Madame Delphine | Page 3

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, may be, nearer correct than 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 it 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.
CHAPTER III.
CAPITAINE LEMAITRE.
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 grave and quiet, but also luminous,
sort, which was instantly admired and ever afterward remembered, as
was also the fineness of his hair and the blueness of his eyes. Those
pronounced him youngest who scrutinized his face the closest. But
waiving the discussion of age, he was odd, though not with the oddness
that he who reared him had striven to produce.
He had not been brought up by mother or father. He had lost both in
infancy, and had fallen to the care of a rugged old military grandpa of
the colonial school, whose unceasing endeavor had been to make "his
boy" as savage and ferocious a holder of unimpeachable social rank as
it became a pure-blooded French Creole to be who could trace his

pedigree back to the god Mars.
"Remember, my boy," was the adjuration received by him as regularly
as his waking cup of black coffee, "that none of your family line ever
kept the laws of any government or creed." And if it was well that he
should bear this in mind, it was well to reiterate it persistently, for,
from the nurse's arms, the boy wore a look, not of docility so much as
of gentle, judicial benevolence. The domestics of the old man's house
used to shed tears of laughter to see that look on the face of a babe. His
rude guardian addressed himself to the modification of this facial
expression; it had not enough of majesty in it, for instance, or of large
dare-deviltry; but with care these could be made to come.
And, true enough, at twenty-one (in Ursin Lemaitre), the labors of his
grandfather were an apparent success. He was not rugged, nor was he
loud-spoken, as his venerable trainer would have liked to present him
to society; but he was as serenely terrible as a well-aimed rifle, and the
old man looked upon his results with pride. He had cultivated him up to
that pitch where he scorned to practice any vice, or any virtue, that did
not include the principle of self-assertion. A few touches only were
wanting here and there to achieve perfection, when suddenly the old
man died. Yet it was his proud satisfaction, before he finally lay down,
to see Ursin a favored companion and the peer, both in courtesy and
pride, of those polished gentlemen famous in history, the brothers
Lafitte.
The two Lafittes were, at the time young Lemaitre reached his majority
(say 1808 or 1812), only merchant blacksmiths, so to speak, a term
intended to convey the idea of blacksmiths who never soiled their
hands, who were men of capital, stood a little higher than the clergy,
and moved in society among its autocrats. But they were full of
possibilities, men of action, and men, too, of thought, with already a
pronounced disbelief in the custom-house. In these days of big
carnivals they would have been patented as the dukes of Little Manchac
and Barataria.
Young Ursin Lemaitre (in full the name was Lemaitre-Vignevielle) had
not only the hearty friendship of these good people, but also a natural

turn for accounts; and as his two friends were looking about them with
an enterprising eye, it easily resulted that he presently connected
himself