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    Madame Delphine
    Madame Delphine
    Madame Delphine
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Madame Delphine

    By George Washington Cable

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    About this ebook

    "Madame Delphine" is a romance novel set in New Orleans. The roundest and happiest-looking priest in the city of New Orleans was a little man fondly known among his people as Père Jerome. He was a Creole and a member of one of the city's leading families. The priest receives a visit one day from Madame Delphine, who shares her concern about her daughter's mixed race and hopes that she can find a wealthy husband who can help her solve her financial troubles. With the two plotting to make this reality come into being, nothing can stand in their way…
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigiCat
    Release dateNov 22, 2022
    ISBN8596547415688
    Madame Delphine
    Author

    George Washington Cable

    George Washington Cable (1844–1925) was an American writer born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Cable’s family was initially wealthy due to their position as slaveholders. Yet, after his father’s untimely death they lost most of their fortune. The young Cable enrolled in the military and fought as a Confederate soldier during the American Civil War. It proved to be a lifechanging experience that would influence his future endeavors. In 1870, he became a journalist and spent years honing his skills before publishing his first novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. Cable’s work is best known for its exploration of Southern politics, culture and race relations.

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      Book preview

      Madame Delphine - George Washington Cable

      George Washington Cable

      Madame Delphine

      EAN 8596547415688

      DigiCat, 2022

      Contact: [email protected]

      Table of Contents

      CHAPTER I.

      AN OLD HOUSE.

      CHAPTER II.

      CHAPTER III.

      CAPITAINE LEMAITRE.

      CHAPTER IV.

      THREE FRIENDS.

      CHAPTER V.

      THE CAP FITS.

      CHAPTER VI.

      A CRY OF DISTRESS.

      CHAPTER VII.

      MICHÉ VIGNEVIELLE.

      CHAPTER VIII.

      SHE.

      CHAPTER IX.

      OLIVE.

      CHAPTER X.

      BIRDS.

      CHAPTER XI.

      FACE TO FACE.

      CHAPTER XII.

      THE MOTHER BIRD.

      CHAPTER XIII.

      TRIBULATION.

      CHAPTER XIV.

      BY AN OATH.

      CHAPTER XV.

      KYRIE ELEISON.

      CHAPTER I.

      Table of Contents

      AN OLD HOUSE.

      Table of Contents

      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 everything 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 lock-jaw. 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.

      And this is likely to be all the information you get—not that they would not tell, but they cannot grasp the idea that you wish to know—until, possibly, just as you are turning to depart, your informant, in a single word and with the most evident non-appreciation of its value, drops the simple key to the whole matter:

      Dey's quadroons.

      He may then be aroused to mention the better appearance of the place in former years, when the houses of this region generally stood farther apart, and that garden comprised the whole square.

      Here dwelt, sixty years ago and more, one Delphine Carraze; or, as she was commonly designated by the few who knew her, Madame Delphine. That she owned her home, and that it had been given her by the then deceased companion of her days of beauty, were facts so generally admitted as to be, even as far back as that sixty years ago, no longer a subject of gossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens of the quarter as a character, nor her house as a feature. It would have passed all Creole powers of guessing to divine what you could find worthy of

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