Mortemart des Islets. When she came into society, in the brilliant
little world of New Orleans, it was the event of the season, and after
she came in, whatever she did became also events. Whether she went, or
did not go; what she said, or did not say; what she wore, and did not
wear--all these became important matters of discussion, quoted as much
or more than what the president said, or the governor thought. And
in those days, the days of '59, New Orleans was not, as it is now, a
one-heiress place, but it may be said that one could find heiresses
then as one finds type-writing girls now.

Mademoiselle Idalie received her birth, and what education she had, on
her parents' plantation, the famed old Reine Sainte Foy place, and
it is no secret that, like the ancient kings of France, her birth
exceeded her education.

It was a plantation, the Reine Sainte Foy, the richness and luxury of
which are really well described in those fervid pictures of tropical
life, at one time the passion of philanthropic imaginations, excited
and exciting over the horrors of slavery. Although these pictures were
then often accused of being purposely exaggerated, they seem now to
fall short of, instead of surpassing, the truth. Stately walls, acres
of roses, miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane, colossal
sugar-house--they were all there, and all the rest of it, with the
slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole villages of negro cabins. And
there were also, most noticeable to the natural, as well as to
the visionary, eye--there were the ease, idleness, extravagance,
self-indulgence, pomp, pride, arrogance, in short the whole
enumeration, the moral _sine qua non_, as some people considered it,
of the wealthy slaveholder of aristocratic descent and tastes.