Social life in old New Orleans

Chapter 1: FOREWORD

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About This Book

A first-person memoir of girlhood and social customs in a Southern city, recalling childhood routines, schooling, family entertainments, markets, shops, fashions, music, theater, and civic spaces; descriptions extend to plantation visits, domestic service, seasonal festivals, balls and weddings, and the effects of the Civil War on everyday life. Vivid vignettes of people, buildings, and pastimes are organized into topical chapters and illustrated with period images, offering reflective observations on changing manners, memory, and the passage from a vanished social world.

FOREWORD

Far more vivid than the twilight of the days in which I dwell, there rises before my inner eye the vision, aglow in Southern sunshine, of the days that are gone, never to return, but which formed the early chapters of a life that has been lived, that can never be lived again.

Many of the following stories are oft-told tales at my fireside—others were written to record phases of the patriarchal existence before the war which has so utterly passed away.

They have been printed from time to time in the pages of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, the editor of which has very kindly consented to their publication in this form.