Marie-Françoise Antoinette Petit de Coulange was born at the Arkansas Post in 1732. The daughter of the Post's commandant Pierre-Louis Petit de Coulange and his wife Françoise Gallard de Chamilly, she left this frontier settlement with her family as an infant and was raised among the elite of New Orleans. Both of her parents were born in North America, with her father coming to Louisiana from Canada by the mid-1720s and her mother born on Dauphin Island, a barrier island off the coast of present-day Alabama. Known as Françoise, their daughter
married Jean-Baptiste Boucher de Monbrun de Saint-Laurent, a Canadian-born nobleman, at the age of fourteen in 1746. She lost her husband the following year.
The seventeen-year-old widow entered into a second union with Vincent Guillaume Le Sénéchal d'Auberville in 1749. Her new husband was a native of Brest and the colony's commissaire ordonnateur, similar to an intendant. He headed the Sovereign Council of Louisiana in New Orleans. Working together with the governor of the province, Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, d'Auberville served in this capacity twice, once from 1748 to 1749, and again from 1752 to 1757. In the interim he oversaw navy and military expenses, provisioning vessels as a naval commissary in New Orleans. The couple had two daughters, Marie-Louise and Elisabeth-Céleste.
married Jean-Baptiste Boucher de Monbrun de Saint-Laurent, a Canadian-born nobleman, at the age of fourteen in 1746. She lost her husband the following year.
The seventeen-year-old widow entered into a second union with Vincent Guillaume Le Sénéchal d'Auberville in 1749. Her new husband was a native of Brest and the colony's commissaire ordonnateur, similar to an intendant. He headed the Sovereign Council of Louisiana in New Orleans. Working together with the governor of the province, Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, d'Auberville served in this capacity twice, once from 1748 to 1749, and again from 1752 to 1757. In the interim he oversaw navy and military expenses, provisioning vessels as a naval commissary in New Orleans. The couple had two daughters, Marie-Louise and Elisabeth-Céleste.
Widowed a second time in 1757, Françoise crossed the Atlantic for France to settle various accounts sometime before the end of 1759. She risked much in making an ocean crossing; she was traveling with two young daughters, and war between France and Great Britain had raged since 1756. The ensuing Seven Years' War, an international conflict, would all but seal the fate of New France by 1760. Before formal peace was signed in 1763, Louis XV secretly ceded Louisiana to his cousin, Carlos III of Spain, in 1762.
Madame d'Auberville arrived in France with 60,000 livres' worth in bills of exchange from Louisiana. This was in addition to unpaid debts owed her late husband. To no avail, she sought meetings with influential ministers at court, hoping to receive payment. It was under these straitened circumstances that she married Jean-Pierre Paul Gérard de Vilemont at Versailles in 1761. They had likely met in New Orleans, where Vilemont was stationed in the 1750s. With the chevalier in the employ of Spain and returned to Louisiana in 1764, Madame de Vilemont prepared for a return to her native land. Records place her in Paris, Versailles, and Joigny after her marriage and in La Rochelle by 1764. Probably leaving for Louisiana from this Atlantic port, she traveled with her older daughter Marie-Louise, and a son, Charles-Melchior, born in 1762. Her youngest daughter remained in Paris, where she died of smallpox later that year. The family soon welcomed a second son, Jean-Paul Gérard, born in New Orleans in 1767.
Madame d'Auberville arrived in France with 60,000 livres' worth in bills of exchange from Louisiana. This was in addition to unpaid debts owed her late husband. To no avail, she sought meetings with influential ministers at court, hoping to receive payment. It was under these straitened circumstances that she married Jean-Pierre Paul Gérard de Vilemont at Versailles in 1761. They had likely met in New Orleans, where Vilemont was stationed in the 1750s. With the chevalier in the employ of Spain and returned to Louisiana in 1764, Madame de Vilemont prepared for a return to her native land. Records place her in Paris, Versailles, and Joigny after her marriage and in La Rochelle by 1764. Probably leaving for Louisiana from this Atlantic port, she traveled with her older daughter Marie-Louise, and a son, Charles-Melchior, born in 1762. Her youngest daughter remained in Paris, where she died of smallpox later that year. The family soon welcomed a second son, Jean-Paul Gérard, born in New Orleans in 1767.
The chevalier de Vilemont died in New Orleans in 1769 from wounds sustained in a duel. Françoise's surviving daughter Marie-Louise d'Auberville married Francisco de Bouligny, a celebrated Spanish officer, in 1770. Her Vilemont sons chose military vocations. Made a cadet in the Louisiana Battalion at the age of eight, the elder Charles or Carlos served as commandant of the Arkansas Post from 1795 to 1802. Louis or Luis left Louisiana for France and served in various units there and in Spain. Apart from a trip home shortly before the French Revolution, it is not known whether he returned to Louisiana. At the time of her death in November of 1812, the thrice-widowed Françoise Petit de Coulange was buried in the first Saint Louis Cemetery, formed in 1789. Aged eighty, she had experienced successive French, Spanish, French, and American regimes in the city. She lived just long enough to see Louisiana enter the Union as the eighteenth state in April of 1812.
Françoise's portrait was completed when she was in the prime of her life, probably around the age of thirty. Depicted in what is likely an elegant robe à la française or sacque back gown with a floral breast knot and black ribbons and lace at her throat and wrists, Madame de Vilemont holds a fan in her left hand. Her attire is consistent with documented fashions for both France and colonial Louisiana. Completing the portrait's aristocratic setting is the elegant chair just visible behind her. Given the rounded shape of the back or dossier, the chair is likely an armchair of the sort referred to as a fauteuil en cabriolet. Although it is difficult to tell, the crest rail features a carved detail, possibly a flower or a shell. A red textile, perhaps velvet, serves as an upholstery fabric.
Now a part of the Historic New Orleans Collection, the pastels of Françoise, her two d'Auberville daughters, and her third husband are among the oldest surviving portraits known to depict French colonists from Louisiana. Although the artist is unknown, Françoise's portrait provides a unique encounter with an elite inhabitant of French North America that suggests the nature of furniture in New Orleans, an outpost of French colonialism founded in 1718.
Françoise's portrait was completed when she was in the prime of her life, probably around the age of thirty. Depicted in what is likely an elegant robe à la française or sacque back gown with a floral breast knot and black ribbons and lace at her throat and wrists, Madame de Vilemont holds a fan in her left hand. Her attire is consistent with documented fashions for both France and colonial Louisiana. Completing the portrait's aristocratic setting is the elegant chair just visible behind her. Given the rounded shape of the back or dossier, the chair is likely an armchair of the sort referred to as a fauteuil en cabriolet. Although it is difficult to tell, the crest rail features a carved detail, possibly a flower or a shell. A red textile, perhaps velvet, serves as an upholstery fabric.
Now a part of the Historic New Orleans Collection, the pastels of Françoise, her two d'Auberville daughters, and her third husband are among the oldest surviving portraits known to depict French colonists from Louisiana. Although the artist is unknown, Françoise's portrait provides a unique encounter with an elite inhabitant of French North America that suggests the nature of furniture in New Orleans, an outpost of French colonialism founded in 1718.
Françoise's upholstered fauteuil en cabriolet embodied the political and social culture of the French colonial regime of her youth. Unlike in Canada, no French furniture brought or exported to Louisiana is known to survive. However, other sources can help make sense of this chair and its inclusion in the portrait. For example, the chevalier de Pradel is known to have furnished his Louisiana plantation with French chairs and a couch upholstered in crimson velvet. His letters describe this order and the furniture's placement in the salle, the main public room of his Monplaisir plantation, located across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Monplaisir was dubbed a château, and as he worked to complete it in the 1750s Pradel wrote "Although we may be in another world than France, we like our ease, and we see to our comforts as best we can." Although portraiture might idealize or even fabricate a sitter's appearance and material surroundings, the chair in question could very well have existed, perhaps brought to Louisiana by the Vilemont family in the 1760s.