e last read The Seventh Chapter, in which the widow ventured into the swamp for a cure.
Pursuit of an eligible husband was the most popular pastime among European ladies of a certain age. The courting season began each winter when local plantation owners brought their daughters to the city for a surfeit of social soirées.
Exultant balls, parties, dances, symphonies, operas, and theater performances set the stage for what would appear to the modern sympathies, a kind of harlotry. One in which wealthy European fathers solicited their daughters into the hands of equally wealthy suitors.
The women, for their part, played their roles flawlessly, flaunting their coquettish ways in an attempt to lure the most amiable of bachelors. For this, they required the most extravagant ensemble: a dress fitted with all the trimmings wealth could provide and jewels that would draw the eye to the most alluring of locales.
The quality of these women’s lives greatly depended on the status they were able to achieve through marriage, and so they adorned themselves with every possible armament in their pursuit of the opposite sex. Attraction, however, was a competitive game—one in which a very small quotient of European women vied for a very large quotient of European men. More often than not, those bachelors selected their mates from the much more abundant sum of gens de couleur libres.
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