Category: Novels

Madame Delphine

A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal street, the central avenue of the city, and to that corner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of the arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant merchan...

Chapters

15. Chapter 15

Père Jerome, pausing on a street-corner in the last hour of sunlight, had wiped his brow and taken his cane down from under his arm to start again, when somebody, coming noisele...

5. Chapter 5

About two months after the conversation just given, and therefore somewhere about the Christmas holidays of the year 1821, Père Jerome delighted the congregation of his little c...

8. Chapter 8

A quiet footstep, a grave new presence on financial sidewalks, a neat garb slightly out of date, a gently strong and kindly pensive face, a silent bow, a new sign in the Rue Tou...

6. Chapter 6

Yet surprise could hardly have been altogether absent, for though another Sunday had not yet come around, the slim, smallish figure sitting in a corner, looking very much alone,...

4. Chapter 4

The roundest and happiest-looking priest in the city of New Orleans was a little man fondly known among his people as Père Jerome. He was a Creole and a member of one of the cit...

13. Chapter 13

One afternoon, some three weeks after Capitaine Lemaitre had called on Madame Delphine, the priest started to make a pastoral call and had hardly left the gate of his cottage, w...

7. Chapter 7

Madame Delphine sold one of the corner lots of her property. She had almost no revenue, and now and then a piece had to go. As a consequence of the sale, she had a few large ban...

12. Chapter 12

"_Ah! ma piti sans popa_! Ah! my little fatherless one!" Her faded bonnet fell back between her shoulders, hanging on by the strings, and her dropped basket, with its "few lill'...

14. Chapter 14

The Saturday following was a very beautiful day. In the morning a light fall of rain had passed across the town, and all the afternoon you could see signs, here and there upon t...

3. Chapter 3

He was one of those men that might be any age,--thirty, forty, forty-five; there was no telling from his face what was years and what was only weather. His countenance was of a...

16. Chapter 16

The second Saturday afternoon following was hot and calm. The lamp burning before the tabernacle in Père Jerome's little church might have hung with as motionless a flame in the...

9. Chapter 9

She was just passing seventeen--that beautiful year when the heart of the maiden still beats quickly with the surprise of her new dominion, while with gentle dignity her brow ac...

1. Chapter 1

A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal street, the central avenue of the city, and to that corner where the flower-women sit at t...

2. Chapter 2

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 gal...

10. Chapter 10

Monsieur Vignevielle looked in at no more doors or windows; but if the disappearance of this symptom was a favorable sign, others came to notice which were especially bad,--for...

11. Chapter 11

"Ah, Miché,"--Madame Delphine might have tried a thousand times again without ever succeeding half so well in lifting the curtain upon the whole, sweet, tender, old, old-fashion...