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.
[Illustration: THE OLD FRENCH OPERA HOUSE.]
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!_
[Illustration: TYPICAL OLD NEW ORLEANS DWELLING.]
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.
[Illustration: A CREOLE PARTERRE.]
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