In the waning years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th it attracted believers and skeptics alike, drawn by supernatural claims about an exquisite golden icon which the faithful called “The Reluctant Virgin.” The revered icon surely has a much longer history, but the chapters known to us began in March of 1794 during the revolutionary “Reign of Terror” in France.
*****
Lashing his tiring horse a bare league ahead of blood-mad revolutionaries crying for his head, young Count Henri de la Haye reached the Roncevaux Pass in the High Pyrenees Mountains. Riding fresh mounts, his pursuers were soon within sight and closing fast on their intended victim. But luckier in these same dark defiles than legendary Count Roland a thousand years earlier in the reign of Charlemagne, Henri barely outraced them to the border and emerged at last into the relative safety of Spain.
Other members of his family were not so fortunate. Like thousands of other French aristocrats, the de la Haye line, proud descendants of the Valois princes, fell like harvest wheat under the strokes of the busy guillotine. Among the victims were his young wife and infant son snatched away and executed in the middle of the night. He alone was left, and that by a happenstance that many would call miraculous. But that story we must leave for another telling.
The grieving aristocrat made his way to San Sebastián where he boarded a vessel carrying dozens of noble French families into exile in Louisiana. Of landed properties, now he had none; of possessions, few; but among these was a wondrously wrought icon of the Virgin Mary that in happier times reflected both the devout piety of the de la Haye family and the artistic splendor of Renaissance Italy. Many believed the beautiful figurine was the work of the great Cellini himself. Yet the de la Hayes claimed the icon came not from Italy but was brought from the Holy Land by one of their Crusader ancestors centuries earlier.
In time Count de la Haye joined the colony of exiles in St. Martinville on the Bayou Teche, where as far as resources permitted they reconstituted the genteel life they had known in the glorious, decadent France of King Louis XVI. In little St. Martinville they organized operas, parties, plays, and balls, and fancied themselves again in glittering Versailles half a world away.
But unlike many of his countrymen, Count Henri de la Haye soon realized that life in La Louisiane could not be simply a make-believe continuation of old France. Here, he discovered, titles and family meant very little. The Acadians (or Cajuns, as the Americans would call them in a later era), among whom they had settled, were rudely democratic and egalitarian, and their French lacked the polished elegance of their Parisian speech. Even worse in the eyes of the aristocrats, they had the disturbing tendency to judge people on their personal qualities, not on ancestral pedigree.
It was more than some of his compatriots could bear, and they thought of nothing else but returning to France, which most of them did in time. But Count Henri embraced the new country and the challenge of a new life. To the strong disapproval of his aristocratic countrymen, he dropped his title and shortened his surname, becoming simply Henri Lahaye. Not only that, but two years later he married an Acadian girl and began life with her on his Vermilion plantation, which he purchased with a combination of generous credit and the modest monetary assets slipped out of France. Within three years his wife blessed him with a son. Not only was he again a father but also a working planter who labored with his own hands, a thing unthinkable for a highborn aristocrat in his native France.
But though a changed man in this new land, he did not change everything. His ancestral piety and devotion to his religious heritage continued and perhaps even intensified, at least in gratitude. For Henri prospered in his new country and condition, and his wife bore him many more children. By 1820 he was one of the richest men in Louisiana. His religious devotion took on a visible aspect. He commissioned the building of an impressive chapel for family worship but made it available also to his workers and slaves, whose numbers, despite his wife’s objections to slavery, grew apace with his wealth and prosperity. Not only pious but generous, he sponsored frequent masses and soon added residential quarters for itinerant priests.
The golden icon of the Holy Mother became an object of especial veneration in the chapel, and the belief spread that miracles of healing often occurred in her presence.
Like a biblical patriarch, Henri died in 1850 “old and full of years.” His eldest son Augustin took over the vast Lahaye estates. Though less overtly pious than his father, Augustin surpassed him in astuteness of mind and generosity of spirit. Under his guiding hand, the Lahaye estates prospered even more.
So it was that the Lahayes of the New World regained the equivalent of their de la Haye ancestors in the Old. But within a few years it was all destined to change, including the fate of the golden icon.
When the Civil War broke out, the Lahayes cast their lot with the Confederacy. Augustin himself raised and commanded a company of dragoons under General Beauregard. They were decimated at Atlanta, and Augustin himself was killed. His brother René replaced him as head of the Lahaye properties. But only for a few months. After the surrender of the Confederate armies, brigands and former slaves plundered the Lahaye holdings and burned its buildings, including the chapel. Thus, the terror of revolutionary France was revisited on a new Lahaye generation.
Seeing that all hope was lost, René buried the golden icon and refused to reveal its location even under torture and eventual strangulation at the hands of the outlaws. The few Lahaye survivors fled for their lives, their properties passed into other hands, and the stories of the icon and its miracles faded into legend.
A generation passed.
*****
In August of 1888 Douglas Cotton, owner of the old Lahaye planation, hired Bob Terrell to enclose the site of the chapel with barbed wire. Cotton was religiously indifferent, and it annoyed him to see “superstitious Catholics,” as he called them, trampling his property, praying for some residual blessing from an icon stolen or destroyed many years earlier.
Bob hated work of any kind, and none more so than digging post holes in rock-hard gumbo soil in the hot, dry summer. But he needed all the money he could lay hands on. Within a month at most Bob planned to strike out for Texas.
Not that intended to go alone. His mistress, Annie Scroggins by name, would accompany him. He and Annie had gone over their plans several times and self-righteously compiled a list of reasons to justify their illicit love affair. She complained of her preacher husband’s suffocating moral rules and restrictions that sucked every last jot of joy out of her. Women were by nature perverse, Amos Scroggins preached and cited the stories of Eve and Jezebel to prove his case. He even reproached himself for desiring her and occasionally giving in to his own carnal urges.
*****
“Honey, Amos tells me all the time I’m a whore, says that all women are, and he makes me feel like one,” she complained to Bob. “Then he expects me to act like a saint in front of the church people.”
As for Bob, he was tired of farming, tired of his stringy-haired wife who complained day and night and pretended sickness whenever the possibility of intimacy came up. Not that he really wanted intimacy with her, he hastened to assure Annie.
“Besides all that, she can’t cook a lick,” Bob groused, “and you never heard a woman moan and groan every time I take a notion to have a little drink.”
“She just don’t know how to appreciate a good man,” Annie assured him with a giggle and a kiss, “but, lordy, I do every time we’re together.”
In short, to hear them tell it, neither was to blame for the failure of their respective marriages. They convinced each other that they deserved better and with a clear conscience could run away for a happy life together.
Bob grinned as he considered his prospects, including a deal he had dreamed up to cheat miserly Douglas Cotton out of some extra money for their Texas escape. The day before he had offered to sell his wagon and team to Cotton for the ridiculously low price of fifty dollars. The shrewd Cotton considered the deal, but first had to know why Bob wanted to sell.
“Aw, Mr. Cotton, I reckon I’m gonna get out of farming and go into the logging business, and it’ll be a help to me if you can take them off my hands.”
“Well, Bob, I tell you what. I’ll buy them from you, but I won’t give you a nickel over forty dollars. That’s my only offer. You can take it or leave it.”
“Mr. Cotton, you know as well as I do that my wagon and team is worth way more than forty dollars. But I’m in a tight and under the circumstances I reckon I’ll take the money. Only thing I ask is that you pay me now so’s I can clear up some debts. And one more thing: if you could see your way clear to let me haul some stuff over to my new place. It won’t take me but two or three days to move the stuff and get the wagon and team back to you. And I’ll finish the postholes tomorrow before I leave.”
Cotton grumbled about releasing the money before he had property in hand, but the deal was too profitable to turn down. Reluctantly he decided to trust him. Terrell, of course, had no intention of keeping the bargain.
The next day Bob was chuckling to himself over the deal when the posthole diggers struck an object. At first, he thought it was a cluster of clam shells or a chunk of rock salt that sometimes turned up in the area, but as he dug around it with his hands, metal began to gleam. When he reached to pick it up, he realized that it was too heavy for rock salt or clam shells. Then it hit him: the gold icon! He had heard stories about it but always supposed like everybody else that no one would ever find it again.
His first impulse was to take the icon and run home with it. But then on second thought, somebody might spot it. No, better to stay calm, he told himself. The best thing was to cover it with dirt and leave it where it had been all these years. He and Annie would pick it up on the way to Texas.
The icon changed their plans. Instead of waiting any longer, they would get started that very night, if Annie could slip out of her house.
It so happened that Amos had to go on a pastoral visit that night, which made it easy for Annie to get away with most of her clothes and some of her things. They loaded her things in the wagon and giddy with excitement, headed for the icon. With that much gold they could start life in style out in Texas. And Cotton’s forty dollars would help.
Everything went as planned. Bob hopped out of the wagon and retrieved the icon, wrapping it in a sack and hiding it under their belongings. Then he jumped in the wagon, popped the mules with the leather reins, and they were off.
They rode for three days, nervously looking over their shoulder and camping only when both they and the team had to rest and take food. Now though they were beginning to breathe a bit easier. In fact, by the third day Bob thought they had already crossed the Texas border. But he did not know the region and had mistaken a bayou for the upper Sabine River. They were still in Louisiana. In any case, Annie, who suffered from exhaustion and diarrhea all day, begged him to stop for the night.

When they asked about the odd markings, the Spanish explained to the native people that they were words. This caused even greater confusion. How could they be words, the Native Americans reasoned, if they made no sound, yet could be heard by the Spaniards over great distances? The only words they knew were the ones they heard spoken, nothing they could see. Since these soundless words seemed illogical to their cultural way of thinking, in the beginning of their dealings with the Spanish, they looked on writing as a form of magic and regarded it with superstitious awe. To them it seemed that the marks on the parchments could hear and see in their silent, mysterious way and then tell others what they knew. At first, they could conceive of no way to get around these magical missives that seemed to know everything yet uttered not a word that a normal person could hear. But awed or not, the native people started to seek ways to outwit the conquerors’ magic.
Finally, two runners thought they had hit on a workable tactic. It began when the Catholic Prior they served ordered them to deliver a letter and two strapped-on baskets of delicious fruit—apples, oranges, mangos, bananas, berries, and nuts—from their fertile Peruvian valley farms to the commandant of a Spanish fort in the Andes. The journey was long and the young runners, increasingly tempted by the succulent fruit they were carrying, lusted for a taste.
“If we eat the fruit, the letter will tell the commandant and we will be whipped,” whispered one runner so the letter could not hear him.
For a long time, they jogged on in their tireless trot, ascending ever higher along the twisting mountain trail. Finally, one of them stopped, excited by an idea that might allow them to outsmart the all-knowing letter.
“If we hide the letter behind a tree or a rock while we eat without saying anything,” he explained “it won’t see or hear what we’re doing and can’t say anything to the Spaniards, can it?”
“Who knows, brother? I want a taste of the fruit as much as you do, but I fear their magic even more.”
But eventually hunger wore down his reservations and the two hid the letter and silently but happily ate some of the fruit. But when they reached the fort, the commandant read the message, checked the baskets, and asked about the missing fruit. Naturally the frightened men at first denied any knowledge of it but finally had to confess they had eaten it. The commandant ordered his lieutenant to whip them. But before their punishment, one runner asked the commandant how he knew about the fruit.
“Señor Comandante, we hid the letter, so it couldn’t see or hear us, so how could it know what we were doing?”
The amused commandant replied with a straight face, “Oh, but the letter knows anyway. Our letters always see and hear everything, so don’t lie again. This time you get off with only a whipping. If you do it again, your punishment could be much more severe. And beware; the letters will be watching you.”
The sore and chastened runners jogged back to the valley and spread the word to their kinsmen. The warning worked, but not for long. In time the Native Americans caught on and began to master the mystery of the written word themselves.
As I said, the mysterious soon becomes mundane.