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Madame Delphine
by
Young Ursin Lemaitre (in full the name was Lemaitre-Vignevielle) had not only the hearty friendship of these good people, but also a natural turn for accounts; and as his two friends were looking about them with an enterprising eye, it easily resulted that he presently connected himself with the blacksmithing profession. Not exactly at the forge in the Lafittes’ famous smithy, among the African Samsons, who, with their shining black bodies bared to the waist, made the Rue St. Pierre ring with the stroke of their hammers; but as a–there was no occasion to mince the word in those days–smuggler.
Smuggler–patriot–where was the difference? Beyond the ken of a community to which the enforcement of the revenue laws had long been merely so much out of every man’s pocket and dish, into the all-devouring treasury of Spain. At this date they had come under a kinder yoke, and to a treasury that at least echoed when the customs were dropped into it; but the change was still new. What could a man be more than Capitaine Lemaitre was–the soul of honor, the pink of courtesy, with the courage of the lion, and the magnanimity of the elephant; frank–the very exchequer of truth! Nay, go higher still: his paper was good in Toulouse Street. To the gossips in the gaming-clubs he was the culminating proof that smuggling was one of the sublimer virtues.
Years went by. Events transpired which have their place in history. Under a government which the community by and by saw was conducted in their interest, smuggling began to lose its respectability and to grow disreputable, hazardous, and debased. In certain onslaughts made upon them by officers of the law, some of the smugglers became murderers. The business became unprofitable for a time until the enterprising Lafittes–thinkers–bethought them of a corrective–“privateering”.
Thereupon the United States Government set a price upon their heads. Later yet it became known that these outlawed pirates had been offered money and rank by Great Britain if they would join her standard, then hovering about the water-approaches to their native city, and that they had spurned the bribe; wherefore their heads were ruled out of the market, and, meeting and treating with Andrew Jackson, they were received as lovers of their country, and as compatriots fought in the battle of New Orleans at the head of their fearless men, and–here tradition takes up the tale–were never seen afterward.
Capitaine Lemaitre was not among the killed or wounded, but he was among the missing.
CHAPTER IV. THREE FRIENDS.
The roundest and happiest-looking priest in the city of New Orleans was a little man fondly known among his people as Pere Jerome. He was a Creole and a member of one of the city’s leading families. His dwelling was a little frame cottage, standing on high pillars just inside a tall, close fence, and reached by a narrow out-door stair from the green batten gate. It was well surrounded by crape myrtles, and communicated behind by a descending stair and a plank-walk with the rear entrance of the chapel over whose worshippers he daily spread his hands in benediction. The name of the street–ah! there is where light is wanting. Save the Cathedral and the Ursulines, there is very little of record concerning churches at that time, though they were springing up here and there. All there is certainty of is that Pere Jerome’s frame chapel was some little new-born “down-town” thing, that may have survived the passage of years, or may have escaped “Paxton’s Directory” “so as by fire.” His parlor was dingy and carpetless; one could smell distinctly there the vow of poverty. His bed-chamber was bare and clean, and the bed in it narrow and hard; but between the two was a dining-room that would tempt a laugh to the lips of any who looked in. The table was small, but stout, and all the furniture of the room substantial, made of fine wood, and carved just enough to give the notion of wrinkling pleasantry. His mother’s and sister’s doing, Pere Jerome would explain; they would not permit this apartment–or department–to suffer. Therein, as well as in the parlor, there was odor, but of a more epicurean sort, that explained interestingly the Pere Jerome’s rotundity and rosy smile.