l for young
Creole girls, which was established about fifteen months ago.... The
Creole women lacking in general the talents that adorn education have no
taste for music, drawing or, embroidery, but in revenge they have an
extreme passion for dancing and would pass all their days and nights at
it."

There was indeed some attendance at theatres as the source of amusement;
but of the sources of cultural pleasure there were certainly very few.
To our French friend it was genuinely disgusting, and he relieved his
feelings in the following summary of fault-finding: "Few good musicians
are to be seen here. There is only one single portrait painter, whose
talent is suited to the walk of life where he employs it. Finally, in a
city inhabited by ten thousand souls, as is New Orleans, I record it as
a fact that not ten truly learned men can be found.... There is found
here neither ship-yard, colonial post, college, nor public nor private
library. Neither is there a book store, and, for good reasons, for a
bookseller would die of hunger in the midst of his books."

With little of an intellectual nature to divert them, with the
temptations incident to slavery and mixed races on every hand, with a
heritage of rather lax ideas concerning sexual morality, the men of the
day too frequently found their chief pastimes in feeding the appetites
of the flesh, and too often the women forgot and forgave. To
Berquin-Duvallon it all seems very strange and very crude. "I cannot
accustom myself to those great mobs, or to the old custom of the men (on
these gala occasions or better, orgies) of getting more than on edge
with wine, so that they get fuddled even before the ladies, and
afterward act like drunken men in the presence of those beautiful
ladies, who, far from being offended at it, appear on the contrary to be
amused by it." And out of it all, out of these conditions forming so
vivid a contrast to the average life of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania,
grew this final dark picture--one that could not have been tolerated in
the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the North: "The most remarkable, as well as
the most pathetic result of that gangrenous irregularity in this city is
the exposing of a number of white babies (sad fruits of a clandestine
excess) who are sacrificed from birth by their guilty mothers to a false
honor after they have sacrificed their true honor to their unbridled
inclination for a luxury that destroys them."

Thus, we have had gli