Meet three lovely Frenchwomen who cross the Atlantic to America...to land in pre-Louisiana Purchase (1803) French Louisiana. What do they find in the New World?
Although Massenet, in his 1884
Manon, leaves his eponymous
heroine to perish at Le Havre, on the French shore, Puccini, in his
Manon Lescaut that premiered nine years later, permitted her deportation following her arrest for theft and prostitution. Alas, although the text of the libretto does not make quite clear
how she escaped from her fellow transportees, Act IV finds her and Des Grieux perishing of the heat in a dismally barren plain on the borders of New Orleans. One would suspect that, accustomed to town and city life, they truly have no idea how to be pioneers; also, the sea voyage itself might have taken its toll on Manon, who is racked with fever. De Grieux surveys the area and exclaims,
"E nulla! nulla! Arida landa...non un filo d'acqua" - "There is nothing! nothing! Arid land...not a drop of water!" Manon encourages him to scout for some kind of shelter; as soon as he goes off, she sings despairingly,
"Terra di pacemi s'embrava questa" - "I sought this land as a peaceful haven." It never occurred to her that she had run away into a vast wasteland; she probably expected a bucolic countryside. Des Grieux returns, without hope:
"Nulla rinvenni!" - "I found nothing!" Clinging to him, Manon expires. Whether he ever figures out how to survive on nuts and berries is left to our imagination.
Back in 1856, Auber's version of this story gave us a view of a more physically attractive and developed Louisiana, at least for one scene's worth. Act III opens three months after her arrest, on a plantation near New Orleans. The people we first encounter are M. Gervais' adoring black slaves, who sing in their patois, "Quand esclavo avoir bon maître, oui, bon maître il aime à servir!" - "When slave get good master, good master he likes to serve." Gervais himself appears, to jubilantly greet his fiancée Marguerite, just arrived from France. They are to be married that morning. "Que c'est un beau pays que la Lousiana!" she sings - "What a beautiful land Louisiana is!" And Gervais adds, "Et quel beau fleuve que le Mississippi! - C'est quasiment la mer!" - "And what a beautiful river the Mississippi is! - It's almost like the sea!" However, not all is blissful.
