Letter to the Editor: Classified

Dear Editor,
The national News has reminded me of an incident that took place hereabouts, almost 300 years ago.
Leonard Billeron, the royal notary of Kaskaskia, passed away on January 17, 1738. One month later, his widow, Marie, refused to give the French authorities 243 documents in her possession.
Document confiscation aside, the contrasts between former president Trump and madam Billeron are more glaring than the parallels. Donald was born the heir to a large fortune. Marie was an orphan.
Marie was raised by Ursuline nuns whose convent was connected to a female prison, in Paris. When an inmate gave birth to a girl the good sisters would take in the little one.
Population growth was slow in 18th century Louisianna, so the French Crown began to send fertile orphans to the New World. Marie and 87 others, the “Baleine brides”, were given two sets of clothes and a single mission, to marry within a year. The ship arrived in old Mobile in January and Marie, 18 years of age, married Billeron in late April. Her honeymoon would have ‘been the perilous, 3 months slog up the Mississippi to-the Illinois Country.
Leonard and his Parisian bride had 4 boys and a daughter. In an age when parents arranged marriages, Marie seems to have been a good judge of character, her daughter, Marianne, was betrothed to Francois Valle, who became the wealthiest man in Illinois.
At the risk of drifting from my theme, I have to share a personal experience. Teaching World History at PHS the subject of arranged marriage came up. I called on a sophomore girl, saying, “Chelsea, would you want your dad to choose your husband?”
Without hesitation the young lady said, “No, he’d pick a hippie.”
I had to laugh. I knew the girl’s pop well and I thought she’d made a pretty good call.

Marie shattered a formidable frontier custom when she chose to remain a widow. The longest Kasky’ widowhood in the 1720s was 7 months. Immediate remarriage was not uncommon. Dorothe Mechaperouta lost her husband in July of 1724; she married Louis Turpin in September. Turpin had lost his spouse in February.
The confiscated documents probably functioned as a bargaining chip. Marie returned the paperwork after she was made sole guardian of her children in May of 1740.
Don’t you know a crew of village notables visited the widow in the spring of 1738, reminding her of all the eligible widowers and bachelors thereabouts. I see Marie smiling, offering her guests perlines as she says, “It took a King to make me marry the last time, and none of you fine fellows seem to be carrying a crown.”
I don’t know why Donald Trump kept Classified documents, but the sleeping dog of Justice would have continued to snooze if he had simply given them back when they were respectfully requested.
Trump’s niece has published a book about Donald’s upbringing and the latter half of the book’s title, Too Much, And Never Enough, may best explain the former president’s intent. Conservative voters bestowed a magnificent honor on Donald Trump in the fall of 2016, unfortunately, honor won’t fit In a billfold or lengthen a bottom line.
The English poet, Robert Browning, once wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?”
Marie reached. The Billeron biography is a model of human perseverance, a rags-to-riches story.
Donald shows us how to grasp and grasp, like a monkey in the banana tree. Culminating as a geriatric riot-runner, his life is a riches-to-rage saga.

Jesse Laurentius
Perryville