Old Creole Days | Page 3

an excellent person, the neighbors said,--a very
worthy person; and they were, maybe, nearer correct then 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 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 had 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 would 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 practise 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 with the blacksmithing profession. Not exactly at the forge in
the Lafittes' famous smithy, among the African Samsons, who, with
their shining black bodies bared to the waist, made the Rue St. Pierre
ring with the stroke of their hammers; but as a--there was no occasion
to mince the word in those days--smuggler.
Smuggler--patriot--where was the difference? Beyond the ken of a
community to which the enforcement of the revenue laws had long
been merely so much out of every man's pocket and dish, into the
all-devouring treasury of Spain. At this date they had come under a
kinder yoke, and to a treasury that at least echoed when the