Bienville’s settlers were hardy pioneers from Canada, and presently we find him writing to France:  “Send me wives for my Canadians.  They are running in the woods after Indian girls.”  The priests also urged that unless white wives could be sent out for the settlers, marriages with Indians be sanctioned.

Having now a considerable investment in Louisiana, France felt that a request for wives for the colony was practical and legitimate.  Louisiana must have population.  A bonus of so much per head was offered for colonists, and hideous things ensued:  servants, children, and helpless women were kidnapped, and the occupants of hospitals, asylums, and houses of correction were assembled and deported.  Incidentally it will be remembered that out of these black deeds flowered “the first masterpiece of French literature which can properly be called a novel,” the Abbe Prevost’s “Manon Lescaut,” which has been dramatized and redramatized, and which is the theme of operas by both Massenet and Puccini.  Though a grave alleged to be that of Manon used to be shown on the outskirts of the city, there is doubt that such a person actually existed, although those who wish to believe in a flesh-and-blood Manon may perhaps take encouragement from the fact that the arrival in the colony of a Chevalier des Grieux, in the year 1719, fourteen years before the book appeared, has been established, and, further, that the name of the Chevalier des Grieux may be seen upon a crumbling tomb in one of the river parishes.

When the girls arrived they were on inspection in the daytime, but at night were carefully guarded by soldiers, in the house where they were quartered together.  Miss Grace King, in her delightful book, “New Orleans, the Place and the People,” tells us that in these times there were never enough girls to fill the demand for wives, and that in one instance two young bachelors proposed to fight over a very plain girl—­the last one left out of a shipload—­but that the commandant obliged them to settle their dispute by the more pacific means of drawing lots.  As the place became settled Ursuline sisters arrived and established schools.  And at last, a quarter of a century after the landing of the first shipment of girls, the curious history of female importations ended with the arrival of that famous band of sixty demoiselles of respectable family and “authenticated spotless reputation,” who came to be taken as wives by only the more prosperous young colonists of the better class.  The earlier, less reputable girls have come down to us by the name of “correction girls,” but these later arrivals—­each furnished by the Company of the West with a casket containing a trousseau—­are known to this day as les filles a la cassette, or “casket girls.”