Tag: Alice Heine

Angel

LSU! LSU! LSU! LSU!

The Lady Tigers dominated Iowa yesterday to the point of it being embarrassing. They scored over a hundred points–a first for a NCAA women’s title game–and won LSU’s first national title in an NCAA championship tournament in program history.

PAUL: When LSU wins it’s going to bring all the racists out because Iowa is all white and LSU is all Black.

He wasn’t wrong. All the racists who watched to see the white girls win were out in force on Twitter, and like all racists, the hypocrisy and idiocy was strong. Then again, you have to be both hypocritical and idiotic to be a racist in the first place.

And later that evening, LSU Gymnastics qualified (thanks to a tie-breaker) for Nationals as well. All in all, it was a good day for women’s athletics down here in bayou country.

LSU! LSU! LSU! LSU! So proud of our young women!

Well, I finished the revision yesterday. I just need to go over it one last time to make sure there are no screaming, glaring errors (like a chapter missing, that sort of thing) and will send it off today. I am rather pleased with it; it wasn’t nearly the enormous mess that I thought it was originally, and it didn’t need nearly as much work as I had originally feared. One of the primary problems with being older and having had COVID-related memory issues as a writer is I can’t remember sometimes what I’ve already written. As someone who has a very bad habit of writing the same scene twice at different spaces in the book, or sometimes will make a change to the story in the middle of a later chapter that needs correcting or being set up earlier in the book…yes, it’s a serious problem for me. But its done, finished and completed and now I can move on to fixing the mess that is the Scotty book, Mississippi River Mischief, which might not be as easy as this one was–the problem with it is systemic and runs through the entire book, from beginning to end–but I am getting there. Hopefully by the end of April it will be completed and I can move on from both of these, other than copy edits and proofing.

It feels like I’ve been working on these two manuscripts forever.

I also went down a bit of a rabbit hole I’ve visited before on the web; Princess Alice of Monaco, the first American-born Monegasque princess and was from New Orleans: Alice Heine. She fascinates me, and it’s amazing how little she is known in the United States, let alone New Orleans. There are no biographies of her and her colorful life, which included an early marriage to the Duc deRichelieu and a second marriage to the prince of Monaco. She built the Monte Carlo opera house and I believe she also founded the Monegasque ballet as well. She and the prince were unhappy, and she left him, moving to Paris where she was a patroness of the arts, was known for her fabulous salons, and took lots of lovers. The only book I found by looking her up was Anne Edwards’ The Grimaldis of Monaco, and it’s really a history of the 800 year old royal family. I bought the ebook of it, and look forward to reading about Princess Alice. Were I a biographer and/or a historian, I would probably do a biography of her. She fascinates me. For a little while I even thought she’d make an interesting heroine for a period series about an amateur sleuth; the Princess of Monaco as an amateur sleuth in Paris around the turn of the century? The Dreyfus affair? The trial of Oscar Wilde, whom I am sure was a friend of hers?

I also finished reading Robert Caro’s immense opus The Power Broker this weekend. It was a fascinating study of Robert Moses, an incredibly driven and smart man who rose to great power without ever being elected–by building highways, bridges and parks, not just in New York City but the entire state. I did note something during the course of the 1100+ pages; something I’d also noticed with in-depth biographies of Lyndon Johnson (also Caro) and Huey Long: these men were all forward-thinking and progressive, and tried to effect change only to be thwarted by those in power…so the three men out-thunk their enemies, outplayed them, and amassed enormous power in order to get the things they wanted accomplished. They fought dirty, certainly weren’t opposed to corruption in order to get what they needed/wanted, but eventually…as in every case, overplayed their hands. Johnson left office a tattered old man with his reputation in ruins; Moses lost all his power and control; and Long of course was murdered. My next non-fiction read will be David McCullough’s The Johnstown Flood, methinks.

I’m a bit sleepy and groggy this morning; I didn’t sleep great or deeply last night but it was restful physically; more of a mental thing, really; it felt like my mind never really went into the sleep mode. But that’s fine. I have a mentally challenging day at the office ahead of me today, so hopefully sleep will come tonight. We also watched a couple more episodes of The Night Agent, which is getting better and more interesting. Hong Chau is fantastic in it (as she is in everything) and the male lead is certainly good-looking and hot enough to make up for his wooden delivery of his lines–but it actually works for his character, who is supposed to be an unemotional do-your-job kind of guy; though there are times when it’s just cringy.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will be back in the morning.

Waiting for the Sirens’ Call

Well, it’s now Thursday and let’s see how the rest of this week goes. I don’t have to go back to the office until Ash Wednesday–working at home today and tomorrow–and then over the weekend (all four days of it) I can leisurely clean and write and get things done, which is always a plus. Paul hasn’t been getting home from the office until almost ten every night this week–making me a Festival widow, as I always am every year at this time; the primary difference being Paul would come home for the parades and then work on things at his desk until all hours of the night while I went to bed. Last night’s Youtube wormholes included Kings and Generals videos about the Ottoman Wars; short documentaries about Henry VIII’s sisters, Margaret and Mary (who don’t get near as much attention as their famous brother– had Henry’s matrimonial efforts been a bit more in line with those of a normal king, Margaret and Mary would have most likely gone down in history for their own notoriety and scandalous lives…as it is, they are most forgotten footnotes to Tudor history. But all the British monarchy after Elizabeth I is actually descended from Margaret Tudor rather than Henry VIII); another couple about another favorite sixteenth century royal woman Marguerite de Valois (immortalized as Queen Margot in the Dumas novel); famous courtesans of history; and the decline and fall of the Byzantine Empire. (I really have always wanted to write about palace intrigue in Constantinople–there’s a reason why “byzantine” has come to mean interconnected elaborate conspiracies with twists and turns and surprises)

I was also very tired yesterday, after my third “get up at six and go to the office” day in a row. I am acutely becoming more and more aware of my age and the increasing fragility of my body; nothing terribly original or insightful, really. The decay of our bodies is something we can generally spend a good portion of our lives not thinking about, and of course, we consistently always push aside thinking about our own mortality because–well, because no good can come of it, really, other than paralyzing depression and panic about the shortening of the life string held by the Three Fates. I have become very used to the idea that I am not going to be able to write all the things that I want to write in the limited time I have left to me (see what I mean about paralyzing depression? Just typing those words made my entire body shudder), particularly with all the new ideas I get on an almost daily basis.

And the more research I do about New Orleans and Louisiana history, the more fascinated I become. I was actually thinking the other day, as I idly went down a research wormhole about Alice Heine (the first American born princess of Monaco was NOT Grace Kelly, but Alice Heine–born and raised in the 900 block of the French Quarter in New Orleans), I couldn’t help but think man, I should have started studying all this New Orleans/Louisiana history YEARS ago–at least when we first moved here. There is so much rich, vibrant material in New Orleans’ checkered history; and when you expand it out to Louisiana as a whole, it becomes even more interesting. I had, in fact, primarily always assumed the prevalence of Spanish names in the state and region came from when the Spanish owned Louisiana….which in a way it kind of did; but it was because to populate their new lands and territories as a protective measure against both the British and the Americans, the Spanish governors encouraged immigration from the Canary Islands–their descendants are called los isleños; I knew about the isleños, but I never really knew when they came here and to what part of Louisiana they came. (There was also a Filipino settlement at a place called St Málo; outside the levees, that settlement was completely destroyed by a hurricane in the early twentieth century…which just goes to show precisely how much of a cultural and ethnic melting pot New Orleans is and always has been.) It’s all so goddamned interesting…the main problem is the older books about the state and city’s history aren’t necessarily reliable–Lyle Saxon, Harnett Kane, and Robert Tallant, in particular; their works weren’t always based in fact but in rumor and legend, and all too often in upholding white supremacy–but the stories are highly entertaining, if inaccurate, biased, and with perhaps too high a degree of fictionality built into them. But the stories themselves are interesting and could make for good stories–in particular Tallant’s book Ready to Hang: Seven Famous New Orleans Murders, (one can never go wrong with historical true crime, even if Tallant’s sources were faulty and included rumor and speculation)…the title tale is, in and of itself, one I’ve been interested in fictionalizing since I first became aware of it–I can’t recall the murderer’s name, but a very good-looking young man, he used to lure men in to rob and kill; and while he always had a girlfriend–sometimes accomplices–and Tallant never comes right out and says so, my takeaway from the story is that the guy basically preyed on older men with either gay or bisexual tendencies, which puts it right into my wheelhouse, really.

And of course, so many of these stories would work in my Sherlockian world of New Orleans in the first decades of the twentieth century.

And this, you see, is why I will never be able to write everything I want to write. Heavy sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May your day be as splendid as you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll catch you again tomorrow morning.