With something of a kindred faith in the sincerity of Mons. Zola’s work, I am yet not at all times ready to admit its truth, which is only equivalent to saying that our points of view differ, that truth rests upon a shifting basis and is apt to be kaleidoscopic.

Chopin stressed the importance of a writer reaching for the truth. She sought in her stories to depict the “shifting basis” of the truth of life in Louisiana as she knew it during the fourteen years she lived there. And when she assembled her stories into collections she worked to capture in each book the feel of a kaleidoscope, the sense that each story was distinct in itself but composed of the same little pieces of life that made up all the other stories.

 

As they are arranged in the two books, the stories in Bayou Folk or A Night in Acadie almost seem to comprise a novel. They share a geographic space, with most set in New Orleans or in Natchitoches Parish, although characters have ties to many parishes (counties, as they would be called in other states): Caddo, Sabine, Avoyelles, Assumption, Lafourche, and others. Moreover, the characters who live in this imaginative world know one another, marry one another, are related to one another, or work together. The Duplan family, mentioned in the first story in Bayou Folk, reappears in a later story and then again in A Night in Acadie. Members of the Santien family—Placide, Hector, and Grégoire—and the Laballière family—Alphonse, Alcée, Didier, and their mother—figure in several Bayou Folk stories. A journalist named Gouvernail plays a major part in two Night in Acadie stories (and later appears in The Awakening). Many other characters are common to both books.

Motifs and images also recur: houses and outsiders and boundaries are present in both collections, as are poverty, violence, race, and sex. A ’Cadian ball is a field for choosing marriage partners in both books. The cross-referencing, the links in content and form, unify the stories in Bayou Folk and the ones in A Night in Acadie, and they unify the two books as well. The stories that open each collection are especially integrated, full of interconnections—with other stories in the same book and stories in the other book.

Chopin’s planned third book of stories, A Vocation and a Voice, was not published until 1991. With only two or three stories set in Louisiana, it is not a continuation of the earlier collections. Those Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie themes and motifs that appear are distorted and darker, and the sense of balance found in A Night in Acadie is missing. A Vocation and a Voice is a fascinating book, but the stories Chopin planned for it are of a different order from those of her earlier two collections.

 

Many of the best stories in Bayou Folk are about young people seeking good marriage partners and better lives for themselves. The opening story stresses a young couple’s determination to balance a culturally rich life with a personally rewarding one. The woman, eighteen-year-old Euphrasie Manton, cannot tell what, exactly, it is she yearns for, any more than The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier can—most of Chopin’s characters act more from their instincts, their cultural dispositions, than from conscious thought—but Wallace Offdean, the businessman Euphrasie will marry, certainly can: “What he wanted . . . was to get his feet well planted on solid ground, and to keep his head cool and clear. . . . Above all, he would keep clear of the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul.”

Offdean wants balance—between work and pleasure, the intellectual and the physical, the body and the spirit. He wants “a life that, imposing bodily activity, admits the intellectual repose in which thought unfolds.” Chopin writes of such a yearning for balance again and again in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie.

The first three stories in Bayou Folk explore marriage possibilities, and all revolve around the Santien brothers—Placide Santien, Euphrasie’s rejected fiancé in the first story; Hector Santien, a New Orleans gambler, in the second; and Grégoire Santien, also rejected by a woman, in the third. Each of the Santiens is involved with a woman seeking a better life for herself, and the women are all successful. Euphrasie of “A No-Account Creole” will marry her New Orleans businessman, purchase the old Santien plantation, and reach for the quality of life she knew as she grew up with the wealthy Duplans. Suzanne St. Denys Godolph of “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” will agree to be courted by the planter Alphonse Laballière. And ’Tite Reine, the once imperious “little queen” of “In Sabine,” will escape from her drunken, abusive husband to seek the comfort of her family, if nothing else.

But marriage in Bayou Folk may lead to a loss of balance and a diminished social life. The Acadian Doudouce in “A Visit to Avoyelles,” like Grégoire Santien, encounters a woman whose difficult life affects him deeply. Doudouce’s journey to another parish—Chopin is fond of the journey motif—has brought him to a woman who has married an attractive outsider and is now living in poverty. But Mentine has no interest in being rescued. She adores her husband, poor as her life is, and Doudouce, who loved her before she left her community, loves her still.

Among the strongest stories in the collection is “At the ’Cadian Ball,” for which Chopin would write a magnificent sequel called “The Storm,” not published in her lifetime. The Bayou Folk story does not match the sweeping power, the intensity of focus, or the stunning language of “The Storm,” one of America’s great short stories, but it succeeds as a penetrating look at how two marriages came into being.