Jena Streets, and the visit of Lafayette in the naming for him of both a street and an avenue.  But perhaps the most striking names of all the old ones were Mystery Street, Madman’s Street, Love Street (Rue de l’Amour), Goodchildren Street (Rue des Bons Enfants), and above all those two streets in the Faubourg Marigny which old Bernard Marigny amused himself by naming for two games of chance at which, it is said, he had lost a fortune—­namely Bagatelle and Craps—­the latter not the game played with dice, but an old-time game of cards.

The French spoken by cultivated Creoles bears to the French of modern France about the same relation as the current English of Virginia does to that of England.  Creole French is founded largely upon the French of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, just as many of the so-called “Americanisms” of older parts of the country, including Virginia and New England, are Elizabethan.  The early English and French colonists, coming to this country with the language of their times, dropped, over here, into a linguistic backwater.  In the mother countries language continued to renew itself as it flowed along, by elisions, by the adoption and legitimatizing of slang words (as for instance the word “cab,” to which Dean Swift objected on the ground that it was slang for “cabriolet"), and by all the other means through which our vocabularies are forever changing.  But to the colonies these changes were not carried, and such changes as occurred in the French and English of America were, for the most part, separate and distinct (as exampled by such Creole words as “banquette” for “sidewalk,” in place of the French word trottoir, and the word “baire,” whence comes the American term “mosquito bar.”) The influence of colloquial French from Canada may also be traced in New Orleans, and the language there was further affected by the strange jargon spoken by the Creole negro—­precisely as the English dialect of negroes in other parts of the South may be said to have affected the speech of all the Southern States.

Between the dialect of the Louisiana Cajan and that of the French Canadian of Quebec and northern New York there is a strong resemblance; but the Creole negro language is a thing entirely apart, being made up, it is said, partly from French and partly from African word sounds, just as the “gulla” of the South Carolina coast is made up from African and English.  The one is no more intelligible to a Frenchman than the other to a Londoner.  The ignorant Creole negro wishing to say “I do not understand,” would not say “moi je ne comprends pas,” but “mo pas connais”; similarly for “I am going away,” he does not say, “je m’en vais,” but “ma pe couri”; while for “I have a horse,” instead of “j’ai un cheval,” he will put the statement, “me ganye choue.”  It is a dialect lacking mood, tense, and grammar.