French Quarter Life

“It is not an easy thing to describe one’s first impression of New Orleans; for while it actually resembles no other city upon the face of the earth, yet it recalls vague memories of a hundred cities. . . . I fancy that the power of fascination which New Orleans exercises upon foreigners is due no less to this peculiar characteristic than to the tropical beauty of the city itself.”

—Lafcadio Hearn, “At the Gate of the Tropics” (November 19, 1877)

“I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.”

—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

“New Orleans is like your first raw oyster. You must suspend your squeamishness and take it on its own terms to enjoy it. If you keep your distance, you’ll never get it. If you go for it, though, you will be rewarded with the fulfillment of lust. Lust is an urge you need to have to live in this city successfully. Without lust, you’re probably better off living somewhere else.”

—Tom Fitzmorris, Hungry Town (2010)

“I dined at a score of different restaurants . . . . . none of the great and famous ones. I couldn’t afford them. But the standard of good cooking is higher in New Orleans than in the North. There were little French restaurants which served wine with the dinner, just as in France. Oysters, fresh from the bayous, were ten cents a dozen over the bar . . . . . and how delicious they were! I made the acquaintance of many dishes new to me, such as shrimp remoulade, jambalai, the famous New Orleans risotto, full of shrimp, peppers and other mysterious ingredients. I well remember a little restaurant, below the Market and just inside the levee. The patrons were, for the most part, Italian longshoremen. It looked like a pirate’s resort . . . . . and it may well have been so, back in the days when pirates swaggered in the streets of New Orleans.”

—William C. Odiorne (ca. 1933), unpublished memoir in THNOC’s holdings

“This is not the best known view of it. Most persons prefer its facade, as seen from Jackson Square, with the sun shining brightly upon it. But the aspect which seems to me most significant is the one it presents after nightfall, then the great white statue of Christ, with arms outspread, casts a shadow on the wall behind it, and the green plot in which the statue stands is veiled in darkness.”

—Frances Parkinson Keyes, All This Is Louisiana: An Illustrated Storybook (1950)

“Some prosperous Frenchman had built the house in the late 1700s to house a menage of wife, children, and spinster tantes. The tantes had been stored up in the attic along with the other excess and unattractive furniture, and from the two little dormer windows in the roof they had seen what little of the world they believed existed outside of their own monde of slanderous gossip, needlework, and cyclical recitations of the rosary.”

—John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

“[T]he fishermen have a nice way of filling the wells of their boats with fine fish all alive, which they scoop up with a net, and string on Palmetto fibres in a twinkling as the numerous orders pour in upon them. We brought home a string of a dozen which were scarcely dead when we got to the house at 8, so that we had a delightful fish supper. . . .”

—Thomas K. Wharton (June 18, 1856), in a journal entry reprinted in Queen of the South: The Journal of Thomas K. Wharton (1999)

“There were many different kinds of people and instruments to inspire me to carry on with my music when I was a boy. I always loved music, and it did not matter what the instrument was or who played it so long as the playing was good. I used to hear some of the finest music in the world listening to the barroom quartets who hung around the saloons with a cold can of beer in their hands, singing up a breeze while they passed the can around. I thought I was really somebody when I got so I could hang around with those fellows—sing and drink out of the can with them.”

—Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954)

“Yes, how different the Quarter was then from the Quarter of now! Because, like the old sections of Paris, it looked old and it felt old. It had no pretensions. It was not “spruced up” or “slicked up” to appear something other than what it was. It was itself—without apology and without pretense.”

—Clarence John Laughlin, “Lost Louisiana: An Essay in the Poetry of Remembrance” (undated), unpublished manuscript in THNOC’s holdings

“Somebody said that the only interesting thing about New Orleans was that it smelled different. There are whiffs of ground coffee and a congeries of smells which one imagines to be the ‘naval stores’ that geography books were always speaking of. Yet the peculiar flavor of New Orleans is more than a smell. It has something to do with the South and with a cutting off from the South, with the River and with history.”

—Walker Percy, “New Orleans Mon Amour,” in Harper’s Magazine (September 1968)

“It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.”

—Mark Twain (March 1859), in a letter to Pamela Moffat

“Some of the houses have outlived their usefulness, like so many of the old, and while you may look upon them as much as you please, you must look with friendly eyes. If you do not, you may come away with only the idea of dirt and squalor—and you may miss altogether that lingering charm which clings to these old mansions even in the last stages of their decay.”

—Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (1928)