Judge Farrar, with whom I enjoyed a slight but valued acquaintance, stopped me one day in Carondelet street, New Orleans, saying, “I have a true story that I want you to tell.  You can dress it out—­”

I arrested him with a shake of the head.  “Dress me no dresses.  Story me no stories.  There’s not one of a hundred of them that does not lack something essential, for want of which they are good for naught.  Keep them for after-dinner chat; but for the novelist they are good to smell, not to eat.  And yet—­tell me your story.  I have a use for it—­a cabinet of true things that have never had and shall not have a literary tool lifted up against them; virgin shells from the beach of the sea of human events.  It may be I shall find a place for it there.”  So he told me the true story which I have called “Attalie Brouillard,” because, having forgotten the woman’s real name, it pleased his fancy to use that name in recounting the tale:  “Attalie Brouillard.”  I repeated the story to a friend, a gentleman of much reading.

His reply dismayed me.  “I have a faint impression,” he said, “that you will find something very much like that in one of Lever’s novels.”

But later I thought, “Even so, what then?  Good stories repeat themselves.”  I remembered having twice had experiences in my own life the accounts of which, when given, would have been great successes only that they were old anecdotes—­great in their day, but long worn out in the club-rooms and abandoned to clergymen’s reunions.  The wise thing was not to find out or care whether Lever had somewhere told something like it, but whether the story was ever a real event in New Orleans, and, if so, to add it to my now, to me, priceless collection.  Meeting the young judge again, I asked boldly for the story’s full authentication.  He said promptly that the man who told it of his own knowledge was the late Judge T. Wharton Collins; that the incidents occurred about 1855, and that Judge McCaleb could doubtless give the name of the notary public who had been an actor in the affair.  “Let us go to his office right now,” said my obliging friend.

We went, found him, told him our errand.  He remembered the story, was confident of its entire verity, and gave a name, which, however, he begged I would submit for verification to an aged notary public in another street, a gentleman of the pure old Creole type.  I went to him.  He heard the story through in solemn silence.  From first to last I mentioned no name, but at the end I asked: 

“Now, can you tell me the name of the notary in that case?”

“Yes.”

I felt a delicious tingling as I waited for the disclosure.  He slowly said: 

“Dthere eeze wan troub’ ’bout dat.  To which case do you riffer?  ’Cause, you know, dey got t’ree, four case’ like dat.  An’ you better not mention no name, ‘cause you don’t want git nobody in troub’, you know.  Now dthere’s dthe case of——.  And dthere’s dthe case of——.  And dthere’s the case of——.  He had to go away; yes; ’cause when he make dthe dade man make his will, he git behine dthe dade man in bade, an’ hole ’im up in dthe bade.”