Note 113 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

French (part iii. p. 12, note) says: “The two brothers met in deep mourning, and after mutual embraces the brave D’Iberville sought the tomb of his brother Sauvolle, where he knelt for hours in silent grief.” All this is purely imaginary; and in French’s second series (vol. ii. p. 111, note) he concludes that Sauvolle would appear from the text not to have been Iberville’s brother. This doubt whether Sauvolle was a brother of Iberville penetrates even such a work as Nos gloires nationales. The author not finding such a seigniory, says of François Le Moyne, “We do not know if he followed his brother to Louisiana, and is the same to whom the name Sieur de Sauvole was given,”—all this in face of the record in the previous paragraph of his burial in 1687 (Nos gloires, i. 53). To the account of the massacre at Natchez, in his translation of Dumont, French appends a note (vol. v. p. 76), in which he identifies a ship-carpenter, whose life was spared by the Indians, as “Perricault, who, after his escape, wrote a journal of all that passed in Louisiana from 1700 to 1729.” Penicaut, the spelling of whose name puzzled writers and printers, left the colony in 1721. There was no foundation whatever for the note.