Léona Queyrouze was born in New Orleans in 1861 to a wealthy Creole family. Her father was the son of a veteran of the Napoleonic wars who immigrated to New Orleans and sold wine and groceries imported from France. Her mother was a Creole from Saint Martinville. As she grew up Queyrouze’s parents held salons at their home that attracted the luminaries of the Creole intellectual world. Because she joined adult conversations at a very young age, the precocious Léona earned the nickname "little Mme de Staël," a reference to the woman writer who then enjoyed enormous popularity in France and Europe. At 15 Queyrouze’s parents sent her to France to improve her skills in the French language. Soon after she returned to Louisiana, she befriended the locally famous writer Lafcadio Hearn, forming a partnership that would play a great role in her future literary career. Their relationship soon became the talk of the town. Hearn encouraged her to write and he read her first poems. Queyrouze soon published poems in L'Abeille, which she signed with her male pen-name: Constant Beauvais--the name of her grandfather, a former Louisiana governor. "Vision", here displayed in manuscript and published versions, was one of her most well-known poems. From an early age, Léona Queyrouze was surrounded by older men who were at the same time her mentors, confidants or suitors. Her correspondence with Victor Cousin, a man forty years her elder, is typical of her relationships with the men in her life. When he first met her in 1881, Cousin recited the following lines to her:

I would have liked to have saved up for your sweet face/ All the kisses of bygone days;/ They are now but an abuse to your youth/ And are but an outrage to springtime.

In the pages of L'Abeille Queyrouze replied to her elderly suitor:

Under your beautiful white forehead, eternal youth/ Throbs, together with spring and all its tenderness/ And art still glows warmly in you.

This intense literary flirtation persisted for several years and Cousin's letters to Queyrouze all begin by calling her “ma lionne” (my lioness) instead of Léona. In 1888, in one of the last letters he wrote to her, the aging Cousin lamented his young muse's obvious indifference and he philosophically resigned himself to the capriciousness of the fair sex:

Will then you, my lioness, embody the truth of the words written by François I on one of the windows of the Chambord castle: Woman is fickle:/ Whoever trusts her is a fool!

In 1880 Léona Queyrouze published her "Étude sur Racine" ("Essay on Racine") in Les Comptes-Rendus de l'Athénée Louisianais. At the age of 23, Queyrouze tested the limits of contemporary tastes by giving a lecture at the Athénée Louisianais on the subject of "Indulgence" , the first public speech given by a young Creole woman in Louisiana. Word of Léona Queyrouze's literary abilities and bold personality soon reached France, where a Mr. Combes, president of the Academy of Sciences and Letters in Bordeaux, wrote a letter praising her talent. Combes' letter was published in L'Abeille on March 1st 1885 . A fervent admirer of the renowned French writer Émile Zola, Queyrouze wrote a letter to her idol that boldly included one of her poems. Zola took the time to send her a few lines in response. In 1886 Queyrouze spent a year in New York translating and adapting French dramas for the American stage. Back in New Orleans again, she gave a lecture on "Wagner and patriotism" which illustrated her wide ranging interests. The audience at this lecture included General Beauregard, Louis Placide Canonge, Alfred Mercier and Charles Gayarré, the patriarchs of the defense of the French language in Louisiana. But at 41, Léona Queyrouze once more defied the mores of Creole society by marrying quite late in life. She abandoned her literary ambitions for many years until, late in her life, she published an essay in English entitled The Idyll: my Personal Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn (1933). Queyrouze died in 1938 at the age of seventy-seven.
 

See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932).

Case 13 Gallery:

Newspaper Clipping. Letter from Combes, president of the Academy of Sciences and Letters in Bordeaux. L'Abeille, March, 1st 1885. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 71, Box 7A, folder 7: 52]

De l'Indulgence. Léona Queyrouze (New Orleans: Imprimerie Franco-Américaine, 1884).
[Hill Louisiana PQ 3939. B27D4]

Five Photographs of Léona Queyrouz. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5B, folder 5: 42]

Five Photographs of Léona Queyrouz. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5B, folder 5: 42]

Five Photographs of Léona Queyrouz. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5B, folder 5: 42]

Five Photographs of Léona Queyrouz. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5B, folder 5: 42]

Five Photographs of Léona Queyrouz. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5B, folder 5: 42]

MS letters, Léona Queyrouze to Émile Zola and reply from Zola. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5A, folder 5: 36]

MS letters, Léona Queyrouze to Émile Zola and reply from Zola. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5A, folder 5: 36]

MS letters, Léona Queyrouze to Émile Zola and reply from Zola. in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 5A, folder 5: 36]

Manuscript poem. "Vision". in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 70, Box 6, folder 6: 45]

Newspaper Clipping. "Vision” in Queyrouze Papers.
[UU: 71, Box 7A, folder 7: 56]