Marie de Berniere: A Tale of the Crescent City is a collection of stories published in
1853 by Lippincott, Grambo, and Co. of Philadelphia. In addition to the title story, the
collection includes “The Maroon” and “Maize in Milk.” Each story was published serially prior to
the collection and gradually expanded from its serial version into novella form. In a 20 June 1853 to James Henry Hammond,
Simms mentioned “collecting my scattered novellettes & tales. You have probably seen ‘Marie de Berniere
&c.’ This will be followed up by other vols. of similar material; all of
which will yield me a little money.” In 1855, Lippincott, Grambo, and Co.
published the same collection under the title of the second story, The Maroon: A Legend of the Caribees, and
Other Tales. The work embodies
Simms’s commitment to publishing shorter works of fiction; as he wrote to
publisher John R. Thompson in a 10 January 1863 letter, Simms believed tales
such as these should be collected “for reading in camp and along the highways.”
Early
reviews of the collection were positive.
In a notice of the book from the Literary
World on 21 May 1853, “Logan” from Philadelphia praised the work: “It is
unnecessary to say these tales are good, exhibiting all the force of Simms’s
animated style, with local truthfulness of scene and character. Nowhere else may we find so good a picture of
life in New Orleans as in Marie de Berniere — its author has seen and
appreciated everything. It is novel too;
for society there is not as we cold Northerners can comprehend it without long
familiarity, and even then we rarely possess the open-sesame to knowledge of
life, sympathy.” The Charleston Courier provided a warm review a few days later with regional observations
that Simms himself would affirm: “The tales are all marked by the most
felicitous traits and characteristics of the well-known author, who would have
been one of the most popular of our novelists, and the most generally read in
the South, had he not lived in that section himself.” In a similar vein, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in July 1853 praised the collection’s
“highly-wrought portraitures of Southern character.”
“Marie
de Berniere” can be classified as both a story of local New Orleans “manners”
and a “moral imaginative” tale. The story
was first published pseudonymously (under the name of “E—”) in the Southern and Western Monthly Magazine and
Review in 1845; in this instance, it was entitled “The Unknown Masque. A
Sketch of the Crescent City.” A
subsequent version, “The Egyptian Masque; A Tale of the Crescent City,” was set
to be published serially in the American
Metropolitan Magazine in 1849, but only lasted through one February
installment prior to the magazine’s cessation.
The story was expanded and its title changed again to “Marie de
Berniere” when it was published serially in Arthur’s
Home Gazette in 1852. The tale’s evolution and expansion, according
to John C. Guilds, was accompanied with the addition of sentimentality and
sensationalism, much of which was derived from German influences: “It is clear,
however, that in expanding ‘The Unknown Masque’ into ‘Marie de Berniere,’ Simms
depended more and more upon literary sources, largely German, and less and less
upon personal experiences. In brief,
‘The Unknown Masque’ is much more a domestic story of manners and much less a
literary import from Germany than ‘Marie de Berniere.’” The early versions proved to be a germ for
the novella that would be roughly ten times larger in its 1853 version found
here.
The novella was later republished by
Chapman and Company in 1866 under the title of The Ghost of My Husband; a Tale of the Crescent City.
In his
textual introduction to “The Maroon: A Legend of the Caribees,” Guilds commends
the tale as ranking “among the more artistically pleasing of the generally
undistinguished byproducts of the Charleston writer’s interest in and knowledge
of Spain and its literature.” Guilds
also praises the “picturesque and fast-moving romance” for its unusual
frankness in portraying the main character, Lopez de Levya, and the explicit
love scenes that were shocking at the time. “The Maroon” has a rather extensive
publication history prior to its inclusion in Marie de Berniere. The germ for the story came from a short sketch
published in 1832 by Simms anonymously in the New York Mirror entitled “A Legend of the Pacific,” which was also
republished in The Book of My Lady in
1833. It was then published in six installments in
the New York Illustrated Magazine of
Literature and Art in 1847; the story was again published serially in the Southern Literary Gazette in 1850 with
minor revisions. Subsequent to its appearance in book form,
“The Maroon” was set to be published in 1865 by a Columbia press, Evans &
Cogswell, but never came to fruition due to Sherman’s occupation of the city. The publisher was a likely victim of the
occupation, as evidenced by Simms’s 9 September 1865 letter to Evert Augustus
Duyckinck. Referencing As Good as a Comedy — scheduled to be
released the same year by the Columbia publisher — Simms noted that the “advent
of Sherman was fatal to its publication.” It is likely that “The Maroon” suffered the
same fate.
“Maize
in Milk. A Christmas Story of the South,” the third novella included in Marie de Berniere, provides a fictional
account of the customs and traditions of Christmas in the Old South. Simms likely began the tale in 1846; he noted
in a 17 March letter to Duyckinck: “I wrote recently to W & P suggesting to
them an American Tale of Christmas, for which I have the scheme of a very
pretty story.” Wiley and Putnam apparently rejected it,
leading Simms to publish it serially the following year in Godey’s Lady’s Book from February through May of 1847. Guilds praises the “spirit and atmosphere of
its setting” abundant throughout while cautioning that the reader “interested
in understanding the social order and philosophy of the Old South will find
much of it captured here, including the paternalistic concept of the Negro
slave so inimical to Simms’s reputation”; consequently, Guilds maintains the
tale is “best read as a reflector of nineteenth century Southern thought and
manners.” Perhaps Simms encapsulated it appropriately
in a 25 February 1847 letter to Duyckinck: “It is simply descriptive.”
The
1853 edition of Marie de Berniere,
housed in the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina,
features green boards with a raised ornate design on the cover. The spine, green with gilt lettering, reads:
[rule] | MARIE | DE BERNIERE | A TALE | OF THE | Crescent City | ETC. |
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO. | PHILADA. | [rule]. The title page reads: MARIE DE BERNIERE: | A
| TALE OF THE CRESCENT CITY, | ETC. ETC. ETC. | BY | W. GILMORE SIMMS, | AUTHOR
OF "THE YEMASSEE," "RICHARD HURDIS," "GUY
RIVERS," ETC. | [rule] | PHILADELPHIA: | LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO, AND CO. |
1853. A microfilm copy of The Ghost of My Husband is also held in
the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. The front cover features ornate, floral frame
surrounding all; portraits of three men dominate the cover, which reads: Price 20 cts. No. 2. | THE | SUNNY SIDE
SERIES | [portraits of three men] | THE | GHOST OF MY HUSBAND. | A | TALE OF
THE CRESCENT CITY. | [rule] | ''If I stand here, I saw him.'' —SHAKSPEARE. |
[rule] | BY W. GILMORE SIMMS, ESQ., | AUTHOR OF ''THE YEMASSEE,'' ''THE
FORARYERS,'' ''EUTAW,'' ''MELLICHAMPE,'' | ''KATHARINE WALTON,'' ETC. ETC. |
[floral rule] | NEW YORK: | CHAPMAN & COMPANY, 116 NASSAU STREET. | THE
AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY, PUBLISHERS' AGENTS.
Michael Odom
See John Caldwell Guilds, Textual
Introduction to “The Unknown Masque. A Sketch of the Crescent City,” Stories and Tales by William Gilmore
Simms (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 698, 700. The expansion to which Guilds refers can be
traced to a 20 November 1848 letter Simms wrote to James Lawson referencing an
article he sent to Israel Post, a publisher of American Metropolitan Magazine, who would pay $5 per page. This unconcluded story, “The Egyptian
Masque,” lasted only one installment due to the publication’s perishing, but it
had already surpassed the total word count of “The Unknown Masque”; this
increase would become more obvious in its fullest manifestation, Guilds
asserts, when “Marie de Berniere” began appearing four years later.