Little Paqueta, nice Paqueta, sweet Paqueta, slave Paqueta, my pen runs riot when speaking of Paqueta, heaven bless her soul. Thus Paqueta lived, and breathed, and was happy during two whole years under my eyes, when a great change came over her life, and she put off the bonds of servitude never to resume them more. Her mistress, who had wealth, and who, with all of her sex among the creole French of Louisiana, looked forward to a translation to Paris with much of the expectation that fills the breast of a devotee who travels toward a “city out of sight,” removed to La Belle France. As the law then stood, it was the practice of those who went abroad to add a favorite slave to their train, as a readier and earlier means of manumission than the statute gave. All who touched la belle France returned free; so Paqueta’s mistress, knowing full well that her little maid-in-waiting, whom she had spoilt, and whom everybody had spoilt, was too white for servitude, was too white for any thing except one long Easter-day, as the pagans kept it, put her among her baggage. I saw Paqueta on shipboard, and there, standing upon the deck which was to take her forever from the clime of which she was a most true child, the wind whistling through her hair, and her tongue garrulous of the joy which childhood ever finds in all things new. I gave her my last lesson.

“Paqueta,” said I, “never trouble yourself about counting five; if you should ever arrive at the counting of a hundred, you would be none the better for it; but remember always the good Father Joseph’s gift and his instructions—good bye.”

And again the little slave-girl, so happy and so beautiful, rolled at my feet, and took them in her hands, and looked up, and was silent; for the long lesson of two years was ended, and was to be washed out by the wetting of a passing sorrow which I saw hanging upon her eyelids.

Ten years had rolled away since Paqueta’s emigration, and in the course of them I had grown more than ten years older under this hot, quick-racing sun. I had forgotten the long-haired, blue-eyed, Easter-born quateronne, with her mistress, and ten thousand other things beside, when, one long vacation, having nothing else to do, and having just got through a dull history of Paris in twelve big volumes, I resolved to see that great heart of the world. It was in King Philippe’s day, when the Parisians enjoyed more rational liberty than they ever enjoyed before, or will ever enjoy again, except they very much mend their ways. Now any thing may take place in Paris, as we know very well; and one who has lived there a long time must have long since ceased wondering. Paris is the mother of civilization, and civilization is a Proteus which turns itself inside-out, and upside-down, every day throughout the week. Paris is a citizen of the world, and has the good and the bad qualities of all the earth beside; so that no one, wherever born, is at a loss in its streets, but at once feels at home, and leaving it, leaves it with regret. Paris, therefore, is as infinite in its incident as the earth is; and although it might be hard to find, elsewhere in Europe, the manners of two widely-separated people in close and harmonious juxtaposition, yet, in Paris, you tread upon the four continents every step you take. In Paris man’s intellect is stretched to the utmost, the best fencer takes the prize, the hardest fends off, and no false coin passes for true metal; real merit is recognized, and mind, polished, sharp, ready for effective use, is the only nobility which ranks one higher than another. Therefore, sir, you need not open your eyes very wide when I tell you of Paqueta’s transformation in Paris.

I had been in the city a whole month, running about in every quarter to see the world of art collected within its walls—and twelve months, and twice twelve-months would not have been sufficient for the Louvre alone—when, one early eve, the light yet hanging upon the house-tops and dropping down upon the passengers below, I discovered in the Champs ElysÉes, moving in a direction opposite to my own, a gentleman and lady whose manner, whose comeliness, whose air of full content, strongly fixed my attention. As we drew near to each other, I saw that the lady was possessed of a rare beauty, and as Frenchwomen are proverbially plain, and as her complexion was of the deeper olive, I at once said that she was from the Peninsula, perhaps Cadiz, of whose excellence in that way we have all read so much.

The lady and her companion were engaged in earnest conversation, when, just as we were about to cross, her eye caught mine; she hesitated, stopped, moved on, hesitated, stopped again, and then, her whole face lighting up with a burst of joy, sprang forward, and seizing both my hands in hers—

“Ah, have you forgotten me!” she exclaimed; “mon cher ami, mon ancien ami; have you forgotten Paqueta—little Paqueta, who would not count five!”

All of Paqueta, as I had taken leave of her upon the ship’s deck, came back to me in a moment, and I wondered that I had not recognized her, enlarged as she was, with the same beauty, the same heart, the same child-character, raised and instructed to fill another and higher condition in life. She was so warm, so truthful, so full of recollections of the early years which she still loved, that I half feared she might again roll at my feet, and take them in her hands, and say, “non, ce n’est pas juste; un, trois, quatre”—and I told her so.

“And now, you must know my husband, my Charles,” said she, turning to her companion who stood making big eyes at the scene which was enacted before him. Charles received me with the polished courtesy of a Frenchman, asked for my address, gave me his own, and said that his wife received her friends every Thursday. We parted; Paqueta, a being of impulse, all the girl again, laughing until her eyes ran over at my perplexity, which I could not wholly conceal, and I promising that she should see me on the morrow, although Thursday was yet two days off.

On ascending to my rooms, at the head of four flights of French stairs, dark, odorous, and which comfort never visited but to die, I opened my note book, and commenced the journal of the day. I am now writing from it, and the page is marked with a flourish, a sort of out-breaking animal spirits, to show that it commemorates one of the happiest incidents of my life. “Charles R——; so; I have heard of that name before. He is something already, and is young enough to become in the end a great deal more. Charles R——; he must be a feuilletonist or a politician, an attachÉ to some one of the innumerable parties with which this miserable country is cursed; for these are the only names that get over to the other side of the water. Very well, he has won Paqueta—and she was worth the winning. Into what a noble woman the little minx has grown! And who can discover a trace of her former servitude about her! I hope he knows her beginning; and certainly Paqueta is too honest to have concealed her life; how does an extreme civilization civilize away our prejudices: and, after all, condition is but one of the positive laws of men.”

On the morrow I called upon Paqueta, and found her living, with some elegance, upon a second floor, or “flat,” as we call it in Edinbro’. To those who have been in Paris, or to those who have read Parisian books, or books written elsewhere of Parisian life, it is not necessary to say what a “second floor” is; and all others may as well remain as they are. She received me with her whole heart, with no show of her changed condition—which was to me like the sudden shifting of a scene in some melo-dramatic piece upon the stage—and sat me down, and at once commenced talking of Louisiana, and of her early life, and of its happiness, and sighed that it could not have so remained forever. She then told me of her history since her coming into France; how that her mistress, who was without children, after settling down in Paris treated her more as a favorite daughter than otherwise; how that she had masters given her, who taught her ten thousand things beside the counting of five; how that her mistress had died two years before, bequeathing her thirty thousand francs; and how Charles once met her, and loved her, and they were married. And thus she ran on for one full hour, her eyes sparkling with delight, the same Paqueta with whom I had trifled away many a pleasant minute ten years before. Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currant. While we conversed, her husband entered, and took my hand with much cordiality, and welcomed me, saying that his wife had told him of her having known me in America.

“And did you tell him what a hard master I was?”

“Ah, I remember the fillips perfectly well, and sometimes think I feel them burning upon my ears even now,” said Paqueta.

“And the little medal, your god; with the good Father Joseph’s advice?”

Paqueta’s face, for the first time, looked troubled; the sunlight left it; and I felt sorry that I had asked the question.

“Charles made me lay the medal aside the second day after our marriage; and as to praying for health, or aught else, Paris knows nothing of that.”

Charles laughed, and said “that he had been long since convinced that a priesthood was incompatible with Liberty.”

Charles R. was, as I had supposed, connected with the “press,” a socialist, a believer in the perfectability of men—of Frenchmen at least—and, in theory, an organizer of Labor. At that time the “press” had no great liberty in France; but it had to the full as much as it deserved, whatever the interested, or those who know nothing of the matter, may say to the contrary. The French “press,” when it has had its way, has done little else than to overturn a government, without the power or the knowledge to set up another in its place. It is not best that children, or the unskillful, should be entrusted with edge-tools; and a people is to be educated, through long centuries, to a fitness for the enjoyment of civil liberty, as man is educated, through long years, to a fitness for becoming his own master. Such has been the pupilage of our ancestry; but such has not been the pupilage of the ancestry of the French. In France liberty is anarchy; and so it is upon the Continent, in Germany, in Italy, and the Peninsula; and he who thinks it is to be made otherwise in a day, might as well pour the contents of a library at a fool’s feet, and bid him rise learned. But Charles R. and his friends, among whom was Louis Blanc—who looked like a boy, as a boy indeed he was, who had achieved something beyond his years—and Ledru Rollin—the future leader of the Mountain, which he had neither the ability to protect, nor the courage to fall with—and Proudhon—the plausible corrupter of youth, who endeavored to persuade France that “property is theft”—thought much and talked much of the liberty of the “press,” until in the end they got it, and made such use of it as we all know. A las la presse. I heard that cry once, and thought it the most conservative and the best for France.

Such was the atmosphere which Paqueta now breathed, and I sometimes thought that, for her soul’s health, it was no better than the servitude from which she had escaped. I saw her often during another month that I remained in Paris, and more than once with a deal of company at her rooms. She had grown to her husband’s intellect, conversed freely upon the lightest and gravest topics, and performed the duties of a hostess with an ease and propriety which flowed directly from her native good taste; it is so with French blood every where, and however small may be the proportion to the whole mass. Her husband was a brilliant feuilletonist; I had read something of his pen before seeing France; but he found more excellence in his wife than his imagination ever limned; and, as a proof of it, he himself told me that his friends said his articles had more heart in them since his marriage.

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