Kate Chopin House — What the 2008 Fire Took

When Oscar Chopin died of malaria in Cloutierville in December 1882, he left his wife Kate with six children, a failing general store, and $12,000 in debt. She kept the store open for two more years, then sold it and moved back to St. Louis. The writing began there. In *Bayou Folk* (1894) and *A Night in Acadie* (1897) she reproduced the Cane River country — the dialect, the gossip at the store, the way the bayou smelled after rain — with the accuracy of someone who had worked a cash register in it. *The Awakening* followed in 1899.

The house she had lived in was built around 1809 by Alexis Cloutier: bousillage walls, a galleried front, the attic the Chopins used as bedrooms. It opened as the Bayou Folk Museum in 1990 — the only Kate Chopin house museum anywhere, a genuine literary pilgrimage site for a writer whose reputation had climbed, quietly and then decisively, from forgotten to canonical. On October 1, 2008, it burned. The replica on the site today was built from HABS drawings and photographs. The bousillage is gone. The attic Kate Chopin slept in when her husband died and her widowhood began is smoke.