_How De Moulin Comes to Flirt at the Quadroon Ball but Remains to Fight_
I
The lady in the moon, at ease in her airy chariot, gazed downward with
smiling eyes. Far beneath her lay the city of New Orleans, picturesque
enough by day, but even more so by night, with the one lone spire of St.
Louis praying silently to the stars.
Here could be seen the old gardens of the Faubourg Ste. Marie, with its
parterres of jonquils and hyacinths smiling in the silvery glow, and its
groups of lagustrums and laurestines vaguely delineated in the black
shadows of the acacia thickets. Here could be caught dazzling glimpses of
the walks of gleaming pounded shell, winding through groves of magnolias
with buds as white as the moon itself, and flowering orange trees. And
from each fairy-haunted garden is wafted aloft on the balmy night air the
myriad scents and odors of nature’s efflorescent masterpieces, to delight
the senses of the immortals on high.
And her celestial ladyship peers down on the sparkling waters of the
Gulf, and continually kisses its face, and with magnificent impartiality
distributes her favors, as well, on the broad bosom of the restless,
sullen, ever-changing Mississippi—that Titan of many moods—and the
youngest of the watery trinity, Lake Pontchartrain; and does not even
neglect the more modest, lagoon-like bayous, unexpectedly scattered,
here and there, on the marge of the virginal forests. And the personage
in the Moon smiles tenderly.
On Ste. Philippe Street, in a broad, white-brick theater, honeycombed
with gambling dens, ablaze with light, and made conspicuous by the
two huge wrought-iron lanterns hanging pendant on either side of the
entrance, a theater ball is in progress.
The Philippe Street Theater, like that of Condè Street, is, as all the
world knows, one of those celebrated edifices of amusement wherein are
held the brilliant quadroon balls which are the talk of half the South.
What, you have not heard of the quadroon, _mon ami? Nom d’un nom!_ What
deplorable ignorance! The quadroon caste, _mon pauvre ami_, are descended
from the merry chevaliers of the colonial military Frenchmen, grown
coarsened by intimate contact with Spanish-American frontier life, and,
on the other hand, from the most comely specimens of the less negroidal
types of the newly brought-over slaves, bought at the auction-block
of New Orleans. And now, after perhaps seventy or eighty years, their
half-caste female descendants, one-fourth negro though they are, are
among the most beautiful of all the beauties of this lotus land of the
South; and, truth to tell, oftentimes are hardly recognizable for the
class they are.
The balls? Ah, the balls that were gotten up for them! What beauty! What
gayety! What elegance! What a brilliant attendance! The quadroon balls
alone were sufficient to give New Orleans a unique place in history.
How often would the aristocrats, the Creole gentry, desert their friends
at the fashionable Theatre d’Orleans to spend the rest of the evening
at the equally exclusive, quadroon theater balls! Here were to be found
the flower of the masculine world of Little Paris—planters, officials,
gentlemen of leisure, merchants, bankers—scions of the proudest names in
Louisiana, the “_jeunesse dorée_”—the gilded youth. Were the quadroons
their equals? Of course not! But what would you? When one seeks
amusement....
To have danced, quarreled, and made passionate love at the quadroon
theater ball was as necessary a part of a gentleman’s education as
to have a course in debauchery in Orleans Street, in gambling for
high stakes in Royal Street, or in having fought at least one duel at
Slaughterhouse Point. And it was a pleasureable duty participated in by
every Creole gentleman from his later adolescence to his second childhood.
The theater balls were a habit. As was the masquerade—the Mardi Gras.