wind followed by an earthquake.  Some one hundred souls lost their lives, and upwards of thirty-five ships foundered or were stranded.

Rose’s family suffered financial hardship due to this overwhelming storm.  Rose’s Tante Edmée (who had been the mistress of Francois, Vicomte de Beauharnais, of the French aristocracy) devised a plan.  She promoted an advantageous marriage of Rose’s younger sister, Catherine-Desirée, to the vicomte’s son Alexandre.  This beneficial maneuver would keep the Beaurharnais money in the hands of the Tascher family, but the 12-year-old girl died before she could leave Martinique.  It was then that Rose (at only sixteen years of age) dutifully took her sister’s place and left for France in 1779.

She wed Alexandre two months later, and they would have a marriage that was not extremely happy (although it produced two children, Eugène and Hortense).  Alexandre remedied all of this by a visit to the guillotine on July 23, 1794, leaving Rose an attractive and charming widow.

The following year she met a young general six years her junior.  He wrote to her that “the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.”  One thing he did not love about her was her name.  At his request, Rose was from then on to be known as Joséphine.  And who was to deny him?  He was, after all, Napoleon Bonaparte.

They married in January of 1796 and were crowned Emperor and Empress of the French in 1804 at Notre Dame de Paris.  Eventually she agreed to a divorce so Napoleon could have an heir.  He and his new wife, Marie Louise of Austria, became the parents of Napoleon II of France.  Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, married Napoleon’s brother Louis.  Their son became Napoleon III.  Joséphine’s granddaughter, Joséphine, daughter of Eugène, married Sweden’s Oscar I, son of Napoleon’s ex-fiancée, Desirée Clary Bernadotte.  (Desirée came alive on screen, played by Jean Simmons to Marlon Brando’s Napoleon.)

Napoleon has always been part of the history of New Orleans, most obviously by his sale of New Orleans and the whole of Louisiana to the United States.  But he has also been part of its culture in many wonderful ways:  Bonaparte’s death mask at the Cabildo, Napoleon Avenue, Dresden Napoleon figurines in Royal Street shop windows or perhaps those prints of the Emperor on the walls of Brennan’s (and there’s always the wonderful legend about pirates waiting to smuggle him back to the Napoleon House). And with him, Joséphine has never been too far away.

John Chase tells the story of how Josephine Alley in New Orleans, some years back, went about a name change.  Locals wanted to change Josephine Alley (off North Rampart between Piety and Desire) to the more elegant Beauharnais Alley.  But the alley was not named for Napoleon’s Joséphine but for a “neighborhood personality”.  So they renamed it Rosalie Alley for “another neighborhood personality”.  Today (and for several years now) yet another local personality, Mambo Sallie Ann Glassman (Voudou priestess) hosts an annual prayer ceremony to ward off hurricanes at the Achade Meadows Peristyle at 3319 Rosalie Alley.

New Orleans also has a Josephine Street that is again named for someone else.  It is the story of yet another plantation and the widow who owned it.  Margarethe Wiltz began subdividing her land in 1824 and named the streets.  One was named Grand Route Panis for her second husband, Jacinto Panis.  That street is today Jackson Avenue.  It is believed that Panis was in charge of the firing squad that executed Margarethe’s first husband, Joseph Milhet.  (Seems there’s just as much romance and irony in New Orleans as in France.)  Josephine Street was most likely named for a Wiltz relative, Marie Josephine Wiltz (born October 22, 1828).

And to set the record straight, there is no evidence that Napoleon ever uttered the words “Not tonight, Josephine”.  That was the title of a song performed in 1915 by Florrie Forde, an Australian-born music hall singer.  A big hit from four years earlier was “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine”, made popular by Ada Jones and Billy Murray.  But for New Orleanians, the big year for song was 1960.  Three of the songs in Billboard’s top 100 for the year had New Orleans in the title:  “New Orleans” by Gary (U.S.) Bonds, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” by Freddie Cannon and “Walking to New Orleans” by Fats Domino.  Fats had another quite appropriate hit that year:  “My Girl Josephine”.

NED HÉMARD

New Orleans Nostalgia

"A Rose by Any Other Name"

  Copyright 2007