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50 At Home in the Illinois Country André Michaux,the intrepid French botanist,sometime political agent,and travel writer, was in Pittsburgh in August 1793 and met Audrain there. Michaux remarked that Audrain had been in North America for fourteen years, that his business was shipping flour to New Orleans, and that he was said to be in partnership with “one Louisière or Delousière. . . . This Louisière is at present absent from Pittsburgh.”1 Absent indeed, for when Michaux commented about him de Luzières was in faraway Ste. Genevieve where he had the specific responsibility of getting a first-class flour mill up and running. He seems never even to have begun this task. His letters to Tardiveau, who was in New Madrid overseeing the mill-building project there, during the autumn of 1793 are full of pathos and sadly lacking in energy. His intermittent malarial fevers were compounded by other illnesses, both physical and mental. “My situation is frightful, persistent diarrhea and stomach problems, and I’m getting weaker every day. Moreover, my sad and dark ruminations are not conducive to getting better.”2 De Luzières’s mood was not lightened by the arrival in Upper Louisiana of the news of Louis XVI’s execution. De Luzières was extremely proud of his honorific title,“councilor to the king,”and he never wavered in his loyalty to 4 1. See André Michaux’s“Journal,”in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: A. H. Clark Co., 1904), 3:31. On Michaux’s sojourn in North America , see Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v.“André Michaux,” by J. F. M. Hoeniger. Michaux had met Edmond Genêt before heading for the Ohio River valley. 2. De Luzières, letter of September 30, 1793, Illinois State Historical Library, Tardiveau Papers (hereafter ISHL, TP), no. 177. At Home in the Illinois Country 51 the Bourbon family, which via Spain ruled Louisiana at the time. On October 2, 1793, Lieutenant Governor Zénon Trudeau wrote from St. Louis to Carondelet that de Luzières had conveyed to him the news of Louis XVI’s death, “which affected all the old French people here.”3 Surely this gloomy news descended on de Luzières with more weight than anyone else in the region, but in the autumn of 1793 he did not have spare time to“sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” De Luzières was especially worried that his new residence, which was rising very slowly on the hills above the plowlands of Ste. Genevieve’s Grand Champ (see map, p.59), would not be completed when his family arrived, and, as it turned out, it was not. “Everything here is talk and promises but nothing ever gets done,” he complained.4 Trudeau wrote to François Vallé in Ste. Genevieve informing him that de Luzières was “terribly upset [une inquiétude infinie ]” about the prospect of his family arriving from Pittsburgh and finding no proper house in which to live.5 A building boom was in full swing in the region as the move from the old town of Ste. Genevieve to the new town was being accomplished, however, and skilled craftsmen were in short supply.6 Eventually, black slaves belonging to the wealthy Ste. Genevieve residents,Vall é and Jean-Baptiste Pratte, were put to work on de Luzières’s house.7 This case suggests that many of the fine residences erected in the new town of Ste. Genevieve during the 1790s—including the still-standing Nicolas Janis, Louis Bolduc, Vital St. Gemme Bauvais, and Jean-Baptiste Vallé houses—were built largely by anonymous black craftsmen, trained in the local vernacular style of vertical-log construction. “Merde, les américains arrivent, les américains arrivent” were words that surely reverbrated through all serious conversations in the francophone communities (and they were uniformly francophone) of Spanish Illinois for about four months, from the autumn of 1793 to the late winter of 1794. Rumors were rife and they were wild. The gist of them was that George Rogers Clark 3. Trudeau’s letter in Papeles de Cuba, legajo 211, Archivo General de Indies, Seville (henceforth this collection will be cited simply as PC [Papeles de Cuba] followed by the legajo number). See Trudeau’s official service sheet (“good application, capacity and conduct”) in Jack D. L. Holmes, ed., Honor and Fidelity: The Louisiana Regiment and the Louisiana Military...

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