| [Paris] was the mother of New Orleans, understand
that first; it had given New Orleans its life, its first populace; and
it was what New Orleans had for so long tried to be. But New Orleans,
though beautiful and desparately alive, was
desparately fragile. There was something forever savage and primitive
there, something that threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both
from within and without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor
a brick of the crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce
wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it.
Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague - and the damp of the Louisiana
climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone facade, so
that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of
her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious,
though unconscious, collective will.
Anne Rice 1976, p.204-5 |