I shall never forget the day—­although marked by no startling incident—­when I sat in its lofty drawing-rooms and heard its classes in their annual examination.  It was June, and the teachers and pupils were clad in recognition of the special occasion and in the light fabrics fitted to the season.  The rooms were adorned with wreaths, garlands, and bouquets.  Among the scholars many faces were beautiful, and all were fresh and young.  Much Gallic blood asserted itself in complexion and feature, generally of undoubted, unadulterated “Caucasian” purity, but sometimes of visible and now and then of preponderating African tincture.  Only two or three, unless I have forgotten, were of pure negro blood.  There, in the rooms that had once resounded with the screams of Madame Lalaurie’s little slave fleeing to her death, and with the hootings and maledictions of the enraged mob, was being tried the experiment of a common enjoyment of public benefits by the daughters of two widely divergent races, without the enforcement of private social companionship.

From such enforcement the school was as free as any school is or ought to be.  The daily discipline did not require any two pupils to be social, but only every one to be civil, and civil to all.  These pages are written, however, to tell a strange true story, and not to plead one cause or another.  Whatever the story itself pleads, let it plead.  Outside the “haunted house,” far and near, the whole community was divided into two fiercely hostile parties, often at actual war with each other, the one striving to maintain government upon a co-citizenship regardless of race in all public relations, the other sworn to make race the supreme, sufficient, inexorable condition of supremacy on the one part and subjection on the other.  Yet for all this the school prospered.

Nevertheless, it suffered much internal unrest.  Many a word was spoken that struck like a club, many a smile stung like a whip-lash, many a glance stabbed like a knife; even in the midst of recitations a wounded one would sometimes break into sobs or silent tears while the aggressor crimsoned and palpitated with the proud indignation of the master caste.  The teachers met all such by-play with prompt, impartial repression and concentration upon the appointed duties of the hour.

Sometimes another thing restored order.  Few indeed of the pupils, of whatever racial purity or preponderance, but held more or less in awe the ghostly traditions of the house; and at times it chanced to be just in the midst of one of these ebullitions of scorn, grief, and resentful tears that noiselessly and majestically the great doors of the reception-rooms, untouched by visible hands, would slowly swing open, and the hushed girls would call to mind Madame Lalaurie.

Not all who bore the tincture of the despised race suffered alike.  Some were fierce and sturdy, and played a savage tit-for-tat.  Some were insensible.  A few bore themselves inflexibly by dint of sheer nerve; while many, generally much more white than black, quivered and winced continually under the contumely that fell, they felt, with peculiar injustice and cruelty upon them.