rworked and is perhaps complaining a little,
and the brilliant costumes of the masquerade divert the eye of the
visitor so that he hardly knows what sort of house he is in. Attend the
ball if you like, but do not fail to revisit the house when normal
conditions have been restored; see the festivities of Mardi Gras if you
will, but do not fail to browse about old New Orleans and sit down at
her famous tables when her chefs have time to do their best.

CHAPTER LVII

HISTORY, THE CREOLE, AND HIS DUELS

Canal Street is to New Orleans much more than Main Street is to Buffalo,
much more than Broad Street is to Philadelphia, much more than Broadway
and Fifth Avenue are to New York, for Canal Street divides New Orleans
as no other street divides an American city. It divides New Orleans as
the Seine divides Paris, and there is not more difference between the
right bank of the Seine and the Latin Quarter than between American New
Orleans and Creole New Orleans: between the newer part of the city and
the _vieux carre_. The sixty squares ("islets" according to the Creole
idiom, because each block was literally an islet in time of flood) which
comprise the old French town established in 1718 by the Sieur de
Bienville, are unlike the rest of the city not merely in architecture,
but in all respects. The street names change at Canal Street, the
highways become narrower as you enter the French quarter, and the
pavements are made of huge stone blocks brought over long ago as ballast
in sailing ships. Nor is the difference purely physical. For though they
will tell you that this part of the city is not so French and Spanish as
it used to be, that it has run down, that large parts of it have been
given over to Italians of the lower class, and to negroes, it remains
not only in appearance, but in custom, thought and character, the most
perfectly foreign little tract of land in the whole United States. Long
ago, under the French flag, it was a part of the Roman Catholic
bishopric of Quebec; later under the Spanish flag, a part of that of
Havana; and it is charming to trace in old buildings, names, and customs
the signs of this blended French and Spanish ancestry.

La Salle, searching out a supposed route to China by way of the
Mississippi River, seems to have perceived what the New Orleans
Association of Commerce perceives to-day: that the control of the mouth
of the river ought to mean also the control of a vast part of the
cont