Old Creole Days

Old Creole Days

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Creole Days, by George
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Title: Old Creole Days
Author: George Washington Cable
Release Date: November 24, 2003 [EBook #10234]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CREOLE DAYS ***

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OLD CREOLE DAYS
A STORY OF CREOLE LIFE
BY

GEORGE W. CABLE
1907

CONTENTS
MADAME DELPHINE CAFÉ DES EXILÉS BELLES
DEMOISELLES PLANTATION "POSSON JONE'" JEAN-AH
POQUELIN 'TITE POULETTE 'SIEUR GEORGE MADAME
DÉLICIEUSE

MADAME DELPHINE.
CHAPTER I.
AN OLD HOUSE.
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
merchandise. The crowd--and if it is near the time of the carnival it will
be great--will follow Canal Street.
But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover of
Creole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone to call
the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a few auction-rooms,
a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize that you have left
behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchants before you
find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, where an ancient
and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories, overhangs the
ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon every thing has
settled down a long sabbath of decay. The vehicles in the street are few
in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are shrunken into
shops; you see here and there, like a patch of bright mould, the stall of

that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many great doors are shut and
clamped and grown gray with cobweb; many street windows are nailed
up; half the balconies are begrimed and rust-eaten, and many of the
humid arches and alleys which characterize the older Franco-Spanish
piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor almost oriental.
Yet beauty lingers here. To say nothing of the picturesque, sometimes
you get sight of comfort, sometimes of opulence, through the unlatched
wicket in some porte-cochère--red-painted brick pavement, foliage of
dark palm or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and blooming
parterres; or through a chink between some pair of heavy batten
window-shutters, opened with an almost reptile wariness, your eye gets
a glimpse of lace and brocade upholstery, silver and bronze, and much
similar rich antiquity.
The faces of the inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the street a
sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting
you off your guard, there will pass you a woman--more likely two or
three--of patrician beauty.
Now, if you will go far enough down this old street, you will see, as
you approach its intersection with ----. Names in that region elude one
like ghosts.
However, as you begin to find the way a trifle more open, you will not
fail to notice on the right-hand side, about midway of the square, a
small, low, brick house of a story and a half, set out upon the sidewalk,
as weather-beaten and mute as an aged beggar fallen asleep. Its
corrugated roof of dull red tiles, sloping down toward you with an
inward curve, is overgrown with weeds, and in the fall of the year is
gay with the yellow plumes of the golden-rod. You can almost touch
with your cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging eaves. The
batten shutters at door and window, with hinges like those of a postern,
are shut with a grip that makes one's knuckles and nails feel lacerated.
Save in the brick-work itself there is not a cranny. You would say the
house has the lockjaw. There are two doors, and to each a single
chipped and battered marble step. Continuing on down the sidewalk, on
a line with the house, is a garden masked from view by a high, close

board-fence. You may see the tops of its fruit-trees--pomegranate,
peach, banana, fig, pear, and particularly one large orange, close by the
fence, that must be very old.
The residents over the narrow way, who live in a three-story house,
originally of much pretension, but from whose front door hard times
have removed almost all vestiges of paint, will tell you: "Yass, de 'ouse
is in'abit; 'tis live in."