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 an excellent person, the neighbors said,--a very
worthy person; and they were, maybe, nearer correct then they knew. They
rarely saw her save when she went to or returned from church; a small,
rather tired-looking, dark quadroone of very good features and a gentle
thoughtfulness of expression which would take long to describe: call it
a widow's look.
In speaking of Madame Delphine's house, mention should have been made of
a gate in the fence on the Royal-street sidewalk. It is gone now, and
was out of use then, being fastened once for all by an iron staple
clasping the cross-bar and driven into the post.
Which leads us to speak of another person.