Strange True Stories of Louisiana

Chapter 10 ODD PARTNERS IN THE BOLERO DANCE.

Word Count: 795 | Released on: 01/12/2017

Sunday clothes, gathered on deck, and papa read the mass aloud surrounded by our whole party, kneeling; and in

een a suffocating heat all day. It was with joy that we came up on deck. My father, as he made his appearance, showed us his flute. It was a signal: Carlo ran for his violin, Suzanne for Alix's guitar, and presently Carpentier appeared with his wife's harp. Ah

so with me. I had attended my first ball only a few months before, and had taken nearly all my dancing-lessons from Suzanne. What was to become of me, then, when I heard my father ask me to dance the bolero which he and Alix were playing!... Every one made room for us, crying, "Oh, oui, Mlle. Suzanne; dancez! Oh, dancez, Mlle. Fran?oise!" I did not wish to disobey my father. I did not want to disob

her intention

eck. The Italian with a shoulder movement loosed the scarf, caught it in his left hand, threw his violin to Celeste, and bowed low to his challenger. All this as the etiquette of the bolero inexorably demanded. Then Maestro Mario smote the deck sharply with his heels, let go a cry like an Indian's war-whoop, and made two leaps into the air, smiting his heels against each other. He came

ed me; but when I tried to speak of

reach of form is permissible." He resumed h

ix; "our turn, Fran?oise

was easily persuaded, and fan in hand followed Alix, who for the emergency wore her husband's hat; and our minuet was received with as much enthusiasm as Suzanne's bolero

Chapter End

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Strange True Stories of Louisiana

George Washington Cable Literature

“True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in—not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself. Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen oftener than once I thought they did. Within the last few years there have dropped into my hands by one accident or another a number of these natural crystals, whose charms, never the same in any two, are in each and all enough at least to warn off all tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without being necessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and follow one another like the days of a week. They are mine only by right of discovery. From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's interest, have to abridge; but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no unconfessed "restorations," not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essential feature, I give them as I got them—strange stories that truly happened, all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana.”