THE VOSS PAPERS
A brick-paved street in the rebuilt town, a brick church with a domed bell tower at the end of it, a bakery cart and a grocer's sign in the foreground, townspeople going about the morning.

Théodorville, circa 1815. As soon as the herringbone central square was built, horses were allowed on it only in an emergency, which kept it nice and tidy for the pedestrians. Thomas Scull was very impressed by Théodore’s thinking.

Théodorville

Good Friday, 1788. In under five hours the fire took better than four out of every five buildings in New Orleans: the original parish church among the first to go, better than two hundred more following it before the wind finally dropped. The cathedral the city knows today was built in the rebuilding afterward. Théodorville stands about three miles outside the burned ground, and it was the fire that got it built. What Théodorville remembers is not the fire itself but what it left standing.

A wall of fire and smoke over New Orleans seen from across the river, embers streaming upward, onlookers gathered on the levee.

New Orleans, Good Friday, 1788.

It was also a town of the gens de couleur libres, the free people of color of Louisiana: artisans, tradesmen, landowners and militiamen, a community with its own standing under Spanish law and its own say in how the new town was laid out.

A carved and painted wooden statue of Mary Magdalene, in a blue cloak, standing in a whitewashed niche.

The Statue of St. Mary Magdalene

St. Mary Magdalene Church, Théodorville

Carved and painted by artisans from Théodorville, and by the time of the fire already old. Everything around it that Good Friday went to ash and cinder; the statue came through all but untouched, the blue of the cloak barely dulled. It has been venerated ever since, by people who will tell you exactly why, and a few who won't say.

Father Augustin in a black cassock with a gold cross, a small book in one hand, standing by an open door with a church tower beyond.

Father Augustin

Théodorville, 1788

Ready to serve the spiritual needs of the gens de couleur libres community, and possessed of excellent organizational and financial acumen. In a town just then being built from nothing, the second counted for nearly as much as the first.

A smiling man on horseback, hat raised in greeting, leading a long line of horses of every color across an open field.

Talbot

Horse trader, a regular caller at Théodorville

Talbot comes through a few times a year with a string of horses behind him and a hat he never seems to stop waving. Nobody has ever managed to catch him at a bad price, and nobody has ever caught him in a lie about a horse's age, either, a reputation that, in this business, is worth considerably more than either.

A man in a blue coat bowing low over a woman's hand in a yellow gown, at a candlelit evening gathering, other guests watching.

Supervía and Élise

The night they met

The bow is lower than courtesy strictly requires, and the room is watching closely enough that someone thought it worth painting: the first time Supervía and Élise Tebieux were ever in the same room, at the Vauclare sugar plantation. It would not be long before her life took a turn neither of them could have predicted standing here.