Here is the way they talked in New Orleans in those days.  If you care to understand why Louisiana has grown up so out of joint, note the tone of those who governed her in the middle of the last century: 

“What, my child,” the Grand Marquis said, “you a fille a la cassette? France, for shame!  Come here by my side.  Will you take a little advice from an old soldier?  It is in one word—­submit.  Whatever is inevitable, submit to it.  If you want to live easy and sleep easy, do as other people do—­submit.  Consider submission in the present case; how easy, how comfortable, and how little it amounts to!  A little hearing of mass, a little telling of beads, a little crossing of one’s self—­what is that?  One need not believe in them.  Don’t shake your head.  Take my example; look at me; all these things go in at this ear and out at this.  Do king or clergy trouble me?  Not at all.  For how does the king in these matters of religion?  I shall not even tell you, he is such a bad boy.  Do you not know that all the noblesse, and all the savants, and especially all the archbishops and cardinals,—­all, in a word, but such silly little chicks as yourself,—­have found out that this religious business is a joke?  Actually a joke, every whit; except, to be sure, this heresy phase; that is a joke they cannot take.  Now, I wish you well, pretty child; so if you—­eh?—­truly, my pet, I fear we shall have to call you unreasonable.  Stop; they can spare me here a moment; I will take you to the Marquise:  she is in the next room....  Behold,” said he, as he entered the presence of his marchioness, “the little maid who will not marry!”

The Marquise was as cold and hard-hearted as the Marquis was loose and kind; but we need not recount the slow tortures of the fille a la cassette’s second verbal temptation.  The colony had to have soldiers, she was given to understand, and the soldiers must have wives.  “Why, I am a soldier’s wife, myself!” said the gorgeously attired lady, laying her hand upon the governor-general’s epaulet.  She explained, further, that he was rather softhearted, while she was a business woman; also that the royal commissary’s rolls did not comprehend such a thing as a spinster, and—­incidentally—­that living by principle was rather out of fashion in the province just then.

After she had offered much torment of this sort, a definite notion seemed to take her; she turned her lord by a touch of the elbow, and exchanged two or three business-like whispers with him at a window overlooking the Levee.

“Fillette,” she said, returning, “you are going to live on the sea-coast.  I am sending an aged lady there to gather the wax of the wild myrtle.  This good soldier of mine buys it for our king at twelve livres the pound.  Do you not know that women can make money?  The place is not safe; but there are no safe places in Louisiana.  There are no nuns to trouble you there; only a few Indians and soldiers.  You and Madame will live together, quite to yourselves, and can pray as you like.”