In the world of fiction, nothing is more sacrosanct than storyline. But sometimes nothing can feel more overrated. Sometimes I crave a plotless story, one overflowing with dramatis personae, a dizzying cast of characters with lightly sketched interior lives but exaggerated personalities. And if they have offbeat names, all the better! 

Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day is one of those novels: relatively plotless and brimming with outlandish characters blessed with monikers that, if South Louisianans ruled the world, would top the lists of trending baby names.  

The first and only book published by Thaddeus (Thad) Ignace St. Martin, the novel documents a single day in the life of Marie Toussaint Molinère, a widow returning to the matrimonial altar once again. Just twenty-eight years old, she’s birthed eight wonderfully named kids over a dozen years: Catin, ’Ti-Toussaint, Évariste, the twins Oléus and Azénor, Napoleon, Talma, and baby Christophe. They live in a crowded cabin along the Chênière Chien-Loup, a Gulf-front community with easy access to the shrimp-rich lakes and bays of coastal Louisiana.  

St. Martin modeled that community on the Acadian families who lived and fished the inland waterways and shoreside chênières—derived from the French word for oak, chêne, the local name for skinny, muddy spits of land. Born in Terrebonne Parish, among the scattering of families that scratched out a living along Bayou Dularge, St. Martin attended Tulane Medical College and worked as a parish doctor in downtown Houma. Released in 1936, Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day would become one of the first twentieth-century novels centered on the lives of Cajuns. 

As Marie frets, dawdles, and grows tired of waiting for her wedding vows, she meanders up and down the chênière. Men mend seine nets and women gather to gossip. Children pluck fiddler crabs and periwinkles. Camille du Bois, Chien-Loup’s esteemed grocer, shares news that fresh shrimp are going for eighteen cents a pound—a windfall! Marie, who would be fishing today if it weren’t for her wedding, continues her passage among the chênière’s cast of characters.  

Grand’mère Exnicios, the local midwife for the past forty years, chats rain chances. Polissonne, the resident faith healer and abortionist, offers cooking advice. Marie’s nemesis, Madame Théodule Boudreaux, teasingly inquires whether she will be hiring a priest, a twenty-dollar splurge, or settle for the traditional jumping over the broom. “They had been jumping the broom handle in the presence of three witnesses for so many generations,” St. Martin writes, “that it had become hereditary.” Anxious, the bride-to-be buys a devotional candle dedicated to the Virgin Mother, then another, and eventually four candles in all for matrimonial blessings.  

Marie eyes master shrimp boiler Tropbeau Hébert, who is no longer as handsome as his name would suggest, while Claymile Bértelé, the chênière’s amateur dentist, scrutinizes a “pecky eyetooth” he can’t wait to pull from Marie’s mouth. She steers clear of the husband-swapping sisters Julie, Julia, and Julienne, but can’t avoid her own foster sister, Mélazie, the snobbish town pariah married to ’Ti-’Can Verret, once the coast’s handsomest man and best dancer, who had since gone to seed. (“Lord only knew when last he had danced,” Marie reflects with delight.) Everyone she meets shares the latest scuttlebutt or wishes glad tidings for the bride, while also extolling the shrimp bounty headed their way—Have you heard? Eighteen cents a pound!  

The only voice that doesn’t talk shrimp belongs to Marie’s deceased husband, his voice replaying in her head throughout the book, offering aphoristic advice, just as he did when they were married. “Marie,” he says, “life has a way of heaping crosses with a strange impartiality on the just as well as the unjust.” 

“Remember, Marie, the sea is an exacting mistress and will spurn all that is not of the best.” 

“Marie, when troubled take counsel from the sea.” 

She interprets this last message from the grave as a command to cast her nets—the broom can wait. “Papa says to go to work!” she orders her children, who ready the boat and set off for shrimp-bursting Timbalier Bay. This allows Marie to interplay with even more characters, including Jean, an accordion-squeezing, dirty-ditty–singing man-child who’s in no rush to jump the broom. Then, just as Marie and her brood fill their boat to overflowing with shrimp, the motor sputters out, and they must pole themselves home for the wedding. 

Released by the major publishing house Little, Brown and Company, Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day attracted major attention from the trade press—the New York Times deemed the novel “sprightly and colorful.” It bears a striking resemblance to Eudora Welty’s first full-length novel, Delta Wedding, which arrived a decade later. But unlike Delta Wedding, Wedding Day would not lead to literary fame. Though St. Martin continued to write—his papers, held at Nicholls State University, contain unpublished manuscripts for short stories and novels—he focused on his medical practice.  

Still, St. Martin and his wife, Gladys, stayed active within literary circles, including a long friendship with John Steinbeck, who, in a letter to St. Martin, called Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day “a remarkable book,” and passed a copy along to a Hollywood screenwriter. Steinbeck linked up with the St. Martins several times, including in 1960, en route to New Orleans, accompanied by his poodle. He stopped in Houma, “one of the pleasantest places in the world,” he wrote in his celebrated memoir Travels with Charley. “There lives my old friend Doctor St. Martin, a gentle, learned man, a Cajun who has lifted babies and cured colic among the shell-heap Cajuns for miles around. I guess he knows more about Cajuns than anyone living, but I remembered with longing other gifts of Doctor St. Martin. He makes the best and most subtle martini in the world by a process approximating magic.” 

I’d name my second-born Tropbeau (or Tropbelle) to sip a St. Martin martini, but I’ll settle for Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day, a charmingly silly novel that conjures its own sort of magic.  

Rien Fertel thanks Michelle Benoit for introducing him to the wonderful Chênière Chien-Loup crew.