The epidemic finished what the Civil War started, killing the rest of her family, including her husband Octave. Marguerite performed at the opera house for several years until the summer of 1878 when yellow fever arrived once again in New Orleans. “Sunday Amusements in New Orleans: A Creole Night at the French Opera House” by Alfred Rudolph Waud, (1828-1891) published as engraving in J“Harper’s Weekly” (Wikimedia Commons) Marguerite kept her opera house gig secret from her husband, which was easy enough because they both worked at night ). The French Opera House, designed by famed New Orleans architect James Gallier Jr., had opened in 1859 in the 500 block of Bourbon Street and was the pillar of Creole society for the rest of the century, hosting Carnival balls and performances by the biggest names in entertainment. Unable to stand being in the house with him, she went to work as a chorus girl at the French Opera House on Bourbon Street, lying about her age by saying she was in her early twenties (by then she was 33). Her husband, however, survived the fighting but returned to Marguerite a broken and cruel man. The war devastated Marguerite’s family all five of her brothers as well as four of her sisters’ husbands were killed in the fighting.
At the age of 18, she married Octave Sauvé, but before she had much time to enjoy marital bliss, Octave went off to fight in the Civil War. She was the only one of the couple’s seven daughters to inherit her mother’s French beauty. Hear now the tragic tale of one Marguerite O’Donnell, born in New Orleans in 1842, the youngest of twelve children of recent Irish immigrant Michael O’Donnell and his French wife. – Micaëla’s Song from the Opera “Carmen” A performer (Marguerite?) on the cover of program for 1919-1920 season of the French Opera House, a season that was never finished because the opera house burned to the ground in 1919.
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