"Oh, the villains! How they have fooled us! These things are worthy of a queen. They are court costumes."
I said to myself, "Poor, dear little Alix!"
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Ancestor of the late Judge Alcibiade de Blanc of St. Martinville, noted in Reconstruction days.—TRANSLATOR.
[18] By avoiding the Spanish custom-house.—TRANSLATOR.
[19] This seems to be simply a girl's thoughtless guess. She reports Alix as saying that Madelaine and she "were married nearly at the same time." But this tiny, frail, spiritual Alix, who between twenty-two and twenty-three looked scant sixteen, could hardly, even in those times, have been married under the age of fifteen, that is not before 1787-8; whereas if Madelaine had been married thirteen years she would have been married when Alix was but ten years old.
This bit of careless guessing helps to indicate the genuineness of Alix's history. For when, by the light of Françoise's own statements, we correct this error—totally uncorrected by any earlier hand—the correction agrees entirely with the story of Alix as told in the separate manuscript. There Alix is married in March, 1789, and Madelaine about a year before. In midsummer, 1795, Madelaine had been married between seven and eight years and her infant was, likely enough, her fourth child.—TRANSLATOR.
[20] The memoirist omits to say that this person was Neville Déclouet.—TRANSLATOR.
XV.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAT
"Oh!" cried Celeste, "but what will Tonton say when she sees you?"
"Do not let her know a thing about it, girls," said Madame du Clozel, "or, rather than yield the scepter of beauty and elegance for but one evening, she will stay in the white chapel. What! at sixteen you don't know what the white chapel is? It is our bed."
Before the ball, came Sunday. Madame du Clozel had told us that the population of the little city—all Catholics—was very pious, that the little church could hardly contain the crowd of worshipers; and Celeste had said that there was a grand display of dress there. We thought of having new dresses made, but the dressmaker declared it impossible; and so we were obliged to wear our camayeus a second time, adding only a lace scarf and a hat. A hat! But how could one get in that little town in the wilderness, amid a maze of lakes and bayous, hundreds of miles from New Orleans, so rare and novel a thing as a hat? Ah, they call necessity the mother of invention, but I declare, from experience, that vanity has performed more miracles of invention, and made greater discoveries than Galileo or Columbus.