New Tales Told – Original Short Stories
Sep 21, 2026 · 15 min · 9 segments
Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his…
Long before the war came and emptied the city of its young men, there was scarcely a gentleman in New Orleans who had not stood at least once at the oaks before breakfast in the wet grass under the moss and waited there to learn whether he would walk back to his carriage or be carried to it.
The dueling ground kept its own green hush even at noon.
Men went out to it to settle the small unbearable things.
A look held a beat too long.
A card laid down wrong.
A word about a man's sister, his horse, his honor, his vote.
The code that governed the whole bloody sacrament was older than the colony and observed more faithfully than the mass.
And like the mass, it ran on forms that nobody thought to question, because the forms were the entire substance of the thing.
bernard de marigny knew those forms the way other men knew their own names he had been born to seven millions and a coat of arms and he was spending both with the serene carelessness of a man who believes the supply to be a law of nature He gambled.
He danced.
He christened the streets of his own Forberg after the things he loved, which were dice and desire and the duels themselves, so that a man could stand on the corner of craps and desire and read the whole Maronese character without being taught his letters.
He had once, for a wager, lit a cigar with a banknote worth more than a working man saw in a year, and he had watched the working men watch him do it, and the watching, you understand, was the entire point of the exercise.
He stood in his stockings, well under six feet.
He was thin as a foil.
He had gone out to fifteen separate mornings at the Oaks, and more than fifteen by some tellings, and had walked back to his own carriage from every one of them, because the one thing the smallness of him hid was that Bernard de Marigny, with a blade or a pistol in his hand, was very near the most dangerous man in Louisiana, and the portion of the city that had ever doubted it had long since stopped saying so aloud.
That is the one man.
Hold him there for a moment, small and quick and lethal and proud past all curing.
Now the other.
James Humble stood about seven feet in his stockings, and his boots were the size of coal scuttles.
He was a blacksmith, the son of a blacksmith, came out of the backcountry by a hard road west, and he had arrived in the Louisiana legislature the way a boulder arrives in the bend of a river, by being too large for the country upstream to keep any grip on him.
His parish had sent him for the plain reason that he was the biggest thing in it, and they had reasoned, not without sense, that a man that size would be difficult for the capital to mislay.
He wore black wool that had been cut for him in something close to despair by a tailor who kept running short of cloth.
Set among the Creoles in their silk and their fast bright French, he had the look of a chimney that had wandered indoors and could not find the way back out.
He spoke seldom.
When he did speak, it was English, and it was slow, and it came out of him the way his work did, heated and beaten and then left to cool into the exact shape he had meant from the start.
Long before the war came and emptied the city of its young men, there was scarcely a gentleman in New Orleans who had not stood at least once at the oaks before breakfast in the wet grass under the moss and waited there to learn whether he would walk back to his carriage or be carried to it.
The dueling ground kept its own green hush even at noon.
Men went out to it to settle the small unbearable things.
A look held a beat too long.
A card laid down wrong.
A word about a man's sister, his horse, his honor, his vote.
The code that governed the whole bloody sacrament was older than the colony and observed more faithfully than the mass.
And like the mass, it ran on forms that nobody thought to question, because the forms were the entire substance of the thing.
bernard de marigny knew those forms the way other men knew their own names he had been born to seven millions and a coat of arms and he was spending both with the serene carelessness of a man who believes the supply to be a law of nature He gambled.
He danced.
He christened the streets of his own Forberg after the things he loved, which were dice and desire and the duels themselves, so that a man could stand on the corner of craps and desire and read the whole Maronese character without being taught his letters.
He had once, for a wager, lit a cigar with a banknote worth more than a working man saw in a year, and he had watched the working men watch him do it, and the watching, you understand, was the entire point of the exercise.
He stood in his stockings, well under six feet.
He was thin as a foil.
He had gone out to fifteen separate mornings at the Oaks, and more than fifteen by some tellings, and had walked back to his own carriage from every one of them, because the one thing the smallness of him hid was that Bernard de Marigny, with a blade or a pistol in his hand, was very near the most dangerous man in Louisiana, and the portion of the city that had ever doubted it had long since stopped saying so aloud.
That is the one man.
Hold him there for a moment, small and quick and lethal and proud past all curing.
Now the other.
James Humble stood about seven feet in his stockings, and his boots were the size of coal scuttles.
He was a blacksmith, the son of a blacksmith, came out of the backcountry by a hard road west, and he had arrived in the Louisiana legislature the way a boulder arrives in the bend of a river, by being too large for the country upstream to keep any grip on him.
His parish had sent him for the plain reason that he was the biggest thing in it, and they had reasoned, not without sense, that a man that size would be difficult for the capital to mislay.
He wore black wool that had been cut for him in something close to despair by a tailor who kept running short of cloth.
Set among the Creoles in their silk and their fast bright French, he had the look of a chimney that had wandered indoors and could not find the way back out.
He spoke seldom.
When he did speak, it was English, and it was slow, and it came out of him the way his work did, heated and beaten and then left to cool into the exact shape he had meant from the start.
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