Block # 6 Madame's Star
By Pat Styring
Southern girls educated at Northern boarding schools risked "imbibing habits and manners not perfectly congenial with those of the people of the South," warned an Alabama parent. Cautious planters and urban aristocrats had the option of pricey schools closer to home. Among the elite academies was Madame Talvande's French School for Young Ladies,
L'École pour Demoiselles, in Charleston, South Carolina, run by a family of Haitian refugees.
Madame Talvande's school building still stands,
known today as the Sword Gate House.
Mary Boykin Miller (1823-1886) soon after her marriage to
James Chesnut in 1840.
Mary Miller, a student in the late 1830s, recalled Madame as,"the Tyrant of Legare St." who was forced to seek U.S. asylum by revolution in Haiti, then called St. Domingue.
The Haitian uprising (1791-1804) was the most successful of
the slave revolutions, creating the second
independent country in the Western hemisphere.
"She wasted no time in vain regrets, or in thoughts of what was
due her by God and man---on account of her social position---before the social
earthquake; but she at once took measures to utilize her rare accomplishments,
and to make them pay."
Madame's accomplishments: She was a native French speaker and a force to
be reckoned with. The Eastern U.S. was dotted with what were called French Schools run by exiles from Europe and the Caribbean with just those gifts.
Unknown school. Class picture with Madame?
About 1860
Mary was a favorite student, invited to sit at Madame's
table during meals, conversing skillfully in the required French. (English was
forbidden.) Classmate Susan Petigru was not so favored. Sue did not thrive in
French and believed that girls in her elite position wasted time and tuition on education.
Block # 6 Madame's Star
By Denniele Bohannon
Sue and Mary had much in common besides social class. Both
were gifted writers and conversationalists, witty and outspoken. But Mary knew the
limits for Southern womanhood. Sue never accepted the conventions, earning a lifelong reputation as a "fast woman."
Sue published
popular novels pushing those limits in the 1850s. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut wrote novels too,
but she's remembered for her Civil War diary, while Sue Petigru King is
forgotten except by those who relish a scandalous life story.
Older sister Caroline Petigru Carson (1820–1892)
enjoyed her years at Madame Talvande's
more than Sue did. The 1841 portrait is by Thomas Sully,
Collection: Gibbes Museum of Art
Chintz album quilt. Signatures from
Columbia, Charleston, Savannah, Danbury,
Connecticut & New York
sold at Skinner's Auctions.
Quilt dated 1848, Eudora F. Davis,
Sumter District, South Carolina. Online auction.
Other names include Clark.
Finding antebellum South Carolina album quilts with pieced blocks is almost as hard as finding Yankee pupils in Carolina girls' schools.
Cut-out-chintz applique is the dominant style in pre-Civil-War
South Carolina signature quilts but here are some familiar pieced designs.
(We are not going to do the pale blue sunburst!)
Madame Talvande's "had two or three distinct cliques," wrote Mary in a thinly veiled novel about school days. She classified herself (and probably Sue) as among the English girls---those "of Cavalier stock" (meaning descended from English aristocrats). There were "The French speaking [Catholic] refugees from St. Domingo of whom Madame was a distinguished representative. wonderfully handsome girls... gayer and less studious than Charleston proper...." Then the "Huguenots...not ashamed then to be both American and protestants." She lists their traits: piety, thrift, industry, energy and worldly wisdom, "stiff necked, with somewhat of a hard narrowness." The always observant Mary could bite.
Mary's parents removed her from Madame Talvande's after gossip she was seen walking with James Chesnut, six years older.
James and Mary married when she was 17.
He was a clerk in Sue's father's law office.
Once the Millers met Mary's callers in frontier Mississippi, a temporary home, they sent her right back to Charleston. Sue's stay at Madame Talvande's was short. Hoping perhaps for more polish, her parents enrolled her in a French School in Philadelphia, which she didn't like any better than she did Philadelphia or the North.
Mix of chintz and calico styles in an album dated 1843
from the Philadelphia/NJ area,
made by Hannah Nicholson Grave's Quaker relatives.
Collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
See a post on Hannah Grave's three quilts here:
Links between Carolina students and Philadelphia schools seems to have been one agent of design transmission. Girls like Sue (if Sue noticed needlework at all) would have brought new Philadelphia fashion back home.
The Block: Madame's Star
Block # 6 Madame's Star
By Mark Lauer
Blocks from an undated mid-19th century
New Jersey album from Stella Rubin Antiques
Simple nine patch stars often served as signature blocks. This month's design gives different effects with different shading.
On the reverse of an 1843 quilt from Swedesboro, New Jersey
in Mary Koval's collection.
It's #1634 in BlockBase, published in
the 1930s by Nancy Page as Mosaic.
Block # 6 Madame's Star
By Mark Lauer
Cutting a 12" Block
A - Cut 2 dark & 2 light squares 4-7/8" Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles. You need 8 large triangles.
B - Cut 1 light, 1 dark & 2 medium squares 5-1/4". Cut each into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts. You need 16 medium-sized triangles.
C- Cut 2 squares 2-7/8" Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles. You need 4 small triangles.
D - Cut 1 square 3-3/8".
Sewing
Block # 6 Madame's Star
By Denniele Bohannon
A Sentiment for June
A scroll with a bouquet from a set of blocks dated 1843 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Civil War & After
Mary and Sue kept up an edgy relationship through the Civil War. Through her husband Mary was Confederate elite. Sue married Henry King, a Charleston lawyer who was neither ambitious nor sober. By the time the War came and Henry joined the Sumter Guard they were living apart. Henry was killed in the Battle of Secessionville in June, 1862.
Susan Dupont Petigru King Bowen
(1824 - 1875) perhaps about 1870
Sue's Southern family was outspoken against Secession. During the War sister Caroline found that Charlestonians thought so little of her opinions she was obliged to obtain a pass to move to New York and then Italy. Sue remained in Charleston and Columbia, suspected of spying, treason and hiding Yankee fugitives and growing more rebellious and combative as the years passed.
The former classmates met at Columbia's 1862 Gunboat Fair. In her diary Mary noted Sue's escort, an infatuated soldier 12 years her junior, and called her "fast." "People talk of her flirtations and keep out of her way because she is so quarrelsome." Two years later Mary had the nerve to accuse Sue to her face of dressing provocatively in search of a new husband. "And yet I am as afraid of her as death."
In January, 1865 Sue was talking of her engagement to Confederate General Pierre Toutant Beauregard. Mary was indignant. "She showed his letters and his photograph. Incredulous we were and openly pronounced the photograph proof worth nothing. Anybody can get that for a small pile of Confederate money. It is in every shop window."
Paper photos like this carte-de-visite of
P.T. Beauregard were collectibles, apparently advertised in
"every shop window" in Columbia right up to the end of the War.
Sue was perhaps delusional as well as bad-tempered. Well, I could go on as it's so much fun to read Mary Chesnut's diary. She is a 21st-century woman in a 19th century-milieu.
Block # 6 Madame's Star
By Becky Brown
Read previews of recent editions of both Mary's and Sue's novels.
Sue enjoyed financial success with several of her books in the 1850s. See Busy Moments of an Idle Woman (1853) and Lily: A Novel (1855). Gerald Gray's Wife and Lily: A Novel have recently been republished. Here's a preview:
Mary Chesnut's novel Two Years or the Way We Lived Then was not published till recently.
The introductions are the best part.
