THE original grantee was Count——
Assume the name to be De Charleu; the old Creoles never forgive a public mention. He was the French king’s commissary. One day, called to France to explain the lucky accident of the commissariat having burned down with his account-books inside, he left his wife, a Choctaw comtesse, behind.
Arrived at court, his excuses were accepted, and that tract was granted him where afterward stood Belles Demoiselles Plantation. A man cannot remember everything. In a fit of forgetfulness he married a French gentlewoman, rich and beautiful, and “brought her out.” However, “All’s well that ends well”; a famine had been in the colony, and the Choctaw comtesse had starved, leaving naught but a half-caste orphan family lurking on the edge of the settlement, bearing our French gentlewoman’s own new name, and being mentioned in monsieur’s will.
And the new comtesse—she tarried only a twelvemonth—left monsieur a lovely son, and departed, led out of this vain world by the swamp-fever.
From this son sprang the proud Creole family of De Charleu. It rose straight up, up, up, generation after generation, tall, branchless, slender, palm-like, and finally, in the time of which I am to tell, flowered, with all the rare beauty of a century-plant, in Artémise, Innocente, Félicité, the twins Marie and Martha, Léontine, and little Septima, the seven beautiful daughters for whom their home had been fitly named Belles Demoiselles.
The count’s grant had once been a long point round which the Mississippi used so to whirl and seethe and foam that it was horrid to behold. Big whirlpools would open and wheel about in the savage eddies under the low bank, and close up again, and others open and spin and disappear. Great circles of muddy surface would boil up from the depths below and gloss over and seem to float away; sink, come back again under water, and with only a soft hiss surge up again, and again drift off and vanish. Every few minutes the loamy bank would tip down a great load of earth upon its besieger, and fall back a foot, sometimes a yard, and the writhing river would press after, until at last the pointe was quite swallowed up, and the great river glided by in a majestic curve and asked no more. The bank stood fast, the “caving” became a forgotten misfortune, and the diminished grant was a long, sweeping, willowy bend, rustling with miles of sugar-cane.
Coming up the Mississippi in the sailing-craft of those early days, about the time one first could descry the white spires of the old St. Louis Cathedral, one would be pretty sure to spy just over to the right, under the levee, Belles Demoiselles mansion, with its broad veranda and red-painted cypress roof, peering over the embankment, like a bird in the nest, half hidden by the avenue of willows which one of the departed De Charleus—he that married a Marot—had planted on the levee’s crown.
The house stood unusually near the river, facing eastward, and standing foursquare, with an immense veranda about its sides, and a flight of steps in front spreading broadly downward, as we open arms to a child. From the veranda nine miles of river were seen; and in their compass, near at hand, the shady garden, full of rare and beautiful flowers; farther away broad fields of cane and rice and the distant quarters of the slaves; and on the horizon everywhere a dark belt of cypress forest.
The master was old Colonel De Charleu—Jean-Albert-Henri-Joseph De Charleu-Marot, and “Colonel” by the grace of the first American governor. Monsieur—he would not speak to any one who called him “Colonel”—was a hoary-headed patriarch. His step was firm; his form erect; his intellect strong and clear; his countenance classic, serene, dignified, commanding; his manners were courtly; his voice was musical, fascinating. He had had his vices all his life, but had borne them, as his race does, with a serenity of conscience and a cleanness of mouth that left no outward blemish on the surface of the gentleman. He had gambled in Royal Street, drank hard in Orleans Street, run his adversary through in the dueling-ground at Slaughter-House Point, and danced and quarreled at the St. Phillippe-Street Theater quadroon balls. Even now, with all his courtesy and bounty, and a hospitality which seemed to be entertaining angels, he was bitter-proud and penurious, and deep down in his hard-finished heart loved nothing but himself, his name, and his motherless children. But these! Their ravishing beauty was all but excuse enough for the unbounded idolatry of their father. Against these seven goddesses he never rebelled. Had they even required him to defraud old De Carlos—I can hardly say.
Old De Carlos was his extremely distant relative on the Choctaw side. With this single exception, the narrow, thread-like line of descent from the Indian wife, diminished to a mere strand by injudicious alliances, and deaths in the gutters of old New Orleans, was extinct. The name, by Spanish contact, had become De Carlos, but this one surviving bearer of it was known to all, and known only, as Injin Charlie.