Old Creole Days: A Story of Creole Life Read online

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  OLD CREOLE DAYS

  A STORY OF CREOLE LIFE

  BY

  GEORGE W. CABLE

  1907

  CONTENTS

  MADAME DELPHINECAFE DES EXILESBELLES DEMOISELLES PLANTATION"POSSON JONE'"JEAN-AH POQUELIN'TITE POULETTE'SIEUR GEORGEMADAME DELICIEUSE

  MADAME DELPHINE.

  CHAPTER I.

  AN OLD HOUSE.

  A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you toand across Canal Street, the central avenue of the city, and to thatcorner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of thearcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrantmerchandise. The crowd--and if it is near the time of the carnival itwill be great--will follow Canal Street.

  But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover ofCreole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone tocall the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a fewauction-rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize thatyou have left behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchantsbefore you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, wherean ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories,overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon everything has settled down a long sabbath of decay. The vehicles in thestreet are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores areshrunken into shops; you see here and there, like a patch of brightmould, the stall of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many greatdoors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many streetwindows are nailed up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten,and many of the humid arches and alleys which characterize the olderFranco-Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor almost oriental.

  Yet beauty lingers here. To say nothing of the picturesque, sometimesyou get sight of comfort, sometimes of opulence, through the unlatchedwicket in some _porte-cochere_--red-painted brick pavement, foliage ofdark palm or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and bloomingparterres; or through a chink between some pair of heavy battenwindow-shutters, opened with an almost reptile wariness, your eye gets aglimpse of lace and brocade upholstery, silver and bronze, and muchsimilar rich antiquity.

  The faces of the inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the streeta sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are puttingyou off your guard, there will pass you a woman--more likely two orthree--of patrician beauty.

  Now, if you will go far enough down this old street, you will see, asyou approach its intersection with ----. Names in that region elude onelike ghosts.

  However, as you begin to find the way a trifle more open, you will notfail to notice on the right-hand side, about midway of the square, asmall, low, brick house of a story and a half, set out upon thesidewalk, as weather-beaten and mute as an aged beggar fallen asleep.Its corrugated roof of dull red tiles, sloping down toward you with aninward curve, is overgrown with weeds, and in the fall of the year isgay with the yellow plumes of the golden-rod. You can almost touch withyour cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging eaves. The battenshutters at door and window, with hinges like those of a postern, areshut with a grip that makes one's knuckles and nails feel lacerated.Save in the brick-work itself there is not a cranny. You would say thehouse has the lockjaw. There are two doors, and to each a single chippedand battered marble step. Continuing on down the sidewalk, on a linewith the house, is a garden masked from view by a high, closeboard-fence. You may see the tops of its fruit-trees--pomegranate,peach, banana, fig, pear, and particularly one large orange, close bythe fence, that must be very old.

  The residents over the narrow way, who live in a three-story house,originally of much pretension, but from whose front door hard times haveremoved almost all vestiges of paint, will tell you: "Yass, de 'ouse isin'abit; 'tis live in."

  And this is likely to be all the information you get--not that theywould not tell, but they cannot grasp the idea that you wish toknow--until, possibly, just as you are turning to depart, yourinformant, in a single word and with the most evident non-appreciationof its value, drops the simple key to the whole matter:

  "Dey's quadroons."

  He may then be aroused to mention the better appearance of the place informer years, when the houses of this region generally stood fartherapart, and that garden comprised the whole square.

  Here dwelt, sixty years ago and more, one Delphine Carraze; or, as shewas commonly designated by the few who knew her, Madame Delphine. Thatshe owned her home, and that it had been given her by the then deceasedcompanion of her days of beauty, were facts so generally admitted as tobe, even as far back as that sixty years ago, no longer a subject ofgossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens of the quarter as acharacter, nor her house as a "feature." It would have passed all Creolepowers of guessing to divine what you could find worthy of inquiryconcerning a retired quadroon woman; and not the least puzzled of allwould have been the timid and restive Madame Delphine herself.