The strict perfection of his Creole architecture is readily recognized by all who have resided in New Orleans. Each one of those charming pictures of places--veritable pastels--was painted after some carefully selected model of French or Franco-Spanish origin--typifying fashions of building which prevailed in the colonial days.... The author of _Madame Delphine_ must have made many a pilgrimage into the quaint district, to study the wrinkled faces of the houses, or perhaps to read the queer names upon the signs--as Balzac loved to do in old-fashioned Paris.[115] It is realism, and yet how far removed from Zola and Flaubert--Flaubert with his "sentiment is the devil"! It is realism tempered with romance; it is the new romance of the transition. There is seemingly no art about it, no striving for effect, and there is no exhibition of quaint and unusual things just because they _are_ quaint and unusual. Rather are we transported into a charmed atmosphere, "the tepid, orange-scented air of the South," with the soft Creole _patois_ about us and romance become real. The very style is Creole--Creole as Cable knew the Creoles of the quadroon type. There is a childish simplicity about it, and there is a lightness, an epigrammatic finesse, an elision of all that can be suggested, that is Gallic and not Saxon at all. One can feel this exotic quality most fully in the portraits of women: 'Tite Poulette, Madame Delphine, Aurora Nancanou, Clotilde, and the others, portraits etched in with infinitesimal lightness of touch, suggested rather than described, felt rather than seen. These are not Northern women, these daintily feminine survivals of a decadent nobility, these shrinking, coquettish, clinging, distant, tearful, proud, explosive, half barbarous, altogether bewitching creatures. A suggestion here, a glimpse there, an exclamation, a flash of the eyes, and they are alive and real as few feminine creations in the fiction of any period. One may forget the story, but one may not forget Madame Delphine. If one would understand the secret of Cable's art, that Gallic lightness of touch, that subtle elision, that perfect balance between the suggested and the expressed, let him read the last chapter of _The Grandissimes_. It is a Cable epitome. "Posson Jone," "Jean-ah Poquelin," and _Madame Delphine_, which, despite its length and its separate publication, is a short story belonging to the _Old Creole Days_ group, are among the most perfect of American short stories and mark the highest reach of Cable's art.