New Orleans at that time was a city of about thirty thousand inhabitants. It was the chief commercial and social capital of the South, and thoroughly conscious of its pre-eminence. On its small but concentrated scale it was the gayest, most Parisian city in the country. The Spanish and French blood of the original settlers of Louisiana and of their early followers was largely represented in its leading families. Then and there the chivalry of the slave-holding South, in all its patrician characteristics both of virtue and of vice, was at the acme of its glory. The types of men were unquestionably the most varied and sharply defined and pushed to the greatest extremes of development, the freedom and beauty of the women the most intoxicating and dangerous, the social life the most voluptuous, passionate, and reckless, of those of any city in the United States. Wealth was great, easily found, carelessly lost, leisure ample, pride intense, living luxurious, manly sports and exercises in physical training assiduously cultivated, gambling common, duelling and every form of desperate personal conflict constant, the code of manners alternately bewitching in courtesy and terrible in ferocity. From every part of the State the gentlemen planters loved to congregate in New Orleans, perfect masters of their limbs, their faculties, their weapons, and their horses, not knowing fear or embarrassment, living their thoughts and passions spontaneously out, their tall forms aflush with bold sensibility, the rich strength and grace of the thoroughbred pointing their elastic motions. And in the parlor, the ball-room, at fashionable resorts, on the promenades, the women were the peers of the men in their intensity of being, their fondness of adventure, their courage, brilliance, and piquancy. The crossing of tropical bloods, the long lineage of aristocratic habitudes of ardent indulgence and leisurely culture, had produced a class of women famed throughout the land for the symmetry of their forms, the visible music of their movements, the dreamy softness of their voices, and the bewildering charm of their eyes, swimming seas of languor and fire. Many an imaginative and burning nature asked no other paradise than the arms of these Creole houris. But, unfortunately, the reverse of being immortal, its dissolving views melted into degradation and vanished in death, too often with accompaniments of frantic jealousy, crime, and horror.