Merriment in l'Éurope, and Wishes for a Joyous New Year

After a hiatus in Biarritz, Monte Carlo, and Lido over the holidays, we have arrived safely back in our stately estate along one of the great rivers of our splendorous nation (I am afraid I may not name my exact location; one must’n’t tempt destitute factory workers intent on capturing Papà’s fortunes). Welcome back to me! I did not want for attention whilst abroad, attracting many potential suitors as I strolled feebly through hotel lounges and along beaches. The briny air was beneficial for my consumption, I was able to hone my skills in the French language, and my neurasthenia dissipated into imperceptibility! I did so miss Horace, but now we are back together, spending evenings a comfortable eight feet from one another in the parlor, Horace serenading me with his euphonium.



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En Lido, nous sommes restées ici, à l’Hôtel Excelsior:






Un souvenir de Biarritz:




Une image de Monte Carlo:



Et une peinture du Ballet Russe que nous avons vu à Monte Carlo:



Et enfin, (je ne dois pas oublier):







Joyeux Noël et Bonne Nouvelle Année!

An electric belt to cure what ails one

Tillie, my nursemaid since I was just a wee one, insisted I purchase this new-fangled item:



'Tis an electric belt, constructed using the most modern technology, and meant to cure my consumption and neurasthenia, and my many other maladies, some of which are not fit to mention in a public forum.

Of course, Papá thinks that tubercular symptoms are pleasant for the eye of young suitors, and that these need not be cured. I of course told him that I am betrothed to Horace and have no further need for men to be attentive to me, but he still thinks it unbecoming for a virginal lady to gain weight above 90 pounds and to have a flush restored to her glabrate face, let alone for her to breathe without wheezing and grasping for the nearest firm bicep to steady her! He certainly would deem it a stain on our family were my waist to grow too girthful to squeeze into my 18” corset. I told him he need not worry, that this new electric belt would only alleviate my symptoms enough so that I do not faint so often and may have the strength to leave the safety of my boudoir on a more regular basis.
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This morning I received this delightful card from Horace:



Ah, the wonders of love!

A comment on "jass" music

More about the other evening’s fright. I was being transported in my carriage to cousin Ida’s debutante ball, when the bothersome chauffeur lost his way. We found ourselves wending an unfamiliar and unsavory course along dismal streets and decrepit alleyways. I promptly set about flogging the driver with a leather lash that I stow in the carriage for just such a purpose (and after we returned home I had Papá ensure his disemployment from our family or any other family of repute, in this town and in any town on the Eastern seaboard, for the remainder of his natural life). But his well-deserved punishment did not quell my agony upon finding myself adrift in a tangle of streets where people ride not in carriages but upon mules, a district rife with Irishmen and -women scurrying around with no police presence, the stench of whiskey and syphilis permeating the air, the denizens bedecked in garments far more crass than even the wretched Orpha dares wear. I even spotted a few Italians, chattering away in their bewildering and morally inferior tongue. The prolific offspring of these foreigners is something else altogether. Why, some of these mothers bear eleven or twelve children; my own Mother was more than content to stop at a respectable eight. The families often can afford only one servant, yet they continue to breed like Spaniards.

As my heart pounded and I covered my nose with my handkerchief to prevent inhaling the miasmatic air, we passed a row of insalubrious establishments. And then a strange noise wafted into my ear from one of the drinking-halls. I daren’t even call it music; rather, ‘twas a series of sounds and – oh, I despise the very word! – rhythms strung together without heed to form or development.

“Whatever is that heinous noise?” I asked the driver, momentarily ceasing the beating.

“They call it jass, madam,” he whimpered in his brogue, “Please, madam, please stop whippin’ me.”

Before I resumed the lashing, I glimpsed inside the saloon and saw a throng of people dancing in a most loutish fashion. This crowd was composed of Irish, Negroes, and Italians alike, both the sterner sex and the fairer, all wriggling together like so many herring in a fisherman’s net. Oh, the shocking amount of mingling!

Upon witnessing this scene, I became dizzy and fainted, and have no recollection of anything else until I was parked safely in front of the ball and Horace was waving smelling salts under my nose.

The morally decrepit scene on view in that saloon could only arise from today’s dissolute and ill-educated youth, content to squander their energy on crude forms of entertainment, destroying their soul in the process; they contribute to the decay of modern society, to the masses of spurious children and the rampant rate of divorce. Why can’t they behave like the more respectable members of their class, the ones who put in an honest 16 hours’ work before lazing about or engaging in wayward pastimes? Idleness is for genteel ladies such as myself, not for young, destitute slatterns and the men who accompany them.

The activities I witnessed aside, this jass music is inconsequential as an art form. It will fade into oblivion, I am sure, within a few months or years, and its purveyors along with it. These musicians could spend their time creating something that will endure, and yet they choose to waste their lives away on this tomfoolery.

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Slum children up to no good.

I have heard a strange new musical form

They call it “jass,” and I heard it wafting out of a saloon in the murkiest section of town. ‘Tis not exactly ragtime, but viler and cruder. It caused a sensation in my loins that I can only describe as nefarious, tho’ not altogether unpleasant.

A most delightful arrival in the post-box!

My heart is replete with vim and vigor, faintness and flutters! This morning Minnie, the foyer’s maid, came back from the post-box waving a letter from my dearest Horace, so long absent from my sight but not my heart:



O, I am as ecstatic as Helen must have been upon being kidnapped by the swarthy Paris! Dear Horace, how my heart aches for your solid embrace!

I know Papá does not approve of our forbidden love, as he is the son of a mere haberdasher; but he has such ambitions, and such a generous heart! I can only envision how dashing he will appear on our wedding night!

I apologize for that bit of erotica, but forsooth, I cannot control my womanly, savage emotions when I hear Horace's name. Dr. Higgenthal says 'tis not beneficial for my manifold symptoms. I shall try to be more composed come tomorrow.

A sumptuous feast

We feasted this eve on the traditional Harvest meal of lobster, oyster chowder, boiled onions, spinach, roast goose with currant jelly, quail galantines, mashed turnips, salsify, tongue, watermelon pickles, chow-chow, mince pie, plum pudding, almond tart, citron preserves, along with nuts and figs and gooseberries and the like. A bit of a peasant meal, but tasty nonetheless!

A brief account of Orpha's life

Some of you have sent me correspondence expressing interest in Orpha, the wretched servant girl, and wishing to know more about her bio-graphy and plight. Well, I can’t imagine a more dreadful subject, but if you insist on obtaining this knowledge I suppose I don’t see how harm can come of it.

The year was 1891. I was fresh out of my hand-woven christening gown, mother had contracted another bout of cholera, and Papá was recuperating from a head wound inflicted by the striking brutes at his jute mill (inflicted by a son of immigrants from Dublin, who was justly hanged for his crime). To make matters worse, my nurse-maid had recently perished in a fire at her tenement, and mother had to fire the sullen cook for serving dried-out ptarmigan to the Mayor and his wife at a very important luncheon. Oh, what were they to do? Life was so trying with only eight servants. I am fortunate that I have no memory of this very turbulent era in my history.

Papá was able to promptly employ a new nurse-maid and cook. Many in our city were desperate for honest work ever since Papá had purchased and closed down the competing Collingswood-Smurfitt Cotton factory. But an unexpected visitor was thrust upon us: an infant, wan, malnourished (though not in the pleasing feminine way that I was wan and malnourished), plebeian. She was left on our marble stoa at the front of our estate in Maine, where the doctors had sent Mother to recuperate, and the children along with her. She was wrapped in a tattered calico that stank of offal; I shudder even now thinking of what a shock this must have been for Mother, who was already in a frail state. The child was not pleasant to the eye, and she let out a gruesome squall that reminded one more of a hyena’s caterwaul than a baby’s soft whimper. “I shall throw her back out in the snow!” remarked Ada, the head maid, holding her nose. But something in Mother’s heart would not let Ada carry out the task that reason dictated was suitable. Mother always had a softness for the plight of the poor; it was the one flaw in an otherwise great lady.

So in from the bitter cold came this horrid child. There was much discussion as to whether she should be placed in an indigent children’s home or fattened up to be put to work in Papá’s mill when she reached the lawful age of six. Eventually it was decided that she should be prepared to be an attendant for me, and she was given generous quarters in the basement behind the Armagnac cellar, where she was fed on rice porridge and corncobs. My elder sister Marguerite, all of seven at the time, thought it would be amusing to call her Orpha, which sounded like “orphan,” and the name stuck. Perhaps some day she will have advanced enough to attain a surname as well.

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Is that sketch of Orpha, you ask? Why of course not! 'Tis me. No such likeness exists of Orpha.