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The Knight of New Orleans is a novel following Creole chess player Paul Morphy on his tour of nineteenth century New Orleans, New York, Paris, London, Havana and back to New Orleans.
Morphy conquered the world but found his relationships with family, friends and the girl he pursued a little trickier than the sixty-four square madhouse. Above is Paul Morphy's house, 90 Royal Street, with its port-hole windows. Today it is 417 Royal Street between St. Louis and Conti Streets.
Born at 1113 Chartres Street, Paul soon moves to Royal Street, where he grows up under the tutelage of his father Alonzo Morphy and his Uncle Ernest, after they discover his talent. Paul's exceptional ability alters the Morphy family, as he is projected towards the possibility of fame: he takes on the chess players of Europe, in the mid-nineteenth century, the best in the world.
Click on the house to read more about Paul Morphy
New Orleans is divided by race, gender and social position, power shared unequally between politician and public, black and white, Creole and American, men and women. The Morphys cross from the upper to the lower class.
The Morphys cross from the upper to the lower class. They attend the opera and play chess on Sundays against visiting champions of the royal game. So too they trade in slaves with pirates, duel, drink and wandering into the red light district. So long as secrets remain, all will be well. Paul's infatuation with la belle Clara Young opens the possibility of social transgression.
But for how long? Paul must take a respectable career, and Clara must consider her future. Dark clouds gather over the forgotten Crescent City, and the country itself. Mardi Gras must end one day, as every game has an end.
Yet uniting divided people holds more fantastical promise, it seems, in New Orleans than anywhere else...
Above is a Creole corner house with wrought iron balconies. These buildings look the same today as they did during Paul Morphy's life and when this photograph was taken at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Big Easy
The Knight of New Orleans takes place at a time when prostitution in the Big Easy
was legally sanctioned, before child prodigies and mental illness were better understood. In the mid-nineteenth century chess matches were fought as duels, with seconds, monetary stakes and gambling. Mismatched love could be fatal.
Before modern chess competition but not before Mardi Gras, operatic funerals, destructive hurricanes, Creole slavery, Civil War Union soldiers lining Bourbon Street, or real passage d'armes fought for love and honor...a chess player caught the national mood, a gentleman with a calm passion for the royal game, but an obsession for an 'unsuitable' woman.
Who was Paul Morphy?
