Old Creole Days | Page 2

And this is likely to be all the information you get--not that they would
not tell, but they cannot grasp the idea that you wish to know--until,
possibly, just as you are turning to depart, your informant, in a single
word and with the most evident non-appreciation of 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
in former years, when the houses of this region generally stood farther
apart, and that garden comprised the whole square.
Here dwelt, sixty years ago and more, one Delphine Carraze; or, as she
was commonly designated by the few who knew her, Madame
Delphine. That she owned her home, and that it had been given her by
the then deceased companion of her days of beauty, were facts so
generally admitted as to be, even as far back as that sixty years ago, no
longer a subject of gossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens
of the quarter as a character, nor her house as a "feature." It would have
passed all Creole powers of guessing to divine what you could find
worthy of inquiry concerning a retired quadroon woman; and not the
least puzzled of all would have been the timid and restive Madame
Delphine herself.
CHAPTER II.
MADAME DELPHINE.
During the first quarter of the present century, the free quadroon caste

of New Orleans was in its golden age. Earlier generations--sprung,
upon the one hand, from the merry gallants of a French colonial
military service which had grown gross by affiliation with
Spanish-American frontier life, and, upon the other hand from comely
Ethiopians culled out of the less negroidal types of African live goods,
and bought at the ship's side with vestiges of quills and cowries and
copper wire still in their head-dresses,--these earlier generations, with
scars of battle or private rencontre still on the fathers, and of servitude
on the manumitted mothers, afforded a mere hint of the splendor that
was to result from a survival of the fairest through seventy-five years
devoted to the elimination of the black pigment and the cultivation of
hyperian excellence and nymphean grace and beauty. Nor, if we turn to
the present, is the evidence much stronger which is offered by the
_gens de couleur_ whom you may see in the quadroon quarter this
afternoon, with "Ichabod" legible on their murky foreheads through a
vain smearing of toilet powder, dragging their chairs down to the
narrow gateway of their close-fenced gardens, and staring shrinkingly
at you as you pass, like a nest of yellow kittens.
But as the present century was in its second and third decades, the
quadroones (for we must contrive a feminine spelling to define the
strict limits of the caste as then established) came forth in splendor. Old
travellers spare no terms to tell their praises, their faultlessness of
feature, their perfection of form, their varied styles of beauty,--for there
were even pure Caucasian blondes among them,--their fascinating
manners, their sparkling vivacity, their chaste and pretty wit, their grace
in the dance, their modest propriety, their taste and elegance in dress. In
the gentlest and most poetic sense they were indeed the sirens of this
land where it seemed "always afternoon"--a momentary triumph of an
Arcadian over a Christian civilization, so beautiful and so seductive
that it became the subject of special chapters by writers of the day more
original than correct as social philosophers.
The balls that were got up for them by the male sang-pur were to that
day what the carnival is to the present. Society balls given the same
nights proved failures through the coincidence. The magnates of
government,--municipal, state, federal,--those of the army, of the

learned professions and of the clubs,--in short, the white male
aristocracy in every thing save the ecclesiastical desk,--were there.
Tickets were high-priced to insure the exclusion of the vulgar. No
distinguished stranger was allowed to miss them. They were beautiful!
They were clad in silken extenuations from the throat to the feet, and
wore, withal, a pathos in their charm that gave them a family likeness
to innocence.
Madame Delphine, were you not a stranger, could have told you all
about it; though hardly, I suppose, without tears.
But at the time of which we would speak (1821-22) her day of splendor
was set, and her husband--let us call him so for her sake--was long dead.
He was an American, and, if we take her word for it, a man of noble
heart and extremely handsome; but this is knowledge which we can do
without.
Even in those days the house was always shut, and Madame Delphine's
chief occupation and end in life seemed to be to keep well locked up
in-doors. She was