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ing on Bayou Road with Mme Cabaret, a twenty-five-year-old mulatress, whose relative Jose Cabaret had a Bayou Road plantation. There were three Cabaret children, and four Pedesclaux minor mulattos, according to the 1850 manuscript census. Also in the menage was a seventy-five-year-old female mulatress named Cabaret.
A similar p/afage took place between another prominent lawyer-notary, Narcisse Broutin, and Mathilde Gaillau. Broutin owned the Bayou Road Zeringue-Bellanger habitation in 1802.
He was a descendant of one of the earliest settlers of the city, the king's engineer-in-chief during the French colonial period, who had designed the Ursuline Convent. In his will, deposited in the records of Carlile Pollock, July 12, 1819, Narcisse Broutin declared that he had never been married and had no legitimate descendants. "I hereby acknowledge," he added, "Rosalie and Augustine and Frumence to be my children, born of Mathilde Gaillau, free woman of color, who now resides together with our said children with me in my present dwelling." Broutin bequeathed to the children one-half of all of his property, which was the maximum allowed by law even though he had formally recognized them and had no legitimate heirs.M
Francois Meilleur, a white man, had a p/afage and acknowledged colored children. His mulatto plac£e, Elize Baumier, was from the West Indies, and in 1850 they had free children ranging in age from one to nineteen. At this time Meilleur was fifty and Elize, thirty-nine. One of their sons, Pierre Alphonse, died in 1841 at their home on Rue Treme. Several children of this alliance survived. The 1850 census enumerates them as Francillette, 19; Rosa, 17; Francois, 10; Louisa, 5; and Laperle,
1 ,n Francois was in business with a free man of color named Brusle, who may have been the free mulatto Captain Charles Brusle, who distinguished himself as a member of the Spanish pardo group. Francois' white relative, Michel Meilleur, was a state senator; and Simon Meilleur built a beautiful villa at 1459 Bayou Road.
Louis Doquemeny de Morand was the son of the French colonist Charles de Morand, eighteenth-century developer of the great plantation from which a large portion of Faubourg Treme is derived. He married Suzanne Perault, a white New Orleans Creole, by whom he had a son, Louis Joseph Doquemeny de Morand, born about 1791. Soon afterward Mme Morand died. Morand then took a p/acee, free Negress Marie Franfoise Decoudreaux, member of a family of free persons of color who owned land in Faubourg Treme. Her father, Charles Decoudreaux, held a small habitation on the right side of Bayou Road by 1812. The Decoudreauxs also had a maison de mattre in the 1600 block of Bayou Road across from philanthropist Alexander Milne and next to wealthy French creole Joseph Chalon and his wife of French Canadian descent, Elizabeth Desruisseaux.
In addition to his legitimate heir and three natural colored daughters, Morand had another illegitimate child, a white son; "Louis Azenor Dauqueminy, twenty-two years old, who was living with him but was at the moment of the writing of the will (March 30,1821) traveling together with his legitimate son to Campeche." The mother of .this young man was a white woman, but Morand avowed that "delicacy does not permit him to name her."*3 White men did not have exclusive rights on a p/afage ar-
rangement; however, when engaged in by free men of color with either free or slave women, the terminology applied was more biblical—concubinage. The natural children of such unions were accepted socially, religiously, and legally as legitimate as were the issue of plagages.
Free people of color shared another unifying factor with their white brethren, that of religion. Whether native Louisianians or emigres, free persons of color were Roman Catholic. During the early history of the area, both gens de couleur libres and their white neighbors propagated the faith. Those who owned slaves arranged for and were witnesses to marriages, baptisms, and funerals within the parish church of St. Louis. Of course, in doing this, they were following the laws of the Code Noir and the early decrees of Bienville. Carlos Decoudreaux and Euphrosina Ysnard (Isnard), gens de couleur libres of Bayou Road, were two witnesses at the wedding in August of 1803 in the parish church of the Negro slaves of M. Vidal, white plantation owner along Bayou Road. The church kept careful records of such marriages, baptisms, and funerals.64
In the Spanish period gens de couleur libres and their slaves were recorded in separate books from white persons. On each occasion the parents of the subject, their color and condition of servitude, as well as that of the principals, were recorded. The exactness of these entries, as in the French period, was subject to the intelligence and disposition of the recording curate.
Among married couples with substantial land holdings in Faubourg Treme were Gustave Auguste Dauphin, a Louisiana native mulatto, and his wife, Jeanne Milne, the freed slave of Alexander Milne. In 1850 she was listed in the census as.a thirty-five-year-old mulatress, a native of Louisiana. Their estate at the time was valued at $5,500, his profession that of carpenter and landowner of a small Bayou Road habitation. Her sister Nancy lived with them at 1253-55 N. Villere Street from 1841 to 1858, but Jeanne continued to live there as owner until 1875.
Other Dauphins in Faubourg Treme were Fran^oise, mulata libre, native of Paris, and natural daughter of Francisco Isnard, and Marianne, negra libre. J. B. Dauphin, mulato libre of New Orleans and natural son of Martin Dauphin, married in 1805 Francisca Larase, mulata libre of New Orleans, legitimate daughter of Juan and Maria Juana Larase. Witnesses were Francisco Marco, Francisco Dauphin, Bazile Demaziliere, and Pierre Colvis.45
I''‘~1 The Boisdore family were prominent for over a hundred /	years in the development of Faubourg Treme. Between 1800
I	and 1841 Francois Boisdore, free man of color, owned land on
Esplanade between Treme and Marais. “In 1828 he contracted to build a maison de maitre on Bayou Road at Rue Treme for I	Marcely Cornu. In that same year on May 24 Boisdore married
/	Josephine Sophia Livaudais, attesting in the marriage record
I	that he was the natural son of Dubruisson Boisdore and Ade-
laide Boisdore. Plan book 85, folio 14 in the New Orleans notarial archives shows F. Boisdore buying three lots on Villere corner Bayou Road in 1841. He sold 1260 Esplanade in 1844.
This Francois Boisdore and his neighbor Louis Dollioie thwarted the city's attempt to widen Esplanade through their plantations until a fair and proper price could be agreed upon. The negotiations lasted from 1832 to 1837. A plan ordered for the sale of fifteen lots by another neighbor, Frenchman Jean Mager, was drawn by surveyor Bourgerol in January of 1839.