That she was admired, raved about, loved even, goes without saying.  After the first month she held the refusal of half the beaux of New Orleans.  Men did absurd, undignified, preposterous things for her; and she?  Love?  Marry?  The idea never occurred to her.  She treated the most exquisite of her pretenders no better than she treated her Paris gowns, for the matter of that.  She could not even bring herself to listen to a proposal patiently; whistling to her dogs, in the middle of the most ardent protestations, or jumping up and walking away with a shrug of the shoulders, and a “Bah!”

[Illustration:  “WALKING AWAY WITH A SHRUG OF THE SHOULDERS.”]

Well!  Every one knows what happened after ’59.  There is no need to repeat.  The history of one is the history of all.  But there was this difference—­for there is every shade of difference in misfortune, as there is every shade of resemblance in happiness.  Mortemart des Islets went off to fight.  That was natural; his family had been doing that, he thought, or said, ever since Charlemagne.  Just as naturally he was killed in the first engagement.  They, his family, were always among the first killed; so much so that it began to be considered assassination to fight a duel with any of them.  All that was in the ordinary course of events.  One difference in their misfortunes lay in that after the city was captured, their plantation, so near, convenient, and rich in all kinds of provisions, was selected to receive a contingent of troops—­a colored company.  If it had been a colored company raised in Louisiana it might have been different; and these negroes mixed with the negroes in the neighborhood,—­and negroes are no better than whites, for the proportion of good and bad among them,—­and the officers were always off duty when they should have been on, and on when they should have been off.

One night the dwelling caught fire.  There was an immediate rush to save the ladies.  Oh, there was no hesitation about that!  They were seized in their beds, and carried out in the very arms of their enemies; carried away off to the sugar-house, and deposited there.  No danger of their doing anything but keep very quiet and still in their chemises de nuit, and their one sheet apiece, which was about all that was saved from the conflagration—­that is, for them.  But it must be remembered that this is all hearsay.  When one has not been present, one knows nothing of one’s own knowledge; one can only repeat.  It has been repeated, however, that although the house was burned to the ground, and everything in it destroyed, wherever, for a year afterward, a man of that company or of that neighborhood was found, there could have been found also, without search-warrant, property that had belonged to the Des Islets.  That is the story; and it is believed or not, exactly according to prejudice.

How the ladies ever got out of the sugar-house, history does not relate; nor what they did.  It was not a time for sociability, either personal or epistolary.  At one offensive word your letter, and you, very likely, examined; and Ship Island for a hotel, with soldiers for hostesses!  Madame Des Islets died very soon after the accident—­of rage, they say; and that was about all the public knew.