the rue des Ramparts marks, like the outer
boulevards of Paris, the line of the old city wall. Other streets were
given pretty feminine names by the old Creole gallants: Suzette,
Celeste, Estelle, Angelie, and the like. The devout doubtless had their
share in the naming of Religious Street, Nuns Street, Piety Street,
Assumption Street, and Amen Street. The taste for Greek and Roman
classicism which developed in France at the time of the Revolution,
found its way to Louisiana, and is reflected in New Orleans by streets
bearing the names of gods, demi gods, the muses and the graces. The
pronunciation given to some of these names is curious: Melpomene,
instead of being given four syllables is called Melpomeen; Calliope is
similarly Callioap; Euterpe, Euterp, and so on. This, however, is the
result not of ignorance, but of a slight corruption of the correct
French pronunciations, the Americans having taken their way of
pronouncing the names from the French. The Napoleonic wars are
commemorated in the names of Napoleon Avenue, and Austerlitz and Jena
Streets, and the visit of Lafayette in the naming for him of both a
street and an avenue. But perhaps the most striking names of all the old
ones were Mystery Street, Madman's Street, Love Street (Rue de l'Amour),
Goodchildren Street (Rue des Bons Enfants), and above all those two
streets in the Faubourg Marigny which old Bernard Marigny amused himself
by naming for two games of chance at which, it is said, he had lost a
fortune--namely Bagatelle and Craps--the latter not the game played with
dice, but an old-time game of cards.

The French spoken by cultivated Creoles bears to the French of modern
France about the same relation as the current English of Virginia does
to that of England. Creole French is founded largely upon the French of
the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, just as many of the
so-called "Americanisms" of older parts of the country, including
Virginia and New England, are Elizabethan. The early English and French
colonists, coming to this country with the language of their times,
dropped, over here, into a linguistic backwater. In the mother
countries language continued to renew itself as it flowed along, by
elisions, by the adoption and legitimatizing of slang words (as for
instance the word "cab," to which Dean Swift objected on the ground that
it was slang for "cabriolet"), and by all the other means through which
our vocabularies are forever changi