Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III BERNARD DE MARIGNY IT was the third child of Philippe Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville, who represented the family during the last century; and who is the hero par excellence of New Orleans' social traditions; who, we may say, was to the Marigny family what the final bouquet is to a pyrotechnical display. He, more than any of his family or men of his time, is responsible for what we call to-day the Creole type; originating the standard of fine living and generous spending, of lordly pleasure and haughty indifference to the cost; the standard which he maintained so brilliantly for a half century, until, even to-day, one receives, as an accepted fact, that not to be fond of good eating and drinking, of card playing and pretty ladies; not to be a fin gourmet, not to be sensitive about honor, and to possess courage beyond all need of proof is, in sober truth, if such a truth can be called sober—not to be a Creole. It was a standard that required the greatest fortune Louisiana could produce to maintain it. It ravaged the great wealth of Marigny himself, and ruined many and many of the old families who tried to follow in his aristocratic footprints and who arrived at poverty as Bernard did but without the prestige that distinguished him to the end. The handsome furniture, cut glass, porcelain, jewelry— the real lace, and delicate bric-a-brac of all kindsthat have delighted the eye for decades past in the antique shops of New Orleans, are indubitably remnants of the wreckage of the fortunes that went to pieces in the wake of the Marigny standard of living. And as in the course of two centuries the Marigny family intermarried only with the best families in the place, and, as we shall see, all of the old families bear one or two of the Marigny names as the proudes...