The Big Easy

The Pride and the Sorrow 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, and true genius was lauded but not without jealous undercurrents. 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 interest, a gentleman with a calm passion for the royal game but a troubled obsession for an unsuitable woman.