The furniture is moved, master, mistress and servants
are excited, the cook is overworked and is perhaps complaining a little,
and the brilliant costumes of the masquerade divert the eye of the
visitor so that he hardly knows what sort of house he is in. Attend the
ball if you like, but do not fail to revisit the house when normal
conditions have been restored; see the festivities of Mardi Gras if you
will, but do not fail to browse about old New Orleans and sit down at
her famous tables when her chefs have time to do their best.
CHAPTER LVII
HISTORY, THE CREOLE, AND HIS DUELS
Canal Street is to New Orleans much more than Main Street is to Buffalo,
much more than Broad Street is to Philadelphia, much more than Broadway
and Fifth Avenue are to New York, for Canal Street divides New Orleans
as no other street divides an American city. It divides New Orleans as
the Seine divides Paris, and there is not more difference between the
right bank of the Seine and the Latin Quarter than between American New
Orleans and Creole New Orleans: between the newer part of the city and
the _vieux carre_. The sixty squares ("islets" according to the Creole
idiom, because each block was literally an islet in time of flood) which
comprise the old French town established in 1718 by the Sieur de
Bienville, are unlike the rest of the city not merely in architecture,
but in all respects.
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