Two hundred years after Napoleon sold his once vast colony in America to Jefferson, the descendants speak a language (and serve food) unknown in Paris. G.Y. Dryansky listens to history talking in the Louisiana bayou

Here and there on the Louisiana Scenic Highway, in a haze beyond the endless sugarcane fields, something resembling a wraith of the Industrial Age is ensnarled in the intricate piping of oil refineries and takes over the landscape. Soon enough, though, rivulets begin meandering off through thickets of greenery—cypress, reeds, and live oaks hung with gray Spanish moss. All is so ardently present that for a moment, as you contemplate the awesome allure of Bayou Country, Joseph Conrad's Congo comes to mind. It's as if those waters mean to lure you to an antediluvian morass of nature.

The idea of disappearing into these marshy hinterlands to check out what time and place have wrought is what has brought me from France. Precisely two centuries have passed since Napoleon Bonaparte sold the Louisiana Territory to Thomas Jefferson, leaving behind a big community of French. The territory—sold for a mere fifteen million dollars with the arrière-pensée that the British might steal it anyway—ran along the west bank of the Mississippi all the way north to Canada and as far west as Montana.

But it's here, down in the delta swamplands of the Big River and its tributaries, that the French people who came to be called Cajuns and Creoles gathered and would prevail, trapping for fur and fighting deadly snakes and alligators and making friends with the Indians, while others among them built vast plantations on the sweat and blood of black slaves—raising big families and creating a music and a language that have survived whole in the great melting pot of America.

I came from Paris looking for things French. It seemed a timely, provocative thing to do. Americans and the constituents of Jacques Chirac were hotly insulting each other's wisdom and courage over Iraq.

A lot of French people were, I found, already on the same route. The 2003 bicentennial seemed to have jogged memories that France fitted into the history of the United States in consequential ways. These people, who'd been taught for generations that their past lay with "our ancestors the Gauls," had awoken to the fact that some of their roots went sideways.

In a place deep in their being, the French have an awed attraction to America. Perhaps as early as their very strict toilet training, they react with both fascination and fear to the freedom that allows so many things to exist and happen in America's vastness. I always think of the song that Paul Anka revved up into a hit in the United States in the late sixties. The original French title translates "As Always." Anka and Sinatra immortalized it, belting out "I did it my way." French people I know keep coming back from trips to the United States dazzled by America as a huge open venue for doing things. What puzzles, rankles, and sometimes scares them is that we do those things our way.

Napoleon was, to say the least, an exceptionally proactive Frenchman. Selling Louisiana seems to have given him regretful afterthoughts. Near the end of his imprisonment on St. Helena, he felt the lure of that once-French portion of the busy New World. He dreamed of touring the entire territory before settling down with his brother Jérôme on Jérôme's homestead near Trenton, New Jersey. The British wouldn't consent to let him go, and may have chosen to poison him instead.