“Let him who wishes continue.”
Louisiana abounds with tales of antebellum sugar kings and their baronial estates. For extravagance and tragedy, few eclipse Valcour Aimé, the “Louis XIV of Louisiana” and his home, Petit Versailles. Wondering what remained, I drove up the Great River Road some years back and found lush cane fields crowding the bones of what had been the grandest private garden in the Americas. The big house had been lost to a fire in 1920, but old photos and journals gave a glimpse of the grandeur that was. François-Gabriel “Valcour” Aimé was born into wealth in St. Charles Parish in 1798 but never rested on his lofty laurels. After buying a string of sugar plantations, he experimented with refining methods and developed a vacuum pan system revolutionizing the...
Read MoreRequiem for a Queen
They said she sinned by ambition and was doomed from the outset, tethered to a world facing apocalypse. She listened to nothing save the siren song of destiny, a stone-and-iron fantasy that became the jewel in the crown of Louisiana plantation houses. No one had seen her likes before, nor would they see them again. She was Belle Grove, the fabulous queen of sugar king John Andrews, and she was born of a genteel rivalry to build bigger and better than anyone in the antebellum South. Her competitor, Nottaway (see Game of Thrones), was the work of John Hamden Randolph, another incredibly rich planter a short distance upriver. From sheer size alone, there was never any doubt that Belle Grove would take the sweepstakes as Andrews erected a palace to please a pharaoh....
Read MoreGame of Thrones
My favorite perk of writing historical fiction is exploring sites for my plots and characters. More often than not, the search leads to serendipitous flights of fancy that are great fun despite having nothing to do with the book. For example, when I started researching Creole Son about painter Edgar Degas’s visit to New Orleans, I needed a scene at a sugar plantation to introduce his inventor cousin Norbert Rillieux whose invention for refining sugar revolutionized the industry. The Millaudon plantation Degas actually visited was no longer standing, but since I lived in the French Quarter there were others nearby to provide the ambience I needed to write the scene. Lots of old homes line the Great River Road paralleling the Mississippi, and after some homework I...
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