Part 4

Our shopping trip would be incomplete if we failed to call on an old Scotch couple who had a lace store under Col. Winthrop’s residence on Royal Street. The store had a door and a window, and the nice old parties who had such a prodigious Scotch brogue one would scarcely understand them, could, by a little skill, entertain three customers at one and the same time. If one extra shopper appeared, Mr. Syme disappeared, leaving the old lady to attend to business. She was almost blind from cataract, a canny old soul and not anyways blind to business advantages. I am pleased to add they retired after a few busy years quite well-to-do. There was Seibricht, on Royal Street, a furniture dealer, and still further down Royal Seignoret, in the same lucrative business, for I do not recall they had any competitors. Memory does not go beyond the time when Hyde and Goodrich were not the jewelers; and Loveille, on the corner of Customhouse and Royal, the grocer, for all foreign wines, cheeses, etc. Never do I see such Parmesan as we got from Loveille in my early days.

William McKean had a bookshop on Camp Street, a few doors above Canal. Billy McKean, as the irreverent called him, was a picture of Pickwick, and a clever, kindly old man was he. There was a round table in the rear of his shop, where one found a comfortable chair and a few books to browse over. In my childhood I was always a welcome visitor to that round table, for I always “sat quiet and just read,” as dear old Mr. McKean told me. As I turn the pages of my book of memories not only the names but the very faces of these shopkeepers of seventy years ago come to me, all smiles and winning ways, and way back I fly to my pantalette and pigtail days, so happy in these dreams that will never be reality to any place or people.

There were no restaurants, no lunch counters, no tea rooms, and (bless their dear hearts, who started it!) no woman’s exchange, no place in the whole city where a lady could drop in, after all this round of shopping, take a comfortable seat and order even a sandwich, or any kind of refreshment. One could take an éclair at Vincent’s, corner of Royal and Orleans, but éclairs have no satisfying quality.

There was a large hotel (there may be still—it is sixty years since I saw it), mostly consisting of spacious verandas, up and down and all around, at the lake end of the shellroad, where parties could have a fish dinner and enjoy the salt breezes, but a dinner at “Lake End” was an occasion, not a climax to a shopping trip. The old shellroad was a long drive, Bayou St. John on one side, swamps on the other, green with rushes and palmetto, clothed with gay flowers of the swamp flag. The road terminated at Lake Pontchartrain, and there the restful piazza and well-served dinner refreshed the inner woman.

I am speaking of the gentler sex. No doubt there were myriads of cabarets and eating places for men on pleasure or business bent. Three o’clock was the universal dinner hour, so the discreet _mesdames_ were able to return to the city and be ready by early candlelight for the inevitable “hand round” tea.

Then there was Carrollton Garden (I think it is dead and buried now). 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.

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!_

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.

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.