Balcony Stories | Page 4

recounting--his star-like personality.
A sheet of paper always infolded the bank-notes. It always bore, in fine
but sexless tracery, "From one who owes you much."
There, that was it, that sentence, which, like a locomotive, bore the
General and his wife far on these firsts of the month to two opposite
points of the horizon, in fact, one from the other--"From one who owes
you much."

The old gentleman would toss the paper aside with the bill receipt. In
the man to whom the bright New Orleans itself almost owed its
brightness, it was a paltry act to search and pick for a debtor. Friends
had betrayed and deserted him; relatives had forgotten him; merchants
had failed with his money; bank presidents had stooped to deceive him;
for he was an old man, and had about run the gamut of human
disappointments--a gamut that had begun with a C major of trust, hope,
happiness, and money.
His political party had thrown him aside. Neither for ambassador,
plenipotentiary, senator, congressman, not even for a clerkship, could
he be nominated by it. Certes! "From one who owed him much." He
had fitted the cap to a new head, the first of every month, for five years,
and still the list was not exhausted. Indeed, it would have been hard for
the General to look anywhere and not see some one whose obligations
to him far exceeded this thirty dollars a month. Could he avoid being
happy with such eyes?
But poor Madame Honorine! She who always gathered up the receipts,
and the "From one who owes you much"; who could at an instant's
warning produce the particular ones for any month of the past
half-decade. She kept them filed, not only in her armoire, but the
scrawled papers--skewered, as it were, somewhere else--where women
from time immemorial have skewered such unsigned papers. She was
not original in her thoughts--no more, for the matter of that, than the
General was. Tapped at any time on the first of the month, when she
would pause in her drudgery to reimpale her heart by a sight of the
written characters on the scrap of paper, her thoughts would have been
found flowing thus, "One can give everything, and yet be sure of
nothing."
When Madame Honorine said "everything," she did not, as women in
such cases often do, exaggerate. When she married the General, she in
reality gave the youth of sixteen, the beauty (ah, do not trust the denial
of those wrinkles, the thin hair, the faded eyes!) of an angel, the dot of
an heiress. Alas! It was too little at the time. Had she in her own person
united all the youth, all the beauty, all the wealth, sprinkled

parsimoniously so far and wide over all the women in this land, would
she at that time have done aught else with this than immolate it on the
burning pyre of the General's affection? "And yet be sure of nothing."
It is not necessary, perhaps, to explain that last clause. It is very little
consolation for wives that their husbands have forgotten, when some
one else remembers. Some one else! Ah! there could be so many some
one Else's in the General's life, for in truth he had been irresistible to
excess. But this was one particular some one else who had been faithful
for five years. Which one?
When Madame Honorine solves that enigma she has made up her mind
how to act.
As for Journel, it amused him more and more. He would go away from
the little cottage rubbing his hands with pleasure (he never saw
Madame Honorine, by the way, only the General). He would have
given far more than thirty dollars a month for this drama; for he was
not only rich, but a great farceur.

LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE
That was what she was called by everybody as soon as she was seen or
described. Her name, besides baptismal titles, was Idalie Sainte Foy
Mortemart des Islets. When she came into society, in the brilliant little
world of New Orleans, it was the event of the season, and after she
came in, whatever she did became also events. Whether she went, or
did not go; what she said, or did not say; what she wore, and did not
wear--all these became important matters of discussion, quoted as
much or more than what the president said, or the governor thought.
And in those days, the days of '59, New Orleans was not, as it is now, a
one-heiress place, but it may be said that one could find heiresses then
as one finds type-writing girls now.
Mademoiselle Idalie received her birth, and what education she had, on
her parents' plantation, the famed old Reine Sainte Foy place, and it is

no