Frances Jane Pasteur Obituary (The Times Picayune, 1911)

THE TIMES PICAYUNE
Thursday Nov.7, 1911

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MRS. PASTEUR’S FUNERAL
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Reunited with Distinguished Husband
On Anniversary of Wedding.
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The funeral of Mrs. Frances Jane Pasteur Sunday afternoon was a tribute to a life as beautiful as it was good, and the presence of so many close friends served as a touching testimony of the esteem in which the lady had been held.

There was a coincidence connected with Mrs. Pasteur’s death that made the parting with a loving family, if anything, harder to bear, for Mrs. Pasteur’s soul took its flight on a day which was an anniversary – the dearest and sweetest anniversary that memory, always clinging to the brightest and fondest things of life, kept alive and fresh in the gentle lady’s thoughts. It was the anniversary of her marriage to Christopher Neale Pasteur, the husband of over half a century, who had preceded her to the grave but three years, and the day which was to have been the occasion for a revival of the old sweet memories was the day which saw the reunion in death of the two souls which had been one in life.

Mrs. Pasteur as Miss Frances Jane Ellis, the lovely daughter of an old and prominent Virginia family, wedded the son of a long line of distinguished Southern ancestors on 4 November 1852, and fifty-nine years from the date of the wedding morn the charming bride of the state antebellum day closed her eyes, in the last long sleep. Mrs. Pasteur was a true daughter of the old South, and clung to the proud traditions of race and family, living by the higher code which governed the custom and manner of the true cavalier period.

She was Southern to the depths of her soul, and to the day of her death was animated by the same zeal for the Lost Cause, which in the days of her young life had prompted her to give all of her energies and liberally of the wealth she possessed in aid of the splendid fight the Confederacy was making against overwhelming odds, a fight which her gallant husband aided as one of Forrest’s intrepid troops.

She could have left her children no higher, nobler heritage than the record of her work among the Confederate soldiers in the hospital at Camp Moore, which was located near the fine old Southern home in which Mrs. Pasteur lived during the dark days of the sixties, and while she belonged to no organization or society, whose mission is to keep alive the memory of that heroic struggle, yet does the service she rendered compare with the devotion shown by the Swiss women, who fought the Austrian invader in the mountains, or the wives and mothers of Saragossa, who manned the guns on the crumbling battlements of their doomed city.

Mrs. Pasteur lived a life which emphasized the soul’s desire for the refined and beautiful. She was always the splendid lady of a dead past, and although she was kind, thoughtful and full of the love which tends to make the world better, she never seemed a part of the present workaday age, but rather the survivor of a period of romance and poetry.

Mrs. Pasteur, although in her eightieth year, still retained much of that marvellous beauty which had made her one of the most sought-after belles before the war. She possessed all her faculties to a marked degree, and read all the newspapers, the current literature and the new books up to the time of her last illness about a fortnight ago. She was the light of the happy little home circle, the faithful, tender mother, possessing the gentle attributes that make the name “mother” so dear to all the race.

Mrs. Pasteur leaves one son, Christopher Neale Pasteur, of Milwaukee, and four daughters, Misses Amelia, Eva, Cecile and Louise, besides two grandchildren. The funeral took place from the Pasteur Home in Marengo Street, near Pitt. and Rev. Dr. Coupland of Trinity Church, conducted the obsequies. The pallbearers were Thomas Sloo, George B. Matthews, William Warren, W. H. Keigley, P. H. Judge and John T. Whitaker, who had been persons friends of Mrs. Pasteur.

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