In 1842 there was a class in Spanish at Mr. Hennen’s house, on Royal Street, near Canal. Señor Marino Cubi y Soler was the teacher of that class; a very prosaic and painstaking teacher he was, too, notwithstanding his startlingly high flown cognomen. Miss Anna Maria and young Alfred Hennen and a Dr. Rhodes, from the Belize, as the mouth of the Mississippi is called, with a few other grown-ups, formed the señor’s class. I was ten years old, but was allowed to join with some other members of my family, though my mother protested it was nonsense for a child like me and a waste of money. Father did not agree with her, and after over sixty years to think it over, I don’t either. When the señor’s class dispersed I imagine the text-books, of which, by the way, he was author, were laid aside. But years and years thereafter, during the war, while traveling in Mexico, some of the señor’s teaching came miraculously back to me, bringing with it enough Spanish to be of material help in that stranger country.
Another teacher wandered from house to house with his “Telemaque” and “colloquial phrases,” giving lessons in French. Gimarchi, from the name, may have been partly, at least, Italian, but he was a fine teacher of the sister language. Por supuésto, his itinerary was confined to the American district of the city.
Is it any surprise that the miscellaneous education we girls of seventy years ago in New Orleans had access to, culminated by fitting us for housewives and mothers, instead of writers and platform speakers, doctors and lawyers—suffragettes? Everybody was musical; every girl had music lessons and every mother superintended the study and practice of the one branch deemed absolutely indispensable to the education of a demoiselle. The city was dotted all over with music teachers, but Mme. Boyer was, par excellence, the most popular. She did not wander from house to house, but the demoiselles, music roll in hand, repaired to her domicile, and received instruction in a music room barely large enough to contain a piano, a scholar and a madame who was, to say the least, immense in bulk, the style of Creole who appears best in a black silk blouse volante.
Richard Henry Chinn
Painted by Hardin
Art was not taught, art was not studied, art was not appreciated. I mean by art the pencil and the brush, so busily wielded in every school now. No doubt there were stifled geniuses whose dormant talent was never suspected, so utterly ignored were the brush and the palette of the lover of art. I call to mind the ability evinced by Miss Celestine Eustis in the use of the pencil. She occasionally gave a friend a glimpse of some of her work, of which, I regret to say, she was almost ashamed, not of the work, but of the doing it. I recall a sketch taken of Judge Eustis’ balcony, and a group of young society men; the likenesses, unmistakably those of George Eustis and of Destour Foucher, were striking.
M. Devoti, with his violin in a green baize bag, was a professor of deportment and dancing. He undertook to train two gawky girls of the most awkward age in my father’s parlor. M. Devoti wore corsets! and laced, as the saying is, “within an inch of his life.” He wore a long-tail coat, very full at the spider waist-line, that hung all round him, almost to the knees, so he used it like a woman’s skirt, and could demonstrate to the awkward girls the art of holding out their skirts with thumb and forefinger, and all the other fingers sticking out stiff and straight. Then curtsey! throw out the right foot, draw up the left.
Another important branch of deportment was to seat the awkwards stiffly on the extreme edge of a chair, fold the hands on the very precarious lap, droop the eyes in a pensive way. Then Devoti would flourish up and present, with an astonishing salaam, a book from the center table. The young miss was instructed how to rise, bow and receive the book, in the most affected and mechanical style. Another exercise was to curtsey, accept old Devoti’s arm and majestically parade round and round the center table. The violin emerged from the baize bag, Devoti made it screech a few notes while the trio balanced up and down, changed partners and promenaded, till the awkwards were completely bewildered and tired out. He then replaced the violin, made a profound bow to extended skirts and curtseys, admonished the pupils to practice for next lesson, and vanished. Thus ended the first lesson. Dear me! Pock-marked, spider-waist Devoti is as plain to my eye to-day as he was in the flesh, bowing, smiling, dancing with flourishing steps as in the days of long ago.
Were those shy girls benefited by that artificial training? I opine not. This seems to modern eyes, mayhap, a whimsical exaggeration; nevertheless, it is a true picture. Devoti’s style was indeed the “end of an era”; he had no successor. Turveydrop, the immortal Turveydrop himself, was not even an imitator. These old schools and teachers march before my mind’s eye to-day; very vivid it all is to me, though the last of them, and perhaps all those they tried to teach, have passed away. Children who went to Mme. Granet and Mme. Delarouelle and Dr. Hawks and all the other schools of that day, sent their daughters, a decade or two later, to Mme. Desrayoux. Now she is gone and many of the daughters gone also. And it is left to one old lady to dig out the past, and recall, possibly to no one but herself, New Orleans schools, teachers and scholars of seventy years ago.