You forget us? they asked, and behind them thunder grumbled over the lake. You play Michie Mozart's little tunes, and forget all about us out here drumming in the cipri?re?

All those years in Paris, Michie Couleur Libre in your black wool coat, you forget about us?

About how it felt to know everything could be taken away? Father-mother-sisters all gone?

Nobody to know or care if you cried? You forget what it was, to be a slave?

If you think a man has to be a slave to lose everything he loves at a whim, January said to the drums, pray let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholira and to her who in her life was my wife.

And with a flirt and a leap, the music sprang forward, like a team of bright-hooved horses, swirling the drums' dark beat away. Walls of shining gold, protecting within them the still center that the world's caprices could not touch.

In the strange white gaslight, alien and angular and so different from the candle glow in which most of the French Creoles still lived, January picked out half a dozen women present in the magpie prettiness of second mourning, calling cards left by Monsieur le Cholera and his local cousin Bronze John, as the yellow fever was called. Technically, Suzanne Marcillac Pritchard's birthday ball was a private party, not a public occasion, suitable even for widows in first mourning to attend-not that there weren't boxes at the Theatre d'Orl?ans closed in with latticework so that the recently bereaved could respectably enjoy the opera.

And in any case, it would take more than the death of their immediate relatives to keep the ladies of New Orleans's prominent French and Spanish families from a party. Marion Desdunes-that very young widow gazing wistfully at the dancers-had lost a brother to the cholera last summer and a husband the summer before. Delicate, white-haired Madame Jumon, talking beside the buffet to Mrs. Pritchard, had only last summer lost her middleaged son.