New Orleans was in its golden age. Earlier generations--sprung, upon
the one hand, from the merry gallants of a French colonial military
service which had grown gross by affiliation with Spanish-American
frontier life, and, upon the other hand, from comely Ethiopians culled
out of the less negroidal types of African live goods, and bought at the
ship's side with vestiges of quills and cowries and copper wire still in
their head-dresses,--these earlier generations, with scars of battle or
private rencontre still on the fathers, and of servitude on the
manumitted mothers, afforded a mere hint of the splendor that was to
result from a survival of the fairest through seventy-five years devoted
to the elimination of the black pigment and the cultivation of hyperian
excellence and nymphean grace and beauty. Nor, if we turn to the
present, is the evidence much stronger which is offered by the _gens de
couleur_ whom you may see in the quadroon quarter this afternoon, with
"Ichabod" legible on their murky foreheads through a vain smearing of
toilet powder, dragging their chairs down to the narrow gate-way of
their close-fenced gardens, and staring shrinkingly at you as you pass,
like a nest of yellow kittens.

But as the present century was in its second and third decades, the
_quadroones_ (for we must contrive a feminine spelling to define the
strict limits of the caste as then established) came forth in splendor.
Old travellers spare no terms to tell their praises, their faultlessness
of feature, their perfection of form, their varied styles of
beauty,--for there were even pure Caucasian blondes among them,--their
fascinating manners, their sparkling vivacity, their chaste and pretty
wit, their grace in the dance, their modest propriety, their taste and
elegance in dress. In the gentlest and most poetic sense they were
indeed the sirens of this land, where it seemed "always afternoon"--a
momentary triumph of an Arcadian over a Christian civilization, so
beautiful and so seductive that it became the subject of special
chapters by writers of the day more original than correct as social
philosophers.

The balls that were got up for them by the male _sang-pur_ were to that
day what the carnival is to the present. Society balls given the same
nights proved failures through the coincidence. The magnates of
government,--municipal, state, federal,--those of the army, of the
learned professions and of the clubs,--in short, the white m