“La Grande Demoiselle” by Grace Elizabeth King

 

What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn she studied, what she did not, she ignored; And she followed the same simple rule untrammeled in her eating, drinking, dressing, and comportment generally; and whatever discipline may have been exercised on the place, either in fact or fiction, most assuredly none of it, even so much as in a threat, ever attainted her sacred person. When she was just turned sixteen, Madame Idalie made-up her mind to go into society. Whether she was beautiful or not, it is hard to say.

A perfectly delightful representative example from King’s Balcony Stories [1893.] These tales are a series of fourteen stories told  one evening by New Orleans women in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Being close in time to the event they are redolent with period detail that was not studied detail but lived detail.

I find it hard to believe that Margaret Mitchell did not read this volume and study it closely for her magnum opus, Gone With the Wind.

Delightful.