But beneath all this gaudy show of dress and wealth there was a shameful ignorance that seems to have disgusted foreign visitors.  There was so little other pleasure in life for the women of this colony; their education was so limited that they could not possibly have known the variety of intellectual pastimes that made life so interesting for Eliza Pinckney, Mrs. Adams, and Catherine Schuyler.  With surprise Berquin-Duvallon noted that “there is no other public institution fit for the education of the youth of this country than a simple school maintained by the government.  It is composed of about fifty children, nearly all from poor families.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught there in two languages, French and Spanish.  There is also the house of the French nuns, who have some young girls as boarders, and who have a class for day students.  There is also a boarding school for young Creole girls, which was established about fifteen months ago....  The Creole women lacking in general the talents that adorn education have no taste for music, drawing or, embroidery, but in revenge they have an extreme passion for dancing and would pass all their days and nights at it.”

There was indeed some attendance at theatres as the source of amusement; but of the sources of cultural pleasure there were certainly very few.  To our French friend it was genuinely disgusting, and he relieved his feelings in the following summary of fault-finding:  “Few good musicians are to be seen here.  There is only one single portrait painter, whose talent is suited to the walk of life where he employs it.  Finally, in a city inhabited by ten thousand souls, as is New Orleans, I record it as a fact that not ten truly learned men can be found....  There is found here neither ship-yard, colonial post, college, nor public nor private library.  Neither is there a book store, and, for good reasons, for a bookseller would die of hunger in the midst of his books.”

With little of an intellectual nature to divert them, with the temptations incident to slavery and mixed races on every hand, with a heritage of rather lax ideas concerning sexual morality, the men of the day too frequently found their chief pastimes in feeding the appetites of the flesh, and too often the women forgot and forgave.  To Berquin-Duvallon it all seems very strange and very crude.  “I cannot accustom myself to those great mobs, or to the old custom of the men (on these gala occasions or better, orgies) of getting more than on edge with wine, so that they get fuddled even before the ladies, and afterward act like drunken men in the presence of those beautiful ladies, who, far from being offended at it, appear on the contrary to be amused by it.”  And out of it all, out of these conditions forming so vivid a contrast to the average life of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, grew this final dark picture—­one that could not have been tolerated in the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the North:  “The most remarkable, as well as the most pathetic result of that gangrenous irregularity in this city is the exposing of a number of white babies (sad fruits of a clandestine excess) who are sacrificed from birth by their guilty mothers to a false honor after they have sacrificed their true honor to their unbridled inclination for a luxury that destroys them.”