François-Dominique Rouquette was an American poet. He was the eldest brother of Adrien Rouquette.
Background
François-Dominique Rouquette was born at his parents' summer place on Bayou Lacombe, Louisiana. His father, Dominique, was a native of France, from near Bordeaux, who came to New Orleans about 1800, set himself up as a wine merchant, and married a Creole, Louise Cousin. Young Dominique played so much with the Choctaw children in the nearby Indian camps that he learned their language at an early age and could shoot a bow and arrow with the best of them; and as soon as his brother Adrien was old enough to walk he took him along on these excursions.
Education
At the age of seven the elder boy was sent to the College d'Orleans, where he stayed for five years and exhibited the lack of emotional control that is so often considered a peculiarity of poets. Then, at twelve, he crossed the ocean alone and matriculated at the Royal College of Nantes in Brittany. In due course he graduated and in 1828 returned to New Orleans, but his relatives persuaded him to go to Philadelphia to study law in the office of William Rawle, then the leader of the Pennsylvania bar.
Career
A dreamer and unconquerably indolent, Rouquette soon tired of this profession and went back to Bayou Lacombe to divide his days between idly wandering with the aborigines and writing occasional verse. He was forever falling in love, and then going to France to get over it. In 1839, during one of these visits, he published in Paris a thin volume of poems in praise of life among the Indians, which he called Les Meschacébéennes, the ancient name of Mississippi. Cheteaubriand had created a vogue for this type of literature, and Rouquette's little book was an immediate success. Hugo, Beranger, Barthelemy, as well as lesser critics, praised it enthusiastically and predicted a future for its author.
He returned to New Orleans in the same year. He had wasted most of his patrimony on his gay trips to Paris and so, to make a living, began to write poems and articles for L'Abeille and Le Propagateur Catholique, and in time opened a boys' school in New Orleans.
When this venture ceased to pay in 1849 he took his family to Fort Smith, Ark. , and opened another school; but the citizens of that frontier town were more interested in having their sons learn how to fight Indians and ride wild horses than in having them taught to read and write. Rouquette was soon forced to convert the school into a grocery store, but he was so impractical that this too failed, and he went back to New Orleans in 1851.
Meanwhile (1850), he had published a translation, The Arkansas, by J. B. Bossu, Rouquette's only work in English. In 1852 he opened still another school at Bonfouca, in St. Tammany Parish, where he made his older pupils teach the younger ones while he went away for two or three days at a time to smoke, read, and write poetry under the oaks of Matassa. This was his last attempt to support his family.
In 1856 Rouquette published a second collection of poems under the title, Fleurs d'Amérique. The French critics received it as enthusiastically as they had Les Meschacébéennes.
For the rest of his life Dominique drifted without bag or baggage from the house of one relative to that of another, repaying hospitality with poems for birthdays, baptisms, and weddings, which he sang at the feasts. When he was older he wandered the streets of his city, in broken shoes and wrinkled, patched clothes, always with a blanket around his shoulders, a palm-leaf fan in one hand and a stick in the other. Sitting on someone's doorstep, he scribbled poetry on a piece of brown manilla paper and then found some friend to buttonhole on the corner, to whom to recite with flashing eyes the lines he had just finished. His many women relatives would walk blocks rather than meet him on the street, for he always insisted upon enveloping them in the folds of his musty old blanket as he kissed them and asked solicitously after the health of each member of their families. He never failed to present them with a grimy little caramel wrapped in yellow straw paper, a supply of which he carried in his pocket together with loose tobacco and his very rank pipe.
Had he lived in the days of the troubadours when poets had patrons, he would have had fame and riches; but born too late, he died in penury, even though his verses had been much praised by some of the best critics in France. On May 10, 1890, he was buried under the grass of Bonfouca.