Road, white, almost as snow, with its smooth, silent pavement of powdered shells.  This road followed the slow, clear meanderings of Bayou St. Jean, from red-roofed and embowered suburb St. Jean to the lake, the swamp of giant, grizzly bearded cypresses hugging it all the way, and the whole five miles teeming with gay, swift carriages, some filled with smokers, others with ladies and children, the finest equipage of all being, as you may recollect, that of John Fitz Miller.  He was at that very time master of Salome Muller, and of “several others fairer than Salome.”  He belongs in the present story only here in this landscape, and here not as a typical, but only as an easily possible, slaveholder.  For that matter, Madame Lalaurie, let it be plainly understood, was only another possibility, not a type.  The two stories teach the same truth:  that a public practice is answerable for whatever can happen easier with it than without it, no matter whether it must, or only may, happen.  However, let the moral wait or skip it entirely if you choose:  a regular feature of that bright afternoon throng was Madame Lalaurie’s coach with the ever-so-pleasant Madame Lalaurie inside and her sleek black coachman on the box.

“Think,” some friend would say, as he returned her courteous bow—­“think of casting upon that woman the suspicion of starving and maltreating her own house-servants!  Look at that driver; his skin shines with good keeping.  The truth is those jealous Americans”—­

There was intense jealousy between the Americans and the Creoles.  The Americans were just beginning in public matters to hold the odds.  In private society the Creoles still held power, but it was slipping from them even there.  Madame Lalaurie was a Creole.  Whether Louisiana or St. Domingo born was no matter; she should not be criticised by American envy!  Nor would the Creoles themselves go nosing into the secretest privacy of her house.

“Why, look you, it is her common practice, even before her guests, to leave a little wine in her glass and hand it, with some word of kindness, to the slave waiting at her back.  Thin and hollow-chested—­the slaves?  Yes, to be sure:  but how about your rich uncle, or my dear old mother:  are they not hollow-chested?  Well!”

But this kind of logic did not satisfy everybody, not even every Creole; and particularly not all her neighbors.  The common populace too had unflattering beliefs.

“Do you see this splendid house?  Do you see those attic windows?  There are slaves up there confined in chains and darkness and kept at the point of starvation.”