Background
He was born in New Orleans, in October, 1814, the son of a Frenchman from Bordeaux and his octoroon mistress.
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Camille Thierry
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Camille at first had private tutors but when he was older went to day school. He was preparing to go to a college in Paris when his father died, leaving him a small fortune. What decided him to change his mind no one knows, but he remained in New Orleans and went into business.
Career
He made frequent trips to Paris, where he lived in a spectacularly dissipated fashion and wasted his patrimony. In 1855, convinced by these visits that he could no longer bear the intellectual and social isolation imposed upon him in New Orleans because of his color, he placed all his affairs in the hands of his agents, Lafitte, Dufilho & Company, and went to Paris to live. There he frequented literary circles and continued his tempestuous career for some years until, suddenly tiring of it, he withdrew to Bordeaux, where he lived the life of an anchorite.
He had written a good deal of French verse, and as early as 1843 his "Idées" was published in L'Album Littéraire of New Orleans. When Armand Lanusse in 1845 was preparing his anthology of French verse written by Louisiana men of color, he included in Les Cenelles, as he called it, fourteen of Thierry's poems, twice as many as those of anyone's else, which goes to show that Thierry was regarded as one of the leading poets of his race. His verses were especially admired for their quality of freshness and gentleness, although a note of bitterness born of racial discrimination crept into his later poetry, which clearly showed the inspiration of Charles-Hubert Millevoye and Lamartine.
In 1873 his Louisiana agents became bankrupt, and Thierry lost both the rents they had collected and the capital he had invested in their firm. Leaving his retreat in Bordeaux, he sailed for New Orleans to attempt to straighten out his affairs. But he was more a poet than a business man, and so he was persuaded to transfer all title in his real estate to his agents, who had reembarked in business, upon their promise to pay him an annuity of fifty dollars a month for the rest of his life.
He returned to Bordeaux and, collecting all his fugitive poems, published them there at his own expense in a small volume called Les Vagabondes, which appeared in 1874. Shortly after this Lafitte, Dufilho & Company failed again, Thierry's annuity was discontinued, and he was left practically penniless. This shock was too much for him, and in April 1875 he died in Bordeaux.
