The two brothers are of somewhat different type.  Fernand is, above all, a chef; I have never seen him outside his own kitchen.  His son, Fernand Jr., superintends the front part of the Louisiane, which he has transformed into a place having the appearance of a New York restaurant.  The young man has made a successful bid for the fashionable patronage of New Orleans, and there is dancing in the Louisiane in the evening.  Jules, upon the other hand, is perhaps more the director than his brother Fernand—­more the suave delightful host, less the man of cap and apron.  Jules loves to give parties—­to astonish his guests with a brilliant dinner and with his unrivaled grace as gerant.  That he is able to do these things no one is better aware than my companion and I, for it was our good fortune to be accepted by Jules as friends and fellow artists.

Never while my companion and I lived at Antoine’s did we escape the feeling that we were not in the United States, but in some foreign land.  To go to his rooms he went upstairs, around a corner, down a few steps, past a pantry, and a back stairway by which savory smells ascended from the kitchen, along a latticed gallery overlooking a courtyard like that of some inn in Segovia, along another gallery running at right angles to the first and overlooking the same court, including the kitchen door and the laundry, and finally to a chamber with French doors, a canopied bed, and French windows opening upon a balcony that overlooked the side street.  His room was called “The Creole Yacht,” while mine was the “Maison Vert.”

I remember a room in that curious little hotel opposite the Cafe du Dome, in Paris (the hotel in which it is said Whistler stayed when he was a student), which almost exactly resembled my room at Antoine’s, even to the dust which was under the bed—­until ’Genie got to work with broom and brush.  Moreover, connected with my room there was a bath which actually had a chaufbain to heat the water:  one of those weird French machines resembling the engine of a steam launch, which pops savagely when you light the gas beneath it, and which, as you are always expecting it to blow up and destroy you, converts the morning ablutions from a perfunctory duty into a great adventure.

Then too, there was Marie who has attended to the linge at Antoine’s for the last fifty years, and who helped the gray-haired genial Eugenie to “make proper the rooms.”  Ever since ’Genie—­as she is called, for short—­came from her native Midi, she has been at Antoine’s; and like Francois—­the gentle, kindly, white-mustached old waiter who, when we were there, had just moved up to Antoine’s after thirty-five years’ service at the Louisiane—­’Genie is always ready with a smile; yes, even in the rush of Mardi Gras!