Susan Saulny

He was a force in the city.

He had amassed a lot of wealth and a lot of economic and cultural power.

If you name a board or an organization from that point of time, you can almost be sure that he's on it.

You know, whether it was the library or the volunteer firefighters or the French opera, different Mardi Gras crews, people who throw the parades.

He was...

just everywhere and in everything.

And it seems as though from reading newspapers of the time, he was very well known in the city.

People followed him socially, wrote about when he went abroad and when he went on business trips.

People were very much interested in his life.

I think he, to some of the Confederate sympathizers who were still in New Orleans, they looked up to him in some way.

He had a very complicated life, and I'm sure a very complicated relationship with his son.

once he realized his son was having an open relationship with a black woman.

I think we know from history that a lot of white men had secret families or a second family.

or perhaps a mistress.

But that's not the relationship he had with Minerva based on all of the evidence that

I found.

He had a very open relationship with her.

They were public.

That's what was different about this relationship.

And when they had kids, he didn't hide them.