More courtyards, more old houses, a venerable hall now occupied by a sisterhood of the Roman church but formerly gay with the "quadroon balls" which gave spicy romance to all this quarter. And here, rising high above the narrow thrust of Bourbon street, the French Opera, for be it remembered that New Orleans had her opera house firmly established when New York still regarded hers as a dubious experiment. To come into the old opera house, builded after the impressive fashion of architects of another time, with its real horseshoe and its five great tiers rising within it—is again to see the old New Orleans living in the new. It is to see the exclusive Creoles—perhaps the most exclusive folk in all America—half showing themselves in the shadowy recesses of their boxes. And to be in that venerable structure upon the night of Mardi Gras is to stand upon the threshold of a fairy world.
*****
It is not meet that the details of the greatest annual carnival that America has ever known should be fully described here. It is enough here and now to say that New Orleans merely exists between these great parties at the eve of each Lent; that nearly a twelvemonth is given to preparations for the Mardi Gras. One festa is hardly done before plans are being made for the next—rumor runs slyly up and down the narrow streets, costumiers are being pledged to inviolate secrecy, strange preparatory sounds emerge from supposedly abandoned sheds and houses, rumors multiply, the air is surcharged with secrecy. Finally the night of nights. Canal street, which every loyal resident of New Orleans believes to be the finest parade street in all the world, is ablaze with the incandescence of electricity, a-jam with humanity. For a week the trains have been bringing the folk in from half-a-dozen neighboring states by the tens of thousands. There is not a single parish of venerable Louisiana without representation; and more than a fair sprinkling of tourists from the North and from overseas.
Finally—after Expectancy has almost given the right hand to Doubt, the fanfare of trumpets, the outriders of Parade. From somewhere has come Rex and The Queen and all the Great and all the Hilariously Funny and the rest besides. From the supposedly abandoned sheds and houses, from the costumiers? Do not dare to venture that, oh uncanny and worldly minded soul!
Fairyland never emerged from old sheds, a King may not even dream of a costumier. From thin air, from the seventh sense, the land of the Mysterious, this King and Queen and all their cavalcade. Then, too, the Royal Palace—the historic French Opera House floored and transformed for a night. More lights, more color, the culinary products of the best chefs of all the land working under a stupendous energy, music, dancing, white shirts, white shoulders, gayety, beauty—for tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and Catholic New Orleans takes its Lent as seriously as it gaily takes the joyousness of its carnivals.
*****
For three-quarters of a century these carnivals have been the outspoken frivols of the old French lady by the bend of the yellow river. In all that time the carnival has progressed until it today is the outward expression of the joyousness of a joyous city. In all that time did we say? There was an interregnum—the Four Years. In the Four Years the little French restaurants were closed, the lights at the Opera extinguished—there could be no Carnival, for Tragedy sat upon the Southland. And in a great house in Lafayette square there sat a man from Massachusetts who ruled with more zeal than kindness. And that man New Orleans has not forgotten—not even in the half-century that has all but healed the sores of the Four Years.
"It is funny," you begin, "that New Orleans should make so much of the Boston Club, when Butler came from—"
It is not funny. You saw the Boston Club which vies for social supremacy in the old French city with the Pickwick Club, there in Canal street, at least you saw its fine old white house in that broad thoroughfare. It is not funny. Your New Orleans man tells you—courteously but clearly.
"We named our club from that game," he says.