[In the essay below, Perkins gives a brief literary biography of Séjour.]

Victor Séjour, Genius of Drama

Victor Séjour, the most versatile writer and brilliant dramatist among that unusual group of free colored Creoles who lived in Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Seaboard, was born in New Orleans, June 2, 1817, illegitimate son of Eloisa Philippe Ferrand, and Juan Francisco Louis, Victor Séjour Marcos, a native of San Marcos (San Dominque).¹ There is a lack of accord as to the date of his birth, varying from 1809 to 1821, but the record in St. Louis Cathedral establishes the correct date of his birth as that above. This liaison was legitimatized by marriage on January 13, 1825.² The child preferred to call himself "Victor Séjour," and by that name he was baptized and known. He was baptized in the St. Louis Cathedral as shown in the register of baptisms for les hommes de couleur.³ His father also abbreviated his own name to François Marcou.⁴ He ran as a prosperous dyeing establishment at 25 rue de Chartres, then the main artery of trade in New Orleans.⁵

Victor received his early education under Michel Seligny at Saint-Barbe Academy. Seligny himself had received his education in Paris, says Nathalie Populus Mello, herself a brilliant pupil of Seligny.⁶

The people of color had many wealthy persons among them, and this group formed an organization known as the Société d'Economic, founded by Creole artisans.⁷ Upon the anniversary of his graduation, at the age of seventeen, he wrote a poem complimentary to these artisans. It made such a profound impression that a subscription was immediately raised to send Victor to Paris to be educated.⁸ Incidentally, this also shows the prosperous condition of some of these free people of color. His parents terminated his studies in Paris in 1836, for reasons of economy.⁹ He rested after leaving college for a brief while; then in 1841, he made his literary debut through a heroic poem appearing in Les Cenelles,¹⁰ "Le Retour de Napoléon." This poem opened the doors of the literary circles of Paris to him, where he met Alexandre Dumas and Emile Augier.¹¹ It was perhaps his relation to these two famous characters that bent him towards a theatrical career.

Le Thêatre-Français in 1844, enjoyed his première adventure in Diégarias.¹² While it was pompous and sophomoric, it well disclosed the versatility, wide range of imagination and dramatic powers of the author and actor. Diégariau is a Jew who keeps the secret of his racial identity even from his daughter Inès and Don Juan de Tello, her husband; Henry IV, King of Spain; and Abdul-Bekri, the Moorish spy. After twenty years he confesses himself to Inès. An extract of the translation of his confession follows.

Ta mère.… Elle me dit un mot.…Fuyons!—Ma haine arait fait place à ma tendresseHeureux et confiants nous partîmes—La GreceNous recut.… Je devinsRiche et puissant. Je fus honoré; mais en vain,… Mon in jure passée.Comme un crime, un remords, pesait sur ma pensée.Bianca mourut, laissant, dans ses derniers adieux,Le désir d'être transportée un jour dans ces lieux.Ce désir fut ma loi.…… Après vingt ans … d'exil enfin,Nul ne revit en moi Jacob-Eliacin.13

Séjour's star was rising. "Paris theatre-goers came in droves" to witness his plays. The height of his popularity may be imagined, as well as his ability and culture appreciated, when it is noted that he became in the hey-day of his career private secretary to Louis Napoléon.¹⁴

Séjour reached the height of his career about 1853, perhaps, when he was thirty-six years old, and in a prose drama of five A description acts. All Paris turned out to witness is premières.¹⁵ A description of the night in the Porte de Saint-Martin Théâtre of his first play of Richard III may serve to give a faint picture of this quandroon dramatist at the pinnacle. The theater is brilliantly lighted. His voice is clear and vibrant, his movements, precise and elegant, his interpretation and imitation are superb. As the curtain ascends for him a man of olive complexion bows with kingly mien. He commands. His voice rings out over the large audience and the house cheers and cheers. Victor Séjour has "arrived." Describing him a bit more minutely: His brown eyes have the fire and the reflection analogous to the panther on the chase. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and walks with self-assurance. He is descending le foyer via l'escalier. He carries a coat on his right arm, and upon close approach to him he resembles un Français du Midi. He has heavy lips and is of the exotic type.¹⁶ A woman exclaims from the crowd audibly: C'est lui! C'est l'auteur, Victor Séjour! (It is he! It is the author, Victor Séjour.)¹⁷ Séjour is at the pinnacle. His star swings to its zenith.

His Mother In Need

One might wonder why these free people of color so much sought and loved France. France was free. America was slave. And while the status of free people of color was in Louisiana more nearly, that of the whites, especially the mulatto race, than it was that of the slave, it was not yet without restraint, and at times these peoples, many of them well educated, refined, wealthy, and of the best blood of France, felt painful humiliation at mistreatment. That accounts for much of the desire for many of them to make Paris their home, not less than its classic atmosphere.

A call from his mother, who evidently had lost her husband by death, brought Séjour hastily to her, for she was in great need.¹⁸ But he found his birthplace now unbearable. Whether this state of his mind had been effected by the large freedom and opportunity that Paris had given him or by an actual changed social condition in New Orleans, is not definite. But it was probably both, for it was about this time that Governor Robert Wickliffe had recommended to the Legisature of Louisiana that "Public policy dictates that immediate steps be taken at this time to remove all free Negroes now in the State when such removal can be effected without violation of law. Their example and association have a most pernicious effect upon our slave population."¹⁹

Phelps says, "A class of quadroons grew up with alarming rapidity, and by a process of natural selection which may be easily inferred, developed just those characteristics which made them dangerous. Many of these quadroons, endowed with superior mental qualities, and ambitions impossible to the pure Negro, won their freedom, and demanded a place in the civilization of the whites."²⁰

Séjour did not therefore tarry long in the city of his birth. But while in New Orleans, says Nathalie Populus Mello, he formed a liaison with an octoroon who accompanied him upon his return voyage to Paris. From this liaison a son was born.²¹

Such unions were not unusual at the time. It was taken by the society as an incident. It was the result of a social condition arising out of slavery. The large number of mixed bloods in Louisiana, and generally upon the Gulf and Atlantic coasts at the time, testifies to the general acceptance of this social condition as a matter of course.

Lyle Saxon says, "Now it must not be assumed that these women were prostitutes—they were not. They were reared in chastity, and they were as well educated as the times would permit. These were for the greater part the illegitimate daughters of white men and their quadroon mistresses.… Their chastity was their chief stock in trade, in addition to their beauty. Their mothers watched them as hawks watch chickens, accompanied them to the balls where white men were admitted and did not relinquish their chaperouage until the daughter had found a suitable 'protector.' … Sometimes these liaisons lasted for years, occasionally for life."²²

In 1849, Séjour enacted his La Chute de Sejan, which seemed to be an adaptation of a play of Ben Johnson by the same name.²³ In all he wrote for various Parisian theatres twenty-four plays,²⁴ two of which were composed in collaboration with Théodore Barrière, one with Brésil and one with Jamie (fils). In 1856 he played Fils de la Nuit, and yet large audiences were flocking to hear him.²⁵ Both a student and an admirer of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, he probably knew the latter, as they were both noted dramatists. He understood the psychology of an audience. Desdunes says, "Séjour played the stage with the skill of a master."²⁶

His Star Begins to Wane

It was in 1874 that Séjour made a contract with La Gaiété; to play Cromwell andLe Vampire, both fantatic dramas.²⁷ But Séjour is now fifty-seven. The years are beginning to tell their tale. His revenues have stopped. Il est maintenant malade et pauvre. (He is now sick and poor.) On September 21, 1874, he fell to galloping consumption. The curtain coming down upon him swiftly, his tragic passing might well remind one of some of his major dramas.

His old friend, Pergallo, does not, however, forsake him in his last darkest hour. He will take care of the funeral. He conducts the sad and poorly attended cortege to Père-Lachaise. The simple casket is ready to be lowered into the tomb. Here we might wonder where were the crowds that followed him to the theaters and lionized him in the hey-day of his brief, passing glory.²⁸

A man dressed in a blouse suit followed the cortege weeping inconsolably. Unauthorized he took hold of the cord.²⁹

Permettez-moi, s'il vous plait; je suis le manouevre au théátre.

Cette raison u'est pas suffisante.

Je le sais, mais je vous prie. Il m'aimait. C'est moi qui tirais toujours la corde du bateau dans le Fils de la Nuit.

Pergallo yielded to Jean the cord.

There are probably two major reasons for Séjour's relative obscurity in American literature and dramatics. First, Séjour's mother tongue was French, and second, Negroes are not readily admitted into the circle literati. It would hardly be contended that Dunbar, Du Bois, William Stanley Braithwaite, James Weldon Johnson, Brawley, Locke, Kelly Miller, and Carter G. Woodson, all admittedly writers of great creative ability, experienced no greater difficulty in entering the circles literati than Ralph Waldo Emerson or Joel Chandler Harris experienced. Every one of them met unusual difficulty. Dunbar, because of his inimitable genius of humor and pathos, and Du Bois because of his rich, rare gift in literary expression as well as his unbending philosophy of that higher law of human equality, literally unbarred doors of color locked against them.

Séjour suffered in American even more than mese suffered, for regarding Negroes in terms of letters in 1850 was unthinkable in all but Latin America. In the South it was a crime. Victor Séjour, comme tant d' autres, était obligé de s'éloigner du pays qui l'avait vu naître?³⁰

Prejudice was sharper against men of color than against women of color in New Orleans, that is, especially when men assumed the intellectual role. The titles pétite made-moisélle, mademoisélle and madame were terms commonly employed in New Orleans when addressing females of color of marked respectability. In the enumeration of free colored people in Woodson's Free Negro Heads of Families, 1830, polite reference frequently occurs, as Miss Meleric Borei, Mme. Jeanette Alexis, Mlle. Htte. Bumchartrean, Mme. Theophile, Ld. (Lady) Gabrielle, Widow T. Daubreuille, et cetera.³¹ The term F.L.C., Free Lady of Color, was used at times. Without doubt, people of color, men and women, free and slave, were treated better in New Orleans than in any other slave community.³²

Séjour, however, and many other men of his social level, suffered, and as a result found residence in Paris rather than in New Orleans.³³

He wrote poetry, drama and prose copiously.³⁴ No account of his death is found in New Orleans newspapers. The Tribune, owned by the Roudenez brothers, San Domingan mulattoes, suspended operation in 1867. But Paris news-papers took account of his death. Announcements of it occurred in Le Soleil, September 23, 1874; in Le Figaro, September 24-25, 1874; and in Le Gaulois, September 22, 1874.³⁵

Paul de Saint-Victor gives an analysis of Les Mystères du Temple in the Renaissance Louisianaise extolling it, September 24, 1862.³⁶

In his compelling personal magnetism over his audiences, in his rare gift of penetration, interpretation, richness of vocabulary and vocal expression he had few equals.

His last days were sad. In his taking leave of the stage there was tragedy,—tragedy such as he himself had so inimitably enacted "before all Paris" as it turned out to see and hear him play.³⁷

When he fell before the "fatal malady,"³⁸ his popuarity had already begun to wane. Tastes were changing.³⁹ A less serious age was coming on that demanded something light. Yet Séjour, the "unfathered quadroon," born in a slave society that hindered the expression of his genius, had through sheer audacity and courage ventured beyond its pale in quest of freedom and fame and had achieved them,—achieved them at fearful cost and sacrifice.

His was the glory of the setting sun in mystic eclipse, a brilliant and melancholy star moving across the heavens and illuminating its own pathway, and sinking with mournful éclat into the darkness below. It is for gratitude and pride to reclaim him and award to him the crown of dramatic excellence that he so grandly sought and achieved.

Notes

¹Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 428.

²Ibid.

³Register of Baptisms, St. Louis Cathedral, Vol. XV, p. 174. B. No. de l'acte, 871.

⁴Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 428.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Ibid.

⁷Ibid.

⁸Ibid.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰Les Cenelles pp. 55-59.

¹¹Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 428.

¹²Charles B. Rousséve, The Negro in Louisiana, pp. 84-85.

¹³Charles B. Rousséve, The Negro in Louisiana, pp. 84-85. Translation: "Thy mother … ? She spoke a word to me. 'Let us flee!' My hate yielded to tenderness, Happy and confident we departed.… Greece received us … I became rich and powerful. I was honored, but in vain. My past, suffering, like a crime, a remorse, weighed upon my mind. Bianca (his wife) died, expressing, in her last farewell, a desire to be brought to this land. That wish became my law. After twenty years of exile, after all—none saw in me Jacob-Eliacin."

¹⁴Ibid., p. 83.

¹⁵Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 429.

^l6lbid., p. 428.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 429.

¹⁸Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIXe Siècle, p. 429.

¹⁹A. E. Perkins, Who's Who in Colored Louisiane, p. 32.

²⁰Ibid., p. 33.

²¹Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^e Siècle, p. 429.

²²Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans, p. 181.

²³Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 428.

²⁴Ibid.

²⁵Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 429.

²⁶R. L. Desdunes, Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, p. 39.

²⁷Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 429.

²⁸Ibid.

²⁹Ibid.

³⁰R. L. Desdunes, Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, pp. 38-39. Note: Free translation n. 47: Victor Séjour, as others, was obliged to leave his native land in order to escape its prejudices.

³¹Carter G. Woodson, Free Negro Heads of Families, p. 31 ff.

³²R. L. Desdunes, Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, p. 39.

³³Ibid.

³⁴Edward L. Tinker, Les Écrits de Langue Française en Louisiane au XIX^eSiècle, p. 430.

³⁵Ibid.

³⁶Ibid.

³⁷Ibid.

³⁸Ibid.-Ante, p. 8.

³⁹Ibid.