Pavie in the Borderlands: The Journey of Theodore Pavie to Louisiana and Texas, 1829-1830, including Portions of His "Souvenirs Atlantiques"

Abstract

Pavie in the Borderlands: The Journey of Theodore Pavie to Louisiana and Texas, 1829-1830, Including Portions of His Souvenirs Atlantiques. By Betje Black Klier. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 280. Appendix, maps, illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $24.95.) Voyage to North America, 1844-45: Prince Carl of Solms's Texas Diary of People, Places and Events. Translated and edited by Wolfram M. Von-- Maszewski. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 244. Illustrations, maps, appendix. $32.50.) Louisiana State University Press and the University of North Texas Press have recently published two interesting translations and analyses of European perspectives on American borderlands in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. In Pavie in the Borderlands, Betje Black Klier provides a fascinating look at one of Louisiana's most enterprising families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Pavies, French immigrants who maintained close ties with their family back in France, built a family empire around Nachitoches, Louisiana, while intermarrying with the local Spanish, French, and American families. As a result, the family eventually lost much of its French culture. The primary purpose of Klier's narrative, however, is to set the stage for and examine the visit of the Pavies' young French kinsman, Theodore Pavie, during the winter of 1829-30. Pavie, an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer in the tradition of the great Romantic authors of the age, came to the United States not only to visit family, but also-and more importantly for this budding artist-to experience nature in its purest form, as had other Romantic writers before him, particularly his hero, Chateaubriand. After providing the reader with a thoughtful narrative of Theodore Pavie's life up to this important voyage and trip to the Louisiana-Texas borderlands, Klier includes a chapter of translations of Pavie's letters home with commentary on the significance of the letters. This chapter is perhaps the most important one in the book. While the young Pavie postured in these letters to the family about his adventures and his importance within his American family circle, these letters are far more informative regarding life on the American borderlands in the first half of the nineteenth century than his later, more carefully prepared memoirs of his American adventures, Souvenirs Atlantiques: Voyage aux Etats-Unis et au Canada (1832). In his letters, Pavie is more honest about the terror that gripped inhabitants and visitors alike regarding the diseases of Louisiana. His letters also reveal a sadly insecure young man, alone in a strange, wild place. The young Frenchman-painfully homesick for his country, family, and friends-was out of place in a world of transplanted Europeans, frontiersmen, Indians, and African slaves. His letters tell us much about how Europeans perceived the dangerous place called America and the hodgepodge of people who inhabited it. In his more carefully-prepared memoirs, apparently based only partly on his personal experiences, Pavie consciously imitates the style of European Romantic writers. In the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-- century European travel literature, Pavie describes in florid detail the purity of the American wilderness. By providing the first English translation of excerpts from Souvenirs Atlantiques, Klier has done a considerable service to students of nineteenth-century French and European literature. However, this section of the book is probably the least useful to students of the American borderlands. Pavie's sensationalized, though superficial, look at African slavery and his description of the displacement of American Indians and the erosion of their culture appear designed more to demonstrate the author's literary style than to educate his readers. …