Monsieur Motte/Chapter 3

by Grace Elizabeth King

The Drama of an Evening.

The Drama of an Evening.

T was carnival time of the year in New Orleans. The annual machinery of gayety had been set in motion: heavy, cumbersome, antiquated machinery, with etiquette, ceremony, precautions, and safeguards innumerable for the inflammable hearts transplanted from a tropical court to a tropical clime. It was the meeting-time of the year for the young people, the season for opportunity, the mating-time to come later in the spring, when the flowers twisted themselves naturally into bridal-wreaths, or in the early summer, when the mocking-birds sang all through the moonlight nights. In the wise little self-sufficient creole world there was no opportunity like that offered by a soirée. From time immemorial a soirée had been the official gate of entrance into the great world of society, and this year Madame Fleurissant was to open the season,—Madame Edmond Fleurissant; for the last name had been so stretched that it embraced not individuals, but classes. The soirée was given to her grand-daughter, Stephanie Morel, who was to make her début into the great world out of the little world of school. Stephanie had not graduated; indeed, she was only in the second class; but Nature would not wait for the diploma of St. Denis. Nature is that way in New Orleans,—so impatient. A young girl must be very industrious there to get an education before her début.

From the time the invitations were sent out there had been nothing else talked about by the débutantes. The giddy little heads, still full of Mass, and still wet with the touch of holy water, would loiter, on their way from the cathedral, by the seductive shops, or come together outside the artificial-flower windows (rivalling the show within) to consult on the proper parure for the occasion. Field flowers, lilies of the valley, daisies, myosotis, and rosebuds, "rose tendre," the sweetest of all flowers for a débutante,—they bloomed, a miraculous spring, in the confined laborariums, and but for the glass would have poured out over the damp stone banquette. The day of the intellect was felt to be over; it was the body which had to be furnished now. It was not only a question of artificial flowers, tulles and tarlatans, gloves, and slippers, but of pointed or round bodices, clinging or spread skirts. With Paris so far away, and American fashions so encroaching and so prosaic, what problem had their arithmetic ever furnished to compare with it?

The interest, which had been diffused to the extreme limits of the square of the city, as the original French settlement is called, began in reflex to return as the 27th of December approached, until with the day itself it hovered over a once fashionable neighborhood, now a quartier perdu given over to coffee-houses, oyster-stands, mattress-makers, and chambres garnies suspects, and finally concentrated on the old gray stucco building,—a by no means insignificant theatre of social festivities in that celebrated time long past, to which even a reference now is monotonous. As night fell, the venerable mansion arose through the darkness, glittering with light, shedding a stately radiance over the humble roofs opposite, and shaming the social degradation of its whilom intimates and neighbors on each side. Both portals were opened for the reception of guests,—the great wide porte-cochère in front, and the back gate on the street in the rear. This gate had been thoughtfully propped open, that the hinges might not be injured or the mistress disturbed by the continual opening and shutting of another procession of guests,—the expected if uninvited, a not inconsiderable gathering from an old ostentatious superfluous retinue. Having come within the radius of the news that Madame Edmond was going to give a soirée, they, naturally considering their former intimate relations with the family, came to the soirée itself. Those who had ante-emancipation costumes of flowered mousseline-de-laine gowns, black-silk aprons, and real bandanna head-kerchiefs, put them on for volunteer service in the dressing-room. Those who had shawls put them on to hide toilet deficiencies, and also a prudently provided basket. Those victims of constitutional improvidence who had neither baskets nor shawls came in untempered shiftlessness to gloat their eyes and glut their bodies on whatever chance might throw in their way. All entered alike boldly and assuredly, in the consciousness of their unabrogated funeral and festal privileges, inspected, with their heaven-given leisurely manner the provisions for refreshment, commented on the adornments, reconnoitred the rooms, and finally selected advantageous positions for observation behind the shutters of the ladies' dressing-rooms, or posted themselves in obscure corners of the hall. What sights to take home to their crowded shanties! And the sounds! Where could so many voices, so many emotions, be assembled as in a ladies' dressing-room before a soirée,—a début soirée?

"Have I too much powder?"

"Is my hair right so?"

"Does my dress show my feet too much?"

"Perhaps my comb would be better this way?"

"Shall I put a mouche just here?"

It is so important to look well on a début night. Everything depends upon that. Why, a wrinkle in a bodice, a flaw in a glove, a curl this way or that, is enough to settle a destiny. No wonder they were nervous and excited. Self-confidence vanished as it had never done before, even in an "Histoire de France" contest at school. And in matters of toilet there is no such thing as luck. There seemed to be an idea that Fate could be propitiated by self-abnegation. The looking-glass extorted the most humble confessions.

"I am a fright!"

"As for me, I am perfectly hideous!"

"I told maman how it would be!"

"Now, it's no use!"

"It is that Madame Treize! ah, what a demon!"

"I can hardly stand in my slippers, they are so tight."

"And mine are so loose,—perfect ships."

"Ah, that Renaudière! the rascal!" came in chorus from all, for they all knew the shoe-maker well.

"Just see what wretched gloves!"

"Look at my bodice! My dear, it was laced three times over,—the last time more crooked than the first."

In fact, there was not an article of dress, glove, shoe, or parure that answered expectations; not a modiste or fabricant of any kind that had not betrayed trust. And so restricted as they were to expression,—hardly daring to breathe under their laces or lift an eyebrow under their hairpins! Each one yielded unreservedly to her own panic, but strove to infuse courage into the others.

"Chére, you look lovely!" imprinting prudent little kisses in undamageable spots.

"You are so good, you only say that to console me."

"But I assure you, Doucette!"

"Ah, if I only looked as well as you!"

"What an exquisite toilet!"

"No, chérie! You can't conceal it, it is unbecoming!"

"But, on my word of honor!"

"My dear, it is not to flatter, but you look like an angel!"

"No, it is all over with me, I told maman! I did not wish to come."

"My hair is getting limp already."

The weather was really turning warm and moist, as if purposely to relax their curls.

The music commenced downstairs.

"Ah, that's Benoit!"

And they fell into still greater trepidation over this exhibition of expenditure on their behalf.

"There's going to be a crowd!"

"Ah, mon Dieu!" came from a despairing heart.

"Marcélite, my good Marcélite, put a pin here!"

"Marcélite, for the love of heaven tie this bow!"

"Marcélite, this string is broken!"

"See that big, fat quadroon! That is Marcélite Gaulois, the coiffeuse. She is the hairdresser for all the haut ton," whispered one of the knowing ones in the crowd outside the window.

"That must be her mamzelle, hein,—the tall one with the black hair?"

"Marcélite, I am so afraid," whispered Marie Modeste all the time.

"Zozo, you are the prettiest of all," or, "Zozo, your dress is the prettiest of all," was the invariable refrain.

"Must we go down now?"

"Bonne chance, chère!"

"Pray for me, hein, Marcélite?"

"And don't forget me, Marcélite!"

"Here, this is for good luck!" And with signs of the cross and exhortation they went downstairs into—not the parlors, that was not what frightened them, but the future, the illimitable future, that for which all their previous life had been a preface. One step more, it would be the present, and their childhood would be over.

From the time her carriage left her door, Madame Montyon had talked incessantly to her son, a handsome young man with a listless face, who was carefully seated in an opposite corner, out of the way of the never-an-instant-to-be-forgotten new velvet gown. What she intended to do, what she intended to say, what her listeners intended to do and say,—nay, what they intended to think! Always speaking and thinking consonant to her disposition, she evidently intended to carry her business to the ball, and had laid out her plans in consequence of some recent interview with her agent.

"I told Goupilleau, 'Goupilleau, nonsense! You don't know whom you are talking to! Can't get money out of this people! bah! Giving balls, going to balls, and not pay house-rent, not pay office-rent, not even pay interest on their debts! debts reduced to ten cents on the dollar! But what are you singing to me, mon ami?' 'But Madame must not judge by the present.' 'And why not? Why not judge by the present?' 'The crises, the revolution, the reconstruction—' 'La, la, la, you are too sympathetic. Goupilleau, my friend, let me tell you, you are no longer a notary, you are no longer an agent. You are a philanthropist,—a poetic philanthropist. Go coo with the doves, but don't talk business like that!' . And Goupilleau knew I was right. I can read thought! One isn't a Duperre for nothing."

This was a well-known allusion to the fact that her father, General Duperre, a child of the Revolution in default of more illustrious ancestry, had distinguished himself once in a certain provincial trouble in France by his boundless sagacity and impregnable firmness.

The young man made a movement, but only with his foot.

"Take care! My dress! You will crush it! Black-velvet dresses cost money, and money is not picked up under the foot of every galloping horse!"—whatever she meant by this favorite expression. "No, my son." She pronounced these words with a slight insistence on the "my," an assumption of motherhood that betrayed the pretender. "One must give a hand to one's own affairs. The eye of the master is very good, particularly when one employs lawyers.

"'Goupilleau,' I said, 'what of those stores on Chartres Street?'

"'Taxes, Madame.'

"'And the houses on Dumaine Street?'

"'Repairs, Madame.'

"'The Ste. Helena plantation?'

"'The freeze last year, Madame.'

"'The old Dubois—the old rascal!—plantation?'

"'Overflow, Madame.'

"'The brick-kiln over the river?'

"'Destroyed by fire, Madame.'

"'Goupilleau, you wrote me that that miserable wretch, that abominable hypocrite, old Gréaud, is broken-hearted, wants to commit suicide, bankrupt, and I don't know what all; and yet his daughter gets married, and orders her trousseau from Paris (oh! don't take the trouble to deny it; I know it, I got it from my own dressmaker); and has such a wedding as the world has never seen!' 'Ah, Madame!' shrugging his shoulders,"—shrugging hers too; she had been imitating his voice and manner all along in the dark,—"'it came from his wife, the mother of the young lady.' 'But, just heavens! Goupilleau.' I said, 'do you mean to tell me that what little God and the Government leave to me of my debts is to be hidden under the women's petticoats?' Well! I shall see for myself this evening. I am very glad the Grandmère Fleurissant gives this ball. Ah! I shall let them know!"

"I hope," said the young man, in a voice that expressed a very faint hope indeed, "you will be discreet; the creoles—"

"Bah! the creoles," contemptuously; "don't you think I know the creoles? They are creoles, remember, not Parisians."

It was hardly possible for him to forget a fact of which he had been reminded at almost every stroke of the clock since their departure from France.

"You forget that I, too, am a creole."

"Charles,"—the voice came back suddenly, cold with offended dignity,—"you forget yourself; you must not speak so, I do not like it; in fact, you know it displeases me extremely;" and silence lasted now until the carriage stopped before the house, where, really, a policeman was very much needed, to keep not only the forward bodies of the banquette children, but also their impudent tongues, in order.

She had been going on to tell him much more,—about the "Succession d'Arvil," which, after all, had been the important reason of her coming to America; how the half-million she hoped from it was still buried in a mass of old paper, a regular rag-picker collection. "That Goupilleau—oh, Goupilleau! he is not the man he was; marriage has quenched him. He was still looking, looking, looking,"—screwing up her eyes and handling bits of paper in her gloved hands,—"examining, comparing, as if in fact he held a contract from heaven to supply him with all the time he needed. Not one half of the papers gone through, and fully a month since he died,—old Arvil! It ought to be at least a half-million!" She had suffered that amount of shame from him during his lifetime, it was worth half a million to appear as his niece now.

"But Goupilleau is so slow! I shall give him a talk to-morrow! I shall say 'so and so,' and he will say 'so and so.'"

Her irascibility once excited, eloquence flowed without bounds; her verbal castigation of the notary was satisfactory and complete, and the succession of her uncle hastened to a conclusion,—her own conclusion, a half-million. It would be a neat addition to Charles's heritage. "Charles!" her robust, strong nature melted over the name. Late in life her fortune had bought her the temporary possession of a husband but the permanent ownership of a child,—a beautiful little child, who had unlocked the passion of maternity in her. She was of the kind who are born to be mothers, not wives; who can do better without a husband than without children. As her old Uncle Arvil had hoarded money, so she hoarded this affection. As he had descended to base usages to obtain his desire, so had she descended to unworthy measures for the monopoly of this one heart. The little boy had responded well to her efforts, had given her much, had forgotten much. But he had not given her all, and he had not forgotten the one whom to eradicate from his memory she would have bartered all her possessions, much as she loved them,—his own mother.

"I am your maman, Charles."

"You are my maman, but not my own maman." The childish verbal distinction became the menace of her life, the sentiment of his. And the dead mother, as dead mothers do, became a religion, while the living one remained a devotion.

She walked like a Duperre through the volleys of commentaries on the sidewalk. "Maman," said the young man in a low voice, as they mounted the steps, "be discreet, I implore you."

"Bah!" was the answer; and then he began to regret that he had not sought an excuse to stay away. He was as sensitive as she was obtuse, and there seemed to be no escape from impending ridicule. He placed himself out of the way of the dancers, against the wall; condemned by his forebodings to be an observer of, rather than a participant in, the pleasures of the evening.

The antique gilt chandeliers festooned with crystal drops lighted up the faded, as they had once lighted up the fresh, glories of the spacious rooms. Gilt candelabra with fresh pink-paper bobèches branched out everywhere to assist in the illumination,—from the door, the windows, the arches, and under the colossal mirrors, which were sized to reflect giants. Old magnificences, luxuries, and extravagances hovered about the furniture, or seemed to creep in, like the old slaves at the back gate, to lend themselves for the occasion; even in a dilapidated, enfranchised condition, good, if for nothing else, to propitiate present criticism with suggestive extenuations from the past. As the parlors with their furniture, so were many of the chaperons with their toilets. There were no reproaches of antiquity to be passed between them. But the good material had remained intact with both, and the fine manners which antedated both furniture and clothes, and to an observer obliterated them, establishing a charming and refreshing supremacy of principals over accessories.

"Ninety years old!"

"Ninety!" exclaimed Tante Pauline. "Ninety-two, if you believe me; I know well!"

Every one naturally said the same thing, coming away from the venerable hostess. Tante Pauline, who was aunt only by courtesy to every one in the room, had constituted herself a kind of breakwater to turn the tide of compliment into truth. She was in an admirable position, near the door.

"How can she be so malicious!" thought the young married woman standing by her side, adjusting her eye-glasses for another look about the room.

It was well she did, for she was so near-sighted she would never have seen the candle-grease dripping down over a bobèche upon a young man's coat.

She made a motion to speak, then hesitated, then, with some mental admonition to courage,—

"Monsieur, you are standing under the drip of a candle."

"Ma foin!" she thought, "he is distingué, good-looking, and young. Why doesn't he dance? If I knew his name I could introduce him. In fact, if I knew him I could talk to him myself."

"Ah! I can tell you, my maman went to school with her youngest daughter, and then she was a woman; a woman of a very certain age in society."

The tall, angular, Tante Pauline talked all the time, shrugging her shoulders under her thin glacé-silk waist, tapping her sandal-wood fan, and gesticulating with her bony hands, in their loose black silk mittens.

"Ninety! Who would think it?"

"It is a miracle!"

"And so charming, so spirituelle!"

"A beautiful ball! Really like old times."

"Eh, Odile!" Tante Pauline spread her fan (rusting spangles on a ground of faded red silk) to shield what she was going to say to her companion.

"She ought to know how to give balls! She has given enough of them. That is the way she married off six daughters."

"Tante Pauline!"

"Of course, and evaded paying the dot with every single one of them," emphasizing each syllable. "What do you think of that, hein? Oh, she has a head for business. She has plenty of money to give balls."

"Who can he be, Tante Pauline?" asked Odile, looking towards the young man whose coat she had rescued.

"Eh!" The sharp eyes screwed under their brows. "But what specimen is that? I can't place him. Ma chère, how foolish, but don't you see whom he is looking at? But look over there! there!" and she pointed with a long knotted finger. "Black velvet, diamonds, marabout feathers. Ah, what a masquerade! a whole Mardi-gras. But, Odile, how stupid of you! Madame Montyon, enfin; that is her son,—her step-son, I should say."

"Ah!" said Odile, with a vivid show of interest; "just from France!"

"Of course, my dear. Have you not heard? But where have you been all this week? Come over on business, to buy out or sell out, Heaven knows what!—all of us poor creoles who owe her a picayune. And then there is the Arvil succession, too. Who knows what a hole that will make in our poor city? Poor old New Orleans! But just look at her, my dear; did you ever see such airs? Ah, well! I don't wonder Laflor Montyon died. I remember him well, as if he were of yesterday. I must confess it served him right; he married her for money," she laughed maliciously, "but he only got her: the money was kept well out of his embraces; and very wisely, for Laflor was a fool about money. Poor Mélanie! She would turn in her grave to know who had had the raising of her baby. And what does he look like, after all?" with a disparaging glance at the young man. "A Parisianized creole! An Americanized creole is bad enough, but a Parisianized—good-day! Why does he not dance? Why can he not play the polite to the young girls? Does he think perhaps that he is too good for us,—that we are savages, barbarians! That old paper-shaving Arvil! buying, buying, buying,—always secretly; and hiding, hiding it all away in his rat-hole, a perfect miserable caboose, under the mattress. No wonder he lived so long. Death hated to go there for him! And the clothes he wore! We will not even allude to them. Well, he did die and was buried, and then, grand coup de théâtre, Madame turns out to be his niece and heiress. The rich, the elegant, the aristocratic Madame Montyon, with her château in France, the niece of old 'rag-picker' Arvil, as we used to call him. And he, our disdainful young man, will get it all. Ha! ha! ha! Ah, the poor creoles! She wiped the tears of merriment from her eyes with a thin saffron-colored handkerchief, a sharer of the sandal-wood perfume of the fan. But surely, Odile, you have heard all this?"

"I don't say no, Tante Pauline." Odile spoke with indifference; she was in truth a little disconsolate. Her husband had brought her into the room and planted her there at the beginning of the soirée; she had not seen him since. As for beaux, they had bidden her farewell the night of her marriage, as the beaux of discreet brides always do. But her discretion did not preserve her from ennui now.

"Excuse me, Madame, but it is broken!" and she warned for the fourth or fifth time some fatigued dowager off an incapacitated chair, which stood in a conspicuous place by warrant of its great age and beauty,—an ornamental guet-apens.

"Ninety—Bonté divine!"

"Odile," Tante Pauline interrupted her asseveration, "just look at Goupilleau and his wife,—the newly-married ones! Goupilleau! Heavens, what a name! Poor old Lareveillère! he was an aristocrat, at least. They say—ah, I don't know," and her shoulders began to rise again with serpentine motions from her far-distant waist,—"they say he has adopted that young girl. Well, it isn't my affair; but what can you expect, since the war?"

"Well, well, my dear, are you amusing yourself?" Odile's husband came through the door at her back. He always carefully spoke English in public, being what Tante Pauline called "an Americanized creole;" his wife, as carefully, spoke French.

"As you see," shrugging her frail shoulders out of her low-necked waist.

"Ah, one soon gets past all this!" He spoke like an old, old married man; this was another of his affectations. She turned her head and gave a quick side-glance at him with her languid oval eyes. It was not so very long ago since she, too, was dancing out on the floor there, a young girl, he a young man,—dancing, with the honeymoon in their distant horizon, gayly and thoughtlessly as any. They had reached and passed it. What is one moon to a year of matrimony? She wore her wedding-gown this evening, fresh still, with only the seams taken up. He was stouter, bluffer, wore his coat carelessly, left a button out of his vest. "Who is the young coxcomb?" So he designated the young man who was still in fixed contemplation of the décolletée black-velvet dress and marabout feathers.

"Young Charles Montyon. I find him quite comme il faut, on the contrary."

"He has a confounded supercilious air."

"I admire it; I would like to know him."

"Benoit is playing well this evening." Her husband nodded toward the piano, behind which the dark bold head of the colored pianist could be seen in passionate movement.

"Ah, he ought to play well," chimed in Tante Pauline, "he asks enough; but really, his prices are enormous. And I am not the only one who is wondering how the Fleurissants can afford it; when you think of poor Caro Fleurissant making her living embroidering for a few miserable picayunes. But then they say Benoit gives half to his old mistress. In fact, she would starve without it. Well, some women are fortunate to have people work for them! Eh, Henri?"

But Henri Maziel had left; indeed, he had not waited beyond the last word of his own remark.

"I do not think we can compliment Henri Maziel on his manners," whispered Tante Pauline, under the perfumed shelter of her fan, to her left-hand neighbor. "Poor Odile! but she would marry him; she was warned enough! I heard she threatened to kill herself or go in a convent. The threats of a girl of seventeen—bah! And that is what is called having a husband!"

The young girls danced as only young girls can dance, to Benoit's music,—with no past behind them to weigh down their light feet, and no future before them but of their own manufacture; danced round and round in the circle bounded by the rows of darkly-clad chaperons, as if they did not see them, their anxious, calculating faces, their sombre-hued bodies, or their sombre-hued lives; danced in the frank, joyous exuberance of youth on its first entrance into the "great world." Their tulle and tarlatane skirts spread wider and wider in the breeze from their own motions, until they stood out like full-blown roses, showing the little high-heeled slippers underneath playing as lightly on the floor as Benoit's fingers on the piano. Bunches and crowns of artificial flowers were pinned on their quick-moving, restless heads. Their fresh, young, bending, curving bodies swelled under the tightly-laced satin bodices. Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen,—they were not out a moment too soon. Over their books, over their dolls even, their majority had come to them,—their fragile dower of beauty, the ancestral heritage of the women, held in mortmain from generation to generation. Type came out strongly under the excitement. In their languid, dormant creole lives it had held feature and character tenaciously; to southern, to northern France, to Spain, to Italy, with faint tinges from Semitic or Anglo-Saxon influences. The newly-bloomed faces were varied, unconventional, changing, with nothing regular, nothing perfect, nothing monotonous in them, presenting constant surprising, piquant variations on the usual coloring and features, with exotic exaggerations and freaks in both, which permitted little audacities of toilet, risks in coiffure, originality in bows; they walked, spoke, were graceful, fascinating, and charming, grandes dames, by inspiration or tradition, as the grammatical but ill-spelling court of Louis XIV. talked.

Their timidity had left them, self-confidence had returned. Naïvely proud of their new trousseaux, of looks and clothes, they dispensed their favors with prodigal generosity, unconscious of their own wastefulness; experimenting with looks and smiles and winsome address; using their dangerous woman-eyes with childish hardihood; charging their transparent little phrases with expressions of which life had not yet taught them the significance.

They were, without doubt, now delighted with themselves. They could not keep from looking up at the mirrors, as they passed in promenade, twirling with Cuban agility their scintillating plumed fans. And the old mirrors, at times, could hardly contain between their gilded frames the upturned, flower-crowned, questioning faces. They did not indorse each other now, or ask indorsement; they had already journeyed too far in their feminine tactics.

The breath-laden air, mounting warmer and warmer, seemed to brighten the Cupids and the flowers painted on the ceiling. The white lint from the drugget floated around like pollen in autumn in search of flower-hearts to fructify. One could not look across the room without traversing the dazzling electricity shooting from eye to eye.

"Ah, they are very happy, Madame Edmond!" said her old beau, with a sigh.

"Or they think they are, which is sufficient," answered the old lady.

"Oh, no, they do not think. The more one thinks the less one laughs. Hear them laugh!"

Out in the hall was the punch-bowl, and out in the hall were the fathers and uncles, and all the old, old gentlemen who are neither fathers nor uncles, but who come to balls simply because they cannot stay away. They complimented one another's families, talked Alphonse Karr and Lamartine, repeated sharp truths from Thiers or blunt ones from Guizot between their sips of punch, and in the neutral garb of their dress-coats discussed moderately, republicans, royalists, and imperialists, the politics of France. They made periodical excursions into the parlors, where their old hearts (grown torpid in the monotonous decorum of married life), warming at the sight of so much beauty and the taste of punch, grew lusty, and were eager to fall in love again—with one another's grand-daughters.

"How gentille she is,—that little Stephanie Morel!"

"A perfect bonbon!"

"It's a family trait. 'La gentille Fleurissant,' as we used to say, eh, Auguste?"

"Aïe! It hurts me still!" and the old victim laid his wrinkled hand over the sepulchre of his defunct heart.

"Ah, coquette! coquette!" A warning finger was shaken at a passing belle.

"You do not tell me that is the daughter of—"

"The daughter! Come! You are posing for youth; the grand-daughter, it is, of your old flame."

"They grow with a rapidity,—a rapidity, these young girls!"

"Ah, they do not wish to wait until their grand-mamans have wrinkles!"

"Bah! women are such coquettes, they do not wrinkle any more."

"That is true. Mon Dieu! just look at them!"

"They have not changed in the least,—only the fashion of their dresses."

"As for that, the fashions are no longer what they used to be. The grace, the charm of the old ball dresses!"

"And the coiffures!"

"The coiffures of the present! look at them,—monstrous exaggerations!"

"When it comes to coiffures, what will not a pretty woman put on her head!"

"Or an ugly one!"

"Ugly! no, mon cher, there are none."

"Do you remember Madame de Pontalba, when—"

"Apropos of coiffures, that anecdote Alphonse Karr relates, ha! ha! ha!" The anecdotes crossed.

"It was Monsieur de Pontalba."

"No, it was Madame de Pontalba."

"The hairdresser of Madame Récamier, ha! ha! ha!"

"Briant was there at the time,—Auguste Briant,—and he told me—"

"The hairdresser looked around and saw, imagine—ha! ha!"

"Madame de Pontalba said, 'Monsieur!'"

"A white object on a chair—"

"She was never the same again."

"And that was the coiffure she wore, ha! ha! ha!"

"Goupilleau! Goupilleau!" Madame Montyon walked up like a brigadier and ordered the notary out like a soldier from the ranks. One could easily imagine a brigadier uniform under the new black-velvet gown,—sword, epaulettes, spurs, and all; and the marabout feathers in her hair waved over a face that would have suited a képi.

"Goupilleau, I cannot believe it! That Madame Flotte maintains—"

"To-morrow morning, my dear lady, in my office, I shall be entirely at your service."

"No, no! Now! Come to her; tell her yourself!"

"In my office, to-morrow—"

"No! now!" And they walked away together, she victorious, as usual.

"Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ho! ho! ho! ho!"

"Hear that old 'Jean qui rit' still laughing over his Madame Récamier story."

"No! no! Ho! ho!" The old gentleman's extended mouth cut a semicircle in his soft, round, beardless face. "Ho! ho! ho! ho! That Providence! What a farceur, my friends! For a jeu d'esprit there is no one like him. To the sans-culotte father he sends a pantalooned daughter,—ha! ha! ha!"

When the arrivals entirely ceased, the lookers-on upstairs, the back-door guests, had to advance their positions to be at all repaid for the trouble of peeping. Like shadows they crept out on tiptoe from their hiding-places to hang over the banisters and look down on the exalted, God-favored world below, their eager eyes catching the light and shining strangely out of the darkness of their faces. The hairdressers and maids, in virtue of their superior appearance, had the privilege of the steps all the way down to the floor beneath. They sat, their bright bandanna heads looking like huge posies, exchanging their bold, frank, and characteristically shrewd comments on their whilom masters and mistresses. What did they not know of the world in which destiny had placed them in the best of all possible positions for observation? What had been too low, dim, or secret for them as slaves to crawl into? From their memory or experience, as they sat there, what private archives of their city might not have been gathered,—the snarls and tangles, the crossings and counter-crossings of intrigue, the romances dipped in guilt, the guilt gilded with romance, the tragedies from the aspiring passions of some, the degrading passions of others, and all the impurities from common self-indulgence, with indestructible consequences to stalk like ghosts through the pleasant present! Their school had well taught them the strength and weakness of Nature, the baseness and nobility of humanity. Understanding the problems of the heart better than those of the head, they translated them into the unveiled terms of their intimate language, giving free vent to their versions and theories, but aggressively in their loyal partisanship and their obstinate servility to family and name. It was a pleasure to look up and see them, to catch a furtive greeting or a demonstration of admiration. Their unselfish delight in the enjoyment of others gave a consecration to it.

"I warrant you, Madame Morel has courage,—a little baby at home, and introducing a young lady in society."

"Look at Madame Edmond's old beau, Monsieur Brouy! He looks like a Papa Noël."

"Hé! that grand seigneur Benoit drinking off his champagne!"

"Brought him on a silver waiter!"

"C'est ça des manières!"

"Benoit has luck!"

"No, Benoit has what they call genius!"

"He is not the worst-dressed person in the room, either!"

"Why not? He was educated in Paris! He should dress well and play well too!"

"It is his old Madame who is proud now, hein?"

"Look, look my children, look! Madame Montyon!" They all craned their necks to see.

"Madame Montyon!"

"Eh, but what finery!"

"What airs!"

"Madame is Parisian now! she is not a common creole! Oh, no! she had to bring white servants with her from Paris. She cannot stand the color!"

"Well! She has not grown younger nor prettier."

"Poor Monsieur Laflor! No wonder he shot himself!"

"Shot himself? He took poison."

"But my old master was there."

"So was mine—in Paris."

"But he did not 'suicide' at all! He died of apoplexy. I was there myself. I went to the funeral," protested a third.

"Of course they said that to deceive the priest, but he 'suicided' all the same."

"Ah, ça! But you mustn't abuse politeness! You can't come on the stairs! Look over as much as you please, but not to be seen, hein?" One of the women of the house spoke sharply to the crowd above.

"It's not me! It's not me!" came a score of whispers; "it's Nourrice!"

"Nourrice! For the love of—"

"Eh, poor devil! But let her come, Olympia," came in antistrophe from the crowd on the steps. "She'll soon go away; she never stays long."

"Here, Nourrice! here!"

"By me, Nourrice!"

"Here's a nice place for you, Nourrice!"

The kind-hearted women moved this way and that to find a place for her on the steps.

Two long, thin, naked, yellow feet, caked with mud, came down the steps, feeling their way over the carpet, and an old woman stiffly sat in the corner offered, tucking her ragged, soiled skirt about her, and drawing her piece of shawl over her breast. Her arms were bare, and the elbow-joints projected sharply. Her kerchief seemed to have worn in holes on her head; the gray wool stuck out everywhere, like moss from an old mattress. She had drifted in from the street through the back gate, in her rags, her dirt, and her mendicancy, like some belated bug attracted from the distant swamps to the gaslight.

They began to joke her in a rough, good-natured way.

"Hé! but, Nourrice, you love balls still?"

"Like old times, hein, Nourrice?"

"You could show them how to dance, Nourrice?"

"Who used to run off to the balls at night, Nourrice?" for they all knew her,—a character famous for escapades in the old times.

But the old woman paid as little attention to them as if she had not heard them. The lips of her sunken mouth, into which all the wrinkles of her face converged, were glued together; and so the comments resumed their way without regard to her.

"Whom is she dancing with there,—that little Mamzelle of the Goupilleaus?"

"Eh! but she's not pretty!"

"Not pretty? Mamzelle Motte not pretty? Ah, par exemple!" Marcélite's voice took another tone from that in which she had criticised others.

"Chut! it is her Mamzelle!"

"Here is Madame la Grande-Duchesse again." They had all been attendants on the opera-bouffe, and could fix a title on Madame Montyon as well as any one.

"She has not got any prettier, that's the truth!"

"Nourrice! Nourrice!" shaking her by the shoulder, "look, look—your old mistress!"

"A nice old mistress, vas!"

"A mistress who was too good to own slaves; she had to sell them."

"Madame had susceptibilities; Madame was a Parisian, not a creole."

"Hé! Nourrice, that's the God's truth, isn't it? She sold you?"

"Sold the nurse of her baby,—Seigneur!"

"It was not her baby; it was the first one's baby."

"That's the reason she was jealous,—jealous of Nourrice;" and they all laughed except Nourrice herself, who pressed her thin fingers over her mouth and looked on the crowd below.

"And the little boy, the young man, where is he?"

"Oh, but I would like to see him,—Monsieur Florval."

"Florval? Charles, you mean."

"It is you who do not know what you are talking about; his name is Charles Florval."

"Ask Nourrice; she knows."

"She used to nurse him; he was the apple of her eye, poor wretch!" one whispered, pointing to Nourrice.

"I remember him well. Such a temper! a perfect little devil! but Nourrice could always manage him."

A late comer, a very late comer, ascended the stairs, and they all stood up to let him pass. He walked as if hurrying from a danger, his large blond face exhibiting the nervous panic of a bashful man,—a panic not assuaged by the coolly critical eyes that scanned him up the long way,—eyes that were pitiless to anything like a social infirmity.

"But who is he?"

"Pas connais li."

"Not one of us, sure," meaning creoles.

"An American from up-town."

"Some rich American," corrected another.

He soon descended; the nervousness driven from his face to his hands,—great, stout hands, which worked incessantly, smoothing his white gloves, the sleeve of his coat, and travelling up to his cravat. He avoided the gaze of the women, betraying a fatal cowardice, and made his way, through the old gentlemen around the punch-bowl, to the parlors. He was, in fact, a débutant. No young girl could have been more overcome on entering the room than he; no one could have felt more helpless and bashful; no one could have more excusably yielded to the strong temptation to flight. He felt awkward in his new clothes, not one article of which was an acquaintance of more than an hour's standing: he was vexed that their delay in coming had postponed his arrival at the ball until such an ostentatiously late hour; and the people all around him were as new as his clothes. His long quiet evenings at the plantation, after the hard day's work, came up before him. There he was at ease; there he was master; there, on the finest plantation in St. James's Parish, he was in a position to inspire, not feel, a panic. He remained at the door stock-still under the charm of retrospection, until some deputy of the Fleurissant family, all apologies and fine speeches, put an end to the uncomplimentary position. According to etiquette he was taken around the circle and introduced to every individual, chaperon and relative, composing it.

"Monsieur Morris Frank."

"Monsieur Maurice Frank."

"Monsieur Maurice Frank."

"Of the Parish of St. James."

"Of the Ste. Marie plantation of the Parish of St. James."

The repetition, reinforcing name with title, title with name, accumulated such a deposit of self-esteem, that at the end of it he could really assume the air of a young proprietor with a large bank-account,—the air which distinguished the plantationless, bank-accountless young scions about him.

"From St. James, you say,—from St. James, Monsieur Fleurissant? What a chance! He may know something of an old friend of mine, a particular friend, Monsieur Deron,—Philippe Deron, of the Ste. Helena plantation."

The dance was still going on,—the soft, light dresses crushing up against him, the bare arms grazing him, and the white necks everywhere, like the dropping petals of the Malmaison roses from the vine on his gallery at home. He had to move this way and that, to keep out of the waltz.

"Monsieur Deron,—Philippe Deron?"

At first he could only bow low and reverentially, with blushes of pleasure. His language could not come on the instant, before such a volume of black velvet and a diamond necklace, that was so beautiful it charmed the beholders into admiration of the neck it encircled, and puffy marabout feathers, like his own tender ducklings at home, in her hair.

"Monsieur Philippe Deron?"

His face lighted with pleasure at the ease of the reply: "Philippe Deron? Intimately; his plantation is next to mine."

"And his crop,—his crop last year?"

"Superb."

"Superb? Ah, you see that! The fox! Where is Goupilleau? Goupilleau must hear that! Come with me; we will find Goupilleau. You just tell Goupilleau that. A superb crop! Ah, I have caught you this time, my friend Deron!"

"Mademoiselle Pauline Ruche—"

The introducer had reached the end of the circle, when Madame Montyon prevented the pleasure about to be expressed on both sides by carrying one of the participants bodily away.

"Goupilleau! listen! Ah, that Deron! what turpitude!"

The patience as well as the politeness of even a notary, however, can come to an end.

"To-morrow morning, at ten o'clock, in my office." Monsieur Goupilleau was firm and silent after these words.

"Montyon manners! The manners of a policeman, my dear, absolutely," explained Tante Pauline to her companion, whom fate had only released by intervals from her depressing lonesomeness.

"That is the way with those révolutionnaires. They come from the depths; not from the bourgeoisie, my dear, but from the people,—the people." And she pronounced these words with the unique expression of contempt which she conscientiously reserved for them.

"That young man! He is a new beau, evidently. Just come in, you say? Well, better late than never. What stature! The other men look like dwarfs. Ah! our creole blood is degenerating; we have no more men, only manikins. He is a stranger; he must be a German, he is so fair. He is a nobody, too; a blind person could see that! What can the old Montyon want with him? She has no daughter to marry,—'only a son.' But look, Odile! Our Parisian is at last caught. You see that little creature, that little Motte! Don't tell me that Eugénie Lareveillère is not an intriguante! Oh, she knows how to manage. He is a parti, my dear,—a parti; no one can deny that. The only parti in the room. Goupilleau? Mon Dieu! when a woman has been Lareveillère for fifty years, who can 'Goupilleau' her all of a sudden? Ah, see there! She goes rapidly; our young creole girls are learning from the Americans the art to flirt. [Flurrter, she pronounced it.] You know it means for the young lady to pretend to be in love, in order to induce the young man to be so in reality. What! Odile's husband? Henri Maziel? Not a cent, my dear." She turned to her interlocutor on the left. "He is drawing the devil by the tail, I hear." (Il tire le diable par la queue.)

"Not a cent!" She had said it of almost every one in the room, not from default of imagination, but from the monotonously truthful, unfortunate circumstances.

"The on dit,"—Tante Pauline suddenly remembered that she had let a precious subject pass without relating all she knew about it,—"the on dit about this young girl,—you must have heard it. Odile, you have heard it, have you not? Quite romantic; of course, they tried to hush it. Very naturally; but it is the truth, nevertheless. I see nothing in it to be ashamed of, or, of course, I would not repeat it. Madame Hirtemont told me she got it from Artémise, the coiffeuse,—Artémise Angely, you remember; she belonged to Amènaïde Angely. Well—"

"Tante Pauline!"—the fan was tapping away: the young married woman extended her hand and arrested it,—"for the love of Heaven do not repeat that silly story! It is so absurd—and justice to the poor young lady. Besides, remember how kind Eugénie Goupilleau has always been to you."

"If it is a story, there is no harm in repeating it. I don't say positively it is the truth. Silly! It is not silly, even if it were true."

She resented bitterly any imputation of maliciousness. Her kind heart repudiated any desire to do evil. She talked simply with the vague idea of affording gratification. She was also proud of her reputation of knowing everybody and everything, and desired to sustain it. So, to prove her perfect disinterestedness, and to leave it to the impartiality of her hearers, she related all the circumstances from the beginning,—from the very beginning, where Artémise, the coiffeuse, had been called in to comb Madame Lareveillère for a grand concert and distribution of prizes. "And such an éclaircissement, my dear, about Eugénie's toilet mysteries," etc., carrying her story successfully and fluently to the end. "Although the Mottes are of good family, best creole blood. Marie Modeste Viel was at the convent the same time as I,—the old Ursulines' Convent. Your mother was there too, Odile. She was pretty enough, but delicate, and so gnian, gnian," uttering the criticism with appropriate grimace and intonation.

"Alphonse Motte was a very nice young man, quite comme il faut. Not over-burdened with intelligence, however, or he would have seen how delicate she was; every one else knew that she could not live long. Oh, the daughter has lost nothing by being at the Goupilleaus'! It was very kind of old Armand Goupilleau to take her in. He's no relation,—at least, not that I know of;" which effectually decided the matter for her hearers, human certainty of knowledge not going in New Orleans beyond that possessed by Mademoiselle Pauline Ruche.

The story, as water by capillary attraction, soaked farther and farther away from the fountain-head, making the tour of the room as exactly as Mr. Morris Frank had done; going from one to another until all had become permeated with it to such an extent that each one felt authorized to issue a private version from such facts as her own eyes could see, her own ears hear, and her own intelligence logically suggest, with the young girl in question dancing before them in a fluttering white dress, with a crown of blue myosotis on her black hair, her face beautiful in her complete self-surrender to the joy of the passing moment, her partner making no attempt to conceal his admiration.

"He is really the only parti in the room."

"Yes, he has money; he can marry."

"He's welcome to it at that price,—the father running away from his country during a war. It is not a Villars who could do that."

"This was it! This was happiness!" Since she had worn long dresses Marie had caught it every now and then. In the fragment of a dream or in one of those fleeting day-moments that shoot like meteors at times across the serenity of a young girl's mind, diffusing a strange, supernatural sensation of causeless bliss, passing away with a sigh,—the absent-minded, causeless sigh of young girls, who, when asked about it, answer truthfully, "I do not know, it came just so;" a sensation of bliss which their age does not permit them to understand, but which they recognize distinctly afterwards, when it comes at the proper time; and then they feel that they have lived and known this moment ages before.

All around Marie Modeste were dancing her school companions, young ladies now,—and she was a young lady too!—almost disguised one from another in their beauty and mature manner. Could that be Elmina, who had passed hours in the corner with a foolscap on; and Loulou, who had almost wept her eyes away over faults of orthography; and Ernestine, who had monopolized the leathern medal; and Gabrielle, who had waged a persistent war, a perfect siege of Troy in duration, against her music-teacher; and all those who had passed out of the gates of St. Denis before her, year after year, graduated into the then far-distant great world? These did not dance, but walked around with the languid movements and preoccupied eyes of young matrons. "What a bright, what a beautiful world! Was there ever a dark day in it? Was it ever so bright or so beautiful to any one before?" So they all thought, each one dancing in a fresh, new, original creation,—a special paradise, full for each one to name and classify. Her first illusion goes when the young girl finds her own Eden neither the brightest nor the best, nor an individual creation; the last goes when she finds that she is not the only woman in it, but that Eves are under every tree.

When they looked at anything, they looked at themselves in the mirrors, or at their partners, not at the crow's-feet and wrinkles which had travelled from the hearts to the faces of the débutantes of twenty-five years ago, the possessors, then, of a paradise too.

The young girls had of course consulted the bonne aventure about him,—the future one whom they hoped to meet this or some other near evening. Was he to be fair or brown, tall or short, widower or bachelor? Candles were even now burning before distant altars to hasten his coming, placed by the zealous hands of some of those very nurses out on the stairs; the saints were being arraigned, perhaps, by some of the impatient mother-spectators about him; all to be forgotten in the supreme moment by the most interested ones! Quadrilles, deux-temps, and waltzes succeeded one another; but the heedless young girls thought only of the pleasure of the dance, forgetting the profit. How could they do otherwise, with that new blood beating in their veins, and new life bursting in their hearts under the forceful music of Benoit,—that warm, free, full, subtilely sensualized African music? The buds themselves would have burst into blossom under the strains, and the little birds anticipated spring.

"Ah, what a beautiful world it is! How good it is to live! How good God is!"

And it came about as Marie Modeste danced with the young "Parisianized creole;" it is so inexplicable, so indescribable; to state it destroys the delicacy of it; to confess it almost vulgarizes it; but an impression was made on their fresh, impressionable hearts, slight and faint, easy to efface or subdue, but more easily kept alive and fixed. Neither knew—how could they? it was the first time—what it was. A change came over the charm upon her; a dissatisfaction crept into the young girl's heart; her pleasure all departed. When she spoke, it was to perceive that she was silly; she became conscious of marked inferiority in her appearance; she was wearied; and when she looked in the mirror now, it reflected not her face but her mood. And he, seeing the light pass from her face, became self-accusing, self-depreciative, and taciturn; his life became a hateful barren to look back upon, his stepmother an intolerable irritant whom he wished to deny before Marie.

When the time came for them to part, they both started, as if being together were a sudden impropriety. She had not a glance to encourage him in her embarrassment. He followed her upstairs to the dressing-room without a word to retrieve himself with, so absorbed in the new sensation that he stumbled over an old negro woman who had apparently forgotten, in her enjoyment of the scene, to take herself away with the rest.

Her companions it was that had forgotten to drive her away into the back-yard for supper, or into the back-street for shelter. The music crept through her brain like soft fingers through her matted, knotted, massed hair, loosening the tangles in her half-crazy mind. "How would she know him, they were all so much alike, the young men, and all dressed the same?"

"My little heart. My little love. My little kiss. My little soul." A long-buried litany of diminutive tenderness, the irrepressible cajoleries of colored creole nurses; she kept her fingers pressed tight against her lips; not a word of the myriads that teemed in her heart disturbed the scented, warm atmosphere. She nodded at times, and dreamed she was at the bedside of a patient. The lace-lined trains of tired ladies on their way to the dressing-room swept over her. At the sound of every man's step she would raise her head alertly, and the gleam in her eye would transfuse the white film that obscured it.

A little boy with black hair which she used to curl, black eyes which she used to kiss, and lace petticoats! If he would only come up the stair that way! Oh, he will know me! He will do me justice! He will give me satisfaction for all,—all! His poor old Nourrice! His nigger! His dog! His Patate!

Her menial heart, which had cast tendernesses on her nursling, cast humiliations on herself. Her thoughts flew like martins back to old times, and there dallied and rested. She was no longer the eccentric old beggar Nourrice, the bedfellow of street curs, the ravager of garbage-barrels, but a pampered, spoiled nurse, the unmanageable, the wild, the reckless quadroon, of a wild, reckless period. Some one stumbled over her; she caught hold of the baluster and pulled herself up, instinct with old servile apology. Bidden by the same impulse that had brought her there, she followed after, close to the footsteps of the young man, stretching out her arms to catch him, to detain him.

"I know you! I know you! It's God did it,—God!"

She had caught him somehow; half pulling, half pushing, had got him through the open door to the dark gallery behind.

"Your Nourrice! Your poor old Nourrice!"

He had not pronounced the word in twenty years. "Nourrice." It meant then a world of solicitude,—protection from danger, covering from cold, food when hungry, drink when thirsty, a cooling, a soothing, a lullaby, a great strong, dark bulwark to fly to, a willing Providence in reach of baby arms. He stretched out his arms again at the word; they reached far over the limp, mal-odorous object at his feet.

"It's God sent you,—God!"

He felt her lips, a soft, humid, toothless mass, pressing again and again on his hands. Beyond her, over the irregular roofs and chimneys and balconies, the skies stretched full of hot, gleaming, Southern stars; the music from the piano, the chattering voices in the dressing-room, filled the gallery. She kept raising her voice louder and louder, for her own dull ears to hear the epitome of her sufferings; he could hear plainly enough.

"Little master! I've no home, no bed, no food, no nothing. I'm 'most naked! I'm 'most starved!"

The heart-rending sob of human desperation broke her voice.

"Nourrice! Poor old Nourrice! Patate!"

It was an inspiration,—his recollection of the old nickname. God must have ordered it with the rest.

"Patate! You haven't forgotten 'Patate'? Saviour!"

Her tears began to fall; they should have been soiled, wrinkled, bleared, and distorted from such eyes. "I am not lazy, little Master! I have worked and worked! but God knows I am too old. I was an old woman when I nursed you. I can hardly see, I can hardly hear, I can hardly stand; and I am sick, I am diseased."

"I've no home, no bed, no food, no nothing!" she repeated. "The little children run after me in the street, they throw dirt at me; 'Hé! la folle! la folle!'" raising her voice in piercing imitation of their cruelty. "The little nigger children,—the rottenness of the earth! I fall in the gutters! The policemen drag me off. They club me; they beat me all over; they tear my clothes!—nigger policemen, little master!" Passion exhausted her breath at every item; her voice came hoarse and gusty out of her exposed, bony chest. "Clubbed by nigger policemen! Ah, God! They lock me up in the calaboose. Poor me!"

Her breath and recital ended in a wail of misery. The wail and the misery reached him, not here, but in that bright, gay, selfish world of Paris, where he had passed a happy youth, a useless manhood. "France? What was he, an American, a creole, doing in France when such things were passing in America?"

"It was not right to sell me! It was not right to sell the nurse of a child!"

"Sell?" he repeated. "Sell?"

"I begged on my knees, I begged and begged!"

"Sell," he thought, "my nurse,—the nurse of my mother,—sell her, and spend the money in France"! He felt a hot wave in his heart, as if it were blushing.

"What did God free me for, hein? To be beaten by niggers? To be run after by little nigger dogs? Why didn't He kill me?

"Philo! Odette! Tom!" They were her children. She began to curse them, horribly, frightfully.

"They stole my money! They drove me out! They put the police on me! They set the children to insult me! I curse them! I curse them!"

Her shawl had fallen from her shoulders. She pulled and tore in the darkness at her shrivelled bare breasts, as if to tear away the ungrateful lips they had once nourished. He picked up the wretched rag and folded it around her. It felt good to touch her ill-treated limbs, to soothe the violence away from her trembling head.

"Hush! Hush!" She might be overheard. He tried to conform his Parisian accent to her creole ears; he even recollected some fragmentary creolisms. "Hush! hush! Philo, Odette, Tom; forget them! It is Charlot you must remember,—your little Charlot; eh, Nourrice?"

The Goupilleaus were going downstairs now,—the husband and wife arm in arm. He should have been there for the young lady.

"Give me satisfaction! Give me justice, Monsieur Charles!"

He remembered now distinctly hearing her call his father so,—"Monsieur Charles." A faint, shadowy form came out of his memory; it never came more distinctly than that, but he knew it for his own mother, and as he thought of her, his eyes again sought the stairway; the blue myosotis wreath was just disappearing. His own mother was a creole girl too, like Marie Modeste Motte.

"A little cabin somewhere, and a few picayunes to keep me from starving until I die! You are rich! rich!" What an accusation here, at this time, in this city, from such a source. Rich! great God! at what expense!

"To-morrow, Nourrice! To-morrow, the cabin; now, the picayunes!"

His white gloves received the soil of the gutter-mud as he took her horny, wrinkled hands in his.

"And those mulattresses! those impudent mulattresses in their fine clothes! As if they had not been freed too!"

She was a mulattress herself, but she could not forbear the insult, the curiously galling insult invented by the pure blacks.

"To-morrow! To-morrow morning, Nourrice! See, it is almost here!" It was not far off—the dawn. The stars were beginning to look pale and weary as if the ball had lasted too long for them also. On the gallery, the darkness was becoming gray.

The old woman felt her way along by the balustrade to the back-stairs. After waiting so many years, it was not too much to wait a few hours more,—out on the banquette in front of his house. She would follow him home; she could not trust even him; when he went out in the morning it would be better to be there to remind him.

The repetition of quadrilles, waltzes, deux-temps continued, but the gayety was no longer in the parlors; from the supper-room the guests went to the dressing-room; the procession was turning to the street again.

As Tante Pauline had said, it was a kind of judgment-day for the poor creoles. It is not pleasant to be in debt, but it is a comfortable mitigation of it to have an ocean between one and one's creditor. They could not help feeling towards Madame Montyon as on the real judgment-day the poor sinners may feel towards the archangel who wakes them from the sweet security of death to receive long-delayed punishment. If she had not said a word, her presence would have proved too suggestive for their consciences; but the good lady belonged to a school which did not economize powder and shot when occasion required, nor did she breath; she carried out her plans only too well. At the end of her prepared speeches, finding that the respondent did not assume the rôle of either thinking or speaking attributed to him or to her, she was enabled to elaborate her own manner and argument à indiscrétion. The initiative of politeness had been tried, the propitiation of a cordial welcome, the head held high to avoid her, or at least the eyes, so that only the marabout feathers came in the plane of vision,—the attitude that expresses an effort to keep on a level with elevated principles, the attitude generally of the poor in pocket. Some quietly avoided her; others fled before her, but nothing diverted her. She lent not only one hand but two hands to her affairs. Her conversation rolled on uninterruptedly, exhaling rent-bills, due-bills, promissory notes, mortgages, and every other variety of debt which had been used to procure money from her or old Arvil. Her voice took the suavity out of the truffles, the bouquet from the champagne. The creole gentlemen (and who says creole says gastronome) had never eaten their patés, woodcock, and galantine with such obtuse palates. Law, conscience, honor! She arrayed herself and her obligations under the protection of each and all. "Extravagant as creoles, no wonder they cannot pay their debts! In Paris, millionnaires and richissimes alone give such suppers," she screamed, holding her black-velvet train high up, out of the way of the waiters. "And Goupilleau says the community is bankrupt."

"My dear lady, we must make an effort for our young people; we must marry our daughters."

Marriage was the last necessity for her to recognize.

"But on what basis,—on what basis, in the name of Heaven, do you intend to found your families?"

"On love, pure and simple; it is the best we have, having no money."

"Love! Love! And what of honesty, eh? Can you buy bread for love in New Orleans? meat? rent houses? pay debts with love?"

"Would to Heaven we could, Madame!"

"Ah, Monsieur Frank," she said,—she had taken a fancy to the young German, and kept him near her,—"it is a community of Philippe Derons! Apropos, you will not forget to come to Goupilleau's office to-morrow at ten? We will show Mr. Philippe Deron whom he has to deal with. You see that old lady over there,—the one with the black lace cap,—well, to this day she owes me for a servant, a valuable nurse. And she can come to balls, to introduce a grand-daughter into society, I believe. I reminded her of it this evening. And Goupilleau says that the law does not compel the payment of such debts; the law! yes, the law! but honor, the famous old creole honor! For gentlemen and ladies, all debts are debts of honor!"

It was unfortunately said in the hearing of one who, though the least solvent pecuniarily, was good for any amount payable by the code,—Monsieur Henri Maziel.

"That, that is a little strong," he muttered,—"ça, c'est un peu fort."

He sought out some undertakers of duelling pomps and ceremonies, who promptly requested Monsieur Charles Montyon, then descending the staircase, to furnish at his earliest convenience reparation to creole honor impugned by his step-mother. The waiters carried it to the back-yard, the guests whispered it in the dressing-room; Madame Montyon herself was the only one to ignore it.

The last carriages rolled away in the breaking of a new day. The 28th of December succeeded to the inheritance of consequence left by the 27th. Old Madame Fleurissant slept, under the weight of her ninety, ninety-two, or ninety-five years, the hermetically sealed sleep of the aged, with no crack or crevice for gnawing thought to intrude and torture the brain; while her guests carried to their homes and into their future lives the germs of variations in both which she through her soirée had sown.

Morris Frank, never more secure in the possession of his magnificent plantation, went over his nightly résumé of the details composing it,—the acres under cultivation, the uncleared forest, the sweep of the river-front, the sugar-house, the hands, even to the names of the mules; his settlement with his merchant that day: his bank-book heavy with amounts of deposit. His elation for the first time was untempered by regret for his father, whose toilsome life and recent death had made him heir to it all. In his superb physical strength and accumulated fortune he had but to put his hands out to grasp the pleasures of life,—his great, strong hands made to grasp, and his great, strong heart made to enjoy. The magnificent, complimentary Madame Montyon had also her share in his self-satisfaction. Through his dreams ran the appointment to meet her the next day in the notary's office, and he sought in his mind all possibly useful information with which to confuse the plausible Philippe Deron.

Madame Montyon, whose fatigues blurred the enjoyable retrospect of her evening's business, felt only a sleepy triumph. The imported white maid missed her usual scolding, as she removed the panache of feathers and velvet train,—with professional tenderness and solicitude for them, professional indifference to their wearer.

To Madame Odile Maziel, instead of slumber came a vigil filled with the recollection of an evening of mortification and ennui, dominated by the prophecies she had defied at her marriage, which came now to brood over her future like sluggish crows.

Young Montyon, in his feelings an old Montyon, looked through a veil of cigar-smoke at the old raving Nourrice and the adjacent childish remembrances her presence evoked; at his native city, and the people whom his step-mother and father had abandoned in time of crisis; at the irrepressible step-mother herself, at the imminent choice of swords or pistols her indiscretion had brought upon him, and the probable eventualities of the morrow; but last, and longest, he looked at a crown of blue myosotis over eyes that seemed the eyes of a thousand women in one, and at a face made from the core of his own heart, and at the history of it which he had overheard from his station near the parlor door.

And Marie Modeste; the music, the inexorable music, carried her around and around, on and on, until, horribly awake, yet expiring with fatigue, the early church-bells dissolved the infernal charm. She sank like a feather into a sleep of eider-down, where dreams came to tease her with sudden fallings, or with hints and suggestions touched her sensibilities to the coloring of a blush, the starting of a tear; her feet twitching and moving still in the waltz,—the one waltz with the young Parisian.

Even a soirée, however unusual the occurrence, could not disturb the equilibrium of Monsieur Goupilleau's notarial existence. He descended at his habitual hour the next morning to his office, situated on the ground-floor of his dwelling, and resumed the interrupted business of yesterday; leaving stoically on the threshold all thoughts of the seducing comforts and luxuries so recently installed in his chambers upstairs.

He was soon immersed in the "Succession d'Arvil," extracting the papers from a tin box, smoothing, cataloguing, annotating them, and arranging them in distinct little piles on his long office-table.

The private door of his office was pushed open by Marcélite.

"Monsieur!" she said, "Monsieur!" her voice boding ill news.

The whole upper stories of his house, with their treasures of domestic love and happiness, tottered under the notary's sudden fear.

"Speak quick!"

"Monsieur,"—she gave vent to a long-repressed excitement, her words coming rapidly, incoherently,—"that, that was Morris Frank last night!"

"Ah!" Monsieur Goupilleau gave a sigh of relief.

"Morris Frank! But who is Morris Frank? Do you know who Morris Frank is?" she asked, raising her voice.

"Morris Frank?" repeated Monsieur Goupilleau, wonderingly.

She looked at him, still in the doubt which had confused her all night. Would it have been better to say nothing about it? Was it really better to tell? A year ago she would have kept it to herself; now—

"A little white-headed boy," she bent over and stretched her hand out, at the height of a young child, above the floor, "playing around the plantation quarters with the little negro children,—the son of the overseer, a German overseer, a man who hired himself out to whip slaves he was too poor to own!" Her scathing, fierce tongue brought the fire into her eyes.

"My God! The son of an overseer at the ball of the aristocrats! On my old plantation?" She read the confused inquiry in the notary's face. "The plantation of Monsieur Alphonse Motte, the father of my Mamzelle? He lives there still?" Monsieur Goupilleau's face brightened with a discovery. He commenced a question: "The son of the overseer on Monsieur Motte's plantation?"

"That night! That night! It makes me crazy to think of it! The ringing of alarm-bells, the shooting of cannon, the gun-boats coming down the river, the negroes running away, setting fire, stealing; and the soldiers, soldiers everywhere, none of our white gentlemen about. My God! we were so frightened we could not think; we left everything in the house and ran. We got in a cart; it broke down; we walked miles. When we got to the town, what did we see? The young white boy the soldiers were hanging! No wonder she died, Mamzelle Marie!" She tried to steady her hand on the back of a chair, but it shook and trembled to the floor.

The front door of the office flew wide. Madame Montyon had jerked the knob out of the hand of the bowing clerk.

"Hé! Goupilleau, my friend!" she exclaimed brusquely; "on time, you see! To work; to work! What have we here, eh?"

She had divested herself of so much the night before, and invested herself in so little this morning, that really her manner (which was always the same) alone remained to identify her.

She threw back the ends of her India shawl, which she had put over her purple cashmere morning peignoir, and tossed up her black lace veil, under which the gray hair stood out crinkled and crisp from the crimping and manipulation of the evening before.

"Just out of bed, you see! Only a cup of coffee!"

She seated herself at the table and began recklessly to open, examine, mingle, and scatter the papers arranged by the notary.

Monsieur Goupilleau had made a sign to Marcélite to place herself in a corner.

"Pardon me, Madame," he said to the lady, rescuing some of the documents, "but these papers are now in my possession. I am responsible for them."

"Pooh! pooh!" She was about to express further contempt of the admonition, when her words were cut short by the surprising appearance of her son. He was as much astounded as she at the meeting, and more confused.

"My son! Up at this hour!" She extended her cheek for his morning salute. "What in the world do you want here, with Goupilleau? But what is that—filth?" She got it from her father to select the strongest and coarsest word, but it was not entirely inapplicable to Nourrice, who had followed him in like a spaniel.

The poor old woman started at the voice; her ears were younger than her eyes. "Ah, mistress! You do not know me. He has better eyes than you; he knew me at once! Ah, Madame, it was not right to sell me, an old woman, a nurse! I begged you! I begged you on my knees!"

Madame Montyon, taken by surprise, wavered under the assault. "Nourrice! Elvire!"

"I was old, I was past the age, I was diseased!"

"Will you be silent?" She shook her hand before the face of the negro. What revelations, the terror of her motherhood, might not be impending?

"To sell a nurse! God never intended that!"

The young man stood in close conversation with the notary.

"Eh? What is that,—what is that?" Madame Montyon unceremoniously thrust herself in between them.

"Only a little cabin somewhere, little master, to keep me out of the gutters!" Nourrice, afraid still of her old mistress, raised her voice in anxiety.

"What is this nonsense? what is this craziness?" Madame screamed to her son. To the old woman: "Will you cease that whining? A little cabin? A little policeman!"

"My baby! My baby! It's your poor old Nourrice!"

"But, my son, what have you got in your head? I never received one cent for her,—not one cent! Those dishonest Montamats! They were only too glad of the emancipation!"

The gentlemen had continued their conversation without attention to her. She overheard some of their words.

"Money! money!"—the clerks in the next room must have heard her excited voice,—"to a wretch like that! Never! never! I forbid it!" She snatched from the notary the paper he had prepared.

"Do you understand, Charles? I forbid it! I command you to desist!" She launched full speed into one of her ungovernable tempers. "A check, tudieu! a check! without my advice! without my consent! One must have a private fortune, tudieu! to pension, to squander, to throw away,—a private fortune! My money, tudieu! my money!"

To her son's face arose an expression that only an intolerable insult could provoke; and the temper that seized him,—she knew only too well what that was, if she had not been too blind to see it. He closed his lips and turned away.

"Enough! Come, Nourrice!" The old woman followed him again; her back—the strong back he had once ridden for a horse—bent over nearly double; this time not in play, but in decrepitude.

He paused at the door and pointed to Nourrice. He had also thought of a supreme retort, an irreparable one: "She was my nurse, given me by my own mother. You sold her!"

The door had not closed on their exit before it was opened again.

"Mr. Morris Frank, to see Monsieur Goupilleau by appointment," announced the clerk.

The young German, fresh, fair, and rosy, had to struggle almost as hard to enter an office as a parlor. "Monsieur," said he, bowing to Monsieur Goupilleau; then, remembering the lady, "Madame," to Madame Montyon; then he paused, not knowing whether to offer his hand or not, until the opportunity passed, and he had to compose something appropriate to say.

The notary came to the rescue: "Ah, Mr. Frank! You are a little early, we are not quite prepared—in fact—"

"But, Goupilleau! what do you mean? You are going to let Monseiur Frank go without giving the information? He is a witness, don't you see, against Deron." Madame Montyon got this also from her father,—her versatility in passing from one passion to another.

"As you please, Madame; interrogate Mr. Frank yourself!"

Monsieur Goupilleau was plainly preoccupied about some other matter now, but she did not see it. She put her young friend through a cross-examination to prove her point of view of the creole character as presented by the distant Deron.

"There, you see, Goupilleau, I am right! Monsieur Frank proves everything. All you have to do now is to make Deron pay."

"One moment, Mr. Frank," said Monsieur Goupilleau, as the young man was preparing to leave, "have you any objections to telling me if your plantation, the Ste. Marie plantation in the Parish of St. James, was once the property of Monsieur Alphonse Motte?"

The old lady's eyes brightened. She saw a new claim, a new debt. She looked greedily at the spread papers, and suspiciously at her young friend, ready to detect and expose any subterfuge.

"Motte? Motte? Is there something there, Goupilleau? Something new? Motte? But who are they? Motte! Motte!" She kept repeating the name to start her ear into recognition. "One of our high-minded, borrow-in-haste-and-repay-at-leisure creoles?"

Marcélite came from the corner where she had been waiting.

"Pardon, Madame, pardon," she said, in eager defence. "Those words should not be used to designate the deceased Monsieur Alphonse Motte."

"Eh! eh!" Madame Montyon responded sharply to the assault. "What is this? Whom have we here? One of the family?"

The quadroon's eyes burned at the insult. The blood rushed to her head, deepening the color of her dark skin, reddening her lips, swelling her throat, inflating her nostrils, maddening her beyond all discretion. She raised her voice in the impudent way quadroons know so well, and looked at the white lady with an expression which, brave as she was, once she would not have dared.

"Madame is, perhaps, not satisfied; the insults of last night were, perhaps, not enough; Madame apparently does not mind duels; she would have one every day. Madame, perhaps, loves blood, or perhaps Madame thinks Monsieur Henri Maziel cannot fight, or perhaps she thinks her son has more lives than one; or—"

Even Morris Frank was prompt in the emergency. He caught Marcélite by the arm.

"Silence!"

"Marcélite!" the notary raised his voice in anger.

"Speak! I command you, wretch! Goupilleau, make her talk, I say! A duel! My son!"

Physical and verbal violence struggled for the mastery. Her face changed rapidly from crimson to white, then to crimson again; her lips trembled and became blue. She fell into her chair. Was it apoplexy, or a swoon? She responded to the quick touch of the notary.

"Goupilleau! Goupilleau!" her voice was all anguish, all submission, now. "She says—she says," pointing in the direction of Marcélite— "My son!—a duel!" She tried to rise, to pull herself up by the help of the table.

"Wait!" said Monsieur Goupilleau, forcing her back into her chair. "Do not stir! Not a word until I return!"

The little man had a manner which in emergencies could rise above occasions and impose commands on the most exalted.

In the very next room, sitting at one of his desks, plodding over some notarial copying, Monsieur Goupilleau possessed the very Supreme Court of the Duel, the very infallibility of the code of honor,—a tall, thin, sallow young man, behind whose fierce black moustaches were no front teeth whatever.

"Ah," thought the notary, after the first glance, "Théodule is silent; Théodule is mysterious; Théodule has on his black coat and white cravat,—a duel, sure!"

The old lady had laid her head on the table. Her vigor had snapped. "My money! my money!" and the retort, "My own mother,"—that was all she could hear from the buzzing in her ears. What she saw? All she could see; what, as a soldier's daughter, she should have better borne. When she raised her face, on the notary's return, her eyes—her little, strong, bold, brigadier eyes—were weeping.

"Madame!" It was the sympathy in Monsieur Goupilleau's voice that prepared her for the worst. "Madame, words spoken last night, no doubt in an unguarded moment, insults passed, taxing with dishonor honorable personages,—under the circumstances, Madame, nothing is to be done." He shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, just as Théodule had done. "Gentlemen, even if they have no money, I might say particularly if they have no money, pay their debts of honor.'

"Words spoken last night! but I only said the truth!" She began to reiterate them angrily, then changed to an attack on the notary. "Nothing to be done, tudieu! Nothing to be done! You dare tell me that, Goupilleau,—me, a mother!" She had strength enough to rise now, and shake her head at him until her bonnet dropped to the floor. "You dare tell any mother that, when her son is going to fight a duel?"

The "Succession d'Arvil" lay scattered everywhere,—documents folded, unfolded, face up, face down. She seized one and grasped a pen. Her fingers had not recovered, nor could her eyes see clearly; but despite wavering, blots, and irregularities, the words yet stood out with sufficient clearness:—

I apologize to Monsieur —— for offensive words spoken at Madame Fleurissant's ball last night. I beg him to believe that a moneyed debt is not a debt of honor. Louise Duperre Montyon.

"Tudieu! nothing to be done! Goupilleau, you are a fool! You will see that something is to be done. Here, supply the name and send it to that—" and she called Monsieur Henri Maziel, in French, the name of a man who prepares ambushes for assassination. "What's that?" She jerked her head aside from a touch. It was Marcélite gently replacing her bonnet, and examining her face and head with professional interest.

"Blessed Virgin!" she thought; "what a genius her hairdresser must be!"

"Here, my good woman," said the old lady, when the bonnet was fastened and the lace veil dropped, "give me your arm; conduct me home immediately."

The notary read first one side of the paper, then the other, scratched over with the hard terms of some of old Arvil's extortions.

"Ah!" said he, looking around his office, deserted now of all except the young German, who was still trying to think of something to say, something to do.

Bred in a classical school, Monsieur Goupilleau was addicted to phrases that came epigrammatically. Shrugging his shoulders, his eyes beamed with the intelligence that only legal experience can give, and with the satirical intelligence which only such experience with women inspires: "Ah, grattez la femme, et vous trouverez la mère!"