Adrien Rouquette was born in New Orleans in 1813. His father, a Frenchman from Bordeaux, established himself as a wine merchant in New Orleans in the early Nineteenth Century. He soon married a young Creole woman and had five children, two of whom would later become well-known Louisiana poets. Shortly after Adrien's birth, the Rouquette family moved to the outskirts of New Orleans near the Native American settlements along Bayou Saint John. Adrien quickly learned the language of his neighbors and later in life found in these early experiences a great source of poetic inspiration. Rouquette was first educated in New Orleans at the Collège d'Orléans and later continued at schools in Kentucky and New Jersey . Because he had lost most of his skills in French, he planned to pursue his education in the Collège Royal in Paris, but the political turmoil in the French capital drove him to the West of France--first to Nantes then to Renne. After traveling for a period in Europe, he returned to Louisiana in 1833 and settled in Bayou Lacombe, where he lived near another settlement of Native Americans. The following years were punctuated by comings and goings between France and Louisiana; many of Rouquette's poems bear the mark of his time in Paris and his unhappy love affairs. In 1841 he published one of his best collections of poems, Les Savanes. The well-known French critic Sainte-Beuve offered the following praise of Rouquette’s first poetic effort:

I took great pleasure in your Savanes at smelling many youthful and sincere fragrances. It seemed to me that I was in a country that was friendly but that had not lost the charm of the unexpected. It is a great accomplishment, dear sir, for you to have experienced this vast wilderness and to have captured it in your heart.

Rouquette's admiration for contemporary French poetry, and especially for Chateaubriand, is evident in the many poems that he dedicated to the famous French romantic poet. Writing under his pseudonym Chahta-Ima, which in Choctaw means "one of us", Rouquette published a short novel in 1879 entitled La nouvelle Atala ou fille de l'esprit (The New Atala, or Daughter of the Spirit)--a direct response to Chateaubriand's Atala. Back in Louisiana once again, he decided to devote the rest of his life to religion. In 1841 Rouquette entered the Plattenville seminary in Assumption Parish and was ordained a priest in 1845. He was posted to Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans and was eventually made vicar general. A highlight of his fourteen years in the priesthood was an inspiring speech he gave in New Orleans on January 8, 1846, commemorating the Battle of New Orleans. In 1860 he published Les Préludes de l'Antoniade (Preludes to the Antoniade), in which his deep attachment to Louisiana was lavishly developed in poems such as "La Louisiane et la Nouvelle-Orléans" (Louisiana and New Orleans)-- displayed here in both manuscript and published versions. Rouquette, choosing to spend his final years with his Choctaw friends, retreated to Bayou Lacombe and continued to perform his religious duties in a small Chapel . He met and made friends with the writer Lafcadio Hearn, temporarily back in Louisiana. Rouquette became insane in the later years of his life and died in 1887, at the age of seventy-four, while working on a dictionary of the Choctaw language.
 

See: Dagmar-Renshaw Lebreton. Chahta-Ima. (Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 1947).

Case 10 Gallery:

Manuscript Poem."À la Louisiane." Adrien Rouquette. in Rouquette (Adrien) Papers.
[Rouquette (Adrien) Papers, A-15, Box 1 folder 1]

Poetry. Préludes de L'Antoniade. Adrien Rouquette. (New Orleans, L Marchand, 1860).
[Hill Louisiana Rare PQ 3939 R6 A66]

Poetry. Préludes de L'Antoniade. Adrien Rouquette. (New Orleans, L Marchand, 1860).
[Hill Louisiana Rare PQ 3939 R6 A66]

Engraving. "Choctaw Indian Squaws" in New Orleans Characters. Léon Joseph Frémaux. (New Orleans: Peychaus & Garcia, 1976).
[Hill Louisiana Rare Oversize N6435. N65 F75]

Photograph. “Bayou Lacombe” in Titcombe Collection
[E-73, folder 1]

Poetry. Les Savanes, poésies américaines. Adrien Rouquette. (Paris: J. Labitte; New Orleans: A. Moret, 1841).
[Hill Louisiana Rare PQ 3939 R6 A72]

Poetry. Les Savanes, poésies américaines. Adrien Rouquette. (Paris: J. Labitte; New Orleans: A. Moret, 1841).
[Hill Louisiana Rare PQ 3939 R6 A72]

Photograph. “Chapel at Chinchuba” in Life of the Abbé Rouquette. Susan B. Elder. (New Orleans: L. Graham co., 1913)
[Hill Louisiana PQ 3939. R6 E53 c.1]

Engraving. “Picture of A Rouquette” in Life of the Abbé Rouquette. Susan B. Elder. (New Orleans: L. Graham co., 1913).
[Hill Louisiana PQ 3939. R6 E53 c.1]

Sheet Music. "Zozo Mokeur." W.T. Francis. Paroles de Chatah-Imah [Adrien Rouquette] (New Orleans: L.Grunewald, 1887).
[Chol (Emmanuel) papers, Box 2, folder 48]