A Little Girl in Old St. Louis — Key Ideas to Explore

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In Category - Fantasy Juvenile Worlds

Authors: Douglas, Amanda M., 1831-1916 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2012 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Bildungsromans; First loves -- Juvenile fiction; Saint Louis (Mo.) -- History -- Juvenile fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 94,911

Reading time 413 min

Text sections 8

For A Little Girl in Old St. Louis — Key Ideas to Explore, the stored edition analysis reports 94,911 words, 6 hr 53 min estimated reading time, and 8 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 12.8 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Bildungsromans,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #41526

This editorial note examines how the opening, middle, and later excerpts of Amanda M. Douglas's 1903 novel guide a first reading, focusing on the protagonist Renée's voice, the layered setting of French colonial St. Louis, and her evolving inner life as shaped by prayer and longing.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg41526

Read the Text

ng. Once his place had been searched, he standing by, looking on and jibing the men so engaged, turning any apparent mystery inside out for them. Then he would be gone days at a time, but his house was securely fastened. Occasionally he had taken longer journeys, and once he had brought back from New Orleans a beautiful young wife, who died when her baby girl was born. The nurse had taken it to her home in Kaskaskia. Then it had been sent to the Sisters’ School at New Orleans. She had been home all one winter and had her share in the merry making. In the spring her father took her to Canada, to the great disappointment of hosts of admirers. At Quebec she was married and went to France. That was ten years ago. He had grown queer and morose since, and turned miserly.

There was a peremptory thump at the door, and Antoine started, glancing wildly about an instant, then went through and unfastened the stout hook. The chain he did not remove: it was about a foot from the floor and well calculated to trip up any unwary intruder and send him sprawling face downward.

The night had grown dark, and a mist-like rain had set in. The trees were beating about in the rising wind.

“Open wide to us, Antoine Freneau! See what I have brought you, if you can make light enough.”

“Gaspard Denys—is it you? Why, I thought you were in the wilds of Canada. And——”

He kicked aside the chain and peered over at the small figure beside Gaspard.

Gaspard had just stood the child down, and his arms tingled with the strain when the muscles were set loose.

“You have brought her!”

There was a sound in the voice far from welcome, almost anger.

“Yes; your messenger from New Orleans told the truth. The nurse or companion, whatever you may call her, had instructions, if no one claimed her, to place her in a convent.”

“And you—you interfered?” Freneau struck his clinched fist hard on a pile of skins.

“What I am to do with a child is more than I can tell,” Freneau said doggedly, almost threateningly.

“Well, you can give us something to eat. Your supper has a grand fragrance to a hungry man. Then we can discuss the other points. A bear taken away from his meal is always cross—eh, Antoine?”

Freneau turned swarthy; he was dark, and the red tinge added made him look dangerous.

“I don’t understand——”

“Well, neither do I. You married your daughter to a French title when you knew she would have been happier here with a young fellow who loved her; and—yes, I am sure she loved me. Somewhere back, when my forebears called themselves St. Denys, there might have been a title in the family. In this New World we base our titles on our courage, ambitions, successes. Then her little daughter was born, and she pined away in the old Château de Longueville and presently died, while her husband was paying court and compliments to the ladies at the palace of Louis XVII. There are deep mutterings over in France. And De Longueville, with his half dozen titles, marries one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting. The child goes on in the old château. Two boys are born to the French inheritance, and little mademoiselle is not worth a rush. She will be sent to her grandfather somewhere in the province of Louisiana. But the nurse goes to Canada to marry her lover, expatriated for some cause. You see, I know it all. If mademoiselle had stayed in France she would have been put in a convent.”

“The best thing! the best thing!” interrupted the old man irascibly.

“Word was sent to enter her in a convent at Quebec. Well, I have brought her here. Give us some supper.”

He had been taking off the child’s cap and coat after they entered the living room. A great flaming torch stood up in one corner of the chimney, and shed a peculiar golden-red light around the room, leaving some places in deep shadow. The old man turned his meat, took up his cake of bread, and put them on the table. Then he went for plates and knives.

“This is your grandfather, Renée,” Denys said, turning the child to face him.

Continue Reading →

The novel begins not with its young heroine but with Antoine Freneau, a trader in a log hut hidden by trees, listening at his door. The year is roughly 1780, twenty years before the century ends, and St. Louis is a small stockaded town with a flourishing trade in lead and furs. The prose moves deliberately through Freneau's evening routine—closing iron-banded doors, lowering chains—before the narrative shifts to Renée de Longueville, a girl whose loneliness is established through her prayer in the old church. The excerpts show a story that balances historical texture with a child's emotional world, using precise domestic details (a cat named Chatte, wild grape jam) to ground the setting.

A Town in Transition

The opening chapter establishes St. Louis as a place of layered histories: French traders, Indian alliances, and the looming presence of the Mississippi. Douglas names Pierre Laclede as the city's founder and mentions lead mines that “supplied a large tract of the Mississippi River east and west.” The stockade gates close at night, but farms and houses exist outside—a sign of relative safety. Freneau’s hut, part storehouse and part home, is cluttered with goods traded with Indians and boatmen. This is not a romanticized frontier; it is a working settlement where survival depends on practical knowledge. The author’s note thanks a public librarian and a historian for old maps, indicating a deliberate effort to ground the fiction in documented geography.

Renée’s Voice and Her Solitude

Renée emerges through her actions and interior responses rather than direct description. She avoids the Renauds’ house, feels her heart “like lead in her bosom,” and prays in the church for Uncle Gaspard’s return. Her prayer is direct: “O holy God, … send back Uncle Gaspard, for my life is so lonely without him.” The narrative stays close to her perspective, noting that she does not understand religion but finds comfort in it. Small gestures—patting Chatte, kissing Mère Lunde—reveal her affection and her grief. The prose uses simple, concrete language: “She crept in softly,” “the little old place was very, very plain.” This restraint keeps the focus on Renée’s emotional state rather than authorial commentary.

Prayer as a Recurring Motif

Prayer becomes a structural element across the excerpts. In Chapter XII, the narrator notes that “petitions grew” as Renée walks to the church regularly. A woman who lost her baby tells Renée, “I think thou wilt be comforted,” contrasting Renée’s hope of return with the woman’s permanent loss. The church is described as having a candle burning, a basin of holy water, and few decorations—details that make the setting feel both humble and sacred. Douglas uses prayer not as a religious lesson but as a way to chart Renée’s inner life: her loneliness, her fear of her grandfather’s arrival, and her gradual acceptance of uncertainty. The motif is woven into the rhythm of the seasons—August ripening pears, preparations for winter—so that spiritual longing coexists with daily labor.

The Weight of Waiting

The later excerpt shows Renée learning to live with absence. She hears news of a small fleet coming down the river, but it is only Latour’s boats, not Uncle Gaspard. The narrative does not resolve her waiting; instead, it places her among others who also wait—women whose husbands and brothers have not returned. The prose shifts between her private prayers and communal activities: dances at night, preparations for winter. Douglas avoids melodrama, letting the quiet accumulation of days convey the passage of time. The final lines of the excerpt show Renée happier without understanding why, a subtle shift that suggests growth through endurance. Readers are left with a sense of a story that values patience and small comforts over dramatic resolution.

The excerpts offer a first-time reader a clear entry point: pay attention to the physical details of old St. Louis—the stockade, the log huts, the river traffic—and to Renée’s quiet, persistent voice. Her prayers and her relationships with Mère Lunde, Wawataysee, and Chatte reveal more than any summary of plot could. The novel rewards those who read slowly, noticing how Douglas builds a world through small, precise observations.

Reading about Renée’s quiet prayers in old St. Louis, I remembered kneeling by my own window as a girl, hoping for something I couldn’t name. The stillness of her longing feels like that. Later, I found the same hush in A Tale of the Tow-Path — Reading Notes, where a boy’s loneliness by the canal matched mine perfectly. Books hold those secret moments.