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!
Last winter I was invited to a view (sounds like a picture exhibit!)
of the trousseau and wedding gifts of a fashionable young lady. I was
stunned with amazement! A large room filled to overflowing with glass,
china, silver, mirrors, everything a body could require, and a vast array
of utterly useless articles! and the trousseau which the tired mother,
who has had nervous prostration ever since, spent months accumulating in
Paris. My gracious! the best _blanchisseuse_ in the land could not cope
successfully with all that flimsy finery, laces and ribbons. I could only
look and wonder, “What can all this lead to?” (I add here, anticipating
events: It led to an apartment and one maid servant.) The young man was
a salaried clerk, and the young girl utterly unfit to care for even the
superabundance of china and silver, so much more than they could possibly
find use for in a three-story house, not to mention a six-room apartment
and “light housekeeping.” I wonder if the whirligig of time won’t bring
back some of the simplicity of my day?
Already it is the style to “fire out of sight” the useless bric-a-brac
ornaments that twenty years ago cluttered up drawing rooms till one had
to pick her way carefully lest she stumble over a blue china cat, or tilt
over a bandy-leg table covered with ivory idols and Chinese mandarins
with bobbing heads. Some of the most fashionable drawing rooms to-day
are already so stripped of furniture one has to wander around quite a
bit to find a chair to sit on; not even a pier mirror to prink before,
nor a parlor clock, flanked by “side pieces,” on the mantel. All that
banished for stunning simplicity. Not so, however, the costumes and
entertainments, which are becoming, so it seems to a near-sighted old
lady, more and more luxurious. Perhaps this extreme (we all dote on
extremes) of simplicity will come to take the place of many other equally
absurd extremes of the present day. _Qui vivra verra._
XIII
A COUNTRY WEDDING IN 1846
We missed the train! and here we were in the old Bayou Sara Hotel,
looking for some kind of locomotion. We had eighteen miles to make, and
if the _Belle Creole_ had made the run we would have been all right,
but the _Belle Creole_ was not a flier; it had no time for arrivals or
departures; it just jogged along at its own good will, answering every
call, running all sorts of antics up and down the river. Dick started out
to see what he could do.
I sat on the dirty porch, looking through November china trees towards
the river. Is there anything more depressing than a view of china trees
in November? The pretty, fragrant, blue flowers long gone, and the
mocking birds (nobody ever heard of English sparrows then!) that had
drunk their fill of intoxicating liquor from the scattering china berries
were gone too. The train we had missed, the dear old _Belle Creole_
always missed, was a kind of private affair. The whole outfit, about
twenty miles of track, the lumbering cars, the antiquated engines, and
I think, too, the scattering woods that supplied the fuel were all the
private property of the McGehees. The McGehees had a cotton factory in
the neighborhood of Woodville, twenty miles from the river. They had one
train, cheap and dirty, that made one trip a day, going with freight
very early in the morning, returning later, with freight and one small
passenger car for the owner’s use. This concern stopped for wood and
water and nothing else, and was the only means of transport for “casuals”
like ourselves from the river to Woodville. Ladies going back and forth
and gentlemen of leisure used their own conveyance, a turtle-back affair
that was entered by a row of steps. The dear _Belle Creole_ was too much
of a convenience to have a time table, so it was useless to construct a
time table and plan to “connect” with that equally free and easy train.
Some disgruntled chap chalked on an unused car, left on the rails as a
depot, “We belong to the McGehees, and go when we please.”
Well, to make the matter short, though it was long to me, on that dirty
porch by the china trees, Dick found a man with a turtle-top coach, and
a harness mended by cords and stakes and bits of rawhide. The man had a
mended look, too, but he was sober, and for a good, round sum agreed
to take us to Laurel Hill. Laurel Hill, where we proposed to go, was
a post office station, about ten miles from Woodville and four miles
across country. We meandered along, tired and out of all patience. At
the date of this tramp I was a little girl and not given to moralizing.
When we arrived at Laurel Hill we were told, “Creek is up; been a big
rain somewhere; not even a horseman has crossed all day.” There was no
accommodation for man or beast at the queer little depot, no place to sit
and nothing to sit on. It was long after dark, and there was no one to
tell us the story of the high water but a negro man, who was shutting up
the one door of the building. There was nothing left us but to go to the
nearest plantation house and ask for lodgings.
I was so tired I felt we had gone ten miles further when we reached Major
Dick Haile’s, though it really was only a few miles. The tired horses
and the sleepy driver made slow work. There was a gate and an opening,
but the house was pitch dark, every door closed and everybody apparently
asleep. The nags were willing to stand, unhitched, beside the fence; not
an automobile or flying machine could have scared them; they were asleep,
too.
After much knocking and calling at what seemed to be the door of
entrance, an old gentleman, candle in hand and very scantily dressed,
demanded to know what was wanted. My brother called that we were on our
way to the General’s, and we could not cross the creek, so we begged the
privilege of a lodging for the night.
“General’s for the wedding? Come right in.” A brighter light was
procured, and before we were seated in the reception room we heard the
hospitable voice, “Put your carriage under the shed, give those horses a
good feed, then come to the kitchen and get a bite for yourself.” The two
young daughters came in, hurriedly dressed (people did not have bathrobes
and wrappers seventy years ago). I was awfully tired and awfully sleepy,
and I began to think our lodgings were to be parlor chairs, long before
the dining room door was opened, and the genial old gentleman, in night
shirt and trousers, led the way to the table. We had fried chicken, hot
cornbread, coffee, cakes, and I don’t know what else. It would take me
back forty years to see a cook roused at midnight, to prepare such a
meal. I presume she even took herself to the roost and caught her young
chicken by the legs and wrung its neck before she reached the newly-made
fire. Major Haile knew we had not broken our fast at the town hotel.
It was late the following day when we all assembled to just as fine a
breakfast, and heard the major say, “Your ‘turnout’ is gone. I sent to
see about the condition of the creek; it goes down about as fast as it
rises. When you are rested my carriage is at your disposal. Your driver
was not used to these roads, but mine knows every crossing in the creek.”
It was a four-mile drive, even after we had crossed the waters. The
wedding house we found in commotion. There were no caterers or experts
even in New Orleans in 1846. The wedding supper was in process of
preparation, under the superintendence of a noted old cakemaker from
Woodville, nine miles off. Everybody was busy; only General McCausland,
the dear old master of the house, was quietly seated by his parlor
window, a very old man, but a soldier withal, who could rise to
emergencies when required. I drew up a chair and explained our delay, and
told him how grandly hospitable his neighbor was. The two old men were
the last remaining ones of their company of the battle of New Orleans.
Their homes were in payment from the Government for their services. The
dear old gentlemen said they were neither general nor major; they were
simple soldiers who had discharged their services and accepted their
pay. Both the men were Irish, both poor boys. They worked hard, soon
exhausted the old red soil of their neighborhood.
Later the General moved his workmen to the river bottoms, so that,
while living for health’s sake in the old home, the house of which he
originally helped to build, his income came from Bayou Fordoche, many
miles away.
Time flew; neighbors had arrived, the table was spread in the long
back porch. The guests, many of them, lived miles and miles away, in
common country roads, often through dense woods—a long drive under best
circumstances, a perilous one at night, everybody waiting, everybody
in a hurry, everybody getting tired and fretful. It was long after the
appointed time, and the New Orleans preacher had missed the train! Old
Dilsey in the kitchen was mad because her pig was getting too brown;
Elfey in the porch worrying that her ice cream was waiting too long;
ladies in the parlor trying to kill time; men wandering around the front
yard in restless groups. Carriages had been to the depot; no appearance
of Mr. Jahleel Woodbridge, the New Orleans minister. He was endeared to
the family, had been for years their minister at Woodville. Bride, in
all her regal attire, upstairs in tears; no Presbyterian preacher nearer
than ten miles away. So we waited and waited. At last the General sent
for his especial groom, ordered him to take the buggy and go four miles
through the woods, where there was a Methodist itinerant, and tell him to
come without delay to marry the couple.
The accommodating preacher came, just as he was. He had been plowing
his field, and his wife, off to see a sick child, had carried the keys
with her. He could not even get a clean handkerchief, but he came in his
workaday suit. The company hastily assembled. He performed the ceremony,
gave them his blessings, and congratulated her on her “escape from the
quicksands and shoals of celibacy.” Recognizing his own condition at
the time, he begged to be excused from refreshments, and took a rapid
and hurried departure. The kindly man was scarce gone when Mr. Jahleel
Woodbridge arrived in a coach, most astonishingly like the one we had
used the previous day. Only a year or two later the hospitable Major
passed away; shortly after the General followed him, and the dear old
homes have passed away also from the face of the earth.
XIV
THE BELLES AND BEAUX OF FORTY
Do not think I mean to imply the belles and beaux of which I am about to
speak were forty years old, but they had their butterfly existence in
the year 1840. Some, no doubt, fluttered around before, and a few after
that date, but they all were of that era of simple life that, alas! is of
the distant past—a host, as Auctioneer Beard used to say when parading
his goods, “too multitudinous to particularize.” In the first place, the
costumes, as well as the customs of society, were so different from those
of the present day that they marshal before my mind’s eye almost like a
fancy dress parade.
Miss Ellen Johnson, who became later the wife of William B. Walker (of
the firm of Woodlief & Walker), and her sister, Malvina, wife of our
celebrated Dr. Warren Stone, wore the most beautiful curls—wore them long
after that style ceased to be _haut ton_. I have some “Moniteurs des
Dames” of that early date that afford insight into costumes then worn.
The long pointed waist, chuck full of real, hard, stiff whalebones (all
the whalebones must have been used up then; nobody can find one now),
corset also whaleboned to the limit, laced at the back and with literally
a board up the front, at least three inches wide—a real board, apple
tree wood preferred, hard and stiff and unyielding. Ladies so girded
up walked and stood and sat, too, like drum majors; no round, stooping
shoulders; one just had to stand straight, with an apple tree board as a
constant reminder. I used even to hear that in cases where the poise had
a tendency to lapse it was not unusual for the victim to wear the corset
night and day.
The tournure of 1840 was buried in such oblivion that it requires one to
be almost eighty years old to drag it forth and display its hideousness,
explain its construction. The tournure, called “tchuny” for short, was
long and round, the size and shape of the biggest kind of a rolling pin,
such as your cook uses for pastry. The ends, however, tapered to points,
which met and were secured in front of the waist. It was stuffed with
moss, or cotton, or hair, I don’t know what, for the monstrosity “came
ready-made” from France. Over this awful precipice the full gathered
dress skirt fell in rippling cascades. I remember a chiné silk, an
indistinct, plaided purple and green; it was ruffled to the waist, and
over the tchuny it hung in irregular folds. To my childhood’s eye it
was most graceful and beautiful. Good-by, tchuny! I am sure you will
never resurrect. Your reign was disastrous to taste. You lived one short
decade; without a mourner when you departed. Good-by, tchuny!
Whatever did become of chiné silks? Can it be possible they are back on
the counters masquerading under another name? I never see a silk now that
bears any resemblance to the pretty chiné of 1840. Nor do I see tarletans
of that date. It required a whole piece (or bolt) of that goods for a
dress. It had to have at least three skirts, one over the other, to give
the diaphanous effect. Such sweet, simple dresses they were, too. Miss
Mary Jane Matthews, a belle of the forties, wore a pink tarletan, trimmed
with wreaths of small white roses, that was an inspiration. One very
striking one comes to mind, gold colored, garnished with red hollyhocks!
I think some Western girl must have sported that; it was scarcely simple
enough for Creole taste.
Emma Shields was a noted beauty. I recall a plaster bust of Queen
Victoria, idealized beyond all reason or recognition, one of my brothers
kept on a shelf in his room. He adored it because he saw a resemblance
to beautiful Emma Shields. She, poor girl, married unfortunately, and
dropped suddenly out of sight. About the same time an accidental flourish
of a feather duster knocked Queen Victoria off the shelf—and smashed my
brother’s idol.
Don’t I recall as though he stood before me this minute, on my father’s
balcony, Mr. Peter Anderson? Tall and thin and angular (he imagined
he looked like Henry Clay, and he was of similar build), dressed in
what was known as moleskin, a tan-colored goods looking strangely like
rough-finished kid, the trousers so skin-tight and so firmly strapped
under the shoe that he had to assume a sitting posture with considerable
deliberation and care.
Here comes Adolphus Hamilton, a quiet eligible, more known in business
than in social circles, but the far-seeing mammas kept an eye on him,
he was such a _bon parti_. One fine day he surprised these mammas by
arriving with his bride from a trip to Natchez. Henry Hollister, too, was
a business man who made few social calls, but was in evidence at all the
dances. A few years ago I met his daughter at a summer resort. She was
prodigiously amused that papa, now hobbling about with a gouty foot and
stout cane, ever could have been a dancing beau.
George W. Kendall went off one fine day, to what he proposed would be a
kind of picnic, in the wilds of Western Texas. His Santa Fe expedition
spun out a longer and more varied experience than he contemplated,
of which his graphic account, now unhappily out of print, is most
entertaining. He married in France, and in Texas during the war we
met him, after a lapse of many years. He had founded the town of New
Braunfels, near San Antonio, and retired, full of years, and full of
interest in the rough life around him, so different from the New Orleans
of his earlier days and the Paris of his gayer ones.
The Miltenberger brothers were never old. They danced and made themselves
admired through several generations of belles. The “sere and yellow leaf”
could never be applied to a Miltenberger. Evergreens were they, game to
the last, for no doubt they are all gone, and the places that knew them
will know them no more.
A. K. Josephs, a lawyer of some note and a very acceptable visitor, was
a replica in the way of flowered waistcoat and dangling chains of a
prominent man of his race in England, Disraeli. Don’t I see a bird of
paradise waistcoat? Indeed I do. And also a waistcoat of similar style
sent to another prominent beau of the period, a black satin confection,
with gorgeous peacocks embroidered on the ample front. I don’t think
the recipient of that garment ever appeared in it. Flamboyant as were
the waistcoats of that day, a peacock with spread tail was the limit.
They are all dead, those belles and beaux of the forties. The old lady
chronicler could expect nothing else of these folks she loves to remember
and talk of to children and grandchildren, who listen with becoming
patience, no doubt often thinking, “Dear grandma must be nearing her
dotage.”
XV
AS IT WAS IN MY DAY
I am like the deaf old lady who, when asked why she took a box at the
opera when she could not hear, replied, “I can see.” So it is on piazzas
at summer hotels, I do not overhear remarks, so perforce the pleasure of
gossip is denied me, but “I can see,” and no doubt do observe more than
those who have the other faculty to play upon; also I see and moralize.
Last summer in the mountains didn’t I see young girls, young society
girls, educated girls who ought to have known better, with bare heads and
bare arms playing tennis in the hot sun; and, worse still, racing over
the golf links? I could see them from my window, equally exposed, chasing
balls and flourishing clubs. The sun in August is pitiless even on those
breezy mountains, so I was scarcely surprised when one young girl was
overcome by heat and exposure, and was brought to her mother at the hotel
in a passing grocer’s cart or lumber wagon. I tell my grandchildren who
want to “do like other girls” that is not the way “other girls” did in
my day. Grandma may be so old that she forgets, but she moralizes all the
same. These athletic girls come back to city homes so sunburnt and with
such coarse skin they have to repair to a skin specialist, and have the
rough cuticle burnt off with horrid acids, and be polished up before the
society season opens.