Among some startling beliefs entertained by Chicot was one that “Michié St. Pierre et Michié St. Paul” had created him. Of “Michié bon Dieu” he held his own private 200opinion, and not a too flattering one at that. This fantastic notion concerning the origin of his being he owed to the early teaching of his young master, a lax believer, and a great farceur in his day. Chicot had once been thrashed by a young Irish priest for expressing his religious views, and at another time knifed by a Sicilian. So he had come to hold his peace upon that subject.
Upon another theme he talked freely and continuously. For years he had tried to convince his associates that his master had left a , rich, cultured, powerful, and numerous beyond belief. This prosperous race of beings inhabited the most in the city of New Orleans. Men of note and position, whose names were familiar to the public, he swore were grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or, less frequently, distant relatives of his master, long deceased, Ladies who came to the market in carriages, or whose of attracted the attention and of the fishwomen, were all des ’tites cousines to his former master, Jean Boisduré. He never looked for recognition from any of these superior beings, but 201delighted to by the hour upon their dignity and pride of birth and wealth.
Chicot always carried an old gunny-sack, and into this went his . He cleaned stalls at the market, scaled fish, and did many odd offices for the merchants, who usually paid in trade for his service. Occasionally he saw the color of silver and got his clutch upon a coin, but he accepted anything, and seldom made terms. He was glad to get a handkerchief from the Hebrew, and grateful if the Choctaws would trade him a bottle of filé it. The butcher flung him a soup bone, and the fishmonger a few or a paper bag of . It was the big mulatresse, vendeuse de café, who cared for his inner man.
Once Chicot was accused by a shoe-vender of attempting to steal a pair of ladies’ shoes. He declared he was only examining them. The clamor raised in the market was terrific. Young Dagoes assembled and like rats; a couple of Gascon butchers like bulls. Matteo’s wife shook her fist in the accuser’s face and called him incomprehensible names. The Choctaw women, where they 202squatted, turned their slow eyes in the direction of the , taking no further notice; while a policeman jerked Chicot around by the puffed sleeve and a club. It was a narrow escape.
Nobody knew where Chicot lived. A man—even a nég créol—who lives among the reeds and of Bayou St. John, in a chicken-coop constructed chiefly of tarred paper, is not going to boast of his habitation or to invite attention to his domestic appointments. When, after market hours, he vanished in the direction of St. Philip street, limping, seemingly under the weight of his gunny-bag, it was like the from the stage of some petty actor whom the audience does not follow in imagination beyond the wings, or think of till his return in another scene.
There was one to whom Chicot’s coming or going meant more than this. In la maison grise they called her La Chouette, for no earthly reason unless that she perched high under the roof of the old rookery and scolded in sudden outbursts. Forty or fifty years before, when for a little while she acted 203parts with a company of French players (an escapade that had brought her grandmother to the grave), she was known as Mademoiselle de Montallaine. Seventy-five years before she had been christened Aglaé Boisduré.
No matter at what hour the old negro appeared at her threshold, Mamzelle Aglaé always kept him waiting till she finished her prayers. She opened the door for him and silently motioned him to a seat, returning to herself upon her knees before a crucifix, and a shell filled with holy water that stood on a small table; it represented in her imagination an altar. Chicot knew that she did it to him; he was convinced that she timed her devotions to begin when she heard his footsteps on the stairs. He would sit with eyes her long, spare, poorly clad figure as she knelt and read from her book or finished her prayers. Bitter was the religious that had raged for years between them, and Mamzelle Aglaé had grown, on her side, as intolerant as Chicot. She had come to hold St. Peter and St. Paul in such utter detestation 204that she had cut their pictures out of her prayer-book.
Then Mamzelle Aglaé pretended not to care what Chicot had in his bag. He drew a small hunk of beef and laid it in her basket that stood on the bare floor. She looked from the corner of her eye, and went on dusting the table. He brought out a handful of potatoes, some pieces of sliced fish, a few herbs, a yard of calico, and a small pat of butter wrapped in leaves. He was proud of the butter, and wanted her to notice it. He held it out and asked her for something to put it on. She handed him a saucer, and looked indifferent and resigned, with lifted .
“Pas d’ sucre, Nég?”
Chicot shook his head and scratched it, and looked like a black picture of and . No sugar! But tomorrow he would get a pinch here and a pinch there, and would bring as much as a cupful.
Mamzelle Aglaé then sat down, and talked to Chicot uninterruptedly and . She complained bitterly, and it was all about a pain that in her leg; that crept and acted like a live, stinging serpent, twining 205about her waist and up her , and coiling round the shoulder-blade. And then les rheumatismes in her fingers! He could see for himself how they were knotted. She could not bend them; she could hold nothing in her hands, and had let a saucer fall that morning and broken it in pieces. And if she were to tell him that she had slept a through the night, she would be a , deserving of perdition. She had sat at the window la nuit blanche, hearing the hours strike and the market-wagons . Chicot nodded, and kept up a running fire of sympathetic comment and suggestive remedies for and : herbs, or tisanes, or grigris, or all three. As if he knew! There was Mary, a perambulating soul whose office in life was to pray for the shades in purgatory,—she had brought Mamzelle Aglaé a bottle of eau de Lourdes, but so little of it! She might have kept her water of Lourdes, for all the good it did,—a drop! Not so much as would cure a fly or a mosquito! Mamzelle Aglaé was going to show Purgatory Mary the door when she came again, not only because of her
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