In college and in his postgraduate work he devoted himself to his studies with a single-mindedness that excluded athletics, though he seems to have taken up fencing while abroad, a sport of many European surgeons. One may therefore take it for granted that while at Tulane he neither shared pilgrimages to the wide-open gaming establishments just across the parish line from New Orleans in adjoining areas, nor patronized the peep-hole Joe-sent-me establishments where needled beer, home-brew, raisin wine, and cut whisky were retailed in the sanctified era of national prohibition.
At one time a story was current that he had met Yvonne Pavy while both were students in Paris. This was not the case. She did not leave for France until a year after he had returned to the United States. An honor graduate of Tulane University’s Newcomb College for Women, she had been immensely popular in the social and sorority life of her student years. In 1931 she was selected as one of a group of girls who were sent to Paris to represent Acadian Louisiana. At the same time she was awarded on a competitive basis a French-government scholarship to the Sorbonne, and extended her Parisian sojourn to pursue language studies there.
Returning to Opelousas, she was appointed to a teaching position in the grade school at St. Martinville, where Emmeline Labiche, who according to Louisiana tradition was the prototype of Longfellow’s Evangeline, had died nearly two centuries before. The following year she went to Baton Rouge to study for her master’s degree at the state university, where she taught a French class at the same time.
Short-lived as it then was, her professional teaching career did follow a Pavy family tradition. Her sister Marie taught in one of the Opelousas grade schools, and one of her father’s brothers, Paul Pavy, was principal of the high school there until Huey Long, as inflexible in his attitude toward the Pavy family as Judge Pavy was in his attitude toward him, dismissed them out of hand by invoking one of the “dictatorship statutes”--the one requiring the certification of every public-school employee by a Long-controlled state board.
When Carl Weiss, Jr., returned to Baton Rouge, he joined his father in the practice of medicine. However, he was so determined not to capitalize on the wide esteem and affection in which the elder Dr. Carl Weiss was held that for a time he called himself “Dr. C. Austin Weiss.” It was not long, however, before he built up a substantial practice on his own account.