When Madame Honorine solves that enigma she has made up her mind how to act.

As for Journel, it amused him more and more.  He would go away from the little cottage rubbing his hands with pleasure (he never saw Madame Honorine, by the way, only the General).  He would have given far more than thirty dollars a month for this drama; for he was not only rich, but a great farceur.

LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE

That was what she was called by everybody as soon as she was seen or described.  Her name, besides baptismal titles, was Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des Islets.  When she came into society, in the brilliant little world of New Orleans, it was the event of the season, and after she came in, whatever she did became also events.  Whether she went, or did not go; what she said, or did not say; what she wore, and did not wear—­all these became important matters of discussion, quoted as much or more than what the president said, or the governor thought.  And in those days, the days of ’59, New Orleans was not, as it is now, a one-heiress place, but it may be said that one could find heiresses then as one finds type-writing girls now.

Mademoiselle Idalie received her birth, and what education she had, on her parents’ plantation, the famed old Reine Sainte Foy place, and it is no secret that, like the ancient kings of France, her birth exceeded her education.

It was a plantation, the Reine Sainte Foy, the richness and luxury of which are really well described in those fervid pictures of tropical life, at one time the passion of philanthropic imaginations, excited and exciting over the horrors of slavery.  Although these pictures were then often accused of being purposely exaggerated, they seem now to fall short of, instead of surpassing, the truth.  Stately walls, acres of roses, miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane, colossal sugar-house—­they were all there, and all the rest of it, with the slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole villages of negro cabins.  And there were also, most noticeable to the natural, as well as to the visionary, eye—­there were the ease, idleness, extravagance, self-indulgence, pomp, pride, arrogance, in short the whole enumeration, the moral sine qua non, as some people considered it, of the wealthy slaveholder of aristocratic descent and tastes.

What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn she studied, what she did not she ignored; and she followed the same simple rule untrammeled in her eating, drinking, dressing, and comportment generally; and whatever discipline may have been exercised on the place, either in fact or fiction, most assuredly none of it, even so much as in a threat, ever attended her sacred person.  When she was just turned sixteen, Mademoiselle Idalie made up her mind to go into society.  Whether she was beautiful or not, it is hard to say.  It is almost impossible to appreciate properly the beauty