He was born to wealth, with a wife and children in a mansion on St. Charles, land from Natchez to Memphis, a man of taste and discretion, well-schooled in the ways of the world.
She was born to poverty, with a father who beat her and a red leather trunk containing everything she owned, a woman-child with a stage for a cradle, knowing nothing but footlights.
But in those, oh, how she shined.
One night she plucked out his heart and held it in her hand. For an ethereal week, he kept her with style and passion in an apartment on Ursuline. Then the revue—a musical comedy, ‘In Dahomey’—swept her to Chicago, Manhattan, London, Paris, and into the arms of others.
When he bought 24,000 acres in Boliver County the next year, and named the land for her face, radiant in the limelights, and her body, warm in the morning sun beside his.
