The strict perfection of his Creole architecture is readily recognized by all who have resided in New Orleans. Each one of those charming pictures of places—veritable pastels—was painted after some carefully selected model of French or Franco-Spanish origin—typifying fashions of building which prevailed in the colonial days.... The author of Madame Delphine must have made many a pilgrimage into the quaint district, to study the wrinkled faces of the houses, or perhaps to read the queer names upon the signs—as Balzac loved to do in old-fashioned Paris.[115]
It is realism, and yet how far removed from Zola and Flaubert—Flaubert with his "sentiment is the devil"! It is realism tempered with romance; it is the new romance of the transition. There is seemingly no art about it, no striving for effect, and there is no exhibition of quaint and unusual things just because they are quaint and unusual. Rather are we transported into a charmed atmosphere, "the tepid, orange-scented air of the South," with the soft Creole patois about us and romance become real. The very style is Creole—Creole as Cable knew the Creoles of the quadroon type. There is a childish simplicity about it, and there is a lightness, an epigrammatic finesse, an elision of all that can be suggested, that is Gallic and not Saxon at all.
One can feel this exotic quality most fully in the portraits of women: 'Tite Poulette, Madame Delphine, Aurora Nancanou, Clotilde, and the others, portraits etched in with infinitesimal lightness of touch, suggested rather than described, felt rather than seen. These are not Northern women, these daintily feminine survivals of a decadent nobility, these shrinking, coquettish, clinging, distant, tearful, proud, explosive, half barbarous, altogether bewitching creatures. A suggestion here, a glimpse there, an exclamation, a flash of the eyes, and they are alive and real as few feminine creations in the fiction of any period. One may forget the story, but one may not forget Madame Delphine. If one would understand the secret of Cable's art, that Gallic lightness of touch, that subtle elision, that perfect balance between the suggested and the expressed, let him read the last chapter of The Grandissimes. It is a Cable epitome.
"Posson Jone," "Jean-ah Poquelin," and Madame Delphine, which, despite its length and its separate publication, is a short story belonging to the Old Creole Days group, are among the most perfect of American short stories and mark the highest reach of Cable's art.
The Grandissimes, his first long romance, appeared in 1880. Never was work of art painted on broader canvas or with elements more varied and picturesque. Though centering in a little nook among the bayous, it contains all Louisiana. Everywhere perspectives down a long past: glimpses of the explorers, family histories, old forgotten wrongs, vendettas, survivals from a feudal past, wild traditions, superstitions. Grandissime and Fusilier, young men of the D'Iberville exploring party, get lost in the swamps. "When they had lain down to die and had only succeeded in falling to sleep, the Diana of the Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and beauty, and fell sick of love." The love of this Indian queen begins the romance. Both eager to possess her, they can settle the matter only with dice. Fusilier wins and becomes the founder of a proud line, semibarbarous in its haughtiness and beauty, the Capulets to De Grapion's Montagues. The culmination comes a century later when the old feudal régime in Louisiana was closed by Napoleon and the remnants of the warring families were united according to the approved Montague-Capulet formula.
But the theme of the book is wider than this quarrel of families, wider than the conflict of two irreconcilable civilizations and the passing of the outworn. In a vague way it centers in the episode of Bras Coupé, the African king who refused to be a slave and held firm until his haughty soul was crushed out with inconceivable brutality. The cumulative and soul-withering power of an ancient wrong, the curse of a dying man which works its awful way until the pure love of innocent lovers removes it—it is The House of the Seven Gables transferred to the barbarous swamps of the Atchafalaya.
The strangeness of the book grows upon one as one reads. It is a book of lurid pictures—the torture and death of Bras Coupé, the murder of the négresse Clemence, which in sheer horror and brutal, unsparing realism surpasses anything in Uncle Tom's Cabin, anything indeed in the Russian realists. It is a book too with a monotone of fear: the nameless dread that comes of holding down a race by force, or as Joel C. Harris has phrased it, "that vague and mysterious danger that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder and rapine and pillage"; the superstitious thrill when at dead of night throbs up from a neighboring slave yard "the monotonous chant and machine-like time-beat of the African dance"; the horror of finding morning after morning on one's pillow voodoo warnings and ghastly death charms placed seemingly by supernatural hands. No one has ever surpassed Cable in making felt this uncanny side of the negro. His characterization of the voodoo quadroon woman Palmyre with her high Latin, Jaloff-African ancestry, her "barbaric and magnetic beauty that startled the beholder like the unexpected drawing out of a jeweled sword," her physical perfection—lithe of body as a tigress and as cruel, witching and alluring, yet a thing of horror, "a creature that one would want to find chained"—it fingers at one's heart and makes one fear.
And with all this strangeness, this flash after flash of vivid characterization, a style to match. "Victor Hugo," one exclaims often as one reads. Let us quote, say from chapter five. The stars are Cable's:
There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable determination to make a fresh start against the mortifyingly numerous Grandissimes.
"My father's policy was every way bad," he said to his spouse; "it is useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them out by duels; we will try another plan. Thank you," he added, as she handed his coat back to him, with the shoulder-straps cut off. In pursuance of the new plan, Madame De Grapion—the precious little heroine!—before the myrtles offered another crop of berries, bore him a boy not much smaller (saith tradition) than herself.
Only one thing qualified the father's elation. On that very day Numa Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere child, received from Governor De Vaudreuil a cadetship.
"Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we shall see! Ha! we shall see!"
"We shall see what?" asked a remote relative of that family. "Will Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?"
* * * * *
Bang! Bang!
Alas, Madame De Grapion!
It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever left a braver little widow.
It is French, too, in its sudden turns, its fragmentary paragraphs, its sly humor, its swift summings-up with an epigram: