Chapter 7

Suzanne on the arm of Olivier, I on Charles's, Celeste beside her fiancé, the grandparents in front, we entered the theater of St. Martinville, and in a moment more were the observed of all observers. The play was a vaudeville, of which I remember only the name, but rarely have I seen amateurs act so well: all the prominent parts were rendered by young men. But if the French people are polite, amiable, and hospitable, we know that they are also very inquisitive. Suzanne was more annoyed than I can tell; yet we knew that our toilets were in excellent taste, even in that place full of ladies covered with costly jewels. When I asked Celeste how the merchants of St. Martinville could procure these costly goods, she explained that near by there was a place named the _Butte à la Rose_ that greatly shortened the way to market.[18] They were bringing almost everything from London, owing to the Revolution. Between the acts many persons came to greet Madame du Clozel. Oh, how I longed to see the friend of Alix! But I would not ask anything; I resolved to find her by the aid of my heart alone.

Presently, as by a magnetic power, my attention was drawn to a tall and beautiful young lady dressed in white satin, with no ornaments except a set of gold and sapphires, and for headdress a _résille_ the golden tassels of which touched her neck. Ah! how quickly I recognized those brown eyes faintly proud, that kind smile, that queenly bearing, that graceful step! I turned to Charles du Clozel, who sat beside me, and said:

"That is the Countess de la Houssaye, isn't it?"

"Do you know her?"

"I see her for the first time; but--I guessed it."

Several times I saw her looking at me, and once she smiled. During the last two acts she came and shook hands with us, and, caressing our hair with her gloved hand, said her husband had seen papa's letter; that it was from a dear friend, and that she came to ask Madame du Clozel to let her take us away with her. Against this the baroness cried out, and then the Countess Madelaine said to us:

"Well, you will come spend the day with me day after to-morrow, will you? I shall invite only young people. May I come for you?"

Ah, that day! how I remember it!... Madame de la Houssaye was fully five or six years older than Madame Carpentier, for she was the mother of four boys, the eldest of whom was fully twelve.[19] Her house was, like Madame du Clozel's, a single rez-de-chaussée surmounted by a mansard.... From the drawing-room she conducted us to a room in the rear of the house at the end of the veranda [galerie], where ... a low window let into a garden crossed and re-crossed with alleys of orange and jasmine. Several lofty magnolias filled the air with the fragrance of their great white flowers....

XIV.

"POOR LITTLE ALIX!"

Hardly had we made a few steps into the room when a young girl rose and advanced, supported on the arm of a young man slightly overdressed. His club and pigeon-wings were fastened with three or four pins of gold, and his white-powdered queue was wrapped with a black velvet ribbon shot with silver. The heat was so great that he had substituted silk for velvet, and his dress-coat, breeches, and long vest were of pearl-gray silk, changing to silver, with large silver buttons. On the lace frill of his embroidered shirt shone three large diamonds, on his cravat was another, and his fingers were covered with rings.[20] The young girl embraced us with ceremony, while her companion bowed profoundly. She could hardly have been over sixteen or seventeen. One could easily guess by her dress that the pretty creature was the slave of fashion.

"Madame du Rocher," said Charles du Clozel, throwing a wicked glance upon her.

"Madame!" I stammered.

"Impossible!" cried Suzanne.

"Don't listen to him!" interrupted the young lady, striking Charles's fingers with her fan. "He is a wretched falsifier. I am called Tonton de Blanc."

"The widow du Rocher!" cried Olivier, from the other side.

"Ah, this is too much!" she exclaimed. "If you don't stop these ridiculous jokes at once I'll make Neville call you out upon the field of battle." ... But a little while afterward Celeste whispered in my ear that her brothers had said truly. At thirteen years Tonton, eldest daughter of Commandant Louis de Blanc and sister of Chevalier de Blanc, had been espoused to Dr. du Rocher, at least forty years older than she. He was rich, and two years later he died, leaving all his fortune to his widow.... One after another Madame de la Houssaye introduced to us at least twenty persons, the most of whose names, unfortunately, I have forgotten. I kept notes, but have mislaid them....

A few moments before dinner the countess re-appeared among us, followed by two servants in livery bearing salvers of fruit; and while we ate she seated herself at the harpsichord and played.

"Do you sing?" she asked me.

"A little, madame."

[The two sisters sang a song together.]

"Children," she cried, "tell me, I pray you, who taught you that duet?"

"A young French lady, one of our friends," replied Suzanne.

"But her name! What is her name?"

"Madame Carpentier."

The name meant nothing to her. She sighed, and asked us to sing on.... At dinner we met again my father and the count. After dinner the countess sent for me to come to her chamber while she was nursing her babe. After a few unimportant words she said:

"You have had your lessons from a good musician."

"Yes, madame, our friend plays beautifully on the harp."

"On the harp! And you say her name is--"

"Madame Joseph Carpentier."

"It is strange," said Madame de la Houssaye. "The words of your duet are by me, and the music by my friend the Viscomptesse Alix de Morainville. All manner of things have happened in this terrible Revolution; I had for a moment the hope that she had found chance to emigrate and that you had met her. Do you know M. Carpentier?"

"Yes, madame; he was with her. He is--in fact--a laboring gardener."

"Oh! then there is no hope. I had the thought of a second marriage, but Alix de Morainville could never stoop so low. Poor, dear, innocent little Alix! She must be dead--at the hand of butchers, as her father and her husband are."

When we returned to the joyous company in the garden all wanted to speak at once. The countess imposed silence, and then Tonton informed us that a grand ball was proposed in our honor, to be given in the large dining-room of Mr. Morphy's tavern, under the direction of Neville Déclouet, the following Monday--that is, in four days.

Oh, that ball! I lay my pen on the table and my head in my hands and see the bright, pretty faces of young girls and richly clad cavaliers, and hear the echoes of that music so different from what we have to-day. Alas! the larger part of that company are sleeping now in the cemetery of St. Martinville.

Wherever you went, whoever you met, the ball was the subject of all conversation. All the costumes, masculine and feminine, were prepared in profound secrecy. Each one vowed to astonish, dazzle, surpass his neighbor. My father, forgetting the presents from Alix, gave us ever so much money and begged Madame du Clozel to oversee our toilets; but what was the astonishment of the dear baroness to see us buy only some vials of perfumery and two papers of pins. We paid ten dollars for each vial and fifteen for the pins!

Celeste invited us to see her costume the moment it reached her. It certainly did great honor to the dressmaker of St. Martinville. The dress was simply made, of very fine white muslin caught up _en paniers_ on a skirt of blue satin. Her beautiful black hair was to be fastened with a pearl comb, and to go between its riquettes she showed us two bunches of forget-me-nots as blue as her eyes. The extremely long-pointed waist of her dress was of the same color as the petticoat, was decolleté, and on the front had a drapery of white muslin held in place by a bunch of forget-me-nots falling to the end of the point. In the whole village she could get no white gloves. She would have to let that pass and show her round white arms clasped with two large bracelets of pearls. She showed also a necklace and earrings of pearls.

Madame du Clozel, slave to the severe etiquette of that day, did not question us, but did go so far as to say in our presence that camayeu was never worn at night.

"We know that, madame," replied my sister, slightly hurt. We decided to show our dresses to our hostess. We arranged them on the bed. When the baroness and her daughter entered our chamber they stood stupefied. The baroness spoke first.

"Oh, the villains! How they have fooled us! These things are worthy of a queen. They are court costumes."

I said to myself, "Poor, dear little Alix!"

FOOTNOTES: [17] Ancestor of the late Judge Alcibiade de Blanc of St. Martinville, noted in Reconstruction days.--TRANSLATOR. [18] By avoiding the Spanish custom-house.--TRANSLATOR. [19] This seems to be simply a girl's thoughtless guess. She reports Alix as saying that Madelaine and she "were married nearly at the same time." But this tiny, frail, spiritual Alix, who between twenty-two and twenty-three looked scant sixteen, could hardly, even in those times, have been married under the age of fifteen, that is not before 1787-8; whereas if Madelaine had been married thirteen years she would have been married when Alix was but ten years old.

This bit of careless guessing helps to indicate the genuineness of Alix's history. For when, by the light of Françoise's own statements, we correct this error--totally uncorrected by any earlier hand--the correction agrees entirely with the story of Alix as told in the separate manuscript. There Alix is married in March, 1789, and Madelaine about a year before. In midsummer, 1795, Madelaine had been married between seven and eight years and her infant was, likely enough, her fourth child.--TRANSLATOR.

[20] The memoirist omits to say that this person was Neville Déclouet.--TRANSLATOR.

XV.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAT.

"Oh!" cried Celeste, "but what will Tonton say when she sees you?"

"Do not let her know a thing about it, girls," said Madame du Clozel, "or, rather than yield the scepter of beauty and elegance for but one evening, she will stay in the white chapel. What! at sixteen you don't know what the white chapel is? It is our bed."

Before the ball, came Sunday. Madame du Clozel had told us that the population of the little city--all Catholics--was very pious, that the little church could hardly contain the crowd of worshipers; and Celeste had said that there was a grand display of dress there. We thought of having new dresses made, but the dressmaker declared it impossible; and so we were obliged to wear our camayeus a second time, adding only a lace scarf and a hat. A hat! But how could one get in that little town in the wilderness, amid a maze of lakes and bayous, hundreds of miles from New Orleans, so rare and novel a thing as a hat? Ah, they call necessity the mother of invention, but I declare, from experience, that vanity has performed more miracles of invention, and made greater discoveries than Galileo or Columbus.

The women of St. Martinville, Tonton at their head, had revolted against fate and declared they would have hats if they had to get them at the moon. Behold, now, by what a simple accident the hat was discovered. Tonton de Blanc had one of the prettiest complexions in the world, all lily and rose, and what care she took of it! She never went into the yard or the garden without a sunbonnet and a thick veil. Yet for all that her jealous critics said she was good and sensible, and would forget everything, even her toilet, to succor any one in trouble. One day Tonton heard a great noise in the street before her door. She was told that a child had just been crushed by a vehicle. Without stopping to ask whether the child was white or black or if it still lived, Tonton glanced around for her sun-bonnet, but, not finding it at hand, darted bareheaded into the street. At the door she met her young brother, and, as the sun was hot, she took his hat and put it on her own head. The Rubicon was crossed--Tonton had discovered the hat!

All she had heard was a false alarm. The crushed child was at play again before its mother's door. It had been startled by a galoping team, had screamed, and instantly there had been a great hubbub and crowd. But ten minutes later the little widow, the hat in her hand, entered the domicile of its maker and astonished the woman by ordering a hat for her own use, promising five dollars if the work was done to her satisfaction. The palmetto was to be split into the finest possible strips and platted into the form furnished by Madame Tonton. It was done; and on Sunday the hat, trimmed with roses and ribbons, made its appearance in the church of St. Martin, on the prettiest head in the world. The next Sunday you could see as many hats as the hatmaker had had time to make, and before the end of the month all the women in St. Martinville were wearing palmetto hats. To-day the modistes were furnishing them at the fabulous price of twenty-five dollars,--trimmed, you understand,--and palmetto hats were really getting to be a branch of the commerce of the little city; but ours, thanks to Alix's flowers and ribbons, cost but ten dollars.

The church was crowded. The service, performed by an old priest nearly a hundred years of age, was listened to with interest; but what astonished me was to see the crowd stop at the church door, the women kissing; to hear laughter, chat, and criticism at the door of this sacred place as if it were the public square. I understood the discontent that knit my father's brows and the alacrity with which he descended the church steps. Tonton saw and came to us--so fresh, so young, she was indeed the queen of beauty and fashion. Out of nothing Tonton could work wonders. Her dress to-day was of camayeu the pattern of which was bunches of strawberries--the very same stuff as our dresses; but how had she made it to look so different? And her hat! It was a new marvel of her invention. She had taken a man's felt hat and entirely covered it with the feathers of the cardinal bird, without other ornament than a bunch of white ribbon on the front and two long cords of white silk falling clear to the waist. That was the first hat of the kind I ever saw, but it was not the last. With one turn of her little hand she could make the whole female population of St. Martinville go as she pleased. Before we left St. Martinville we had the chance to admire more than fifty hats covered with the feathers of peacocks, geese, and even guinea-fowl, and--must we confess it?--when we got home we enlisted all our hunter friends to bring us numerous innocent cardinals, and tried to make us hats; but they did not look the least like the pretty widow's.

Sunday was also the day given to visiting. Being already dressed, it was so easy to go see one's friends.... Among the new visitors was Saint Marc d'Arby--engaged to little Constance de Blanc, aged thirteen. He came to invite us to a picnic on the coming Wednesday.

"Ah," I cried, with regret, "the very day papa has chosen for us to leave for the town of Opelousas!" ...

Since arriving in St. Martinville we had hardly seen papa. He left early each morning and returned late in the evening, telling of lands he had bought during the day. His wish was to go to Opelousas to register them.... To-day the whole town of Opelousas belongs to his heirs; but those heirs, with Creole heedlessness and afraid to spend a dollar, let strangers enjoy the possession of the beautiful lands acquired by their ancestor for so different an end. Shame on all of them!

It was decided for papa to leave us with the baroness during his visit to Opelousas.

"And be ready to depart homeward," said he, "on the following Monday."

XVI.

THE BALL.

The evening before that of the ball gave us lively disappointment. A fine rain began to fall. But Celeste came to assure us that in St. Martinville a storm had never prevented a ball, and if one had to go by boat, still one had to go. Later the weather improved, and several young gentlemen came to visit us.... "Will there be a supper, chevalier?" asked the baroness of her future son-in-law.--"Ah, good! For me the supper is the best part of the affair."

Alas! man proposes. The next morning she was in bed suffering greatly with her throat. "Neither supper nor ball for me this evening," she said. "The Countess de la Houssaye will take care of you and Celeste this evening."...

At last our toilets were complete....

When Madame de la Houssaye opened the door and saw us, instead of approaching, she suddenly stopped with her hands clasped convulsively, and with eyes dilated and a pallor and look of astonishment that I shall never forget. I was about to speak when she ran to Suzanne and seized her by the arm.

"Child! for pity answer me! Where did that dress--these jewels, come from?"

"Madame!" said my sister, quickly taking offense.

"Françoise!" cried the countess, "you will answer me. Listen. The last time I saw the Countess Aurélie de Morainville, six years ago, was at a reception of Queen Marie Antoinette, and she wore a dress exactly like that of Suzanne's. My child, pity my emotions and tell me where you bought that toilet." I answered, almost as deeply moved as she:

"We did not buy it, madame. These costumes were given to us by Madame Carpentier."

"Given! Do you know the price of these things?"

"Yes; and, moreover, Madame du Clozel has told us."

"And you tell me a poor woman, the wife of a gardener, made you these presents. Oh! I must see this Madame Carpentier. She must have known Alix. And who knows--oh, yes, yes! I must go myself and see her."

"And I must give her forewarning," I said to myself. But, alas! as I have just said, "Man proposes, God disposes." About six months after our return to St. James we heard of the death of the Countess de la Houssaye, which had occurred only two months after our leaving St. Martinville....

* * * * *

Oh, how my heart beat as I saw the lights of the ball-room and heard its waves of harmony! I had already attended several dances in the neighborhood of our home, but they could not compare with this. The walls were entirely covered with green branches mingled with flowers of all colors, especially with magnolias whose odor filled the room. Hidden among the leaves were millions of fantastically colored lampions seeming like so many glow-worms.[21] To me, poor little rustic of sixteen, it seemed supernaturally beautiful. But the prettiest part--opposite the door had been raised a platform surmounted by a dais made of three flags: the French, Spanish, and Prussian--Prussia was papa's country. And under these colors, on a pedestal that supported them, were seen, in immense letters composed of flowers, the one German word, _Bewillkommen_! Papa explained that the word meant "Welcome." On the platform, attired with inconceivable elegance, was the master of ceremonies, the handsome Neville Déclouet himself, waiting to wish us welcome anew.

It would take volumes, my daughter, to describe the admirable toilets, masculine as well as feminine, of that memorable night. The thing is impossible. But I must describe that of the king of the festival, the young Neville, that you may understand the immense difference between the toilets of 1795 and those of 1822.

Neville had arranged his hair exactly as on the day we first saw him. It was powdered white; his pigeon-wings were fastened with the same pins of gold, and his long queue was wrapped with a rose-colored ribbon. His coat was of frosted rose silk with broad facings of black velvet. His vest came down nearly to his knees. It also was of rose silk, but covered with black buttons. His breeches, also rose, were fastened at the knees with black velvet ribbons escaping from diamond buckles and falling upon silk stockings shot alternately with black and rose. Diamonds sparkled again on his lace frill, at his wrists, on his cravat of rose silk, and on the buckles of his pumps.

I cast my eye around to find Tonton, but she had not come. Some one near me said, "Do you know who will escort Madame du Rocher to the ball?" And another said, "Here is Neville, so who will replace him at the side of the pretty widow?"

As we entered the room the Baron du Clozel passed his arm under papa's and conducted him to the platform, while his sons, following, drew us forward to receive the tributes prepared for us. Neville bowed low and began his address. At first he spoke with feeling and eloquence, but by and by he lost the thread. He cast a look of despair upon the crowd, which did not conceal its disposition to laugh, turned again quickly towards us, passed his hand twice across his forehead, and finished with:

"Yes, I repeat it, we are glad to see you; you are welcome among us, and--I say to you only that!"

There was a general burst of laughter. But my father pitied the young man's embarrassment. He mounted the platform, shook his hand, and thanked him, as well as all the people of St. Martinville, for his gracious welcome and their warm hospitality. Then, to our great joy, the ball opened.

It began with a minuet danced by twelve couples at once, six on each side. The minuet in vogue just then was well danced by but few persons. It had been brought to St. Martinville by émigrés who had danced it at the French court ... But, thanks to the lessons given us by Alix, we had the pleasure to surprise them.

Now I ought to tell you, my daughter, that these male costumes, so effeminate, extravagant, and costly, had met great opposition from part of the people of St. Martin parish. They had been brought in by the French émigrés, and many had adopted them, while others had openly revolted against them. A league had been formed against them. Among its members were the Chevalier de Blanc, the elder of the d'Arbys, the Chevalier de la Houssaye, brother of the count, Paul Briant, Adrian Dumartrait, young Morse, and many others. They had thrown off entirely the fashionable dress and had replaced it with an attire much like what men wear now. It was rumored that the pretty Tonton favored the reform of which her brother was one of the chiefs.

Just as the minuet was being finished a loud murmur ran through the hall. All eyes were turned to the door and some couples confused their steps in the dance. Tonton had come. She was received with a cry of surprise; not for her beauty, not for her exquisite toilet, but because of him who entered with her.

"Great God!" exclaimed Celeste du Clozel, "it is Tréville de Saint Julien!"--"Oh!" cried Madame de la Houssaye, "Tonton is a fool, an arch-fool. Does she want to see bloodshed this evening?"--"The Countess Madelaine is going to faint!" derisively whispered Olivier in my ear.

"Who," asked Suzanne, "is Tréville de Saint Julien?"

"He is 'the hermit of Bayou Tortue,'" responded the gentle Celeste de Blanc.

"What pretense of simplicity, look you!" said Charles du Clozel, glancing towards him disdainfully.

"But look at Madame du Rocher," cried a girl standing on a bench, "how she is dressed. What contempt of fashion and propriety! It is positively shameful."

And Tonton, indifferent to these remarks, which she heard and to which she was accustomed, and to the furious glances thrown upon her cavalier by Neville Déclouet, continued, with her arm in his, to chat and laugh with him as they walked slowly around the hall.