While Cable presented a romanticized view of Creole New Orleans, many of the city’s Creole writers and musicians also represented their home as romantic and exotic. In an 1885 lecture The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance, Charles Gayarré, a prominent judge and historian, disputed point by point Cable’s depiction of Creole New Orleans and emphatically refuted Cable’s questioning of the racial purity of the Creoles. Gayarré’s 1885 History of Louisiana offers an alternative to Cable that is equally romantic and exotic, as he here describes the early European exploration of Louisiana:

What materials for romance! Here is chivalry, with all its glittering pomp, its soul-stirring aspirations, in full march, with its iron heels and gilded spurs, toward the unknown and hitherto unexplored soil of Louisiana.
 

Adrien Rouquette’s La Nouvelle Atala was a response to Chateaubriand’s romantic story set in the New World. Adrien Rouquette’s brother Dominique idealized the simple life and natural state of Native Americans in his book of poems Meschabéennes. In his preface, Dominique Rouquette borrows a common romantic theme in writing of the rich Louisiana landscape as fertile ground for poetic inspiration.

Yes, our Louisiana is a land both of sadness and of poetry! Like old Caladonia, it is an austere and savage country--stern and wild; this nature, vast and untamed, shall be rich with poets.
 

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, probably the most widely known New Orleanian of the Nineteenth Century, based several of his early compositions on slave songs that he heard in his youth. His popular “Creole Trilogy” included “La Savane, Ballade Créole” and other songs that capitalized on the exotic side of New Orleans. These creole writers and musicians sought their own romanticized formula for exporting their New Orleans to the rest of the world.

See: Joseph G. Tregle, Jr. “Creoles and Americans” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992).

Case 6 Gallery:

Photograph. Bayou Scene. A. Lytle. Fuqua, H. L. Jr. papers, Lytle Photograph Collection and Papers.
[T: 13, folder 7, #36]

Speech. The Creoles of History and The Creoles of Romance. Charles Gayarré. (New Orleans: C.E. Hopkins, 1885)
[Edward Clifton Wharton Family Papers, Gayarré Collection. UU: 119, folder 10]

Poetry. Meschacébéennes, poésies. Dominique Rouquette (Paris: Librairie de Sauvaugnat, 1839).
[Hill Louisiana Rare PQ 3939 R62 M4 1839]

Fiction. La Nouvelle Atala. Chahta Ima [Adrien Rouquette]. (New Orleans, Imprimerie du Propagateur Catholique, 1879).
[Hill Louisiana Rare PQ 3939 R6 A65 c.1]

Sheetmusic."La Savane. Ballade Créole."in Gottschalk, "Miscellaneous selections for Piano." (New York, Boston, 1853-1893).
[Hill Louisiana Flat M20. G687 M5 no.16]