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Reine Helluy de Montluzin
June 12, 1833 - January 19, 1910
Reine Helluy de Montluzin was bom in the town of Luneville in the French province of Lorraine, the granddaughter of a Polish refugee who had fled Poland for political reasons. When she was only fourteen, she married the twenty-year-old Louis Adrien de Montluzin, whom she always called ?Ludovic,? the Polish equivalent of his name. Her husband was an idealistic young journalist, and when his political opposition to Emperor Napoleon III made him despair of their future in France, they emigrated to America. Ludovic and their eldest child, Ferdinand, made the journey first, to establish a home, and Reine followed about a year later, in 1856, traveling by sailing ship in a three-month voyage, accompanied by their second son, Alfred, their infant daughter Jeanne, and a female servant. Reine?s passport describes her as barely five feet tall, with an oval face, chestnut hair, and gray eyes.
In America, Ludovic and Reine had three other children?Roger, Rene, and Corinne-and after Ludovic developed heart trouble, they retired to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to live for the rest of their lives.
Reine was a typically French matriarch, firmly believing that her household was her domain to rule. She never consented to learn English, which she considered a ?barbaric? language. She put on her bathing dress every day, summer and winter, and went for a swim in the waters of the bay in front of her home at 208 North Beach Boulevard. When a deadly epidemic of yellow fever raged on the Coast, she took her two youngest children to France for two years to visit her family in Paris, and her husband?s letters to her during that time overflowed with his tenderness and love.
On the day after Christmas, 1909, Ludovic, her beloved husband of sixty-two years, died in their home. Not desiring to continue to live, Reine took to her bed; and on January 19, 1910, she died, simply because she willed it. In the words of the Latin inscription engraved inside her husband?s wedding ring, Virtus iunxit, mors non separabit ? ?Virtue united us; death will not separate us.?
They were both buried in the family tomb in Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay St Louis.
[Account prepared by Emily Hosmer de Montluzin and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, Feb. 2007]