Neat cottages of plaster and brick lined Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy, pale yellows and celery greens, pinks and sky blues under the savage light. For years, wealthy bankers and planters and brokers had been buying their quadroon and mulatto mistresses dwellings like these, along the back edge of the old town. These days just as many belonged to respectable craftsmen and artisans, clerks and tailors, whose wives and families turned their eyes from their sisters and cousins and neighbors of the demimonde.

His mother's protector had bought her such a house, when January was eight and his full-sister, six. The daughter his mother had subsequently borne to St. Denis Janvier had recently been given the deed to such a house herself, by a fat, indolent Creole named Viellard.

Most stood empty now, shuttered tight in the hot glare of morning. When Bronze John came calling, a lot of people, no matter how strait their circumstances, came up with the money to remove for the summer to one of the hotels or cottages on the shores of the lake, where the air was cleaner, in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. Those who hadn't done so from fear of the fever, which came nearly every year-or from the horrible combination of summer decay and summer insects-reconsidered the matter when the first cases of the cholera were diagnosed.

As he walked along Rue Burgundy, January counted off houses. After sixteen years' absence he was just coming to know these people again. The yellow cottage belonged to his mother's dressmaker; the two-and-a-half-story town house occupied by Dr. LaPlante and his family (currently residing at his cottage in Milneburgh); the pink cottage owned by the perfumer Crowdie Passebon. The planks that ordinarily bridged the deep gutter from the unpaved street to the brick banquette were one and all propped beside the high brick steps.