Le Nègre et la créole, ou Mémoires d’Eulalie D*** by Gabrielle de Paban (review)

Paul Adam and Zola; the reception of Romain Gary’s work; the “deux arts de guérir” (213) in Hervé Guibert’s Le Protocole compassionnel; the “construction of a hybrid identity” (241) in several Beur texts; or the Vichy propagandist Philippe Henriot. Nor can we consider two interesting texts on cinema, one on Jacques Tati’s Playtime in dialogue with utopian architecture, the other on two films by Philippe Grandrieux. Unfortunately, bibliographical information must be extracted from the notes following the individual essays. The absence of a bibliography may be attributable to cost-cutting, understandable in difficult times. Nonetheless, the carefully-edited volume is well worth consulting and deserves space on library shelves. Occidental College (CA) Annabelle M. Rea PABAN, GABRIELLE DE. Le Nègre et la créole, ou Mémoires d’Eulalie D***. Ed. Marshall C. Olds. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN 978-2-296-07037-0. Pp. xl + 236. 25 a. Originally published in 1825, Gabrielle de Paban’s story details the life of Eulalie D***, a member of a French colonist’s family in Saint Domingue (Haiti) who, as a 5-year old, is separated from her father on the family plantation during the violent slave rebellion of 1791. Eulalie is rescued by Maky, an African slave woman on the plantation, and flees with Maky and Maky’s son, Zambo, to Benin. Eulalie spends many years in Africa with her adoptive family living the customs of Benin, and eventually falls in love with her African “brother,” Zambo, a love doomed as in all contemporary sentimental novels. Years later, the trio attempts to flee to Sierra Leone, the only anti-slave country when the tribal chief of Benin attempts to claim Eulalie as his wife, an ironic twist wherein a white European woman flees enslavement at the hands of an African tribal chief. The three are kidnapped by Africans in Guinea and sent on a slave ship to Puerto Rico. Zambo is sold into slavery and sent to Martinique, while Eulalie and Maky, thanks to the kindness of a Jesuit priest, Father Félix R*** (a thin disguise for l’abbé Raynal who detailed the horrors of slavery and the slave trade in the eighteenth century, according to the introduction by Olds), spend two years in seclusion in a convent in Puerto Rico. Eventually, the two are sent to Paris to a convent where Eulalie finds a biological brother sympathetic to her unusual story, and he agrees to take her to Martinique to their uncle’s plantation. In a final scene of sentimental pathos, Eulalie dies of a broken heart in Martinique, for a Maroon rebel she witnesses marching to his execution, a certain “Joseph,” is none other than her longlost beloved Zambo. The re-edition of this story, in L’Harmattan’s Autrement Mêmes series with its extensive and invaluable introductory presentation by Marshall C. Olds, provides a treasure trove for those interested in filling in gaps in our knowledge of colonial literature. In fact, this book is essentially three texts in one: 1) Olds’s careful documentation of the possible sources for the text, the identity of Gabrielle de Paban, and the situation of the text within contemporary historical (Restoration) and generic (sentimental novel) considerations; 2) The story itself of the peripatetic, all-suffering heroine; and 3) introductory and endnotes sections, both supposedly written by a convent friend of Eulalie who encouraged her to write her story down and who presents it to us second-hand. The notes section is Reviews 581 designed to authenticate the facts in the story through references to other works on slavery and the slave trade, and to serve as a polemic against human rights abuses due to the horrors of slavery in general. The presentation by Olds is indispensable for an understanding of the text. In addition to offering important historical, social, literary, and political facts that help to situate this work and offer much food for thought for scholars interested in colonial writing and postcolonial reexaminations of those writings, Olds reminds the reader that this work was published just two years after Duras’s Ourika, providing an opportunity for comparative study. A twenty-first-century reader might...