Elizabeth Louise Tureaud

see also for similar account of Tureaud and Bringier history in Louisiana where more accurately his wife is Elizabeth "Betzy" Bringier. Fanny was her sister.

Title Plantation Parade ~ The Grand Manner in Louisiana

Chapter 3, "Will You Be My Son-in-Law", pages 61 - 80

Author Harnett T. Kane

Publisher 1945 New York; William Morrow and Company

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title Creole families of New Orleans / by Grace King ; with illustrations by E. Woodward.

Author King, Grace Elizabeth, 1852-1932. Call # R 929.2 KING

Publisher Baton Rouge, La. : Claitor's Publishing, 1971, c1921

Old Families of New Orleans

Chapter XXXIII

TUREAUD

Pages 419 - 422

 The Tureaud family were originally Huguenots, but they became Catholics before emigrating from France.  The first Tureaud known in Louisiana was Augustin Dominique, born in St. Sauveur Parish, la Rochelle, in 1764, the son of Jacques Tureaud, “courtier,” and of Francoise Guillon.  He received collegiate education, was dashing in conduct, talented and good looking, and, consequently, as we might say, became involved in a love scrape which brought about his being sent by his father to St. Domingo to take charge of a plantation he owned there.

In the revolt of the negros and the massacre of the whites, Tureaud was saved by the ingratiating qualities that distinguished him through life. His housekeeper, a mulatress, the wife of one of the ringleaders of the revolt, who therefore knew in advance of the revolt, what was impending, led him to the shore, where she had secreted a boat and embarked in it with him and her two children. The cold was intense, the boat was an open one and all were thinly clad. They suffered cruelly. One of the children died the second day out. The mother threw the boy overboard, and the little skiff drifted about at sea until it was picked up by a vessel bound for Baltimore. Tureaud by this time was lying unconscious in the boat. He always said that he had no idea what could have influenced the mulatress to save his life except an unconscious politeness on his part. When he came from France, ignorant of the customs of Martinique, he addressed the housekeeper as “madame” and although he does not say so, he most likely treated her with consideration due to a “madame.”
A commission house in Baltimore received the refugee and communicated the fact to Tureaud’s father in France, who remitted funds for his son’s expenses, asking the firm to keep him in America. The surviving child of the ringleader and mulatress, although free survived in the Tureaud family, and his children were given European educations and subsequently returned to New Orleans, where they held good business positions.
Tureaud, after settling in Baltimore, made a number of voyages. In the diary he tells about being shipwrecked in the Pacific and residing with Baron de Cambefort at the Mole of St. Nicholas, but unfortunately only one section of his diary has been preserved, that relating to 1801 and 1802. This is full of the exciting adventures, love affairs, etc., that befell amateur knight-errants on the Gulf of Mexico at that time. Once he was captured on his vessel by the English, once drifting about with a crew helpless with yellow fever, he put into Vera Cruz for relief and, being refused by the authorities there, he sailed for New Orleans where his greatest adventure yet awaited him, for he met Marius Pons Bringier, who invited him to his plantation, White Hall, taking him into his cabriolet There his visit being terminated, he was about to leave when a heavy rain fell flooding the road and detaining him a few days longer. His host, more and more pleased with his agreeable guest, more and more reluctant to part with him, yielded at last to temptation and a propos of nothing offered the hand of his daughter Fanny. Naturally, according to French customs, there were preliminary conditions connected with business to be arranged, but they were settled in a satisfactory way, and the young man, duly accepting and accepted, was, as his wrote in his diary, raised to the seventh heaven of bliss over good fortune. Fanny was only thirteen and, he confesses, not beautiful, but she was the daughter of the owner of the magnificent White Hall! Tureaud returned to New Orleans where, he writes, congratulations were showered upon him. He went back to Baltimore and a year later presented himself to claim his bride.
Fanny did not keep a diary, but her account of the affair has come down to us nevertheless. She was in her room dreaming, as girls do, of her ideal in love and indulging in the usual romantic visions of marriage, when her father summoned her to his presence, and informed her that her hand had been promised to Monsieur Tureaud. She went almost into a state of collapse, but managed to stammer out that she bowed to the will of her father. Then, hastening to her room, she gave herself up to the wildest grief and indignation that she was to be given away to an old gray-haired man. Tureaud was then thirty-eight years old, but this was, of course, aged to the eyes of thirteen, and his hair had turned gray when he fled from St. Domingo.
The marriage was celebrated at White Hall in 1803. While preparations for the ceremony were being made, the rebellious little bride spent her time weeping in her room, but in spite of her fears the union turned out to be the ideal one she had dreamed of.
Her father gave her “Union” plantation (so named for the happy event) as a wedding gift. The life spent there for both was a very happy one. Tureaud became as judge in the parish of St. James and during the Civil War served as a Captain of Calvary. But, the bold high-spirited daredevil of the diary suffered miserably in his old age from the effect of a wound supposed to have been received in a duel. He died at “Union” plantation in 1826.
He had sent to France for his nephew Jean Francois Theodore Tureaud, to join him in Louisiana.
Theodore, born in Rochefort in 1791, had served in Napoleon’s army, and was in the Treasury Department of the Marine in 1812. He arrived in Louisiana in 1814 , and was followed a year or two later, by his mother and two sisters. He became a Notary Public in New Orleans, and married Claire Conand, daughter of a Dr. Joseph Conand of the same city. They founded a second line of Tureauds in Louisiana.