Jump to content

Page:New Orleans; the place and the people (IA neworleansplacep00kin).pdf/420

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

others, upon those who are committed, by birth or conviction, against pleasure for pleasure's sake. To the contrite journalist, laying aside mask and domino, to pen such an editorial, it must seem indeed at such a time a disheartening fact that money-making is the only pleasure in the United States that meets with universal journalistic approbation.

There is a tradition that the royalties of the carnival show a no more satisfactory divine right to their thrones than other royalties; that the kings are the heavy contributors to the organization, and that a queen's claims

upon the council boards of the realm of beauty are not entirely by reason of her personal charm. There is such a tradition, but it is never recognized at carnival time, and seldom believed by the ones most interested; never, never, by the society neophyte of the season. Ah, no! Comus, Momus, Proteus, the Lord of Misrule, Rex, find ever in New Orleans the hearty loyalty of the most unquestioned Jacobinism; and the real mask of life never portrays more satisfactorily the fictitious superiority of consecrated individualism in European monarchies than, in the Crescent City, do these sham faces, the eternal youth and beauty of the carnival royalties.