The Baroness Pontalba
Description
The Baroness Pontalba is a biography of Micaela Almonester de Pontalba. The work begins with a discussion of New Orleans at the time of her birth in 1795, when streets were surrounded by mud and alligators, and the most prominent citizens were Cabildo Magistrates such as her father, Andres Almonester. At the age of fifteen, Michaelle, as she was called, married into a Creole family that envied her father's success. The Pontalbas looked on the marriage as a kind of business merger that would facilitate the transfer of the Almonester fortune into their hands. Michaelle went to live in France with the Pontalbas; there, surrounded by hostility and a legal system that deprived women of all rights, she fought to maintain control over her inheritance Michaelle's husband Celestin was apparently torn between his domineering father and his domineering wife; but he evidently loved Michaelle and was sometimes swayed by her. During one period, when Michaelle was attempting to get a legal separation, she apparently pried some concession from her husband which enraged her father-in-law. The elder Pontalba locked her in a bedroom and shot her three times. Though critically injured, Michaelle survived; but the old man killed himself The French courts at last allowed Michaelle to live apart from her husband and his family. She then started investing her fortune in buildings. In 1839 she began construction of a mansion in Paris that is now the residence of the United States ambassador; in 1849 she began the massive Pontalba Buildings in New Orleans. In her later years she remained in France with her three sons. She lived through the seige of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, and the savage civil war of 1871, which was fought mainly in her neighborhood in the elegant Faubourg Saint-Honore of Paris. Her last twenty years were spent caring for her husband, who became ill and senile. She died in 1874 at the age of seventy nine