But the laugh, that "sudden glory" which in a flash eclipses in the heart sorrow, poverty, stress, even disgrace, it has become obsolete among them. Smiling people can never become laughing people; their development forbids it.
New Orleans is not a Puritan mother, nor a hardy Western pioneeress, if the term be permitted. She is, on the contrary, simply a Parisian, who came two centuries ago to the banks of the Mississippi,—partly out of curiosity for the New World, partly out of ennui for the Old—and who, "Ma foi!" as she would say with a shrug of her shoulders, has never cared to return to her mother country. She has had her detractors, indeed calumniators, with their whispers and sneers about houses of correction,—deportation,—but, it may be said, those who know her care too little for such gossip to resent it; those who know her not, know as little of the class to which they attribute her origin.
There is no subtler appreciator of emotions than the Parisian woman,—emotions they were in the colonial days, now they are sensations. And there are no amateurs of emotional novelty to compare to Parisian women. The France of Louis XIV. was domed over with a royalty as vast and limitless as the heaven of to-day. The court, with its sun-king and titled zodiac, was practically the upward limit of sight and hope for a whole people. In what a noonday glare from this artificial heaven, did Paris, so nigh to the empyrean, lie! Its tinsel splendours, even more generously than the veritable sunlight itself, fell upon the crowded streets and teeming lodgings. Nay, there was not a nook nor a cranny of poverty, crime, disease, suffering, vice, filth, that could not, if it wished, enjoy a ray of
