A whole regiment of troops had come to supply the garrisons. Quantities of munitions and stores to maintain them were in the hold. Several priests and nuns were among the passengers. All were welcomed by cheer after cheer.
On deck and on shore interest centered in an item of the cargo, a bevy of girls, shipped from the mother country by the king as a gift to the colony. Chaperoned by nuns, they came to the dock half-shyly, half-boldly.
Anthony Auguelle, stationed with the Indians, was embarrassed. He twisted his best cap round and round and dangled its plume. Four girls were looking at him and he didn't know what to do. The every-day smile which he used for officers, priests, red men, and negroes with such good effect faded away. He was grave and awkward. The girls passed him with indifferent tosses of their dainty heads.
His Majesty had sent them to persuade the too lively young bachelors of the colony to settle down in sedate home life. They were penniless orphans of Paris. Nothing could be lost by venturing into another country; fortune and happiness might be gained thereby. Romance and adventure called to them as it had to their brothers, and they had answered blithely.
With no dowry except the tiny hand-trunks of personal needs with which the crown had furnished them, they would have gone unclaimed in the matrimonial markets of the capital. On the brink of the Great River their ruffles and ribbons, coquettish headgear of lace, small, neat shoes, their whole feminine charm, sent the pulses of backwoodsmen to fluttering. Straightway each maid had her choice of a dozen suitors.
French overlords, even on the remotest borders, kept up the dignity of the Empire by holding court in as formal an imitation of the royal audience at Versailles as they could.
The hall at New Orleans, built of bark-covered logs, was large and high. A mammoth fireplace at one end and a canopied dais with a throne-like chair gave it an air of state. In its impressive atmosphere the Sieur de Bienville received all the colonists as graciously as any king could have done.
Immigrants from the poverty-stricken lower middle class of workaday France were enchanted with the semi-tropical luxuriance of this new land of parti-colored races. The elegance of the reception-chamber appealed to their love of change. Where else in the wide world could common people be associated so cordially with uniformed soldiers and their gorgeous officers, be waited upon by fantastic blackamoors, be introduced to a dusky princess more beautiful than any one they had ever seen? She spoke to them in the French phrases Anthony had taught her. Her maids danced with the officers the steps that his fiddle had measured for them in his visits to the White-Apple plantation.
The governor patronized all the marriage ceremonies which the priests performed for the king's maids. He presided over the fête which followed.