In
front of the altar of his cathedral Don Andreas is buried, and masses
are said, in perpetuity, for his soul. When the Don's young widow
remarried, she and her husband were pursued by a charivari lasting three
days and three nights--the most famous charivari in the history of a
city widely noted for these detestable functions. The Don's daughter, a
great heiress, became the Baronne Pontalba and resided in magnificence
in Paris, where she died, a very old woman, in 1874.
In the Place d'Armes much of the early history of New Orleans, and
indeed, of Louisiana, was written. Here, and in the Cabildo, the
transfers from flag to flag took place, ending with the ceding of
Louisiana by Spain to France, and by France to the United States. At
this time New Orleans had about ten thousand inhabitants, most of the
whites being Creoles.
Harris Dickson, who knows a great deal about New Orleans, declared in an
article published some years ago, that outside lower Louisiana the word
"Creole" is still misunderstood, and added this definition of the term:
"A person of mixed French and Spanish blood, born in Louisiana." As I
understand it, however, the blood need not necessarily be mixed, but may
be pure Spanish or pure French, or again, there may be some admixture
of English blood. The word itself was, I am informed, originally
Spanish, and signified an American descended from Spaniards; later it
got into the language of the French West Indies, whence it was imported,
to Louisiana, about the end of the eighteenth century, by refugees who
arrived in considerable numbers from San Domingo, after the revolution
of the blacks there.
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