Chapter XXXIX: A Visit of Tender Memories 320 (2)

I have reason to think at this late date, not hearing to the contrary at the time, that the commodore’s visit was quite amicable and friendly. If he was escorted by Texas warships! or even arrived in his own flagship! I never knew. With his imposing uniform and a huge gilt star on his breast, a sword at his side, and a rather fierce mustache (mustaches were little worn then), he looked as if he were capable of doing mighty deeds of daring, for the enterprising new republic on our border. He was accompanied by his aide, a callow youth, also in resplendent attire, a sword so long and unwieldy he was continually tripping, and therefore too embarrassingly incommoded to circulate among the ladies. I met that “aide,” a real fighter in Texas during the late war. He proudly wore a lone star under the lapel of his coat of Confederate gray, and we had a merry laugh over his naval début. He was Lieut. Fairfax Grey. His sister was the wife of Temple Doswell, and many of her descendants are identified with New Orleans to-day.

Mr. Clay, grand, serene, homely and affable; also Gen. Gaines in his inevitable uniform. The two military and naval officers commanded my admiration, as I sat quietly and unobtrusively in a corner in a way “becoming to a child of nine”—“a chiel amang ye, takin’ notes”—but no one took note of the chiel. We had also a jolly itinerant Irish preacher, I think of the Methodist persuasion, whom my father had met at country camp meetings. His call was to travel, and incidentally preach where the harvest was ripe. I remember how, laughingly, he remarked to my father, anent the commodore’s visit, that the chief inhabitants of Western Texas were mesquite grass and buffaloes. He was father of John L. Moffitt of Confederate fame, and a very attractive daughter became the wife of President Lamar.

There was dance music—a piano only—but the room was too crowded for more than one attempt at a quadrille. The notabilities, army, navy and State, did not indulge in such frivolity. Life was too serious with them.

These functions generally began at 8 and terminated before the proverbial small hours. So by midnight the last petticoat had fluttered away; and then there followed the clearing up, and, as the old lady said, the “reinstating of affairs,” which kept the hostess and her sleepy helpers busy long after the rest of the family had fluttered away also—to the land of Nod.

VII

NEW YEAR’S OF OLD

“When I was young, time had for me the lazy ox’s pace,
But now it’s like the blooded horse that means to win the race.”

Here it is New Year’s Day again. It seems only yesterday when we had such a dull, stupid New Year’s Day. Everybody who was anybody was out of town, at country mansions to flourish with the rich, or to old homesteads to see their folks. Nobody walking the streets, no shops were open. Those of us who had no rich friends with country mansions, or no old homesteads to welcome us, remained gloomily at home, with shades down, servants off for the day, not even a basket for cards tied to the doorknob.

Nobody calls now at New Year’s. It is out of fashion, or, rather, the fashion has descended from parlor to kitchen. When Bridget and Mary don their finery and repair to Bridget’s cousin’s to “receive,” and Sambo puts on a high shirt collar and a stovepipe hat, and sallies out on his round of calls, we have a pick-up dinner, and grandma tries to enliven the family with reminiscences of the New Year’s Days of seventy years ago, when her mother and sister “received” in state, and father and brother donned their “stovepipes” and proceeded to fill the society rôle for the year.

In the forties and for years thereafter, New Year’s Day was the visiting day for the men, and receiving day for the ladies. All the fathers and grandfathers, in their newest rig, stick in hand, trotted or hobbled around, making the only calls they made from year to year. Before noon, ladies were in their parlors, prinked up, pomatumed up, powdered up, to “receive.” Calling began as early as 11, for it was a short winter day, and much to be accomplished. A small stand in the hall held a card receiver, into which a few cards left from last year’s stock were placed, so the first caller might not be embarrassed with the fact that he was the first. No one cared to be the very first then, any more than now.

A table of generous dimensions occupied a conspicuous position in the parlor (we never said “drawing room”), with silver tray, an immense and elaborately decorated cake and a grand bowl of foaming eggnog. That was chiefly designed for the beaux. On the dining room sideboard (we did not say “buffet,” either) a brandy straight or whisky straight was to be found for those walking-stick ones whose bones were stiff and whose digestion could not brook the fifty different concoctions of eggnog they were liable to find in the fifty different houses. Those varied refreshments, which every caller was expected to at least taste, often worked havoc on the young and spry, to say nothing of the halt and lame.

There were no flower decorations. It was the dead season for plants, and Boston greenhouses were not shipping carloads of roses and carnations to New Orleans in the ’40s. Rooms were not darkened, either, to be illuminated with gas or electricity, but windows were thrown wide open to the blessed light of a New Year’s Day. Little _cornets_ of bonbons and _dragées_ were carelessly scattered about. Those cornucopias, very slim and pointed, containing about a spoonful of French confections, were made of stiff, shiny paper, gaudily colored miniatures of impossible French damsels ornamenting them. I have not seen one of those pretty trifles for sixty years. It was quite the style for a swain to send his Dulcinea a _cornet_ in the early morning. If the Dulcinea did not happen to receive as many as she wanted, she could buy a few more. One liked to be a Belle!

Living in Canal Street, a little girl was unconsciously taking notes that blossom now in a chronicle of the doings and sayings of those New Year’s Days of the early ’40s. She enjoyed looking through the open window, onto the broad, unshaded street, watching an endless procession of callers. There were rows of fashionable residences in Canal Street to be visited, and the darting in and out of open doors, as though on earnest business bent, was a sight. The men of that day wore skin-tight pantaloons (we did not call them trousers), often made of light-colored materials. I clearly remember a pea green pair that my brother wore, flickering like a chameleon in and out of open street doors. Those tight-fitting pantaloons were drawn taut over the shoe, a strong leather strap extending under the foot buckled the garment down good and tight, giving the wearer as mincing a gait as the girl in the present-day hobble skirt. The narrow clawhammer coat with tails that hung almost to the knees behind and were scarcely visible in front, had to have the corner of a white handkerchief flutter from the tail pocket.

Military men like Gen. E. P. Gaines (he was in his zenith at that date) and all such who could sport a military record wore stiff stocks about their long necks. Those stocks made the necks appear abnormally long. They were made of buckram (or sheet iron?), so broad that three straps were required to buckle them at the back, covered with black satin, tiny satin bows in front which were utterly superfluous, for they tied nothing and were not large enough to be ornamental. The stocks must have been very trying to the wearers, for they could not turn their heads when they were buckled up, and, like the little boy with the broad collar, could not spit over them. However, they did impart a military air of rigidity and stiffness, as though on dress parade all the time.

I remember Major Waters had a bald spot on the top of his head and two long strands of sandy hair on each side which he carefully gathered up over the bald spot and secured in place by the aid of a side comb! I used to wish the comb would fall out, to see what the major would do, for I was convinced he could not bend his head over that stiff, formidable stock. The major won his title at the battle of River Rasin (if you know where that is, I don’t). My father was in the same battle, but being only seventeen he did not win a title. I don’t suppose that River Rasin engagement amounted to much anyway, for dear pa did not wear a stock, nor a military bearing, either. Gen. Persifor Smith was another stock man who called always at New Year’s and at no other time. And Major Messiah! Dear me, how many of us remember him in the flesh, or can forget the cockaded, epauletted portrait he left behind when he fought his last life’s battle?

All the men wore tall silk hats that shone like patent leather. Those hats have not been banished so long ago that all of us have forgotten their monstrosity, still to be seen now and then in old daguerreotypes or _cartes de visite_. They flocked in pairs to do their visiting. It would be a Mardi Gras nowadays to see one of those old-time processions. Men of business, men of prominence, no longer society men, fulfilled their social duty once each year, stepped into the dining room at a nod from mother, who was as rarely in the parlor to “receive,” as the men who, at the sideboard, with a flourish of the hand and a cordial toast to the New Year, took a brandy straight. They are long gone. Their sons, the beaux of that day, quietly graduated from the eggnog to the sideboard, become even older men than their fathers, are gone, too.

I remember a very original, entertaining beau of those days saying eggnog was good enough for him, and when he felt he was arriving at the brandy-straight age he meant to kill himself. How would he know when the time for hari-kari came? “When my nose gets spongy.” He had a very pronounced Hebrew nose, by the way. Not so many years ago I heard of him hobbling on crutches. Not only his nose, but his legs were spongy, but he gave no indication that life was not as dear to him as in his salad days.

The younger element, beaux of my grown-up sister, rambled in all day long, hat in hand, with “A happy New Year,” a quaff of eggnog, “No cake, thanks,” and away like a flash, to go into house after house, do and say the same things, till night would find they had finished their list of calls and eggnog had about finished them. So the great day of the year wore on.

After the house doors were closed at the flirt of the last clawhammer coat tail, cards were counted and comments made as to who had called and who had failed to put in appearance, the wreck of glasses, cake and tray removed, and it was as tired a set of ladies to go to bed as of men to be put into bed.

As the beautiful custom of hospitality spread from the centers of fashion to the outskirts of society the _demi mondaines_, then the small tradesman, then the negroes became infected with the fashion of “receiving” at New Year’s, in their various shady abodes. The bon tons gradually relinquished the hospitable and friendly custom of years. Ladies suspended tiny card receivers on the doorknob, and retired behind closed blinds. Those of the old friends of tottering steps and walking sticks, always the last to relinquish a loved habit, wearily dropped cards into the little basket and passed on to the next closed door. Now the anniversary, instead of being one of pleasant greetings, is as stupid and dull as any day in the calendar, unless, as I have said, one has a friend with a “cottage by the sea” or a château on the hilltop and is also endowed with the spirit of hospitality to ask one to spend the week-end and take an eggnog or a brandy straight.

VIII

NEW ORLEANS SHOPS AND SHOPPING IN THE FORTIES

The shopping region of New Orleans was confined to Chartres and Royal Streets seventy years ago. It was late in the fifties when the first movement was made to more commodious and less crowded locations on Canal Street, and Olympe, the fashionable modiste, was the venturesome pioneer.

Woodlief’s was the leading store on Chartres Street and Barrière’s on Royal, where could be found all the French _nouveautés_ of the day, beautiful _barèges_, Marcelines and chiné silks, organdies stamped in gorgeous designs, to be made up with wreathed and bouquet flounces, but, above and beyond all for utility and beauty, were the imported French calicoes, fine texture, fast colors. It was before the day of aniline and diamond dyes; blues were indigo, reds were cochineal pure and unadulterated; so those lovely goods, printed in rich designs—often the graceful palm-leaf pattern—could be “made over,” turned upside down and hindpart before, indefinitely, for they never wore out or lost color, and were cheap at fifty cents a yard. None but those in mourning wore black; even the men wore blue or bottle green coats, gay flowered vests and tan-colored pantaloons. I call to mind one ultra-fashionable beau who delighted in a pair of sage green “pants.”

The ladies’ toilets were still more gay; even the elderly ones wore bright colors. The first black silk dress worn on the street, and that was in ’49, was proudly displayed by Miss Mathilde Eustis, who had relatives in France who kept her _en rapport_ with the latest Parisian style. Hers was a soft Marceline silk; even the name, much less the article, is as extinct as the _barège_ and _crêpe lisse_ of those far away days. It was at Woodlief’s or Barrière’s these goods were displayed on shelves and counters. There were no show windows, no dressed and draped wax figures to tempt the passerby.

Mme. Pluche’s shop, on the corner of Royal and Conti, had one window where a few trifles were occasionally displayed on the sill or hung, carefully draped on the side, so as not to intercept the light. Madame was all French and dealt only in French importations. Mme. Frey was on Chartres Street. Her specialty (all had specialties; there was no shop room for a miscellaneous stock of goods) was _mantillas_, _visites_, _cardinals_ and other confections to envelop the graceful mesdames _en flânant_. I call to mind a _visite_ of thinnest muslin, heavily embroidered (no Hamburg or machine embroidery in those days), lined with blue silk, blue cords and tassels for a finish. It was worn by a belle of the forties, and Mme. Frey claimed to have imported it. The madame was not French. She had a figure no French woman would have submitted to, a fog-horn voice and a well-defined mustache, but her taste was the best and her dictum in her specialty was final.

The fashionable milliner was Olympe. Her specialty was imported _chapeaux_. She did not—ostensibly, at least—make or even trim _chapeaux_. Olympe’s ways were persuasive beyond resistance. She met her customer at the door with “Ah, madame”—she had brought from Paris the very bonnet for you! No one had seen it; it was yours! And Mam’zelle Adèle was told to bring Mme. X’s _chapeau_. It fit to a _merveille_! It was an inspiration! And so Mme. X had her special bonnet sent home in a fancy box by the hand of a dainty _grisette_. Olympe was the first of her class to make a specialty of delivering the goods. And Monsieur X, though he may have called her “Old Imp,” paid the bill with all the extras of specialty and delivery included, though not itemized. Those were bonnets to shade the face—a light blue satin shirred lengthwise; _crêpe lisse_, same color, shirred crosswise over it, forming indistinct blocks; and a _tout aller_, of raspberry silk, shirred “every which way,” are two that I recall.

Madame a-shopping went followed by a servant to bring home the packages. Gloves, one button only, were light colored, pink, lavender, lemon, rarely white; and for ordinary wear bottle green gloves were considered very _comme il faut_. They harmonized with the green _barège_ veil that every lady had for shopping.

Our shopping trip would be incomplete if we failed to call on an old Scotch couple who had a lace store under Col. Winthrop’s residence on Royal Street. The store had a door and a window, and the nice old parties who had such a prodigious Scotch brogue one would scarcely understand them, could, by a little skill, entertain three customers at one and the same time. If one extra shopper appeared, Mr. Syme disappeared, leaving the old lady to attend to business. She was almost blind from cataract, a canny old soul and not anyways blind to business advantages. I am pleased to add they retired after a few busy years quite well-to-do. There was Seibricht, on Royal Street, a furniture dealer, and still further down Royal Seignoret, in the same lucrative business, for I do not recall they had any competitors. Memory does not go beyond the time when Hyde and Goodrich were not the jewelers; and Loveille, on the corner of Customhouse and Royal, the grocer, for all foreign wines, cheeses, etc. Never do I see such Parmesan as we got from Loveille in my early days.

William McKean had a bookshop on Camp Street, a few doors above Canal. Billy McKean, as the irreverent called him, was a picture of Pickwick, and a clever, kindly old man was he. There was a round table in the rear of his shop, where one found a comfortable chair and a few books to browse over. In my childhood I was always a welcome visitor to that round table, for I always “sat quiet and just read,” as dear old Mr. McKean told me. As I turn the pages of my book of memories not only the names but the very faces of these shopkeepers of seventy years ago come to me, all smiles and winning ways, and way back I fly to my pantalette and pigtail days, so happy in these dreams that will never be reality to any place or people.

There were no restaurants, no lunch counters, no tea rooms, and (bless their dear hearts, who started it!) no woman’s exchange, no place in the whole city where a lady could drop in, after all this round of shopping, take a comfortable seat and order even a sandwich, or any kind of refreshment. One could take an éclair at Vincent’s, corner of Royal and Orleans, but éclairs have no satisfying quality.

There was a large hotel (there may be still—it is sixty years since I saw it), mostly consisting of spacious verandas, up and down and all around, at the lake end of the shellroad, where parties could have a fish dinner and enjoy the salt breezes, but a dinner at “Lake End” was an occasion, not a climax to a shopping trip. The old shellroad was a long drive, Bayou St. John on one side, swamps on the other, green with rushes and palmetto, clothed with gay flowers of the swamp flag. The road terminated at Lake Pontchartrain, and there the restful piazza and well-served dinner refreshed the inner woman.

I am speaking of the gentler sex. No doubt there were myriads of cabarets and eating places for men on pleasure or business bent. Three o’clock was the universal dinner hour, so the discreet _mesdames_ were able to return to the city and be ready by early candlelight for the inevitable “hand round” tea.

Then there was Carrollton Garden (I think it is dead and buried now). There was a short railroad leading to Carrollton; one could see open fields and grazing cattle from the car windows as one crept along. Except a still shorter railroad to the Lake, connecting with the Lake boats, I think the rural road to Carrollton was the only one leading out of the city. The Carrollton hotel, like the Lake one, was all verandas. I never knew of any guest staying there, even one night, but there was a dear little garden and lots of summer houses and pagodas, covered with jasmines and honeysuckle vines. One could get lemonade or orgeat or orange flower syrup, and return to the city with a great bouquet of monthly roses, to show one had been on an excursion. A great monthly rose hedge, true to its name, always in bloom, surrounded the premises. To see a monthly rose now is to see old Carrollton gardens in the forties.

IX

THE OLD FRENCH OPERA HOUSE

It was on Orleans Street, near Royal—I don’t have to “shut my eyes and think very hard,” as the Marchioness said to Dick Swiveller, to see the old Opera House and all the dear people in it, and hear its entrancing music. We had “Norma” and “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Robert le Diable” and “La Dame Blanche,” “Huguenots,” “Le Prophète,” just those dear old melodious operas, the music so thrillingly catchy that half the young men hummed or whistled snatches of it on their way home.

There were no single seats for ladies, only four-seated boxes. The pit, to all appearances, was for elderly, bald gentlemen only, for the beaux, the fashionable eligibles, wandered around in the intermissions or “stood at attention” in the narrow lobbies behind the boxes during the performances. Except the two stage boxes, which were more ample, and also afforded sly glimpses towards the wings and flies, all were planned for four occupants. Also, all were subscribed for by the season. There was also a row of latticed boxes in the rear of the dress circle, usually occupied by persons in mourning, or the dear old _messieurs et mesdames_, who were not chaperoning a _mademoiselle_. One stage box belonged, by right of long-continued possession, to Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert Bullitt. The opposite box was _la loge des lions_, and no less than a dozen lions wandered in and out of it during an evening. Some were blasé and looked dreadfully bored, a few were young and frisky, but every mortal one of them possessed a pompous and self-important mien.

If weather permitted (we had to consider the weather, as everybody walked) and the opera a favorite, every seat would be occupied at 8 o’clock, and everybody quiet to enjoy the very first notes of the overture. All the fashionable young folks, even if they could not play or whistle “Yankee Doodle,” felt the opera was absolutely necessary to their social success and happiness. The box was only five dollars a night, and pater-familias certainly could afford that!

Think of five dollars for four seats at the most fashionable Opera House in the land then, and compare it with five dollars for one seat in the topmost gallery of the most fashionable house in the land to-day. Can one wonder we old people who sit by our fire and pay the bills wag our heads and talk of the degenerate times?

Toilets in our day were simple, too. French muslins trimmed with real lace, pink and blue _barèges_ with ribbons. Who sees a _barège_ now? No need of jeweled stomachers, ropes of priceless pearls or diamond tiaras to embellish those Creole ladies, many of whom were direct descendants of French nobles; not a few could claim a drop of even royal blood.

Who were the beaux? And where are they now? If any are living they are too old to hobble into the pit and sit beside the old, bald men.

It was quite the vogue to saunter into Vincent’s, at the corner, on the way home. Vincent’s was a great place and he treated his customers with so much “confidence.” One could browse about the glass cases of pâtés, _brioches_, éclairs, meringues, and all such toothsome delicacies, peck at this and peck at that, lay a dime on the counter and walk out. A large Broadway firm in New York attempted that way of conducting a lunch counter and had such a tremendous patronage that it promptly failed. Men went for breakfast and shopping parties for lunch, instead of dropping in _en passant_ for an éclair.

As I said, we walked. There were no street cars, no ’buses and precious few people had carriages to ride in. So we gaily walked from Vincent’s to our respective homes, where a cup of hot coffee put us in condition for bed and slumber.

Monday morning Mme. Casimir or Mam’zelle Victorine comes to sew all day like wild for seventy-five cents, and tells how splendidly Rosa de Vries (the prima donna) sang “_Robert, toi que j’aime_” last night. She always goes, “_Oui, madame, toujours_,” to the opera Sunday. Later, dusky Henriette Blondeau comes, with her _tignon_ stuck full of pins and the deep pockets of her apron bulging with sticks of bandoline, pots of pomade, hairpins and a bandeau comb, to dress the hair of mademoiselle. She also had to tell how fine was “Robert,” but she prefers De Vries in “Norma,” “_moi_.” The Casimirs lived in a kind of cubby-hole way down Ste. Anne Street. M. Casimir was assistant in a barber shop near the French Market, but such were the gallery gods Sunday nights, and no mean critics were they. Our nights were Tuesday and Saturday.

Society loves a bit of gossip, and we had a delightful dish of it about this time, furnished us by a denizen of Canal Street. He was “horribly English, you know.” As French was the fashion then, it was an impertinence to swagger with English airs. The John Bull in question, with his wife all decked out in her Sunday war paint and feathers, found a woman calmly seated in his pew at Christ Church, a plainly dressed, common appearing woman, who didn’t even have a flower in her bonnet. The pew door was opened wide and a gesture accompanied it, which the common-looking somebody did not fail to comprehend. She promptly rose and retired into the aisle; a seat was offered her nearer the door of the church, which she graciously accepted. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had asked for a seat in that pew, as she bore a letter of introduction to its occupant. This incident gave us great merriment, for the inhospitable Englishman had been boasting of the coming of Lady Mary. I introduce it here, for it has a moral which gives a Sunday school flavor to my opera reminiscences. Now they have all gone where they are happily singing, I hope, even better than Rosa de Vries, and where there are no doors to the pews.

X

MURAL DECORATIONS AND PORTRAITS OF THE PAST

The pendulum is swinging. Landscape wall papers, after a seventy years’ truce, are on the warpath, to vanquish damask hangings and other fabrics that are traps for moths and dust and microbes, we old-time people aver. Now, in view of the return to favor of landscape wall papers, some elegant, expensive and striking specimens rise in my memory, and clamor to be once more displayed to the public.

I vividly remember a decorated wall at a school under the charge of a superannuated Episcopal clergyman. His aged wife must have possessed considerable artistic ability, for she painted, on the parlor walls, mythological subjects, as befits a school teacher’s, if not a preacher’s, residence. There were Diana and her nymphs (quite modestly wrapped in floating draperies) on one side the room, and opposite, was Aurora in her chariot, driving her team of doves. They were up in the dawning sky, and below was such greenery as I presume old Mrs. Ward thought belonged to the period of gods and goddesses, but it was strangely like the bushes and trees in her own back yard. Various other figures were floating or languishing about. The colors, on the whole, were not brilliant; in fact, artistically subdued. That bit of mural adornment was a curiosity to all. I, a little child, thought it most wonderful, and it was. All these landscape walls had a three or four-foot base of a solid color, surmounted by a band of wood, called in those days “chair boarding.” So the figures came near the level of the eye.

Years after the two old people had joined the immortals, I had occasion to call at the house. It was a great disappointment to find the parlor wall covered with stiff paper, representing slabs of white marble (marble, of all things, in that dingy red-brick house!). Aurora and Diana, and perhaps Calypso, for I imagine the scope was sufficiently extensive to comprise such a picturesque immortal, were buried under simulated marble. A weather-beaten portrait of Major Morgan in full uniform hung right over the spot where Aurora drove her fluttering birds. I looked at the desecration in dismay, when the voice of old black mammy was heard. “Dat is Mars Major in his rag-gi-ments; you never know’d him?” No, I didn’t. “And dat odder portrait over dar” (pointing to a simpering girl with curly hair) “is Miss Merriky ’fore she married de major.” Where are those old portraits now? The whirligig of time has doubtless whirled them away to some obscure closet or garret, where, with faces turned to the wall, they await a time when there will be a general cleaning up or tearing down—then where? _Sic transit!_

I recall, in later life, a wonderful wall paper on the broad hall of Judge Chinn’s house in West Baton Rouge. That was very gay and brilliant, somewhat after the Watteau style, swains playing on impossible instruments to beauties in various listening attitudes; lambs gamboling in the distance, birds flying about amid lovely foliage, horsemen on galloping steeds with extraordinary trappings. How I did love that wall! It was never permitted the family to cover all that glory with “pillars and panels,” for the house, shortly after my visit, was destroyed by fire, and the debonair ladies, prancing steeds and all went up in one great holocaust.

The new house that rose over the ashes was aptly called Whitehall. It was all white, inside and out, broad, dead white walls, grand balconies all around the mansion dead white; white steps led to the lawn, and the trees surrounding had their trunks whitewashed as high as could be reached by a long pole and a brush. All the old portraits and some awful prints (it was long before the chromo era) were fished out of closets and other hiding places and hung about on the white walls. One old man with a tremendously long neck and a stiff black stock to help hold up his head, and a fierce look, had a pair of eyes that looked like great daubs of ink. His portrait decorated the parlor. I was warned not to handle the gilt-edged books and little trinkets on the marble-top center-table, “for your Cousin Christopher will see you; notice, whichever way you turn his eyes will follow you.” I was mortally afraid of that old spook till little black Comfort told me, “Laws! if dem eyes could hurt we’d all be’n daid in dis house.”

At “The Oaks,” Dr. Patrick’s plantation, the wall paper illustrated scenes from China, in colors not gorgeous, like the last mentioned, neither was the house so pretentious. There was no broad, high ceilinged hall to ornament with startling figures that seemed to jump at you. The orderly processions of pigtailed Chinamen in sepia tints could not by any possibility get on one’s nerves. Whole processions wended their way to impossible temples, wedding processions, palanquins, and all that; funeral processions dwindled away to a mere point in the distance, all becomingly solemn, until some of the irrepressible Patrick children, with black pencil, or charcoal, or ink, put pipes into all the mouths and clouds of smoke therefrom spotted the landscape. Moral suasion was the discipline of the Patrick children, so that freak was not probably followed by after-claps, but the Chinese were promptly marched off, and the inevitable white walls were the result.

Family portraits came forth to brighten the room. One notable one that superseded the Chinese wall paper was a full-length portrait of Gov. Poindexter’s (everybody knows “Old Poins” was the first Governor of the State of Mississippi) first wife, who was a sister of Mrs. Patrick. She was a vision of beauty, in full evening dress. Facing her was the glum, “sandy complected” Governor, not one bit fascinated by the sight of his wife’s smiling face.

The fashionable portrait painter of the time was Moïse; it was he who painted the author’s portrait shortly after her marriage. He was a dashing, improvident genius, and many of his portraits were executed to cancel debts. At one time he designed and had made for my husband, in settlement for a loan, a handsome silver lidded bowl with alcohol lamp beneath. It was known as a _pousse café_ and was used to serve hot punch to after-dinner parties. I am glad to say it has survived all the family vicissitudes, and is an honored heirloom, in company with a _repoussé_ silver pitcher, which we won as a prize for cattle at the Louisiana State Fair, described in a later chapter.

At John C. Miller’s place the house was only one story, but it spread over what seemed to be a half acre of land. A square hall, which was a favorite lounging place for everybody, had wall paper delineating scenes from India. Women walked toward the Ganges river, smilingly tripping along with huge water jars on their shoulders, in full view of another woman descending the steps of a temple, with a naked baby, poised aloft, to be thrown into the sacred Ganges. A crocodile ruffled the blue (very blue) waters, with jaws distended, ready to complete the sacrifice. That sacred river seemed to course all around the hall, for on another side were a number of bathers, who appeared to be utterly oblivious of their vicinity to the mother and babe, not to mention the awful crocodile.

The culmination of landscape wall paper must have been reached in the Minor plantation dwelling in Ascension parish. Mrs. Minor had received this plantation as a legacy, and she was so loyal to the donor that the entreaties of her children to “cover that wall” did not prevail. It was after that style of mural decoration was of the past, that I visited the Minors. The hall was broad and long, adorned with real jungle scenes from India. A great tiger jumped out of dense thickets toward savages, who were fleeing in terror. Tall trees reached to the ceiling, with gaudily striped boa constrictors wound around their trunks; hissing snakes peered out of jungles; birds of gay plumage, paroquets, parrots, peacocks everywhere, some way up, almost out of sight in the greenery; monkeys swung from limb to limb; ourang-outangs, and lots of almost naked, dark-skinned natives wandered about. To cap the climax, right close to the steps one had to mount to the story above was a lair of ferocious lions!

I spent hours studying that astonishing wall paper, and I applauded Mrs. Minor’s decision, “The old man put it there; it shall stay; he liked it, so do I.” It was in 1849 I made that never-to-be-forgotten trip to jungle land. The house may still be there; I don’t know; but I warrant that decorated hall has been “done over,” especially if little children ever came to invade the premises. Upon the departure of landscape wall paper, the pendulum swung to depressing simplicity of dead white walls or else “pillared and paneled,” which is scarcely one degree better.

Old portraits and any kind of inartistic picture or print were brought forth to gratify the eye unaccustomed to such monotony. Only a few years ago I asked: “What became of that military epauletted portrait of old Major Messiah that always hung in your mother’s hall when we were children?” “Oh, it was hanging twenty or more years ago in the office of a hardware concern down town. Don’t know where it is now.”

After the war, inquiring for a lot of portraits of various degrees of merit and demerit that disappeared when the Yankees left, we heard that some were in negro cabins in West Feliciana. So they come and are appreciated, those images of loved ones. So they often go, and are despised by those who follow us, and who, perchance, never knew the original. Now the questions arise, will landscape wall papers really return? And in their pristine splendor? Surely the scope in brilliancy and variety could not be excelled. The limit was reached almost seventy years ago, and naturally (I was a child then) comes as vividly to my mind as the counterfeit face of my ancestor with eyes following me all around the room. The tigers and ourang-outangs, even the den of lions and the crocodile of the Ganges, never made my little soul quake like the searching eyes of “my Cousin Christopher.”

XI

THOUGHTS OF OLD

I shall begin to think I am in my second childhood by and by. I have just been reading of a fashionable wedding where the bride and her attendants carried flat bouquets with lace paper frills. I don’t doubt the revival of the _porte bouquet_ will come next, the slender bouquet holders made of filigree silver with a dagger like a short hatpin to stick clear through and secure the bouquet—a chain and ring attached to the holder and all could be hung from the finger. I used to think, a childish looker-on, that it was pretty to see the ladies in a quadrille “balancing to your partners,” “ladies changing,” etc., each with a tight little bouquet in a trim little holder swinging and banging about from the chain.

Later the _porte bouquets_ were abandoned, but the stiff little posies, in their lacy frills, remained. They were symmetrical, a camellia japonica, surrounded by a tiny row of heliotrope, then a row of Grand Duke jasmine, one of violets, finally a _soupçon_ of greenery, and the paper bed. James Pollock had a fund of such rare flowers to draw from, for though the Pollock home down on Royal street was the simplest of old Creole houses, flush on the street, only two steps from the _banquette_ leading into a modest parlor, there was a tiny _parterre_ in the rear, a vision of the most choice collection of plants. How it was managed and cultivated I don’t know, for it was hemmed in on all sides by buildings that intercepted much of the air and almost all of the sun’s rays. Still those camellias, Grand Dukes and violets thrived and bloomed, and delighted the heart of any girl to whom James, the best dancer in society, sent them in one of those tight little bouquets on the eve of a dance.

I have to-day a much larger _parterre_ in my backyard, open to sun and rain and wind, but no amount of coddling brings anything better than dock-weed and tie-grass. I leave it to the climate of my own sunny Southland to explain the problem. The _porte bouquet_ will no doubt come in time. I for one will hail an old friend, if I am “on deck” when it arrives.

Last Christmas what should my granddaughter receive but a mob cap of gold lace! almost exactly like one my mother wore before I can remember. Caps! Every woman when she arrived at middle age, and some who found them becoming at an earlier age, wore caps. My mother was considered very tasty and expert at cap-trimming. She had a papier mâché, or soft wood dummy head—I know she stuck pins into it—on which she fashioned her caps.

Mechlin lace (one rarely sees it now) was considered the fashionable cap lace. Remember cotton laces and Italian laces and machine-made laces were not in existence in those days, neither were Hamburg embroideries and Nottingham curtains, two awful products of to-day; and a thousand other make-believes, cheap and tawdry now. When mother’s fine Mechlin edgings became soiled she “did them up” herself, clapping the damp lace in her hands, pulling out and straightening the delicate edges—drying them without heat; and she had a deft way, too, of what she called “pinching” with her dainty fingers; she knife pleated it. The net foundation was fitted to the wooden head, the lace was attached in folds and frills, and little pink rosebuds or some other tiny flower scattered tastefully here and there. Behold a dress cap! One can imagine the care and taste and time and thought consumed in its manufacture. And how the old lady must have appeared when in full dress!

Many of those dames wore little bunches of black curls to enhance the effect, those tight, stiff little curls that looked like they had been wound on a slate-pencil. Dear Mrs. Leonard Matthews always wore the black curls. Even a few years after the war I met the sweet old lady, curls and all, jet black, tight little curls, and she looked scarcely older than in my earliest recollection of her.

Well, I must return to cap trimmings to tell of a bride. She must have been in the neighborhood of seventy, for she made what her friends called a suitable match with a widower long past that age. They came to the St. Charles Hotel on a kind of honeymoon trip. She decorated her head, oh, ye cherubim and seraphim! with a fussy cap sprinkled with sprays of orange flowers!

I, who revel in a towering white pompadour, have just had the present of a soft silk cap, with frills and bows. I presume it will be useful on the breezy piazzas of the mountains a week hence; but it looks to me now that the caps of our mothers and grandmothers are on the march hitherward. I possess a few “Moniteurs des Dames,” dated in the late forties, that contain pictures and patterns for “bonnets,” as they were called. Who knows but they may be useful yet?

Now, “in regard to” (as a lady we all know prefaces every remark)—“in regard to” frills, in my young days we had to make our own frills. Nobody had dreamed even of machine-made ruchings any more than of vehicles that run all over the streets without the aid of horses. We made our frills of lawn, neatly gathered on to a band, and what is more, they had to be fluted with hot irons. The making was not beyond everybody’s skill, but the “doing up” and fluting was way beyond me, as beyond many others. How queer it is, when we recall to mind the images of people so long absent that they are almost forgotten, the image presents itself, emphasized by some peculiarity of dress or speech. When I think of Dr. Bein’s daughter Susanna, whom I knew and loved so well, it is with the beautifully fluted frill she always wore and so excited my envy. Now, every Biddy in the kitchen and every little darky one sees wandering around wears handsomer frills than Susanna and I ever dreamed of.

Parasols had heavy fringes; so, to show to advantage, they were carried upside down, the ferule end fitted with a ring to be, like the bouquet holders, hung from the finger. My sister had a blue parasol, with pink fringe, that I thought too beautiful for words. How I should laugh at it now!

Best frocks, such as could be utilized for dinners and parties, were made with short sleeves, “caps,” they were called, and tapes sewed in the armholes; long sleeves similarly equipped were tied in under the “caps.” I used to see even party guests take off their sleeves as they put on their gloves to descend to the dancing room. Black, heelless slippers, with narrow black ribbons, wound over the instep, and crossed and recrossed from ankle, way up, over white stockings, were the style; it was a pretty fashion.

I recall the autumn of 1849, when I, a young girl, was at the Astor House, in New York. Coming downstairs one morning to breakfast, how surprised I was at glaring notices posted on walls and doors, “Hop to-night.” You may well believe I was at the hop, though I had no suitable dress. I was only a looker-on.

When I mentioned slippers I recalled that hotel hop, for Mme. Le Vert wore a pink silk dress and pink satin slippers, all laced up and tied up with broad pink ribbons. Nobody had ever seen the like before. Mme. Walton, her mother, was on hand, and hopped, too, just as spry a hop as any young girl. I contrived to sidle along and keep near to Mme. Le Vert, for I was as fascinated as any one of her numerous beaux. Dr. Le Vert, by the way, had just started on a trip to Europe for his health. Going to Europe then was like taking a trip to Mars now.

I heard Mme. Le Vert talking to four different swains in four different languages. I believe she considered her linguistic versatility her strong point. She surely was a most remarkable woman. She was as tender and sweet to me, a very plain, simple, unattractive girl, as to her swellest friends. One does not easily forget such an episode of early life. I never met Mme. Le Vert after that autumn. We all returned South together on the Crescent City, the pioneer steamer between New York and New Orleans.

I will not moralize or sermonize over these reminiscences. They are all of the dead past. Both fashions and people are gone.

XII

WEDDING CUSTOMS THEN AND NOW

We were lingering about the breakfast table having such a comfortable, chatty review of the last night’s party, when a familiar voice was heard. “Oh! congratulate me; we have captured him; they are engaged.” That was the first time I had ever heard an “announcement” from headquarters. It was made to Mrs. Slocomb, in her library. There followed many amusing particulars, audible to us, in the adjoining room, but we were discreet young girls; perhaps that was one reason we were among the very few invited to the wedding, which so quickly followed the engagement that it was a complete surprise to the whole community.

Sixty years ago only Catholics went to the sanctuary for a wedding ceremony. Protestant weddings were home affairs, necessarily confined to family and nearest friends. Houses being limited in space, company was limited in number. No city house could boast of a ballroom; few had “double parlors.”

At the wedding whose “announcement” was such a surprise to us, I think our family and the Slocombs were the only guests, except the families of the groom’s business associates. The idea of having a grand reception to announce a marriage engagement, to which everybody who is anybody is invited, was unheard of. The anxiety, too, of the parties interested to get the news in a suitable form in the daily papers, for the butcher boy and the sewing girl, out of the social swim, to read, accompanied by the genealogies of the engaged people, the wealth of the girl and how she came by it, and the numbers of clubs of which the young man is a member, as though the money and the clubs were “the chief end of man”, was unheard of, too. We did things on a very different scale sixty years ago!

I recall my astonishment when Elèna Longer told me her sister Héda was married the night before, for Elèna and I (we were ten years old at the time) had played together all that day of the wedding, and not a hint was imparted to me of the impending event. I had not even heard the name of Mr. Charles Kock, the fiancé, mentioned. There were already six married daughters, with hosts of children, at that time in the Longer family, so there could have been little room on such an occasion for outsiders, even if their presence had been desired.

Wedding presents were not made, either. The first time we saw a display of wedding gifts, how surprised we were, and how we wondered as to how it happened! There were not many, nor were they expensive, so for ever so long I could have given the list and the names of the donors. Dear Maria Shute, who, as I remember, was the bridesmaid, presented a pearl-handled paper cutter! That article might have escaped my memory, along with the others, but years after that wedding I met Maria, then Mrs. Babcock, and we talked of it all, and had a merry laugh over the paper cutter.

Fifty-eight years ago, when I married, I was surprised by a solitary wedding present, a napkin ring! From the most unexpected source it came. The giver is long since dead and gone; dead and gone also is the napkin ring.

At the wedding of Caroline Hennen to Mr. Muir, the first I ever attended, there were not a dozen guests, but the rooms were filled, indeed the Hennen family easily filled one of them. At this wedding we met Mr. William Babcock from New York, a forty-niner en route to California (this was in 1849). The following day I went with him to call on and introduce him to his young cousin, an intimate friend of mine he was desirous of meeting. She was of that handsome family of Smiths, a niece of Mrs. Labouisse. I never saw either him or her afterwards, for within the following fortnight they quietly married and started “round the Horn” to San Francisco. More than fifty years after I saw their children and grandchildren in California.

Some of us must remember genial, gossipy Mrs. Garnet Duncant, the _bon vivant_, so bright, so fat and so entertaining? She it was who called one day (sixty years ago) to tell us Amelia Zacharie had married her invalid cousin, and sailed away with him. Those two are the only cases I recall of wedding trips, and both were permanent trips, for there was no intention of a return to New Orleans of either couple. It was the fashion for the newly-mated to remain quietly in the home nest, until one of their very own be made ready for their reception.

James Pollock, I recall to mind, made a late appearance (in 1850) at a dance given by the Lanfears, on Julia street, that old “13 Buildings.” The Lanfears were the last to leave that once fashionable row. Pollock swept in late, full of apologies. His sister Mana had married that evening and he was detained.

The only other wedding trip I can chronicle was one where the bridegroom went alone. Do you remember what an excitement there was, years ago, when a wealthy young man disappeared from the side of his bride the morning after the wedding? There were no wires or wireless then to facilitate the hunt, undertaken with frantic haste, and continuing two mortally anxious weeks. He was eventually discovered, in a semi-conscious, dazed condition, on a wharfboat at Baton Rouge, or some such river town. He recovered from that attack, to be blown away by another “brain storm” a few years later. It was twenty years after this second disappearance that the courts pronounced him dead, and the widow permitted to administer on the estate.

In those days old maids were rare. Every girl, so to say, married. The few exceptions served to emphasize the rarity of an unmated female.

Divorces were so rare when I was young that they were practically unknown in polite circles. I know of cases, and you would know of them, too, if I mentioned names, where men sent their erring or cast-off wives, not to Coventry, but to Paris, and made them stay there. One such died in Paris lately at the age of ninety-five, who was packed off, under a cloud of suspicion. There was no divorce, no open scandal. She simply went and stayed! He simply stayed!